Just beat Bloodstained Ritual of the Night. Did 100% of the map, but did not 100% the game because that involves hunting and rng farming monsters for another 10-15 hours in order to fill out the inventory lists of a cookbook and item and weapon checklist. I'm just not that invested in walking into a room back and forth until a harpy drops sixteen sets of strawberries.
It's… basically Symphony of the Night. Exactly what it was supposed to be but overall it didn't impress me. The level design hasn't really advanced or become most interesting over the last 30 years, and SotN (and Super Metroid and Axiom Verge and Dark SOuls and countless others...) felt more cohesive and like better put together structures that really make use of the skills you build up.
It lets you have access to like 200 monster abilities, and that really appealed to em at the start because I thought that would be super interesting and keep it fresh the whole time, but they boil down to only maybe four or five actual varieties and a lot of them are pretty useless... once I had a directional attack I liked, a shield of paintings, a companion and a stationary attack, I was basically done.... and the Metroidvania aspects were poorly handled. All the locked off areas were VERY specifically locked off by having a boss ability that you'd equip specifically, use once or twice then never use again except maybe one other backtracked wall somewhere. The skills didn't grow or reiterate or enhance each other meaningfully. There were 8 different ways to get you to jump higher including a teleport beam, a gravity reversal and a super jump, but no amount of skill or pixel perfect movement or clever application let you move forward or get back into an old off limits area until you had the SPECIFIC ability it wanted. Really kills any true sense of exploration or replayability or desire to experiment when I tried to backtrack to some areas with multiple different powerups and it just didn't work until I had an exact late game thing. Even speedrunners are having to do the bosses and map portions in exact story order.
Also, it insisted on telling a story and there was just... no point. Let me explore, SotN got by with like 4 lines of dialgue. So it was fine, it was decent Castlevania game that hit the nostalgia, but not great. I was really hoping to love it and want to come back to it and try different things the next time.
In contrast to that... I've also been playing Iconoclasts which I'm almost done with… ALSO a Metroidvania... and while it starts out simple and ALSO with a "why are you giving me this nonsense story, just let me play" feeling, its story actually grows into something you'd see in an RPG, just with platforming instead of overhead turn based combat a real legit story to tell... and the skillsets naturally grow and evolve into a full kit that you consistently utilize all of for puzzles and bosses and backtracking. Every power up is consequential, the difficulty curve pretty consistent, the bosses are super varied and require different things basically every time, and overall feels a lot more satisfying in that respect.
Also been playing Slay the Spire, which is a fun card game roguelike that I don't really know how to describe other than I put 100 hours into it during quarantine..
Really want to start on Ori 2, but wanted to clear out some backlog first.
@Nobodyman:
Speaking of which, Mighty is pretty cool, but I found Ray's flying ability to be utterly impractical.
Its the cape flying from Super Mario World. Which was always impractical yes, but does what it needs to do.
