E3 2018 Hands-on: Bloodstained & Interview With Koji Igarashi
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an upcoming title that many have been rabidly waiting for. Ever since its Kickstarter wrapped up back in 2015, the game’s release has been continually pushed back, but it seems an end to the wait may finally be in sight. Producer Koji Igarashi was present with 505 Games at E3 to show off the latest build of
Bloodstained, and while they still have no firm release date to announce, 2018 still appears to be the target.
We had a chance to sit down with the game’s most recent build, spending half an hour playing through the game’s opening dialogue and stages…and honestly, the game feels great. While I haven’t played the Castlevania game many are comparing
Bloodstained to,
Symphony of the Night (feel free to call me a heretic or whatever right now), I am deeply familiar with the series’ Nintendo DS trilogy, and this title reminds me quite a bit of an upgraded version of those games.
An opening text scroll sets up the world, but I opted to skip most of it so I could maximize my allotted demo time playing the game. I then found myself in control of protagonist Miriam, on a ship being invaded by monsters and creatures. The controls were immediately easy to pick up, and I was weaving around and slaying enemies in no time flat.
Despite being an introduction level isolated from the rest of the game world, there were still a number of paths to explore and secrets to find. I was also coming across a new weapon to use every couple minutes or so, which was apparently done specifically for this demo to give players the chance to try out a wide array of them. I eventually settled on a rapier as my weapon of choice to finish out the demo.
Bloodstained also features “shards” as a similar system to the “souls” from
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrowamongst others. The system will be instantly familiar to Castlevania vets, allowing you to collect various attacks and mobility enhancements by defeating enemies.
The ship stage ended with a quick cutscene and a battle against some kind of wild tentacled sea creature, which forced me to use every health-restoring potion I had in my inventory to defeat it. I’m not sure if it was that difficult of a boss or if I was just not playing vary well, but I eventually bested the creature and moved to a village map, where I met a few more characters before my demo time came to an end.
Following the demo, we had a chance to sit down with
Bloodstained producer Koji Igarashi. With the assistance of an on-site translator, we were able to ask him a few questions that came up during our time with the game.
Gamer Escape: What I noticed while playing Bloodstained, compared to your earlier work, is that it seems to have more of a cinematic direction to it. More cutscenes, more dynamic camera, more focus on story. What inspired you to go in a more cinematic direction with this game?
Koji Igarashi: The reason why there’s more of a cinematic approach is because this is a very new IP. In order to explain sort of the lore of the game, sort of just the general story of the game, this is the easiest way to explain that and to introduce new players to this game.
GE: With the resurgence nowadays of a lot of companies going back to the “old-school” 8-bit/16-bit style, more along the style of your older Castlevania games, what made you decide to go with the more modern 2.5D presentation?
Igarashi: From the very beginning, we wanted to release this game on all different platforms. In order to utilize the strength of the platforms, we thought it might be easier to go with more modern graphics, rather than going to 8-bit or pixel art-based graphics.
GE: In the demo there were a lot of different weapons. Is the amount of weapons going to be the same in the main game?
Igarashi: Yeah, same goes with the actual game! There’s going to be a lot of different weapons, like the ones you saw in the demo. For just the demo’s sake, we put in a lot of different types in order for everyone to try out different weapons, but yeah, in the full game, there’s going to be that many different kinds of weapons.
GE: And with the weapons too, I know in the demo, some of them had bonus actions where you could make combos. Do all the weapons have that or only a few?
Igarashi: We’re still trying to figure out whether we’re going to implement this on all the weapons or just a few. But, in the actual game, we’re going to include a lot more of these combo-type or special attack for different types of weapons. Not just the types, but different weapons in general.
GE: Between your past works, and now Bloodstained, I was curious as to what drives your interest in this kind of gothic horror genre and presentation?
Igarashi: I guess the main reason why I decided to go with the gothic horror theme once again is because it all started out with just a Kickstarter project. In order to appeal to my fans, and also to the community, I couldn’t go out of that gothic horror theme. If I decided to go with, like, a Sci-Fi, then it would be like, “Hey, this isn’t Iga’s game!” They want to see that gothic horror theme, so that’s why we’ve decided to go with that again.
GE: What kind of challenges have you faced doing the Kickstarter campaign? Has it been more difficult than you thought it would be?
