Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

While I love retro games as much as the next person, I have mixed feelings about how the video game industry as a whole milks nostalgia for all it's worth.

On one hand, it stifles creativity, as studios pump out never ending streams of remakes and remasters of the same games we played 20 years ago. It also prevents those games from standing on their own, almost as if they weren't worthwhile. On the other hand, it has led to some really, really great titles, like the Final Fantasy VII Remake. It has also brough us an almost-subgenre of games, games done in an old school style as homages to their classic counterparts. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night fits squarely into that almost-subgenre and it's easy to see why. The game was the brainchild of Koji Igarashi, a former producer for Konami who had a major role in the creation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. After leaving the company in 2014, Igarashi couldn't escape fan requests to create a game similar to SOTN. So, he turned to kickstarter in an attempt to demonstrate the demand for such a title (another cool aspect about modern gaming, by the way). And demonstrate he did. The kickstarter campaign raised $5.5 million, more than 10 times its initial goal. It took a couple of years, but in 2019, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night finally arrived on the PS4, XBox One and Switch.

The close relation to Symphony of the Night will be apparent within about two seconds of booting up Bloodstained. It looks like SOTN, it sounds like SOTN, it has similar atmosphere to SOTN, you get the idea. It's definitely a spiritual successor in every sense of the word and in some ways, it feels like it might have gone a little too far in that regard. But that's a discussion for later. For now, we will start with the story, which puts you in control of a sharbinder named Miriam. As a result of experiments performed on her by the Alchemists guild, Miriam has the ability to unlock the power of shards, allowing her to cast powerful spells and gain untold strength. Unfortunately, she has also been placed into a deep slumber for ten years, awakened only when an ominous castle appears from nowhere. Demons begin flowing from this castle, laying waste to a nearby village and devouring its residents. Miriam and fellow alchemist Johannes arrive to investigate, only to find the one responsible for summoning the castle is none other than their former companion Gebel. The duo team up with Dominique, an exorcist, and Zangetsu, a samurai, to bring down their ex-ally and banish the castle once and for all. Along the way they must also face off against fellow alchemist Alfred, who is hellbent on recovering a tome called the Liber Logaiath. It isn't much to write home about, but it's a pretty standard story for this kind of game with an interesting twist at the end.

It goes without saying, but B:ROTN is a MetroidVania style game, and it does very little to deviate from the classic formula. The map expands as you explore, with some areas inaccessible at the start. Throughout the game, you will acquire items, skills and shards that will allow you to gain further access to the map. Along the way, you will fight a variety of enemies and bosses while building levels and finding new equipment. The demon castle is a foreboding presence and B:ROTN's outstanding graphics do a great job of creating atmosphere and building suspense. The 2D style combined with 3D effects looks great and the scrolling and rotation effect as you walk up to the castle is great. The sound is similarly great, it almost sounds like a remix of Symphony of the Night's soundtrack. A lot of the areas within the castle are also similarly designed, though they do more than enough to make themselves stand out. I'm generally not very good at determining these things just by eyeing them up, but I think the map here is of similar size to the one found in SOTN, at least if you don't include the reversed castle. I will say it was a bit easier to explore, I was able to get close to 80% completion on my first playthrough without really trying all that hard. There also weren't instances where you had to basically use a glitch to explore some of the far-off corners of the castle, so it has that going for it as well.

Miriam starts out with very few abilities, she can slide, backstep, slash and use magic to open certain doors. However, she will quickly find that defeating enemies will yield shards, which will teach her new attacks. There are five different shard slots, two for direct attacks, one to summon a familiar, another to add passive buffs and resistances and the final one for abilities that allow interaction with the environment. There's a pretty substantial variety of attacks and combinations and almost all of the shards can be useful in certain situations. Collecting more of a specific shard will power up their attacks, and they can also be upgraded to a new level with the correct items. Most of these attacks will consume MP, but you can replenish MP by breaking background torches to collect powerups. Miriam can also equip a variety of different weapons, another way in which I think B:ROTN is superior to its predecessors. You have swords, greatswords, clubs, spears, daggers, katana, whips, guns and boots available and most of them play fairly differently. The spears are great for enemies straight in front of you, the greatswords and katana are great for enemies slightly above or below you, boots and daggers are fast but require you to rely on special moves and guns do exactly what you think they do. It definitely adds some variety, and I spent a lot of time switching weapons just for fun. It would have been nice to have more preset options, but I think it's great that almost all of these have uses. I think the guns were the only weapons I never really found worthwhile.

