Oh hey, I played the demo for this at Anime NYC while standing next to Landro! It’s pretty fun with beautiful sprites. The enemy death animations are surprisingly gory!
It’s way less Igavania and more Bloodlines-esque Castlevania, which might disappoint some people (I had a little disappoint but still enjoyed it). Hope the demo goes up so more people can try it!
this
coming from inti creates
is an early game of the year 2023 contender imo
Not really sure about this beyond being deeply offended that the soundtrack in the trailer is not Bloody Tears. Beginning is from CV3!
Simon’s Quest got Zero Missioned. I bet I’m going to hate this!
How does Deedlit wonderlabrynth compare to bloodstained?
AC2R
Deedlit is stage based and very straight forward and shorter than Bloodstained’s getting the band back together try and recreate the energy of an album they wrote when they were all 17.
so the game is out already - the trailer doesn’t make this clear. edit: wait no it does lmao
so i downloaded it. i wanted to hear Bloody Tears, so i exited right from the Town of Jova and was greeted by…a buttrock rendition of Stage 2’ from Rondo of Blood?
the backgrounds in the game feel flat - they remind me a lot of this old doujin game that was called like “Vampire” or something else generic like that. the spritework is good but the backgrounds have no depth or texture to them in the way that the NES game does. Jova looks arguably worse than its NES counterpart in every way conceivable, for example. the first forest area has been slightly reworked and has some decently nice godray effects, but overall the game feels tonally and aesthetically inconsistent. and also, it controls like a “newer” CV game, but you still can’t jump on stairs? i feel like you need to either go all in or not at all.
the Wii Shop Castlevania remake of Castlevania Adventure is a good example of the kind of thing i’m thinking about - giving players an option for how they want to play it. granted, it’s rude to look a gifthorsefangame in the mouth, but these are just the immediate thoughts i had after watching the trailer and playing the game for a few minutes last night
edit: full disclosure, CV2 is my favorite of the NES games, and i am the kind of weirdo that thinks nothing about it really needs to change, and that it’s fine if you get lost
I can imagine a good remake of simon’s quest but it’s like the opposite of this. this looks fucking terrible in every way.
For something selling itself as a sequel to the X68000 Castlevania, I’d actually expect a much more radically divergent take on the source material than whatever this appears to be.
it sure is full or re-used assets for something trying to be chronicles II
Replacing the weirdness of the rib with the recycled shield graphic is pretty unadventurous.
But I get that they wanted to stay with established sprites.
nah it sucks, using dracula’s rib as a shield fuckin’ owns. makes you consider how fat his ribs must be. raises questions about vampire morphology.
does nothing please you
By the hooves of your mount,
to the demon in black.
Grip the rib of the count,
“I want my baby back.”
An overdue account,
baby back…baby back…baby back…
Deedlit is a short-and-sweet 6-8 hour game, has polished animations and cool mechanical gimmicks, not too difficult.
There are two Bloodstained subseries: the CotM games are challenging linear-ish Castlevanias along the lines of Rondo of Blood. RotN is a maximalist Igavania with XP/item/soul farming and a proliferation of unbalanced skills.
the CotM games are very unusually good for like, Shovel Knight-core NES throwbacks with multiple (CV3-style) protagonists and co-op and such, imo
Man there are a lot of ripped order of ecclesia sprites and backgrounds in that trailer.
i spent about a half an hour with this just now and want to post more impressions:
game does not feel very playtested. all skeletons - i mean every single one of them - throw bones at an angle that’s often really hard to avoid, and they throw a lot of them. i was barely able to make it to Berkeley Manor with one life remaining. the skeletons were part of the issue, but i also lost a life in the platforming area with the mermen because at one point, right before the critical position to make a jump, they just continually, endlessly spawn, making the jump almost impossible if you stop moving for a second to judge your jump.
sometimes when Simon gets hit, his sprite disappears from the screen entirely and you have no idea where you are, but can still take damage. i wonder if this is some weird glitch that happens because i was outputting HDMI to my TV, but feel like it might occur regardless.
on the note of graphical issues, the parallax scrolling clouds above Jova are all moving at different speeds and don’t synch up, so you just see lines/layers of cloud parts moving separately from each other.
when i arrived at the manor, i was pleasantly surprised by its look - it looks pretty nice! here, i thought, is maybe where the game shines? i then encountered a somewhat high-level enemy with an 8-way shot, and died. all of the enemies in the game, in the first area, feel like late-game CV enemies.
the continue function also no longer exists in the way it used to; dying in a manor doesn’t start you back at the entrance to the manor, and you have to start back in the last town you saved in (manors might have save points inside of them, i’m not sure, yet).
there’s no more day/night cycle in the game, which…well, i guess i’m open to the argument that the night cycle merely wasted time for players because you can’t do certain interactions during that time, but i feel like taking out such an iconic feature of the original is a strange choice.
the game is less grindy, as hearts and (the new insertion of) gold drop constantly and plentifully, but again, i think this changes the nature of the game somewhat significantly.
i get the impression that the devs who made this do not like the things about Simon’s Quest that i enjoy, and that’s fine, but i think this is where my journey with the game ends.
