Just wanted to say that I played with Kureransu on Saturday and had a blast! He was very considerate with his healing as a Witch player! I'm also up for playing with others, if you (or anyone else) is interested. Currently at Level 20 with the Empress.Didn't see this in time but I'll play whenever.
Are you using her dragon arm? When you have meter you can hold A to shoot a giant stream of flames for massive damage.
Also you do get the XP you've earned so far even when failing a quest (not when you abandon it), it's just that normal enemies give worthless amounts of XP compared to what you get for completing a quest.
Funnily enough, I was wishing last night that the game played/felt more like Castlevanias (in terms of the non-boss portion of the stages, anyways), but I have spent virtually the entire game playing with at least one other person which heavily biases my opinion. Boss fights and patterns are still sometimes fun to figure out in that same sort of vein, in my opinion, though!I nearly passed on this game because of the talk about it being multi-player focused. I took a chance though, and I'm glad i did. While I can completely understand how others may not be into the grind, it suits me perfectly.
Though I wouldn't say the games are all that similar, for me it fills the void left by the GBA/DS Castlevania games where I would just zone out and mindlessly run around killing stuff with the hopes of unlocking a few new souls. The action here feels similarly simple yet great to control, with the primary difference being that I'm grinding stages to gain more experience to make other stages viable. I've replayed that first stage so any times at this point that I could easily ace the boss even at a low level.
I haven't gotten all that far yet, but I'm already thinking about grabbing the other characters and DLC. Fingers crossed that they update in (single-Switch) couch-coop, I'd love to be able to play it with my son.
TLDR: Not for everyone, but I love it.
For me, the game really reminds me of the Gauntlet style games.It's a game I enjoy playing with others, but I likely wouldn't enjoy solo. Playing with 3+ people, though, and the game's difficulty seems to become pretty trivial unfortunately, which definitely wasn't the case in Gauntlet games in my experience. Even when playing with two players, after the initial stages, the difficulty feels like it goes down considerably - I think in the last 10 or so quests I've beaten, we've only collectively failed once (technically we cleared one mission with a missing objective, so twice, I guess)? To be fair, I've beaten about 14 quests and this opinion may drastically change moving forward as a lot of the game is still left.
I actually enjoyed my time playing with Kureransu more than playing with random people as we were figuring out things together, whereas it appears many people playing online are replaying stages. also had one other stage where the other player was clearly new to the stage; we were scrambling around looking for a switch that we couldn't find for a while, haha.