I forgot to mention one of the things in this game that always always brought a smile to my face
"KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD"
so funny.
"KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD"
so funny.
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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night |OT| We Have Paid Our Tribute, Igavania Is Resurrected
- Thread starter Dancrane212
- Start date
See for me what puts Bloodstained below the DS titles, is its complete lack of polish. There are so many little things that a game coming from some one who has been a developer as long as Iga just shouldn't have. From things like selecting multiple quests being a pain in the ass, stupid line of dialog, select quest, kicks me out of menu, 3 more lines of stupid dialog, repeat for the next quest, and again and again. Let me select all of them then give me the stupid repeated lines of dialog. The enemy designs are on average weak, have very unclear silhouettes, and so many of them are just repeated with shader changes. The second to last area is so disappointing. You also have stuff like this giant outdoor town like area that is up in a tower of the castle???? What??? Like it feels like areas were just made by different teams and they kind of just put them where ever. The drop rate on some needed endgame items is ridiculously low. The minimap and the map itself just feel, outdated some how. Hell going into the map screen doesn't even zoom in and auto orient on the room your in! Yeah some of this stuff can be fixed in updates, some of it can't. For a game that had a rumored 10 - 15 million dollar budget it just feels very unpolished. In ways that never should have made it this far from some one with as much experience as Iga.
I'm playing on Xbox One and can select multiple quests by pressing X so I can accept them all in one action.
Other than that I agree that if really needs a lot of polish.
You mean related to their respective time of release?
Or at present day?
Because I don't really see that much lack of polish/QoL comparing it to DoS and PoR.
Unless you mean the plethora of bugs, but they only affected the console versions and I haven't played those so I can't really comment, but I guess I would be very angry now if I did.
I feel we're being very generic now though, so it's hard to compare point to point in a more specific and unbiased way.
I'll add my comments to the few specific points you reported, just my 2 cents.
That has been patched.
It annoyed beyond sanity but you can skip the dialogues and we're talking about what, 20 quests?
I mean sure it's annoying but it's like 0,001% of the overall time you're gonna spend on the game? Anyway it's been fixed.
I have more issues with the 3D technique used to render them (the shaders etc).
More than everything they lack a clear direction, it's like we have different developers each doing their own thing and not talking to each other.
Overall the situation isn't tragic, but certainly not where it should be either.
I think this is a broader problem though, I wouldn't put this under the "polish" category, I think it has a completely different source. These are things you decide at the core of the game, not when it's over and you want to "polish" the experience.
Checking DoS and PoR though the enemy design had several flaws there as well.
Going from copypasted (literally!) stuff from previous games/SotN, to monsters that just felt, "uuuh? The fuck is this doing in this game?"
A feeling I experienced in Bloodstained too and I didn't remember the situation in DoS and PoR was so similar honestly, until I started re-playing those two games over the last week.
Tell me about it.
SO. UGLY.
Could've been a nice idea, but it's such a bad implementation, UGLY.
In general the copypasted Caverns stuff is very bad though, I'd say. The weakest points of bloodstained.
I guess I save the desert one, that's okaysh.
wut? Not getting what you mean, honest.
Nope. If anything droprate in Bloodstained is waaaay higher than in past games (try hunting the super rare stuff in SotN, in DoS etc, then tell me about it). I farmed everything on the first run quite easily with way less effort than I took me in those other games where some items had NOTICEABLY lower drop rates.
Also you get the real Drop rates % in Bloodstained instead of obscure stuff like stars etc. It's much better, if anything we could've used some more rare stuff, it's way too easy to get everything compared to past games.
Somehow how? Past games didn't even have the minimap, well on DS you had the secondary screen but you couldn't zoom and honestly sometimes it was hard to see the details.
The only problems I had with the map, and they were some major annoyance, have been fixed.
Like the command to exit the map.
The command to leave the rose-note
The autocenter on enter.
All major annoyances but they've all been fixed in the latest patch from what I read.
