Topic: The first sign rises with the full moon.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

^mood, right there.

Played until like 2am and had to stop because I need to sleep to function at work, the next day.

[Zuljaras]

I managed to pursue my retailer to give me the PS4 copy tomorrow instead of Friday! This is a little win for me!

[TatteredSeraph]

I’ve just started playing it quickly and holy crap it’s like an itch that I’ve had for years, that of wanting a new Castlevania game, is being scratched.  I’m really liking it so far.

[whipsmemory]

Finally got my copy, its great I love it, controlling Miriam feels great and exactly like old good Igavanias, the soundtrack is amazing, Im loving the areas so far and the boss fights, but man oh man those paintings.... they really take me out of the mood, they look terrible (not because of those great great and pretty good looking backers who pledged so much to be in the game, of course), they just break the immersion into the game world and just dont' fit aesthetically... i wish those were put in a special area/room or whatever, instead they keep popping out in different areas, its a nightmare. With a bit more effort and thought Im sure there could have been a better way to fit them imho.

[Zuljaras]

Also I did not see anywhere a graveyard area or a catacombs/burial chamber. Is this a Castlevania-Like game without one. I hope I find something like that in the game because that would be a shame!

I need to have a graveyard area in Bloodstained RotN!

[piscesdreams]

I picked up the PS4 version yesterday and I have to say, I expected a higher quality standard especially considering the Kickstarter budget.  That's not to say I think the game is bad, but there are some areas that need some further polish that hopefully will be addressed in an upcoming patch.  Some minor nitpicks, some major issues that I find.

1) The hitboxes seem really awkward.  When you're attack causes you to reach forward that makes you just happen to collide with an enemy, that seems unfair to me.  I guess I'm of the mindset that the damage hitbox should be the same size standing as well as attacking.
2) The textures in places are still really rough and at times clash between characters and backdrop elements.  It's certainly a tough balance to achieve when your characters have the art style they do but the backgrounds have a little more "realism" in their textures.
3) Some of the animations are funny but need work - especially Dominique's walk.  That woman has one helluva stick up her butt when walking. 
4) The voice acting feels all over the place.  Some characters are voiced really well, others not so well.  I find myself just turning down the voice acting and getting the text only.
5) What's up with the moon in the beginning being in front of the castle?  Maybe that's a story element I haven't reached yet... I hope...
6) During the cutscenes, it's distracting how the text types itself out and when it runs out of space it carriage returns to the next line to finish the word.  Why didn't they just program the carriage returns in the right place?
7) Sometimes the backdrop elements feel further in the background and like I shouldn't be able to interact with them, candles specifically, so sometimes I find myself not sure what's interactive and what's not.
I adjusted the transparency of the mini-map, but it hinders my field of view sometimes.  The bats in the entrance are a bitch that come out of nowhere because of the minimap obscuring their placement.

All those gripes said, the controls do feel pretty solid for the most part.  I like the crafting system and I usually despise them, but it feels pretty intuitive and natural here.  Being able to upgrade your shards to higher levels is also a welcome addition.  I was hoping for a greatly polished game, but it feels like they were forced to rush it out by the publisher.  None of these are things I feel break the game and would be easily fixed, here's to hoping.

[Gaawa-chan]

Hnnnng... they put the squeaky shoes in!  That was the one item I really, really wanted! 

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Also I did not see anywhere a graveyard area or a catacombs/burial chamber. Is this a Castlevania-Like game without one. I hope I find something like that in the game because that would be a shame!

I need to have a graveyard area in Bloodstained RotN!

I thought that when you give town deceased a proper burial, a grave would be erected next to the woman.
I have a few graves there.  They're not far from the farmer dude.

[Kingshango]

Heh, I just met the librarian O.D, who's totally not Dracula in any way.

[Zuljaras]

I thought that when you give town deceased a proper burial, a grave would be erected next to the woman.
I have a few graves there.  They're not far from the farmer dude.

I did not know that. So you can make a graveyard? Do you by any chance have a screenshot?

[Sindra]

So, for those who might not have heard already, there's a game-breaking bug within the 1.02 patch update for console versions of the game. If you created a save file prior to the patch installation, several chests within the game will swap out their status from "opened" to "closed" and vice-versa. This means you will find chests you previously opened now closed with duplicate items, and closed chests that are now opened and unable to get their item. This will make progress to certain areas of the game impossible and you'll be unable to advance.

I tweeted the announcement, made only to the Bloodstained Discord (and now I see Reddit), but not on the official forums and as of yet not in a Backer Update.

https://twitter.com/sindravania/status/1141693424959201283

(There is a fix being reported; that if you uninstall the game and reinstall from disk and then suspend the patch update, you won't hit this bug and will just have to deal with the graphical glitches of the original version, since the save files stay on the cloud and you can just pull them into the pre-patched game from where you left off and at least beat the game. I will be trying that later)


I'm pissed this wasn't communicated to backers, since most of us got the game early and this affects us the most. I'm also pissed that this is just one more example of how this game's final phase of production was rushed to launch sooner, before they had all their shit together. I've been very happy with their communication and the game development for the past 4 years up until about the last month, where it seems like everything's been rushed and broken.

[Foffy]

I was lucky backing the PC version, as I didn't have this issue. That said, I beat it and really enjoyed my time with it, so I'll just copy/paste my thoughts I posted elsewhere. Still thinking where I'd rank this amongst the exploration Castlevania games, but I think it's in the top five, maybe even top three for me personally. I think I like Aria of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia more, but it has less faults than every other Metroidvania in the series that hold it down in my eyes.

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.

For those on the fence here, somehow, this is really what one expects from a Castlevania game that tries to not focus on Dracula and the Belmonts. How amusing that IGA called the series "Castlevania" in Japan to create games in the world following the themes of no Dracula (and maybe no Belmont, but I don't remember this as his explanation) and only after he leaves Konami, he does it.

[Ahasverus]

Man if Konami wasn't so damned stupid they'd release a game like this one and save the series.

Bloodstained is good enough, but it's not Castlevania sadly. Something did get lost in translation. And that's a shame

[Kingshango]

Man if Konami wasn't so damned stupid they'd release a game like this one and save the series.

Bloodstained is good enough, but it's not Castlevania sadly. Something did get lost in translation. And that's a shame

After seeing their newest Contra game, they can keep Castlevania dead for as long as they want.

[DragonSlayr81]

Man if Konami wasn't so damned stupid they'd release a game like this one and save the series.

Bloodstained is good enough, but it's not Castlevania sadly. Something did get lost in translation. And that's a shame

If they were smart, they would've tried to pull what Capcom did with Mega Man 11. But unlike Capcom, who's been releasing some damn fine stuff lately, Konami ain't THAT smart and I doubt they have a able and ready team willing to put out a big, full-scale 2D CV on consoles.