Bloodstained Release Thoughts

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One of the nasty bits about the hype cycle surrounding a video game release is that by the time we finally get our grubby paws on it… we have effectively lived with the image of the game in our heads for one to two years. This gives our brain a lot of time to construct the game that we want to see, so that by the time we get the actual product the two rarely match. So I feel like it is worth taking note of the times when the final product meets or exceeds the mental image that I created for it. This is absolutely the case with Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, which released yesterday as what I can only assume was a purposefully timed birthday present.

When someone asks me what my favorite video game is, I have replied for some time Castlevania Symphony of the Night. It was this perfect vessel that concentrated so many things that I love about video games… RPG Progression, non-linear exploration, rock infused soundtracks, brooding gothic mood, and what was at the time the penultimate evolution of pixel based graphics. It was sort of a master class in how to make a game that Bel liked, and while there have been successors on other platforms… that was the last great non-handheld console Castlevania game. That is until now.

We are in this modern era of nostalgic games, that go back to the roots of something we loved from our past and painstakingly create that feeling. Bloodstained is something completely different because it not only brings everything that I loved about SoTN but also manages to push the genre along a very familiar path and in so creates a new experience. Firstly Bloodstained manages to take what I loved about the 16/32 bit pixel graphics era and creates that same look and feel with 3D models, which allows the game to go in a bunch of different places than would have been possible with 2D graphics. There are these jawdropping sequences where you are walking what appears to be a 2D path and then the game itself warps around you showing that you are moving in different ways than a strictly X/Y plane.

  • Bloodstained E3 Demo
  • Bloodstained Final Release

So often times the final product is lacking in some small way because compromises had to be made to meet a deadline. However Bloodstained is a weird example of the final release of the game going above and beyond and applying a sheen of polish to what already felt like a pretty great product. I have three copies of this game installed on my machine.. the first being a demo copy that just shows off the first level of the game that was released shortly after the Kickstarter campaign came to a conclusion. The second is an E3 Demo that they released in April showing what was effectively what I thought the final state of the game represented by the image on the left above. The last version is the release client represented by the image on the right above… which takes what I thought was already a great product and tweaks so many things to present amazing results. I tweeted about this yesterday and I was super happy to have similar screenshots to show off the tweaks that were made.

An aspect of Castlevania Symphony of the Night that was barely explored is the interactions you have with various NPCs that happen across your path. There are a few of these moments but they never seem to go very far and it always seemed like they were maybe experimenting. Bloodstained digs into this aspect hard and presents a lot of the common RPG tropes… like this woman who wants something to eat but cannot remember what she wants giving you hints and showing you the icon for the food she wants you to make for her. I cannot believe I have farmed mobs to get drops to feed this lady that always seems to be hungry. The game is filled with several of these little minigames including farming, avenging fallen villagers or collecting mementos to let other villagers rest in peace. There is a full crafting and cooking system in the game, and most items seem to be obtainable through drops, crafting, quests or through outright sale on the vendor at the town hub of sorts.

The game has a series of stained glass doorways that can be found as you explore and these rapidly become something you seek out along with the nearest save room so you can travel freely back to your makeshift base of operations. You can see the doorway rooms marked in green on the map, and there is the familiar heal and save room marked in red. This freedom of traversal is extremely nice and allows you to move around without worrying too much about backtracking the entire way between where you are and the destination that you really need to be at. I realize that Symphony of the Night had this functionality as well, but the placement seemed way less handy than they are in Bloodstained with almost every area of the castle having its own portal room.

Previously I wrote a piece about the E3 demo and spent a lot of time talking about the combat in the game and very little of that functionality has changed. You are given so much free reign over how you want to approach the game be it with weapon choices that feel absolutely unique. They also all have their own hidden special moves that you find out about by reading the various bookcases scattered through the castle… or through experimentation with fighting game style inputs. Additionally the shards that you pick up through killing monsters give you a wide range of attacks that can be improved over time by collecting materials and visiting the Alchemist in town. Then there is also the layer of gear customization which seems to be wide and plentiful… giving you a ton of different methods of tweaking your game play to suit your own needs at the time.

Last night I go far enough to collect my very first Familiar, which is a sort of summoned battle pet creature that follows you around. They are not extremely effective and have their own leveling system, but the floating ghost knight for example randomly stabs things with that spear. I’ve seen others like a disembodied weapon that randomly slashes at things, and that I am likely going to farm until I get it tonight. That is another aspect of this game is the ability to farm monsters over and over until they finally drop a shard for you as it seems like most everything has the capability of dropping something. This absolutely tweaks the center of my brain that used to farm the Colosseum in Final Fantasy VI just to see what all I could get from it.

Another great mini game is Todd the Killer Barber who can only be freed if he gives 666 unique makeovers. So this introduces the player customization system and you can visit him at any point to tweak your hairstyles, hair color, skin color, primary and secondary outfit colors and it looks like maybe other items later on. He asks you to collect books for him that will teach him new hairstyles to use, and late last night I managed to get one of these. Tonight one of the very first things I plan on doing is making my way back to him and seeing what happens when I turn in a book. This however is a perfect example of the quirky systems in the game that I find so damned charming.

