I think the first thing I want to say about this game is that I think for better or worse it fulfilled all of its Kickstarter goals, well except for the WII U edition but I was never planning on buying this game on a console, but aside from that and relooking at all their stated goals it seems like everything they listed made its way into the game. Now the second question is does this game live up to Symphony of the N... Let's not even write the whole name out, the answer is no. Bluntly I'll just say up front that this game is not as good as that game was. That being said I think this game has some good qualities and while I don't think it lives up to its predecessor I still enjoyed this game for the most part and I enjoyed it more than Konami's subsequent Castlevania releases after
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night [悪魔城ドラキュラX 月下の夜想曲].
Like a lot of people, I was skeptical of the change from 2D to 2.5D graphics. We all know the horror stories pertaining to this type of game and Kickstarter need I even say the name of that other game that will no doubt be compared very unfavorably in comparison to this? Instead of me comparing it to Mighty No.9. I would like to instead compare it to a game much closer to home and that is the 2.5D remake of
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood [悪魔城ドラキュラX 血の輪廻] that you get in the PSP collection
.... To the extent that I have ever heard anyone talk about this game, it was always in the slight negative. Well, I didn't think the game looked as good as the original Rondo of Blood, but I did think in almost every regard it was as good of a game as it's original counterpart, in fact, it had controls that were slightly less floaty and more precise which I think most people would expect the opposite. Despite the limitations of the hardware and in adapting a 2D game to an awkward 2.5D I always admired the attempt with that remake to do almost as much detail as the first game with this new take on the graphics.
In a lot of ways BS reminds me of that game but graphically enhanced like a million times. So I think one of this games biggest strengths was one of most peoples biggest concerns the 2.5D looks absolutely breathtaking in some areas. One thing I like about this game's graphics a lot is the way lighting looks in it. It flows naturally from a source and doesn't use excessive bloom shit all over the place like some indie games and attempts "modernize" a retro game like
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee - New 'n' Tasty! I would like to point out areas I thought looked particularly good but I would basically just be listing every area in the game. I'll give you two areas of note. I think the spiral staircase clock tower area was particularly good at showcasing how 2.5D can be used in creative ways that odd to the platforming of a game instead of just being a detractor to it. The way the area looked and functioned was great and I wish more areas tried to do more creative things with the graphics and the environments to really justify to people why 2.5D is necessary over a simpler 2D game. I do like the "Oriental lab" part the best of all the areas and the dojo part with the sliding Japanese paper doors was also an excellent use of this games graphical advantages. It reminded me a little bit of a similar level in
Super Mario 3D World [スーパーマリオ3Dワールド].
I have to admit a further bias here in that I really like the 32/64 bit era 2D games and their mix of 2D environments with 3D enhancements and production values. I think this overt love for this mix is why
Mega Man 8 [ロックマン8 メタルヒーローズ] is my favorite game in that particular series even though everyone else seemed to dislike it if they thought anything about it at all. I love the death effects and the particle effects that come from this mix of graphical prowess. I know there are a lot of Japanese only Sega Saturn games that were 2D with minor 3D enhancements but since the N64 and the PlayStation both primarily focused on 3D there are only a few scant games in their libraries where we got this mix at the time, but every time they did I thought it was awesome. I even praised a similar mix albeit not exactly the same in my
Final Fantasy Tactics [ファイナルファンタジータクティクス] review. I love its mix of 2D art with 3D particle effects and lighting. To me, there is just something magical about this and I guess I'm a hobbyist of this kind of outdated graphical prowess that no one else seems to give a shite about or just tolerates.
Now while the areas look good on their own, I do have to knock this game a little for having a bit of a lack of cohesion to the areas of this game. A lot of the areas just seem a bit too unique and jarring when placed next to each other. I think more should have been done to make all this seem like one cohesive place instead of just having random areas connect to one another for no reason.
