Is there seriously not even a thread for this?
Koji Igarashi & team's spiritual follow-on from his explore-em-up Castlevania games was a Kickstarter mega-success, and eventually launched earlier this year, following after the rather fab 8 bit-esque, more traditional platforming & level-based sideshow, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. Perhaps not the smoothest of launches, what with some game-breaking bugs at launch, the Switch version getting a fair bit of stick for reduced visual fidelity, poor frame rate, and input lag, and the Japanese version getting delayed for 4 after the rest of the world. But now it's out everywhere, reduced to < £30 on most platforms, and patched up the wazoo. You're good now.
First impressions: straight away this feels very much like you'd expect it to. Miriam moves about like a protagonist from any other Igavania game, enemies are varied and telegraph their attacks, and the controls feel very right. There's a wee bit of it's rather hammy story before you first go stomping about, but all of the tutorials in the opening area are subtle and non-instrusive. Voice acting's a bit off in places, and I'm still finding the move to 3D all a bit jarring, but it's 100% got the heart of Castlevania pumping through it.
I'm about 4 hours in now, have got myself a double jump, have committed a few particular dead ends to memory that clearly need another way to travel through them, and a few items on a mental checklist that I'm looking out for.
Some things I'm really digging so far: the village quests are very Order of Ecclesia, which breaks things up nicely. There's a crafting system, which allows you to power up your shards (read: souls in Aria/Dawn of Sorrow) but also allows you to craft meals from food items - and the first time you eat one you gain yourself a permanent stat increase. One of the passive skills you get allows you to configure load outs you can switch between super-quick by holding one button and then using the left stick.
Koji Igarashi & team's spiritual follow-on from his explore-em-up Castlevania games was a Kickstarter mega-success, and eventually launched earlier this year, following after the rather fab 8 bit-esque, more traditional platforming & level-based sideshow, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. Perhaps not the smoothest of launches, what with some game-breaking bugs at launch, the Switch version getting a fair bit of stick for reduced visual fidelity, poor frame rate, and input lag, and the Japanese version getting delayed for 4 after the rest of the world. But now it's out everywhere, reduced to < £30 on most platforms, and patched up the wazoo. You're good now.
First impressions: straight away this feels very much like you'd expect it to. Miriam moves about like a protagonist from any other Igavania game, enemies are varied and telegraph their attacks, and the controls feel very right. There's a wee bit of it's rather hammy story before you first go stomping about, but all of the tutorials in the opening area are subtle and non-instrusive. Voice acting's a bit off in places, and I'm still finding the move to 3D all a bit jarring, but it's 100% got the heart of Castlevania pumping through it.
I'm about 4 hours in now, have got myself a double jump, have committed a few particular dead ends to memory that clearly need another way to travel through them, and a few items on a mental checklist that I'm looking out for.
Some things I'm really digging so far: the village quests are very Order of Ecclesia, which breaks things up nicely. There's a crafting system, which allows you to power up your shards (read: souls in Aria/Dawn of Sorrow) but also allows you to craft meals from food items - and the first time you eat one you gain yourself a permanent stat increase. One of the passive skills you get allows you to configure load outs you can switch between super-quick by holding one button and then using the left stick.
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