Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 252: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

For a little over a decade, Castlevania keeper Koji Igarashi cut his own path with the famous side-scrolling series by backing away from its traditional hardcore action and platforming, and leaning more towards RPG elements and exploration. The result was what we now know as the "Metroidvania," a genre that thrived for the ten years Igarashi found himself away from the style of game he and his team popularized. But does our current glut of Metroidvanias make his newest creation, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night feel less special? On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, and Imran Khan as the crew explores Igarashi's latest work to find out whether or not it's a total Dragula.

Hey everybody, it's Bob, here with a special announcement about our next live panel. It shouldn't come as any surprise, but we will be heading back to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and yes, of course, Portland, Oregon for another live Retronauts panel. PRGE happens from Friday, October 18th to Sunday, October 20th, but our panel will be at 9 p.m. on Saturday in Auditorium A, and the topic will be when celebrities and video games collide. It's going to be a fun late-night panel, and we'll have tons of amazing. of some of the worst celebrity appearances in video games and a few of the best.

Again, that is happening at 9 p.m. on Saturday, October 19th at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in Auditorium A, but we recommend you stay for the entire weekend and enjoy the fun festivities of PRGE. Thanks again for listening, and we'll let you get back to your regularly scheduled podcast. This week on Retronauts is a podcast hosted by some real eagomaniacs. Hello, everybody. It's another episode of retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey, and today's topic is blood-stained ritual of the night. It's not an old game, but a new game that feels like an old game.

Before I go on any further, who is here with me today? Across the table, as usual. Who is this? Hey, it's Yemmer Edge Parrish. I'm Jeremy Parrish's half vampire son who hates his dad. Based on that name, I'd never, ever figure it out. And we have a new guest here. Very rare do we have a new guest, but we have one today to talk all about bloodstained.

Who is our new guest? Hi, it's Imran Khan, and I like to kill those murderers dead. It's one of the many things you can do in this game is kill murderers dead. as many times as you want. Yes, and you get some good prizes. But yes, today's topic is Bloodstain Ritral the Night, the true Metroidvania. And who else? I mean, it is.

It's the one true Metroidvania. The master has come back to his craft to make us a Metroidvania of his own design. Castlevania has risen again after 100 years, except now it's called Bloodstain. More like 10 years, but it felt like 100. It really did. But yeah, so we do occasionally episodes about modern games with classic Root. So I think so far I've done things like Stardue Valley. What else have we done? I'm trying to think. I mean, we've done Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, things that obviously either are new games meant to feel old or new games that have a lot of ties to old things. And this is definitely made to feel like a much older game. So basically, this is a Metroidvania made by the maker of the modern Castlevania games from Symphony the Night Onward, Koji Igarashi. And so Konami, he left that company about like 2014. And, and, And this is essentially the thing everyone was waiting for him to make, a new Castlevania, in his own style.

Yeah, basically, Konami was like, video games, eh, we don't need to do that. We can make casino games with erotic violence, and we can make fitness machines, but video games, and now that Japan has starting to crack down on gambling machines and Pachinko parlors, suddenly Konami's like, you know, we're really committed to core video games. I don't know. It sounds like they never left. In a way, I can't blame them. I mean, I think my life got slightly better when I pivoted away from video games a little bit.

But I'm not a giant corporation. But, yeah, let's talk about our experience with this genre. I mean, Jeremy, you write books about Castlevania. You make videos about Castlevania. I have written a book about Castlevania. The anatomy of Castlevania, correct? But that wasn't about the Igavannias. That was about the old NES games.

But there's a little bit of that baked into this whole package, too. That's true. But we all love Castlevania here at Retronauts. We've done many episodes about it. the classic games. We just did a PACS panel about Castlevania. That's right, versus Super Metroid. Yep. And is that available anywhere? By the time this comes out, probably. Okay, good. And if not, I wish you were there. But so it's been 11 years since the last Castlevania. So, Imrah, where do you fall in this pre-Symphony, post-Simphony, Castlevania world? Because they're

very different iterations of a platformer. So I loved Castlevania as a kid. I remember making my mom teach me how to use the phones so I can harass the Nintendo's own employees at Toys R Us about when Simon Belmont, or Simon's Quest was coming out. Because I recall that was like one of those weird cart shortage games. Yeah, I was the same way with Zelda 2. I was constantly calling the camera department at best

products or service merchandise to be like, when's Zelda 2 coming out? I don't know, kid. Then Simon's Quest did come out, and it wasn't great. But Supercast, I mean, it was great. And other games were great. And I remember when I finally did get my hands on safety of the night because I remember dismissing it early on

because it wasn't 3D, because that was the era at the time of, I remember just absolutely loving it. And I played pretty much every of the egavaneas that he was involved in or not involved in since. That's interesting that your first reaction to Symphony the Night was kind of negative because I remember seeing it for the first time on like a role of video at a Walmart, like coming soon, coming fall 1997, and just seeing like five seconds of footage of it and being like, wow, that Castlevania looks amazing.

That is so cool. It's like 2D, but advanced and fancy. That's exactly what I want. It was that age of, well, Zelda was coming out. Oh, I mean, yeah, like I was, I was, you know, buying Next Gen magazine, which was 2D sprites. Who needs that garbage? But I still, you know, saw that and was like, it's Castlevania, but exploded into awesomeness, and I want that. Yeah.

Eventually I realized my error and was like, oh, this actually looks and sounds and plays amazing. Yeah, I think I might have told this on the symphony of the night. podcast, but I was very bad at the NES, Castlevania games, because they're very difficult games. And I played a bit of symphony. I rented it. And I just assumed, like, well, this will get much harder later. So I didn't even play that much of it. I was like, okay, I get it. It's Castlevania, cool music, cool characters. But I don't want to be frustrated, so I put it away. And I think it wasn't until a year later after reading about it, like, oh, I missed out on what it actually is. And I think even Jeremy had written about it a bunch

by then. And that's when I went back to it and played through all of it again. And of course, I love Metroidvania's. I love all the Igavanyas. And it's funny that so the last proper Castlevania done by Igarashi was 2009. Oh, 2009. Wasn't it? I think it was. Oh, maybe it was 2008. Yeah, I think it was 2008 Order of Ecclesia.

And then there was a weird Harmony of Despair game that he produced but didn't direct and it was an Xbox live multiplayer Castlevania all about loot, which I heard is kind of cool if you can play with other people, but it's, I guess you can only play on Xbox. one now. Have you ever played that? It's, I did. It's like, it actually has some roots

in Monster Hunter. Yeah, I thought so. It's like really loot focused. You go into the same areas over and over to get drops and loot and level up characters and things like that. Yeah. Well, and it's great because it takes all these different maps and just like mash them together into one gigantic map. And there's even, you know, there was DLC versions of the game

or DLC add-ons to the game that took the original Castlevania and just like gave you the actual castle to move through. And then what's it called? Getsu Phumadden? Yeah, yeah, the Japanese samurai Castlevania game that never came out here. Yeah, so there was a lot of love in that.

And it's fun because you can just kind of go freely wherever you want and go in whatever order you want, but you really want to power up and get loot and then team up with other people before you go to the boss area because the bosses are like super hard. That game is very interesting because it's emblematic of, like Jeremy,

you mentioned earlier, when Konami left video games as a kind of thing. That's only kind of half the story of what happened to Igarashi. Igarashi was kind of blackballed within Konami, and he probably would have been outright fired if his girlfriend and wife were not on the board of the company at the time.

And there's a lot of internal politics and so of it has to do with Hideo-Kajima, but one of the things that drove Igarashi out of the company was that Konami was just fed up with his Casabania games not selling. And here's a low-budget project, see what you can do with it kind of thing. Yeah, Harmony of Despair felt like one last chance, and it was, I felt like 90% recycled products.

Just like, oh, hear all the graphics we've made to date, do something with these. Maybe there's a few new enemies or a few new hero characters. It was an extremely low budget product, like below 100,000 budget. Yeah, it seemed extremely cheap. And that was really the last chance for Castlevania. So there have been 10 years since, you know, roughly 10 years since that came out. I think it was 2010 was Harmony of Despair. Sorry, there's harmony of dissonance, but also harmony of despair.

I have to keep looking at my notes because they're two different games. There were the Lords of Shadow games. I'm talking about Igavannias, though. Yes. Well, the Lords of Shadow do directly affect the Igavania stuff because there was a time, and I want to say 2007, when at a TGS there was a... He showed up. Yeah, yeah.

Which was, it was supposed to be Ego's big, like, Gambit, that he was going to make a big 3D action Metroidvania starting Olicard. Yeah, it was going to be a direct sequel to Symphony. Yeah. But apparently, it wasn't shaping up great with Kanovi's internal sources, and Iga was actually... Ego was asking for more resources, and Kojima, who was basically head of Konami development at the time, was incredibly not satisfied with how that game was shaping up.

At the time, Mercury's Steam, who was publishing a separate unrelated game to Castlevania Lords of Shadow, was just showing Konami their new updates on the game. Kojima liked it and said, why don't you just make this Castlevania, thus canceling the All-A-Card game? Oh, that's right. I forgot about that, and I forgot that Kojima rubber-stamped that Lords of Shadow game. Which is why, like, all the marketing said, Hideo Kajima's making this game. Yeah.

But he wasn't like that. And I'm sure it's fine for what it is in the time it came out, but I never played it. I just heard it was just a very, very long game. And I think nobody really likes the sequel to that. No. It's terrible. But that has been the fate of Modern Castlevania. And then, of course, there was that 3DS game, which was sort of dipping back into the older style a bit.

I think you played that, Jeremy. Yeah, the Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate. Yeah. Yeah. That was, you know, taking the Lords of Shadow lore and creating a sequel. I mean, there's a lot of story there, but doing it in kind of a 3, 2.5D. I mean, really, Lords of Shadow, Mirror of Fate is the closest thing that Castlevania ever did actually to bloodstained. Like, bloodstained mechanically and stylistically is probably the most similar, but mirror of fate really sucks.

I think it is extremely unfun. It is, you know, a Metroidvania done by people who don't, I hate to say this, but so I don't want to impugn people who created it, but I feel like the designers of the overall game didn't really get what makes that style of game work and fun. And so it's very tedious and very dull. And it's a lot of kind of running around, not doing a whole lot, and then all of a sudden you'll get to like a crazy hard boss. I feel the same way about Samus Returns, even though I like that game.

