Revisiting Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night
(Prep For A Flight - David Newman)
In my review for Igarashi's love letter to the granddaddy of this genre, I primarily concerned myself with his mission to properly pay homage. In that respect, I think he did quite well. When you pick up Bloodstained for the first time, SOTN fans will immediately notice a few things that make them feel right at home:
- The mapping system in this game is pure Symphony. Igarashi didn't even try to hide that. This is a good thing in many ways, because SOTN's map was excellent and very, very necessary for a game of that size.
- The main character's movement is also pure SOTN. She plays like a female version of Alucard. Her jumps are floaty and easily controlled, movement is forgiving, and platforming is done slowly enough that you can be ultra-precise with it.
- The enemies are strangely...familiar. They're familiar in how they look, in how they move, in the noises they make when they die, in where their names pop up on your screen, in how they display the damage they've done to you, all of it.
- The way the game handles its ending.
- There's a library. It's long. And there's a librarian with a buttery smooth voice that will make any Symphony fan clap like a happy child.
Indeed, there are many, many ways that this game harkens back to its predecessor. All of that said, for every way that this game makes you feel right at home, it has another way that it doesn't. Now that I've fully explored every nook and cranny that the game has to offer, I've actually started to suspect something very, very ugly:
Igarashi might not have known what he was doing at all. Be warned, in order to explain why, I'm going to have to spoil a few things about both Symphony Of The Night and Ritual Of The Night. You proceed at your own peril.
Everyone worships Symphony Of The Night for a variety of reasons, and while the excellent gameplay is clearly evident here in Ritual, there's absolutely something missing as well. Several somethings, now that I've had a chance to think about it. Some of those things are small, and some are alarmingly large. Let's start with the big things first, chief among them the story.
The story in Ritual is awfully similar to Symphony on the surface. A bad man is squatting in a castle full of evil, and you have to go do something about it. When you start to look at the details, stuff begins to fall apart. Symphony benefitted from legacy. Everyone knew who the Belmonts were. Hell, you started the game out playing as a Belmont. The character of Richter Belmont was clearly established, so when he pops back up as the main bad guy in Symphony, it's a mystery that demands to be solved. What happened to Richter? Solving that mystery is one of the key things that leads you to exploring the massive castle.
Bloodstained doesn't have this kind of legacy to work with. They tried to copy the story to a great extent, but the main villain, Gebel, is sort of established as a bad guy from the outset. Yes, you know there are other demons involved, but it seems like a pretty straight shot from Gebel to the demons themselves. There's no mystery here because all of the pieces are already out on the table. Yes, there are a few other pieces of data on the table to suggest that Gebel was a better man at one point, but that evidence is so sparse that it sort of...doesn't matter. And even if he was, there are corruptive demons involved, so you don't -want- to look for more.
This would be problematic on its own, but the lack of compelling story dovetails into the other really huge problem that Bloodstained is dealing with, and that's 'The Search'. This is where the really big spoilers come into play.
Both Symphony and Ritual have big worlds to explore, but you have to want to explore them. That's not really a problem with Symphony because the game goes out of its way to let you know that there's more to see, and that seeing it is important. No part of the main castle is unimportant, nor does it feel unduly burdensome to explore. Sure, parts of the castle get more dangerous as you move forward, but Symphony provides you with the tools to deal with that, especially if you've figured out how to cast 'Soul Steal'.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with Ritual. The world is huge, but there are large quantities of it that you'll never, ever explore without either getting insanely lucky or exploring every last nook and cranny of the world to the point of unpleasantness. Worse, you're not drawn to do this in Ritual because the game doesn't really give you a reason. You need to go and stop Gebel, the game's big bad. This can be accomplished before you're even halfway through the game, and that's not counting all of the side-quests and optional bosses. Yet still worse, the game doesn't really give you much incentive to keep playing. Sure, you know that Gebel gets defeated, and while there are still demons, they make it quite clear that Dominique will handle the rest of them. So....why keep playing?
I have to give a special, stupid shout-out to two barriers in the game that no one would ever, EVER get past without prodding or a ton of scrutiny:
- To explore the water-filled areas in the game, you'll need to find and kill a random enemy until it gives up an ultra-rare drop that allows you to do so. When you -do- find this item, it simply tells you that you can now shoot jets of water and air out of your hands. You're given no indication that it is specifically the MacGuffin that allows you to swim. Even worse, after you stumble into this, you'll still not be able to open any of the chests you find under water without obtaining yet another Shard called 'Deep Sinker', a reward from a boss. EVEN EVEN WORSE is the fact that after you obtain this shard, movement through water becomes the most slow, painful, unwieldy thing I've ever experienced in a game. I very nearly put the game down on principle because of the game's underwater sections, and they're critical to getting the better endings out of Ritual.
