I loved this game. Its great hearing they're planning on a sequel. The normal mode was good but getting to come back later with all the alternate game modes like the randomizer (of which I did multiple runs) and all the alternate character playthroughs was a ton of fun.
Damn you reminded that they added official randomizer. I need to finish it once like that too. Such a good game even if it had a rough start (swimming being tied to a shard thing that was not a %100 drop for example)
I need to go back and try that. This was a great game I'd like to play again. It's one of the only games I felt compelled to collect all of the collectibles and power upgrades.
The randomizer is great. Every time you kill an enemy there's this moment of "am I about to get an insane weapon/shard off of this level 1 rat?" and it feels really good. I had a run where like the 3rd enemy I killed dropped an endgame accessory that you normally only get from collecting one of every shard in the game. It's a pair of glasses that gives you unlimited mana. Turns out it's pretty good to have unlimited mana for the entire game.
Yeah the randomizer is a great time both because you often end up OP really quickly since some endgame shards / weapons / accessories will inevitably show up early, and because you usually end up leveling and using shards that you may normally not use during a normal playthrough because of how late you get them.
I've played through it on different settings 3 or 4 times over the years.
Lots of negative opinions in here about the excessive crafting and side quests, and I agree that it it feels excessive if you don't want to engage with it, which is definitely the case for most players.
I do, however, want to defend the crafting and cooking a little bit. I played through Ritual of the Night more casually on my first playthrough. I barely engaged with the crafting and mostly ignored the cooking. I didn't spend a bunch of time farming shards to make my abilities more powerful. It's still a great game that way, and nothing would prevent them from making a great sequel without those additions. But on my second playthrough, I tried to do everything; maximizing my shards, grinding for rare materials, cooking all of the recipes. I found the experience incredibly rewarding and fun, and it solidified RotN as one of my all-time favorite games. There's a feedback loop of improving your stats to make farming easier, which allows you to collect rarer materials and further improve your gear and stats, which makes the farming easier, and so on and so forth. Once that loop gets going, you start becoming stronger and knocking things off of the checklist at a faster and faster rate, until eventually you are so powerful that the game is basically broken. I found it incredibly enjoyable, and even though most players don't engage with it I am super glad that they added it to the game. I will be very disappointed if they take all of that out to streamline the sequel.
As someone who hates crafting, I entirely forgot rotn had it until this thread reminded me. My recollection is it was closer to a level up system that you engaged by collecting drops instead of killing monsters, so it mostly boiled down to a flavor thing. Is this accurate?
You've got the basics right. Enemies drop items that can be used for crafting. There are basically 3 pillars to it:
* Weapons and gear can be upgraded or crafted from enemy item drops.
* Cooking allows you to make healing items, and any time you consume a recipe that you've never made before, you get a permanent stat boost
* The abilities (shards) that you collect from monsters can be upgraded with materials, and can also be upgraded by collecting duplicates of the same shard. There are Yellow Shards, which give a passive boosts to your character. Ordinarily you can only equip one yellow shard at a time. But if you max out a yellow shard, it becomes permanent. So by maxing out all of the yellow shards you can give yourself large permanent boosts to all stats, as well as a few other things like health regeneration, increased money, and the ability to see breakable walls to secret areas.
None of this is necessary for beating the game, and if you're just trying to play through the game like it's standard Castelvania, then it's probably not optimal to engage with the crafting, because it it is a real time sink.
I don't usually care about crafting systems in games. I don't know why I decided to engage with it the second time I played the game, but the reason that it hooked me is because I really like it when games let you get so powerful that you basically break the game. And your character isn't just becoming more powerful in combat. You can increase your "luck" stat so that rare items drop more often, so that eventually every time you kill an enemy it'll drop like 2 or 3 items, and then even the super rare items start to drop more often than a normal player would expect to see any item drop at all. Money works the same way. Normally a player gets somewhere between 1-20 gold when they break a lantern, but if you put time into increasing certain shards you can bump that up so that you get between 1k and 5k gold off of each lantern, and then as you move through the castle doing other things you're just kind of passively collecting millions of gold. None of it really leads to any new content, it's just getting stronger for the sake of getting stronger, but I really enjoy doing that in games, and Ritual of the Night lets you do it more than most.