No, I feel Samus Returns is much more competently created than Mirafate. That probably had more watchful I of Nintendo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a much denser and more content-packed game, whereas Mirror of Fate is just like, you're just running around and like, what am I doing? So, yeah, so that is a direction that Konami took Castlevania without I garashi, I believe. So Koji Igarashi, he is the godfather of this style of Castlevania, starting with Symphony of the Night, 1997 and after that 2010 recycled Castlevania game Harmony of Despair, I believe he was put on

connect projects and mobile game projects. I remember when I first started working at a one-up and there were connect games being reviewed. One of his products was lead me's, which was basically you are on front of the camera and things are walking across your body. You have to like lead them across like it's sort of like lemmings, but your body is are the platforms. You're leading things across. I mean, cool idea. I don't think that's what he wanted to do. So in 2014, he left to form his own company called ArtPlay, and that is essentially the beginning of this entire story. But it's funny. So in 2008 and 2010, the last two Castlevania games are coming out.

And at that same time, something was happening in the gaming world. Who can tell me what that is? What new scene is rising in the late 2000s? Was it the EDM? Possibly, but that's unrelated to games. That would be the mobile upbringing. And indie games, too. So indie games sort of filled the gap.

So we are living almost, it's like Peres before swine, these Metroidvania games where now Metroidvania. So when I was writing about games, it was sort of an editorial command, like don't use Metroidvania. I'm not saying you said this, Jeremy, but people were like of the opinion, like, Metroidvania is a stupid word. No one knows what it is. There has to be a better word for this.

Don't use it. Yeah, I'm still seeing articles like that. They're wrong. They're wrong. People understand what they mean. And in fact, when you go on to Nintendo Z shop, and, you know, And on Steam, that is a category. You can select.

So the cultural awareness is there. Ten years of games journalists ramming this word into your brain. It's all worked. So now it's okay if we use Metroidvania. But in the time that Castlevania has left, so many Metroidvanias have risen. I think things that have come very close to capturing Castlevania's magic, like I would say Hollow Night. I think I like it even more than Bloodstain. Like Hollow Night is like the high watermark for me.

It's an amazing... I would say it's the best Metroid being out there. And it is much more Metroid. is Kalsavana because it's not as messy as the Egania's, but I feel like now bloodstained is not as special anymore because so many other creators have

sort of filled the gap, although they are not making the same game Egarashi's making. They are making their own interpretation of that themselves. So I want to get into the development history of bloodstained ritual of the night. And in case you didn't know this, it's a kickstart a success story, although it was many years in the making. and it was the second highest fundraising total until a few months later

when Shenmoo 3 had their Kickstarter in 2015. So that game was not out yet, and it looks like it might exist at some point. I mean, limited run games just put the limited edition up for sale. That's true. That's true. That means... So there's got to be something. There's some sort of promise there.

So, yeah, this was kickstarted in May of 2015. The estimated delivery was March of 2017, and I'll say, hey, we ran a Kickstarter. sometimes you're a bit optimistic about when you can deliver things and all of our things have been delivered by the way but there were development problems

which would be expected from Kickstarter I don't know how you guys feel that when I give to a Kickstarter I just file it away my brain like eventually one day I will have something all of the Kickstarter updates gets sent to this abandoned

like folder in my Gmail that I never see so when I get a game code it's like oh yeah I forgot I backed La Moulana too still waiting on unsung story by the way But, yeah, that...

Little orbit will do it someday. That's got to be something. Like, send me something in the mail that proves that I gave you 20 bucks five years ago. Prove of life. Yes. Just a lock of Matsuno's hair or something. At least one of them. But so the goal was 500,000, and they took in 5.5 million.

And they met so many stretch goals to the point where their stretch goals are now DLC that's still coming in as of this recording date. Like things like the rogue-like mode and other bonus modes like that. are still coming planned features in this game. But this game was released, I believe, in June of 2019. So we're sitting here in September, and it's still semi-incomplete. Like, the core game is complete, but still they have a lot more to add to it. And, of course, as of this recording, there are switch problems with the switch version. Yeah, the switch version, the internal resolution is very clearly sub 720P.

And I'm not, righty somewhere on there. Yeah, I'm not really a person. who fusses too much when, you know, like, I'm not going to count lines. So when someone's like, hey, Halo 3 is only 700p instead of 720, I don't care. But this is actually to the point where even on that tiny switch portable screen, you're kind of like, ooh, that's not looking so great. The bigger issue is just the frame rate. The frame rate's pretty bad. And there is like a tiny, like maybe a frame or two of control lag, which is not ideal.

I think the complaints about it have been exaggerated, having. played several hours of the Switch version. But, you know, like, definitely it could stand to be sharpened up, and they are working on that. They immediately said, hey, we realize this came out, not in the best condition, and we want to make it right. So what was great about this Kickstarter is I believe they partnered with FanGamer, the great company to, you know, I believe Igarashi didn't really know a lot about Kickstarter, but KG Nafune was one of the first big success stories and also one of the first big disappointments. But I guess in 2015, he wasn't quite at that disappointment stage yet. So there was a turning point in Japanese development where these creators

were leaving and some of them were being forced out of their company like Kojima. Kiji Inafune, the godfather of Mega Man, not the creator, but the steward of Mega Man. He had left to form his own company to Kickstarter Mighty Number 9. And so a lot of creators were leaving. And across the world, there were a lot of Kickstarter success stories. So this is what made you get Rashi want to do this. And I believe this started out with a lot of cheeky teases. So there was the Sorter Whip website. I mean, what was going to happen was obvious, but they did an excellent job of building up hype.

I don't think they would have hit $5 million. People were ready immediately to give this thing money instead of them just dropping in your laps and saying, hey, look, bloodstain's coming out. This great pipe building and the amazing video they made to launch the Kickstarter, I think, were a very excellent job of building the hype that was already pre-built for them. People wanted this. But then this campaign made them realize how much. much they wanted it. Yeah. And Igarashi is a very shy, introverted kind of guy. I've

interviewed him many times, and he's just very sort of quiet. And despite the fact that he walks around with a bullwhip and a cowboy hat, he's not a flamboyant person. It's just like that one quirk of his public persona. But he did a great job with the campaigning for this and the publicity of sort of, you know, playing a goofball and playing up sort of cheeky references to his work. And yeah, I don't know, like, just kind of knowing who he is in real life, I really admire the fact that he was sort of willing to sort of step up and adopt the public persona a little bit to help pitch this game. Yeah, I feel like also, you know, at the same time, he was happy to do this because it was something he was able to work on that he was passionate about and people

stood behind him for once. And it was really fun to see him sort of lean into the memes of Castlevania. Like, we all know this is a joke, and he's playing into it, like, throwing the wine glass and things like that. So, yeah, it was great to see him. part of the joke. I was lucky enough to get to interview him for this. Meaning in person, yes, he's a very, like, down-to-earth normal guy. He's not like, he never whipped me. I can say that. Even though I

asked. Yeah. And it was weird. Like, I felt like I wasn't the first to break this story, and I mentioned in a previous podcast, but I found it interesting. Like, he wasn't thinking of Metroid when he was developing something in the night. In fact, he was a Castlevania Worst like me. He looked at Calcivania and said, these games are hard. I want

to make an approachable Castlevania game. Yeah, I think like the actual mantra was he wanted to make a case of any game where you can't fall for the ditch. Yeah, that was a big part of the philosophy. But he also said that Zelda was a major influence, especially linked to the past, where all of the backtracking you do when you get certain items and things like that. So, I mean, technically these are Zelda vannias, but Metroid was the conclusion the fans came to before the creator stepped in and said, well, this was actually my inspiration.

I don't know. Well, I mean, when you hit the select key and you get a map that looks almost exactly like the endgame Super Metroid map, you kind of say, hmm, where did that come from? Yeah, I mean, that idea was definitely borrowed, or at least the UI somebody thought of Metro when designing that. I mean, like the specific coloration and the iconography of it, it was very Metroid. Yeah, yeah, like the right thoughts.

Forward thinking of, in a day where everyone puts RPG elements in the games, he was one of the first to, like, what if we just make an action game that has RPG elements? And has he ever commented on Super Metroid or the Metroid games in general, Jeremy? I mean, he's said he enjoys them. Yeah. You know, I feel like with somebody in the night, they were kind of reaching back into, like, 10 years prior when RPGs were first exploding in Japan. And if you go back and you look at Famicom, NES games, released in 1987, 88, so many of them take that action thing and, like, 2D platforming and tie RPG mechanics to it. things like Vizanado, Zelda 2, even Pakensoft's Rambo game.

Like, all of these games, you know, were saying, how can we do the Dragon Quest thing, but as an action game? And then that kind of went away, and you didn't really see a lot of it. Like, how many 2D action RPGs were there in the 16-bit era? There was, like, East 3, there was Popple Mail, maybe one or two others, but it just kind of vanished. And then he sort of brought it back in a much more. elaborate, exciting way. And I say he, but I mean, obviously

it was a whole team. And he actually didn't start out as director on the city. It was actually Toru Hagiwara. And you know, he kind of stepped in and when Hagiwara, I think, became an executive, he stepped in and took over and finished up the project and then

took that and just ran with it for the sequels and kept, you know, building and iterating on the concept. Yeah, he did kind of, I don't want to say fail upwards because it does, like, diminish his role a bit, but he ended up just sort of being the Castlevania guy, the producer of the series, through almost happenstance.

After Symphony of the night, they went like, okay, well, what can you do next? And he ended up on other projects that were not necessarily Castlevania, but he started rolling into like, well, I do want to go back and revisit this idea and thus begin the lifetime of Igavannias.

Yeah, after Symphony, the next few games to come out in the Castlevania series were Castlevania 64 in, like, a Sea of Darkness. There was Circle the Moon, Castlevania Legends, Castlevania Chronicles,

like none of those games he was involved with. Yeah, that was... It wasn't until Harmony of Dissinence in 2002. So there was like a five-year gap between Symphony and Harmony of Dissinance where he wasn't involved in the series, but then he came back and I guess they were like, hey, people really liked Symphony in the Night,

so can you just do more of that? Yeah, we tend to think of it as a standard. Like, there's always been Igavina since Symphony of the Night, but there was such a long break, and it really wasn't critically acclaimed again until Aria. That's true. I forgot like there were five years between Symphony and Aria, Wait, and Harmony of Dissinance.

