Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls

Unfortunately I'm running on an iPhone in the US, so can't play it just yet. What's good about it? Unfortunately from the YouTube videos it doesn't look fun to me, but the visuals are amazing.

It's cool how the gameplay seems to be skill-based enough that it's feasible to clear without being too expensive/long of a grind to level everything, but I think that's probably where the time limit comes in. At some point, even if you're playing at highest level possible with no damage, you're not going to be able to dps enough to actually clear stages before time's over. I ran into this with Dragon's Crown, which for some reason itself had a pain in the ass time limit on bosses (not as much with HD), though that was more of a problem in multiplayer when the other person wasn't doing enough.

I'm aware HD had the same thing, but it's different when it's likely that later-game meaningful upgrades would be the paid ones. I imagine time limits aren't even a consideration until the final 10% of the content and post-story raid stuff they add so that they got you comfortable enough leading up to it thinking "well, I've put so much time into this already, I may as well spend *some* money here so I can even finish this damn stage...", and then some more money afterward, again, etc. If you've played an until-then free to play game for 200 hours and you have to spend "just" $10 to get over one hurdle, sure - and again after that, and so on. That's probably how it ends up working for most players who stick around.

So that said, it would seem from your description that Shanoa would be the best F2P character if she has the best combos (assuming then the highest dps) + highest skill ceiling, you won't have the timer to worry about as often late game if you can eke out optimal gameplay with her. Whether that's worth doing or not to you depends - and I imagine it'll be "possible" to clear content F2P by a 324380994 hour grind, lol.

What's also interesting is the matter of controls. I can't say for sure since I haven't played it at all, but I would think that people use gamepads would have some advantage over touch players. The slide cancel tech you're talking about isn't something I can picture being easily done with taps, not to mention just real time gameplay in general at the higher levels - "oops, I touched the screen at the wrong spot at the wrong time once, so I lost at this level at the 19:48 mark of a 20 minute timer - playing F2P trying to do my optimal DPS" lmao. Not having perfect execution, the "beat the clock" game you're playing likely becomes a lot harder or impossible.

Yeah, so I would definitely rather have limited continues.

This is the first I'm hearing it ever being in Japanese app stores in the first place. Game is still in Canadian softlaunch.

So.. Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls Will Shut Down on September 9, 2020

It's been fun while it lasted I guess. Was kinda looking foward to trying out Soma too.. oh well :/

This is sad. A shame really.

Konami or not, this game brought life to some of the best characters that IGA has created, and i never got to play the game.
i would be lying if i said i wasn't interested.

Knowing that Konami does what Konami does, perhaps this is for the best. With this game out of the stores, Castlevania franchise will go back to its coffin where it should stay until Konami sells the IP or hires a competent team to make a competent game.
Silly of me to think that could happen.

This is a shame. Would have loved to give the game a try on steam or consoles since it actually looks more fun than the Contra they put out on consoles a while ago.

They should have made the Switch the game's primary platform and then at a later date ported to PC, other consoles, Mobile, etc.

Considering where Konami's at right now, the best thing they could do is outsource game development of their IPs to Way Forward with the Switch as primary platform.