The characters look great in this game and the main character shows almost all of the armor changes when she gets a new piece of gear and through a "barber" you meet halfway into the game you get a lot more customizability options for her. I want you to read the rest of my reviews and guess what I made Miriam look like. Spoiler: If you guessed that she had short hair and was wearing the skimpiest outfit possible you just might have been close to right. Unfortunately, there is no prize for being right on this.
I imagine that everyone's 2.5D erections went full 3D after seeing Dominique Baldwin for the first time. A character who is a vendor for you at first but ends up having a bigger role in the story. She looks like another Umbra Witch in the
Bayonetta [ベヨネッタ] universe except even hotter somehow. I guess the game has a positive I never considered could come from a sequel to Castlevania games a new height for the fanservice and sexual appeal of the games. They did it, this is the games biggest achievement over Symphony of The Night. I only ever considered fucking Alucard once or twice every playthrough, but my image folder for these two women grew exponentially in comparison to my time actually playing the game. They came up short on a lot of things in this game, but they knew what us nerds really needed in a sequel. 20/10 best game of the year on the strength of Dominique's outfit alone.
I joke around folks and even though my joke reflects a reality about myself and other losers, I wanted to overdo this little bit here to say that this game pandered a bit. Not just in sexual regards, I mean the whole premise of the game is to pander to people who opine for a game that came out twenty years ago. Even giving it some leeway in that the games whole existence is predicated on a special kind of pandering, I still feel like it went a little overboard in this game. One thing I should do before elaborating on this point further exclude some of the positive ways they did this aside from Dominique's mile-long legs, a positive form of fanservice that is strewn all throughout the game is references. There are a lot of references to previous Castlevania games. The victims in Lindsay's quests are named after Castlevania characters. There a lot of weapons items and locations that are reminiscent of those games. It also surprisingly has a lot of references to
Shovel Knight which break out the kaleidoscopic Inception jokes here because that game was a spiritual successor to among other games earlier Castlevanias and now it is being referenced in a spiritual successor to another type of Castlevania game. Any time Shovel Knight is mentioned I'm happy. So the game got some points for me with the inclusion of a Shovel Knight enemy and his armor and weapons. These are all types of fan service that I like and can stomach despite their sugary nature. It's hard for me to pinpoint the exact negatives of this game in terms of pandering but something about the game as a whole just feels a bit too pandering and condescending in it's want to recreate the past experiences of my wasted youth. There is something about it that is too much of recreation and a retread of past ideas. I liken it to problems I had with Dark Souls 3 where the pandering retreading nature of the third iteration of the crestfallen warrior, "Siegward" and the fucking third Ornstein fight started to get on my nerves. Well imagine if a whole game tried to be an already classic game but it comes off a bit like a cheap knock off of that previous game. I feel like that is a harsh assessment given that there is a reason for the games cheapness in that this is coming from a new company and they're starting from scratch on this title, but despite my want to be fair to them, that is how I feel about the title and its attempts to mimic Symphony of The Night. It comes off very overwrought, pandering and a retread to the point of condescension. Which is why it's kind of weird to me that people who I have seen review the game elsewhere have tended to only criticize the ways in which this game was not just a complete retread of SOTN. Like it's 2.5D graphics, the shard system, the missions etc. It seems like everything new they tried is an easy target and I have some criticisms of these things myself, but I think a bigger problem with the game is despite being a spiritual successor to something else I think it needed a bit more of its own identity and a bit less of giving people exactly what they wanted. I can't live on a diet of long anime legs and references to games I already love and believe me I have tried. I tried so hard that instead of being the fourth iteration of Ornstein, I'm the second iteration of Smough. Only even grosser and more detested by my peers.
