Spoilers Thread! (During release window)

^ lol that's interesting, the oriental area was my favorite place of the game I think, and I'm not even usually into stages like that as much as I am gothic stuff.

Anyway, this will be a thread to itself after I lift the spoiler restrictions, but I'll place it here now since it has a huge spoiler at the end.

I have some reputation of being an unshakable blind apologist for the game and find no fault in it or the project at all, and that just isn't true - things haven't been perfect, obviously, but I certainly have always moved ahead and tried to help for the betterment of the game and the situations of its players. Besides that anyway, I wanted to give my thoughts on what I felt were some shortcomings and faults to an otherwise amazing game (for me, probably a 9 or 9.5) - both more objective and subjective to my own experience. This will be sorted in 3 sections - overall non-spoiler, and then personal non-spoiler and spoiler. For reference, this was played on a base PS4 console.

Overall, no spoilers:

Performance:
The game had spots of performance problems. In most cases, it was a frame drop in a predictable location/reduction in FPS, but in one certain boss fight near the end of the game, it was downright awful during one certain attack. Single-digit FPS, I might even say. There is also still post-1.02 a pause whenever a new shard is collected before the animation will play. I more or less got used to that after a while, but it's of course not supposed to be there. The loading times are often overlong, I think, especially in certain cases of room-to-room though infrequently.

Graphics, sound, story, characters, gameplay:
Nothing significant objectively.

Bugs:
Obviously, this is an issue. The big ones are well-covered, but several minor ones were experienced as well. Item bags dropping in unobtainable locations (though you can wait them out to collect them), graphical bugs like the Pure Miriam costume not loading its leg texture, sound bugs like a sound effect playing on well beyond its intended scene, and while not a bug something annoying where text in cutscenes doesn't match the voice acting - sometimes it was just a word or so off, but in other cases entire sentences were missing or added. That should be something rather easy to adjust, and it's odd considering those text boxes don't seem to be direct Japanese translations either - I hear Miriam say other characters' names in Japanese where it doesn't appear in the text.

Subjective/personal non-spoiler:

Graphically:
There isn't much to complain about graphically, nothing at all gave me an impression of "well that's ugly", but I will say that some characters' mouths still open too wide - most notably Anne and Zangetsu. Their models are fine, Anne looks great now, but how big their mouth gets when they talk doesn't match the words at all haha.

Sound:
The music in the game is overall great and pretty varied. The sound effects are also pretty well done, and help with the excellent hit feel/feedback. My only mark against it relates to the bug type things above.

Subjective, spoilers (do not read if you have not cleared the game):


That about does it. Thanks for reading and I hope everyone's having fun!

In that regard does anyone know the budget of SotN? I say that because I compare them pretty closely.

As for

Just some thoughts.

I still would enjoy, even if only told in Bloodstained's universe, finally getting to the bottom of the war of 1999. I mean, we need closure, lol. Plus, isn't it fitting that avenging Julius is IGA's quest? But yeah, the whole did slightly sour things, as it was a bit of a basic way to go about a twist, but I still enjoy the character, personally. It's the final battle that kinda got my meh factor up, since it's literally the same effing fight as the true end of Aria/Dawn and was truly anti climatic.

That said, this game was done on what could be considered a small budget for a game of this scope. I'm pretty sure, since sales are so positive along with the reviews, that a sequel may fix a lot of issues as they'll have a firmer grasp of the engine (unless they decide to build their own game engine) and they would be able to further cement how this new universe's story and characters work. My question would be, do we follow Miriam's adventures more? Is her story over and we get something different? Will Cartman find out who his father is? Find out on the next episode of Dragonball Z!

Thoughts on Bloodstained


Graphics -

I want to start by saying the visuals have definitely improved since a while back. Lighting, color, texture work seem to all have been improved. Some areas look great and have some really cool effects.....coughSANDcough... While I'm disappointed some of the lighting got toned down in the 1.02 patch, things overall seemed to improve. I think in a sequel I'd still like for the graphics to be a bit more stylized in terms of environments cuz some textures while improved feel very shiny and off-putting? Overall, it works well for the first game in the start of the series. The worst aspect of the game graphically is probably cutscene moments....it's super stilted and feels very low budget.

Art Design and Layout

Art Design -

Locations This is a bit hit and miss for me. I think some areas look pretty dang gorgeous. The church, the desert location, the library, and especially the underground water location.....all look really nice. Some areas didn't work for me ....the gold palace just was too much of that shiny off-putting texture stuff, the train itself felt like a missed opportunity, what could have been quite beautiful felt a bit rough visually with a boss that equally looked rough. It could have looked far more atmospheric than it did. I also really missed paintings in environments. There's a lot of backer portraits but to see some gothic looking paintings in areas could have added more life to these locations.  The Retro level was a big disappointment to me. It's cool to have it but it felt less like a level and more like a hallway that they threw a couple enemies in and tagged it with a boss. This whole time I was expecting a Curse of the moon style level with at least some more attention to detail in level design and enemies.....it's still cool but that was definitely a bummer to me. It felt like a missed opportunity


Overall tho the art design was better than I expected but always room for improvement.

