Listen to the Rain

Back in 2015, I learned about the Kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night from people who had watched it and noticed its similarities to my favorite platformer of all time, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In the video, Igarashi Kōji promises to make a game in the style of the old Castlevania games now that Konami isn't interested in doing anything with the IP other than making uncomfortably sexual pachinko games, and basically that's it. There's almost nothing about the actual game in there other than that it would be in the style of Castlevania, but that video! Igarashi walks around an old castle lit by torchlight, he sits at the head of a table and takes a swig from a wineglass before hurling it to shatter on the ground, and he walks outside and transforms into a cloud of bats. I fully admit that I was sold entirely on the game based on the pitch video without even really knowing what the game would be like.

Maybe it's a good thing that I didn't follow the development very closely, then. Through reading USGamer I heard about bringing in Inti Creates, who made the excellent Blaster Master Zero, to help work on the game. I saw the video of all the complaints about the art style where Igarashi once again threw down a wine glass and shouted "I will prove them wrong!" This had all the ingredients of a disaster in the making.

Then Curse of the Moon came out and it was great. And now Ritual of the Night came out and it's fantastic. We wanted Symphony of the Night reborn, and by G-d, that's what we got.


One of the best parts of Symphony of the Night was the sheer variety of stuff in the game. Food, items, spells, armor, an enormous possibility, any and all of which you can choose from to pick your desired playstyle. Want to use the shield rod and summon cows? Throw a sword that spells out VERBOTEN as it swings? Annihilate every enemy in a cloud of blades? All of that and more is possible, but a lot of them were half-baked. The food in Symphony of the Night barely restores any health by the end of the game. The subweapon system from Castlevania exists but is mostly useless for Alucard. There are a bunch of spells, but their existence isn't hinted at and none of them hold a candle to Soul Steal.

Bloodstained takes those lessons, refines them, and blends them with the shard system, which is directly stolen from Aria of Sorrow's "Tactical Soul system." The main character, Miriam, is a "shardbinder" who can absorb the souls of the demons she kills and draw on their powers, and almost every enemy in the game drops a shard. Most of them have obvious combat applications, like hurling fire or ice or lightning or enhancing Miriam's ability with the various weapons she finds, but the wide variety and ability to switch at any time means there are a lot of shards that exist for fun or for alternate strategies. There are familiars, of course, but there are also a line of summon shards that call various demons to aid Miriam. I could have summoned ghosts, or giant frogs, or exploding pigs. I could have thrown knives or shuriken or arrows, or dropped giant ice shards, or laid traps and lured enemies into them.

What I mostly did was fire holy hadōkens at people.

In addition to the direct combat shards, there are Manipulative Shards and Passive Shards. Both of them have some story-critical powers but also an enormous amount of shards that looked interesting but didn't fit my playstyle. Bunnymorphosis turns Miriam into a Lili, a kung-fu bunnygirl demon, and lets her augment her already-powerful kicks (if you equip her with boots). There were passive shards to enhance every weapon, so I could have picked whatever weapon I wanted and built my Miriam around it, and I would have if I wasn't having so much fun burning demons alive with Riga Storæma and then blasting them with Tis Rozain holy lasers.

And then later, hurling chisels and giant frogs at them.


Getting a single shard isn't the end, either. Miriam can hold nine of each shard and enhance each shard's Rank up to nine.

Crafting is a major part of Bloodstained, to a far greater degree than I expected. Enemies drop mostly crafting materials, which you can take back to the town hub of Arrantville and give to the alchemist Johannes to transform into weapons, armor, new shards, and food. There's an elaborate cooking system and each recipe that Miriam eats provides a permanent stat bonus the first time she eats it, so you can bet I hunted down every food I could and devoured it. Some weapons come from drops, but many can only be crafted, so there's an incentive to hunt down specific demons and murder them for their bodyparts or clothing pieces and turn them into weapons for better murdering. Or to rend down existing weapons using alkahest, the universal solvent, and turn them into raw materials and other weapons, and then create even better weapons from the remains.