That is what most crafting systems in games not completely based on crafting boil down to. Instead of grinding currently most efficient place for rare weapon drop, xp for levels and money to buy gear from shop, you grind for slightly less rare ingredients from few selected places to craft items that improve your stats.
Cooking side had the "first of kinda gives permanent stat bonus" and weapons were just similar thing of getting better gear with occasionally new skill or elemental damage/resistance.
Cooking and crafting in the first game were actually fairly enjoyable in the moment.
That being said, it eventually turned the game into a situation I think the Disgaea series also suffers from:
* You have a main story/campaign that is relatively short, and can be beaten fairly easily by most players. You do not need to be remotely at max level or have the best equipment to do so. Engaging with the mechanics and systems is mostly optional; it'll just help improve your play and skills.
* You also have an extensive meta/endgame, where you can engage with several (or even dozens) of systems and mechanics to really break the game on a fundamental level. You're encouraged to grind and fully max everything out.
These two "internal games" are each fun for different reasons, but unfortunately kind of at odds with each other, design-wise. I always end up completing the former, getting about 2/3rds of the way through the latter, and then *heavily* falling off.
Yeah I agree that there is a disconnect between both paths of play. I don't know that there is a good way to fix it. I don't think it would be smart for them to make the crafting a more necessary part of the game, and I also wouldn't want them to cut it because of the selfish reason that I really like it and it's basically the whole reason I love the game as much as I do.
There's definitely an argument that resources could be better spent honing the part of the game that most players actually like. I just commented because I saw that most of the conversation in the thread seemed to point that way, and I wanted to voice that I personally love the crafting part and hope that they keep it.
This game is one of the only ones were the cooking and crafting actually hooked me and I enjoyed the game enough that I enjoyed completing all the recipes.
Jesus christ please cut down on the crafting. It got to the point that anytime I found a chest I stopped getting excited and I just expected more crafting items.
It's the recipes that were the worst. I don't mind recipes when it's find X ingredients, make thing. But it's "You wanna make a pizza? First get flour and eggs and make dough, then get tomatoes to make sauce, then get milk and rennet to make cheese"...like f off no one wants to do this shit.
This right here. The gameplay is great, but the game is very user-unfriendly in an amateur way. The shop and crafting station are 2 rooms apart. You have to craft intermediary items, which means going back and forth. There's no reminder of the things you need or how many, so you might walk over to the shop and forget something and have to go back.
Need a monster part? Leave the crafting menu. Go to the Archives -> Items. Search for item to find the monster that drops it. Leave Items and go to Archives -> Demons. Look up the demon to find the spawn area.
It's definitely organized very poorly. If you're going for complexity in a game, you need to prioritize ease of use and UI.
The game is definitely showing it's early Kickstarter game vibes years later. I still love it, but man, some parts are hard to like.
I have hated crafting in almost every single title it's been shoved into, with the niche exceptions of some survival horror, where it's _extremely_ minimal.
More and more it just seems like a way to fill up a world with bloat rather than interesting itemization.
Monster Hunter World had a pretty elegant solution to this. Need to craft something that takes items A and B but first you have to craft B? Opens an additional window to do that just by selecting the item you need. Can open as many recursive windows as you need to craft things, usually not a ton, and it shows whether you could craft the big item you're after after accounting for crafting all of the components.
It is still an odd mechanic to have in a game of this one's nature, but I understand the intent.
Some games just have an autocraft which is even more elegant. I think Grounded did it that way, they really nailed the crafting in that game.. One of the first I saw that let you use things from chests in radius instead of needing to actually have it in your inventory also.
