Review #672: Bloodstained - Ritual of the Night

 Not to be confused with Castlevania. Completely different games.

 Koji Igarashi, the madman, did it. He successfully led a multi-million dollar Kickstarted to deliver exactly what the fans wanted. Bloodstained - Ritual of the Night is the Castlevania successor we wanted, nay, needed. While the game does little in treading new ground, this is a homage and tribute to all the Metroidvanias Iga had developed during his tenure at Konami, as a matter of fact, the game takes so many cues from Symphony of the Night it might as well be a spiritual reboot.  And yes, I'm coining that expression.

 The game's plot is pretty silly, and I found the introductory cutscene to be needlessly long, but it gets the job done: You are Miriam, our new resident badass, suffering from an affliction that's turning her body into stained glass. As if that wasn't bad enough, her friend Gebel has gone off the deep end, so she sets out to stop him and his evil ways. Simple, dumb, just the way a Metroidvania should play out! On another note, this might pretty well be Iga's largest castle yet, and it even features a few challenging bonus bosses. Order of Ecclesia-challenging bosses. As far as the difficulty goes, it's not as easy as Symphony of the Night, but it's not as challenging(barring the bonus bosses) as Order of Ecclesia, sitting at a happy medium.

 Bloodstained features the usual Metroidvania tropes of exploring a large environment, a Castle in this case, with progression being  held back by obstacles that require finding specific power ups to clear. Along the way Miriam will be battling a ton of baddies, earning experience to level up and increase her stats, as well as scavenging for equipment. There are a ton of different weapons, and there's even a simple crafting system to create even more weapons and pieces equipment. Heck, a few accessories will actually show on Miriam... for good or bad. I wish that could've been toggled on and off, since some of the silliest looking equipment pieces also had good stat increased. Speaking of looks, if you find a specific NPC you can alter Miriam's hairdo, hair color and even the color of her outfit. Simple, but fun, hope future Igavanias only expand on the character customization features.

 Crafting elements isn't the only thing Bloodstained borrowed from Dawn of Sorrow, as the game features Shards, with are analogues to Souls from the Sorrow duo. Defeating enemies not only has the chance to reward you with loot, but there's also the chance that it might drop its Shard. Shards come in various color-coded types, Miriam being able to equip one of each at the same time. Red shards are used with the X button, Blue shards and purple shards are used with the R buttons, yellow Shards give you passive bonuses(And once fully upgraded turn into White Shards, shards that are active at all times) and, lastly, Green Shards summon familiars, like Symphony of the Night. There are over a 100 different Shards, and each Shard can be strengthened by collecting the same Shard and they can also be upgraded by going to the crafting NPC. More shards of the same power will usually increase its strength, while the crafted upgrades tend to extend their range or the such. The shard system is, like the soul system before it, brilliant. Drop rates tend to be more generous than other Castlevanias, which makes sense considering how much stuff you can craft.

 It's easy to tell that Iga wanted his new game to be a celebration of everything he's done before with the Castlevania franchise, as such you'll be noticing a lot of winks and references to his previous Metroivania games. It might stick too close to Symphony's blueprint: The game ending prematurely if you defeat the boss without having the special means to stop him, said special means requiring you to get an armor that can withstand spike damage, having a librarian... for all intents and purposes, it's a very classy stealth Symphony of the Night spiritual reboot. And you can tell that a lot of love was spent making this game.

 ...however, while it's easy to tell that this was a passion project, it's also easy to tell that it was made by a team that wasn't very experienced with the Unreal Engine 4. In this sense, the game can be incredibly unstable. Look, the game was poorly optimized on the big consoles(PS4/XOne) featuring  undeserved framerate drop, so a Switch Port of something that didn't run as well as it should is, unsurprisingly, even worse. Yes, the game can struggle to maintain 30 fps, so much so that you'll eventually start getting 1-2 second freezes every now and then. I thought my game froze(Like, a freeze freeze) after I defeated the second-to-last boss since the game froze for about 6 seconds. I was about to reboot the darn thing before it unfroze. That said, unlike what alarmists would have you believe, the game is far, far from unplayable. Suboptimal? Yes, but the game is perfectly playable, and so much fun that it's hard to care too much about it.

 Sadly, the instability doesn't end there. Every single port of the game is prone to crashes, albeit in a predictable way: Interacting with bookshelves and NPCs has a chance to crash your game. Eventually you'll learn that it's best to wait interacting with an NPC until you saved your game, and while it's worst in the Switch version, every port has this issue. There were a few other technical issues, like a few specific rooms having long load times for whatever reason. There's one in the library that comes after a jump, so if you didn't held jump long enough, Miriam may just drop below the platform triggering the loading screen again. During the latter parts of the game, my enemy compendium sometimes displayed at 0.00% even though it was almost full. There also seems to be an issue with how rooms are connected, since about 3-4 times, while entering-and-exit a room in order to try to get an enemy shard or drop, I would teleport to another zone that was close by. This got me to break a sequence once and get through a door triggered by a switch that was on the opposite end of the room! Another two times I couldn't get out of this void, so I had to use a WayStone to teleport back to town and not lose any progress.

 It's easy to see that the team struggled with the game, there's a reason it got delayed so many times and and how there are framerate issues even on the upgraded current-gen consoles, but because of that the entire game isn't on the cart/disc at the moment. The mandatory alternate characters? The bonus modes, including multiplayer? All of them are to come in the future as free updates. That said, as much as I hate having to settle with a physical/digital hybrid for the entire game, I can say that what we got is a complete game, what's coming is just the cherry on top.

 When it comes down to it, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night is pretty darn great, and it's sure to scratch that itch Konami refuses to acknowledge. A lot of love and care went into designing this game, and I'm sure that Igarashi and his team will be able to polish the game through patches as they get more comfortable with the engine. It's also worth mentioning that the Switch version is definitely the worst way to experience Bloodstained, but even so it's still a great game.
 8.5 out of 10