Blasphemous 2

Blasphemous 2 + The Third Sin update = The Castlevania game of my dreams. No wonder they are called "The Game Kitchen", they know to cook.

this game taught me that every problem can be solved with enough faith, penance, and by hitting it with a giant censer about ten times

This is a game that doesn't respect your time. As many have pointed out, the enemies do tend to be a bit easy. They compensate for this by giving them ENORMOUS amounts of HP and they cause equally huge amounts of damage if you get bored chipping away at them and get greedy. Some people will praise the game for making you mark your own map for collectables, but some of us have things to do. It's a choice that only adds tedium to a game that already has too much of it. The original Blasphemous had no such issues that I can recall, which makes this all the more disappointing. Cool sprite art, though.

Great game, improved on pretty much everything over the first game(except for the cutscenes, they look a bit weird). This is one of the best metroidvanias i have played, having multiple weapons is good, movement upgrades and how they unlock are good, story and lore just flies over my head, even if there is some super DEEP LORE, i would much rather game use its themes but have a more straightfoward way of storytelling if its gonna be a huge part of the gameplay experience instead of every character you meet reading you a poem, that is definitely not in line with what they were going for here but im just saying i would prefer that more personally, it's also great that they gave the first sin dlc for free and whip is probably the most fun to use weapon for me, i haven't played the mea culpa dlc and seeing what people say about it i think i had my fill with blasphemous 2, would reccomend.

[h1][i]Apicem Blasphemia[/i][/h1] [hr][/hr] Like the first game, this game cool setting, music, visuals, exploration, combat, lore. Basically a near perfect video game (I actually liked this one a little bit more than the first game). If you like metroidvanias, this one is one you should play. [h1]Mea Culpa DLC[/h1] [hr][/hr] I had fun playing this DLC, but if you're wondering why it's Mixed right, it's pretty short and it says it "adds" a weapon, it functionally replaces one of the base games weapons. The problem is that the first game had updates of this scale for free. Still worth a play if you're willing to pay, because personally it has a better final boss than the bass game (amazing song by the way, Maestro Mío, if you're wondering.) [h1]The Third Sin[/h1] [hr][/hr] Now this is more in line with what people expect. Bigger map than Mea Culpa, cool as hell weapon, more great songs. I think the final boss is not as cool as Mea Culpas, but this extra bit is cool to have (specially because it's free). [h1]9/10[/h1]

