Underwhelming, but okay game, with a lot of map to explore and different skills to spice up gameplay. Bloodstained is not the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night I hoped it to be, but I can see it working for a lot of people.

Wikipedia summary:

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a 2019 Metroidvania-styled video game whose development was led by former Castlevania series producer, Koji Igarashi, and is considered a spiritual successor to the series.

Review

Setup

  • Version: PlayStation 5
  • Difficulty: Normal
  • Total playing time: 17,5 hours (based on PS5 save stats)

Comments

The game has obvious Castlevania vibes, as is the intention. From the start, the menu’s visual and audio style give hopes the game can live up to the hype and match the expectations for a spiritual successor of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Unfortunately, personally, I did not find it reached that expectation. While the music was nice and really matched the vibe and the style of SotN, the overall gameplay cycle, cinematics, and storyline just threw me off quite a bit, to the point where I was bored and directionless multiple times, not really enjoying enough to be motivated or interested in figuring out what to do next.

The movement of the character felt a bit off, although I guess I got used to it after the first hour or so. But the attacks were quite annoying, as I could not get the character to hit all directions, or at least the common ones, including diagonals up. It made the game a little bit harder, which is welcome, but in a frustrating way, which is not.

A lot of monsters were just too annoying to be considered fun, and it feels like those were the most common types. While I did play the game on Normal and did not expect huge challenges, I also felt like almost all the monsters were not really a challenge, except for these little brats (bats, toads, etc.) that just were not on the right height level for your character to land normal attacks, or the rooms filled with enemies, that gave you little room for movement and attack timing errors.

The 8-bit area was really fun. It was quite straight-forward and short, but it was harder than basically everything seen so far, in a good way. The music there was also really nice, and the boss at the end might have been one of the most food consuming enemies I faced in the game.

What was also funny was that, at some point in the game, you just fight Gebel and the game ends in such an anti-climatic way. And I don’t mean that in the “aha, but you see, that was not the real ending, you have to do this and that”. No, I mean it is out of place and feels completely random. Basically, you are shown back at the beginning, with Johannes telling you everything is fine, and we have done our job, then “Game Over” screen. It was fast, a bit stupid, and totally random.

Story

We play as Miriam, someone who was experimented on by the Alchemy Guild, who infused her with demon powered crystals in order to make super humans (“shardbinders”) with demon powers. These alchemists sometimes summoned demons to the world in secret, to make their work seem important as a defense against demons, in order to continue to get funding. Things got out of hand as demons almost destroyed the whole Alchemist Guild, and the Church got involved, banishing most of the demons.

In order to summon demons, alchemists sacrificed the shardbinders. In the last event, most shardbinders were sacrificed, with only Gebel surviving, and our protagonist, Miriam, being spared as she fell unconscious before the ritual. Fast-forward a decade, Miriam wakes up to find that her former friend and fellow shardbinder, Gebel, has started summoning demons to destroy the world. Apparently, he is seeking revenge for those who did this to him.

At the start of the game, Miriam meets Johannes, a former apprentice at the Alchemy Guild who helped take care of her during her 10-year slumber. She also meets Dominique, a friend of his who is an exorcist from the Church. The trio sets up a camp in the village, with Johannes serving as the go-to point for crafting items, preparing food, enhancing shards, etc. Meanwhile, Dominique informs Miriam that she should not accumulate too many crystal shards, as the more power she gains, the higher will be the influence of the shards over her, potentially becoming fatal. She sets up a shop, as to support Miriam by selling her precious supplies, as well as offering to buy shards to avoid accumulation. We also meet a few other side-quest giving characters, but they have no influence on the story.

Upon entering a demon filled castle summoned by Gebel, Miriam meets Alfred, another surviving alchemist who is trying to retrieve the Liber Logaeth, the magical book that Gebel is using to summon all the demons, but his motives are not clear. Upon further exploring the castle, Miriam meets and fights against Zangetsu, a demon hunter that does not trust Miriam at all due to her nature. Zangetsu was hired by Dominique to infiltrate the castle and eliminate the demons.

Miriam eventually meets Zangetsu again, and he reveals that Gebel is being controlled by a special demon, who he wants to defeat. He can never reach them, as they keep avoiding him due to fearing his powerful sword. After testing Miriam’s skills and finally trusting her abilities and motives, Zangetsu gives the sword to Miriam, and tells her the demon will not escape from her as it would not be expecting her to have the sword. Upon finding Gebel, after getting close to killing him, the moon becomes red, and the player can use the sword to cut it out, revealing it to be the demon in disguise. The demon manages to escape, but Gebel is freed. Gebel thanks Miriam for releasing him, but dies due to the crystal accumulation overcoming his body.

Alfred arrives at this moment, steals the Liber Logaeth, and teleports away. Miriam eventually finds the demon Gremory again, following it through a dimensional portal to another version of the castle. Miriam finds Alfred, deadly wounded, and missing the book. Johannes and Zangetsu appear, and Johannes comforts Alfred as he dies. Meanwhile, Zangetsu explains that he has concluded Dominique can not be trusted. Zangetsu also explains they have a chance to defeat the demon Gremory together. Upon finding Gremory, Zangetsu uses a special technique, but gets caught by the demon and is apparently killed. This gives an opening to Miriam, who attacks the demon and eventually kills it.

Upon further exploration, Miriam eventually finds who took the Liber Logaeth: Dominique. She reveals she had studied both Miriam and Gebel all these years, and through a lot of studying, she has now transformed herself into a shardbinder as well. All the shards Miriam sold her were actually making Dominique stronger. With the power of the shards and the Liber Logaeth, Dominique summons the king of demons, Bael.

