#and Alucard is a lot sturdier

[chimaerakitten]

So Sypha’s backstory is less fleshed out than the other two (not uncommon for the female member of an MMF main character trio) and that also means she’s the least personally connected to the villains in pretty much every instance—Sypha’s motivation is 100% ideologically heroic, she decided to fight monsters because someone had to.

Anyway the fun thing about all that is that from the perspective of all the vampires it’s like

1. Dracula’s half-human son. Powerful even by vampire standards and unfortunately siding with humanity. Highly dangerous.

2. A Belmont. One of the lineage of extremely deadly hunters that have been after Vampires for centuries now. Kill on sight.

3. A…third person? Huh she smells like magic that’s probably not good. Still not the biggest threat in the roo—OH FUCK SHE HAS FLAMETHROWER HA—-

[demonfox38]

Completed (A Few Times) - Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

Monsters are nothing to fear. The giant void they live in, though? Maybe!

So, you know about alchemy, right? The laws of exchange? We’ve got “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” because someone fucked up their summon spell. Or, to be more honest, management of design talent at Konami. Like, this game is super fun, but its existence is bittersweet. With Koji Igarashi’s scenario designing mastery, a tremendous team at his side, and Netflix’s “Castlevania” adaptation blowing up the fandom like crazy, we could have had a banging remastered version of “Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse.” Like, HD! And by HD, I mean Hot Damn, because it would have been salacious in execution!

But, no! We’re stuck in the save state where Konami had to flush away their pedigree and integrity. And now, like a crammed variant of this hypothetical waste disposal system, it’s backing up and blasting all of us in the face.

At least “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” makes for a soft, snuggly towel to clean ourselves off from that shitstorm.

“Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” is the product of successfully reaching a bonus Kickstarter goal for “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.” It is a “Castlevania” game in all but name. If you cut through this game, you would find layer after layer of “Castlevania” design elements and tricks throughout its trunk. While “Castlevania III” is the predominant family member it takes after, I could recall no less than seven different “Castlevania” games that this game takes chunks out of. From character mobility to boss styles to entire chunks of levels, this game howls “Castlevania.” Not to say it doesn’t have a few other games present in the mix—“Mega Man” styled jumping puzzles and “Ninja Gaiden”-like character abilities come to mind—but this is clearly a product of love for the series Igarashi lost so long ago.

Do you ever wonder—if Hideo Kojima wasn’t in this save state— would Koji Igarashi have usurped his role as Konami manic dream designer extraordinaire? I mean, the dude was never “Why can’t we make our floppy disk emit the stink of blood when the player is in a crime scene?” nuts, but he was about zany enough to want a salaryman boss that would ditch a fight after winning the lottery.

“Bloodstained: Cursing at My Former Employers” stars Zangetsu, a ronin cursed by demons and the moon, as he goes off on his merry demon-slaying way. (Dude couldn’t help the moon curse bit. He literally has the kanji for moon in his name! He couldn’t be more fucked if he were named Luna McMoonpie.) Along his path, he releases three additional travelers, which he may either:

recruit to his side,

slaughter to get the power in their souls, or

ignore altogether.

The game’s resulting map layout, strategies, endings, and even to some extent difficulty (more on that in a bit) change based on the player’s actions.

In terms of character design and playstyle, the four playable characters aren’t quite carbon copy variants from “Castlevania III.” But, it’s easy to forgive someone who says that they are. Alfred (an alchemist) and Gebel (an asshole) have a lot of interchangeability with CV3’s Sypha and Alucard, though both have some differences in spell styles. Miriam (the protagonist for “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night”) plays a bit like a hybrid between CV3’s Trevor and Grant, with Trevor’s whipping skills and Grant’s focus on projectile tossing and mobility. Zangetsu varies considerably in strength and play style, depending on the player’s murderous intentions towards Miriam, Alfred, and Gebel. The best I can describe his bog-standard feel is like a sturdier-legged Fūma from “Getsu Fūma Den” or perhaps a slower, heavier Ryu from “Ninja Gaiden.” Loaded down with his allies’ souls, he feels much more modern, complete with double jumps, speed boosts, and a respectable midair slash.

