The Van Helsing to Castlevania
I played Bloodstained for about an hour last night, up to the first boss. I'm not enthused so far. Granted, despite being a backer, I kind of soured on this project along the way - not due to the delays, which are endemic to every Kickstarter title, but due to decisions like withholding the preview demo from "rabble" backers and making it a upper-tier exclusive, plus the narrative forming in the gaming press way before release that this would be the redemption story for the Kickstarter platform, an all-time classic, before anyone had played even a screen of the final product. After all the to-do and fanfare, the game seems...OK. Just OK. But with problems. Actually, it's predominantly problems.
The story is very much Not Shanoa and Not Albus going after Not Alucard (or Not Albus's bad side), and it mainly makes me wish I were playing an Order of Ecclesia prequel. I never got around to writing about it, but I really liked that game, with its effective blend of level-based Castlevania difficulty with Metroid exploration and its surprisingly effective shattered-family story. Igarashi himself was fond of it and wanted to make a sequel, from which this project very apparently sprung. Presentationwise, though, it's the hokey Hugh Jackman movie Van Helsing to OG Castlevania. Cutscenes consist of everyone adopting very self-conscious poses and enunciating stagey Olde Tyme-flavored pronouncements in British accents - everyone's pretending to be someone, but they're quite evidently Not That Thing. Everything seems fakey and understudied, and while it's early, and while I feel a twinge of sympathy for the exploited antagonist Gebel, I don't like these characters like I did Shanoa, Barlowe, the villagers, and even Albus. I want to see where the story goes, but I don't wholly buy into what's going on.
The high point is that the game doesn't look bad like I feared it would. I understand that pixel art is time-consuming and not appealing to certain audiences, but the common compromise of using blocky, largely-untextured figures in a 2.5D plane used by some modern faux-retro titles like Mega Man 11 looks cheap and bad. Bloodstained adopts this style but compensates for it with these almost cel-shaded textures for characters that actually look quite nice - giving parts of the game a "drawn" look despite being in 3D. The artists also gave a bit more care to the backgrounds than is usually lavished on these enterprises. It's not the Baroque opulence of Symphony, but it's not a disgrace.
There are cracks around the edges. Controller support is dodgy; I've used my PS4 controller for other Steam titles without incident, but here, it took tinkering with settings in Big Picture mode, of all things, to get it to work, and it still sporadically disconnects. Text is in a stock Mincho-ass font that looks cheap. The translation is largely competent but opts for some strange, out-of-place word choices, like the lone archaic words studded throughout otherwise fairly modern, readable text - like someone whose first language was not English was paging through an outdated thesaurus and didn't know that some entries weren't in common parlance. (Hint: "Recondite" means "arcane"; I had to look it up, too. Also of note: how the characters' galleon in the opening is described as "lancing" toward their destination.)
The big problem, other than the game's knockoff feel, is the controls. At points, they're outright atrocious. Part of it is the game trying to do just too damn much. You can look through bookshelves in the background, search areas, all sorts of new stuff - and while that's neat and all, the designers thought that each of their nifty new ideas required the showcase of a unique button combination instead of context-sensitive controls. Part of it, though, is a misguided effort to be different from Castlevania for the sake of being different. For example, instead of the traditional up + attack or a simple standard button press, some subweapons are activated by...holding the right bumper and fooling with the right stick? Sometimes - I still can't get those attacks to trigger reliably. Other old standbys like sliding and dropping down through platforms are still activatable through familiar button combinations in practice, but the game will encourage you to use new combinations and won't list the defaults. For certain actions, even the newfangled combinations aren't listed - they'll appear only in a one-time help window that will appear suddenly during gameplay and is easy to dismiss accidentally. At least twice in my hour with the game, I had to look up YouTube videos so I could read instructions I'd missed on weird, unlisted controls for actions that were necessary to progress in the game.
This all results in an unintuitive and overwhelming mess. Maybe this all sorts itself out eventually, but for now, it's just making me not want to play the game.
Bloodstained has a crafting system shoehorned in, evidently. So far, on my way through the first level, I've gotten cut-off tentacles (OK for the milieu), cotton (???), and potato seeds (?!?!????). It's disappointing in that your enemy drops are not cool toys that might not be useful but with which you can have fun fooling around, but random junk that might become a maybe cool toy one day, who knows. There's also a not-so-secret area of the map (a upper platform to a new room you can't reach with your standard jump range) in the second room of the game that I can't figure out how to reach. The internet says you're supposed to damage-boost up there, but like too much in this game, I can't get it to work, and the mechanism isn't explained. Puts a damper on exploration if I'm shut out from 100% (or 200.6%) right off the bat.
One more complaint for the road: acquiring a new ability results in a fetishy, protracted scream from the heroine straight out of The Missing. They did tone down the water boob monster from the preview build, thank God. I also like how save rooms are handled: sitting rooms where the protag goes to have a breather. I don't know why the monsters avoid these rooms like they do the sacred save statues in the Metroidvanias. Maybe they're unionized and understand the sanctity of break time.
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