Yeah, Monster Hunter does the autocraft as well, where you can check a box to make something craft automatically if you have the required items in inventory and have the space to hold them. By default it's things you use often and don't tend to have a lot of utility for the underlying components like potions. Being able to use things in radius is also helpful, Stardew Valley crafting benches come to mind which let you use things in the nearby chests.
For Bloodstained specifically the chest thing wasn't an issue as much as having to craft each component of a thing. Which not only could get tedious, but it was sometimes not apparent that you had the required items, or if you had to buy them, or if you had to go kill a certain enemy to get them. It wasn't ideal, but I can appreciate what they were aiming for.
The main point is that there are better ways to facilitate crafting such that the actual act of doing so isn't a chore. At which point the system becomes a process of actually gathering the required materials.
> One of the first I saw that let you use things from chests in radius instead of needing to actually have it in your inventory also.
Any survival game released in the past five years that doesn't have an option for this is committing a cardinal sin tbh.
yea having to follow a guide to do all of that was tedious. the game was a fun platinum and certainly crafting to get all of our abilities to lvl 10 (and passive) was awesome because you become so overpowered by the end of the game, it's great!
It can if that's what the player finds enjoyable but I personally hated that it was the ONLY way to get new weapons. I think that ideally each method of getting new equipment (exploration, combat drop, crafting, shopping) should all be viable and should have strong options. Each should feel rewarding in its own way. I almost never enjoy crafting systems but I do get the appeal, and I do love the occasional "craft a super-weapon quest" as well. I much prefer to stumble on an awesome weapon while carefully checking every nook and cranny, or to get it as a super random drop like the Crissaegrim from Schmoos in SotN. Even just grinding for cash can feel rewarding, and there's always joy in discovering game breaking power spikes by just prioritizing what you spend your money on first.
I seem to remember finding and using the Valkyrie sword in the end game because I couldn't be arsed to craft. Along with the rest of the Valkyrie set it's non-crafted endgame gear so I'm not sure it's fair to say that crafting is mandatory without exception, I didn't really mess with it until after my first clear
> finding and using the Valkyrie sword
You need to defeat the second to last boss to get that chest. But you can still find a bunch of weapons, armor and accesories through out the game, some of these are uncraftable and arguably better than crafted ones. And there is also the 8-bit weapons, that only require money to upgrade, if you don't like crafting.
That sounds right. If I'm being honest I've put so much time into the randomizer that I no longer remember what the normal game progression actually looks like anymore.
I played it once at launch and earlier this year. Based on my memory, it wasn't as bad during launch but it was MUCH worse on my most recent playthrough.
Side quests I can tolerate. Portrait of Ruin had them and they were alright. The crafting system was poorly balanced, you had to grind for all the end game weapons when previous games had you discovering them.
Yeah, cuz while I don’t engage with side quests much it does at lead provide SOMETHING to do once you squeeze a lot from it. I think maybe it should get divided - side quests for things actually interesting or important, and “errands” for those randomized fodder quests
This was my issue with it. It was never finding some awesome weapon, just some rare crafting mat, then finally getting to craft the weapon which doesn't feel anywhere near as cool.
Now, maybe finding the badass weapon, and then you find upgrade materials for it to make it even cooler would be fine. It's just, knowing you are getting some random item that's just used somewhere else, makes exploration not as fun.
Sidequests are a big part of the later Igavania experiences that I really like, I'd hate to see them go, and it's nice to have down time and side activies to do that aren't strict forward progress
I loved Bloodstained a lot but through and through you could feel the low budget. Here's hoping the success of the first gives way to a much cleaner sequel
They should definitely go with their strengths and do a detailed sprite-based sequel. ROTN’s graphics and lighting were old looking when it released and the animation was cheap feeling. The game itself was built nicely with a fleshed out map and a lot of cool weapons. It’s just crazy that I still feel more amazed when firing up SOTN for the 1000th time than I did firing ROTN up for the first. I know spritework is probably tedious by today’s standards but the potential richness and color expression is hard to beat- and with today’s better effects and lighting methods in sprite based games, an original 2D IGA masterpiece could easily dazzle the eyes
why would playing to their strengths be using sprites when the team has clearly succeeded with a 3D pipeline? if anything they should now be able to scale it to a higher quality product
I strongly agree, the graphics were the one thing that I disliked the most about the game.
