I’m a big fan of the Castlevania series. I love not only classic games, but also later metroidvanias. Therefore, 4 years ago, when Koji Igarashi, the creator of the cult Castlevania Symphony of the Night, began a campaign to raise funds for his new game, this event did not pass me by. All these years I regularly read news about development, transfers and watched the development of the project. And two weeks ago, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night was finally released. True, I only got to it a week later, so I pre-ordered it on Nintendo Switch. And now, having played for more than 40 hours, having gone through the entire plot, it’s time to draw some conclusions about what exactly happened to Igarashi with his IGAvania (Will not check with the maestro about the level of his HRV).
The game takes place in England in the 18th century, during the Industrial Revolution. The alchemists were dissatisfied with the advent of technological progress, and investors began to turn away from them. And in order to prove to the moneybags the importance of their work, the “scientists” decided to fake the end of the world and summon an army of demons from hell. To do this, they created shards, people capable of controlling demonic forces. Having sacrificed them, the alchemists opened the gates of hell and unleashed legions of evil spirits. And here the church comes into play, which, with great effort, drove all the devils back into the underworld. And it seems like a happy ending, but it turned out that two shards survived the massacre of the alchemists, the young man Jibel and the girl Miriam. The latter was mysteriously frozen in time, and her crystal lost its power, which saved her from sacrifice. Ritual of the Night begins 10 years after these events, when Miriam emerges from her long “sleep”. From her childhood friend, the alchemist Yohaness, the girl learns that Jibel, who was like an older brother to both of them, went crazy, massacred almost all the alchemists, declared war on all humanity and summoned an entire castle with an army of demons from hell. Shocked Miriam hits the road to figure out what’s going on.
If you’ve played Igarashi’s previous metroidvanias, you’ll find the plot very predictable. In Ritual of the Night, the Japanese collected all the cliches that were once found in the Castlevania games under his production. And I won’t say that I expected something different from Igarashi. I remember every Castlevania from him very well and therefore I understood what exactly was waiting for me. I wouldn’t even pay attention to this if it weren’t for the ending and the final boss. It seems like everything should be epic and pathetic, but in reality everything looks crumpled. Apparently the budget was a little short.
But at least things are better with the characters. I won’t say that they are original, even within the Castlevania series, but almost everyone is good in their own way. Miriam is just a cutie, Johannes is a typical scientist immersed in research, samurai Zangetsu is a walking embodiment of pathos in himself, and so on. Castlevania fans should love the sarcastic vampire librarian O.D. (Orlock Dracule), clearly copied from Alucard from Castlevania Symphony of the Night. He’s even voiced by the same actor.
And if the game is the successor to Castlevania, then how can we not touch upon the location of the action?. Castle Ritual of the Night consists of several huge locations, each of which has some kind of zest. For example, in the tower of the twin dragons, movement goes in a circle, and not left-right, as in regular platformers. Because of this, you can get a little confused in the map, but in principle this does not cause any major problems. In the steampack library of the castle you need to move shelves with books to move through the location. And so on in every part of the castle: the chapel, underground caves, throne room, and so on. But what surprised me most was the mountain garden in a clearly Japanese style, which is called the “Oriental Magic Laboratory”. No, there is something magical about it, but this is only one room, which is a reference to a location from Castlevania Aria of Sorrow. Moreover, according to the artwork and screenshots, there is only a village around the castle, and the nearest mountain is located several kilometers from the castle. And judging by the location of the kindergarten on the map, it generally hangs in the air.
To be honest, the maestro’s new castle in some places is very reminiscent of the one in Symphony of the Night. Both of them have almost the same structure, the main part, underground caves with catacombs (instead of which in Ritual of the Night there is a desert), and a throne room at the top. Even the waterfall in the caves is in approximately the same place as it was in Symphony of the Night.
But what about the claims that https://mega-riches.uk this is the largest Igarashi castle?? This is partly true, if you forget one fact. In later Castlevania games, particularly Portrait of Ruins and Order of Ecclesia, the player explored not only the castle, but also surrounding areas, such as pocket dimensions or surrounding forests, swamps and caves. If you took all the places you need to explore in any of these games, put them together and compared them to the castle from Ritual of the Night, they would probably be about the same. Of the locations that do not belong to the castle, Miriam will explore only the galleon on which she got to the castle, the train to the secret alchemist laboratory, and the laboratory itself. Apart from the galleon, these are all fairly small locations for a couple of rooms.