Igarashi: Yeah, doing the Kickstarter campaign was very difficult. We realized this after we started the campaign, where we need staff that know and understand what the western fans want from this kind of game. It’s very different from what we know. It’s very different from, “Hey, I want to create this kind of game, so help me fund this game.” It’s more of like understanding the market, understanding the communities, what they want. When we started the campaign, that was the most challenging part, to understand what the community wanted from this Kickstarter project.
GE: In my familiarity of your past work (of games similar to Bloodstained), the only one that had a female protagonist was Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. What went into your decisions to again focus on a female protagonist in Bloodstained?
Igarashi: There’s really no actual reasoning behind it. It’s a little bit more strategic. There are a lot of female protagonists coming out, really strong female leads are trending. The reason why we decided to go with it is because, you know, since we’ve only had Shanoa [Note: Protagonist of
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia] as a female lead before, we wanted to do so for this time as well.
GE: Is there anything you’d like to say to our readers about Bloodstained?
Igarashi:
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a game that uses modern technology, modern visual looks, while keeping the roots back when games used to be really fun. When they were really “game-like” games. Currently, there’s a lot of very cinematic AAA titles and things like that, but we wanted to focus more on the old-school nostalgia feel to it. Please look forward to it!
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E3 Hands-on – Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PC)
The Castlevania successor we've been waiting for
One of my most anticipated appointments during E3 2018 was my hands-on session with 505 Games for
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. The long awaited Kickstarter project lead by the legendary Koji Igarashi, the man behind nearly all
Castlevania games starting from
Symphony of the Nightuntil his departure from Konami a few years ago.
It has been a long time since
Bloodstained‘s announcement and the gaming landscape has been changing ever since. We’ve seen countless Kickstarter projects fail to live up to their promises, such as Keiji Inafune’s disappointing
Mighty No. 9 and the abomination that
Agony turned out to be. We’ve also started to see a huge amount of Metroidvania-inspired games being released on all consoles to the point of saturation. Suffice to say, the gaming scene in 2018 is very different from the gaming scene when
Bloodstained was first announced; I had become extremely skeptical on Kickstarter projects, especially those that have been delayed a few times.
Whenever you get a new ability, it looks like your character isn’t enjoying the moment…
Things started to change after the release of another
Bloodstained title a month ago,
Curse of the Moon. I was impressed with the level of effort put into what was essentially a secondary stretch goal. A tiny companion game, made solely because of the number of supporters that had decided to back Mr. Igarashi’s project. If such a smaller title could turn out to be that good, one could only wonder the amount of dedication put into the main project. After playing
Ritual of the Night at E3 2018, I can safely say, rest assured my friends. This is a good one.
My preview session was presented by IGA himself and was comprised of nearly no talk because the developer wanted us to play the game and feel the magic ourselves. Gameplay-wise, it does feel like a mix between
Symphony of the Night (RPG elements, map design, save rooms, etc) and
Order of Ecclesia (especially in the way you can acquire abilities by killing monsters). Some small but noticeable modern additions to the old
Castlevania formula include cinematic cutscenes, aiming with the right stick, and a simple but effective crafting system. There’s not much to
Ritual of the Night that differs it from other post-
Symphony Castlevania games, but given the fact this is what we have been promised from the start, there’s no way I can get disappointed with it.
She ain’t no Belmont but she gets the job done!
The controls are responsive enough. The game isn’t exactly as fast-paced as, say, Symphony of the Night, but it still runs at 60 frames per second and feels good to play. The soundtrack is completely orchestrated and downright epic. It is being composed by Michiru Yamane, the same composer behind
Symphony of the Night. The graphics are my only slight concern. While the game doesn’t look bad at all, it does feature that typical “clearly polygonal with cel-shaded textures” vibe, in the sense that it doesn’t look exactly like a cartoon in a way a
Guilty Gear game or
The Wind Waker achieve. Those were my only concerns, though. Playing the game, getting to use loads of different weapons, fighting creatively-designed bosses, everything felt just like a classic
Castlevania game should.
Despite my issues with the game’s overall visual style, I can’t deny how fun my playtime session with
Bloodstained was. Koji Igarashi promised a new
Symphony of the Night with some modern gameplay additions and that’s how the game feels and plays like. After countless failed Kickstarter promises from big names in the industry, I’m so glad that
Bloodstained has all the potential to live up to its insanely high expectations. This is the
Castlevania successor we’ve been waiting for.
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Esse último review trouxe uma informação que eu estava aguardando há um bom tempo. Embora o reviewer tenha jogado num PC, ele o fez em 60fps. Aí sim o Tio Blood fica satisfeito!
