YMMV / Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

• And You Thought It Would Fail: After the cold reception of other Kickstarter-backed Creator-Driven Successor games such as Mighty No. 9 and Yooka-Laylee, as well as how bland the graphics looked in previews, many people thought Bloodstained would be headed the same road as the aforementioned games; being a mediocre cash grab meant to lure fans of a beloved and neglected franchise. The game released to stellar reviews, with many praising it for its engaging gameplay and vastly improved graphics, and it is viewed by many as a worthy successor to Castlevania. IGA's Flavor Text even seems to poke a little fun at the sentiment:
  "He was told there was no future... but he knew they were wrong."
• Angst? What Angst?: While most of the survivors of Arvantville display an appropriate amount of grief, Anne, Harry, and Benjamin seem rather chipper, which can lead to Mood Whiplash.
• Base-Breaking Character: Dominique, who serves as Miriam's supplier for the majority of the game. Fans are split on whether or not she's a good main antagonist. Either she's a Tragic Villain with an understandable motivation for turning on God and has a more active role in the story than previous villains from Igarashi's games, or she's a generic villain whose Evil All Along reveal becomes increasingly easy to see coming as the game progresses^{note 1}It doesn't help that she's a stereotypical Church Militant, or that The Reveal doesn't happen until the penultimate area, thus giving her very little time to establish her true colors and doesn't have enough of an active role for her betrayal to have an emotional impact. Complicating things further is the debate on whether her being Evil All Along was even necessary, with some fans arguing that Gremory should have been the Big Bad^{note 2}like she was in Curse of the Moon instead of The Dragon working for her.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Dominique uses the old shards you sold her and power from the Libre Logaeth to throw every prominent technique at you, including crucial in-game shards like Reflector Ray. It makes for an insanely frenetic final boss fight, and almost makes her fusing with Bael a letdown by comparison. If you throw on the Kung-Fu Boots as your weapon of choice and load yourself up with powerful shards, you'll feel just as agile and powerful as Dominique is by this point. Especially on Hard mode, beating this boss feels like an accomplishment.
  • Most fans were eager to trigger the secret boss fight with O.D. on purpose because the character's various nods to Symphony of the Night's Alucard extend to their moveset as well, with O.D. employing the use of Al's bat, mist, and wolf forms. This is on top of their liberal yet judicious use of Time Stands Still.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Towers of Twin Dragons is a throwback to Castlevania Clock Towers, complete with giant rotating gears, flying enemy heads that knock you into spikes, and some of the best music in the game. The sheer size, scope, and unique 3D gimmick takes everything cool about its inspiration and outdoes them, showing off what IGA and the team can do now with modern technology no longer limited by handheld consoles. It's not uncommon to hear players gush about this level being the moment when they tearfully rejoiced "Oh my God! This really is Castlevania!"
  • The Bridge of Evil is perhaps the most unique level in the game, as it takes place on a moving train, where the player teams up with Zangetsu and the two mow down anything in their path. The boss fight is also extremely unique in that Miriam barely does anything to defeat it; the entire fight hinges upon Zangetsu and his awesome sword skills.
  • The Oriental Sorcery Lab is probably the most unexpected level, being essentially a Japanese level in a European castle, with ninjas and torii gate warps. One section even adds to the atmosphere by having sliding walls hiding everything but the characters' silhouettes and showing blood splatters hitting the foreground when Miriam cuts her enemies down. Adding to the aesthetic is the fact that the long hallways make the katana, with its Jinrai technique which cuts anything in a horizontal line, one of the best choices for battle.
• Cheese Strategy: The Valefar can be cheesed by equipping the Aegis Plate, activating Invert, then standing on the spikes. While upside-down, most of his attacks can't hit Miriam there, but you are free to pummel him until he's defeated.
• Complete Monster:
  • Gremory, the seeming right-hand of Gebel, is actually the force corrupting him and The Dragon to Bael, an Eldritch Abomination of a demon to whom Gremory seeks to hand over the entire world. Gremory is behind all of Gebel's evil, using him to unleash scores of demons upon humanity and having the village closest to the Hellhold ravaged and almost totally slaughtered by demons. Gremory callously throws Gebel aside to his death and lets him be slowly killed by his corruption when he's freed from her control in favor with an alliance with Dominique, and personally kills heroine Miriam's mentor Alfred before her own defeat.