This game just nails everything that I want in a Castlevania game, right up to the weird monster types that you end up fighting. This is some sort of a demon cat, that I feel is likely based on someone on the teams cat. There is a similar giant disembodied dog head that likely probably represents a dog from the team as well. Hidden somewhere in the game is apparently a monster type that is exactly Shovel Knight, that has the ability to drop a shovel that you can then use as a weapon. There are rumors that Shovel Knight will be added as a playable character at some point, and I have a feeling that the Save Rooms are a bit of an homage to Hollow Knight with their insectoid appearance. This game is just too perfect for words at times.

I am not really sure what else I can say at this point. Bloodstained has delivered on everything I had hoped it would be, and now I am just hoping it does well enough to be able to fund further games in this series. The point where it absolutely shines is the fact that this universe is already way more intricate and interesting than the Castlevania mythos ever was. Castlevania was effectively cramming as many Transylvanian/Dracula themed tropes into one game as humanly possible. Bloodstained presents a similar feeling universe but one with a way more subtle storyline about the Alchemists guild unleashing a horde of demons on the world, and you as a Shardbinder… one of their experiments are trying your best to right the wrong they created. There are interesting characters that you get to know through the course of the gameplay, and a direction that the game seems to be going as various story paths will likely eventually collide.

I would highly recommend picking the game up and giving it a shot for yourself. However I feel a little odd in doing so given that I have ulterior motive of wanting the game to do well. I may or may not have purchased it on Switch as well as the backer copy that I got on Steam. I’ve additionally picked up the PS4 copy in a physical form because I think this is something that I really want to have a physical edition for. The game is presently available on those three platforms along with Xbox One, so if anything I have said sounds like something you might enjoy then you can get a copy on your gaming destination of choice. Bloodstained was an amazing birthday present… thanks Koji Igarashi (and team of course)!

Trial of the Braves

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Morning folks! I am getting a very late start this morning because… well… it’s my birthday and I slept in significantly later than normal. However at this point I have had breakfast and piddled around a bit and decided to go ahead and blog. I contemplated skipping because I am technically on vacation. One of the lessons I learned early in my career is that it is perfectly okay to take your birthday off. Each birthday seems to have a different reaction for me… some of them are broody and introspective and others relatively happy. So far 43 doesn’t seem to be coming with any major negative side effects, so we are going to call it a good one.

Last night I continued my madness and managed to finish the Trials of the Braves. When I started down this road at least partially inspired by Ashgar I had no clue how far I was from the finish. It turns out that I was three books away and between the last two days I managed to knock those out. The other side effect of this process is it seems to have cleared my mental block against tanking as I spent at least part of my night tanking a dungeon for Lyle. For some reason soloing a bunch of dungeons has allowed me to get back into the swing of Warrior-ing and in essence prepared me for the expansion. Now the irony is… I will have to relearn everything as soon as the patch hits because Warriors change quite a bit.

So now I am on the step that is going to likely cost a bunch of money depending on how much I can get various materia for. Essentially were I doing this when it was actually relevant it would have cost an awful lot more. Now however I just need to research the number of materia that I need and then just buy whatever is cheap. There is a certain amount of pride in infusing the correct stats, but me… I don’t care at all and simply want a cool looking axe that comes from the end of the chain.

As far as today however…. I have already been playing my Birthday gift as I had a kickstarter backer key waiting for me in my inbox when I woke up this morning. It was awfully nice of Bloodstained Ritual of the Night to release on my birthday. I will say they have scaled up the difficulty a bit since the backer E3 demo and scaled down the loot drops. Also there is some weirdness where my Backer Demo character tried to transfer across… but did so poorly so it saved my progress but none of my gear making it extremely difficult to survive without any weapons or armor.

So far the game has improved greatly since even the Backer Demo, namely in the lighting and shading department. I am looking forward to playing some more of it, so I think I will go do that now. I hope you have a great day and I greatly appreciate all of the warm Birthday wishes I have gotten this morning.

Books and Bad Decisions

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I’ve been piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, but have largely languished without a real purpose. This weekend I guess I got a sense of purpose and managed to push my Machinist up to level 50 with darkest dungeon. I had been piddling around during the podcast in Palace of the Dead for a few weeks now, but largely just wound up running around the top of the wall in Quarymill while we talked. I refer to this activity as Dalaran-ing because anytime I would need to talk to someone in game I would find myself running laps around whichever incarnation of Dalaran was in World of Warcraft at the time. I find I do the same with Final Fantasy XIV hubs, and I greatly miss the running friendly walls that our old Free Company house used to have.