And Circle of the Moon was sort of like, can we do this again in a way? It was a halfway point. Yeah, that was Castlevania, I mean, Konami, I want to say Kobe. I've heard that, yeah. I could be wrong. It might have been Nagoya, but anyway, it wasn't the Tokyo team that Igarashi was part of. Although it was confusing because in the credits there is someone named Koji. And I thought, Koji, Igarashi, but no, it's just someone else who's Koji.

Go figure. Yeah, you were talking about this earlier, Jeremy, and that it's sort of a throwback. Well, Symphony was a throwback to the late 80s and RPGs influencing action games. You didn't name Castlevania, too. Was there a reason why? No, I mean, it was one of those also. Because I was thinking Castlevania, too, like, number – that's one of the major ones I can think of. I didn't know if there's a reason why you weren't including it in there.

No, I just didn't want to make a complete comprehensive list. Oh, no, no, it's okay. Because we're talking about Castlevania, and I think, like, Symphony has a lot in common with two. And it's like there's equipment and stats and a continuous map. At the same time, Igorashi is not a big fan of Castlevania 2. I remember asking him, like, hey, you know, you've referenced back to the original Castlevania, and then, you know, you can play as the cast of Castlevania 3, basically, is the bonus mode of Don of Sorrow.

So have you ever thought about going back to Castlevania 2? He was like, oh, that game, everyone lied to you in that game. That wasn't any fun. Yeah, we found out. Why would you want to play that again? I remember it was like maybe 10 years ago or 15 years ago. We found out it's like, no, it wasn't, I mean, it was badly translated, but also it was accurately translated in that.

The Graveyard Duck actually is a referred to as a duck in Japanese. Yeah, check out the Legends of Localization article about that. It's really interesting. It was interesting early on his tenure as Castlevania producer. Iger Roshy had a lot of very strongly held beliefs about Castlevania that he kind of softened on as time went on. Like, there was a weird thing where when the Wii was first shown, he's like, that doesn't make any sense for Castlevania. What would you just do? Use the Wii as a whip and like, no, you just make a 2D game.

And there was the thing with Sonia Belmont. Yeah, a woman can't be a progenitor for the Belmont family. Right. Because I guess the idea was that the Belmont name wouldn't be passed down because she'd take her husband's name. It was a very strange thing. And I honestly think that that reasoning, like the backlash to that comment, was kind of what set off some of the decisions for bloodstained. I guess, like, it's funny that in a world with vampires and werewolves and ghosts is like a woman keeping her own name. That's bizarre.

That's ridiculous. But yes, the protagonist of this game is obviously a woman. And I want to go into the messy development of this because there are so many companies involved with a piece of this pie, which I think it's just a state of modern developments these days. It feels like very rarely just one development studio make a big game like those. So the studios behind this are ArtPlay, so that is Koji Garashi Studio, founded in 2014. It's the main developer on Bloodstained, and this is the Japanese Division's focus since it opened. I believe ArtPlay is a offshoot of a Chinese mobile developer, I'm pretty sure. So that's correct, I'm wrong.

Okay. And is the existing Chinese company known as ArtPlay? I believe so. So Koji just opened up a Japanese branch for that studio. He joined the main company, and then they branched him off to go do his own thing after that. Okay. And I think also Kiji Nafune has a Chinese studio or is working with a Chinese studio as well. So, no, actually, he's at level first.

but there was a while where concept their Kickstarter for Red Ash which was re-dash It was a clever name Yeah it was a bad idea but a clever name I mean I played the little

sad little demo they released and it felt right but they didn't do anything more with that That was going to be a failed Kickstarter and then a Chinese company stepped in and I think was it Tencent? I don't know no it was a Tencent It was not Nixon They were a company that claimed to have a console

That would play all games What was that? Yeah, it never materialized It didn't and their website was very sketchy Yeah, so that was That was kind of a shame, but The anime came out He joined to...

The anime came out? Wow, this is a weird tangent But I have no idea what happened In that property, I was learning this now The anime, there is a re-dash anime There was an anime movie that was just Made separately basically Yeah, nothing to do with them

Yeah, because they launched a Kickstarter for an anime and the game At the same time. Yeah, very bad. See, this is what happens. You need to get somebody like an entity like fan gamer involved who works with and sells things to video game fans. They know what fans want and how to serve it to them and how to hype it up for them. Right.

I mean, games occasionally need publishers to get like things happening. And that was a lesson that a lot of people learned in the Kickstarter boom of early 2010. So, yeah, ArtPlay is the studio involved in the biggest way. There are other studios involved. So one studio is DECO or D-I-C-O-I-E-O-E-E-E-O-E-E-E-E-O. I assume it's DECO, they were just making assets and contributing to level design. They took over the role that Intercreates once played when they left the project. That feels really messy.

We'll get to them in a second. Also, way forward did just sort of like a pass on this, just sort of like was the editor in a way, just, you know, touching things up. The source I got said they polished the game, in quotes, which can mean a lot of things. Yeah, I mean, they do a lot of Metroidvania games there. And I know the people who worked on it, it was definitely Tom Hewlett, and it might have been Austin Ivan Smith. Don't quote me on that, but, you know, they were the folks who worked on Mummy Demastered, which was a pretty solid kind of like Contra-esque take on the Igavenia.

I believe they're more involved now, like with the process of the switchport fixing of like they know how to do that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. So way forward, I had a small role, but still an important one. But also I want to talk about like what Intecreates did for this game because it's kind of confusing looking at various sources and various credit lists for this game. So number one, Intecreates. developed bloodstained curse of the moon, which is an amazing

Castlevania-like, an 8-bit demake-ish version of ritual of the night. Jeremy, have you played this? Yeah, I reviewed it for IGA. Okay, I forgot about that, but this is my ideal retro-Castelvania game because it's made in a fair way. It feels like it's made with modern

sensibilities in mind, but it's also a difficult platformer but not unfair. Yeah, right, yeah. It's really good. And also a non-canon to the actual main game. Right, right. Yeah, it throws a bunch of characters together who have no business being together. I played it before, I knew anything about the actual game because it came out a year before

Ritual of the Night. So I played it all and I forgot all the story details, but I was like, oh, that's that character, that's that character. I really need to go back and play it again, but yeah. So Intecreates, they made that Curse of the Moon game, which you would get if you kickstarted ritual of the night, I believe, or it's just available for 10 bucks. Yeah, you can just buy it now. But it's really good. Please play that. Maybe we'll talk about

that more in the future. But so Intecreates, they did some initial design work and confusingly, Moby Games lists some Integrates people in major roles in the game, including director, but the actual credits don't. The credits of the game don't list those people. It's weird. I spent like a couple of months trying to actually figure this out when I was so

at Game Informer that I was trying to talk to integrate people about it and they were saying well, it was always planned that we would not be on the project at the end, which is not true. Yeah, I didn't think so. As far as I could tell they were supposed to be, but maybe it just wasn't coming together, maybe they had different ideas.

Maybe they just weren't working with Unreal Engine 4 very well, but at some point that was decided that ArtPlay would take over and Intercreates would only focus on the 8-bit-style game. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I was just at Pax, so recording this about a week after Pax, and it's interesting to see how Integrates has changed as a studio when previously they would do development for bigger IP.

And now if you go to their booth at a convention, it's like these are all of their characters. They're running with things like Gunwold and other things in Galgun. They have their own world, and I think maybe they were getting out of doing things for other people and running with their own brands and developing their own brands. I did talk to that at E3, I had a meeting with them, and I was like, hey, do you plan to do more like Castlevania-style games? And they meant they kind of slightly intonated yes that they're going to probably, but they didn't say they would be doing it for bloodstain specifically. So it might be a thing that they, like now that they have those chops under their belt, they're going to do it themselves.

Yeah, I mean, they, I don't even know what the ownership issues are, or like the nature is with the Blastermaster Master stuff they're doing. But they made like a Blastermastermaster remake and then a complete sequel to it. so that's interesting and I don't know who owns that Sunsoft who owns Sunsoft stuff does Sunsoft What is the status of Sunsoft I don't know what who owns Sunsoft

It would go to Hudson and thus cannot Would it? Sunsoft? Mm-mm I don't know Because they were still around as of I don't know like five or six years ago But I haven't looked up on them Checked up on them lately Yeah maybe it's one of those like River City Ransom

Things where just nobody knows Now River City Ransom is million So Oh there is now but it was a weird period in the early 2000s. Oh, okay. I noticed because I tried to buy Re Re Revenue at one point.

Did you? Yes. And it just nobody really knew who owned it. And like Atlas's game kind of came out and like I don't think Atlas knew who owned it.

So they just made one. That's right with bad like Penny Arcade style cover arts. Yeah, there were a few, it was bad. There were a few games kind of like, hey, we're doing River City Ransom and only Atlas actually delivered.

Yeah. Which that happened in the middle of all those like negotiations and talk of who owns it. And there was, like, one guy who claimed to own it, who I was talking to, that was making a fan game himself, but wasn't really getting off the ground. Right. So now somebody owns it. Now are Millionerxes and all that.

Like, they have their control over it. I thought it was, this is also a tangent, but I thought it was just marvelous because marvelous is the Katamari ball of Japanese companies clinging together for life. Just like, we have to hold on all the tiny companies just sticking together. I wouldn't be shot. Like, I guess they own deadly premonition? Yeah, that's also weird. It's also weird, like, does Rising Star Games have that, or it's not access? Yeah, a bunch of Japanese game IP stuff is weird.