I know that I just went on a bit of rant that I think this game was lacking its own identity and we should try to praise it where it was attempting to formulate one, but as a reviewer I also think I should explore the merits of this game as a spiritual successor to SOTN and how much it lived up to that potential or not even if I don't personally think the game should be judged that way. Here is what I think are the greatest aspects of SOTN in a nutshell, It's 2D graphics were some of the best I have ever seen. The castle both regular and inverted was one of the greatest locations in gaming history. I don't think any other Metroidvania even Super Metroid which I hold in almost as high of a regard as SOTN had exploration gameplay that was quite as fun as SOTN. The soundtrack of the game is my personal favorite of the series and one of my favorite soundtracks of any game. There are only about five other games that I could say contend with SOTN's soundtrack. The Castlevania games in general from the first game onward always had particularly good soundtracks for their respective generations, even some of the worst entries in the series like the two Nintendo 64 games had good soundtracks.
Well we have talked about the game's graphics and while I think this game looks pretty good I already know other people aren't going to get over the 2.5D change, so this is a point of contention at best, lets see in this review how the game fares in terms of the other four things listed.
Let's say that a company was making a spiritual successor to
Crysis. The first thing I would expect to be excellent about a spiritual successor to Crysis is the graphics, I mean if everything else was shit I would imagine that this at least would be a key strength of that hypothetical game. Now let's imagine someone was going to make a spiritual successor to
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, well I would expect the game to have a heavy emphasis on storytelling and character development and interaction in particular and a deconstructive look at the genre or series it is a part of. I'm pointing out the rather obvious fact that when something is the "spiritual successor" to something else that I expect it to at the very least try to incorporate that games most well-known aspect. I said all that to explain that normally in a game I would say that having great music is a nice bonus but it isn't necessary for a game being great. This game, however, is a spiritual successor to Symphony of The Night, which is mine and a lot of people's opinion has one of the best soundtracks in gaming history. So I expect the music to at least attempt some modicum of that standard and unfortunately I don't think it even came close to being "good" let alone matching the greatness of the game this is supposed to be a spiritual successor to. You know I honestly liked the music in the eight-bit prequel game
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon more and I wasn't even particularly impressed with that game's music. As I said with that game I don't even think the music in this is as good as other new "retro" titles like Shovel Knight and Sonic Mania. You know I just beat this game and I can't even murmur a single one of the game's songs, it was utterly forgettable in regards to music and sound design.
One thing regarding the sound in this game that is notable is the voice of one of the characters, Zangetsu. He is voiced by a man named David Hayter. David is arguably one of the most well-known video game voice actors because he voiced
Solid Snake [ソリッド スネーク] in the
Metal Gear Solid [メタルギアソリッド] games until Kojima made a mistake and replaced him with
Kiefer Sutherland. Who I don't think did a bad job but it just wasn't the same without David. Obviously, he brings some level of coolness and badassery to the character of Zangetsu in this game that wouldn't be brought from someone completely new to the industry. His character also plays a similar role to that of Solid Snake in
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty in that he is overpowered and in a section where he "helps" you on a train the reality is that you're clearly the Robin to his Batman. Aside from him, the general voice acting in the game was ok, The main character Miriam's actor gave the character a little bit of a personality, but a lot of the other actors were "functional." As in they worked for the role given but didn't really bring anything extra to it.
Before we talk about the gameplay just as a note I played the game on all three difficulties and after playing the first Bloodstained I wanted to go immediately into the hardest difficult after seeing how easy that game was but alas you have to unlock harder modes. I wanted to say this here so that when you hear me say "the game is easy" multiple times throughout this review you'll know that I'm talking about all three of the game difficulties in fact I didn't notice much of a difference between the games various difficulties at all. Which is criticism of mine in that it seems like no effort was put into making the game more challenging as difficulty scaled up.
So now that we got the sound and graphics out of the way lets talk about what I think is the most important thing that it tries to do like it's predecessor, it's exploration. One of the biggest problems with this game and this is something I never would have thought would be a problem with this is that upgrades to yourself don't feel as rewarding as they should. One of the biggest reasons I consistently felt this way is that major upgrades are sometimes hidden among the games shards that you can easily forget about or miss. A key example of this is the ability to swim which you get by killing a random jellyfish enemy and gaining a shard. The problem with this is that swimming is needed to get to a few of the largest areas on the lower half of the map and if you somehow don't get the swimming shard when traversing the area the first time it might lead to you as it did for me hours of frustration not knowing where to go next.