But enough about the castle, let’s finally talk about what IGA’s new creation is all about. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is not just a metroidvania, but a 2D action RPG. The heroine has several characteristics on which the strength of her blows, resistance to different types of damage, maximum health, and so on depend. In addition, like any Castlevania, the game is quite diverse in terms of exterminating the forces of evil. As an example of a weapon. Miriam owns a gigantic arsenal: swords, whips, knives, sledgehammers, katanas, whips and even boots. Yes, you heard right. Unlike Castlevania and many other RPGs, shoes here serve as weapons. Miriam cripples monsters with kicks no less effectively than she would with some kind of sword or whip.
Separately, I would like to highlight the firearm that was in Castlevania, but more in the form of an Easter egg. In Bloodstained they decided to upgrade it to a full-fledged weapon. Firearms themselves do little damage unless you have elemental ammo or rare materials in your inventory. And the maximum number of good bullets is limited by leveling up Miriam. Unfortunately, killed enemies rarely leave behind ammo. But they can be created for a girl by the alchemist Johannes, whom we will talk about later.
In addition to regular strikes or shots, each type of weapon has its own combat techniques. These are techniques that can be performed while wearing one or another weapon. They waste mana, but also deal one and a half times more than regular attacks. You can read about how to learn the technique from the bookshelves hidden throughout the castle. For example, to learn a technique you need a long spear. Then kill using the described technique until the inscription “Technique mastered” flies over Miriam’s head. After this, you can perform it with any weapon of the same type. And this idea has some minor problems, at least for me. Performing techniques involves pressing a certain combination on the D-pad or analog stick and then the strike button. Due to the structure of the cross-pads on the Xbox Controller and Nintendo Switch Pro gamepads, performing these manipulations on them is sometimes problematic. It would be nice if, after mastering, the technique could be placed on a separate button, fortunately one is always free when using the game controls. Why not just use it??
In addition to weapons, Miriam can wear different types of armor, accessories and scarves. Scarves here are generally analogous to the cloaks from Symphony of the Night. They give little bonus to characteristics and are more needed as a decorative element. I am glad that almost all elements of clothing, except armor, are displayed on the main character. Armor, at most, changes the color of the dress. But this is Igarashi’s first Metroidvania where you can generally change the appearance of the main character. Elements such as skin color, eyes, and dresses and hairstyles can be customized. This is quite enough to change Miriam’s appearance to your taste.
All of the above is just a small part of what Miriam is capable of. The main feature of Ritual of the Night is one very interesting set of mechanics. Every time a girl kills a monster, with some probability a magic fragment flies out of it, which pierces the heroine and gives her a new ability. In addition to white shards, which are permanent, Miriam can only use one shard of a certain color at once. Each color works differently. For example, yellow shards increase the heroine’s characteristics or give her a passive ability, such as vampirism or reducing mana cost when using active shards. Or, with the help of red, the heroine can create throwing weapons out of thin air and throw them at demons. In addition, the more identical fragments Miriam collects, the stronger their effect will be.
I won’t say that IGA came up with this idea specifically for Ritual of the Night. Before that, she appeared in two of his Castlevanias, Aria and Dawn of Sorrow, where there were souls instead of fragments. In Ritual of the Night, Igarashi changed the concept slightly by adding purple and green "souls". The first ones act in the same way as the red ones, only the direction of the shot can be controlled using the right stick. Green ones are familiar familiars from previous games. In Sorrows, they were part of the blue fragments, which imposed additional effects or abilities on the hero, only, unlike the yellow ones, they required additional activation and quickly took away mana. As a result, the fragment system itself is not new for IGA, but in Ritual of the Night the Japanese at least improved it a little.
Well, it’s time to remember Johannes. Instead of weapons or clothing, enemies will most often leave behind body parts or gems when they die. With these resources and recipes, the alchemist is able to create new weapons, potions, and even sometimes shards for Miriam. The main thing is to just have the necessary resources with you. In addition to killing monsters, you can collect them by opening blue chests scattered throughout the castle. They are automatically restored every time Miriam returns to the location. This idea was taken from Castlevania Order of Ecclesia. Even in the laboratory, the heroine herself can cook her own food. But unlike Castlevania, where food simply restored health, the first portion of the prepared snack will increase the girl’s characteristics.
