It’s a big difference from all the Igavanias. I remember feeling “forced” in Aria to use the big holy sword, even though I was sick of it on a second playthrough.
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my friend has almost exclusively used the lethal boots his whole playthrough so they did a real good job with the weapons in this one
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yeah lili soul is the speedrun choice, don’t think they even bother leveling it
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I feel so validated rn
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i just found out about max ranking yellow shards and now i’m on a grand grind crusade to give miriam every superpower
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the variety of broken shit is so great because “balance!!! balance!!! lets make everything boring as fuck!!!” has been a trend way too long
people are still playing super turbo 25 years on with the five totally busted characters, it’s fine
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Me too it’s friggen amazing
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Tfw you notice your map completion is 99% booo
My current broken combo is level 9 portrait, level 9 shadow dopplegangers, and the flying sword. You hit so many times per second that I’ve locked 2/3 of the end bosses in their hitstun animation.
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Finished it up with 99.1%. Oracle Blade + holy beam + silver knight + portraits = completely unstoppable .
This is the second game I’ve actually beaten (after DaS) this year, after not completing one in a long while. Guess I’m back into the groove finally.
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It’s interesting to see the responses to this game because I think they are as much informed by people’s tastes and the qualities inherent to the game as much as the gap in between Igarashi’s last Castlevania project and this. The closest analog might be Circle of the Moon’s release, which came after a stretch of Castlevania games developed by the Kobe and Nagoya branches of Konami which were received tepidly, especially relatively to Symphony of the Night, whose popularity only rose once the climate of disdain for 2D games receded a bit. In other words, I think that Bloodstained’s reception has benefited from the gap. It’s given people time to perhaps romanticize those projects led by Igarashi or to build up their tolerance for “another one of these”; there was without a doubt a mounting fatigue once the DS Castlevanias starting coming out.
I distinctly remember joining IC, which soon became early SB, and the extreme hatred there was for Igarashi, characterized as a malicious simpleton whose breakout project, SotN, was only good because of Toru Hagihara’s initial involvement. If you liked the post-SotN Castlevanias produced by him, you too were a simpleton who was participating in the destruction of a once-great series. So it’s kinda funny that now, almost a decade-and-a-half later, I’m not enthused by what I’ve seen (or heard (contrary to Toups, I think the music is pretty bland stuff you could hear in any doujin game with the benefit of some live orchestration; I do agree, though, that the production has destroyed the tracks’ fidelity and sense of volume, in both senses of the word) of this game at all, in contrast to others’ positivity here. The difference is that I don’t resent that positivity.
The option to remove Miriam’s extremely fucked up screams of pain every time she receives a power-up has pushed me closer to considering playing this one day. Until then… 
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diplo did you play the 8 bit bloodstained last year because it was pretty strikingly good and preempts a lot of the criticism I can imagine of this blessed mess
Yeah it’s good
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I remember always pushing back in those threads.
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yeah, i’ve always loved igavaniae. i bought the ds ones as close to release as i could afford when they came out
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yeah there was a definitely a spectrum of opinions about igarashi but I feel like a lot of it got drowned out to some extent.
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Bloodstained was fine to cruise through while poorly but at no point did I really think it was compelling
It withers under analysis of any component
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The fully leveled Revenant’s shard is great for mowing through the boss rush.
Ok, so 1 missing monster. Between the nature of a missing ingredient I need for the final great sword, and some peeking around this thread, I know who it is but it seems I’ve been too responsible with frequently swapping my library books around. Do I just have to run the clock a particular amount?
you don’t have to swap them around