Blasphemous 2

The Miracle giveth and the Miracle taketh away, and as Blasphemous becomes a much better gaming experience, its worldbuilding, story and art become a bit more generic and safe.

Good things first, gameplay-wise, it's one of the best modern metroidvanias I've played.

The combat is diverse with three distinct weapon styles that you often have to switch between to get the best results - some enemies are vulnerable to the swift dodge and parry style of the daggers, some need the wide sweeping arc of the Veredicto, and you often will have to fight a mix of them in quick succession.

It's fun to experiment with the best approaches for the bosses as well, and the game makes it easy, as you just switch between different ability presets and have no penalty for committing to the build. I've relied on Veredicto for most of the game, but for the penultimate boss the daggers and the build that favors high guilt build-up came extremely handy.

The boss battles were challenging, but exactly on the right level - rewarding to study and beat, but not exhausting to the point of losing all the will to continue. Many of the enemies can be treated like mini-bosses as well - requiring you to react to their moveset rather just plowing through them with abandon.

The platforming is excellent as well, something I never expected from Blasphemous. The platforming challenges in the first game were grueling and not fun at all - the special speedrun portions were a particular nightmare. In the sequel, the platforming sections are always dynamic, smart, and don't outstay their welcome - the idea to utilize all the weapons in platforming, and sometimes requiring you to switch between all three mid-jump, is genius.

But flawed as the first part's gameplay was, the aesthetics and the worldbuilding were unique and impeccable. Something that the sequel, unfortunately, doesn't hold up.

In the first game, every enemy, boss, and NPC was a little self-contained body horror nightmare. They were all going through some kind of torture, mutilation, or mutation - an animated Hieronymus Bosch painting coming to kick your ass. There are some great designs in the sequel as well, but overall the concentration of horror is much lower. A lot of the enemies are just generic dark fantasy monsters, and the aesthetics of the bosses were a particular disappointment - it feels like more than half are just sword dudes in pointy hats.

The worldbuilding was much less unique and exciting this time around as well. It doesn't feel like the sequel added much to the Lovecraftian horror that is the Miracle, or found any other fun ways to show macabre perversions of Catholicism. The idea behind Blasphemous' world is so cool and the first game did so much with it, while the sequel plays like more of a generic dark fantasy world.

Nevertheless, it was a ton of fun to play, and a lot of the worldbuilding perfection of the first game seeped into this one.

The first entry in the Blasphemous series is a pretty iconic metroidvania, that has a lot going for it, namely setting and gorey visuals. Unfortunatly for such a gameplay driven genre it felt rather clunky to me, and thus I could never consider it to be one of the best of its genre. Well these guys came back and really fixed just about everything that was subpar in the first entry.

Lets just name what this one does better: it has much more responsive controls, the character is more zoomed in so the combat feels more visceral, there is 200% more weapon variety (from 1 to 3 weapons), there is a much bigger range of spells and prayers, the map is incredible with placeable icons, less cryptic quests, lots of quality of life improvements, high quality animated cutscenes, much bigger focus on custom builds, way better movement options that makes the transversal more fun (a must given the backtracking that is always present in metroidvanias)

What the first does best: the gorey visuals feel like they were toned down and as such perhaps less memorable.

A must play for fans of metroidvania, and one of those indie projects that you can feel that a lot of passion was poured into it.

+ Beautiful art and music, just as the prequel.
+ The combat is even better this time.
- The anime cutscenes are really off-putting, why change the style all of a sudden?
- This is essentially more of the same. If you weren't bored or tired after beating the first game, this is perfect. Otherwise, this is just the same thing all over again.

Not completed.

It's a tight race as to which Blasphemous is better, but the sequel does everything a sequel to a retro throwback should. The series' tone of melancholic flagellation, persecution complexes and religious angst is amped up and almost matches the original for unrelenting cruelty, but they also play with the lore of the first game to give the story a bit more of a throughline. It's not entirely a linear narrative, but it's still more direct than any Souls game because people will actually explain what's happening to them. I mostly understood what was happening, even in a story still reliant on text dumps from item pick-ups. Just tonally, it's deliciously and tangibly evil, too. The Miracle is almost like a Jigsaw killer in how ironic and petty it can be, and it manifests in some of the creepiest visuals in gaming...again. Although the Mechner/Chahi rotoscoping sadly took a back seat this time around.

