Let's rank all the areas best to worst
Jul 18, 2019 19:03:32 GMT -6
Yän, EBBenjy, and 3 more like this
Post by mourningxsun on Jul 18, 2019 19:03:32 GMT -6
Just wrapped up my fresh nightmare file, and boy do I have some opinions on the areas in the game. Four full runs completed, I think I'm qualified at this point.
tl:dr - There's a lot to praise with this game, but regarding areas, as a whole I felt underwhelmed. My expectations were at best, simply met.
1. Forbidden Underground Waterway
There's just something about the water cave styled areas in Iga's games that I really dig. It's hard to really place a finger on it. What they all seem to have in common though, is that they're all just strangely designed. Iga's games tend to be... sorta predictable with area flow. Go through an area, kill the boss at the end, repeat ten times. But the watery caves never really fall into that pattern. SotN's Underground Caverns stretch over half the castle long, have a lot to explore in them, and instead of having a normal boss, has an optional one tucked away to the side. AoS's Underground Reservoir, despite being the largest area in the game by a long shot, doesn't even have a boss at all. DoS's Subterranean Hell just smacks you with the boss the second you walk in there, while also being the largest area in the game. Bloodstained continues this tradition by being the biggest area in the game ignoring Den of Behemoths, while also not having a boss. Still weird. Still love it. Breaks up any monotony. It's the clump of ginger on the metaphorical sushi platter that is Bloodstained.
My feelings aside, Forbidden Underground Waterway offers lots of objectively great features. It hosts a large number of unique enemies that aren't, nor will be later on, reskins. There's plenty to explore, with almost half of the area being optional. A sad rarity in this game. It can be entered from many different areas, and at several different points in player progression which is just wonderful design. There's also a lot of really nice unique rooms like the waterfall room, the lift rooms, and some of the rooms half filled with water. It's just a great area guys. Also using blood steal on the fountain was unique and a smart use of mechanics.
2. Dian Cecht Cathedrial
Why is this so high up? Well a few reasons. The absolute biggest one is the intended ability to kick off a chain of sequence breaking, by jump kicking off of several specifically placed wall candles, thereby being able to access Bloodless immediately after getting double jump. Skipping two whole areas, and the lion's share of one. This is fantastic. This is what I love to see. Question Angel-Corlux Go tell Iga to keep doing that. That being said I'm a bit salty that the day one patch removed the ability to skip most of this area by going through Livre ex Machina/Halls of Termination and coming in right at the back end next to Bloodless. The day one patch put a door/lever there so it can't be done anymore. Lame.
What else makes this area great? Well it has style for one, it's probably the most beautifully designed area in the game. I also like areas that have a whole chunk of content to see when you revisit them, and Dian Cecht does this perfectly. Start of the game you come in, explore a bit, fight a boss, and leave. Later on you can explore more, and oh wait, another boss. Brilliant.
3. Livre ex Machina
Similarly to Dian Chent, Livre ex Machina has you visit it once to fight a boss, and then come back later to fight another. Although strictly speaking, that's optional. Once you get reflector ray, you can go all the way through the rest of the game without touching Livre ex Machina again. Once you have invert, you're free to just go into the Halls of Termination that way. I appreciate it when the game gives you optional areas/content. It's pretty slim pickings in Bloodstained though, and I'm taking what I can get here.
Platforming in this area strikes the rare balance between bullshit and fun, which should be commended. It's just a well executed area overall. One thing to note though, is the weird blue fog in the background? Not sure of the point of that. I had the game several days before the day one patch, and that fog was nowhere to be seen. The area looked much better as a result. Not a fan of the fog that patch added. This is not the only instance of "background fog" that got added in with the patch, but this is the one instance where I feel it actively detracted from the area. I guess Halls of Termination is worse off with the fog too now that I think about it.
4. Galleon Minerva
Probably the strongest starting area that I've seen in Iga's games unless you count City of Haze in PoR. There's not much to say besides the fact that it's just a solid start to the game and really gets things off on the right foot. By far the best starting boss I've seen in one of these games as well. You can tell a lot of refinement went into this area.
5. Hidden Desert
The area really stands out aesthetically, and while I'm disappointed by the lack of properly themed enemies/bosses for a "hidden desert," Alfred was a really fun fight. Take note that this area is the last time you see a unique enemy model for the entire rest of the game. It's reskins aaaaaall the way down from here baby.
Keeping a majority of this area optional, again, is a good choice. While this game doesn't have a single, real, optional area, (to my great disappointment) at the very least there are optional wings to areas that you are required to visit. Not that there's really anything of worth to find in these optional paths besides maybe a recipe book (would it have killed somebody to hide a boss somewhere?), but it's better than nothing.
