Completely and totally okay, just perfect fine, right there in the middle, laying there, not really doing anything special.
I had a hankering for a good SOTN clone, but as I had just replayed it a year or so ago and recently replayed all the GBA ones, I didn't really want to go back to those quite yet. This was on sale and I had some credit, so it ended up being $5, and I'd say it's worth about that.
It's appropriately gothic, sexy, horny, violent, and IGA, completely and totally IGA, so that was nice. It's also like an Asylum version of Castlevania, called... maybe... CastleMANIA. It's got everything. There's a Belmont you can fight, and a boss that throws sickles and teleports. There's a chapel and a clock tower, a soul collecting system like in the future sky castle ones, lots of weapons to play with, and tons of food. It's basically Less Good SOTN, and that's okay!
But it's not SOTN. Your character moves like a real turd. Not quite like a classic Belmont, but she's slow and her backstep doesn't always work. The music is all fine, but none of it is memorable, and I ended up listening to podcasts for a lot of the endgame, where in SOTN, I'm always into that soundtrack. The graphics do not look good, all shiny and rounded in weird ways. Even the backgrounds that are supposed to provide the illusion of this castle stretching on forever look flat and weird.
There is also a LOT of grinding that you have to do to succeed, because most of the bosses are frustrating and a few areas have huge difficulty spikes (if you love grinding and you did all the grinding to get all shards to 9 and all the food etc, more power to you, but god damn I just can't imagine doing that).
They frequently move faster than you, have short tells, hit hard, and often require more than one try to figure them out. This is fine for SOME bosses, but in Bloodstained, this is true of all of them, including the first one. You never get that feeling of being okay enough at the game to feel successful, and even by the end I always felt irritated coming across a boss door. I was supposed to feel anxiety mixed with confidence, but instead, I was already mad about a boss fight before it had even started.
There are just so many weird places that the designers seemed to turn their brains off. The passport is a perfect example. At no time is it set up for the player that the people you meet may have pertinent information for you. Dominque and Johannes sometimes tell you stuff after you visit them, but the none of the other villagers ever talk about anything besides their quests. So how I was supposed to even think that Alucard was going to give me a passport if I had a photograph of myself? It's insane, NES era logic, which is inexcusable in a game that has endless memory and space for scripts and hints. And that's just the start.
Special moves require more perfect precision, rendering them useless. invert does as well, which pushed me to the D-pad to make sure I could pull it off more than 50% of the time. There are an endless amount of weapons, but most of them never have a reason to be used. Why would I use boots for anything when they are never as strong as a faster weapon with longer distance? In SOTN, the punch weapons felt like they were included because someone had fun programming it in, and it was the beginning of a new era of programming, so they were just tucked away in there. But here, they feel like they are here because, well SOTN had punching so we have to too!
But they DON'T have to too! All they had to do was make a good game, but they were too focused on making a game that had already been made that they just couldn't pull it off. In comparison, the Record of Lodoss War game that came out a few years back was not only an excellent SOTN clone, it was shorter and tighter, offering an evolution of the form.
Bloodstained is regressive and irritating, an attempt to be something that already exists instead of being something fresh that reminds us of that thing that already exists. Like how the Castelvania III Bloodstained game was! That was a fresh, new, tightly programmed game that made me remember Castlevania III without being beholden to Castlevania III! And that's what I was hoping this would be. Oh well.
I had a hankering for a good SOTN clone, but as I had just replayed it a year or so ago and recently replayed all the GBA ones, I didn't really want to go back to those quite yet. This was on sale and I had some credit, so it ended up being $5, and I'd say it's worth about that.
It's appropriately gothic, sexy, horny, violent, and IGA, completely and totally IGA, so that was nice. It's also like an Asylum version of Castlevania, called... maybe... CastleMANIA. It's got everything. There's a Belmont you can fight, and a boss that throws sickles and teleports. There's a chapel and a clock tower, a soul collecting system like in the future sky castle ones, lots of weapons to play with, and tons of food. It's basically Less Good SOTN, and that's okay!
But it's not SOTN. Your character moves like a real turd. Not quite like a classic Belmont, but she's slow and her backstep doesn't always work. The music is all fine, but none of it is memorable, and I ended up listening to podcasts for a lot of the endgame, where in SOTN, I'm always into that soundtrack. The graphics do not look good, all shiny and rounded in weird ways. Even the backgrounds that are supposed to provide the illusion of this castle stretching on forever look flat and weird.
There is also a LOT of grinding that you have to do to succeed, because most of the bosses are frustrating and a few areas have huge difficulty spikes (if you love grinding and you did all the grinding to get all shards to 9 and all the food etc, more power to you, but god damn I just can't imagine doing that).
They frequently move faster than you, have short tells, hit hard, and often require more than one try to figure them out. This is fine for SOME bosses, but in Bloodstained, this is true of all of them, including the first one. You never get that feeling of being okay enough at the game to feel successful, and even by the end I always felt irritated coming across a boss door. I was supposed to feel anxiety mixed with confidence, but instead, I was already mad about a boss fight before it had even started.
There are just so many weird places that the designers seemed to turn their brains off. The passport is a perfect example. At no time is it set up for the player that the people you meet may have pertinent information for you. Dominque and Johannes sometimes tell you stuff after you visit them, but the none of the other villagers ever talk about anything besides their quests. So how I was supposed to even think that Alucard was going to give me a passport if I had a photograph of myself? It's insane, NES era logic, which is inexcusable in a game that has endless memory and space for scripts and hints. And that's just the start.
Special moves require more perfect precision, rendering them useless. invert does as well, which pushed me to the D-pad to make sure I could pull it off more than 50% of the time. There are an endless amount of weapons, but most of them never have a reason to be used. Why would I use boots for anything when they are never as strong as a faster weapon with longer distance? In SOTN, the punch weapons felt like they were included because someone had fun programming it in, and it was the beginning of a new era of programming, so they were just tucked away in there. But here, they feel like they are here because, well SOTN had punching so we have to too!
But they DON'T have to too! All they had to do was make a good game, but they were too focused on making a game that had already been made that they just couldn't pull it off. In comparison, the Record of Lodoss War game that came out a few years back was not only an excellent SOTN clone, it was shorter and tighter, offering an evolution of the form.
Bloodstained is regressive and irritating, an attempt to be something that already exists instead of being something fresh that reminds us of that thing that already exists. Like how the Castelvania III Bloodstained game was! That was a fresh, new, tightly programmed game that made me remember Castlevania III without being beholden to Castlevania III! And that's what I was hoping this would be. Oh well.