Bout time!
Again, as annoyed as I was with these things, they seem pretty minor things if you ask me. Despite the initial flaws it's still the best map any Igavania game ever had.
That's a dangerous field we're getting in.
For starters we're customers, not stakeholders, so how much money they got and how well or bad it got spent shouldn't concern us, we should only look at the final result regardless of how it was reached, otherwise you get into double standards of judging the same thing "OMG AWESOME!" or "OMG AWFUL!" because it was, for example, done by a team of 2 person or a team of 100. It shoudln't concern the final player, imho.
Secondly you're talking about rumors, you don't know the details, you don't know how much of that money got spent and where, how many issues they had, how much they had to spend for various features for backers, for the money lost on the WiiU version, blahblah.
It's really hard to get into this field and I think we should rather stay out of it and judge the game for what it is, rather than thinking about how they managed their resources.
Just my personal stance, of course. I use it pretty much on every situation, not just Bloodstained.
I remember similar discussion for the dreaded FFXV but ultimately all those discussions lead to nothing, really.
You only need to craft the 8-bit ones to have them count toward the percentage.
In respect to their time of release. Yeah I'm not playing on the PC and the console versions are an absolute mess. Some more so than others.
It has not been patched on the platform I played (not that I know of, though I can't check it since I completed all the quests already), and I played through the entire game before it was so I can only speak of it as I played it. I also said some of this stuff could be fixed, and the point was more an example of the little things that are found through out the title. Like backing out of the map screen not being on the usual back button, which instead drops a marker, or the issues with the map screen not zooming and centering on your character by default. Yeah these are little things but speak IMHO of a greater lack of polish overall. Things like the quest issue, or the map ones, should have been caught ages ago, they're such basic things. Which is why in some ways it feels like a damn Beta vs a shipped final game.
Well yes there are absolutely IMHO general artistic design issues. I still feel the characters and the backgrounds clash and feel like they're from different worlds/games/whatever. Though I disagree with you on the different developers doing their own thing and not talking to each other as not being a level of polish thing. I'm a lead animator where I work, and I run our dailies (quality reviews). Its my job to make sure that while different scenes are being handled by different animators who all have their own unique style and way of doing things, at the end of the day it all looks like it was done by the same person, that it all has the same style. Bloodstained feels like they had no one doing this final stage of development of going through everything and making sure it all felt unified. Like yeah the art design should have had a design sheet/spec that said this is what we're going for etc etc, but there should have been final checks to make sure everything looked unified and like it came from one source.
Yeah I mean reusing stuff from all the castlevania games definitely had its issues, but I feel the level of design on most of those enemies was at a much higher level than Bloodstained. When you get to the den of the behemoths where literally its all the same monsters just scaled up, you really see how poor some of the designs are. Plus stuff like the fluffy dog heads just felt more out of place to me than anything found in the DS Castlevania's IMHO.
Not only ugly but it just seemed like such a cop out. Like ohh shit we're running out of time what we do, uhhh take models from this section and just scale them up, done!
The secret oriental village area. On the map its located in the top left tower, an area full out of caves and outside areas, is inside and around the top left tower.....I know people will hand wave this as its a magical demon tower, and I get it, but it just felt so off to me. This area and some others just felt like ohh uhh we had this stuff left over from a different version of the game, what do we do with it. Instead of trying to make it work physically and logically it was just put it in the upper left.
I have to disagree, I don't remember spending hours to harvest a material to make a decent end game weapon. Even with my luck boosted to high levels it took me HOURS of just killing G Axe Outsider to get the few pieces of Orichalcum I needed. I agree with you its nice to get an actual percentage vs just stars, BUT we've had 22 - 14 years of game design improvements since SoTN, and DoS came out. I think its a weak argument to say well its slightly better than this game that came out 22 years ago. YEAH! I would fucking hope so!
