Usually I impose a self-inflicted "Classicvania" requirement to all Castlevania (and I consider this one to be a 'vania too) games: no healing items in boss fights. Can't tank when you ain't got the heals. I got lucky tho. I didn't stick with using the Swordwhip because it does less damage than the Bandit Blade, so could you tell me what's so broken about it? :p
Also does anyone have a 100% map completion map yet? I'm at 99.60% so I'm assuming at most I'm missing at max eight or fewer rooms. Also still have no idea where the Meat Dish/R is, and how many Shortcut shards should you be ending on? I have a feeling that if the PC version was affected by the "open chest" bug, it was literally just for this one key item, if it's not in a hidden room I missed somehow.
Finally my overall impressions of the game. I do like it, a lot in fact, but my nostalgia to my favorite series probably clouded a good deal of that. This came up most in bosses, as the ones I liked the most had very, very, very clear Castlevania connections. The newer bosses didn't excite me, and I'm attributing that to them not having an interesting enough fight and not a lot of background to "build" them. And for those that share the scene and appeared in Curse of the Moon, aside from one or two, I think they're all done better in that game than this one.
Quick tl;dr on my thoughts.
Pros
- Very well paced; the game doesn't have many fluff moments that speak for "increasing volume" or ways of milking time out of the game, and this is HUGE because many of IGA's previous games almost always had this sneak up on them due to time and budget reasons. Dracula's Castle in Curse of Darkness or the second half of Portrait of Ruin are clear examples of this going wrong for me, but I didn't see it here.
- Good variety; Maybe two or so locations seem similar but that's because they're supposed to be similar, the rest feel distinct, have a place, and don't feel like holdover areas.
- Great OST and fanservice; if you are a Castlevania fan in any way, there are at least three bosses that should make your face beam up brightly, even if they kick your shit in. For PS4/Xbone users, you don't have the IGA DLC yet, but I will say it's one of the best examples of this, and one of the best fights in the whole game. What you'd expect from IGA and his legacy is actually played into with this fight, and it's amazing for it.
Cons
- A FEW parts it's not made clear where to go; once Dominique stops giving you clues which filter you to an area, the training wheels come off and it expects you to remember one notable location to use an ability and then to actually just explore with the other to piece out what to do next, and the latter of which isn't too clear. I've seen a lot of people on the Bloodstained Discord get lost in regards to this, seeing as the "aha" of it clicking isn't made clear to people.
- Swimming is made tedious; out of the gate this might be the worst swimming in any Castlevania-ish game that allows you to swim. The fact you need to grind to actually move decently underwater seems like it's leaning so deeply into the upgrading shard feature.
- Endgame feels "light"; a bit of the momentum drops near the end because it's right at the end where it feels like the game was unsure what it should do with enemy and level design, so it falls a little bit back into that habit of feeling like it was made without all the time it needed to flesh it out as a climax. I'm talking the level design and general enemy placement, not the bosses, however.
- The game should have some form of marker if an item you can craft is also purchasable from the shop, as many items only appear in the shop if you make them. Having a drop of an item would let you see you have one of it while crafting, but because the game makes no distinction between crafted and collected, you'll have to go back and forth between rooms to double check. This gets quite annoying when it comes to food making.
- Quests are very lame; easily the worst part of this that I thought would be greatly improved over Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia. To my amazement, it's actually the worst quest system I've ever seen from IGA. PoR had some silly quests but they were like "find a bleeding statue" and the upgrades were pretty unique, and OoE had all of the townspeople who had interesting characteristics and a stronger motivation for why you were doing the things you were doing, like taking pictures of elusive monsters or playing hide and seek. Nearly all of the quests here are, to be perfectly honest about it, trash. They feel more like they belong in a mobile or MMO game. They're literally one idea just repeated until it's over for quests from that character, and it never gets any more involved than "give me food" or "kill X baddie". I am honestly shocked that what I thought were placeholder quests in the beta backer build were actually designed as the goal for the quests of the game. They spoke even then to being an undercooked "sample" of what may come, but nothing ever came of it. The fact I'm writing the most about this is because this is the worst part about the game. A handful of rewards are worth it, but they're at the tail end of the quests you can be given. Usually rewards you get while playing normally are almost instantly outclassed by anything you find by exploring. None of them have any quirks that make it even experimental to mess with. Just worry about the last two weapons the kill X lady wants to give you and that's it.
Overall, I really like it. Feels like a game IGA should have made after Order of Ecclesia, and regarding "full-scale" games that weren't downloadables, this really is that game. And I mean that with great praise and appreciation.
