Finished the game at just shy of 40 hours, with 100% of the castle explored, 99% of the enemies discovered, and 98% of the shard abilities bound.
All in all, it was a good Castlevania experience. If it's a game you've been wanting more of, this delivers.
That said, with it being a new IP, and much of the game being built off of previous CV titles, I can't say it feels like biggest, best Castlevania game ever.
The story and worldI've already talked a bit about this. I'll just finish it by saying, whether or not you like the story and setting compared to previous games is up to taste. The earlier games were plenty weeby, but maybe with a bit more serious tone and look. This tries to be pretty serious but in a way its own look kind of interferes with that. I never felt like I was watching an anime when playing the earlier games, merely that their story moments had the look. Here, I feel like there's a lot more talking without much being said. A chance to showcase voice acting. But it didn't do much for the story for me. And because there's no readily identifiable antagonist like "Dracula", it's harder to connect with everything going on, despite it being utterly familiar to a fan of the series. Depending on how much that actually mattered to your enjoyment of the previous game, RotN may feel a bit thin.
GraphicsRotN is a striking looking game, I'll give it that. It's bright and colorful and surprisingly detailed. There's a lot of clever tricks played with perspective in a 2d game which reminds me strongly of some much earlier SNES Castlevania games. Basically those tricks and effects supe'd up for 2019. So it's pretty. But I don't necessarily think it looks cohesive, compared to the previous sprite-based games. It's like, they got so good at making the most of their limited resources in previous games that everything had this very polished look. It all tied together the way it looked. Things tend to look a little stark and unnatural in RotN. The crispness of everything kind of prevents it from every settling down in to one visual. I feel this is particularly true of the monsters. With all the power and tech, and previous experiences, I expected to see a lot of really great monster designs. But I didn't. I saw a lot of rather awkward looking and hard to read monsters, whose often cartoony style further stole any reasons for me to spend a lot of time looking at them. A few monsters here and there have great animations, cool, readable profiles and they look cool. But some are just kind of a mushy mess, while others look pretty fugly. (The dragons in this game, oof.) So while a lot looks razor sharp and very crisp, other stuff just doesn't quite cut it. When I compare how the final game looks compared to their pre-release screenshots and concept art....I definitely like what they thought they were going to have much more. That's kind of a bummer because the sprite art is one of the best things about earlier CV games, and this is kind of like a fumbling attempt at the same stuff with a totally different set of technology.
SoundPretty good across the board. Music is great for the setting, some new enjoyable CV style tracks and some good vague remixes of original ones. The voice acting is quality from top to bottom, almost at odds with the somewhat amateurish cutscenes and animations. If I have one gripe is that there's no filter on Miriam's calls outs when she uses some abilities. You spam the ability, she spams her call outs. A minor complaint but after 40 hours of "Teps Oceus!" and "Riga Dohin!" and "Arise myself and my shadow!" I got a little sick of hearing it.
GameplayAll in all, great.
But I have a few caveats I want to make here.
Overall: It's CV. There's just not much more to say than that. It's pretty much everything other CV games have been, minus or two specific systems.
Map: I sort of think that maybe the castle isn't as strong a feature as it was in other games. It connects in a very familiar pattern yet I could help but feel that many areas were smaller, and easier, than in previous games. And they were a little barren even though logically I know that other games had plenty of "dead end rooms with no monsters and one treasure and you'll never be back to it again" stuff. It's no less than previous games, but it's certainly no more either. For me, combined with the art style and what its priorities were, I found myself a lot less enthralled with the
idea of the castle than in any other previous game. Some areas are all connected up in ways that don't quite make sense. (Why is there like an underground cave-like area directly attached to the soaring cathedral top of the castle?) There's a "Underground Sorcery Lab" a "Secret Sorcery Lab" which uses a very similar tileset, and an "Oriental Sorcery Lab." Each of these would have been distinct areas in previous games, but here they kind of feel like a *shrug* from a design perspective. In a way I found a lot of the places in the castle uninspired, or at least lacking in a critical sense of cool. There's nothing really spooky or dark or demony about anything in the castle. It's all just gothic and pretty and colorful. So in a way I think the castle severely lacks character compared to previous games despite trying its damnedest to have some. Maybe it's just me and my take on it, but there's certainly nothing as cool or characterful like the "Catacombs" from SotN in the this game. Most of it is just like "here's some caves. Some with ice, some with fire, some with sand and some vaguely minimalist Egyptian stylings and tons with water." It's like they were trying to hard to not be a straight up CV game in style but somehow managed to waterdown the whole remainder with that decision rather than replace it with something truly cool.