Another example of this that that is bad in a different way is the high jump shard. You don't get this shard until about 90% of the way through the game and by the time you do it has already been made redundant by your ability to reverse the map, allowing you to "fall" upwards. It also is mapped awkwardly on the controller and I found it to be more of a hassle without the Zangetsu sword equipped and subsequently I never used what I consider to be a fairly basic staple upgrade in these types of games. I mean this is one of the first things you get in
Super Metroid [スーパーメトロイド] and Symphony of the Night. I think this upgrade should have been given to you before you even got a double jump let alone the reversal ability. Even when you get it is simply crafted using a random item and like with swimming blink and you just might miss the ability to do this. I think that in a Metroidvania like this movement upgrades that allow you to explore more of the area should feel like the most important reward you get. Because what appeals to me in these games is the exploration aspect and I think that is the key appeal of the genre. I remember the first time I got the bat ability in SOTN and instantly I realized all the exploration potential from this one upgrade to my character. I remember feeling a similar way about the Varia suit in Super Metroid. So when I can easily miss a major upgrade in regards to my movement or it doesn't feel special I think that is a pretty big failing of a game like this. Every one of the movement upgrades in this game should have felt as special as those I just mentioned and they just never did.
Bridging off of this criticism I found that a lot of events and items you get pertaining to early quests are awkwardly placed. The "In memory quests" ask for items that aren't always available in the near future. You can't craft a pizza the second food item for that old lady for a long period of time unless you're lucky with some low drop rates and I wasn't and that was merely one item on a long list of them and the subsequent items weren't any easier to find or craft. Which means that a lot of the content of this game is "backloaded" for lack of a better term. There is a lot of things that I would consider minor aspects of the game that you're gated away from doing for long periods of time. Strangely the quests that you do where you kill enemies for Lindsay are actually pretty well-paced and you unlock them organically as you discover more parts of the map. It's weird to me that they can get this right with those quests but not with the other two series of quests.
I mentioned that you get a power called "reversal" and that it allows you to flip the screen vertically so that you fall upwards towards the ceiling. I think this was a neat upgrade for a game like this, only it wasn't utilized as fully as I think it could have been. I think aspects of the castle and the upside-down viewpoint should have reflected this change in perspective more as if the viewpoint is an anticipated normal event in this particular location. What I mean by that is I think we should have seen some upside-down furniture and other things that make sense in this perspective that don't normally from our usual gravitational point of perspective. I think rooms should have been made with the upside-down perspective in mind that doesn't make sense from our normal viewpoint. There was also this game I can't think of the name of right now where you fought in an inverted castle and the way the castle was set up in this inverse version it added more challenges and logically illogical things to spice up the fact that you were essentially traversing the same massive place twice. It managed to have the castle look like a unique and interesting place even when it was merely inverted... Oh yeah, this game is supposed to be a spiritual successor to that game. Maybe they should have taken or had ingrained more of the lessons from that games development than this showed with its untapped reversal mechanic.
There is also another problem with this game, the first area you start out in is a ship and when you leave the area to get to the main hub of the game the shipwrecks against the shores. Only not really, the backgrounds of the ship and what you see throughout most of it doesn't reflect the changes to the ship's position. I think a game like this could do more with the change of the ship being grounded rather than afloat but at the very least it could change its backgrounds to reflect it's new circumstances.
Another big problem with the exploration of this game is that it feels a lot more linear than previous games and it is one of the primary reasons for the bad pacing issues I talked about earlier.
So I guess I knocked the fourth thing out, but let's more plainly state the criticism even further the game's map is not as large or as detailed as that of SOTN's. Some areas are neat and I think they would be great in a larger game but most of it just doesn't live up to that fabled game of legend we all love so much.