Combat was always a bigger focus of Blasphemous than other Metroidvanias, and 2 tips the scales even further to mixed results. Having multiple weapons for combat, puzzle solving and mixing up level progression is a wonderful idea, and the three weapons all feel distinct, and while the RPG-lite equipment management on top feels a bit trite and leads to some fetch-questing in the late game, it also means every secret upgrade is actually a meaningful addition that can change how you play, instead of just boosting raw numbers. Combined with a winding and weaving level design that takes a few cues from Metroid Dread in gating off level progression through environmental changes, it makes going through all of Blasphemous 2's vivid and varied biomes refreshing and fun...even if some of the moment-to-moment encounters leave a lot to be desired. There are some fun setpieces and frantic puzzles, but a lot of rooms also just trap you until you kill everyone on screen, and while combat is great, it's still not DMC or anything. Bosses in general are a step-down, save for the second last who puts Orphan of Kos to shame when it comes to catching you on the rebound.

But really, all my issues with Blasphemous 2 are very minor. So what if I miss the old King's Quest style cutscenes? The visual and thematic tone is still unique to Blasphemous alone, evocative and dreadful. So what if the sidequests can expose the backtracking for the fetch quest it can be at times? The winding level design is still great and the upgrades aren't just fluff to tick a checklist, and you're spending your time doing this in one of the best realised settings in 2D games. So what if the additions of a double jump and air dash are slightly stale ideas? They've still always been the best parts of Metroidvania, and by the time you get them both, you have so many combat options available to you that the extra agility really lets you have some fun around the mooks. The Game Kitchen improved the already impeccable style and substance of the first game in many ways; the first game still gets my preference for its novelty and better bosses, but it's a difference of degrees. Absolutely worth the wait.

So Blasphemous 1 was a neat little game. Had a lot of gripes - #1 being instant death spikes/pits in a game trying deliberately to ape Soulsborne gameplay, but there were a few others.

Anyway; Blasphemous 2? Better in almost every way. So good in fact that... it's almost better than Hollow Knight. Yeah, 2 cakes etc. but I think it's worth mentioning because of how tight this game is. Most of my complaints are just towards some of the late game sidequests you need to do to 100%, but often those items aren't actually that good for final 'builds' and it's just for achievements. Art is stellar as expected, map design is great, but what REALLY sold this game for me was the combat, and that's where it outshines Hollow Knight to an absurd degree.

See, I enjoyed Hollow Knight a ton, but later in the game fights got really tedious because you have to rely on your basic melee to do the bulk of your damage, and it just gets annoying because of how short range it is and how often you need to jump to hit enemies. If you aren't able to bounce off an enemies head over and over, the fight is probably miserable. In Blasphemous 2 however, you have 3 weapons each with unique movesets and special abilities, and while I essentially used the same weapon for 90% of the game, not only is that one weapon (the censor, Veredicto) a million times more reliable than the Nail due to it's sweeping, somewhat long range attack, you have options like charging hits to do a big AoE shockwave or a mid air spin move, as well as the ability to light it on fire for bonus damage, which can combo into special moves or with late game upgrades cant you some arcing projectiles off your swings. Almost every fight felt super clean using that weapon, and while the sword seems kind of mediocre, the rapier and dagger combo can do some RIDICULOUS damage output and has a lot of combat maneuvers if you can consistently avoid taking damage to keep it's meter built, and of course having the ability to block and even perfect parry. It's just a very nuanced combat system for the kind of game that didn't necessarily need it, but it's really what brings it all together in my eyes.

Another thing worth noting in that regard though, is that each weapon is also used for specific kinds of progression blockers or puzzles, so you're often expected to be swapping between all 3 anyway just to navigate the map, so someone who's less attached to a specific weapon than I was might find themselves consistently fighting with all 3 and developing a really intricate plan of attack for every encounter. It's not necessary, but the options there and that's always a plus.

Really the only thing I see holding this game back is, well, the way everything is presented. People say Dark Souls lore is impenetrable and convoluted, and they're sorta right, but trying to parse what was going on in this when I have no real knowledge of the bible for me to catch most of the analogues, nor do I have any experience with the way people speak in these games, I never really felt like I fully understood what was going on even on a basic level. We're trying to stop the heart in the sky from birthing... something, for some reason. After beating the game I think I have a better idea of what our reason for doing all that was but I cant be certain. I don't really know if this is just a me thing, but I figure it surely cant be, since I'm usually pretty good at catching onto plot lines and figuring things out and all that, but it is something that just kinda comes with the territory and you can't really make this kind of a game with these kinds of themes without having those parts that make it hard to parse crop up. Still, I don't think you need a concrete understanding of everything going on to be able to enjoy what is at it's core a VERY solid metroidvania.