Pacing: This game almost feels like it overstays it's welcome. It's basically SotN in size, except stored all in one castle. So where there was this definite middle point to SotN where you knew, "Ok, this is where we're at and this is what I have left" RotN kind of leaves you guessing on that pretty much the whole game, only having your "map completion %" to go off of. There was more than one occasion where when I walked in to a new area my reaction wasn't surprise or delight, but more a sense of "ho hum." It doesn't help that the last 15 to 20% of the game kind of feels like they checked out. There's several areas and themes that get reused during your tour of the castle. I definitely felt some fatigue with the game around the 30 hour mark as I hunted and struggled to find the way forward.
Abilities and gimmicks: As I've said before, a lot of the shard abilities are kind of ho-hum, and there feels like a ton of redundancy in form and function. Which isn't too off the mark for previous CV so I don't consider this a big one. One thing that did kind of get me though is how many gimmick abilities there are. So many. So many limited uses for them. Also toward the end of the game RotN starts handing out powers that basically render most of the game trivial. You spend the whole game waiting for double jump, only by the end of the game be able to:
INVERT GRAVITY. You can flip the whole castle upside down on a whim like it's SotN. This renders jumping almost a non-issue.
Shoot yourself straight up the air repeatedly without touching the ground. This late game ability also basically invalidates jumping as a mechanic to pay attention to.
Run super fast in any direction for any amount of time. Combined with the above ability, movement basically stops being relevant either.
Teleport through solid objects. This late game power factors in to exactly one wall, one treasure chest, and one quest before having no other practical uses.
Most of these abilities are earned after the 70% completion mark. And I felt like right at the end someone said 'just give them unlimited power. No we really don't have time to build any gameplay around these things." These are in addition to all the other Manipulation and passive powers that came earlier and got you through the first half of the game. Maybe there was a section or two of the game that had puzzles based around them. Maybe that puzzle shows up in one doorway later on in game. Maybe they have some vague combat application if you REALLY like the power. But by and large and I felt like I had a bunch of abilities that did fruity things that I rarely had to use for long, and that the end of the game powers were completely over the top for what the game had been up to that point and served no other purpose than to give people the shit they wished they'd had 20 hours ago. Previous CV games would have had revisit secrets built around all these powers, gameplay that accounted for them and made their gifts worthwhile. They come in a day late and a dollar short in RotN IMO. Other than that, RotN definitely feels like it has some heavy-hitting abilities that completely overshadow half the stuff you might use, so a lot of the shards in game feel useless. MAYBE if your mana regen didn't get so good that you can spam the most costly abilities like they cost nothing, MAYBE if it wasn't so easy to farm for stuff, MAYBE I'd have been force to use other things and have some variety. But none of those things are true. This cuts to balance below.
Secrets: It honestly feels more straightforward about this stuff than most CV games. The big "aha" secret is spelled out for you as long as you manage to find all the areas in the castle. But finding all areas of the castle, which in SotN hinged on this one obscure secret, here is not really formalized in any way. You just have to "figure it out."
There is a shard ability on one monster in the Forbidden Underground Waterways that lets shoot out of a jet of water and essentially propel yourself DOWN in to the watery areas, despite not having the "sink down into water" ability yet, which is what you spend your whole time waiting to find because that's how other games have worked. You use this propulsion ability go through a fairly sizeable number of rooms while underwater until it pops you out in a new series of areas that basically links up the whole bottom of the castle and eventually earns you the ability you need to reach all the TOP areas of the castle. Had I not anal-retentively farmed every single monster shard, I might have had to go to the internet to figure out what to do. In terms of what gets you through CV games, I feel like this one was pretty obscure. Most abilities that get you to new places in the castle are enshrined in a boss fight, as a big sign that "HEY, USE THIS THING TO DO STUFF AND GET FARTHER." Here it's just a garden variety enemy of no note that has an ability you absolutely need to complete the whole game.
Other than that I feel like RotN does a lot more to help the player get what they want out of the game. There's Shards to detect secret walls, so I found all those pretty handily and they make up a big chunk of your upgrades. There's plenty of rings and charms to help you out in farming items, cash and shards. There are no insanely esoteric secrets in the game. Mostly some direct throwback secrets to early CV, some "revisit this area" secrets and a series of locked doors scattered around the castle, with the keys *mostly* easy to find. There were only two things I had to ask the internet about, and one of those came after beating the game. So does RotN have secrets? An assload of them. Are you really going to struggle to find any of them? Probably not.