This game had a problem that I quickly noticed as a fan of the Soulsbourne games and that is that bosses that weren't a humanoid shape were easy to kill or I just wasn't impressed with their attacks and their ability to counter. Aside from the two Zangetsu fights, the optional OD fight and Bloodless most of the fights in this game are extremely easy. Now granted SOTN was not the most difficult game in the Castlevania series and balance was definitely not one of its strong points. I actually like that it gave you so many options and ways to beat the game but I know a lot of people didn't but I'll say that even the easiest boss in SOTN was harder than the hardest boss in this game.
Aside from the bosses the game controlled and played as well as a game mimicking SoTN should. Most of the enemies were nicely designed. I like that they went more of an absurdist route with some of them like the cats that were a reward to Kickstarter backers. I think more of the game should have gone with this absurd surrealist route to differentiate it more from past titles.
Now some minor bad things. One thing that this game kept that I would rather not see come back from SoTN was the backdash ability. I think it's a neat ability to have but from a movement improvement standpoint, I would rather have Super Metroid's speed boost. Which you get in this game any way making the backdash a redundant ability. One thing that made me hate the backdash in SoTN was using it and watching it being used in speed runs. I can see why people used it because it gave you a minor movement speed advantage but it just makes the game seem broken to see this stupid ass ability spammed. I wish they would have either made it waste magic or have a stamina bar for this and other abilities so that it can't be spammed stupidly. Its use reminds me of people who bunnyhop in MMO's for a minor speed increase yes it helps but it just makes the game look awkward and stupid to play. I don't know about other people but I always feel worse when not min/maxing my gameplay in every way possible and needing to do shit like this that actively makes the game feel worse takes a little bit of the games luster away for me.
A small concern of mine is that the game had this really ornate UI but a basic font that didn't really go with the ornateness of the rest of the design. It was like seeing a plastic license plate holder on a Rolls Royce with silver trim.
The story of this game is pure mediocrity. Now the story in SOTN was also not the greatest story penned to paper and some of it's dialogue scenes like the opening scene with Richter and Dracula is so over the top cheesy and delivered with such terrible voice acting that it almost loops back on itself and becomes awesome through sheer tacky force of will. I think that scene stands out as being particularly bad though because it's at the start of the game and everyone sees it and because it's the most amount of story you get in the game. People and by people I mean magazine reviewers who were writing reviews on a deadline and probably didn't finish or get to see as much of the game as the average video game player may have noticed that Alucard's voice acting wasn't as bad as the intros and a lot of the other minor characters weren't bad, I particularly like the librarian. The game's acting and story holds up a little better than people collectively remember. Most of your time playing SOTN is all gameplay and to the extent that it had a story at all, it was one-liners spouted to you from bosses before a fight. So the biggest problem with this game is that unlike SOTN where you could ignore most of the story and still enjoy 98% of the title, a lot of this games bad story is forced on you and because you have to interact with vendors more in this game because of the crafting and soul shard systems you're forced to be around all the characters a lot longer. I didn't really mind this much, but I can imagine some of the forced dialogue and added exposition you get from these people sometimes being tiring for other people who play this game. I mean they constantly complained about the story in SOTN and it was almost nonexistent so I can't see them enjoying this, but who knows.
