CV2 complaints are never about actual difficulty just folks not knowing what the fuck to do. Similarly you got the worst ending, getting the best is a matter of beating the game quickly, so entirely about knowing where to go and what to do while also knowing what shit you don’t need to fuck with.
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CV2 scared the shit out of me as a kid, which is still a really amazing feat for an NES game.
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Yeah, as a kid, the area in the dungeons right before you pick up a treasure/Dracula piece with all the hung bodies/skeletons creeped me out soooo much. I even hated looking at screenshots of it in magazines. 
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Grim Guardians demo is up on Steam until Feb 13 Gal Guardians: Demon Purge on Steam
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Lol
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not groovy 
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shitty phone games should know their place tbh
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Oh oops, I didn’t read the statement and assumed they were changing the name to make the galgun connection more obvious 
What the heck even is grimguard and how is that name even close enough to be litigious??
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Can’t wait to play Bloodstained again with a buddy
Wish there were more details about it though. Is it just a vs mode within a contained portion of the game? Or the entire game playable with a friend?
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Cross post with played today post.
Got to the real ending last weekend. As a product it feels fine. Mostly delivered what you’d expect as a little more than a portable era IGAvania. For as much as it felt like IGA wanted to market it as his gothic masterpiece I don’t feel it met the image in my head. My memory of skimming the kickstarter page painted more of an image like Haunting Ground where Miraim was going to be more like a final girl and less of starting out as a kick ass action hero and build up to it. The vibe felt more like a theme park ghost house most of the time instead of the country ran scare houses with laxer safety considerations. I feel its a good frame work but the castle kind of feels like a patchwork of ideas and less like the journey of SOTNs castle. I wish there were a few more interactions with the world for having spells you could freely aim.
Guess I should check out the Curse of the Moon games to see how they help flesh out the setting any better. I’m feeling the itch for more search action and might check out the GalGardian and LoveLive games.
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Yeah, I agree. I’d really love to see all the ideas evolve and smoothed out in a sequel!
I disagree that it’s similar to a portable era Igavania though, because of the sheer splendor and scope of everything in here that the portable era couldn’t deliver on. The portable game maps were much more claustrophobic/mapped to the screen size to the GBA/DS, while Bloodstained really goes all the way with huge areas like the spiral tower or the labyrinth Japanese area (even if it’s not fun to run through it lol) or really neat setpieces like the train and the corresponding train stations.
Though I guess it’s like a souped-up Ecclesia in that sense? That there’s so many locations that are outside the castle as well as areas seemingly unrelated but inside the castle. Hmm
Unrelated but did the multiplayer DLC ever come out? I’ve completely forgotten. God I’ll play again
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The zones certainly are able to play more with scale but I make the portable era comparasion as a broad qualitative statement on the experience as a whole where it kinda just feels like a big place to just search and action in where flavor is spread thinly through out.
That’s my question. I’m personally waiting for the CV2 mode with Dominique. I’m looking for something that splits the difference of pure classic mode and the main game. Starting to feel like it was announced last year but was just 3 months ago.
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This all just sounds like every Igavania to me? For all their numerous joys they are completely incoherent as like…places. You just sort of arbitrarily stumble into spaces. The game design makes it work but it doesn’t have the careful Biome crafting of something like Super Metroid or Hollow Knight, it’s just aesthetics bolted into each other that individually are all cool but none of them really seem like…a place.
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would disagree in a way, SotN isn’t exactly coherent but the areas build logically on each other. Each area is an escalation of both difficulty and aesthetic, starting in a stone hallway and moving into more and more gaudy, bloody, and complicated areas.
Bloodstained really feels like a soup to me, just a bunch of stuff jumbled together and vaguely tied by vibes. It doesn’t build as much as it surprises, which is cool (the area where all the monsters and levels are huge all of a sudden totally rocks for example), but it doesn’t build much of a sense of place.
I think building a sense of place is more than just being coherent. It’s about intuitive places that make sense, even if only in a dream. I think DOOM is a good example of this: it has a huge sense of “place” even if that place is dream dungeon labyrinth hellscape.
Maybe I’m describing something else though. Whatever it is, it’s not in Bloodstained.
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SOTN has the artistic chops to sell you on possible stories that could or might have happened in them. Zig Zagging though it all you see which areas are fresher and cleaner opposed the areas falling apart or painted with horrors and set dressing to make things feel alive or unlived in. Bloodstained feels a little to clean all the way through but that’s probably because of all the 3D foreground and backdrops. SOTN castle also creates an illusion of a real place like how the alchemy lab also feels like the pipework center of the castle or the tower stairwell connects to 3 or so different zones and even an attic room. Bloodstained isn’t completely terrible at this but just has a enough off kilter areas like the asian castle, a library that is also full of heavy machinery that would ruin books and two flavors of ice cave to stand out. I get its a castle from hell but it needs a little lip service or set dressing to sell that these zones can fit in like PoRs painting dimensions.
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i didn’t really feel a lot of logic in those games either. in Super Metroid the wettest area criss-crosses the driest area and transitions can be as blunt as walking through a door. in Hollow Knight i felt like most areas could have been rearranged anywhere on the map other than a couple of “dark abyss” areas at the very bottom (the doubling up on area themes also dilutes their significance).
but this isn’t even necessarily what i’m most drawn to, since SotN’s mine+catacombs make sense as the lowest areas but i found them relatively boring in the whole equation
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I want my Castlevania games to have bowling alleys in the middle of caverns.
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bonus points if the bowling alley is also one of the largest rooms in the game
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