When the GameCube launched in 2001, one of its launch games was Luigi’s Mansion. It was part tech demo, part Survival Horror parody, and totally unlike the traditional Mario platformer many Nintendo fans wanted at launch. It was fun, though, and it gave Luigi a personality. He wasn’t much more than Green Mario before. It’s thanks to that game that Luigi plays how he does in Smash, he got the personality that made him a meme superstar with his Mario Kart 8 death stare, and we eventually got Luigi’s Mansion 2 (Dark Moon) on The Year of Luigi. Now, Luigi is back and better than ever. Luigi’s Mansion 3 feels like a game from a developer that has learned from its past mistakes and put some real effort into making Luigi’s Mansion one of Nintendo’s big series.
Luigi's Mansion 3 doesn't begin on a dark and stormy night. It begins on a beautiful sunny day. The Mario gang has been invited to stay at the Last Resort by its owner, Helen Gravely. Apparently, nobody thinks any of this is suspicious, so they go along with it. But on the first night there, after everyone has gone to sleep, the beautiful luxury hotel is revealed for what it truly is, a haunted luxury hotel. The lights go out, fog rolls in, Mario, Peach, and the Toads go missing, and Helen Gravely reveals that she is actually a ghost working for Luigi's arch nemesis, King Boo. King Boo traps Mario, Peach and the Toads inside paintings, but Luigi and his dog, Polterpup, manage to get away. Luigi then runs into his old friend, Professor E. Gadd, gets his Poltergust vacuum back, and sets off on another ghost busting quest to rescue his brother and the gang.
The hotel's elevator has no buttons, though! How is Luigi supposed to get around the hotel without elevator buttons? There’s only a few stairs connecting the bottom floors. That's probably a fire hazard. It turns out that Helen Gravely’s ghost minions (the bosses) have the buttons, so Luigi must capture them to get them back. These buttons are sort of like stars in Mario 64, except there aren’t 120 of them. Once you get an elevator button, you’re able to go to the next floor. Unlike in LM2, the game isn’t split up into Missions or entirety separate mansions. Each floor is completely self-contained, but you never have to go to a menu screen to do another objective or to move to another floor. You're free to go wherever your buttons and abilities can take you at any time. This isn't a total throwback to LM1, though. There aren't many reasons to go back to previous floors besides catching all the Boos, which only spawn after you complete a floor, or maybe getting gems you missed.
The Last Resort is 17 floors of puzzles and ghost hunting adventures, and it’s much more than hotel rooms. In fact, there’s more activities and entertainment here than there are places to sleep. There’s a mall, concert hall, museum, gym, dance club, a pirate cove themed bar, and a pyramid in the middle of a desert, complete with Indiana Jones style traps and mummies. The environments are much more varied than in either of the previous games, and I like that, even if sometimes they seem out of place. I felt like the game didn’t take advantage of the Mario IP as well as it could have, though. Luigi’s Mansion is kind of its own thing, but it’s still in the Mario universe. They could have filled the pyramid with Super Mario Land references, put Yoshi in the dinosaur museum, and made the generic King Kong in the movie set Donkey Kong instead, for example.
The varied environments also keep the puzzles fresh throughout the whole game. Luigi only has so many things he can do with his abilities, but the different themes keep changing the logic of the puzzles. For example, in the pyramid themed floor, you’re constantly vacuuming tons of sand. You vacuum everything up in this game. That’s not new or unique. But not every floor is covered in sand like that. Simply adding sand that Luigi can move around changes everything because that gives him control over the elevation of the ground. Just when I thought the game had done everything it could do with Luigi’s abilities, it kept surprising me with clever new types of puzzles.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 really is all about the puzzles. Even though the series is a parody of games like Resident Evil, the puzzles are also a lot like Zelda puzzles. There’s a lot of switch pulling, finding hidden doors, and moving things around in the environment. Even the bosses are more puzzly than the average Mario boss. You’re usually showered with health replenishing hearts during a battle, so it’s almost hard to die on them for most of the game. Most boss battles are more about figuring out how to damage the boss than they are about avoiding attacks and doing as much damage as possible.
Luigi’s moves don’t lend themselves to fast-paced action very well anyway. This game is at its best when the action is slow and you have to use your brain. There are definitely times when the game crosses that line, though. Near the end of the game, you often have to do puzzles with strict timing requirements, and the bosses become a little too demanding for what Luigi can do with his limited skills and slow movement speed. I feel like the game became more frustrating than challenging at that point, and some of that stuff could have use a nerf, but I was able to get through it eventually.