The crafting system is why it took me 25 hours to beat the game instead of half that. I'd find a new shard I liked, and immediately I'd farm up nine of them and then the materials to enhance that shard to nine. I'd realize I had almost all of the ingredients to a particular recipe and the remaining ingredient was part of a recipe I had already made, so I'd farm some alkahest or gold to buy alkahest, buy a bunch of food--once you make a recipe, it's available to purchase for money--rend it down, make new food, and eat it while Miriam murmured 美味しい！ (oishii, "It's delicious!"). Cooking systems always make a game better.

There's a couple quests to encourage you to interact with the crafting system, an old woman who wants to eat a lot of delicious food and a nun seeking tokens of the deceased to help lay their souls to rest, but I dove in entirely of my own accord.


One thing Igarashi understands is that people like to play dress-up with their characters in video games. In Symphony of the Night, the only real way to do this was by equipping Joseph's Cloak, which let you change its color. Bloodstained goes all in. In the first hour of the game, I looted a set of elf ears. That's odd, I thought, but they have a bonus to INT and MND, so I'll put them on. You can see the result.

Also check out Miriam's cute bunny scarf in the first screenshot.

Miriam's dress can't be changed, though the color can, but every other aspect of her appearance can be modified by the items in the game. Equipping boots as a weapon changes her footwear. Various accessories like the eyeglasses, the stone mask, or the voice changer have cosmetic effects (the voice change even does exactly what it says!), all headgear is reflected on Miriam, and she can change her hairstyle. Not too long ago I got a survey from the Bloodstained team asking about additional DLC costumes for Miriam, with everything you'd expect included--succubus outfit, mizugi, schoolgirl, maid, etc.--but with other options like 3D wireframe, kimono, valkyrie, modern casual clothes, white mage, cowgirl, chef, and a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting. There's a lot of free DLC coming for this game, but all the outfits would be paid. And honestly, I might even buy one. Casual clothes Miriam picking up Starbucks before starting a long day of murdering demons? I'd watch that anime.


The real thing that's great about Bloodstained is just that it's so fun to play. One of the problems with a lot of modern big-budget games is that they're polished until they're smooth as glass and all the interesting angles are worn smooth. I'm thinking of games like World of Warcraft, where classic was a nightmare for a lot of players because the balance was off, but where Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were my favorite time to play because they tried to make everyone meaningfully distinct and interesting while still being possible to play. In Cataclysm, Blizzard changed a lot of the characters to bring them closer to each other, redid the geography of the world to make it more like a theme park than a real place, and I lost interest.

Bloodstained is more like Master of Magic, possibly my favorite 4X game. Master of Magic was unbelievably broken, with dozens of overpowered combinations, but the benefit of that is that if any of the enemy wizards started fielding mass halfling slingers or high men paladins or wraith rush or any other OP strategy, there was another overpowered combination you could pick yourself to match it. Bloodstained is kind of like that. Chisel Barrage is so unbelievably broken that it makes the game trivial--I beat the boss rush in a minute using it--but the game is tuned easy enough that it doesn't become necessary. A modern "balanced" game would take account Chisel Barrage's existence and make battles that required finding it or grinding everything else high enough to survive without it. Maybe Hard or Nightmare mode are like that, but they're optional. The game let me get Chisel Barrage and use it when I wanted to, and Throw Spear and Summon Plume Parma when I wanted to do that, and every approach worked.

Which isn't to say that the game is too easy. It's not overly hard, but there were several early battles that I had to try multiple times and change up my approach before I could beat them. Much of the ease with which I slaughtered everything after the halfway point was due to all the grinding I did for shards, weapons, armor, and secrets. If I had just run through I would have had more trouble. And that's good. The game should not be tuned around forcing the player to uncover everything to win.


If there's a criticism to be said about the game, it's that it's almost exactly Symphony of the Night. There's a clocktower, there's a library with a librarian named "Orlok Dracul" and who has Alucard's voice actor, there's an early bad ending if you kill the person who has turned evil for no obvious reason, there's a Crissaegrim equivalent, the books in the library have the same writhing-and-letters-falling-out death animations...

That's what we wanted, it's true. I spent money on this so I could get Symphony of the Night reborn after 22 years. But I thought I should mention that it doesn't do anything new with the formula. It takes that recipe and uses only the finest ingredients, cooked by master chefs, and produces the finest multi-course meal you have ever eaten.

Take a seat at the table. The night is young.