Yeah. And we don't know who owns what. But I do want to talk about the people behind the development. So obviously, Koji Igarashi, we know him best as the writer of Tokimaki Memorial. But seriously, we have done about 100 Castlevania episodes. Check out one of those for more on him. but his role in this game was just basically the if this was a TV show he'd be the executive producer

so he's sort of like the overseer of the game I'm sure he did design work I'm sure he did a lot of odd jobs on this game but it is his style being brought forth but I want to talk about some of the other people behind the game including some of the returning Castlevania celebrities so the not really talked about too often director of this game is Shutaro Ida and he's the director and someone Ego worked on with past games

so there was he directed Harmony of Despair, which was the final Castlevania game before Lords of Shadow and whatnot. He was a chief programmer on Ari of Sorrow, Harmony of Distinence, and Lament of Innocence. Also, the writer of Portrait of Ruin, and his pseudonym is Curry, the Kid. So that is his resume with Konami, at least. But yeah, he's the director of the game, and he was one of the people that Ega brought around. So when I was talking to him way back in 2015, like four plus years ago, said, it's not just me, I'm also bringing some of my Konami talent with me to work on this

game. And based on what I played, yes, he brought the right people along. Like, this is definitely of the Igavania style. So some returning talent to this game. We have Michiro Yamane. So this is one of the Castlevania's main composers of the Igarashi era. So a little preview on her, a little biography on her, is that she joined Konami in the late 80s. Her first competition was for a 1988 Famicom menu-based adventure game based around a real idol singer. So she started all the way back on the Famicom

and she started composing on Castlevania Games with 1997 Symphony of the Night and has basically defined the music ever since then. And she did a lot of work on the music for this game, but also there are maybe like four or five other composers and they are all into creates people.

So I guess they were the legacy talent that stuck around or their contributions were the ones that that were done in the beginning of the game's development, maybe. I don't know what the story is there, but everyone else who did music was from IntoCreates. That wasn't Kojima. Or sorry, Yamane.

And, yeah, so I brought up Kojima. It's not Hideo Kojima. It's Ayami Kojima. And I believe she is known for defining the look of the series based on the cover art, the very Baroque designs, the very pretty men. And I believe all she did was the cover art, but it's a very beautiful cover.

so she once again is defining look for this game so as you can see he's got like a real killer's row here of talent along with a lot of other development studios helping him out but he brought the right people along and a lot of these people outside of the director I believe they were Kickstarter goals too just like we'll get this person we'll get that person we'll have this cover we'll do this much music a lot of these were based on the amount they took in for the Kickstarter which is a much better set for goals than it is for like to add more content because that's how when everyone, it gets away from them. Like, I think the Yacht Club is just now

finishing up their Kickstarter goals. Yeah, for Shuffle Night, right? Yeah. Yes. That game is finished now, or? It's still stuff to be released, but it's mostly done. Shuff Night Dig is coming out. That game is really good, by the way.

And what made this very good is that outside of the delays, and there was a bit of complaining, understandably, when they canceled the Vita version and the Wii U version. But from what I know, this was basically a scandal-free Kickstarter. So the problem with the Vita and Wii U versions wasn't that they canceled it is that they announced it in the first place. Yes.

Because those games were not, they were running on Unreal Engine 4, which not compatible with Vita and Wii, like Epic has said we don't support those contals at all. Why they announced those versions knowing that is insane to me, but they said they would get Armitter Studios, which is made up of former Metroid Prime retro people. and said they will not only port the engine to Wii U and Vita, they'll then port the game using that engine, which is an unrealistic expectation for any Kickstarter game, period. They started on that, and the march of time inevitably diminished the ability to do that, and they eventually canceled the Vita version, move the Wii U version to Switch.

But getting them to try and port UE4 to those consoles is absolutely insane, and it completely, I don't know that they ever actually plan to do, it. I don't know how far they ever got. Yeah, I don't know why they promised that. And to be fair, the people who backed those versions weren't, their money wasn't stolen from them. They had options to upgrade to different versions of that game. But I understand why. And I don't know why they would promise that. But I was looking at the Kickstarter goals a lot earlier when I was writing these notes. And some of the goals for ports, I'm like, boy, you're not asking very much. I'm glad they made $5.5 million because I don't know how they would have done any of this without

that money. And they're still working on it now. And a lot of these things still haven't come out like I'm looking at the Kickstarter rewards now like a retro level a classic mode I believe the boss rush and speed run modes are out for the game as of this recording I think so but there's a lot going on that has not been finished yet but as far as I know I mean and they could just if they wanted to or if they didn't have the resources they could just stop development completely but I want to believe that enough people bought the game to fund for the development because the amount that they raised I don't think this much game is coming out of only five million dollars with the development money yeah no they ended up getting up

a publisher in the long run. That's right, 505 games. Yeah, that's right. And I guess I don't know who was going to publish it before that, but they provided more funds for development and publishing and stuff like that. Yeah, they happen to lock out at a time that 505 was looking for indie developers to work on games because they were trying to rehabilitate their own image. It's interesting because I know this because I have done a Kickstarter before, of course,

with Retronaut six years ago. Once you set out your plan and write your text for the Kickstarter, you can't change it. So the Kickstarter still says, you know, oh, into creates, we'll be creating this game. Here are all the people associated with it. So a lot of this up front is incorrect on the Kickstarter page. So that is interesting. Do you have any other insight onto

the Kickstarter, Imrah? I know you said you had a lot of, you were following it, you're following Euraschi. I didn't know if anything else happened. As soon as it happened, I backed it, and then I just ignored it because I wanted to be totally surprised by the game. I backed it and I started watching because they made a lot of lofty promises of we want

people to be more involved, which they did. They actually got, I think they sent out developer surveys every month of what do you guys think about this? We're releasing a new demo. What do you guys feel about this? One of the one controversial things that are a member was early on, they showed a Miriam design that was, how do I put this? She was a lot more flat chested. And people complained because they thought, oh, well, this is not marketable. We don't like this design.

And so in the final game, like maybe a couple of months after they show this is a little design, and she was a lot more buxom. Yeah. I mean, right now we're living through Renoa Gate in the games press. Four pixels of cleavings. Let's not even talk about sirens, pubic feathers. Oh, no. Boy, they're ruining all of games.

They just announced, you know, the Switch version of Tokyo Mirage sessions, so we're going to be back to vagina bones too. They're censoring all the vagina bones out of our games. But, yeah, I mean, I feel like going back and looking at what they were doing throughout the Kickstarter when I was ignoring it, they were falling through with a lot of feedback. Maybe they followed through on a lot of not so good feedback. Yeah, they really isn't to the audience.

It's just the question of like whether there was not a whole lot of delegation in terms of who should be making those decisions. And the game got a really good graphic overhaul. And they're even making fun of how bad the game looked in their video for saying, look at the game now. It no longer looks like poop anymore. Yeah. The poop graphics are gone. Like they literally, it was a slider that just like said poop on one side. Yeah.

And yeah, I don't know if anybody in the room played this. I think Jeremy gave me his code or something. There was a, so this game came out in 2019. In 2016, there was an E3 demo, and that was distributed to backers of a certain level. I think I might have gotten one, but I did play it then. And that version of the game still feels relatively the same, but it is a very different-looking game. And I think you can still access that portion of the previous work on Steam or wherever you got it from. Yeah, I think I did give you my code.

I did play it at E3, though, that year. so before the public release of it and it was basically the first section, the boat and the structure was pretty much the same. He still fought more or less the same boss, but it worked a little differently. The boss battle was different and it looked, it definitely looked different, but it felt right.

Like they got the feel right. I was a bit worried about the boss of the demo because I just remember, like, I'm whipping this giant lady in her naked breasts. It didn't feel that as much that was the point of the boss battle in the final version of the game. You're tacking her in the face and also on her monster belly.

Yes, Monster belly. Igarashi's games could end up being a little horn donkey. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, his games do have a fondness. I don't know if it's him, but someone who works with him has a fondness for the female characters. And it's fun to have, you know, more female characters around the castle. But sometimes you're like, I don't necessarily need to see that. Castlevania judgment really kind of leaned into it in a way that not super comfortable.

Oh my God, I forgot about that game That is stricken from the record I guess that was made during Was it 2010? That was the low budget years It was his belief that a classic Castlevania would not work on Wii Thus he made a party fighting game

Yeah, it was a fighting game With character designs by the Death Notes Manga author Yeah, and then like a year or two later M2 made a really great classic Castlevania game for Wii Which has never been ported elsewhere Which is frustrating

They need to do that That could be another Switch M2 release Have they done M2 Switch releases on any class of games Yeah, they did the Konami collection That's what I thought, yeah This is a Konami game The Rebirth

Which I assumed it would have had it, but it didn't, no Yeah, one thing I think we're missing out on In this modern era is that So in order to give this game context It helps to have played the games that came before And you can see what he's doing What has been brought over, what's changed, what he's reflecting upon

And I thought it was kind of cool That the Wii U was a failure of a system But I think it had like one of the more robust virtual consoles. And all three of the Game Boy Advanced Castlevania, EGovania games were available. And Konami, of course, is putting out Castlevania collections. And those I hear are very good. And they have achievements in everything and safe states and everything you need. But because they were dual screen games, the three, there were three games.

Yeah, three DS games. They have not been made available digitally in any way. You have to track down the carts. and they're very expensive at this point. Or not, they're at the most expensive things, but people will charge money for them because they are some of the better games. Yeah, Order of Ecclesia is really getting up there, I know.

Yeah, and I do want to return to that, but I don't see a solution unless they're reprogrammed in a way that the bottom screen can be a pause menu. And I think there wasn't a lot of touchscreen functionality in that series after the first game had you draw on the screen before the boss fights, the first DS game. Both elaborate and silly.

It was possibly unnecessary. It was one of those things of like, I don't know if Nintendo mandated it or as an audience or marketing it. Yeah, the saying, like, you have to use a touchscreen somehow, and it used it in a very dumb way. Yeah. Portrait of Ruin did a great job of it with the bonus mode where you can play as the sisters, and they're controlled entirely with the stylus. That is cool.

But it's optional. You don't have to draw, like, a pattern to kill a boss. You know, the Switch has a touchscreen, and there is an accessory that allows you to play a Switch. If they can put the Mega Man ZX games on the Switch, they can put anything. Ooh, they did do that. Yeah. What is this? It's going to be announced last week, I think.