As it stands I have every class that is currently in the game above the level of 50, which in theory should allow me to massively clean my vaults and get rid of anything lower level that isn’t particularly cool looking or at least dyeable. I did dump a ton of stuff into ye olde glamour commode, and was pretty happy to see that we are getting an increase in storage space with the upcoming Shadowbringers update. At this point I have dumped every Axe and Katana that I care about keeping as those two classes are already at the level cap. I need to start working my way backwards through my weapon archives and saving anything that I particularly want to keep. Inventory management is the bane of my existence in most MMORPGs and FFXIV is no exception sadly.

After tooling around on my Machinist I decided to push Bard up to 60… at which point something started to bother me greatly. At the end of everything I have completed I get a warning telling me I am capped on Tomestones of Poetics. This lead me down a path of trying to research ways I can spend said Poetics… which lead me back to the original expense that I had previously used them for… Books. I never finished doing books for my Bravura Animus. In fact right now I could not tell you where I am exactly in that process, but I am working my way through a speed book that involves a FATE that apparently never spawns.

So there it is folks. I am making poor life choices and apparently drawn back into piddling around with my Zodiac weapon. I solo’d my way through several dungeons last night and at current moment find myself just needing to do Amdapor Keep and get a FATE in Coerthas to spawn that seemingly doesn’t want to. I figure at some point I will have to start farming down the FATEs that have popped since I believe every zone has a limited number up at a given time. This is apparently what I am doing with my life now… in this lead up to Shadowbringers. Sadly I have not even begun to go through madness because I still have to do my melding materia step. The good news however is that I probably won’t be able to complain about not having something to spend my Poetics on shortly.

Avarice and Guns

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Over the course of this week my blog has largely been devoted to E3 show coverage, or at least that thing that I call coverage where I talk about the things I personally cared about. In the background it has also been a pretty crazy week with a good deal of my time going to trying to catch up all on things E3 instead of actually playing games. This was only complicated by the fact that Tuesday night I went to the rebroadcast of RiffTrax live which is all sorts of wrong name-wise. Then on Wednesday night we met some of my in-laws for an early Father’s Day dinner. Which largely left Monday and last night free… but Monday I more or less spent the night cobbling together the footage needed for the Tuesday post.

Over the weekend I finally reached a point where I was ready to make a run at the Avarice Conquest. For the uninitiated this conquest requires you to hit a 50,000,000 gold streak which means every couple of seconds you need to be looting more gold to keep it active. There are a few ways to do this in game, but the most sure fire method requires copious amounts of farming. Since this takes so much time I absolutely went for the overkill method and gathered up a vault and a half worth of stuff… or in my case 8 rows of 7 caches equally 56 bounty caches.

Now the gotcha here is that a bounty cache retains a memory of what difficulty it was looted on and I started banking the caches when I first became able to farm Torment 13 and quickly worked my way up to 15 and 16… and had not really been paying much attention as to which difficulty I got them on. The key to doing this is to dismiss your companion and dismiss your pet… then stand beside your stash and be ever so careful to not touch anything until you are ready to go. I started by loading every bounty I could fit into my inventory and then reloaded the rest without moving at all. For sake of my own sanity I held down the Shift button while opening the Stash to make sure the game would not accept a movement input from me.

The real challenge however… was doing the cleanup. What you see above is somewhat of a lie, because each one of those items actually represents a stack. At this point I had completed a Solo Greater Rift 80 which I believe took my blood shard capacity up to 1300, and I am pretty sure I made twenty trips between Kadala and the bloodshard pile before I finally farmed those down. I probably crunched over a hundred legendaries and I have no clue at all how much I had in the way of crafting materials. Which is good because I also needed the various Kanai’s Cube related achievements as well. I am essentially in a point with Season 17 where I have knocked out a good chunk of most of the remaining steps, but need to spend some time playing clean up and actually start finishing them. I need two more conquests, and I have not even set my signs on what those are going to be yet.

The other game I have spent a bit of time in lately is Destiny 2 and I am largely working on getting my light level up enough to be able to feel like I have some semblance of choice weapon wise. Right now I am largely just using whatever trash happens to drop with a higher level because I do not have a great stockpile of infusion materials. Now the interesting part of this is that I have picked up some weapons that I have found I actually enjoy and probably never would have played with otherwise… like the submachine gun I am current wielding in my primary slot.

I still find it very hard to get into the Crucible, and whereas I played Gambit constantly it feels like the queues for standard gambit are extremely long. I am however trying to plug away at the various tasks that will give me “powerful gear”. Like I knocked out the planetary quest last night and did a heroic adventure… then plugged away a bit at the crucible related bounties. I will say it is really odd getting to the activity tracker off the map screen because I keep wanting to see it on my inventory. Quite honestly I would prefer if they put that tab in both places, because it takes a lot of retraining to stop looking for those items in my inventory. Still having an awful lot of fun in Destiny 2, but I probably should be playing Final Fantasy XIV and prepping for the impending launch of Shadowbringers.

What have you been playing on regular rotation? Drop me a comment below.