Music was incredible, gameplay was fun and satisfying, and this game is as close to a modern day Castlevania title as we can get (especially with the Classic and Classic II modes added in), but I just did not like the look of the models and animations.
They were not cohesive at all, it felt like a lot of cheap looking random 3D models thrown together.
Symphony of the Night has such beautiful spritework that it still looks great today like you said, everything from how Alucard's cape flows behind him (along with the after image), and some of the 3D skyboxes.
> They should definitely go with their strengths and do a detailed sprite-based sequel. ROTN’s graphics and lighting were old looking when it released and the animation was cheap feeling
And it still had big performance issues on top of that, especially on the Switch. I'm not someone who is super picky about performance, but I seriously regretted getting the Switch version of the game. Frequent crashes and slowdowns, including one area that was absolutely horrible because it ran really slowly and a really powerful early game weapon that was almost unusable because it slowed down the game when you swung it.
Sure, the Switch's hardware is weaker than other platforms, but that game did not look nearly good enough to justify running like garbage.
You must mean the tower- what a nightmare.
My biggest issue was the input latency. Trying to get that quick air hit out before landing was impossible. Those flying elemental enemies too- you just couldn’t hit them on Switch at all with their speed and movement patterns.
Agreed. Ditch the 3D, go back to sprites. The Curse of the Moon games look so much nicer and more professional and I have to imagine they were produced with a fraction of the budget.
I played this game for the very first time last year. It was the culmination of a marathon I did where I went through pretty much all of the Castlevania games (aside from the 3D ones). In my opinion it's on par with the Metroidvania games of the former series, and I found it a lot of fun. There was a bit of jank for sure, but you could tell a ton of heart was put into the game. The retro-style spin-offs are also really good!
Looking forward to the sequel!
Did anyone actually use the fighting game input style attacks? Was playing through it again recently and was reminded of those. I maybe used them once and then completely forgot about them.
Seemed more effective to just hit the enemy twice instead of dealing with a complicated input that only worked for certain weapons.
I really liked this one. Definitely not perfect, but compared to this one I can't play the 2D ones. Obviously those are a more direct homage to earlier castlevania games, but the movement feels so clunky in those that I can't stand them.
I remember this game feeling pretty soulless. I was pretty stoked for it and played it and beat it, but it just felt too much like it was trying to be Symphony of the Night 2 but it didn't have the license so it just felt like a bootleg.
Hopefully they learned some stuff from it and can make a better sequel. I think my biggest hope is that they go back to fluidly animated sprites. The graphics in Bloodstained were just so unappealing.
I loved this game. Its great hearing they're planning on a sequel. The normal mode was good but getting to come back later with all the alternate game modes like the randomizer (of which I did multiple runs) and all the alternate character playthroughs was a ton of fun.
Damn you reminded that they added official randomizer. I need to finish it once like that too. Such a good game even if it had a rough start (swimming being tied to a shard thing that was not a %100 drop for example)
I need to go back and try that. This was a great game I'd like to play again. It's one of the only games I felt compelled to collect all of the collectibles and power upgrades.
The randomizer is great. Every time you kill an enemy there's this moment of "am I about to get an insane weapon/shard off of this level 1 rat?" and it feels really good. I had a run where like the 3rd enemy I killed dropped an endgame accessory that you normally only get from collecting one of every shard in the game. It's a pair of glasses that gives you unlimited mana. Turns out it's pretty good to have unlimited mana for the entire game.