The storyline is also not as straightforward as previous games. When You strip away all the exposition and taunting from the bosses in previous Castlevania games at the core of the story is just a basic fight between you and whatever evil shit Dracula is doing. There aren't any added layers, themes, unfinished or under-explained concepts or gray areas. You gotta kill Dracula and the reason you have to is the guy is an asshole who is constantly doing evil shit with his ever-changing castle. It's like I said about the cover of Diablo, you see the devils face on the cover and you know exactly what the fuck you have to do in the game. Kill that evil sonnofabitch. They try to make things a little more complex in Bloodstained but not in a way that adds depth so much as it just adds needless complication. Miriam and this dude Gebel are humans that have been enhanced by alchemy. Sometimes these enhanced humans go rogue and start fucking shit up, which has led some of the human population to hate them as a whole. I share this same bigotry, as my father was killed by a man who was enhanced by alchemy. Old pap was just going to the store to get the family a new crate of wall meat when he was suddenly attacked viciously by a man with a fire whip. He never saw it coming and he was beaten so badly we couldn't have an open casket at the funeral. So I can't stand the sight of these disgusting creatures, but I tried to put my racist ways aside and judge this game by the content of its characters and not by their glassy and glittery skin. Despite them being perceived as evil by me and most of the human population, Gebel wanted to be the Charles Xavier of alchemical mutants and prove that despite the inherent danger of their massive power and thigh gaps, that they could lead not only a life that makes other humans lives better but that they can be heroes worthy of praise. Miriam despite being treated like she was a second class citizen decided to follow Gebel's lead and use her powers to save humans. So it comes as some surprise at the start of the game when Gebel goes rogue despite his earlier pleas of the worthiness of his race. One of the reasons this happens aside from obvious story convenience is the same shit happened in SOTN. Richter after striking Dracula down with his massive dick a few years later became evil and made the Castle he just emptied of Dracula and his minions his new home. This was as much of a shock to Alucard then as it was to Miriam in this game.
So Miriam is making her way on the boat with some dork named Johannes who was once an evil alchemist that is trying to help her now and make up for his past evil ways. He also later helps her craft things after you finish the small boat section I mentioned earlier in the review. At the end of this stating boat section, you meet Gebel and like SOTN he gives you a speech where he disparages people doing good like Dracula did to Richter. He then leaves and you fight a mermaid with massive scaly tits, which is kind of a weird recurring enemy in a lot of games lately, Cuphead, Shantae the newer Ys [イース] Games. Looking back on my childhood I don't remember mermaids with scaly fish tits being a part of those memories and I think I would and yet somehow these people making games with a retro feel seem to remember something that I don't about those 2D games of the past. The only girl with scales I remember having a crush on in the '90s was Princess Ruto and I'm trying to forget those shameful memories. This fight also reminds me of World of Warcraft: Legion, Helga fight in everyone's favorite dungeon from that expansion Maw of Souls. By everyone's favorite, I mean that you probably thought of this dungeon right before finalizing your suicide note after having to run it thousands of times for minor AP increases.
So after you beat the poor unfortunate soul and leave the boat. You come upon a village and almost all of it is on fire. Which is yet another call back to a Castlevania game, this one being Castlevania: Rondo of Blood [悪魔城ドラキュラX 血の輪廻], which is the game where Richter originated and the one that came right before Symphony of the Night. A lot of the story after this point is you meeting the other characters and trying to get to Gebel for the first two-fifths or so of the game's length. You meet the previously mentioned Dominique Baldwin and she sells and buys stuff. She also ends up being the games primary antagonist and I'll have more to say about that shortly. You meet a monster barber who is really a cursed human and he can help you customize your character. You meet the three people you can get missions from a farmer, some vengeful woman and this old lady that wants you to cook a bunch of shit for her. You also meet this guy throughout the adventure who keeps getting lost and you need to have an item on hand to try to return him to the village but the dude keeps fucking up where he wants to teleport. Throughout the game, all these characters will give you additional dialogue if you come to them at the right time after certain areas are discovered and bosses defeated. I don't think any of these characters are particularly strong which wouldn't be the worst thing ever for some of this side people but with characters like Dominque Baldwin I think a player should feel more strongly about her than I felt in regards to her character and I just didn't. I mean aside from the way in which I did, but we don't need to hash all that out again. Later in the game, you meet the previously mentioned Zangetsu and if I can say the game succeeded with any of these characters Zangetsu was it. He was one of the previously mentioned bigots who hate alchemy mutants. He lost a few body parts to them and he has been at war with the fuckers since they started to exist. With David's voice, the character is just badass and although he hates you at the start, he realizes Miriam is trying to do good despite her alchemical nature. In symphony of the night, you fought a woman named Maria Rennard who was a little girl in Rondo of Blood and she comes to the castle in SOTN in order to find out what happened to Richter. She becomes an ally for Alucard but like Zangatsu she decides to fight him in order to "test" the main character. Just cditing yet another way in which this story is like the previous one. You also meet the old man Alchemist named Alfred who is just kind of a dick for most of the adventure and you fight him at one point, but then in the end through some dialogue, you learn that he was actually trying to do good. Like most of the characters in this story, I don't really think anything about him.