It was a few weeks ago. It was a few weeks ago, yeah. I guess it takes more work than emulation, but it is possible. So maybe we'll see these. I hope we do. I hope we even see just the GBA release because I'm not going to ask anyone to buy a Wii at this point. Port Jeter Ruma is a little weird because, like, it came out, I want to say less than 10

months after Donoom Sorrow. It was very, very quickly after. And I can remember thinking, like, I don't, did Konami just focus on Kessuania so much? They think these are big sales are getters. Yeah, I think, in my opinion, I think annualizing the series made it less special to me because, again, we are living in the Perils before swine era where we're just thrown Metroidvania is the best Metroidvania's ever. And we're just like, I'm too busy for this. And when those DS games are coming out, I played the first one. And then before I knew it, there were two more.

And I'm like, I just played Castlevania. Give me a break. But now it's like, oh, I really want to play those. And I feel like the mistake of Konami was making those come out so often for the DS. They didn't feel as special as they did after, you know, 10 years and we didn't get anything. So, yeah, I'd love to see those available again when I can now finally have full respect for them. But, yeah, we'll take a break now. And when we come back, we'll actually talk about the game, a bloodstained ritual of the night.

Oh, right, that's what this is about. Thank you. So, I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm not I'm going to be I'm going to

I'm I'm going to I'm going I'm on I'm So we're back to talk about the actual the damn video game, Bloodsame Ritual of the Night. And because we talked about Castlevania so much, we don't really need to tell you how these kind of games play.

So I thought we'd go over many of the features of this game in pretty good detail and have a loose discussion around them. know like, hey, what do they bring to the table? What are they returning to? What are they adding that's new compared to past EGivania? It helps if you have played those games, but if not, we'll try to give you a leg up into this world of EGivania. So I guess we could start talking about the story, and we all just admitted like, oh, yeah, there's a story in this game. Which, when it comes to Symphony the Night in games like this, it's like, I'm reminded every hour or two, like, oh, right, there's a story, and then I forget about it. So, like, it's all told out of context, piecemeal, you meet characters.

And then eventually, if you, like, think about all of the cutscenes, they all make sense together and order, but you're seeing them space so far apart. I mean, it's a very video game problem the way stories are told. Yeah, and I admittedly am not that far into the game, but they don't really spend a lot of time thinking about consistency. So, you know, you get to the little village where it's kind of your hub for the game, and your bookish pal, I can't remember his name, is like, hey, yeah, I'm just going to stay here and hang out. because I'll die if I don't. But then you get into the castle away and all of a sudden you're talking to someone and your bookish friend runs onto the screen.

I'm like, wow, you like briskly ran through all these horrible mobs of monsters. How did you get past that lion night so fast? That's a good question, yeah. But do you play somebody, it's a shard binder, I believe the title of the character is and that it's a world where a tragedy happened because of the men playing God.

And of course you're living in the aftermath of this And then a magical castle appears. That's really all you need to know. There is a Dracula-like figure. There are some returning voice actors, at least one returning voice actor, and that the original voice of Alucard plays the librarian in this game. And you can tell he has aged. And he's not being recorded in a bathroom anymore.

Oh, weird. Yeah. So that guy is back. He plays a character named O.D., which it's like Orlock, Dracula or something like that. But I just think of him as original Dracula. Orlock being the original vampire. Right. from Nosferatu, which was all, it's funny that so much, so much of this vampire stuff is like skirting around IP laws.

So Nosferatu was made because they couldn't get the license or the rights to use Dracula. So Nosferatu is just like the generic version of Dracula. And so this is the generic version of Castlevania, which was using things that were stolen from universal, universal movie monsters. Yeah. And some of those ideas were in the public domain. And hammer films too. And some of those ideas were in the public domain. So this entire genre is all about stealing in a way.

Basically copyright loss sucks and we need to revise it. I totally agree. I totally agree. Get rid of it all, except for podcasts. Let me profit from those. The original like, hey, 20 years, that's good. You know, own your work for 20 years. That's great.

I want to make my own Mickey Mouse. Yes. Let him live out my ideas. But yeah, so there's a story in this game. It's very Castlevania. And I believe Egas said, like, yeah, Dracula's public domain. But I don't want Dracula in this game because. I want to make my own, you know, stamp.

I want to make my own thing. Probably there could be some legal stuff, maybe, if he gets too close, flies too close of that Konami's son, who knows. But there's a story in this game. But I do want to talk about some of the systems in this game. So the major system in this game that does resemble previous systems. And I'm a little fuzzier on the DS games than Jeremy is. And I'm not sure about Imrom, if you remember a lot of this stuff.

But there were so many, like, soul systems in these games, all based around, what things enemies drop. Yeah, so this is, sorry, I'm talking over you. No, go ahead. Like, this is straight up the sequel to Order of Ecclesia. Like, Miriam is Shanoa, pretty much. Except that Shanoa, like, could pull magical glyphs and use them as tattoos, whereas Miriam uses, like, fragments of demon glass or something.

They're tattoos in a way. That become tattoos. Yeah. Yeah. So it's pretty much the same thing. And you can, you can equip them to. different parts of your body, essentially, and use them as, like, supporting utility spells. So it's an evolution of Ariavsar, Don of Sorrow, combined with Order of Ecclesia.

Like, Order of Ecclesia, the part of Shanoa's body that was, you attached a tattoo to would kind of affect how you used it, like which button you used and that's the other thing. So, whereas this is like, here's an active skill, here's a passive skill, here's a familiar. Yeah. So, I mean, the way it works is that every enemy has a soul or a shard, rather, and, uh, Each type of shard can do different abilities, and I believe there are five types. So one is the ability that is on the right stick. So she can sort of rotate her arm with the right stick, and that can do things.

One is a projectile attack. One is attached to like the LB or R button, RB button, and that's sort of like an environmental thing. I think one of those is like moving things out of the way. One is passive and one is related to movements. I think those are the – but there are five varieties of skill. and what I noticed was like in Castlevania when you got a relic So in Symphony of the Night when you got a relic You knew like oh this is the thing I need in order to do a certain thing

Like you go to the menu and it says oh you can double jump now or whatever This game is much more subtle in that certain enemy drops are your Metroidvania abilities Like the ability to go underwater and things like that They're not like these big like oh you got the big item sort of fanfare It's just like oh no you have this now The Holy Scuba mask what's that The Holy Scuba mask yeah that's right Things like that where it's like, oh, yeah, now I can go underwater.

With a ritual of the night, it is much more subtle in a way that I actually did get stuck a few times. And I'm not sure. So I'm kind of at the end of the game. I'm not sure, Jeremy, you're a few hours in Imram. How far have you got? I'd say about like 15 hours. Yeah, and it's a pretty beefy game. And I found, like, the times that I did get stuck were like, oh, I always had this ability.

I just never equipped it. Or I didn't notice. I don't think they're as good as signaling when something is giving you an important ability. So I will say if you're stuck in this game, I would dig into your menus and see what you have because you might have something you need to progress in the game. And unlike in Castlevania, you have to equip and unequip certain abilities instead of just having like a bunch of relics you can turn on and off. Yeah, I'm doing something really wild with this game and I'm taking my time with it. Yes, you should. It's the first game I've played in as long as I can remember that I'm not playing for review or for any kind of work-related purpose besides this podcast.

So I'm actually just going to take the time to do side quests as they pop up and, you know, go out and kill time so that the farmer guy can grow some rice for me and I can make food and things like that. Just like take the game as it comes as opposed to rushing through it to see the end. People have been known to play video games for fun. It's happened on the record. It's taking me some effort, but I'm doing it. You should do it more often. It's good for you. You're referring to like this game being essentially the sequel to old.

Order of Ecclesia, and that, like, what you mentioned with the farmer and the village and all that, that's, like, straight up structure taken from Order of Ecclesia, because that game was set up in the thing of, you have a village, you're rescuing the villagers slowly, and you're getting them to create a town. Although, in this case, the villagers just kind of show up. Yeah. They're just like the few survivors. You go back and you're like, where did this person come from?

Every time I go to a boss, I'm like, okay, well, I guess this person survived, so now I can trade food to this old lady who is telling me very vague, abstract ideas of what a pizza is. something round and it's stretchy on top. Just read my thoughts and you'll see the image of it. Yeah, it's funny that, I mean, it's kind of sad that, so Ecclesia came out at what I feel is like maximum Castlevania fatigue when we were

just like, it's the third one in three years, enough, and then it got, was kind of poorly reviewed because there were some enemy damage issues. I remember that was like sort of artificially difficult. That was the sense I got. The boss has taken way too long to the date. It does have an affinity system where you have like

bash attacks, pierce attacks, that sort of thing. which also carries through into bloodstained, like whips and swords and cudgels all deal different kind of damage. But I feel like the bosses in Ecclesia are just so drawn out. I remember a Japanese tiring. A meme comic of like Shanoa just like resting on the ledge while hitting one of the giant crab boss with a pecking horse. Yeah, the giant enemy crab was not exclusive to Sony, by the way. That was one of the things I heard about. That was like the anecdotal elephants I heard over and over by the game.

I was like, you just got to keep wailing on this crab and it takes forever. And actually, I have similar issues with some of the bosses in this game, but we can talk about bosses later. I want to still go back to the shards. What's cool about these shards, and Jeremy, you could refresh my memory about the DS games. So these shards, you equip them obviously, but you can also upgrade them to either amplify their ability or get new abilities. Don Xero definitely had that. You would gain, like, you know, you could get nine Valkyri souls and you'd get like a level nine Valkyri power. So, you know, this was, that game came out in the period of time.

where I was taking the train to work every morning. So believe me, I maxed out everything. And, yeah, this is very much the same sort of thing. Although there are some shortcuts to getting better shards. It's not only, I believe, so. This is a very complicated game, by the way. The systems are really intricate. So when you have these souls, you are given power based on the amount of that same soul you have.

But you can also level up those souls with items. Right. So it's like rank and level. level assigned to each soul thing you have. Shard and Sol and I will keep interchanging them throughout because souls were from the older games and their shards in this game.

So you can level up these souls by having more of them and you can also make them more powerful by dropping items or other shards into them. So there are two ways to make that. So there's a lot to do with all of these different abilities and there are very specific builds to do with them.

I mean, a lot of them are useless and for fun. But it's surprising just because every enemy on the screen has to drop a soul. So every enemy you see has to give you some ability. Yeah, and that also was in portrait of ruin where sub-weapons could be upgraded. And let me tell you a level 9 paper airplane attack was kind of amazing or a level, like a full-level curry attack. Like, it was goofy and fun, and there's definitely some of that in this.