I guess it’s been a while since Luigi was in a new platformer, so he may be out of platforming shape. Luigi has a new jump move in LM3, but he’s actually just using the Poltergust to do a tiny rocket jump. This is the move you rarely use, but the game won't let you forget about. Luigi also gets a plunger with a rope tied to it, which he can use to pull, tow, or throw stuff around. The biggest new ability, which is actually from the LM 3DS remake, is Gooigi, a green jello-like Luigi. You can summon Gooigi and move him around independently from Luigi to solve puzzles or fight enemies, but this also leaves Luigi vulnerable. There’s also a co-op mode in which player 2 plays as Gooigi. He only has 25 hearts, but he can infinitely respawn without penalties to make up for that. Gooigi can help you press down switches, pull objects around, and reach places Luigi can’t by going through gates and drains, like a green T-1000. The Gooigi puzzles are some of the best in the game. Gooigi for Smash!
I did have some trouble getting used to the controls, and the lack of aim inversion options didn't help, but I managed. I've been playing with inverted Y axis since Star Fox, it's hard to adjust. Luigi’s aiming works kind of like in 1st and 3rd person shooters, but Luigi isn’t always facing forward, and the aiming doesn’t adjust depending on which direction Luigi is facing. If Luigi is facing towards the camera, left on the right stick still turns towards Luigi’s left, which is now your right. This method of aiming makes sense, and it would be a real mess if it constantly switched which way is which, but it's confusing, and it doesn’t help that I’m always thinking with inverted aim in mind. There is an option to make aiming work more like in a dual stick shooter, but that forces you to use motion controls to aim up and down, and I am not a fan of motion controls.
The graphics are some of the best I’ve seen on Switch. It does run at 30fps, and there a few dips here and there, but the lighting and amount of detail in the environments and characters is pretty amazing. Luigi’s clothes look even more realistic than Mario’s in Odyssey, his flashlight makes pretty much everything in the environment cast a shadow, and he can vacuum and and throw around pretty much anything that isn’t nailed down. The game also has a very abstract cartoon-like style that I really like. Everything is crooked or slanted in some way, like in The Nightmare Before Christmas or the old Beetlejuice cartoon.
The music is pretty ambient and low-key, but it does have some really good stuff in it. There’s a few remixes of the main LM theme, a Super Mario Bros overworld theme remix when you arrive at the hotel, and lots of slow, jazzy, ambient tunes. The sound effects are very well done, too. You can actually hear Gooigi’s jello-like body wobble as he walks around. And this might sound weird when talking about a Mario universe game, but the voice acting is really good. Mario and Peach both have a lot more lines than in regular Mario games, and it’s kind of mind blowing to hear. Peach actually says stuff like “Yahoo” and “Here we go”, like she’s been hanging around Mario so much that she’s talking like him now. And of course, Luigi has a bunch of new lines, too. You actually get 3 directions on the d-pad dedicated to making Luigi call out for Mario.
I did try out the multiplayer, but I didn’t play a lot of it. It just isn’t really what i want from Luigi’s Mansion. If you played the multiplayer in LM2, it’s basically that. You run around a floor with other Luigis and catch ghosts until time runs out.
I really enjoyed this game. It’s just so fun and full of charm and personality. It has clever puzzles and bosses, the graphics are amazing, and the music and sound effects are incredibly well done. The controls took some getting used to, and it got a little frustrating during the last part, but the good far outweighs the bad here. This is definitely worth picking up, even if Halloween has already come and gone.
When I beat Dragon Quest XI, I was confused but intrigued. I had never played Dragon Quest III, so a lot of the references went right over my head, but I knew DQXI was constantly referencing it. I just didn’t know how much. Since then, I've wanted to play DQIII, but haven't had a good way to do so until now. An English port of the Super Famicom remake has been available on mobile for a while, but it had never been released on consoles in English until this Switch version, even though ports of the SFC remake have been released on Wii, PS4, and 3DS in Japan. I usually stay away from old-school RPGs, but I made an exception for this game, and I don't think I'll be picking up the Dragon Quest I and II remakes after this.
