I hope it's just demo baby mode, I want it to be as hard as Ecclesia was. I'd go as far as to say Ecclesia hard mode was brutal
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Bloodstained is coming to Switch
- Thread starter Skeletos311
- Start date
I hope it's just demo baby mode, I want it to be as hard as Ecclesia was. I'd go as far as to say Ecclesia hard mode was brutal
Stone Ocean
Member
Some difficulty options would be cool. I'm down for being sodomized by Adramelech-level bosses again.
YEP, Igarashi is Inafune tier, people thinking he's 2D Kojima are going to be very dissapointed.
They tend to forget his games were based on recycling PC Engine sprites and Toru Hagihara's work on SOTN (He was the real director, but people think IGA was, for some reason). And his 3D job sucked ass. Without a comeptent technical team, ths game will be stuck in limbo forever (It's his first HD game).
I played the demo of Bloodstained and it was already better than Mighty No9.
Red Arremer
Member
Ecclesia was easy as shit for the most part. The only thing it did was throwing a bunch of enemies at you that did a gorillion damage (especially on hard mode) and made getting money to buy potions difficult, so stacking healing items was a pain in the ass too.
And all of the bosses sans one were easy to beat.
FrontalMonk
Banned
I don't think it's too much to ask for a middle ground in difficulty between SOTN and Ecclesia. I don't want to go through it with my eyes closed, but I lost count of how many times I died to Blackmore.
Man, you can't put your fucking hate for him down huh? How many years now?
Lords of Shadow didn't kill the series. He did. I'll be forever resentful. His complacency got us here. Ecclesia was great but it was too little, too late. That he's deified for some reason makes me fume, because SOTN was not his and every subsequent game was a factory line job. His recluctance to give the series more flair led Konami to look elsewhere, instead of letting it grow from the Castlevania 64 base.
He became the lord of the series and did nothing with it. Now it's dead, and he's going to make THE SAME FUCKING GAME AGAIN. Only this time he gotta put in the real work with no recycling so it's never coming out. Or will, and will sell like 100K copies. Because it's the same fucking game.
I've never seen anybody compare him to Kojima.
Your irrational hate is pretty pathetic.
Game already has a demo with constant backer updates. In what way could this game be said to be in limbo?
Anyway, I will gladly grab this on switch for the best portable version of the game available. Hoping that Battlechasers eventually gets a Switch port, too.
O.K
Is this a new shitty internet meme?
Apparently every kickstarter is now the same as MN9, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.
Red Arremer
Member
Unlike Inafune, Iga isn't just shitting out a concept and then is going hands off. He's mainly been a coder for SotN, but has worked creatively on the project as well, even though he wasn't the producer. The teams in that time were a lot closer knit than they are nowadays, and everyone did a little bit of everything.
There's also been plenty of assets uniquely made that weren't from the PC Engine (all of the GBA art, as well as all of the backdrops and plenty of enemies and bosses for the DS games).
Finally, it's not like Iga just hired a bunch of random ass coders off the street. He's getting published by 505 and Inti is heavily involved in the development, among other smaller teams. I don't even know what you're on if you're thinking he doesn't have the backing of any sort of competent people, especially considering that the demo and test footage that has been shown are looking (and in the demo's case, playing) well.
Stone Ocean
Member
Yeah, because it's Iga's call how much budget he gets to work with. Are you for real?
May God hear you. Last time I saw the game it was a bunch of primitive 3D graphics with flat lightning and floaty controls. Maybe they updated it? I hope so. At the end of the day I want this game to be the best it can be, because that means my favorite series spirit will live on.
I'm simply 15 years out of confidence with the guy.
Red Arremer
Member
If there was no demand for "the same fucking game", then he wouldn't have raised 5.5 million dollars.
D.Lo
Member
I'm someone who also doesn't like Igarashi, mostly because I think his mechanical action design and level designs are abominable, it pissed me off that a mere mimic got to declare himself lord of a long running series.
But he did manage to crap out those SoTN clones quite rapidly, along with the other games (PSP/PS2/Wii) all with small budgets, and didn't always recycle sprites. He seems like an efficient production worker at least. They were in my opinion not great games in many cases, but he got quite a number out there.
And Lords of Shadow (especially 2) is what killed the series. Made it disappear into the pack of every standard bland western action game.
Red Arremer
Member
Mirrors of Fate was basically dead on arrival and drove the knife in even deeper, too.
So, Konami telling him to make the series annual in 2001 and giving him shoestring budgets means any failure of difficulty, of failing to have time to curate ideas, is just on Igarashi, yes?
Are you for real?
Fortunately tons of people put their money where it matters to show that the world does need it.
Also fortunate that I don't have to choose between Bloodstained and the numerous other metroidvanias coming out. More games in a genre I love is a good thing.
D.Lo
Member
Yeah, what a complete waste of development time. I would definitely have taken a two-year-in-development time 3DS Igarashivania over that, and day.