- While we're on the subject of the better endings of Ritual, you cannot get them unless you bull your way through the problem of swimming, grind out all of the underwater segments, and then push through two other areas that serve no purpose other than to convince you to give up. Only then will you find a Shard called Invert, whose use is not clearly explained, and then....well, then nothing. The game doesn't tell you what to do. It doesn't even give you a hint about where to go next, or what tool you'll need to progress the already agonizingly stalled story forward. Only by randomly exploring the entire map will you stumble onto an innocuous-looking, out of the way chest that will yield a piece of armor that will finally clue you in on what's next.
Not just one, but two massive, unclear, obfuscated obstacles are preventing you from reaching the end of the game. The real end. The proper end.
All of this, and we haven't gotten onto the smaller, but only slightly less annoying things about this game:
- So you've finally ground your way through to the parts of the game required to unlock the true end portions of Ritual. All you have to do is take a magic sword into the final conflict with Gebel, and when his HP is down to a certain point, swat at the moon above his head. The problem here is that the threshold for making the moon vulnerable is so close to Gebel's death that you can't roll into that fight with most of the gear you've been using, otherwise you'll smoke Gebel too quickly to actually unlock the latter sections of the game.
- Symphony's enemy design was clearly modeled around Alucard's movement and range of attack. Ritual's clearly wasn't. There are a TON of enemies that are a huge pain in the ass to hit because they're tiny and on the ground, and hitting them can only be done with specific weapons, or when they're jumping. That would be like if every enemy in the game was a Flea Man or a Toad from the Underground Caverns. There's a way to get around this, of course, but it's not what I'd call an even-handed solution...
- Every enemy in the game gives up a shard of some kind. Most of them are useless, but you have to try them out to know for sure. The two most offensively powerful shards in the entire game should be found from End Game monsters. Except they're not. They're found from monsters that you encounter within the first few hours of gameplay. One of them is called the Heretical Grinder, and the other is called Welcome Company. I would urge you not to use these shards unless you want to remove all challenge from the game. They're not quite Shield Rod/Crissaegrim levels of broken, but they're close. Of course, all of that changes when...
- ...You get to the End Game stages like the Oriental section and the Den of Behemoths. Whereas most other sections of the game are easily manageable, even with Company and Grinder, there are sections of the late game that are so difficult to navigate that you have to wonder who designed the difficulty curve for the game. And on that note...
- Symphony logically and evenly distributes the gear you need as you progress through the game. Ritual does not. Ritual demands you fall back on the crafting system, which is rather poorly explained and difficult to use, as it depends entirely on you finding crafting recipes in the game before you can make the gear you need. Not only does this make Symphony more exciting to explore, it adds incentive to do so. The promise of loot is a siren song to many, and that's just not present in Ritual.
- Symphony of the night gave you an effective way to heal. Ritual does not. Instead, you get a very limited number of super expensive healing potions you can carry. About 60% of the way into the game, you do get a shard that allows you to suck all of the blood in a room into you and heal, but you only heal for 8 points a tick, and there's never, ever THAT much blood in the room, with two very obvious, story-driven exceptions. It's too little, too late. Now, don't get me wrong. 'Soul Steal' from Symphony is broken as hell. But there's got to be a middle line between that, and where Ritual lands. And on that note...
- The game gives you the ability to craft potions and high potions. This is great, especially when you figure out that you can craft high potions for 80% of the cost of an actual one from the shop. Doing this is time-consuming and annoying as hell, however. Given the game's extreme reliance on healing items, something here should have been looked at a bit differently.
There's more that I could gripe about, but only one more thing that bears mentioning, and that's the most disappointing part of Ritual for me:
The music.
The music in this game is unremarkable. It's not good. It's not bad. It's not horrible. It's unremarkable. Which is just a damn sin.
I stand by what I said about Ritual in my review. As a love-letter to Symphony of the night, it succeeds. It's an homage, a dedication. Is it in the same league? No. Not even close. Is it worth the $40? That's a tough one. The game is big, and there's quite a bit of production value put into it. I understand why they might charge this much. At the end of the day though....I'm not so sure it's worth it at full price.
Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I was expecting more than a love letter. Maybe I was expecting another Symphony-caliber game. Or maybe Igarashi wasn't the only genius behind Symphony Of The Night.