The main story in Dragon Quest III is very simple; you play as a teenager who is summoned by the king on their 16th Birthday. He wants you to kill the Archfiend Baramos. You're not a legendary hero or anything, you're just the son or daughter of the last guy who failed to kill the Archfiend. So, of course, you recruit a party of random mercenaries who have zero bearing on the story and set off on your adventure. The game’s story does get pretty good as you progress through the game, though. Like in other Dragon Quest games, each town has some self-contained scenario that ties into the overarching story on a more personal level. These always seem to be my favorite part of these games. There's tragic stories, funny stories, and of course, morals. I also enjoyed them because some are obviously the inspiration for some of the scenarios you see in DQXI. I often found myself thinking, “I saw this in DQXI but with an extra twist”. Now I want to play DQXI again.
Your party members don't play a part in the story because they are either recruited from a premade list or created by you. There's a bar in the starting town in which you can create a party member of any class. All non-Hero party members can also switch classes at level 20 and keep the old class' spells, so you can have a mage switch to warrior and have a tanky mage if you want. I like the level of customization this system allows for, but I like party members with a story even more. Dragon Quest VI had both a class system and story characters, and I liked that much better.
I wish I had played Dragon Quest III back in the day, but I didn’t start playing RPGs until Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. I have no nostalgia for NES RPGs, and at its core, that’s what this game is. It has a modern DQ UI and SNES era graphics, but it plays like an NES game. When you talk to the king, he simply tells you to take care of the Archfiend. There's no big cutscene explaining things, and he doesn’t tell you where to go or what to do. You have to figure everything out by talking to villagers and exploring the world.
The game starts off fairly linearly, but quickly opens up when you get a ship and are free to sail all over the world. I've played the DS remakes, so the sudden shift to a non-linear open world adventure wasn't a big surprise, but I still found the lack of direction a bit frustrating. I don't think anyone even told me I had to collect orbs like Dragon Balls. I actually got one orb before running into the altar of the Bird God and putting 2 and 2 together. Even though you are free to go anywhere at this point, that doesn't mean you should because monsters don't scale to your level. That first orb I got was from Orochi, a dragon in a cave that was probably one of the last places I should have gone to. There's also no way to tell what level the monsters will be in an area since this game has random encounters. Lots and lots of random encounters.
It seems like there's a random battle every five steps you take in any direction anywhere outside of towns. This is to be expected from old RPGs, but it gets really annoying when you’re aimlessly sailing around the world in search of the next town with an orb to advance the story and you’re spending most of your travel time fighting monsters. I rarely had to grind for equipment money because I always had tons of gold from fighting. Thankfully, there is a Zoom spell, so you don’t have to travel everywhere by foot or ship after you discover a town, but it doesn't let you Zoom everywhere, just the main towns. There is a Holy Water item that’s supposed to keep some monsters away, but it doesn’t work like Repel from Pokemon games, you still have to fight at least every ten steps.
Another thing that makes this game more work than it needed to be is the way that NPCs talk. The localization uses heavy accents with non-English words mixed in, combined with Yoda-like backwards speech patterns, and lots of thous, thys, thees, and eths at the end of words for no good reason other than to make them soundeth like Old English. Nobody talks like this in real life. It makes gathering information about what to do a real chore. It’s really hard to separate flavor text from hints when people talk like French Yoda from the 5th century.
There are a lot of very bad and puzzling things about the graphics in this version of the game. It uses the SNES game as a base, but for whatever reason, they felt like they had to mess around with the original sprites, and the results are never good. The backgrounds are the only thing that looks okay because they didn’t mess with them. All the character sprites look like they have one of those gross emulator smoothing filters on, but they still look pixelated around the edges as if they were scaled up from a lower resolution after the filter was applied. All the battle backgrounds have been cut down to a small window around the monsters and also have an ugly smoothing filter on them. The monster art looks like it has been replaced with key Dragon Quest art, like what you’d see in a manual or guide. That Akira Toriyama art looks great, but it's not animated like the sprites in the SFC version. I don't understand the logic behind that at all. Why even touch them if you're going to remove the animations? Who could possibly see this as an improvement? The scrolling in this version also looks very choppy, like it’s skipping a ton of frames.
The music is technically in a higher quality than the SFC version's, but it sounds like its missing instruments. It sounds very weak and flat compared to the original soundtrack. I feel like I always diss the music in these games, but I don't hate DQ music. I actually like the songs. It's just that they all sound the same. I've heard every single one of these songs in other games, and in better quality in games that were released before this. There are fully orchestrated versions of these songs out there, so why are those not in this version?