Even a young alchemist can use resources to improve the rank of fragments, increasing their radius of action or one of the passive effects. And here there is an interesting detail: when a yellow fragment reaches the maximum rank, it turns white and acts constantly. The idea, to me, is very controversial. Miriam, with all the passive effects, turns not just into a death machine, but into a real goddess who sends even bosses to the next world with almost one blow.
In general, when looking at crafting games, I often ask the question: if you need to create several items and don’t have enough resources, are there other ways to get them?? Ritual of the Night has. Once you cook a dish or craft an item, it will immediately become available for purchase in the store next to Johannes’s laboratory. But you’ll need a lot of money. Making money here is no longer done according to the modern RPG school, where you need to complete tasks to get money, but according to the old school, when you need to destroy monsters and elements of the environment, such as purple candlesticks. And then the money drops out of the latter only when Miriam has a full supply of mana.
Speaking of tasks, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, unfortunately, does not have any truly interesting additional missions. You need to either kill a certain number of monsters, or create an item and give it to the girl in the starting location, or feed the old lady by preparing her a dish, the name of which she does not remember, but will give a hint in the form of ingredients and a snack icon. There are also missions to find a lost resident, where you need to bring him a teleportation stone, but only Miriam’s reaction is interesting there. I wish there were tasks on the level of Portrait of Ruins with Order of Ecclesia, where you had to take a picture of a yeti or come dressed as a nun. But the reward from completing all the chains is very useful, especially grandma’s.
I could still cover a lot of things, but I’m afraid the article will drag on even more. And what has been said is quite enough to appreciate the game at its true worth. So let’s take stock. Bloodstained Ritual of the Night is a compilation and refinement of the best ideas from the Castlevania metroidvania series. Although this is not true, the game is a new part of Castlevania, only to avoid copyright problems it was renamed. This can be understood not only from the gameplay, but also from most of the enemies and some bosses, which clearly act according to the same logic as in the “parent”. In addition, the game has a lot of unobtrusive fan service in the form of references to games in the series and not only. I cannot fail to note the work of composers led by Michiru Yamane. Although some of the compositions turned out a little crooked, in my opinion, the music is one of the best things in this game. But the main advantage of Ritual of the Night lies in its gameplay and its diversity. The number of shards and weapons available allows Miriam to destroy the evil spirits in the castle in hundreds of different ways.
Unfortunately, the game is not without its shortcomings. These are not only problems with the plot, but also some design and technical flaws. Of the minor Russian localizations, in which Miriam sometimes talks about herself in the masculine gender. Or a game in one place forces the player to farm shards in order to advance in the story. But the big one is the Switch version of the game. You’ve probably already heard that the game crashes on a semi-portable console and there are problems with FPS, loading, and so on. I even met some of them while passing through. Crashes usually occur after moving to another location or loading a cutscene. In just 40 hours of playing Ritual of the Night, I crashed 4 times, three of which were in the first hours of the game. But the most serious problems arise in the castle library. In this location, transitions between rooms take a very long time and sometimes fps drops a lot. In other parts of the castle everything works more or less stably. Sometimes small graphical artifacts just appear. The Switch version has pretty bad graphics, which is why the models with the visual style used look like melted soap ice cream. IGA, of course, has already stated that work to eliminate all problems is proceeding at an accelerated pace.
Even taking into account all the shortcomings, the result was a fairly large-scale metroidvania with a gigantic number of possibilities. This is especially nice compared to most of the current games of this type. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the fact that there are now a lot of projects being developed in this direction, but they are more like Metroid. Most of them are ordinary platformers, only with an open world instead of levels. And that’s why you rejoice at the release of something so large-scale. I recommend this game to all fans of Castlevania and Metroidvanias in general. You won’t regret it. At the same time, the project clearly has big plans for its future. Indeed, in parallel with the development of the Switch version, 13 more free DLCs are currently in development, among which there will be 2 new playable characters. But for now, you can kill Igarashi himself from additional content for $10. This reward was received for free by those who donated to the game during the Kickstarter campaign. The DLC is currently only available on PC and should be released on all platforms soon. And that’s all I have for now. Thank you for your attention.