I agree he was efficient, but he also killed any type of innovation. See Lament of innocence is what i consider his biggest effort, he really tried, and could have made a killer sequel, but he doubled down on the box rooms for CoD (I enjoyed inmensely, especially Trevor mode, but it's a game for fans). He was like that all the time, doing the same thing over and over.
I'm also salty because once he became Lord of Castlevania he killed the Kobe studio, that made the fantastic Circle of The Moon and the N64 games (That I think everyone agrees captured 3D castlevania perfectly, only with lots of early 3D jank), He also immediately retconned out their games out of the timeline, which I found extremely petty.
Then he made Aria of Sorrow, one of the best games of the series (Still a SOTN clone, but whatever, it was good) and wrote himself in a corner with his "Scenario comes after I've decided the weapons gimmick!" philosophy, as he came upw ith the Battle of '99. Which he never followed up, because, in his own words, "I don't even know what happened!". The fans got a case of blueballs that lasted 8 years until his complacency got Konami to forcefuly take the series from him and take it to a western developer, with all that entails.
Now, Lords of Shadow 1 is a flawed masterpiece, a great game with a sense of adventure unrivaled last gen for its genre. It was a GREAT stepping stone for the series, and was a much needed shake up. However, they fucked the sequels up (MoS was a noble effort, but the team really needed Iagarashi's hand to make a 2D game feel good) but we must not forget that LoS2 was ALSO hit with the #FucKonami fuckery, as its producer got out and its director became a mad man with no supervision.
That episode of the CV history could have been avoided if Igarashi
- Had made efforts to keep CV relevant, with innovation and a more focused evolution to modern conventions in storytelling and gameplay systems.
- Hadn't ditched the Konami Kobe efforts, which were onto something both on the SOTN template and, more importantly, in the 3D space.
- Hadn't steered an directionless ship, with games jumping forward and backwards in a timeline each time more convulted and inconsequential, giving fans not much incentive to buy the next game from a continuation standpoint.
Now, I gotta give to him that none of his games were bad, and Ecclesia was especialyl fantastic because he finally stopped aping SOTN and started aping the classicvanias, but as I said, it was too little too late, the damage was done, and Ecclesia sold less than the dreadful Portrait of Ruin.
That's my thing with him. He was given many, many tries. And had many ways to make things better. But he didn't.
Now he's making "I can't believe it's not Castlevania" and I see zero advancement fro him, from gameplay to graphics that still look like late PS2 models, he's jsut confirming my feelings, that he's a one (not even his) trick pony. Badmouth the Lords of Shadow guys all you want, but the three games are indisguishable from each other (For worse, but the intention was there). Igarashi makes Igarashi games and expects Igarashi fans to buy them.
I think the series deserved more. And as this is what the series is now (TV show notwithstanding!) I'm sad I feel like I'm back in 2002. Or earlier, as Lament came out in 2002.
And people will say "It was funded really fast, gamers want this badly" and I'll tell them that yes, there is interest in the game because we haven't had a game like this in over 10 years. But give him time, and he'll start to churn out derivative sequels once more, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Peace.
Exactly. That Konami held Castlevania on an extremely tight budget is evident.
Also lol at discrediting what IGA brought to the table on SotN, I highly recommend this interview translated by Shmuplations: http://shmuplations.com/symphony/
They both acted as directors for about 50% of the game's development. Blatantly stated by both of 'em.
You seem unnecessarily negative.
I played the backer demo of Bloodstained and it was pretty fun already, and that was 2 years or so before the release.
I think you are being a bit negative here too. I mean, this is what the demo released in June last year looks like:
And, again, at that point they still had almost 2 years to improve on it before release.
D.Lo
Member
Eh, I though Lament was a pretty weak effort, it displayed all his handheld weaknesses with such a poor map, and the action was DMC lite. CoD was an ugly dog, the corridors and boxes infantile map design was even more offensive when it was pretending to be a town.
Totally agree with this point, petty as hell, but I doubt he personally closed Kobe.
Well he actually made Harmony of Dissonance before that, his worst game IMO. It's ugly as sin, sounds like shit, and has the blandest of all his castles even with a stupid mirror castle gimmick to clone SoTN's upside down.
Aria was good though.
Red Arremer
Member
See, I really enjoyed the "dreadful" Portrait of Ruin but I hated Circle of the Moon, which I think was everything but "fantastic".
I do agree on CV64 being great though for all of its flaws.
I do agree on CV64 being great though for all of its flaws.
Portrait was fun despite feeling like a rushjob. Which is a shame because it has cool ideas, the areas look nice, the music is amazing, but the actual level design itself is trash tier, huge step up with Ecclesia. Although some levels in that were trash too (one forest level literally being a straight corridor with enemies), apart from that though, it was my fave. Game should've had more segments like the Den of Evil or w/e the platforming challenge stage was called.
CV64 is cool in pretty much every way except where it matters, gameplay. Though if you can tolerate how it plays it's easy to see why one would love it, the atmosphere in that game is thick as hell, great soundtrack too.
Harmony of Dissonance and Aria were made by two different teams.
I believe the HoD team moved to the PS2 titles, as a lot of staff moved on over.