Gear, Gearing, Crafting, all that hoopla:
RotN is kind of weird in that how you get gear is very.....up to you. Probably half of the items in game can be found in the castle, or gotten from defeated enemies and completed quests. The other half though are crafted, or sold by the vendor. So unlike previous CV games where I feel like what you found really mattered in terms of gear, here it's a matter of:
-Did you find the blueprints for the stuff you wanted to make? (Roughly broken up by tiers of gear. "Fine Gear" "Very Fine Gear" "Silver Gear" "Gold Gear", etc...)
-Did you find enough materials from monsters and chests to make said gear?
-Do you have enough money to buy the materials and base items you don't already have or can't craft yourself?"
For me, I ended up sticking with largely the same gear throughout most of the game. I've played a CV game or two enough to know myself, so I always play CV games with a mind toward LUCK based gear. Because CV is all about finding stuff, like gear and shard or soul abilities, always having high LCK means you miss a lot less. In RotN it pays double and triple dividends to have high LCK because you get more gear, more materials for crafting and making food, and more shards. So with the exception of boss fights, I played the entire game wearing farming gear. As a result there was just a lot of stuff I never used or only crafted for completion's sake because
I didn't actually need to use any of it. So while RotN is great for a completionist who wants to make and try everything, I think it undercuts the joy of discover quite a bit. It also leads in to the discussion of....
DifficultyI played through on Normal. And by and large I'll say this: most of RotN is not a tough game. With the right combination of fast, multi-hitting weapons and shard abilities, most rooms of trash are your's for the farming. BOSSES, on the other hand, can be challenging for some builds because they attack often and fill the screen with garbo and do a considerable amount of damage. For me, my basic setup was: Flying Blade for the first half of the game, Oracle Blade for the second half. Welcome Company for my attack shard, Riga Dohin for my directional shard, Healing for my Manipulation Shard, and whatever Familiar shard I happened to be trying to level at the time. (Dantilion seems like probably the best familiar due to his buffing capabilities.) With this setup, and the best LCK gear I could find, I just vaporized most rooms of enemies immediately which made farming pretty easy. Only rarely did I need to "get serious" about gear to deal with a problem. Likewise, with bosses the same setup but geared for damage and defense, basically meant I smoked most bosses just by standing next to them and firing off my crap. There were probably 5 bosses in the game where I needed to actually use the mountains of health consumable foods I'd acquired, and they were bosses intended to be end game challenges. Most other bosses simply had no response to taking 200 to 500 damage a second from the combination of all my stuff. So while RotN seems to be getting a reputation as a tough game I don't know if I agree, for normal difficulty. The biggest limiting factors for the player are their HP pool and magic regen speed, and food and leveling both make those very easy to get up to the level where you can spam your abilities non-stop and take hits without even worrying about either. I feel like, with so many ways to get powerful, RotN should have angled for a harder version of normal difficulty. Because by 50% of the way through the game I didn't feel challenged by hardly anything. Playing the game was more a question of how to farm the most efficiently, not how to survive it.
So....I gotta remind myself that after all, it is a Castlevania game, it's not Dark Souls or something. But maybe that's an illustrative example. Sekrio felt like a Samurai Dark Souls game. They did a different aesthetic, world, whatever but managed to hold on to the essence of what makes their games recognizable and interesting. I feel like maybe, in the effort to both be different but be exactly what people remember and like about Castlevania, IGA maybe missed a little here. It's still a great game that delivered a bunch of stuff that I love. It's just in totality I don't love the game like I can say I do with earlier CV games. Themes, visuals, execution, some of these things felt a little like duds. They don't besmirch the whole project, but if someone were to ask me "Does RotN live up to the the hype" my response would have be 'mostly' rather than "FUCK YEA!"
There's _13!_ free DLCs coming. I don't know what that means for the game or a future title in this same series. If they are ever going to make a sequel I'm probably going to wait and see based on what this offering turned out like. If the game was simply more to my taste aesthetically and visually I'd be on board. But if it's going to be more of this at this level of execution.....might just wait for a sale instead.
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Topic: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Castlestalgia. You may now enter the castle. (Read 10379 times)