28.1 hours played
Written 1 month and 5 days ago
An overly large Metroidvania, blatantly copying a lot of aspects from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, with all that entails. Some extensions to the Bloodstained formula worked out well, others not so much. It's also ludicrously "anime trope" riddled, so it depends on how much you can tolerate that. Overall, I still enjoyed my time with this fun but flawed title.
This is a more linear Metroidvania than many, closer to the style of Team Ladybug's titles than the sprawling backtrack heavy worlds of Ori or Hollow Knight. There are areas you can come back to, but they tend to only contain crafting unlocks, gear upgrades, or stat boost items. The overall progression is pretty linear without much deviation. The typical Metroidvania style upgrades are here, double jump, wall climb, dashes, along with things like creating ladders at certain spots and a high jump (using SotN's down-up+jump movement).
The exploration aspects are much more mixed. The different regions look nice, but it tends to be superficial as there's a LOT of maps that are repeated throughout the game, just with different texturing. The world is just too large without a great deal of variety. There are some puzzles and minigames scattered around, but between them are lots of repetitive hallways and ramps. There's also lots of breakable walls, most are hinted but some are not. While large and somewhat bland, there's only a few areas that I feel go on WAY too long, those are the sewers area later on, and to a lesser extent the mysterious cave. There's also a few really puzzles that overstay their welcome in the oasis. The minigames are hit and miss, some are fun but others are annoying and not worth doing. On a positive note, there are map markers and they're easy to use, set, and remove.
Combat is fun, there's a decent variety of weapons, each of your three characters can equip 3 or 4 types and you have two of them on at once. You can switch between characters easily with very little cooldown, so you can always have "silver bullets" on hand. There's a lot of Bloodstained/SotN style attack skills that work like fighting game moves, each character can equip two spells as well. It's easy to accidentally activate your ultimate moves, but somewhat tough to trigger them when you need them, I don't really know what that's about, and some of those moves are cutscenes that stetch on too long. Bosses in general are pretty easy, especially since all three characters have individual HP and MP bars, and item use is quick and easy if you need it. Only a few later bosses (most infamously [spoiler]Alicia, and possibly the Yuki-Onna/Snow Queen[/spoiler]) will give someone who has experience with these types of game grief. I'm 46 with nerve damage, which lowers my reaction speed, and only a few bosses were fast enough that I couldn't react to them reliably.
There are definitely some cheese strats. Ciara's heavy cannon type weapon absolutely destroys bosses. You can stun-lock them incredibly easily, aside from a few, and it hits like a truck. It also does a lot of break-bar damage, which when broken they take extra damage and are stunned for a short time. In addition, most trash mobs are easily exploitable with crouching attacks, they just sit there taking it without being able to react properly. Any attack with a vertical arc (like katanas, whips, sword+shield, and to a lesser extent dual blades) can also let you do a lot of damage without much retaliation by jumping over the enemy and using that arcing attacks.
The story is flat out bad. The world and its history is pretty interesting, but the way this particular story is presented is not done well. It's done in anime style cutscenes, and they are fanservicey tropey messes. Most of them do nothing to advance the plot or give some exposition on the world, instead they're simply Ciara perving on Ezra or interupting exploration for inane nonsense. I actually like Ezra and your third character, but Ciara is absolutely terrible and I dreaded every cutscene she was in. The sad part is she absolutely melts bosses so I had to use her effectively. To make matters worse, the cutscenes CANNOT be skipped, and cannot be fast-forwarded or sped through. If you do wipe on a boss, you have to sit through the bosses intro cutscene again (don't try to learn the attacks, just use the damn items so you don't waste time). Another aspect, whether it was poor translation or what, but the reveal of your third character was spoiled early by a cutscene in camp, around an hour before the reveal would normally happen!
Quality of life is very variable. There is partial rebinding (on controller, not sure about k/m) which is nice, but an early minigame is a 3D shooting segment and you can't change how the Y axis goes, you can't change between standard and inverted, so if you're used to one method you're going to have a bad time. This thankfully only happens once, and there's only one other shooting minigame which is side view and easier to manage. There's very little as far as graphical customization, good computers will have no trouble but older or weaker machines might lag a bit. You also can't disable screen shake, and there's screen shake on NORMAL attacks on certain weapons (like Ciara's boots or the whip), and destroying mineral nodes also triggers a heavy screenshake. This will get headache inducing after while. Some monster telegraphs also can be masked behind other particle effects.
Finally, a few of the early mechanics aren't explained super well. You will see a lot of barriers that you can't pass, and if you don't realize you need to use a fire spell to burn them, you won't be able to progress. There's one other early optional elemental effect too, and one late game minigame that uses that mechanic. However, the elemental effects never really show up again for the rest of the ~20-30 hour playtime! How ultimates work isn't explained either, but you can figure it out by play.
Overall, I mostly enjoyed this title. The combat was fun if a little repetitive. The graphics looked decent even if the zones themselves are repetitive and on the bland side. Music's solid, sound is just OK. The world is interesting, but the story around it and how it's presented is not. It's probably worth it on sale if you want "more Bloodstained", but I don't think it's worth it at full price. If you don't like Bloodstained, or prefer the current trend of Souls-vanias, look elsewhere.