6. Halls of Termination
It's a pretty by the books "Castle Keep" area. I really just don't have much to say about this area. It doesn't do anything wrong nor does it do anything special. I'm honestly not that thrilled that this is the best praise I can come up with for something nearly in the top third of my rankings. This is though, a great time to bring up a minor gripe I started to notice on my third playthrough. As mentioned above regarding Hidden Desert, a problem continuing here is that there aren't really any themed enemies in the Halls of Termination. Nothing really feels like it fits here. Fairies with big bee butts? Girl with a guitar? Other enemies we've seen elsewhere by now? This is a symptom of the overuse of reskins, as there's only so much you can do when you reuse the same meshes. Ignoring the bosses and 8-bit enemies, there's exactly 13 enemies that aren't used for a reskin, and 49 enemy types in general (for the purposes of that statement, an elemental is one "type" and does not count all five different elemental.) That's, uh, slim, even by 'vania standards. The tangent is getting a bit long though.
All in all, a "safe" area, in terms of design, difficulty, and lack of environmental hazards.
7. Tower of Twin Dragons
I get it, I get what was trying to be done here, but it's a chore to go through for me personally. It's hard to tell what I have or have not explored just due to the way the map (doesn't) work here, along with some awkward platforming since it's hard to judge distances. The boss and music is great though. Hiding the aegis armor here was also... eh... questionable. I find the complaints about needing to go to O.D. to get an ID card, and needing the water pulse shard to explore underwater to be vastly overblown. But trying to find the aegis armor? Yeaaah that's kind of rough. Not in a fun way either like figuring out how to use blood steal.
8. Inferno Cave
As with Halls of Termination, this is an area that's just kind of ... there. It gets bonus points for having some proper enemy theming, sad as it is that that's worthy of praise, but also loses points for being a glorified hallway. No real exploration, just go forward and move on. Backtrack once you get invert if you want I guess. Of note, I think that this is the first time lava has been an actual hazard in these games, so that's neat. Also I do like the boss. Had some fun patterns to figure out on nightmare.
9. Oriental Sorcery Lab
Right, so what the fuck is this actual, literal, cave with rivers in it doing on top of the castle. I don't buy it. To me, is one of the tell-tale signs of the game getting sliced apart towards the end of development and sewn back together really fast to get the product out after an already extended development cycle. Honestly the placement in the castle is the main reason why this is at number 9 instead of like... 5. I like the music, there's a lot of fun gimmicks and room tricks, and the Zangetsu rematch is a fantastic fight.
10. Entrance
It's a by-the-books, castle entrance snorefest. Long halls, bats, we've all seen it before. It somehow never changes between games. Nothing special here. Dawn of Sorrow gets all the credit in the world for skipping this nonsense and just dropping us into an Alchemy Lab.
11. Garden of Silence
Look you can't just call something a garden just because it has some leaves growing on the scenery. This area is almost aggressively unimaginative. The only comparison I have for it is Dawn of Sorrow's Garden of Madness. I don't even like that area very much, but at least the effort was put it to really make it look and feel like a greenhouse. Garden of Silence just has... one plant enemy. The rest are just seemingly selected at random. We couldn't have gotten another leafy enemy? It just feels like an empty courtyard, not a garden.
The level design as a whole leaves a bit to be desired, but I can at least conceptualize it as a "connector" area, as by the time you reach the far end of it, you are immediately presented with three ways forward. I can dig that at least.
12. Secret/Underground Sorcery Lab
I'm pretending that these two areas are actually just the same one, otherwise Underground Sorcery Lab would be at the bottom with "Did they really just try to pass off two rooms and a boss as a whole-ass area?" as my commentary. Anyways, they're still small areas, with borderline nonsensical enemies inside thrown in at random. The areas don't really do anything offensively bad, but it's just so bland. Soundtrack is great though.
13. Bridge of Evil
What should have been a really cool gimmick area fell flat on it's face. I really REALLY wish I liked this area more and could praise it to no end. Conceptually, it's a blast. I love it, and I love working with Zangetsu... Buuuuut the problems. First off, what's with the timer. I haven't been assed to let it run out but I'm just assuming you get a game over screen if you do. Not that there's much to explore here, but maybe don't rush a player through their first time in a new area in a game based on exploration? Secondly, what's with that counter that goes up to 400 in the corner? I don't get it. Thirdly, thanks to the timer, the boss is both fragile and simple, since anything difficult or complex would frustrate players needing to kill it in 90 seconds. Fourth, we can't even explore the whole thing on a revisit? Both the boss area at the front of the train, and the lumber cars in the back can never be explored again. When you get close to them you just "skip to your destination." Again, I don't get it, and that can pose a real problem for some players. It's possible to not fill in every map square in the lumber car section of the train. So if you complete the first run of it without filling those in, are you just fucked out of 100% map completion for that run? I dare not try but anybody else is welcome to. Lastly, if you enter the train from one end, you can't exit out the same door. You *have* to run to the other end to leave without a waystone. What a drag.