I was really curious about DQIII after playing DQXI, so I just had to play this, but I can’t recommend it to anyone looking for a fun RPG on Switch. Buy DQXI for that. Then if you're really curious about DQIII, maybe get this. It's better than the mobile port, at least. It’s not just that it has terrible graphics and lame music, it's just too old-school and not that fun to play. There’s too much aimless wandering around, too many random battles, and the localization is incredibly annoying to read. What Dragon Quest III really needs is another remake, not more ports of this. I feel like this could be a great game if it played more like DQXI and less like an NES game.
Trials of Mana is one of those legendary white whale import games like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Monster World IV once were, and Mother 3 still is. I remember first seeing it in an old game magazine as Secret of Mana 2. Being a big fan of Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy Adventure, I was hyped for a sequel, but it never came. It was released on the Super Famicom as Seiken Densetsu 3 in 1995, but it was never released outside Japan. That is, until Collection of Mana was released on Switch back in June, shortly after Nintendo's E3 2019 Direct. I went into Trials of Mana hoping for a better game than Secret of Mana, and I think I got that, but it’s definitely not the masterpiece I was hoping for.
Trials of Mana has a very cliche premise, but the way it tells its story is very different from most RPGs of the time. You play as the chosen hero, collect 8 stones, and get a magic sword to save the world from an evil being from another dimension. I’ve heard this all before. What Trials of Mana does differently is that it gives you different sides of the story depending on which characters you choose and the order you pick them in. There's 6 characters to choose from, but you can only have a party of 3. The characters you choose will become the focus of the story, and the rest will have much smaller roles. The overarching story is always the same, but each character has a unique intro sequence you only get to play when you pick them first. You also get to see more of your other 2 character's story when they're in your party. You still get to see the 3 characters you didn't pick throughout the game and take part in some of their major story scenes, but they don't stick around for long, and you never get to know them very well. This is a cool idea that adds a little bit of replay value to the game. I didn't play all the way through the game with different character combinations, but I did check out all their intros, and they're really interesting and worth checking out.
Even though the main story sounds like it could come from any other RPG. I really enjoyed each character's personal story arcs. Everyone feels like they have a good reason for wanting to get the Mana Sword (besides saving the world), and their origin stories often cross over in some way, so it makes sense when they team up, even though they might come from completely different kingdoms, or even be affiliated with each other's enemies. All the playable characters also have strong ties to the major kingdoms in the game, so it feels like you have someone on the inside, or you're someone important everywhere you go.
Like Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana is an action RPG with real-time combat. There have been some pretty big changes to the combat since SoM, though. The first thing you'll notice is that ToM has a battle stance you automatically go into when there are enemies nearby. You pull out your weapon and slowly walk around with your guard up. It’s a lot like how you charge attacks in SoM. You can't swing your weapon at all outside of this battle stance, and you can't run while in the battle stance. This makes avoiding enemies much harder than in SoM. The B button, which is used to run outside of battles, turns into your special move button. As you land hits on enemies, a special meter fills up, and when it reaches a certain point, you can unleash a more powerful attack with B, kind of like in a fighting game. You no longer have to hold the attack button to charge up a special move, like in SoM. ToM also introduces a short melee attack cooldown. You can mash A and whiff without triggering the cooldown, but you will not be able to attack again for a second after landing an attack. It's not super fun to press A and have nothing happen, but it's better than SoM's energy bar, which lets you attack wildly, but doesn't let you do damage until it fills up. Aside from the slow walk you're forced into while in the battle stance, I think the melee combat is a big improvement over SoM and its energy bar charging system.
The magic system in ToM is not nearly as good as the melee, though. It feels like a big downgrade from SoM's, and it slows the pace of the game down quite a bit. Picking spells works like in SoM, you have the same popup ring menus, but in ToM, the world stands still while spell animations play. Neither you or the enemies can do anything at all. You just watch fireballs and lightning fly across the screen. This time freezing also affects item use and all level 2 and 3 special attacks. The game might as well become a turn-based game around a third of the way in because that's what it looks like after you start learning spells. Then enemies start casting spells, and time stops when they cast spells as well, further slowing the pace of the game down. Boss battles basically turn into a race to see who can cast as spell first as soon as you regain control of your characters at this point. I had Angela on my team, and she’s a Mage, so I had to use magic as much as possible with her, and it sucked. Time didn't stand still while you used magic in SoM, and it felt much better.