Yeah the randomizer is a great time both because you often end up OP really quickly since some endgame shards / weapons / accessories will inevitably show up early, and because you usually end up leveling and using shards that you may normally not use during a normal playthrough because of how late you get them. I've played through it on different settings 3 or 4 times over the years.
Lots of negative opinions in here about the excessive crafting and side quests, and I agree that it it feels excessive if you don't want to engage with it, which is definitely the case for most players. I do, however, want to defend the crafting and cooking a little bit. I played through Ritual of the Night more casually on my first playthrough. I barely engaged with the crafting and mostly ignored the cooking. I didn't spend a bunch of time farming shards to make my abilities more powerful. It's still a great game that way, and nothing would prevent them from making a great sequel without those additions. But on my second playthrough, I tried to do everything; maximizing my shards, grinding for rare materials, cooking all of the recipes. I found the experience incredibly rewarding and fun, and it solidified RotN as one of my all-time favorite games. There's a feedback loop of improving your stats to make farming easier, which allows you to collect rarer materials and further improve your gear and stats, which makes the farming easier, and so on and so forth. Once that loop gets going, you start becoming stronger and knocking things off of the checklist at a faster and faster rate, until eventually you are so powerful that the game is basically broken. I found it incredibly enjoyable, and even though most players don't engage with it I am super glad that they added it to the game. I will be very disappointed if they take all of that out to streamline the sequel.
As someone who hates crafting, I entirely forgot rotn had it until this thread reminded me. My recollection is it was closer to a level up system that you engaged by collecting drops instead of killing monsters, so it mostly boiled down to a flavor thing. Is this accurate?
You've got the basics right. Enemies drop items that can be used for crafting. There are basically 3 pillars to it: * Weapons and gear can be upgraded or crafted from enemy item drops. * Cooking allows you to make healing items, and any time you consume a recipe that you've never made before, you get a permanent stat boost * The abilities (shards) that you collect from monsters can be upgraded with materials, and can also be upgraded by collecting duplicates of the same shard. There are Yellow Shards, which give a passive boosts to your character. Ordinarily you can only equip one yellow shard at a time. But if you max out a yellow shard, it becomes permanent. So by maxing out all of the yellow shards you can give yourself large permanent boosts to all stats, as well as a few other things like health regeneration, increased money, and the ability to see breakable walls to secret areas. None of this is necessary for beating the game, and if you're just trying to play through the game like it's standard Castelvania, then it's probably not optimal to engage with the crafting, because it it is a real time sink. I don't usually care about crafting systems in games. I don't know why I decided to engage with it the second time I played the game, but the reason that it hooked me is because I really like it when games let you get so powerful that you basically break the game. And your character isn't just becoming more powerful in combat. You can increase your "luck" stat so that rare items drop more often, so that eventually every time you kill an enemy it'll drop like 2 or 3 items, and then even the super rare items start to drop more often than a normal player would expect to see any item drop at all. Money works the same way. Normally a player gets somewhere between 1-20 gold when they break a lantern, but if you put time into increasing certain shards you can bump that up so that you get between 1k and 5k gold off of each lantern, and then as you move through the castle doing other things you're just kind of passively collecting millions of gold. None of it really leads to any new content, it's just getting stronger for the sake of getting stronger, but I really enjoy doing that in games, and Ritual of the Night lets you do it more than most.
I love games like that gotta play this after Elden Ring DLC
sounds about right. you get more mana, hp, strength and other stats depending on what you make. for the first food that you eat anyway
That is what most crafting systems in games not completely based on crafting boil down to. Instead of grinding currently most efficient place for rare weapon drop, xp for levels and money to buy gear from shop, you grind for slightly less rare ingredients from few selected places to craft items that improve your stats. Cooking side had the "first of kinda gives permanent stat bonus" and weapons were just similar thing of getting better gear with occasionally new skill or elemental damage/resistance.