Takashi Takeda was the director to HoD and Curse of Darkness, for example. The same issues of copy/paste apply most heavily to these games.
Portrait was a rush job.
It was developed in less than a year.
Ew the PoR soundtrack was trash of the higest order, jam horns in my Castlevania? GTFOH
That game made me shiver in how anime it felt. It was disgusting coming from the beauty of Ayami Kojima's style to anime faces, anime soundtrack and anime storyline. The music was full of happy tunes, which made me mad. Old CVs also had their share of "not gothic" tunes but they were at the very elast, empowering. The PoR ones were just weird. Like they were made for a cartoon.When I saw Charlotte doing this face
I knew CV had jumped the shark. Fucking Igarashi.
Thankfully Kojima redeemed Charlotte her one last time.
We were so happy when Ecclesia was announced. The art was just so good in comparison. It was not Kojima, but it didn't need to.
What's Ayami doing these days? You know, one of my life goals is buying an authentic painting of hers.
Oh shit, I totally forgot about that lmao. Then it took two years for Order of Ecclesia to release.
Red Arremer
Member
See I can understand why you wouldn't like the level design in Portrait, but I thought it was a lot more unique than Ecclesia, which for the most part was empty corridors that just were stacked with enemies. And there wasn't only one forest area that was literally just a corridor, there was 2, and a third one that was literally just a corridor that went a step down and then continued on.
And yes, Portrait definitely suffered because of the time constraints and the low budget. However, saying that "Iga never tried anything different with the series ever and always shat out literally the same game" (not addressing you here btw) and in the same breath calling Portrait of Ruin uninnovative shit is extremely disingenuous, because particularly Portrait of Ruin tried its ass off to try something entirely new.
It:
a.) Introduced the character switch mechanic into the Igavania (for the leads at least; there was Julius mode in Dawn of Sorrow but that was a throwback to CV3), both of which had unique abilities, instead of being rolled into one omnipotent super being.
b.) By extension, some of the monsters actually reacted differently depending on which character you were playing.
c.) It tried to get away from being mostly castle interiors by introducing the magical paintings that would send us to different levels.
Also imo important: d.) It featured the first female lead character since Sonia Belmont and Carrie Fernandez.
You can tell that points a-c heavily suffered because of the super low development time and funds available, because PoR feels like it tried doing stuff but couldn't flesh it out enough.
Training Hall. Nest of Evil was the boss rush-esque dungeon in Portrait, which returned in Ecclesia as the Giant Cave.
Yeah it definitely was Igarashi's fault that they had to cut corners because of super low development time and budget, so they got an artist who could churn out art a lot quicker than Kojima, and probably cheaper too.
100% all on Iga.
Subpar Scrub
Banned
Because a man can dream, MegaManTrigger, a man can dream.
I'm 100% certain the change in artstyle came from Igarashi himself.
From a dead 1up intervew. He said Kojima was focusing on CoD, but then she never came back.
Red Arremer
Member
I'm still convinced that cash/time also was a reason. And Ayami Kojima seems to be quite busy regardless. They tried getting her for Bloodstained too but she wasn't able to do it, so she's just providing some special box art. I doubt she was just waiting to get hired again to work on CV games.
And even if it was entirely based on that decision, your argument that Iga didn't try to innovate the series is even more disingenuous. He literally is saying in that quote that he's trying something different for a change and see how it flies.
Obviously it didn't fly, which is why for OoE and CVHD they went back to the more gothic looking painting style. But just cause he made a mistake and picked an art direction that you (and the majority of fans, including myself) didn't like doesn't mean he isn't trying something new.
I am pretty sure she doesn't like working with IGA that much. I could have sworn I saw an interview with IGA around the time of the Kickstarter where the interviewer said that Kojima had said something positive about him and he was surprised for this reason and said that maybe they'll end up working together again.
I highly doubt it has anything to do with IGA using a different artist, even when Kojima's art was common to the series she was never the only character designer they were using.
Sir_Crocodile
Member
Ecclesia was fresh and great, Iga knows what he's doing.
I have no worries.
I have no worries.
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
I got mixed up! I was thinking of Slain. Doh!
I'm sure the reason the Lords of Shadow games ended up crashing and burning was because of IGA.
Even when Igarashi was in control of the series he wasn't just "making the same game over and over". He did 2D SoTN style games, 3D games, retro throwbacks, that wierd multiplayer online one and a fighting game.
The series died because Konami wanted to turn the series from a niche one into a big name property and we all saw how that turned out.
Alex_Mexico
Member
I give it until their next monthly Kickstarter backer update for the official announcement of the game coming to Switch and getting cancelled on WiiU.
OmegaDL50
Member
You have played the E3 Demo that was given out to the backers, right?
If you have played the demo you would know the game is already in a solid state despite it's pre-Alpha status.
Starsunder
Member
Bought on switch.
Sooooooo looking forward to this.
Castlevania on a Nintendo portable just feels right to me.
Sooooooo looking forward to this.
Castlevania on a Nintendo portable just feels right to me.
It's not a Castlevania game though.