After a
bit of a hiccup, I finally got started on Rondo of Blood. Here are some thoughts.
Firstly, it might be because I'm playing on what might be a launch day PSP, but the colour scheme is just atrocious in dark areas. Having to deal with bats when they're essentially invisible is more than a little frustrating.
Moving on to the gameplay, I have to say that I much prefer Maria over Richter. He's powerful and all, but he moves like a tank and his defences aren't enough to make up for the fact that he's super hard to dodge with. You have to play so carefully with him, it makes the game a slog for me. Maybe it's because my first Castlevania was Dawn of Sorrow, but I have gotten used to my CV protagonists being quick and agile and, more importantly, armed with something more effective than a whip.
Once I unlocked Maria, I ditched him and never looked back.
Maria, in contrast to her slow rescuer, is sheer joy in a pink dress. She moves quick, can power slide out of danger and her doves can be juggled without losing momentum so that you always have a projectile in front of you at all times, even while moving. With proper timing, you can blitz through levels like a cute little whirlwind of death. Yes, she has a glass jaw and has knockback like Wile E Coyote, but if you get good at using her, it is always possible to avoid getting hit entirely.
She's still oddly clunky at times though, like there's something a little off with her physics. I'm not sure if it's a how the game handles momentum, but if you aren't going at a full run when you hit the button, she jumps and lands a few centimetres in front of where you started. This is fine, but it makes it really hard to control where you land, making platforming sections a real pain. Also, forget about dodging an aerial enemy while on a one-block wide platform by jumping away, killing it, turning mid-air and landing back where you started. Mario physics has primed my brain to expect to be able to do it, so it takes a while to unlearn this behaviour.
If you drop from one level to a lower one, you pause for a second or two, and that can kill you if you land in the wrong place. I still haven't got the feel for when it will happen, so it's caught me by surprise at times.
The other thing that struck me is just how familiar a lot of the locations and enemies feel. I have to assume that the ubiquitous skeleton sprite you find in every IGAvania and recurring enemies like the Skeleton Ape, Axe Armour, Poltergeist, Minotaur, Flea Man, White Dragon and Medusa Head all got their start here. It's a little bizarre, to be honest, like I'm playing a romhack of SotN with more primitive physics. See,I played through a fair chunk of Chronicles X before unlocking Rondo of Blood, so it felt like its own thing until I booted up the original game for the Retroactive.
The branching paths are a great feature, sort of foreshadowing what Order of Ecclesia did years later, though the fact that the level select feature is hidden behind a menu and not just the default once you clear a level is a bit strange to me. If I know there is more than one exit to a level, I want to try again immediately so I can find it. Maybe it's meant to assist with the flow of the game, but I find it unhelpful, especially since it doesn't reset your lives counter. All that means is that when I inevitably die learning the boss patterns, I will get a game over screen that will give me the option to restart the level with the proper number of lives anyway. I might as well just save and quit every time I beat a level so I have the default number of tries - it has the same effect.
It's a fun game, if a little obtuse when it comes to hiding its secrets. I stumbled across Maria in Chronicles X, but might never have done so had I (say) missed the exact lamp with the key in it. Given that she plays so differently to Richter, I might have walked away with a very different view of the game. Maybe some indication that there is a secret like this on the level select screen would be nice. It already tells you about branching paths, so that doesn't feel like much of a stretch.
That's all I have to say for now. So far it looks and feels so familiar, but then it throws up a weird throwback to the CV games of the past and throws me for a loop.