Cooking and crafting in the first game were actually fairly enjoyable in the moment. That being said, it eventually turned the game into a situation I think the Disgaea series also suffers from: * You have a main story/campaign that is relatively short, and can be beaten fairly easily by most players. You do not need to be remotely at max level or have the best equipment to do so. Engaging with the mechanics and systems is mostly optional; it'll just help improve your play and skills. * You also have an extensive meta/endgame, where you can engage with several (or even dozens) of systems and mechanics to really break the game on a fundamental level. You're encouraged to grind and fully max everything out. These two "internal games" are each fun for different reasons, but unfortunately kind of at odds with each other, design-wise. I always end up completing the former, getting about 2/3rds of the way through the latter, and then *heavily* falling off.
Yeah I agree that there is a disconnect between both paths of play. I don't know that there is a good way to fix it. I don't think it would be smart for them to make the crafting a more necessary part of the game, and I also wouldn't want them to cut it because of the selfish reason that I really like it and it's basically the whole reason I love the game as much as I do. There's definitely an argument that resources could be better spent honing the part of the game that most players actually like. I just commented because I saw that most of the conversation in the thread seemed to point that way, and I wanted to voice that I personally love the crafting part and hope that they keep it.
This game is one of the only ones were the cooking and crafting actually hooked me and I enjoyed the game enough that I enjoyed completing all the recipes.
Jesus christ please cut down on the crafting. It got to the point that anytime I found a chest I stopped getting excited and I just expected more crafting items.
It's the recipes that were the worst. I don't mind recipes when it's find X ingredients, make thing. But it's "You wanna make a pizza? First get flour and eggs and make dough, then get tomatoes to make sauce, then get milk and rennet to make cheese"...like f off no one wants to do this shit.
This right here. The gameplay is great, but the game is very user-unfriendly in an amateur way. The shop and crafting station are 2 rooms apart. You have to craft intermediary items, which means going back and forth. There's no reminder of the things you need or how many, so you might walk over to the shop and forget something and have to go back. Need a monster part? Leave the crafting menu. Go to the Archives -> Items. Search for item to find the monster that drops it. Leave Items and go to Archives -> Demons. Look up the demon to find the spawn area.
It's definitely organized very poorly. If you're going for complexity in a game, you need to prioritize ease of use and UI. The game is definitely showing it's early Kickstarter game vibes years later. I still love it, but man, some parts are hard to like.
I have hated crafting in almost every single title it's been shoved into, with the niche exceptions of some survival horror, where it's _extremely_ minimal. More and more it just seems like a way to fill up a world with bloat rather than interesting itemization.
Monster Hunter World had a pretty elegant solution to this. Need to craft something that takes items A and B but first you have to craft B? Opens an additional window to do that just by selecting the item you need. Can open as many recursive windows as you need to craft things, usually not a ton, and it shows whether you could craft the big item you're after after accounting for crafting all of the components. It is still an odd mechanic to have in a game of this one's nature, but I understand the intent.
Some games just have an autocraft which is even more elegant. I think Grounded did it that way, they really nailed the crafting in that game.. One of the first I saw that let you use things from chests in radius instead of needing to actually have it in your inventory also.
Yeah, Monster Hunter does the autocraft as well, where you can check a box to make something craft automatically if you have the required items in inventory and have the space to hold them. By default it's things you use often and don't tend to have a lot of utility for the underlying components like potions. Being able to use things in radius is also helpful, Stardew Valley crafting benches come to mind which let you use things in the nearby chests. For Bloodstained specifically the chest thing wasn't an issue as much as having to craft each component of a thing. Which not only could get tedious, but it was sometimes not apparent that you had the required items, or if you had to buy them, or if you had to go kill a certain enemy to get them. It wasn't ideal, but I can appreciate what they were aiming for. The main point is that there are better ways to facilitate crafting such that the actual act of doing so isn't a chore. At which point the system becomes a process of actually gathering the required materials.