In my review for Igarashi's love letter to the granddaddy of this genre, I primarily concerned myself with his mission to properly pay homage. In that respect, I think he did quite well. When you pick up Bloodstained for the first time, SOTN fans will immediately notice a few things that make them feel right at home:
- The mapping system in this game is pure Symphony. Igarashi didn't even try to hide that. This is a good thing in many ways, because SOTN's map was excellent and very, very necessary for a game of that size.
- The main character's movement is also pure SOTN. She plays like a female version of Alucard. Her jumps are floaty and easily controlled, movement is forgiving, and platforming is done slowly enough that you can be ultra-precise with it.
- The enemies are strangely...familiar. They're familiar in how they look, in how they move, in the noises they make when they die, in where their names pop up on your screen, in how they display the damage they've done to you, all of it.
- The way the game handles its ending.
- There's a library. It's long. And there's a librarian with a buttery smooth voice that will make any Symphony fan clap like a happy child.
Indeed, there are many, many ways that this game harkens back to its predecessor. All of that said, for every way that this game makes you feel right at home, it has another way that it doesn't. Now that I've fully explored every nook and cranny that the game has to offer, I've actually started to suspect something very, very ugly:
Igarashi might not have known what he was doing at all. Be warned, in order to explain why, I'm going to have to spoil a few things about both Symphony Of The Night and Ritual Of The Night. You proceed at your own peril.
Everyone worships Symphony Of The Night for a variety of reasons, and while the excellent gameplay is clearly evident here in Ritual, there's absolutely something missing as well. Several somethings, now that I've had a chance to think about it. Some of those things are small, and some are alarmingly large. Let's start with the big things first, chief among them the story.
The story in Ritual is awfully similar to Symphony on the surface. A bad man is squatting in a castle full of evil, and you have to go do something about it. When you start to look at the details, stuff begins to fall apart. Symphony benefitted from legacy. Everyone knew who the Belmonts were. Hell, you started the game out playing as a Belmont. The character of Richter Belmont was clearly established, so when he pops back up as the main bad guy in Symphony, it's a mystery that demands to be solved. What happened to Richter? Solving that mystery is one of the key things that leads you to exploring the massive castle.
Bloodstained doesn't have this kind of legacy to work with. They tried to copy the story to a great extent, but the main villain, Gebel, is sort of established as a bad guy from the outset. Yes, you know there are other demons involved, but it seems like a pretty straight shot from Gebel to the demons themselves. There's no mystery here because all of the pieces are already out on the table. Yes, there are a few other pieces of data on the table to suggest that Gebel was a better man at one point, but that evidence is so sparse that it sort of...doesn't matter. And even if he was, there are corruptive demons involved, so you don't -want- to look for more.
This would be problematic on its own, but the lack of compelling story dovetails into the other really huge problem that Bloodstained is dealing with, and that's 'The Search'. This is where the really big spoilers come into play.
Both Symphony and Ritual have big worlds to explore, but you have to want to explore them. That's not really a problem with Symphony because the game goes out of its way to let you know that there's more to see, and that seeing it is important. No part of the main castle is unimportant, nor does it feel unduly burdensome to explore. Sure, parts of the castle get more dangerous as you move forward, but Symphony provides you with the tools to deal with that, especially if you've figured out how to cast 'Soul Steal'.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with Ritual. The world is huge, but there are large quantities of it that you'll never, ever explore without either getting insanely lucky or exploring every last nook and cranny of the world to the point of unpleasantness. Worse, you're not drawn to do this in Ritual because the game doesn't really give you a reason. You need to go and stop Gebel, the game's big bad. This can be accomplished before you're even halfway through the game, and that's not counting all of the side-quests and optional bosses. Yet still worse, the game doesn't really give you much incentive to keep playing. Sure, you know that Gebel gets defeated, and while there are still demons, they make it quite clear that Dominique will handle the rest of them. So....why keep playing?
I have to give a special, stupid shout-out to two barriers in the game that no one would ever, EVER get past without prodding or a ton of scrutiny:
- To explore the water-filled areas in the game, you'll need to find and kill a random enemy until it gives up an ultra-rare drop that allows you to do so. When you -do- find this item, it simply tells you that you can now shoot jets of water and air out of your hands. You're given no indication that it is specifically the MacGuffin that allows you to swim. Even worse, after you stumble into this, you'll still not be able to open any of the chests you find under water without obtaining yet another Shard called 'Deep Sinker', a reward from a boss. EVEN EVEN WORSE is the fact that after you obtain this shard, movement through water becomes the most slow, painful, unwieldy thing I've ever experienced in a game. I very nearly put the game down on principle because of the game's underwater sections, and they're critical to getting the better endings out of Ritual.
