With a great love for metroidvanias, it was bound to happen that I'd get around to this game.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a metroidvania, emphasis on the VANIA, game created, as best I can tell by some particularly notable Castlevania developers, namely Shutaro Iida (RIP) and Koji Igarashi. Funnily enough, I didn't even know this until I was nearly done with the game! Truth be told, I've never been a great fan of the Castlevania games, only having played (and enjoyed, mind you) Symphony of the Night. It's not that I actively dislike the games so much as I have just prioritized playing Metroid games over them.
The reason for this comes down to SOTN-era Castlevanias (the ones I have any interest at all in) being not particularly good metroidvanias in my opinion. My father has always had a stick up his ass about the -vania part of metroidvanias as he felt that Metroid as a series originated many of the popular aspects of metroidvanias. Now, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it, you can talk about how in fact Metroid WASN'T the originator for many of its metroidvania-esque traits that it would become famous for - but, I don't really care to get into it.
Point is, while I quite enjoyed SOTN, I think it fails as a metroidvania, especially compared to the best that Metroid has to offer. Even if Metroid as a series did not itself invent all, or even most, of the identifying factors in the metroidvania genre, I would go so far as to say they created an immense foundation from which all other games in the genre must proceed and match up to. Symphony of the Night, what I understand to be the relevant factor in why Castlevania's name is appended to the term of metroidvania (I promise I'll only say that word twice more after this sentence), fails as a... member of the genre in discussion here by failing to excite me into exploring its world.
There's a great deal of stuff to do and many places to go in SOTN, but I would not say it feels particularly good to go anywhere, nor does it feel especially exciting when you gain new abilities that allow you to progress further in places you were previously stuck. To say it simply, it does not do well what I want this style of game to do. On the other hand, the gameplay loop is quite different from the Metroid series, being much more of an RPG than anything else. In that way, it's actually perfect for me as I theoretically quite like the loop of an RPG, I just don't like turn-based combat.
So, what I get out of SOTN has little to do with the actual act of exploring the world. In fact, its world is really just a means to an end for me, the end being thus: creating an unstoppable stat stick the likes of which no enemy has seen before.
The combat is fun and all, but what I really enjoy is the process of growing your character to be a ball of death and despair for any and all creatures in your vicinity. It's fun to be powerful in SOTN and the game is not afraid of letting you be powerful. There's also a lot of enjoyment I get out of the constantly evolving player loadout as you progress through the game and find more and more ♥♥♥♥. It's a lot of fun to be going about your business and then all of a sudden you get a rare weapon drop that completely redefines how you interact with the game for the next hour or so.
Where does Bloodstained fall into all this?
Well, it's not a very good METROIDvania. But! It's a very good metroidVANIA!
Yeah, the reason I went on about SOTN for so long is because much of what I've said up to now can similarly be applied to Bloodstained. Is that a bad thing?
No!
Why would it be? I quite enjoyed SOTN, so I quite enjoy Bloodstained. I don't think it's a complete rehash or anything, and of course it comes equipped with mechanics from other Castlevania games too, though I can't speak to how much of this game comes from prior games simply due to lack of familiarity. The game blends a few different mechanics together in ways that feel simple and easy to understand while also allowing for an extreme amount of personalization in terms of what you can do to go through the game.
There's also, and pardon my language on this one, a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of different things to do and collect. Completing the game's Any% ending took me something like 8 hours, which I did most of what was generally available to me and only even achieved it because I walked into the final boss room without knowing it was the final boss. Completing the true ending took me 16 more hours of play, which I did over the course of two days because I was obsessed with this game for a while.
Most of what I did, though, was entirely extraneous. It was a ton of collection stuff, though honestly if you ignored all that, you're still getting something like 6-8 more hours of content, so it's not as if there is a dearth of content outside of the optional collection stuff.
To speak on specifics, I'll say that the gameplay generally feels quite good. Movement and attacks are both quite snappy and have a nice degree of fluidity so most of what you do will feel good to do. Much of the game is, either fortunately or unfortunately depending on who you ask, easy as all get out. This came from the fact that I would more or less farm a ton of areas incidentally as I killed everything I saw every time. I would go back through a lot of areas to check if I could get previously inaccessible stuff, to look for ways of progression, or because I was just ambiently wandering, so that meant I killed a LOT of enemies. Nevertheless, my impression is that even if I hadn't farmed my way to great strength, I wouldn't say that much of what you're asked to do is particularly difficult. Boss patterns are generally simple, but fun to interact with, and you're given an easy supply of healing items, easier still if you're willing to do a bit of farming. As such, if you can help it, you don't end up being low on HP that often. The skill curve of the game, then, is something like a large hump at the beginning that gradually goes further and further down, with a few bumps along the way.
And hell, it's not like it's unfun to be powerful. As I said early on, I enjoy the idea of being overpowered as all get out, and while there's always a danger of that being something that ends up being boring to experience, I didn't experience that with Bloodstained. All the same, if that's not something you're interested in, I would recommend avoiding farming as much as possible.
If you are going to farm, though, the game is generally fairly easy about it. Item drops aren't generally absurd and there's a lot you can do to facilitate item drops further. As such, even the scant few 1% drop rates I had to farm didn't take me longer than five minutes. Admittedly, I only went for these at the very end, (which if you're going to farm ANY rare drops of that ilk, I'd recommend doing at a similar time), so I may have had a worse time of it if I'd done it earlier. Even so, there's very little that I felt a real obligation towards farming for. Like I said, the game is easy, so it's not like I ever needed to do it in order to get past some obstacle or other. Indeed, I only farmed when I wanted to.
What holds the game back for me is an unfortunate lack of really standout, "wow!" moments. There's also a general disinterest in the aesthetic for me, though it did grow on me as I played the game. My enjoyment of the game was a flat line from beginning to end, in a way. While it did become more and more fun as I got more and more powerful, it also was such that nothing really changed from beginning to end in terms of how I interacted with the game in the grand scheme of things. There's still that great variety in gameplay from all the different tools at your disposal, but the enemies you interact with don't get significantly more complex by the end. Bosses become harder and generally more fun to fight, but that's essentially it.
Areas are also all designed in much the same way and n