Yeah, like certain things. So there are certain boring ones like, oh, you'll be better with this kind of weapon or that kind of weapon, but then there are other ones that give you the Metroidvania travel abilities and, of course, familiars are part of this game, too. Some of the same familiars you've used in Symphony of the Night. Those can be leveled up both through items and through just use in the world. They have their own experience points and everything like that. So there's a lot going on, and frankly, it is a little overwhelming.

Once you get a ton of shards, just looking at all of them, you can spend a ton of time in the menus. But there's no shortage of tinkering you can do with all of these abilities. It's a very easy game to sync a lot of time, just in the farming, souls, and items to make the ultimate character of your own design. One of the things I liked about aria of sorrow was that kind of tethered the soul system to the story. So, like, spoilers for Ariafsarro, I guess, but Soma Cruz was Dracula. And as you discover this through the game,

you realize the way to unlock the actual final ending is to give him, what was it? It was bat powers. And so it was the ability to drain enemy, like, health, the succubus. Turn into a bat, fireballs. Yeah, and... Basically, Dracula's powers on the NES game.

So you put those four souls on And that's how the game recognizes It lets you into the final area Because it recognizes you are Dracula And like that's one of the things I've been kind of missing from the game since then Is that they're tied into the story But they don't feel as mechanically

As story important So which game was that was that Aria of Sorrow And that was the third GBA game Yes, okay The best one It is really good Even though the it's obvious he's Dracula Yeah

Like isn't his last name like Dr. Acula or something No, his name is Cordo. It's Summa Cruz. Yeah, Aracado is the... Genia Aricano. Yeah, it's just like, why I wonder that is. Yeah, in the beginning, it's all pretty obvious.

But, yeah, so, like, what I like about this game and even more so than past Igivania's is that you get your standard Igavania action game, but all the drops that gives you feeds into these many systems and quests and upgrades and things like that. And also, when I was talking to Igarashi, he said one of the major influences on this game

that he was developing at the time was Monster Hunter because he was playing a lot of Monster Hunter with his son. I guess was a teen or a young person at the time. But the amount of drops in this game, I think, is only accentuated by just how loot-based games have taken over the world since Ega dropped out of Castlevania was not allowed to make them. So this is a very luke-focused game, and there are ways I recommend that you up your luck, which is just a classic way to get more loot in these games.

But there are certain abilities that make enemies drop more things or more of certain things if you upgrade them. So it's a very, you can waste a lot of time, well, not waste. You can spend a lot of time just farming rooms for certain items, looking up wikis to see, okay, where do I get this thing or that thing? And we can start talking about quests now because there's a lot of different quests in the village, the surviving villagers of this catastrophe, want you to do certain things. Some are very easy. So Imrom, you mentioned in your intro, what does that old lady say over and over again? Kill those murderers dead.

Exactly. And that might be your one line of voice dialogue in the entire game. But those are the very easy quest in this game where it's like kill X amount of Y monsters. And it basically involves like, oh, here's a room with this monster. And you just leave and come back a bunch of times. It's all very easy, very basic rewards. You're avenging people from the village. And I think early on, they have Castlevania names, but they start like going into other names.

Yeah, there's like Simon and Lisa. Yeah. I don't know how many of those are Kickstarter backers. That's what I'm wondering. I was like how many of those actually end up going into Kickstarter backwards because they stopped being Castlevania names at some point. There's a lot of those quests, yeah. So that's like some of the first quest you'll encounter.

And again, it's very interesting. I'm sorry, very uninteresting, very like MMO style, very basic quests, like kill all the rats or whatever. Yeah, then there's the nun who's like, please bring me something that is a memento of this person who's dead so that their spirit can rest. And you either have to find it or craft it. In that case, you have to get them a piece of armor or weaponry or item,

and that's what that quest entail. So there's a lot of quests that involve, like, finding or making an item. Another one we talked about is making meals for this old woman, where the meal system is very interesting in this game and that meals can be made to level up. Meals can be made to give you more health, but they also, the first time you eat them, they permanently raise a stat. So it's very important to make all the kinds of food you want. Unfortunately, there was a very hungry old lady who asks you to make the food first, and she gives you a lot of good rewards. But she'll say, I want something that's like salty and fluffy. It'll be like mashed potatoes or whatever, and you have to make those.

And you're not sure what you have to make, but after you talk to her, you'll see a little thought bubble with the picture of the food in it, which is a nice. And on a guinea, the thing that I can eat on the go. And also when you're crafting food, it's either you can buy ingredients from a merchant or you have to find what animals or monsters drop certain things like the beef and the milk and things like that. And often it's not very obvious. In order to make some basic stuff, I had to find out like what animal drops this special kind of meat. And it's just like one cow in one room. but I just exit and enter over and over again. Well, and there's another element to it that's not very transparent, and that is just

creating crops. Like there's a farmer guy who shows up in the village, and he'll plant stuff for you, and then it takes a little while of real game time for it to grow. But before you figure that out, you don't know how do you get rice? How do you get flour? And you actually have to go and buy the seeds for those things or find them and then give them to him and then wait for him to, you know, actually harvest that. stuff. And then you'll get a pretty healthy

quantity of the stock. Like, if you give him rice, you'll get like 10 quantities of rice or 10 things of flour for giving him wheat or whatever. But it, you know, it's not transparent and you have to figure that out on your own, which, like, I think it's actually kind of interesting. It doesn't hold your hand about it. Also, not

transparent is the fact that there's some of that stuff comes from blue chests that you go past, you open them up and then like, okay, well, I got the flour from this one. Yeah. You don't know they respond until you come back to them or happen to come back to them later I was like, did I come to this area before? Did I just happen to miss this chest?

At first I thought the game was bugged. I was like, well, more treasure for me then. But then I realized like, oh, no, these are just regenerating resources. Yeah, I figured that out pretty early on because I wanted to go back into the ship after kind of setting the town up and fill out the areas of the map that I hadn't that I could, you know, pass into. And I was like, wow, I sure missed a lot of chests. And then I realized, no, wait, I've been through this room.

So clearly this chest just regenerates. And I realized it's, you know, like resource items. So it's a kind of nice feature. I guess they put those chests on your map to the blue chess. I think they'll show up on your map if you zoom in. I'm pretty sure. Some chess show up. So, yeah, there's a lot of systems and quests going on.

So we talked about all the quests that are happening in the game. But there's also a bunch of systems. So Jeremy mentioned farming. But crafting is a major part of this. And I can't remember in the DS games, was there crafting, like building weapons and armor based on enemy drops? Yes. in I want to say portrait of ruin you could upgrade weapons

I feel like there was some okay so in Donna Sorrow you could take souls that you had captured and you could infuse them into weapons and there were some souls that were like one time only souls like from bosses that you would be valuable or if you wanted to like have 100% completion

you'd have to give them up to create a really really great weapon So it was kind of a trade-off. Yeah, Darkfell has kind of ripped that off completely. But for the better, I will say. I don't know. But, yeah, crafting is a big part of it. I feel like everything is heading in this direction.

I have no problem with crafting. So we are living in a post-Nintendo Direct of September World. It's like, oh, Animal Crossing is crafting now. Like, this is the world that we just live in where every game is crafting. So it's leaning into it, but it's fine. And you can make a lot of things, including food, armor, weapons, items, things like that. and what I've just discovered upon like 15 to 20 hours of playing is like, oh, dismantling is something you could do,

which is also very easy to overlook. So taking apart things you either find or buy, you can get a lot of items that are otherwise hard to get on their own. Yeah, the only thing is you have to have alchemic, what is it called? It's an alchahist. You can buy it, that's it. You can buy it, but it's like 800 gold, or you can find it from certain enemies, like ghosts will drop it.

So at least in the beginning of the game, it's very expensive. and you have to use like more alchahest, like a greater quantity of it to dismantle rare and cool things. Like if you trade in an 8-bit or 16-bit coin for a really cool, unique weapon, you can dismantle that and get your coin back and do something else with it. But you have to spend a lot of alkaest to do it. I think by the time I tried it, I had so much of that. I didn't realize it was an asset that was being used every time I did it. Like I killed a lot of those ghost things for the alchahist. But yeah, so there's a lot to go into this game.

including the crafting, it's very, I mean, it's just combining items, but there's a lot to get out of that that you can't buy in a shop, very powerful items in armor and weapons and things like that. And, yeah, so dismantling is also important, too. But I want to move on and talk about the actual levels in this game, the level design. And based on what you played with previous Castlevenias, how do you guys think this compares to the other Igivania, just in terms of level theming, level layouts, shortcuts, things like that? earlier on it wasn't that impressive like very early on in the game

when you're just on the village you're coming to the castle originally it's a lot of very flat hallways and like by the time you get to the third room in Symphony of the Night you're already vertically jumping up platforms and going to different areas that this game does not onboard you that quickly

yeah I feel like this you know once you get into the castle it really reminds me of the marble hall of the marble gallery in Symphony of the Night where it's pretty much just a long stretch all the way straight across the castle. Which is because Ego loved Rondo of Blood,

so he wanted to reference that place. But it felt a little too slow in Bloodsaint originally, but as you start getting to more areas, it starts getting a lot better. And, like, in terms of theming, they start, he starts feeling, or I don't know, not he, but the director starts feeling a lot more comfortable referencing Catavadia

and also going away from it with, like, the twisted tower kind of area. The Clock Tower is a, they've done Clock Towers in every Pennsylvania so far. there's one's a more interesting way to do it. It just kind of spiling around in a, what's the game I'm thinking of,

Mickey Mania way. That's right. Or like Kirby's Adventure. Okay. Running around a tower. Yeah. Yeah. It's,

yeah, I feel like they could have been more pandery to Castlevania fans with the level theming. I mean, there's a library in this game, of course, but it feels like,

oh, this is a different library. So, I mean, just very basic castle ideas are in this game, but it's not quite as indulgent as they could be with the themes, I think.

based on what I've seen so far. I do appreciate the presentation of when you're first entering the castle, and on the map, you're not actually making, like, if you look at the mini map, you're not really moving forward. It's, like, crawling forward across one block, but it's, you know, the castle is rotating because you see it in the background when you're in the village, and then you approach it, and the map actually turns 90 degrees so that you're running through the castle, and so there's this big presentation where the castle kind of comes into view as you're approaching it. But my only problem with that is that the first time I did that approach, it was the much less impressive underground version of it because I was like, oh, neat, there's an underground passage here. I should go that way. So I got to this part where the screen is rotating. I'm like, why is, where are these catacombs just like crawling? And I finally got there.