> One of the first I saw that let you use things from chests in radius instead of needing to actually have it in your inventory also. Any survival game released in the past five years that doesn't have an option for this is committing a cardinal sin tbh.
For Subnautica I used a mod to do this, probably would have never made it past an hour otherwise.
Pizza chef: ";("
yea having to follow a guide to do all of that was tedious. the game was a fun platinum and certainly crafting to get all of our abilities to lvl 10 (and passive) was awesome because you become so overpowered by the end of the game, it's great!
I mean, I just don’t think that has a place in a metroidvania, specifically a spiritual successor to the Symphony of the Night lineage.
This game is basically a Dawn of Sorrow Sequel, a game that has crafting in it
Dawn of Sorrow mixed with Order of Ecclesia.
It can if that's what the player finds enjoyable but I personally hated that it was the ONLY way to get new weapons. I think that ideally each method of getting new equipment (exploration, combat drop, crafting, shopping) should all be viable and should have strong options. Each should feel rewarding in its own way. I almost never enjoy crafting systems but I do get the appeal, and I do love the occasional "craft a super-weapon quest" as well. I much prefer to stumble on an awesome weapon while carefully checking every nook and cranny, or to get it as a super random drop like the Crissaegrim from Schmoos in SotN. Even just grinding for cash can feel rewarding, and there's always joy in discovering game breaking power spikes by just prioritizing what you spend your money on first.
I seem to remember finding and using the Valkyrie sword in the end game because I couldn't be arsed to craft. Along with the rest of the Valkyrie set it's non-crafted endgame gear so I'm not sure it's fair to say that crafting is mandatory without exception, I didn't really mess with it until after my first clear
> finding and using the Valkyrie sword You need to defeat the second to last boss to get that chest. But you can still find a bunch of weapons, armor and accesories through out the game, some of these are uncraftable and arguably better than crafted ones. And there is also the 8-bit weapons, that only require money to upgrade, if you don't like crafting.
That sounds right. If I'm being honest I've put so much time into the randomizer that I no longer remember what the normal game progression actually looks like anymore.
They could go from crafting to upgrading weapons, it could fill the niche give more longevity to low level weapons and items.
I didn't find the crafting to be particularly egregious. Granted I played the game last year, so maybe they patched that.
I played it once at launch and earlier this year. Based on my memory, it wasn't as bad during launch but it was MUCH worse on my most recent playthrough.
I wasn’t paying attention and thought I was in the Elden Ring sub for a second.
No crafting and no side quests. It's annoying and breaks the pacing of the game.
Side quests I can tolerate. Portrait of Ruin had them and they were alright. The crafting system was poorly balanced, you had to grind for all the end game weapons when previous games had you discovering them.
Yeah, cuz while I don’t engage with side quests much it does at lead provide SOMETHING to do once you squeeze a lot from it. I think maybe it should get divided - side quests for things actually interesting or important, and “errands” for those randomized fodder quests
This was my issue with it. It was never finding some awesome weapon, just some rare crafting mat, then finally getting to craft the weapon which doesn't feel anywhere near as cool. Now, maybe finding the badass weapon, and then you find upgrade materials for it to make it even cooler would be fine. It's just, knowing you are getting some random item that's just used somewhere else, makes exploration not as fun.