[i]For the sake of brevity, I'll refer to Blasphemous 2 as B2, and Blasphemous as B1.[/i] I really like this game, but it took quite a while to get there. I [b]was[/b] unhappy with B2 as a sequel to B1 for the first five (or so) hours. The art's a downgrade, the controls felt clunky, and the map design was confusing. However, power through, the further you get, the last two problems mostly disappear, and you get to experience a great Metroidvania with some of the best buildcrafting out there. B2 fixes all the problems with B1, but also introduces a few. The controls are pretty good (not the default mappings, but they're rebindable), and I'd consider them a massive upgrade over B1. B2 gets rid of the terrible lantern jumps, drastically improves wall climbing, and reduces overly long cooldowns on dodges/dashes and ledge grabs from B1. As usual with most 2D games, I'd recommend using a D-pad on controller. However, the controls aren't perfect, and there's one glaring oversight: swapping weapons. For some reason, and I really have no idea why it was done this way, swapping weapons is done in real-time with a single key/button on three slots. This is ok when you only have two weapons, but this game has five... This is extremely annoying because you need to cycle these weapons for the Metroidvania area gating and platforming. The weapons, while great, satisfying, and unique, are unfortunately tied to traversal abilities. So think of doing some complex platforming, and having to cycle through weapons while mid-air. The two additional DLC weapons you can't even designate a slot for without navigating through the pause menu, and this pause menu doesn't even let you cycle through these weapon swap slots, just set them; only the real-time key/button bind will do that. At the very least, the DLC weapons replace their designated slot's traversal ability. I think the correct way to do this is the way the TLoZ games do it (Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom): time should be frozen while holding the weapon swap key/button, and a small overlay should be shown on screen where you can use your D-pad/WASD to cycle through the weapons. [spoiler]Yes I know about the Altarpiece Figure that gives Mea Culpa all the weapon traversal abilities, but this is not a real solution to this problem. It's very out of the way, late-game, sacrifices an Altarpiece slot, and locks you into a specific weapon...[/spoiler] The atmosphere took a large hit in B2 compared to B1. I really felt that B1's atmosphere was its strong suit; however, I didn't find myself caring much about the art, story, characters, or world nearly as much in B2. The art in B2's still pretty good, but the cutscenes don't fit the style, and the story feels more like a hero's one than a sinner's redemption. The music on the other hand still fits perfectly, and was really well done. B2 does improve enough on the gameplay to where I can overlook this, though. The main strength of B2's the buildcrafting. Oh man, what a massive improvement over B1. Rosary Beads have a designated defensive role, and no longer feel fragmented. That fragmentation from B1 was organized into Altarpiece Figures and their resonance combinations in B2. The figures can make drastic differences to how weapons and abilities feel, and resonances even more. The only criticism I have about this system is that it lacks discoverability. See the pages aren't the only usable resonances; there are unique ones as well. Navigating these unique resonances really requires you to reference a wiki. The endings are also [i]mostly[/i] handled better in B2 than in B1. You're not locked into an ending and can swap between them based on a few attributes. I'm going to touch on what some may consider a spoiler, but I'll be purposefully vague, and think it's actually a large design flaw that should be disclosed. The endings aren't perfect; Ending A requires you to sacrifice 4 altarpiece figures to get it. These altarpiece figures are incredibly potent and are required for many build synergies. Once you do Ending A, for some reason you can't get these figures back without NG+, or using a cheat console and spawning them back in (normally I'd just edit the save file, but the serialization of the save file's pretty obscure). I wish they would just resell these altarpieces at the vendors, or spawn them back in your inventory after you got the ending... I'd recommend either putting off Ending A (and C by extension) until you've actually finished all the content and DLC in the base game, or doing it right after Ending B and spawning the figures back with a cheat console. There are two easily missable events in B2, and one's not too difficult to get through dialogue implications, but the other's very easy to miss. Luckily, neither of these events are required to progress or increase your completion percentage, but I did want to mention them, because they're pretty good to know for the completionists out there. The difficulty felt a lot better and more consistent in B2 than B1. B2's overall more difficult and mechanically demanding. This is good, because I found B1 overall too easy, [i]except the [spoiler]Miriam Mirror Challenges[/spoiler], they still give me PTSD...[/i] The only parts of B2 I really had trouble with were [spoiler]Eviterno[/spoiler], and the path I took early-game that led me to [spoiler]Lesmes & Infanta[/spoiler] which was definitely not the easiest introduction into the game... There are definitely some pain points with B2, especially on the surface for B1 players, but the further you go, the less impact these have, and the more enjoyable it gets. Due to this, I strongly recommend B2, just be patient and make sure to reference wikis.

Blasphemous 2 is a solid experience: it's just more of Blasphemous 1, without changing the formula. Which is good in my opinion. The gameplay is solid and challenging. The presentation is of very high quality but they really cheaped out on the cutscenes, which was disappointing. No more expensive beautiful hand-drawn story beats. I've heard the DLCs are bad so I didn't bother with them.

I initially played this game immediately after finishing and loving the first Blasphemous, and I ended up hating it. It felt so different from the original that I couldn't enjoy the way it played, and I spent most of my time comparing every mechanic to what came before. Because of that, I put the game down and didn't touch it again for nearly two years. With the release of the Third Sin update, I decided to give it another chance with a completely fresh mindset. Instead of expecting it to be Blasphemous 1, I approached it as its own game, and that made all the difference. Letting go of those comparisons allowed me to appreciate the improvements, the combat, the exploration, and the overall experience for what they were. While it's still a very different game from its predecessor, I found it far more enjoyable the second time around and ended up appreciating it much more than I did on my first playthrough.

Very similar gameplay with Blasphemous 1, with a lot of new gameplay elements (such as different weapons) the same amazing pixel art, although the story is not as engaging as the first game. Really enjoyable over all even if you haven't played the first game,

As of writing this, I'm about 1/3 of the way through the base game and so far I think it is a very good game that feels like a love letter to the soulslike genre in metroidvania form. Then you might ask "Sam, why the negative review?" I'm glad you asked. As of writing this, you can find quite a bit of content scattered throughout the base game that is locked behind a $11.99 DLC. I'm fine with DLC content in games but putting it in base game areas and not telling the player is incredibly ♥♥♥♥♥♥ behavior and wastes my time. I also think $29.99 is a little steep compared to other games with a similar amount of content, especially a well know pair from a particular Australian dev team. My verdict is get it on sale and be aware that you need the base game and the DLC unless you want to be googling every five minutes if the door you're stuck at is base game content.