The enemy design is pretty cool, there are a lot of varied attack patterns that really force you to change up your strategy. Combat here is a bit tougher here than it is in older MetroidVanias, but it's not excessively difficult either. I found the boss fights to be difficult but fair, with only one dipping into what I considered to be ridiculous territory. There were a few times I wished the strategy you were supposed to use against the bosses was more apparent, but that's a minor gripe. There weren't too many platforming or jumping puzzles and the ones that did were there tended to be pretty low stakes and easy. I think the exploration was fun and rewarding, part of how I know I'm enjoying games like this is if I want to keep pushing through even when I find a save room and that definitely happened here. I almost wish it was a little bit more difficult, it always felt kind of obvious where to go next and I can only remember one, maybe two times where I was even remotely stumped. A lot of the abilities you can acquire are used once to advance the game and are never useful again, which is a bit disappointing. I do like that the items you need aren't necessarily all "key" items, sometimes they will be shards or equipment or something else. That's good because it makes you think about every item you acquire, how it might potentially get you to the next part of the game.

Of course, B:ROTN isn't perfect. Part of this is due to something SOTN and many of its contemporaries didn't have: crafting. On one hand, I guess I'd rather have some level of crafting than none at all. But it was a little too much here, at least for me. I've never really liked excessive crafting; it breaks up the flow of games and it forces you to stop actually playing to scroll around menus. You can craft items, weapons, armor and food here and each of them require their own different sets of items create. This would be great if it helped keep costs down, but it takes so long to grind for some of this stuff that it's a better time investment to just buy it. It's great that you can craft equipment, but it's not like it's hard to find good stuff out in the wild. Honestly, I think it was easier to get strong equipment to drop from enemies than it was to get some of the rarer crafting materials. The food does at least serve some purpose beyond just healing, each new food you try will give Miriam a permanent stat boost, but this didn't end up being that big a deal in my playthrough. You can also obtain sidequests in the hub area, but again, these aren't really necessary to complete the game. Having the hub town is kind of nice, I guess it's pretty common in MetroidVanias now, but it wasn't always. I'm sure all of this stuff would come into play more during new game plus mode, but I was able to beat the game without touching it too much.

The 3D effects are extremely well done, but there are times where they make the game more difficult than it needs to be. This is especially evident in the tower section, where I found the effect disorienting and not conducive to exploration. Because you are moving in a pseudo-3D plane, but the map is in 2D, it's difficult to discern where exactly you are and how to explore missing parts of the map. The characters are very well animated and detailed, but they are also very small. A lot of the boss fights rely on reading visual cues to read attacks, which is very common in gaming. However, the enemies are so small and blend so well with the background that I found it difficult to effectively pick up on these in some fights. That could just be my lousy vision, but it was something that happened to me consistently. At least they have the courtesy to have most of the boss fights take place near save rooms.

I guess my last complaint is that, at times, B:ROTN doesn't really feel like its own game. As I've already alluded to, it looks like SOTN, it sounds like SOTN, it plays like SOTN, it's almost like it's a straight up sequel to SOTN. I totally understand that it was meant to be similar, but it oftentimes feels like less of a spiritual successor or send up and more like a rip-off. The areas are all so similar to SOTN, the entrance, the cathedral, the library, they will all seem a bit too familiar for veterans of the genre. It really would have been nice to have areas that were a bit different, the opening section on the galleon might have actually been my favorite. I know people love SOTN, I love it too, but it would have been nice to see B:ROTN try to do a bit more of its own thing outside of the crafting. Remember, SOTN and Metriod were novel merely because they were structured the way they were. That isn't the case anymore, just being a MetroidVania isn't enough when there are dozens of games in the genre.

But hey, if you are going to ape a video game, you may as well ape one of the greatest video games of all time. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night wasn't the most revolutionary or unique game. But it was an outstanding title, definitely among the best I've played in a while. I know I've been critical of the lack of innovation, but I also have to give it a pass on that in some respects. Of course it's going to be similar to Symphony of the Night, it was essentially designed by the same person. B:ROTN was incredibly well designed and it's clear that there was a lot of love put into it. No matter how many times I died or got stuck, I always wanted to keep on playing. The areas were all interesting and fun to explore, the enemies were fun to fight and the bosses were challenging but completely fair. You often hear that some games are greater than the sum of their parts, but that isn't the case here. B:ROTN is the exact sum of its parts, and all of its parts are top quality. Of the games I've reviewed so far, the biggest and most obvious comparison would be Hollow Knight, another indie developed, MetroidVania style game. Hollow Knight may be more innovative, but I have to say I think I liked B:ROTN better. It's a must play game that's easy to get your hands on, so check it out.

9.25/10