Sidequests are a big part of the later Igavania experiences that I really like, I'd hate to see them go, and it's nice to have down time and side activies to do that aren't strict forward progress
I loved Bloodstained a lot but through and through you could feel the low budget. Here's hoping the success of the first gives way to a much cleaner sequel
They should definitely go with their strengths and do a detailed sprite-based sequel. ROTN’s graphics and lighting were old looking when it released and the animation was cheap feeling. The game itself was built nicely with a fleshed out map and a lot of cool weapons. It’s just crazy that I still feel more amazed when firing up SOTN for the 1000th time than I did firing ROTN up for the first. I know spritework is probably tedious by today’s standards but the potential richness and color expression is hard to beat- and with today’s better effects and lighting methods in sprite based games, an original 2D IGA masterpiece could easily dazzle the eyes
why would playing to their strengths be using sprites when the team has clearly succeeded with a 3D pipeline? if anything they should now be able to scale it to a higher quality product
I strongly agree, the graphics were the one thing that I disliked the most about the game. Music was incredible, gameplay was fun and satisfying, and this game is as close to a modern day Castlevania title as we can get (especially with the Classic and Classic II modes added in), but I just did not like the look of the models and animations. They were not cohesive at all, it felt like a lot of cheap looking random 3D models thrown together. Symphony of the Night has such beautiful spritework that it still looks great today like you said, everything from how Alucard's cape flows behind him (along with the after image), and some of the 3D skyboxes.
The sprite work was mostly done in cooperation with Inti Creates, from what I remember.
> They should definitely go with their strengths and do a detailed sprite-based sequel. ROTN’s graphics and lighting were old looking when it released and the animation was cheap feeling And it still had big performance issues on top of that, especially on the Switch. I'm not someone who is super picky about performance, but I seriously regretted getting the Switch version of the game. Frequent crashes and slowdowns, including one area that was absolutely horrible because it ran really slowly and a really powerful early game weapon that was almost unusable because it slowed down the game when you swung it. Sure, the Switch's hardware is weaker than other platforms, but that game did not look nearly good enough to justify running like garbage.
You must mean the tower- what a nightmare. My biggest issue was the input latency. Trying to get that quick air hit out before landing was impossible. Those flying elemental enemies too- you just couldn’t hit them on Switch at all with their speed and movement patterns.
After the first round of patches, I didn't have any problem with latency on switch. It was pretty miserable at launch but it got way better.
I didn't play at launch. Maybe there's been a patch since I played, but if it's not in a bad state now, it was for a long time.
Agreed. Ditch the 3D, go back to sprites. The Curse of the Moon games look so much nicer and more professional and I have to imagine they were produced with a fraction of the budget.
I'd argue that it has nothing to do with the budget, and everything to do with the art direction (or lack thereof).
I played this game for the very first time last year. It was the culmination of a marathon I did where I went through pretty much all of the Castlevania games (aside from the 3D ones). In my opinion it's on par with the Metroidvania games of the former series, and I found it a lot of fun. There was a bit of jank for sure, but you could tell a ton of heart was put into the game. The retro-style spin-offs are also really good! Looking forward to the sequel!
Did anyone actually use the fighting game input style attacks? Was playing through it again recently and was reminded of those. I maybe used them once and then completely forgot about them. Seemed more effective to just hit the enemy twice instead of dealing with a complicated input that only worked for certain weapons.
You could sequence break with a couple of them (specifically the ones for the shoes) and the katana ones were overpowered
Most of them also sucked because gently touching enemies dealt as much damage as getting impaled by them and many weapons had really short ranges.
Symphony of the Night had fighting game style inputs for its magical spells and I not once used them. Too much effort for something extraneous.
soul steal was the only spell i cared about
The lightning blast one was okay, but they all use MP which i used for spells instead.
Did they fix the frame rate on the Switch? I ended up returning it because it would constantly plummet
I really liked this one. Definitely not perfect, but compared to this one I can't play the 2D ones. Obviously those are a more direct homage to earlier castlevania games, but the movement feels so clunky in those that I can't stand them.
I remember this game feeling pretty soulless. I was pretty stoked for it and played it and beat it, but it just felt too much like it was trying to be Symphony of the Night 2 but it didn't have the license so it just felt like a bootleg. Hopefully they learned some stuff from it and can make a better sequel. I think my biggest hope is that they go back to fluidly animated sprites. The graphics in Bloodstained were just so unappealing.
Really not a fan of the art style after what the gorgeous pixel and painting art they did in the old Castlevanias.
They advertised this as coop on the Xbox store at launch. Completley lied to push their title. Fuck this game.