A neat bonus this game has over “Castlevania III” is that you can have all four playable characters working together at once, if you so desire. Each character also comes with their own life bar, so you can alternate between them to improve your chances of surviving. If you’ll pardon me for using this as a positive example, it’s a lot like how the first “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” game was intended to operate. The major difference between these two games is that this future retro game tries to keep the player switching between their available characters as much as possible in order to make good use of everyone on the team. Ya know. Instead of just sticking with Donatello all the time.

The gameplay is pretty much what you’d expect from a disowned child from “Castlevania.” Jump through stage, kill boss, rinse and repeat until you get to the end. Personally, the challenge this game posed was not from the bosses, cool as they were. The big problems I faced were with the layout of platform-heavy sections. Given my status as a complete platforming putz, I had some serious struggles making it through the latter half of the game, particularly with rotating conveyer belts and swarming insta-kill bits. Mercifully, the game will allow you to play it with not only infinite lives, but no knockback! I was more excited about that than the lives bit!

Having said that, you might as well go ahead and play on Veteran. The game will give you a chance for each character in your party before yanking a life. Even if all lives are lost, the worst penalty you’ll face is being reset to the beginning of the level. I mean, that’s a bummer if you’re locked up in the seventh level, but it’s doable as long as you have the will to keep trying.

Remember—“Undertale” taught us that our characters always have infinite lives, as long as we are stubborn jackasses.

Familiarity with “Castlevania” games is the greatest help you can get for this game. There are sections that are straight up yanked right out of their mother series. The infinite frog dumping hallway in particular triggered some serious muscle memory from “Castlevania”’s fourth stage. Having said that, you can get your hands bitten if you know a little too much about “Castlevania.” I kept trying to use Up + X on my controller to use subweapons instead of the dedicated Y button (which I had rewired to B’s position because I am that lazy). Also, I don’t think those Helmet Heads operate on quite the same pattern set-up as Medusa Heads. They seem to be tooled for destruction, rather than existing as a hazard to be avoided with continual movement.

While not necessarily as difficult as its heritage games, “Bloodstained: C to the M” puts great effort into looking like its relatives. Not a big surprise, considering that NES-styled games are where developing studio Inti Creates shines. Some of the sprite-work looks more like it came from a Capcom game than a Konami game, but it’s close enough. (Can’t help it when the company is made of ex-Capcom developers, after all!) The ending screens might as well be a mirror image to “Castlevania III.” Similarly, the lead-up to the boss of the Nightmare Mode is a stair case descending the opposite direction of “Castlevania”’s ascending stairwells. It’s a bit of a cheeky, thematic poke in the side.

For me, the winner in the aesthetic department was the music. Along with solid pulse-wave instrumentation, it’s got that sweet sawtooth bass from “Akumajou Densetsu”’s VRC6 chip and DPCM samples for when the characters get hit! With its syncopated rhythms, rapid fire note filler, and mobile bass line, it hits the sweet spot for both quality NES-era composition and “Castlevania”-styled music.

No joke, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for this game pretty much nonstop at work for weeks. For NES audiophiles, it’s like catnip!

The weirdest thing about this game right now is trying to figure out exactly where it fits with “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night”’s canon. I’m assuming this is a prequel to the latter since it came out first, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. I mean, it starts with three characters from the former in spirit form, and it could potentially end with all or none of them dead or in separate dimensions. Hell, it’s hard to tell what ending is even canon. I mean, I’m assuming it’s one of the happier ones, but that may be my Pollyanna personality flashing her petticoat. Until the Kickstarter game proper is released, it may be time and energy wasted trying to figure out how this game pieces to the other chunk of the puzzle.

If you’re a fan of this era of game or “Castlevania” games at large, you’ll get your money’s worth out of it. The game is ten bucks on Steam—a dollar an hour, for the amount of content and how many different ways you can play it. Its familiarity and fairer hand may leave something to be desired for people that run “Ninja Gaiden” speed runs, but for the rest of us schlubs, it’s an accessible portal back in time.

And if I can give it an additional gold star, it’s this: “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” not only improved my abilities as a video game player, but helped restore some of my lost confidence. That feeling is rare and exceptional. The games that give me that feeling—games like “Star Fox 64”, “Tales of Symphonia”, and “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night”—are games that I cherish. This is a game that I will come back to, when I need my saw sharpened once again.

I can’t say for certain that its younger sister will live up to this game’s strength, but it sure gives me hope for the future.