When Koji Igarashi left Konami and later announced a Kickstarter project to revive his “IGAvania” take on Castlevania series, I was excited. Despite usually preferring the exploration, rather than the action RPG aspects of the projects IGA has worked on before and despite not sharing the same reverence for Symphony of the Night as so many people have, Bloodstained sounded exactly like what I’d want to play. It looked like a cool mix of ideas from later Nintendo DS IGAvania entries combined with a more grand presentation of Symphony, something lots of people will find enjoyable in their own separate ways of playing it. 4 years later and one surprisingly good (but completely not my cup of tea) side-game later, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was out. And yeah, it’s pretty damn good.
If you’ve played previous IGAvania titles, any of them, really, you know exactly what to expect. There’s a big interconnected world for you to explore, new abilities and ways to move around for you to unlock, new weapons of different weapon types, each with unique animations, timings and special abilities, focus on killing enemies and finding things, rather than platforming skills and careful planning of resources, and lots and lots of things to find, quite a few of which are completely optional or even more or less just there for flavor and nothing more. Returning from “of Sorrow” games are skills/abilities that you can gain from enemies, there’re more systems and elements than ever before to grind for if you’re into it (preparing food, crafting weapons, collecting big and little upgrades) and you can still occasionally find things inside breakable walls.
The main difference, and originally a big criticism aimed at the game as it was in development, is in its fully 3D rendered presentation. IGAvania titles at Konami used a lot of 2D sprites for most of the game world, objects, characters and enemies, which at one hand led to quite a few of said sprites being reused across games almost as is and, of course, lead to limitations you expect from a 2D pre-rendered image. On the other, it meant a certain level of detail in objects or animations that is hard to recreate in a cheap way with 3D objects without making the whole image look cheap. I’d say, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a “good job” of creating a 2D metroidvania look, and it occasionally looks stunningly good, but it also often feels somewhat plain, barren, boring and cheap and it’s hard to tell just how well this look will age as the technology moves on.
Thankfully, the look barely influences the way the game feels. And it feels right. The movement, the abilities, the platforming, all the little effects and animations when you pick stuff up, when you level up, when you get an enemy ability – it all feels as good as it ever was in IGAvania titles. And there are ideas and elements that I’ve not actually encountered in the previous games of this subgenre. There’s a moment in the game, for example, where you get an enemy ability as an unconventional way of movement before you get a conventional permanent movement upgrade. Lots of weapons now have special “techniques”, which work as your typical fighting game special moves, which feels more natural than, say, spells from SotN. There’re far less movement abilities this time around, yet they feel like the “best of” combinations of the previous ones and are a joy to use. There’s even an attempt at recreating some of the stylus-driven abilities from the DS titles with the right analogue stick, though these are, sadly, rarely ever used and feel somewhat rough.
Of course, the music is top notch, the voice acting is entertaining (not cheesy like it used to be in SotN, but still funny when it wants to be), you can have a sword familiar that screams at inappropriate times and the game can be over about halfway through if you decide to go for the bad ending, yet this time the levels are never reused in a boring way and instead the game just has a ton of really really cool locations.
Yet… There are moments and times when the game gets kinda annoying. Some bosses can be huge difficulty spikes, for example. Some parts of the game can be unclear as to what the game expects from you next, because you’ve explored everything and what’s required is talking to a character who has no obvious connection to where you need to go. Sometimes things that seemingly should have a 100% drop rate don’t drop consistently, which can in one case add to the confusion of “now what”. Some areas aren’t as good as some others – one of the final ones, for example, is far cooler in concept than it is in practice. While a lot of grindy elements in the game are optional, some still feel like they shouldn’t require as much patience than they do. And, of course, there are occasional bugs (especially on platforms other than PC) and some of the new updates and features that were expected to be added by now are still in development. Also, the Soundtrack for the game is, for some reason, in lower quality on some platforms.
These problems aren’t completely killing the enjoyment with the game, of course, but they’re still notable enough that at this point, despite enjoying the game a lot, I still feel like I should perhaps suggest waiting a bit longer and playing the game once all the planned updates are out. If you can’t wait and are itching for a new IGAvania, by all means, go for it and you will most likely love it. It doesn’t have some of the coolest additions to “metroidvanias” that I’ve seen in recent years, it’s a bit rough in certain spots, but it’s a really really good game.