Castlevania 3, but everything is wrong.
Difficulty is wildly inconsistent. Most of the time the game is an utter cakewalk, except when it's suddenly [i]not[/i] because a boss will only have a very small damage window, leading to long, drawn-out fights where it takes you 30 seconds just to land a single hit while you dodge the same attacks repeatedly waiting for that opening. But then other bosses will inexplicably let you phase skip them by churning out damage so fast that they don't even get to use half their moves, making them feel like a wet fart.
But the multi-character system is really where everything just completely [i]breaks.[/i]
You see, part of what makes the game so pitifully easy is that you have access to four characters you can switch through at will. Each character has their own (persistent) health bar, their own subweapons, and their own unique playstyle and movement options. Only lives and subweapon uses are shared between them.
Unfortunately, in spite of this, Miriam is basically the only character you'll want to play, as she has the best jump, the best subweapons with the highest damage and the broadest coverage, the best primary weapon (a whip with ridiculously long range and a lingering hitbox), and the ability to slide, an ability all other characters lack. As a matter of fact, most bosses and enemies seem designed for the use of Miriam's high jump and slide, making all of the other playable characters feel completely tertiary.
Moreover, death doesn't work like Castlevania. In Castlevania, when you die, you're sent back to a checkpoint, unless you run out of lives, in which case you restart the entire stage, a perfectly reasonable system by all metrics. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, however, wants to reinvent the wheel. When you die in Curse of the Moon, only [i]that[/i] character dies, then you're given a death screen and sent back to a checkpoint to try the stage again, minus that character. The only way to get that character back is for [i]everyone[/i] to die, at which point the game finally takes a life away.
However, because of the near-necessity of certain characters, what is normally effortless with a full party can instead become [i]unreasonably difficult[/i] if a character is missing from your group. Adding to this is that character health is, again, [i]persistent,[/i] so you often die only to be sent back to a checkpoint as a character who's going to die in one hit. This inevitably leads to frustrating, hopeless death spirals with next to no counterplay. Worst of all, there's no way to simply reset back to having all the characters at the earlier checkpoint; you just have to manually kill off every character one by one.
The combination of the uneven, unsatisfying difficulty and the boneheaded multi-character system that alternately trivializes and frustrates the gameplay loop leads to Curse of the Moon feeling like Sideshow Bob stepping on all of those rakes.
It's never challenging in a way that's fun, and when it's difficult, it's always for all the wrong reasons ("I'm stuck with the bad characters until everyone else dies," "I broke the candle with Zangetsu instead of Miriam so I got the holy water instead of the daggers and now I can't deal with all these aerial enemies," "Gebel is dead, so I have to do this section manually, and oh now Miriam is dead too, better suicide until I can restart").
If it's anything like the rest of Inti Creates' games, the sequel probably fixes all of the mistakes and nails what they were going for originally... or they learned nothing and made all of the same mistakes again. It's impossible to tell with them, but I probably won't bother to find out.
