Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (an "Igavania")

Mine came along with the Kickstarter Sleeve.

I've also sold mine on eBay already as
1. In the states from what I had seen it been going for a silly price and it's just a sleeve (I could have sold sleeve on its own) being the difference
2. It's the Switch version, yes 3 years ago or whatever after I couldn't have Wii U or VITA that was the version I wanted but now I sooner have on Xbox One (It also doesn't look great on Switch)
3. Honestly, I'm not that bothered playing this now and knowing how Xbox One games drop in price the fasted, I'll get this when it's £10-15

That arrived later for me, and... it's nice I suppose? I don't really care?

Normally I'd be all at Mas and his technical gubbins, but... I can see in this case. The blurring's obvious in the graphics, and if it's improved in the other versions then fair enough. It's still not a big deal though.

The first boss was hard. Could never dodge that opening tentacle swipe.

You would have had the emails from the team basically saying they've F'ed up the Switch verison and all resources are being put into fixing it.

I have, which is nice of them.

Just run into the hub village thing, which is... weird.

If I do pick this up, it likely will be on PS4 as I've heard the Switch version doesn't run as well as the others - I don't mind visual downgrades, but performance issues are another story.

Still, good to hear you're enjoying! IGA makes great Metroidvania games - I've enjoyed all the Igavanias I've played. Is the voice acting/dialogue suitably cheesy, I presume?

Oh it's wonderful. You meet the main villain at the end of the first segment and he is campy as all hell. Nobody else has really matched up thus far, but there was a definite feeling of 'what is a man?' to that exchange. I'm looking forward to more.

I can still recite the opening to SotN, so I'm not expecting something to match that but if it can emulate the mature cheese from that game's opening, we're onto a winner.

Jay wrote:

I've enjoyed all the Igavanias I've played.

Now now if I can't have Metroid-like then you can't have Igavania.

---

Also speaking of SotN I got that Castlevania requiem bundle on ps4 last month and I really should get around to playing them.

SOTN is so good, that it should be Castlevania-like.

The_Jaster wrote:

Jay wrote:

I've enjoyed all the Igavanias I've played.

Now now if I can't have Metroid-like then you can't have Igavania.

The man himself coined the phrase - it's just for the Metroidvanias that IGA has made, tis all. Everything else is quite clearly a Metroidvania as officially recognised by Nintendo.

It's in the thread title and everything!

I've just finished the second boss, and it's nice to see myself improving. Jim Sterling said that there's a big 'stuff you' to Konami somewhere in there, and I keep trying to guess what it might be. I've met an awful lot of characters already for an indie title, though. Think there's some meat on them gaming bones...

Sort of started this today as I got a invite to XCloud (will post thoughts elsewhere) and this is one of the games on it plus there's a reward quest for playing some games with a female lead.

That why not kill two birds with one stone. Anyway did the galleon for what seems like the hundredth time due to demos etc

From that and the bit at the actual start seems like this is actually going to a decent game and I may continue on.

The backlog grows

masofdas wrote:

The backlog grows

I should end every one of my posts with this.

This has now been patched for Switch, so I hear. It's apparently still not perfect, but if it's not breaking this time then I'm up for giving it another shot.

The backlog grows.

What is a backlog? A pile of unplayed games

Sort on topic I bought the Castlevania Collection in the Xbox Black Friday Sale, I now have 13 (I think) games in the series just on Xbox along with the two Bloodstained. I really need to do like Jay has said with Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, to play these sort of back to back.

masofdas wrote:

What is a backlog? A pile of unplayed games

May have to save that one...

masofdas wrote:

What is a backlog? A pile of unplayed games

But enough multiplayer games, have at you! ...is what I wish I could say, but I'm absorbed in Games as a Service hell right now.

Anoter reason I kind of dont mind how long Ive been putting off getting the internet. I don't spend that long playing games as it is, imagine if Splatoon was sticking its nose in there, and ARMS, and some Monster Hunter with the boys . . .

I've told Andy he cannot poke fun at my backlog of games as he ended up roping me into Destiny 2 and I'm hooked on it, so as it's his fault he's lost his right to poke fun at me.

I tried bloodstained a while ago thanks to Gamepass, but I wasn’t big on it. The random looting & dependencies on certain abilities to navigate the environment eventually wore me down. I hit the fake end and that felt like a decent place for me to call it a day.

On the one hand, I don't want to boo Andy because he's just back. On the other hand, I want to boo Andy because he's torn Jay away from Switch game discussion...

Started Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night the other day, completed it today with nearly all the map explored. Good game. Not too blown away by it but I came in with fairly big expectations from what I'd heard about it, and despite it definitely doing some cool new stuff: it really is just another Igavania.

I began disappointed that I couldn't start the game on Hard, but the first boss was surprisingly a decent challenge. Early on it was also a decent fight for survival between save rooms. Around the middle of the game the difficulty did noticeably drop a lot but it was to be expected given the RPG element and how broken some of the abilities were (pretty typical of these kind of games). Did get tough again later on though, and most of the bosses were a decent challenge.

I really like the look of the game. There aren't too many 2.5D Metroidvanias. Can only think of this and Samus Returns, and this looks exactly what I'd want a 3D Castlevania to look like. And though the 'inspiration' from that series is clear, it's nice to see a lot of totally new monster designs even if you can recognise a lot of the archetypes. Being able to customise the look of your character is nice but annoyingly a lot of the decent gear early on in the game isn't too flattering on Miriam.

The music was good but I can't recall too many tracks that slapped to be honest. Most other Metroidvanias I've played are pretty great in this department and have more memorable tunes. What struck me was how similar the tunes were in places to Castlevania tunes - and sure enough after some research I found out it was the same series composer. Kinda felt like she wanted to compose Castlevania tracks but went out of her way to make them not sound too similar since she had to.

Echoing the dissatisfaction towards navigating the environment to an extent. Got kind of annoying how many times I had to switch to the Refractor Ray or whatever it was called to get through some tight spaces - it was binded to the same slot one of my most used weapons had to be in. Setting items as 'favourites' mitigates this annoyance slightly. You can also map equipment sets to shortcuts but throughout the game your weapons and gear will change a lot so a shortcut quickly becomes redundant. Also the map has to start all-the-way zoomed-out every time you open it.

To re-iterate though, I did like the game and will probably play it again at some point and fill out the rest of the map. I liked the story and characters a surprising amount - definitely the kind of stuff you'd expect from Iga but I was satisfied with the premise of this new world. Keen to play Curse of the Moon at some point.

I'm guessing you didn't play it on Switch Kriken, and therefore avoided performance issues? Glad you liked it anyway.

I've still not got around to playing Bloodstained, mainly because I have it on Xbox via Game Pass and it's not going anywhere that I'm in no hurry to play it.

But I did play Curse of the Moon which was excellent and I still reckon I was right the spin-off would be better, and now we have a sequel to that coming very soon

Played a bit of this around a mate's. Seemed pretty cool and it's great that Igarashi got to make it.

Also, Curse of the Moon 2 looks awesome.