- While we're on the subject of the better endings of Ritual, you cannot get them unless you bull your way through the problem of swimming, grind out all of the underwater segments, and then push through two other areas that serve no purpose other than to convince you to give up. Only then will you find a Shard called Invert, whose use is not clearly explained, and then....well, then nothing. The game doesn't tell you what to do. It doesn't even give you a hint about where to go next, or what tool you'll need to progress the already agonizingly stalled story forward. Only by randomly exploring the entire map will you stumble onto an innocuous-looking, out of the way chest that will yield a piece of armor that will finally clue you in on what's next.
Not just one, but two massive, unclear, obfuscated obstacles are preventing you from reaching the end of the game. The real end. The proper end.
All of this, and we haven't gotten onto the smaller, but only slightly less annoying things about this game:
- So you've finally ground your way through to the parts of the game required to unlock the true end portions of Ritual. All you have to do is take a magic sword into the final conflict with Gebel, and when his HP is down to a certain point, swat at the moon above his head. The problem here is that the threshold for making the moon vulnerable is so close to Gebel's death that you can't roll into that fight with most of the gear you've been using, otherwise you'll smoke Gebel too quickly to actually unlock the latter sections of the game.
- Symphony's enemy design was clearly modeled around Alucard's movement and range of attack. Ritual's clearly wasn't. There are a TON of enemies that are a huge pain in the ass to hit because they're tiny and on the ground, and hitting them can only be done with specific weapons, or when they're jumping. That would be like if every enemy in the game was a Flea Man or a Toad from the Underground Caverns. There's a way to get around this, of course, but it's not what I'd call an even-handed solution...
- Every enemy in the game gives up a shard of some kind. Most of them are useless, but you have to try them out to know for sure. The two most offensively powerful shards in the entire game should be found from End Game monsters. Except they're not. They're found from monsters that you encounter within the first few hours of gameplay. One of them is called the Heretical Grinder, and the other is called Welcome Company. I would urge you not to use these shards unless you want to remove all challenge from the game. They're not quite Shield Rod/Crissaegrim levels of broken, but they're close. Of course, all of that changes when...
- ...You get to the End Game stages like the Oriental section and the Den of Behemoths. Whereas most other sections of the game are easily manageable, even with Company and Grinder, there are sections of the late game that are so difficult to navigate that you have to wonder who designed the difficulty curve for the game. And on that note...
- Symphony logically and evenly distributes the gear you need as you progress through the game. Ritual does not. Ritual demands you fall back on the crafting system, which is rather poorly explained and difficult to use, as it depends entirely on you finding crafting recipes in the game before you can make the gear you need. Not only does this make Symphony more exciting to explore, it adds incentive to do so. The promise of loot is a siren song to many, and that's just not present in Ritual.
- Symphony of the night gave you an effective way to heal. Ritual does not. Instead, you get a very limited number of super expensive healing potions you can carry. About 60% of the way into the game, you do get a shard that allows you to suck all of the blood in a room into you and heal, but you only heal for 8 points a tick, and there's never, ever THAT much blood in the room, with two very obvious, story-driven exceptions. It's too little, too late. Now, don't get me wrong. 'Soul Steal' from Symphony is broken as hell. But there's got to be a middle line between that, and where Ritual lands. And on that note...
- The game gives you the ability to craft potions and high potions. This is great, especially when you figure out that you can craft high potions for 80% of the cost of an actual one from the shop. Doing this is time-consuming and annoying as hell, however. Given the game's extreme reliance on healing items, something here should have been looked at a bit differently.
There's more that I could gripe about, but only one more thing that bears mentioning, and that's the most disappointing part of Ritual for me:
The music.
The music in this game is unremarkable. It's not good. It's not bad. It's not horrible. It's unremarkable. Which is just a damn sin.
I stand by what I said about Ritual in my review. As a love-letter to Symphony of the night, it succeeds. It's an homage, a dedication. Is it in the same league? No. Not even close. Is it worth the $40? That's a tough one. The game is big, and there's quite a bit of production value put into it. I understand why they might charge this much. At the end of the day though....I'm not so sure it's worth it at full price.
Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I was expecting more than a love letter. Maybe I was expecting another Symphony-caliber game. Or maybe Igarashi wasn't the only genius behind Symphony Of The Night.
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