Update #55 Get to Know the Japanese Voice Actors

And of course, needless to say, that whether I touch on your particular comment or concern, please feel free to reach out to me with your thoughts, good or bad, I want to hear it all. I may not always be able to tell you something that will make you feel better, but I will tell you the truth. (unless it's a spoiler that would get me fired   )

Ok so let's open with a positive, I see Galamoth , freddyk  and lots of others are excited that Ami Koshimizu and so many top tier names are on board, and speaking myself, I'm a HUGE fan of anime, so seeing this A-list cast being the final roll call really got me pumped too! So much great talent, that it makes me wish there were a Bloodstained anime....

Astaroth haha I approve of your animemes

All right let's tackle some disappointment too of course, estebant made me legit laugh with his "maybe they forgot we don't speak Japanese" comment lol, I don't know if you realize, but that's very Italian humor haha.  

Jokes aside, I see not only Estebant but quite a few people express disappointment with this update, including CastleDan and kronfarfar  among others, and I would like to stress that that's totally understandable and OK, as it's only normal that some updates/announcements/etc. are going to be more exciting for certain people than others. We're all huge fans here after all, and we all just want the game and launch experience to be the best it can be. So if you think you're gonna be banned or w/e because of your criticisms, nothing could be further from the truth. Just keep it respectful and try to be constructive, we are all humans with hearts, doing our best and everything at the end of the day lol. 

But before you write this off as not giving a damn and not coming back for months, I would like to clarify for everyone that this update marks both the resuming of official KickStarter updates, as well as the beginning of my plan to provide a steady and continuous "flow" of information, announcements, teases, and just communication in general.

That doesn't mean that you should expect a KickStarter update every week, but it does mean that for everyone who follows us here on the forums, on Twitter, Facebook, Discord and Reddit, you will get to enjoy a lot of communication that should (hopefully) never leave you feeling like nothing interesting is happening or that you're left in the dark about development progress. 

Another part of this "flow" is that I'm working with Fangamer to establish a regular schedule from here until launch and beyond, so KickStarter updates will come regularly and reliably, so you won't be able to pinpoint and say "the next KS update will be on this day" but you should be able to say "the next KS update should be during this week/period". 

Now let me say a word or two on the much hyped and discussed alpha, beta, etc. Yes, it's true that it was mentioned during some live interviews in the past by Iga about how he would have liked to give an alpha during an August window. However, I can confirm that that (obviously) didn't happen and we won't be releasing a playable build to the public this month either.

I know that's a bummer, but here's the carrot: I am confirming here that the plan I've crafted for Bloodstained will result in backers getting at least two playable builds before launch. I won't go into too much detail here because I'm still in the process of working lots of specifics out with the team and my producer, but I think I can reliably tell you that the first playable build will either be the E3 2017 demo or an updated demo we use at events in the near future, and the other build we give you before launch will probably have more of that "beta" feel, with tons, if not all of the game systems and mechanics in place, and the beginnings of polish applied, so everyone can inundate us (lol) with all the feedback that I'm sure we will all have for Iga and co. Look forward to more news and communications to regarding this outside of this thread. 

Hopefully the above helps fans like DSLevantine - you can rest assured that whether or not we have talked about something, our commitment to you all is rock solid. 

To answer concerns raised by Redogan and others, I regret if my interview led to people thinking earth shattering content was coming right away, I was trying to express my enthusiasm for ALL the crazy awesome things that I know will come, and all the surprises that I know nobody expects, that I'm working on. (very diligently!  )

And as far as game play snippets, audio clips etc., there's a very good reason why you didn't see that in the update, it's generally bad to throw snippets of content out there into the wild, with no context, separate from the game at this stage. Since we're no longer in the early KS phase of the game, but we're actually about to start the full marketing campaign, everything we show you of the game, whether in a KS update or in a trailer etc., needs to be coherently presented, one of the reasons why is because the closer we get to launch, the more "outside" people will be exposed to our content. So while you may think a single monster and its animation being revealed is pretty cool (for example) a non-backer will likely have the opposite reaction.

Now lets move on to some rumor squashing, inspired by ZeroSbr   haha

Also for the sake of everyone's sanity (including mine) here are some black and white statements:

- Nothing that was confirmed for the game has been cut
- Development is on schedule and continuing successfully
- The recent slow down in communication is now over, and happened because the dev team was focusing on making the game vs. communicating about it
- We will be revealing the English voice actors as well

and talking directly to ZeroSbr, it's ok if most of your posts on here are negative (see above) hopefully my clarifications here help with that a little. 

And to anyone who may see this update as "low effort", we actually had this update done (in terms of putting it together) last month, but we had to wait for approval from the VA agencies to display the actors portraits in the way you see, in the update you got. That's not meant as an excuse for anything, but rather it helps explain how sometimes there may be some circumstances that condition us to do things a certain way. So please no one worry about people being stretched too thin or anything like that.

For comparison, it would be like me hyping an update where we announce Bloodstained Sneakers, and people say "but it's just a picture and a few sentences". Like, yeah, but there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes too  lol  

Hm...what else...lemme think...oh right, I saw crocodile wondering if Bloodless would have an actress, and she does! It's actually Saori Goto

XombieMike oh my God haha that reference...I can't wait until the parody/documentary with DeFranco comes out haha

What else, what else...

Pure Miriam wow talk about being on a streak, so far all the comments I remember from you have been pretty spot on. A lot of what you said is correct, with a caveat being that not all future updates will be like this, there will be some that focus more on game content, others that talk about exciting things that aren't directly pulled from the game. 

phew...this was a bit of a longer reply, hope I didn't kill anyone's eyes with my wall o' text 

As I mentioned feel free to let me know if anyone has other questions or concerns, if I missed something, or if you just want to say hi lol. 

I think I'll wrap this up by saying a few things:

Everything I've said (as always) is me trying to be as honest and transparent as possible, but please also consider that things can always change, if they do I/we will communicate with you openly and honestly about it. So if later we announce something that is different or conflicts with things said here, it's not me being a filthy scummy evil publisher overlord, it's just things change sometimes and we'll do our best to tell you when they do, why, and how it's for the best.

Oh and even though every update/announcement etc. will have some people caring more than others, I would just like to point out that regardless of whether you watch anime, or whether you'll even ever play the game with JP audio, the simple fact that Iga and co. got such an A-list star studded cast for the JP voice acting should tell everyone just how much care and quality is going into this game. Think of it like a European fan hearing about how we did some crazy awesome event at a PAX in the U.S., they don't really care for obvious reasons, but they should still be pleased that it means the game is going strong and doing the right things to be great! 

And I've heard the cries, I will personally try to better moderate the use of "soon" when I talk about things, and give better focused time frames of something being "soon" meaning any time between tomorrow and a few months from now. On everyone else's part, if you can try and meet me half way and understand that there are SO many things I wish I could talk about and can't, that if I went into "explanations" on each of them of what exactly "soon" means, then that's probably all I'd ever do lol.

Finally, I think I saw someone worrying about the budget, all I can really say about this right now is that budget is definitely not a problem, Iga and co. have all the resources they need, we always make sure of it, and it's all planned out way in advance (like all development) to make sure that they don't run into some huge bottleneck or kill themselves with work half way through a milestone (checkpoint in game dev terms).