Then I approached the castle the correct way afterward. And I was like, oh, okay, that was that gimmick. I did this wrong. I didn't know there was an alternate way to do that. Yeah. And actually I forgot about that part. You go underneath the castle entrance. I noticed that.

I thought about, I wanted it as a way to prevent you from doing that the first time? I guess no. No, no. There's absolutely not. And I'm the kind of person who's like, well, this seems like the obvious way to go. So I'm going to go this other way because I want to see what happens if I do. So do you have any favorite areas or least favorite areas so far? We've all played different amounts of this game.

I do think this game is a very good introduction. It is a very small level in terms of levels you'll eventually go through. but it does a lot to just to sort of encapsulate the experience up front to let you know, like things are the way you want them to be in this game. I really like the clock tower. Like, as we previously mentioned, it makes platforming more difficult in a way that I'm not sure I appreciate. Like the spiraling thing is like, oh, I should be able to make this jump, but I just barely missed it because the camera is on a weird thing.

Yeah, yeah. I think Jeremy, you were talking about that on Twitter, and I have this issue too in that the preciseness of these graphics often doesn't let you make the right hits, the right jumps. This is why I feel that I love Hollow Knights because as a 2D game, it has that advantage where the attacks are very precise, the platforming is very precise,

but there is some edge cases when it's like, oh, I thought I could hit that platform at this point, or I thought I was going to hit that enemy at this point. Yeah, it's an issue with any kind of 2.5D game that has polygons that represent, you know, traveling in a flat plane because they want to use the polygons to create a sense of realism and depth,

but the edges and boundaries are never as concrete as they should be, at least not in very many that I've played. And this suffers from that where you're like, oh, I feel like, you know, if I walk on this part, it's going to be okay, but then it's not. It's actually part of the background.

Or you walk onto something and you're like, you know, it looks like this is part of the background, but it's actually the foreground. So there is a lot of that ambiguity that you don't get with 2D games. And that's, you know, that's always a frustration. I really, I would be okay with more stylized graphics if they were less realistic and more like, hey, here's the active space within the game. This is what you're interacting with. Yeah, I like thought the tower was really cool.

But when you're climbing it, the sort of, so you're in the same spot on the screen, but the landscape is rotating around you to symbolize like, oh, you're climbing up the tower and making progress up it. but I was like, oh, what happens when I fall? Like, where do I go? And then you get completely lost when you fall down after making progress up the tower. So that's one of the issues with this kind of a game. Oh, my God. That reminds me of the Tower of Babel from Xeneguars. Oh, God.

Except you're not entering random battles while you're in the middle of a jump in this. So that's good. You can't feel your blood turn cold when you hear the loading noise of a boss fight or, sorry, an enemy encounter. That's one of the nice things. They did design the tower a little bit knowing that it was going to be a pain in the ass because the jumps that you are going to have the most trouble with have the least stakes to them. Because you'll just be going for an item

and you won't fall the entire way into an enemy. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, they're kind of thoughtful in that case, but I feel like they could not have made a 2D game. It would have been too expensive. That would just be the ideal version of this if they had the resources, but they clearly couldn't do that. But in terms of what we played so far,

how well do you think the whole Metroidvania thing works on this map and this level design? And I feel like it is a lot more subtle and that I think there's a philosophy about making it more subtle. In some ways, I like that. In other ways, I was also lost because I didn't realize I had the right abilities. And I sort of like the whole like mist could pass giant flag on a door or whatever. There's that in this. Yeah, there are.

They're like, hey, you need the key of the night here. You need this key. You need that key. But it's not like, oh, equip the shard that lets you sink underwater or whatever. That's a little too subtle for me when I just want to make progress. It's like, oh, maybe I need to find the scuba gear equivalent in this. this game or whatever. Yeah, I think maybe they're just kind of taking for granted that you have played these games

and so you kind of know what's up, which maybe is a mistake, but I don't know. Like, I never felt the mist could pass thing was especially elegant. Oh, no. I... To me, that says, hey, we didn't, we didn't make what you're supposed to do here very obvious. Sometimes, I was saying sometimes I wanted less elegant.

Just like, hey, idiot, equip the shard and get on with your life instead of searching the map again. My biggest problem with shards and weapons and stuff is that sometimes I don't realize I've acquired them because the indicators that you've picked up something are in the bottom left of the screen in this tiny little box with tiny type. And that's just not where my eyes are focused. I think, you know, that doesn't work as well. It worked fine in somebody in the night because

it was a, you know, standard definition, four to three format. But here, you know, it's a widescreen, high definition. So that text is just like, you don't even notice it. I'll see like the little pop-up box disappear. Oh, me too. Yeah. And it's advantage. I'm like, what did I just get? Oh, I don't know. I play on a big TV, not on the Switch itself, and I totally miss that, too. I miss that text completely when I pick things up.

I mean, for me, it's a, if I have a set that I'm used to and I'm liking, there's no reason for me to check every time I get a crystal, like, this is the new thing that I care about. And, like, I will do it now because I know it's a Metroidvania, and it's important to check those things. But it's one of the, it feels like a game lost in time in some of those ways, which can be a good or bad thing depending on what it is. but they clearly were laser-focused on evolving from Order of Ecclesia,

which is a couple of years ago, and then also... 10, actually 11. Oh, Jesus Christ. And also, like, laser-targeting Symphony of the Night because that was the big game. Well, I mean, Ega has very, very openly said, I interviewed him a couple of years ago, and he said, like, you know, I'm making this kind of game because this is what fans want. Right.

Like, I am giving people the game that they have asked for. So, yes, when it is slavishly faithful to symphony the night, that's because people want more symphony the night. They specifically gave him $5 million so that he would make another symphony in the night, and that's what he's done. So, you know, on one hand, I kind of, from what I've played, wish it would stray a bit more and do some unexpected things more. But on the other hand, I get that he's like, this is what I got to do. Yeah, you don't want to run into the money number nine situation where you've made a thing where you're saying this is a nostalgia trip and then kind of fuck it up by having these new mechanics. that. Yeah, nobody wanted them.

Yeah. But it's like, it's different for the sake of being different. But yeah, I'm kind of glad he didn't rock the boat too much better enough to make it a new IP and a new experience. I want to talk about some of the bosses, not to spoil anything. So I feel personally that Castlevania Symphony of the Night is a pretty easy game because you can cheesy, you can level up, you can, you know, buy a bunch of potions or get a bunch of health items and kind of blaze your way through the game. And I feel like that was his philosophy going throughout, like, you should be able to finish these games. like a Dragon Quest game, if you keep sinking time into it, you can level up and get more powerful and eventually overcome the challenges. I feel like that this eventually becomes a hard game in very uneven ways.

I was going into it with like, oh, this is like Symphony, the bosses aren't too bad. I might use one health item, but there's a certain point in the game, I would say about like 60 to 70% through, where you fight very difficult bosses that have, I think, too much hit points, way too much hit points. It's entirely a flat road with like random difficulty spot. Yeah. And they're mainly small humanoid enemies, so they're very annoying to fight. And one of those bosses, not to spoil anything, you fight in one of those rotating rooms. I don't know if you've gotten there, Imram. But you fight him in a rotating room and it is just hard to tell like, will that projectile hit me? Will he hit me? Where is he now? It's just very, very difficult. This is a problem that I feel latter-day Metroidvania's suffer from. There's these, like, the overall experience of exploring a Metroidvania game is actually pretty chill. That's one thing I like about it is like, yeah, you're fighting stuff and you have to kind of conserve and ration your health and be careful.

But they're not like, it's not like every inch of the game is a slog. And then, you know, you kind of get into a groove and you're feeling good and you get to a boss. and all of a sudden it's like, hey, this is way more difficult than anything you faced before, and this is going to be your roadblock, and you're going to fight this boss 10 times because it's really hard and expects you to make use of skills that you haven't really had the opportunity to develop within the game. And, yeah, I find this happening a lot with this genre. And I feel like, I don't know, I feel like people want their games to be a lot of different things without necessarily thinking, hey, are all these things compatible?

Like if you look back at Super Metroid, like the bosses could be a little challenging, but all of them kind of once you figured out the strategy there, like what weapons should I be using? What weapon should I not be using? When do I need to dodge? They're all very doable. But I feel like a lot of modern Metroidvenias, it's just like, no, this is balls hard and you're going to die repeatedly. I mean, Hollow Knight is really guilty of that. It's always a tough game. But then you get to the bosses and you're like, I would like to see more of this game, but I'm not going to. Like, we were talking about a slavish dedication as simply the night. Like, it has a very 1997 save system of whatever you do between save rooms, unless you've saved, you're screwed. It would just happen to me, one, because that game is very prone to crashing. So I will have lost, like, at least an hour of stuff between, because I opened a book at the wrong time. Or just, you get into a situation where I cannot find the save room and I'm in trouble. And the game... I've had that plenty of times.

Yeah, the game has no sympathy for you there. Yeah, I mean, when that happens, I'm just like, well, you know, I've played enough entry in Odyssey that I know you stock up on the warp items and go back home and play it safe. It's better to, you know, have to fight your way back to where you were from the sort of hub as opposed to just losing all your progress. I will say that you're right. Hollow Knight is a difficult game with difficult bosses, but I feel like it has the edge, once again, because it is a 2D game. And I feel like the controls in that game are very precise. So I don't consider myself great at Hollow Night, but going into the boss fights like five or six times, I could, you know, get a feeling for the patterns and do the patterns correctly. But with this game, I was completely leveled up.

I had all the best equipment. I had health healing items. But it's just like after I do the pattern so many times, I'm just worn down by the fatigue of having to do it over and over. It's like, how many times I have to do this pattern before you realize, like, I passed your test? And then you have the imprecision of the 2.5D graphics where it's like that shouldn't have hit me. I should have hit him. it is just a problem with this style of game, I think. Yeah, I mean, with the high enemy health issue,

it sometimes seems like people played working designs localized and retweet games in the late 90s and were like, ah, yes, this is very good. I like that they tripled the enemy health. That's a great idea. It's also a little weird because bosses are so inconsistently paced. Like early on, one of the first bosses you fight is, I've forgotten his name, David Hader.