After Miriam finally defeats and banishes both Bael and Dominique, Johannes uses the Liber Logaeth to activate special glyphs Alfred revealed to him before dying, which is what he had been setting up all over the castle this whole time. As the glyphs activate, they destroy the castle. The game ends as Miriam and Johannes are shown leaving the village.

Characters

  • Miriam: our main character. Very skilled in combat, she has superpowers due to being infused with special shards that grant her special skills
  • Johannes: a nice support character for a change, gives up some good pieces of background story and context, and is the go-to for craft, food preparing, shard enhancement, and item dismantling
  • Dominique: a bland, random support character that seems from the get go to have very “randomly placed” motivations. For example, she appears at the very beginning and just straights up “trusts me and nothing can sway her trust”. It feels so shallow and underserved, that it basically diminishes the ending twist.
  • Gebel: a friend of Miriam that has been taken over by some demon and is now being controlled, making it seem at first to be the big bad guy, only to be, unsurprisingly, discarded at some point
  • Alfred: some very powerful older figure, that apparently has never any time to explain why he is in such hurry. He basically teleports away at every single opportunity, so it feels quite ridiculous that he is having troubles to arrive at whatever destination he is trying to reach.
  • Zangetsu: another support character. You get to fight him twice during the story to prove your worth. It was quite a challenging fight the first time around. A man of few words, he basically goes away every time you arrive, only to later put all his trust in you and sacrifice himself for you

Difficulty

I played it at the Normal difficulty. While I did have some expectation that this game would be a very good successor to SotN, I was not convinced. A couple of bosses are challenging though, specially at the beginning when you still haven’t upgraded your shards, but other than minor irritating enemies, an experienced player should not have much difficulty.

I decided to not start from a higher difficulty setting to avoid misplacing my trust, and I am glad I did it. I am always considering higher difficulty settings on games, but for this one I am not convinced that a higher difficulty would have brought me more fun with the challenge instead of just more headache with the irritating mobs.

Graphics

The overall aesthetic is quite nice. The graphics in general are good. I wasn’t a fan of making some parts 3D, but I guess they had to try something new here to differentiate and give itself some identity. It is not bad, it just isn’t that great to me, either.

The animations or cinematics were quite laughable, though. At the very beginning of the game, when a first “boss” appears, there was a cutscene that was so ridiculous I could not discern if it was serious or a joke. I honestly thought my game could have bugged out somehow.

Some of the backgrounds on the castle do not make that much sense. It feels like each screen and background were created separately, so they do not always connect. I felt like there was a lack of continuation between different rooms. One distinct instance was a full red shining moon in a screen, where the previous screen had a regular full moon. While the reason for this particular case is explained by the game’s story, it takes until the end of the game to find it out. So throughout the whole game, I had this “example” of bad background. Although, I have to say that the contrast being so glaring and out of place made it quite remarkable, and since it was explained in game, it was actually a fun twist.

Sound & Music

The music at the menu had my hopes up. However, moving through the game, none of the tracks really stuck to me. There was one area in particular where I considered muting the music as it was very bad, but apart from that, all the rest were nice enough, just not remarkable. Although, I have to be fair here and say that I mostly played this with very, very low volume, because reasons, and so I might have missed on good tunes.

The combat sounds, spells and other battle related were good.

Now that I am stopping to write this, I just realized the whole game was dubbed. It is a shame, because I barely paid attention. The story development was so uninspiring that I could not pay that much attention. However, again I have to say that I played it mostly at low volume, and that for the first couple of hours, I did feel impressed with the voice-over work. So kudos to the team!

Menu & Minimap

The menu for the game itself is kind of nice. It is a bit overwhelming at first, since there are so many things to read through (archives, journal, items, demons, shards, techniques, etc.). But once you get the hang of it, it is indeed nice.

The UI for interacting with NPCs is a bit annoying, though. Everytime you talk to them, a pop up with their chat opens and you have to fast-forward it or skip through a different button. Handling multiple quests at the same time was tedious and repetitive because of this.

Not being able to have a tracker for items you are looking for was also quite sad. Either you have to write down the items you need to complete different crafting/food dishes, or you have to keep going back and forward between the craft NPC and the market NPC that might have what you need. Could have been solved by having a small tracker at some part of the screen, so you could know if you had all you needed.

The minimap was almost identical to that of SotN, visually. Unfortunately, for such a new game, I would have expected some more features to be available, like different types of markings to put on different places with different meanings. You basically have one mark type, and you have to reuse it everywhere. Underwhelming.

The map itself is quite big though, the game has a lot of areas and a lot of content. I feel like if the story and other gameplay elements could have been better, there would have been much more motivation for me to explore. I did finish with over 92% of the areas explored, but it’s just that I did not care much in many parts of the game to actually explore them out of curiosity or entertainment. I was mostly going through the motions of clearing all the areas for opening up the minimap in a “completionist” manner, and not through in-game excitement and motivation.

Pros

  • A lot of content, and a big map to explore
  • A “pokedex” of demons, items, shards. Crafting system, food preparing system, shard upgrading system. Many side-quests requiring specific monster kills or item findings. For completionists, it can be quite a lot to do
  • Different types of weapons, and many different shards granting different spells, which can open quite a few personalization possibilities

Cons

  • The story might be interesting, but I personally felt it was developed in a bad way, so I was not invested
  • I disliked some of the combat choices, like not having a way to attack diagonally upwards
  • If you are not into it, you might miss the clues as to where you should go next in some key moments. As I was not that into it, I missed these clues, which made me more demotivated as I felt lost