It feels amateurish. Again we've had decades of game design and development since these previous games, why are we comparing this minimap and map to them. Why is the minimap not drawn and made to look more interesting than some boxes. Blue boxes were fine 22 years ago on the PS1, its 2019 give me something more interesting. Give me something more than what I would see in a fan made gamefaqs map image. Hell I've seen maps made for SoTN where people have taken screen grabs from every screen in the game and made that the map. Like give me that, not a bunch of generic blue boxes and white lines from 22 years ago.
Again this patch hasn't come to consoles yet, so for me and many others it hasn't been fixed. Plus it shouldn't have needed to be fixed, this shit is common sense development that should have been there from day one. Not coming for consoles almost a month after release once most people have beaten the game already. See I don't feel like this was the best map in any Igavania game. SoTN is still better than it for me.
We will have to agree to disagree here. I think scope and resources definitely affect things. What I expect to experience and see from a project with 3 people and 500k vs a giant team and 15 million dollars are definitely different. The same as my expectations change when it goes from a developer with no experience to some one who has been doing this, and this genre of games for over 20 years.
*edit*
And just reading a post up there reminded me, boss fights in this are so disappointing.
Question with potential late-game spoilers:
How were you supposed to figure out that to progress you'd need the Aegis Armor - from a chest you're unlikely to spot due to it being in a boss arena. Was there some hint I missed? All progress up till now was quite logical if you kept the big map features in mind, but the long search for how to proceed after I got invert made me think a lot less of this game.
You thought I was a simple librarian, but it was me, Alucard, the whole time!
This was one of the elements that got spoiled for me when the chest bug was being discussed, so I honestly don't know what I would have done had I not read about it first.
I do want to say the map tile it occupies is conspicuously still unmarked until you can invert/high jump your way up there.
Honestly, what I would have done is set up a series of lanterns that let you dropkick all the way up there, just as a hint that something is actually up there.
Does this game have an easy mode? I am asking for a friend. I have the game but I honestly can't remember if it did and I won't have my Switch available for a few days to check for him.
I don't think that the Amano poster has been revealed yet. Only the Kojima Collector's slipcase art that is being turned into a poster as a free bonus.
I mostly sat on the roof and used Andromeda and it's bullshit amazing homing action lol. It was still a challenge for sure.
No, but you can always grind food/money/exp to make things easier. Normal isn't that hard, but you may have to retry bosses a few times and bring potions if you want to brute force through them. Fortunately, there are (nearly) always save points very, very close to boss rooms and their entrances are always easily identifiable once you learn what they look like.
Maybe he hasn't started working on it yet XD
Just saw the Kojima poster, it's gorgeous.
Did they ever say when they were gonna release the DLC for the console versions of Bloodstained??
Actually the hint was there: there is a huuuuuuuuuuuuuge column blocking the way up visible on screen, and when the boss dies it destroys the column.
Though, you had to have explored when the column was still there to see something was fishy.
That's actually a longer route. I just started a NG+ playthrough, and I did this instead:
1) Defeat the Twin Dragons and collect the Silver Bromide
2) Talk to Dominique to take the ID photo
3) Talk to OD in the Library, and he gives you the train pass
4) Go to the train and pass through the gate
You don't actually have to explicitly go to the train first and try to board it, but i guess if you want to experience every little bit of dialogue you can. I shaved a little bit of back and forth backtracking my going straight to Dominque after getting the silver bromide.
2) Talk to Dominique to take the ID photo
3) Talk to OD in the Library, and he gives you the train pass
4) Go to the train and pass through the gate
You don't actually have to explicitly go to the train first and try to board it, but i guess if you want to experience every little bit of dialogue you can. I shaved a little bit of back and forth backtracking my going straight to Dominque after getting the silver bromide.
When I was playing this tonight I came across THAT cameo enemy for the first time,
I genuinely had no idea he was in the game so I was absolutely floored and I grinned from ear to ear, but that grin soon faded once he started to kick my butt.
But seriously my favourite thing about the game so far is the over the top groaning sound one of the enemies makes when he dies. I wish I could remember the name of this enemy type, but I laugh everytime I hear it.