When you finally meet Gebel again one of a few things could happen. Depending on whether or not you know the "trick" to defeat him without killing him you'll either get one of the games bad ending or the fight will stop and Gebel will be wounded enough that he comes back to his senses and now you make your way through a few more areas where you fight the games real antagonist Dominique and some giant three-headed thing she summons. Again this happens in the story because the same shit happened with Richter in SOTN. If you take any deeper lesson from the game, understand that when a character tries to be Charles Xavier the only way to win in this world is to be Magneto and kick his fuckin ass. Violence is the answer and the question was "How do I make the world a better place?"
Everything past this is just getting to the final boss and nothing really interesting happens. The story as I showed over and over again is beat for beat the same story as SOTN's. They didn't follow other aspects of the game that well, but they really followed the story of that game almost to a point of parody. I don't really get why either, of all the things people praised about the original game its story, was not one of those things. Again like other parts of the game, I think the best things about the story was the way in which it didn't follow the story of SOTN. I like that the game had a female protagonist and antagonist. I think the antagonist was a bit of a letdown in that her characterization and motives weren't that interesting, but I think that Miriam has the potential to be a more interesting hero if they decide to make another game with her in it. The idea of alchemy and using it as a way to differentiate this game from the last was interesting I just wasn't particularly fond of the execution of it from a mechanical standpoint and story wise it just more needlessly complicated the narrative. The story on a whole is just a worse version of SOTN's with some minor highlights and sparks of insight here and there. I never thought the story in any of the Castlevania games was particularly good and I didn't really go into any of the previous games thinking that I should expect a great story so I didn't expect that here. I started off this review by saying that I think for better or worse this game fulfilled it's Kickstarter goals. Despite it not doing so I think they genuinely did try to make a game that was like SOTN, it just didn't quite meet the mark or their perception of what was great about that game is very different than what most people including myself like about SOTN. As I said throughout the review I think the game would have fared a little better if it changed some things a bit more and aimed for its own identity rather than try to be a copy of something that I don't really think can be completely captured. Even on the merits of this being a modern retro game it just isn't as good as other titles I've played and mentioned all throughout this and the other Bloodstained review. I still think this is a game worth playing and there are some ideas within that show me some of Iga's magic can work again if they really try.
I feel bad that both my reviews of the Bloodstained games came off so negative, but I write what I genuinely felt about the titles and despite my want to see things from a rosier perspective I couldn't deny that these games had some huge flaws. I really want a good sequel or just a Metroidvania that I think finally surpasses the two most iconic games of the genre Super Metroid and SOTN. When I played
Cave Story [洞窟物語] for the first time and I saw that "indie" games were becoming a thing and that other freaks in this world wanted to go back to the old testament of refining 2D gameplay I felt hope for video games I hadn't in quite a while. I wanted to see a modern title that was finally bigger, bolder and offered new ways to explore the gargantuan maps of these games. I still believe this is a possibility I just haven't seen it happen yet. I still believe in a thing called love owwwwwwwwww. I like a few of the steps this game took and some other games in the genre like Cave Story,
La-Mulana [ラ・ムラーナ], Shantae and the slightly overrated in my opinion but still great title
Hollow Knight. I hope they use these two initial Bloodstained games as a stepping stone to really try to build the hypothetical perfect sequel to SOTN that I always imagined in my mind's eye after playing the game non-stop for two months when I initially got it. Some people might find such a devotion to a game a bit slavish. I swear to you though that my intentions are good and my own. *Put's the book made of human leather down and touches the bite marks on his neck as he notices the gallant vampire approaching.* "Oh its you master Alucard... What do you need?"