Like, oh, Zengetsu? Zengetsu, yeah. He is a very difficult boss. He's the first really hard one, yeah. But then after him, it's like the giant fist and the double jump character. And those are both incredibly easy bosses. And then you fight a boss with Zengetsu on the train. Yeah.

And he basically does all the work. It's sort of like almost like a cinematic boss fight where you're doing a bit of damage, but I think you can just win no matter what because he's there with you doing attacks on the boss. Like even though Zengitsu was frustrating to fight, I'm like, okay, cool. I understand what this game expects from me. now from boss fights, and then it kind of just lets it go after that. Yeah, and then you're surprised later when it's like, oh, hard bosses are back, and they're demanding a lot of me.

My solution was just like, okay, I'm going to do all the things to make all the potions I can carry, and after a few boss fights, maybe I can get through about using all of them in one boss fight, and I did that. It wasn't fun, but I at least made progression. We got a little bit more time left. I want to talk about a few other things. So there are so many weapons in this game, many of which I happen experimented with. I will say I'm basic with this game.

I like swords, and I have not branched out beyond swords, but there are whips. There's a whole, like, gun system in this game. It seems very complicated. Yeah, it's, yeah, you basically, you have to forge ammunition, which is apparently very powerful. But if you run out, then it's kind of like rolling thunder where you can fire, like, one puny, pathetic little infinite bullet at a time. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it just seemed like some of the permanent upgrades you get increased the amount of ammo you can carry, but I've never, ever fired a gun in this game. But there are whips and poles and great axes and great swords.

But whips are bad. Wips have been bad in these games since Castlevania Symphony the night. No, like at least, you know, the Castlevania Games, they gave you consistent whip mechanics. But here it's like the whip hits high behind you and low in front of you. It does not have forward range. Yeah. And there's no way to like whip upward either. I didn't even notice that.

It's really frustrating. I guess I just I just rode off whips entirely after Symphony. Like, oh yeah, we're post whip. post-whip society. I like, I, you know, as soon as I saw, I had, I, hey, wow, I picked up a whip and didn't realize that it was in my inventory. How long has that been here? I tried it.

And, like, the way she wields the whip is kind of crappy. Yeah. We need the frustrating. You need the Castlevania 4 wacky whip back. Yeah, wiggly whip. Yeah, exactly. Or just like a Belmont whip where it goes out straight ahead and, like, there's a little bit of striking damage directly behind you if you time it right.

I feel like it's pointed to not do that. Like, they're making me point. Yeah, but then it sucks. Yes. They don't want you to. to use it. Like, I've been trying to pay attention to patch notes recently on this thing, but I know at one point the bunny girl was the soul for her that turns you into a bunny girl is broken

to the point, because it does so much day away in such a small amount of time. That's right. It's another kind of pervy ability you can use. Like, you want your character to be even more attractive. Yeah, the bunny girl thing I found very odd. I have that soul and I use them like, okay, what do I do with this? But apparently messes up cut scenes and stuff like that. Does it?

It's kind of bugged, yeah. Not shocked, the game is very well-programmed otherwise. Yes, it's a miracle that it works. But a ton of weapons, a ton of other stuff. I want to talk about just the presentation of this game and that people have been very, very hard on how it looks. How do you guys feel about it? I feel like it is, in my opinion, a game with inconsistent art design,

but it is still, it looks like a well-made PS2 game at high-res, basically. Yeah, I would just like for this to be a Sprite, game. Like, I mean, you hired into Creates and then you went 3D. What were you, what were you guys expecting? Really? I wish, I mean, I wish they could be that way, too. But I mean, there's no shortage of sprite artists out there. People are making Sprite-based games. But I just felt like maybe there are too many assets in this game to be a Sprite-based game. It did allow for some customization of Miriam as well of like you can change her clothes and her hairstyle and all that stuff. But can you cover up her boobs? Because I would like, you know, to be able to play this

around other people. No. Not that I've seen. Yeah, you can, like, wear masks and hoods and rings and stuff, but she's still going to be showing off her girls. When you put your initial name in at the beginning of the game, like there are certain names that get you different masks. So you can get the mask of Bull Rider from Street Fighter 1, the character that never showed up in actual, in the game, just, I guess, is a meme online now. Weird, okay.

Yeah, the way you can customize, I forget her name even. What's the name that the main character of this game? Okay, Miriam, yeah, I don't know why. I'd look at that twice before this podcast, and I played 20 hours of the game. but yeah like for outside of the armor that you wear the accessories that you wear will appear on the character both in the menu and cutscenes and in the game and I believe you can even change her voice

with some of the some of the things you can equip to you can change her skin color or change her hairstyle it's pretty in depth actually yeah yeah I guess you wouldn't have those options if it was a 2D game but again it will look different so we have to wrap up super soon here is there anything else you guys want to talk about I mean you can go online and there are tons of videos about

like here are all the Kalsylvania Easter eggs here are the references to past games he's worked on and here are just Easter eggs in general there's a lot of fun things going on like the past EGavannias there's a lot of fun of real sense of humor to this game

anything else that's been left and mentioned we still have some more to talk about but we do have to wrap up very shortly no I mean I like I said I've not played nearly as much as I'd like to I'm taking my time I mean I could have probably made it a lot further into the game

in the amount of time that I've played that I have but I just want to you know take my time enjoy it and I am, you know, looking forward to seeing where the game goes, and I'm also curious to see how or if they follow it up. Yeah, I guess that's my final question for you guys. Having played this game, do you think there is room for another egivania in this world? Or do you think this is just like the final chapter, him putting it all out there

and saying, I can move on? Because, again, so many people have risen since he fell to fill the gap. Like here are all these new types of Metroidvania. as let's involve rogue likes, you know, too. Just like so many things are kind of capitalizing on what he used to do. Do you think there is room for another game after this one? And where do you think it could go, Jeremy? Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's plenty of potential for you get to keep working on the style of game and take it in new directions.

I feel like, you know, if there is a second bloodstained or even if it's not a series, if he just does something else in this vein. I think, yeah. I know as soon as I said it. If he creates something else in this mode, you know, I think he'll be free to stray a little further afield. I feel like this one, as he said, was very constrained by fan expectation

and the need to deliver on, you know, the kind of game that people paid him to create. So I'm looking forward to seeing what he can do when he's not constrained by that and not constrained by a large publisher like Konami saying, actually we don't like anything that you do. It'll be interesting. I think a bloodsaint too is inevitable.

Like the game sold well, I think there's not a whole lot else he probably feels comfortable doing at this point. But I think if he does it the same way with this like slavishly dedicated two fan expectations, I think that game is going to be the one that goes like, okay, that's a good encore. What's the next thing? Yeah, that'll be the Mega Man 10.

Like Mega Man 9 was so good And then Mega Man 10 was like Oh yeah you guys already did that Did we release an episode yet? Is that out? Okay That's Mega Man 11 Oh gotcha, got you

I don't even acknowledge that one See I mean I feel I don't know I'm kind of conflicted in that I want to see what else he could do But also he's so good at this But based on what I've read People like this game

I've read no major negative things about it And things that are negative Are the technical aspects Like the version is buggy It's kind of janky, but I will say the game is not crashed on me and playing the PC version, but I do enjoy the jank. It's part of what makes these games fun and interesting and, you know, have personality. If they were just like flawless, seamless AAA games, I don't think they'd be as like endearing to me. So I feel that I would like to see what he does after this.

I don't know if he would need a Kickstarter to make more of this game, but I feel like there is more to be said. And I think he's going to have a lot of fun playing around with these extra versions that are still coming out. Like, I want to see what the rogue-like mode will be for this game. Yeah, I'm hoping it's something like chasm, because I really like chasm. And it seems like that's a minority opinion for some reason. But I'd love to see, you know, a proper igavenia in that mode. Maybe we will. Who knows?

I really want to see what he does next. But I'm glad this was a success. I'm glad there was no major scandals. And I'm glad that he gets to make what he wants to finally. And hopefully he'll make more stuff. So that's the end of another episode of Retronauts. I've been your host for this one, Bob Mackey. Let me tell you all about Retronauts and how you can help the show.

If you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. And if you sign up at the $3 level, you'll get every episode of this podcast one week at a time and add free and at a higher bit rate. And that three bucks a month, a tiny amount of money for you possibly will help our show. It pays for everything that we do, including hosting, flying Jeremy out here, going to conventions. Everything that we do is fan supported and we thank you so much for supporting us. So please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts to help out the show. show and get something in return.

Imron, you're our newest guest, and you're the guest for this podcast, obviously. So please tell us where we can find you. You're at a new place now, right? Yeah, you can currently find me on kindof funny.com. We are also a Patreon, so any small money you can also give to us would be great. And you have a Twitter? You can find me at Twitter.

My Twitter account is Imron Z-O-M-G. Awesome. And Jeremy. Hey, Bob already gave you the spiel on Retronauts, and that's what I do, aside from the greenlit stuff that I do to, you know, pay my bills. But relevant to this episode is my video works series, one of which, you know, part of that project is Metroidvania Chronicles, or Metroidvania Works, I guess I'm calling it now, where I've been very slowly recounting the prehistory and evolution of Metroidvania games. So check that out on my YouTube channel. That's Jeremy Parrish.

And that is also because everyone is Patreon-supported for $2 a month. That's right. It's a discount version. You can help support these videos, and I end up buying very... expensive and exotic equipment and games to make these videos possible and the books that go along with them so that money is very helpful

and greatly appreciated but you know you can still watch it for free on YouTube and it's okay and I'm on Twitter as GameSpite that's also the Patreon handle for those video works patreon.com slash game spite but I'm not really spiteful it's true and by the way I have some other podcasts going on also about old things so if you like hearing about old

video games you might like hearing about old cartoons so check out my other podcast Simpsons and What a Cartoon. Those are available freely, but if you want to go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, we offer those one week ahead of time also. And we have a lot of miniseries behind a paywall, including a new one coming up this fall. So you want to check that out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. That's it for us this week on Retronauts.

We'll see you soon with a new episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you.