Shovel Knight
I genuinely had no idea he was in the game so I was absolutely floored and I grinned from ear to ear, but that grin soon faded once he started to kick my butt.
But seriously my favourite thing about the game so far is the over the top groaning sound one of the enemies makes when he dies. I wish I could remember the name of this enemy type, but I laugh everytime I hear it.
LOL!
It's the only spoken dialogue I haven't skipped in my replay. Her line delivery just makes me laugh every time. I love it.
You will face some other armored tall skeleton enemies throughout the game, with the very same groaning sound. I found it funny too, a remarkable touch to the game.
I think I remember that now that you mention it, but that's so subtle I missed it. It might have stood out to me more if I was even capable of inverting at that point when I first saw it.
Yep, this is what I did on my first playthrough. I had gotten the picture taken and was just dropping by to visit OD to steal more of his books. I was like "wait, what train?"
Lol!
I admit I was stumped about it for my very first playthrough, but NG+ has been so much fun. Just being able to go through the game decimating enemies is so satisfying, especially after I crafted the Rhava Bural before I converted my Clear save to an NG+ save. I have a huge backlog of games to get through, but I'm just enjoying replaying this one too much to move on yet. I generally don't bother 100%-ing games, unless I am absolutely obsessed with it (like Spider-Man PS4), but I actually think I might go for 100% completion in this one. I already got 100% of the bestiary, but I haven't gotten 100% of anything else.
huh, I didn't realize. I figured the trigger for the first bit of dialogue was going to that place first. Good to know and should save me some time on a future NG+, thanks!
I think I know who you're talking about. Is it the guys who pause, drop their weapon, and then go "OOOOOOOOOOOH"??? Lmaoooo. Because that is my favorite XD
you dont have to watch the whole thing but jim cuts the moaning guy into the first 20 seconds of this video. I sort of briefly watched this before i played the game. and I was like "lol?"
Jim Sterling's as well, apparently:
Edit: Dammit :P
Stayed up late finishing off the platinum, then stayed awake longer because speed mastering techniques was actually really fun. All techniques learned and mastered now, only a few holes in the monster drop lists and getting every shard to 9/9 left now.
Yes! 😂 It's such a strange and hilarious noise
Jim Sterling knows what's up.
If you're talking about who I think you are,
Go to the underground caverns, look for the jellyfish looking enemies and kill them until you get their shard. Use the ability you get from said shard to explore down there some more.
Sound design isn't that great in this game either. Just really average typical Japanese stuff. The sound design in SotN was really distinguished and jives perfectly with the rest of the game's atmosphere. All the shrieks and exertions from the monsters feel pitch perfect and there's this sort of phaser-effect on everything giving it this supernatural feel. None of the Igavania sequels have ever come close to replicating that.
Can someone please tell me if its worth getting this or Octopath Traveller? As im in 2 minds which?
Thanks
Thanks
Uh, do you want to play an Igavania or do you want to play a JRPG? I don't think anyone but you can answer that.
I like symphony, but I heard the version for switch is bugged to hell and has drawbacks compared to ps4? or is this been addressed ? or is it being upgraded?
Patches are on the way. Switch performance is a top priority for them right now.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iga/bloodstained-ritual-of-the-night/posts/2548770
The Switch version will always have a 30fps cap with downgraded visuals compared to all other versions, which run on much more powerful hardware. As mentioned above, they're trying to address the severe issues currently affecting gameplay, but it will never have full parity.
I am about an hour into this and the weapons seem to have some .... heft to them. Even the short sword feels a lil wonky. Is this just how the game plays? I get the windup on the Claymore but the whip feels super slow.
Damn, Rhava Bural is an absolute beast of a weapon. I basically just stood in place and slashed the
boss to death. Even the
boss wasn't that bad. I actually switch to encrypted orchid for a bit just to even the playing field a bit more, lol.
train
hyperspeed