Also what's with the music here? I'm used to straight forward, catchy, melody-first songs in this game. Not... whatever this was.
14. 8-Bit Nightmare
Yes, technically an optional area, but actually counting it as one would be an insult to optional areas everywhere. It's maybe 10 map squares long if it was on the actual map. It's not a real area guys. It being ranked down here is largely because I feel like this is the absolute bare minimum that the dev team could have gotten away with in regards to the "retro-styled area" stretch goal. It's not a very pretty or interesting looking area, even by retro standards. It has no personality really. Also no 8-bit Miriam? That just feels lazy. Ya'll had a template for this with Curse of the Moon. What even happened.
Yes, technically an optional area, but actually counting it as one would be an insult to optional areas everywhere. It's maybe 10 map squares long if it was on the actual map. It's not a real area guys. It being ranked down here is largely because I feel like this is the absolute bare minimum that the dev team could have gotten away with in regards to the "retro-styled area" stretch goal. It's not a very pretty or interesting looking area, even by retro standards. It has no personality really. Also no 8-bit Miriam? That just feels lazy. Ya'll had a template for this with Curse of the Moon. What even happened.
15. Arvantville
Yeah I don't really know what to say here. Small area, no exploration, no music, no fun. I will once again praise Dawn of Sorrow, ironically my least favorite of Iga's games, for doing a village area in a cool and fun way that had some decent exploration. Arvantville is just worthless as an area, and should have just been relegated to the one building with all the amenities in it if they wanted to put so little effort into it.
16. Glacial Tomb
Ugh. This place really left a bad taste in my mouth. I didn't mind it at first, but the more I played the more it grew off me, so to say. Where to even start. It doesn't really even feel like a "final area," both in appearance and design. In appearance it's just an icy cave. Frozen demons in the background are kind of cool, but again, no sense of finality. Yeah I get the literary allusions to Dante's Inferno, but it's one of the most popular works of classical fiction in history and gets utilized all the time from all sorts of media, so it's not really interesting from that view either. In terms of design, I beat Gremory, got dimension shift, and thought "Great! Let's go find a new area!" Instead I got five more rooms and another fight. After fighting Dominique I thought "Great! She's going to open up a portal to hell that I can go through now or something!" Nope, we get an end boss that really, REALLY, sucks, and credits. It's hard to express just how disappointed I was with the end of the game, because despite all my bitching about the above areas, they were all still pretty fun in their own rights at the very least, and I would hesitate to call any of them "bad" without my hypercritical lens that I'm using right now. In fact I could tear through any of Iga's games like this if I wanted. But this area though? This small, simply designed area, filled with reskins, crammed with four bosses, without any exploration to be had? It's a bad bad bad excuse for a finale.
17. Den of Behemoths
It's shit. I know it, you know it, the devs know it. The biggest offense to me was how much of the map percentage it ate up. I was expecting maybe four or five more areas by the time I got here, then I watched 15% of the game map just go down the toilet as I went through huge rooms of nothingness. The theme of the area is that everything is huge, except when it isn't. I'm not entirely sure how they managed to fuck up the theming of the area, but they did it. The first enemy I ran into here was a normal ass cannon morte riding on a normal sized chariot buer. A reskin (are the colors even different?) of the triwheel buer and I believe it just has this one single spawn point in the whole game. I don't get the point here. There's also normal sized Abyssal Guardians here, and a normal sized reskin of Sabnock. Also a single giant rat from the beginning of the game? They didn't even make big versions of interesting enemies. It's mostly just bats, toads, cannons, and buers.
The area itself is just a reskin of Garden of Silence, with the added bonus of a moon that's stretched weirdly in the background. Everything about this area screams "we had to cut a lot towards the end but still needed to make the castle big so here's what we threw together over the weekend." This absolutely was not part of the plan, as the datamines from last year had all the areas in the game listed save for Den of Behemoths and Glacial Tomb. What was there instead was Creature Isolation Facility and Halls of Transcendence. What those were, who knows. Probably better than this though. The inclusion of higher leveled enemies in the datamines such as the rainbow elemental also point towards late game areas getting cut. Artplay/505 is savvy though so we'll likely see those in future modes.
Valefar is also just... sorta there. Easily the most wildly out of place boss in the game.
Oh, the race to get the accelerator shard was cute I guess.
---
Remember kids, I criticize because I care <3
---
Remember kids, I criticize because I care <3
Lava and water areas close competitors for me.
yey