I also have a big problem with the game's UI. It's not that it's badly designed, it would be fine if it wasn't so laggy and slow. It comes and goes, but there's a ton of input lag sometimes, transitions between screens are really slow, and it sometimes drops inputs for no apparent reason. It feels like browsing PSN on PS3. I dreaded having to equip stuff or having to do any inventory management. There's also no way to tell which character is buffed or what buffs they have active, and there's no world map, so traveling around the world can be a bit confusing during the first part of the game, when you have to use ships and cannons to get around.
When I played the recent Secret of Mana remake, I was disappointed to see that it was still missing a lot of content in the second half of the game. Thankfully, there are no 1 room dungeons in ToM. ToM's dungeons are pretty good, and they're not just caves and fortresses. Sometimes you fight your way through a forest, ghost ship, or mountainside to find the next Mana Spirit. There's lots of beautiful environments in the game, so why only use them to connect places together? I was a bit disappointed with the amount of puzzles, though. There's a few dungeons with switch puzzles, but most of the time, you just have to kill everything in the room to open a door. None of the weapon specific obstacles, like cutting stalagmites with axes or using whips like grappling hooks, carried over from SoM. I did like how you use the Mana Spirits to open new paths, though. These felt more like story scenes than puzzle solving, but I still thought it was a cool way to bring the Mana Spirits back into the game after you rescue them.
There aren’t a lot of SNES games that look better than Trials of Mana. This was a pretty late SNES game, and it shows. It blows Secret of Mana out of the water. All the sprites have more texture to them, the main characters have a lot of cool animations and expressions, and there's more lighting and shading in the environments. The bosses are all huge and very detailed, but none of their attacks are very flashy. None of my character’s spell animations looked especially amazing, either. The version of the game in Collection of Mana also gets rid of the framerate issues in the original, which is nice because it made the music slow down, too.
The music in this game is also pretty great. There's a lot of trumpet-heavy Squaresoft style music in castles, whimsical upbeat music in towns, and a few songs reminiscent of Secret of Mana’s OST. I enjoyed some of the less traditional sounding stuff the most, though. There's one sad song, "Innocent Sea", that sounds like it has a mandolin in it, or at least as close as a SNES MIDI can get to one, "Swivel" sounds like Peruvian pan flute music, and I even heard some Salsa and Reggae in there, which I didn’t expect to hear in a Squaresoft game.
Trials of Mana is a great looking game with a good soundtrack and characters you can really root for, but the way time stands still while unimpressive spell animations play really drags the game down. It could have been one of the best Squaresoft games on the SNES if it wasn't for that. Still, I think it’s overall a better game than Secret of Mana. I know the upcoming remake fixes the spell freeze, so I'm still looking forward to playing that next year.
In 2014, almost 2 years before the whole mess with Hideo Kojima, longtime Castlevania series producer, Koji Igarashi, left Konami. He wanted to continue making Castlevania games, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to do so there with the company shifting its focus to gyms and pachinko machines. Shortly after leaving, he announced a Kickstarter campaign for a new game in the style of the Castlevania games he worked on, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. The Kickstarter was a huge success, but the game had a long development cycle and was delayed multiple times. The game finally came out in June of this year, but not without its share of problems. The Switch version of the game is still a miserable little pile of something, and it's definitely not secrets. That’s why I had not reviewed this game until now, even though I was a backer. I chose the Switch version and didn’t want to force myself through that mess of a game and ruin the experience, so I didn’t play it. But it’s on Game Pass for PC now, so I’m reviewing that version.
Like Castlevania, Bloodstained takes a pre-existing idea and runs wild with it. Instead of Dracula, werewolves, and the Grim Reaper, Bloodstained is all about demons and the Liber Logaeth. In the real world, the Liber Logaeth is a 16th century book of magic written in Enochian, the language of angels. In Bloodstained, it's full of spells to summon demons. The main villain of the game, Gebel, plans to use the book to summon the demon, Bael, who gets zero backstory in the game, but is one of the kings of hell in real world 17th century writings. You play as Miriam, who along with Gebel, is one of the last 2 surviving Shardbinders, people who were given the power to absorb demonic Shards by alchemists 10 years before RotN.
