LogFAQs > #932344882

#82





Years of release: 2019 (PC/XB1/PS4/Switch)
Beaten?: Currently playing

Okay this is getting into the trickiest games on my list which are "the ones I'm currently playing and haven't finished yet, but should definitely be on the list". I only started this one like a month ago and I'm only a few hours in. It's hard for me to say where a game will rank before I've finished it, it could go up or down in stock depending - I think I kind of "get" this game enough already to know where it's gonna land though. It's an Igavania through and through, and this isn't my first rodeo.

It is really nice to see one of these in 2019 though. Igavanias have never been my favorites but they've always been fun to play and never a bad time (even Harmony of Dissoance is pretty good!), and there's something that's... I don't know, almost reassuring, about the fact that Iga is still able to do his thing in 2019, even without Konami and the Castlevania brand behind him. This game feels just about the same as any of his old stuff ever did, and most of the time I play this I completely forget that I'm not playing a Castlevania game - the transition to these new ideas and characters was pretty seamless.

I'm surprised at how hard this game is, the few boss fights I've gotten to have really made me sweat it out and have gone on for a few hits longer than I expected them to, and even traveling from one save point to the next can be a nerve-wracking experience. I completely forgot that games used to not auto-save everything you did! Bloodstained is decidedly old school in this way, and I can't decide if that's annoying or refreshing. It's nice that being able to survive encounters matters - it makes playing well, as well as fighting items and upgrades, feel like something that actually matters, rather than just a checklist of stuff you have to eventually do. Bloodstained makes me feel something, and I definitely applaud it for that.

It's nice that one of these 'it's like the old series you liked, by the original guy who made it, but it's different now' games turned out well. I have... regrets about Mighty No 9, and they made me a little skeptical about this game as a result, but it turns out that Iga is a game director and he knows what he's doing, and Keiji Inafune is a fucking hack who has no idea how to direct a game. This is an important lesson I'll remember in the future!

I'm gonna keep playing this one, though I've been doing it a little piecemeal as I've been playing other games at the same time - I haven't been immediately drawn back to this one obsessively, which is why it doesn't rank super high, but whenever I'm playing it I feel good about my decision to have started playing it. Igavanias are a nice comfort food.