Overall Enjoyment - Bloodstained: RotN vs Castlevania: SotN

I don't think that these things are fair assessments, though. By any measurable value as far as I know, it's longer/bigger than SotN (and this being before the 13 DLCs), and I haven't counted but I'm positive RotN has more weapons and weapon types.

I can't say it's fair to put it that they focused on boobs and necessary grinding for hours. Miriam is a girl, but her breasts are not a focus of her design unless someone wants them to be. When I think of the character, she's more about being strong-willed and tragic, not tied to a romance with any character and capable/reliable with also some quirks and a sense of humor. Grinding for any amount of time at all is not necessary in RotN to finish the game. I'm never one to grind myself in these games unless it's post-game or I feel like it for some reason, because it's almost never a necessity to beat something. It's there if you want to take your power that far (and for taking on the harder modes/extra content, which isn't the "main game" we're talking about).

I put SotN over RotN myself, but I wouldn't use those reasonings for it.


This is a really odd take for me. I think that the majority by far would prefer the look of Symphony - the huge majority of us coming from 2D purist backgrounds, or at least a deep appreciation of it. SotN is going to get the edge in graphics by default because of that, and it does for me too. This is all the other way around, to me - RotN is not as beautiful of a game in visual/audio design to the core fan, layman, just about whoever (because not many other things that exist are as nice that way as SotN, and RotN is still to many an indie-looking PS3 graphics mishmash *which is fine*), but the fun design and refinement of the gameplay, and breadth of content in RotN does win against SotN.

"Decent modern 3D" is what we could call Ritual, objectively, at most I think. Timeless pixel art with some of the best animation of all time in SotN puts it above that graphically - in the past, present and future. I think it's the art and presentation of that game, and its uniqueness in that spot in its time, that elevate it to us and helps embellish how we perceive how good the design of the game otherwise is, myself included. And that's fine.

Sure, it is, but deep down almost everyone out there is still thinking "wish it was 2D though", or that the next game will be, and optionally: they were deceived by the concept art - "why doesn't this look like SotN/the 2D you showed us", etc. Of course, the root of it is just that concept art is what the name implies - it's that those guys wanted another 2D game like all of Iga's other ones. I'm glad he was able to do RotN in 2.5 pretty successfully, but it's as much a move backward as it is forwards for a whole lot of the fandom and casual people out there.

RotN's bestiary is from Ars Goetia, and unfortunately I think most of us aren't familiar with this lore. 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demons_in_the_Ars_Goetia 

About the length of RotN, what I mean is that if you look at the map and ALLLLL of the blank spots, it's really not that big, at all. It may be a larger castle than SotN, but come on, it's 22 years later and Iga could have created a MUCH larger castle, with more unique areas, making the game much better.

Yes SotN's music crushes RotN. However I am not saying RotN's music is bad. Just saying I expected better music.

So my drive to make this thread is to see if others felt the same way as I do. RotN is a good, fun game. HOWEVER when compared to SotN, it's just not that great. SotN's environment, music, characters and fun factor were all better. I also made this post in the hopes that the developers read it, and change things for Bloodstained 2 (or perhaps Konami will hire Iga back to make a SotN sequel, or remake SotN to high definition! lol)

Yeah the little glitches were definitely fun, not a bother. We all need to get together, have 100k people sign something to send to Konami to make another 2D Castlevania, with banging SotN-like music and is super long