Boss Designs This is one area that disappointed me. For a series of games that attracts mainly an adult audience why do the bosses in a *demon* focused game feel so tame design wise? A lot of them just felt odd. Where's the grotesque designs like Legion or like Beezlebub? Or just monstrosities in general? in the future it'd be nice to see more designs that really brought on more of the darker creepier elements that made some of his earlier Vania titles memorable. The game didn't feel dark enough in that regard and I loved all the light-hearted moments but a better mix would have been great.

Layout

This is one of my biggest problems with latter IGAVANIA games and I'm happy to report it was better than I expected. It's not without flaws but thankfully, for the most part, there wasn't overuse of copy and pasted rooms in each location. Floors weren't always just a box with a horizontal floor there was more to it and I'm thankful for that. I do think some locations are kinda boxed up together and think they could do a better job of organically making use of the negative space for locations to breathe a bit more. 


I will say though that the later locations in the game felt far too repetitive. The Den location basically being an enlarged garden reusing a lot of assets, the ice location and fire location rarely having unique rooms within them but basically just being a series of hallways of their respective element. In a game with the biggest castle I figured they would have done far more creative locations than that. It was a bit of a dissappointment coming from the largely better locations from earlier in the game.

Music

I'm so torn on this OST. I feel like a lot of the tracks we heard from the beta turned out to be the better music, so it was a bit disappointing to play the game and the remaining tracks didn't do much for me. I felt like it lead me to be disappointed. I'm also not sure if the Orchestra direction paid off like I hoped it would. There's something thin about some of the tracks that you never got when Michiru Yamane did the old games.....listen to *Garden Forgotten by Time* for example and compare it to one of the new tracks. One feels full and has loads of energy and a lot of these feel kinda empty.

On top of that the OST lacks major variety compared to SOTN's ost. Maybe I shouldn't compare to that OST but I thought with the amount of time this game was worked on there'd be far more to bite into. Where's piano centered tracks? Where's guitar lead centered tracks? Where's completely bizzare arrangements ....ala wandering ghosts.... I feel like in the process of using an orchestra the game pigeon holed itself into mainly using strings for everything instead of doing all sorts of sounds. My favorite tracks at the end of the day were the character themes.....especially Gebel's which features gorgeous piano, i only wished the game would have done more like that itself.

I was waiting for that truly creepy music, or totally rocking music, or waltzy music and just the styles never achieved it for me. This might sound all bad but overall it's still a good OST with some awesome tracks on it.

Characters and Story

I honestly have no issue with any of this stuff. I think the characters are voiced well and have some great comedic moments. Each character was handled incredibly well at the end of the day it's not what i want out of these characters it's...do they do a good job of selling what these characters are and I think they did. Also...O.D. rules.....please give me a game with him as a lead. I remember suggesting files in the vein of Resident Evil in this game and I don't know if that was always the plan or that thread got some attention but I'm so happy regardless of that. The lore books were fantastic and made the story feel deeper than any Castlevania because of it. They were also well writen. PLEASE keep this going forward.

Gameplay

This is where the game excells and nearly NEARLY topped SOTN for me. The game has so much depth, has so many cool little secrets, has so many cool items......i don't think a game IGA's made has ever given me so many options. Is there things I want improved? sure...I'd love familiars to be completely unique and not from enemies. I'd love transformations that felt like actual transformations....but that's incredibly nitpicky. This is the games shining moment and I hope they continue to keep these elements in future games and just improve them. Don't scrap them.


The game is a 8.5 for me. if some of these issues were ironed out it'd be a 10 and the best game IGA has made but it's got it's flaws that hopefully get ironed out in a second game.


One small note:


I think an expansion to the art team would do IGA's games a lot of favors in terms of layout, art design....etc. I can't imagine how hard it must be to balance so many artistic elements with the size of team they have.

Same spoilers subject:

Huh, now that you mention it, we didn't get a single creepy dark enemy, did we? I wonder if that was a design choice from IGA or something else, he hasn't made any comment on it I think. That's a subject we should probably look more closely.


Certainly a budget decision, I even recall Michiru Yamane talking about how young the staff was, in that behind the scenes with the music team video. It seems that orchestrated tracks are expensive, and Michiru Yamane even more expensive, so that's probably what happened.