I think the story of Ritual of the Night is pretty bad. It's very predictable, a lot of the demon and Liber Logaeth lore is not explained very well, the dialogue is corny, and the whole thing feels more like setup and backstory than a game that's actually telling a complete story. I think the world they're building has potential as a game series, though. A world full of alchemists, demons, and demon hunters could be interesting. Bael is not much of a character compared to Dracula, but I guess you could go in many different directions with a series about people trying to summon Bael, like with people resurrecting Dracula. None of the characters have origin stories as cool as being the son of Dracula, or the latest in a long line of Vampire hunters, but Miriam, Zangetsu, and Gebel all have pretty cool designs, and I would like to see them again.
So what does Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon have to do with Ritual of the Night? Not much. The story of Curse of the Moon doesn't fit before or after Ritual of the Night, and it can’t be canon in the same timeline as RotN. CotM isn't much more than an introduction to the world of Bloodstained.
If Bloodstained CotM was the best of Classicvania, then RotN is a collection of the best ideas from Iga’s Castlevanias. The skills, structure of the game, NPCs, weapons, enemies, and controls all feel like they’re transplanted directly from Castlevania. Miriam plays like a mix of Soma Cruz, Shanoa, and Alucard. She moves a bit faster, but the floaty jumps, backstep, slide, and weapon attacks all feel very familiar. She has that same delay between backsteps Soma had, so you can't back dash faster than you can run, her magic is very similar to Shanoa's, and her weapon attacks are a lot like Alucard's, with diagonal slashes and special moves with fighting game inputs. I instantly felt right at home controlling Miriam.
Just like in Castlevania, you have to make your way through a huge gothic castle, which seemingly appeared out of thin air. This isn't Dracula's Castlevania, though. This is Gebel's Hellhold. Not quite as catchy, but okay. Good thing they went with Bloodstained as the name for the series. The castle is full of familiar gothic settings, like cathedrals, castle halls, alchemy labs, a clocktower, libraries, and also more natural settings surrounding it, like a garden, a Japanese mountain (I thought we were in Europe), and underwater caverns below the castle.
Traversal through the castle and its surrounding areas is classic Metroidvania. You fight your way through long halls and platform jump through vertical areas, fight lots of monsters, use your skills to get past obstacles, and try to make it to the next save room without dying before fighting a boss. There are some Zelda-like block pushing and switch puzzles, but they're never very hard to figure out. Most obstacles blocking your way require you to use a specific Skill, and it's always pretty easy to figure out that these are places you should come back to when you get the right Skill. A lot of the game is just about exploring and finding keys to open locked doors, though. It’s not all about special skills. Overall, I thought it was pretty good map. The layout makes it feel like a real place, like Castlevania, there's lots of breakable walls and secrets to find, the enemy placement keeps the action going, teleports and save rooms are well placed, and the different areas all look different and never get boring to look at.
The Shard system is basically Souls, Glyphs, Relics, and all that stuff from Castlevania combined. Shards give you subweapons, magic, Skills, buffs, and familiars. Every enemy drops a Shard with some kind of power, and you can collect multiples of a Shard to power them up. You can equip 5 of them at once, enhance them, and even save multiple loadouts. There's shards for shurikens, throwing daggers, fireballs, buffs for all the weapon types, movement and attack speed buffs, summons, and all kinds of stuff.
Even though I liked the variety and amount of customization the Shard system offers, I also felt like it kept me from feeling super powerful. Shards can only be equipped in one specific slot, so you have to pick and choose what to equip. Most of your traversal Skill Shards don't have to be equipped, but there's a few that do, so you can't even have all those skills available at all times. The Skills you can always have on are pretty standard Castlevania abilities, and there's only 3 of them, not including the loadout shortcuts, which are technically Shard Skills, too. There's a double jump, underwater walking, and a final one I won't spoil here. That's it. You get stuff like the slide, enemy nameplates, and Street Fighter-like weapon moves as baseline moves. Three Skills might sound low, but you're still getting about the same amount of stuff you'd get from Relics in games like Dawn of Sorrow and SotN in some way. Still, I would have liked a few more Skills in a game this big.
As I mentioned earlier, Shards also give you familiars. If you're not familiar with the term, it comes from the belief that Witches would have demons disguised as animals, like cats, working for them. They're little combat pets. There's a fairy, a ghost knight armor, a giant sword, a book with a face on it, and even one of those annoying floating eyeballs that act like Castlevania Medusa heads. The fairy heals you with special potions and points out breakable walls, the book buffs your stats, and the ghost knight specializes in attacking. They're not mandatory, but they're cool, and I like having them around. They also have some secret animations that play when you sit in certain places with them.
