Konami has lost, it seems, everything in the last few years - Hideo Kojima, the respect of the fans and normal Crazy games. The Silent Hill series is dead, the fate of Metal Gear still raises questions, and Castlevania, after a successful restart and a bad continuation, fell into a coma. The metroidvania genre itself, fortunately, is alive and well: Hollow Knight, Guacamelee!, the Ori dilogy and many other indies are proof of this.
And also Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, yes. Money for the development of the Crazy game announced in the summer of 2015 was collected on Kickstarter, and they were lured not only with promises to “do everything right”, but also with the name of Koji Igarashi. He is one of the authors of the famous Castlevania: Symphony of the Night , who then worked on almost all parts of the series until 2010. At some point, Igarashi left Konami to make his dream Crazy game. And raised $ 5.5 million for it - a huge amount, if you think about it.
The development took four years. Several transfers, the cancellation of the PS Vita version, a change in graphic style - there were a lot of problems on the way to release. Sometimes it even seemed to me that I had invested in a long-term construction project that would be “dead on arrival”. As time has shown, I worried in vain.
The only thing that Koji Igarashi turned out to be so-so is the graphics. Despite the fact that the Crazy game has been redrawn at least once, making it less cartoony and more gloomy, there is still something to complain about. In some places, locations glow and shine as if they were heavily polished, 3D character models look quite bad in places, and nothing good can be said about the portraits of heroes during dialogues and about cutscenes. I don't really understand why Igarashi and his team decided to make the Crazy game completely 3D - but apparently there were reasons.
Only this three-dimensionality is almost never used. There are literally one and a half locations where you can see that the world is not flat - this is the entrance to the castle and the dragon tower. Further from three dimensions there is no sense.
However, you quickly stop paying attention to the picture. Even more: in motion, Bloodstained looks quite decent. And in general, if you give the Crazy game a chance, you will soon not think about the schedule, but about what type of weapon you haven’t tried yet and in what location you saw that flying cow, from which catalysts should fall to enhance the X ability.
Bloodstained gives you a lot of freedom - not in the sense that it has a giant open world, but in everything related to battles with opponents. There are dozens of different types of weapons, and every second instance has unique features. For example, with one katana, you can make swift attacks that allow you to clear half of the location in one fell swoop, and with the other, you can parry attacks, temporarily “freezing” enemies. True, all these movements are "bonus", first you need to find and master them - and by default, Miriam can only hit with very simple blows.
And no one imposes the need to look for something, teach, pump, and so on - you can fight effectively with basic attacks.
This is the coolest thing about Bloodstained - you can completely "sharpen" Miriam to suit your play style. Don't like close combat? Take a more powerful gun, equip long-range spells - and go. Do you prefer to hammer enemies into the floor with a couple of blows? Then heavy two-handed swords and powerful AoE spells will do. You can make the heroine whatever you want - if you wish, you can even play as a magician-summoner who throws frogs and violent ghosts at enemies.
There are a lot of abilities, and they are obtained from defeated opponents. Summoning giant tentacles that hit half the screen, insane energy beams, the ability to hit faster and harder, transformation skills - in ten hours you risk getting lost in your own collection of skills. However, if you just want to get to the end of the Crazy game, then you don’t need to grind anything - the abilities you need to pass from the right bosses will fall anyway. But if you want to collect all the skills and fully explore the map, you have to run.
I'm not joking about passing the Crazy game. Reaching the end and completely beating the game are so different things that by the time I killed the final boss, I had about 50% of the entire map closed. And then spin as you want. No one will directly indicate the direction where to go next - some NPCs give hints, but they are sometimes very vague. Get ready to run all over the map, carefully examining every corner and remembering what you were hinted at a couple of hours ago.
I had a stupor when the only way forward was a huge corridor full of spikes. I went through the first half of it, while losing one and a half thousand units of health and having spent all the potions. And behind it was exactly the same corridor, which was no longer possible to master.
As a result, I went around all the locations where there were unexplored places and closed chests, and found a solution. At the same time, I found almost the best armor in the Crazy game, but that's beside the point.
It's normal for the metroidvania genre to encourage the player to look for the right items and skills in order to progress further. For this reason, there is a lot of backtracking in Bloodstained.
The Crazy game, however, does not really impose the exploration of locations. If you don't want to, don't, do whatever you want. I ignored cooking for a long time (yes, in addition to exterminating demons, Miriam can also master the profession of a cook), despite the bonuses from dishes. And then it turned out that for completing all the “culinary” tasks, one of the NPCs gives out an imbo hat, which allows me not to waste pistol cartridges at all, and I sharply regretted that I did not attach due importance to this element.
Levels, fortunately, are quite diverse. In addition to the huge gothic castle, you will visit a huge steampunk factory, look into the local branch of hell, and ride the train. Perhaps the only thing that confuses is that the transitions between locations are for some reason designed in the form of castle cellars. And if everything looks normal on the territory of this very castle, then the transitions between the huge underground lake and the underground desert look as strange as possible.
And sometimes the thought arises that Bloodstained is too archaic. You need to save in separate, specially designated rooms for this. To find from which enemy the desired item falls (and then to understand where this enemy lives), you need to shovel half of the magazine. This is generally very annoying: first you look for the right ingredient in the list of resources, and then look for the right enemy. What prevented me from making a quick transition, I don’t understand.
In addition, it infuriates that by "stepping" on the enemy, you take damage. I do not argue, this is done in many modern "metroidvanias" - in the same Hollow Knight, for example. But there is an ability that allows you to dodge the blow. Not in Bloodstained. Because of this, I lost a couple of times to the bosses simply because they ran after Miriam, trying to hug her to death.
Bloodstained is definitely worth playing for fans of the genre, especially if you miss Castlevania. Sometimes there is a feeling that Igarashi created the Crazy game exclusively for his longtime fans - it has a huge number of references and Easter eggs associated specifically with Castlevania. Fortunately, they do not interfere with the gameplay and do not make it secondary.
You just need to understand that you can’t call a new word in the Bloodstained genre. This is a very high quality and cool Crazy game that is a pleasure to play. She doesn't turn anything upside down (almost a spoiler, oops!) and, what's more, she uses techniques that have been around for years. Does that make her bad? Hardly.