When Bloodstained was first hinted at on Twitter, their account asked, sword or whip? Well, RotN is definitely a sword game. There are whips in RotN, but they're very different from whips in Castlevania, or Miriam's whip in Curse of the Moon. RotN's whips only swing downwards diagonally, and not directly forwards, like a Castlevania whip. It's like they went out of their way to make this one weapon different from Castlevania. It's a strange choice considering that the rest of the weapons all work very similarly to their Castlevania counterparts. Those other weapon types are; katanas, daggers, shoes (for kicking), rapiers, rifles, spears, great swords, maces, and the regular swords. I mostly stuck to the regular swords because they work a lot like swords in SotN and they seemed to be among the most common weapons in the game. I didn't find many powerful rifles, rapiers, or spears. It seemed like the game was pushing me to craft those if I wanted them.
Order of Ecclesia and Dawn of Sorrow had a little bit of crafting, but nothing quite as in-depth as the crafting in RotN. They've gone full-on MMO here. There's a little underground hideout in the ruined village near the beginning of the game, and in that hideout, Miriam's friend, Johannes, hangs out in a little lab. You can talk to Johannes and make all types of weapons, accessories, armor, and potions, cook, and upgrade your Shards. Technically, upgrading Shards isn't crafting, but it works the same way. You get the materials and ingredients from enemy drops and treasure chests around the world and then make new things in town. I didn't go out of my way to upgrade a lot of Shards or craft anything besides some food and potions for healing, but there's hundreds of items you can make. You just need a Wiki to find out where to get all the mats. Once you've made an item, another NPC will add it to their inventory in a store across the hall, so you can just buy it instead of farming the mats to make it again. Speaking of farming, there's an actual farmer in the village who will take seeds you bring him and grow stuff, like rice and potatoes, for you to cook with. There's also 3 more NPCs in the village with quests you can do for gear and crafting materials. These are all very MMO-like killing and item fetching quests and don't have much of a story to them, but you can probably get them done during normal play without even knowing.
Bloodstained RotN's graphics have come a long way since the 2nd Beta I played. It actually looks alright now. The Beta looked like it used the same glossy shader on pretty much everything, and it just looked wrong, but all that has been fixed. All the materials are more realistically shaded now, there's lots of cool fog and particle effects, and the lighting really gives each zone a unique look and helps important things, like candles and zone entrances, stick out. I still feel like the realistic environment graphics clash with the anime style characters, though. The characters are all brightly colored, celshaded, and have black toon outlines. It's a completely different style from the one used on the environments. And while the game looks good during regular gameplay, it looks horrible when the camera comes in close during cutscenes and when you get to see the characters up close during dialogue. All the characters aside from Miriam are very low poly and don't have enough polygons around their mouths to be trying to lip sync. It looks pretty rough. The animation in the cutscenes also looks very stiff and floaty.
The music is by far the best thing about the presentation. It features a long list of composers; including Michiru Yamane, who is famous for her work on many Castlevania soundtracks, and Ippo Yamada, who has worked on a bunch of Mega Man soundtracks. RotN's soundtrack sounds like a sequel to Symphony of the Night's soundtrack. It's full of epic, classically inspired, orchestral songs, hard rock, chiptune songs for the 8-bit area, and some completely different sounding themes with traditional Japanese instruments for the Ninja mountain area. Yamane’s songs sometimes sound like they’re directly referencing songs from SotN with their notes without sounding like remixes, and the chiptune songs are clearly referencing NES Castlevania’s soundtrack. It’s fantastic.
The voice acting is not as nice, though. If they were going for SotN levels of comedy, they failed, and if they were aiming for something that could be taken seriously, they also failed. The dialogue is corny, the delivery is often awkward, and besides Robert Belgrade, who voiced the not Alucard guy, and David Hayter, who is just doing Solid Snake for Zangetsu, none of the voices sound very good. Miriam's sounds especially bad because you have to hear her fake accent the most.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night feels like a game trying to reclaim its belongings after dying and doing a corpse run. This really is just Castlevania with a different name. That's not a bad thing; though, I love Castlevania! RotN delivers in terms of gameplay. It's a fun Metroidvania, but it's not trying very hard to do anything new. It's a collection of all the best ideas from Iga's Castlevanias. That's fine for a first game, I guess, but I'd like to see more creativity in the future, especially with the abilities. The story and characters leave a lot to be desired, but I think this could become a really interesting world in future games. And I do hope there will be more Bloodstained games. Just don't ask me to back it on Kickstarter.