  • Dominique Baldwin is an exorcist who lost her faith in God after God did nothing to stop the demon invasion 10 years prior and thus desired demonic power to transcend any deity. To this end, Dominique sets Miriam against her childhood friend Gebel, hoping to corrupt Miriam enough to have Gremory possess her and use her a sacrifice to Bael. Dominique is willing to plunge the entire world into demonic carnage all for the power to kill God himself and coldly acknowledges that all love for her family swept up in the demonic attacks has long been consumed by her selfish crusade for power.
• Crossover Ship: Ever since Miriam appeared as crossover DLC in Blasphemous, fans have been shipping her with the latter game's main protagonist, the Penitent One.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Glacial Tomb. Some have found the setting of an ice cave to be rather out of place for the game's final area, while others have pointed out that it's a reference to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Aside from that, people in both camps have argued that the area looks rather generic, feels empty with barely any enemies present, all the enemies it does have are just Underground Monkeys of common enemies from much earlier in the game, and that it lacks the feeling of a Very Definitely Final Dungeon. It's one of the shortest areas in the game and is reserved mainly for the game's final bosses (and one superboss), and even some of those are considered a disappointment by quite a few players.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Orlok Fahrenheit Dracule, better known simply as O.D. He's Bloodstained's answer to Alucard in everything but name, aided by him having Alucard's look and voice actors,^note whereas in Japanese he's fittingly voiced by Ryōtarō Okiayu, who's consistently lent his voice to Alucard since 1997, the English version went the extra mile by getting Robert Belgrade, Alucard's original English voice actor from the same game, to effectively "reprise" the role and the game deliberately gives him a role similar to the Master Librarian from SotN — complete with the exact same "High Jump into chair from the room below" Easter Egg, which can also be triggered with Invert. Then there's the matter of his secret boss fight in the Glacial Tomb: hilarious for its "reasoning" (he was not joking about how valuable the Tome of Conquest is to him) and utterly cool in design (as O.D. employs cryokinesis and chronokinesis along with Alucard's various transformations).
  • Lindsay, the NPC who tasks Miriam with avenging her fallen friends and family, is fairly popular in the fanbase, mostly because of "Kill those murderers DEAD!!"
  • In a game full of memorable enemy designs, Tamako-Death stands out for the appeal of a cute girl with a guitar as her weapon that shoots fire set to heavy metal riffs.
  • As far as familiars go, Carabosse is a popular choice due to the fact that she can attack enemies, heal Miriam and locate breakable walls, which makes her quite useful.
  • Shovel Knight's cameo as the Shovel Armor has also been praised. It helps that players can obtain his trusty armor and shovel as Random Drops.
  • Bloodless, a mid-game boss, garnered attention and pretty much a lot of love from lots of players, due to both her boss fight, which involves lots of Fanservice along the way, and the ability to play as her on Boss Revenge Mode. It was enough for IGA to decide to make her playable in the main game as well via the "BLOODLESS" code used as the player name.
• Fan Nickname: Since his reveal trailer, Zangetsu has been referred to as "Samurai Snake" due to his English voice actor.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Due to their Kickstarters being held at around the same time period, a lot of people who backed Bloodstained also backed Yooka-Laylee, and both of them were widely successful.
  • A number of other Kickstarter-funded games also share a good chunk of fans, which include Shantae and Shovel Knight. Bonus points for WayForward being picked up to help with the game's development late into its cycle and Yacht Club Games' approval of featuring Shovel Knight as the Shovel Armor guest enemy, as well as a summonable Shard attack and playable character via the Ex Shovel Armor due to fan art by Yuji Natsume.
  • There used to be one with Mighty No. 9, another a Kickstarter-funded game, until the troubles with its development led to Bloodstained fans using it as a bad example of a crowdfunded game while lauding Bloodstained as not suffering from the same mistakes, which only got worse after Ritual of the Night came out with glowing praises from critics, backers of both games, and players alike.
  • There's quite a friendly rapport with fans of Blasphemous, another Metroidvania. The two games are sold together on Steam as part of the "Sword and Whip Bundle". Miriam has also appeared as a guest in Blasphemous.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Weapons:
    • The Rhava Velar, the upgraded version of the Rhava Burál. Much like the Crissaegrim from Symphony of the Night, this blade attacks multiple times with one swing, allowing Miriam to dice through just about anything without much trouble. It's a bit hard to find the recipe for it, but once you do, the endgame becomes trivial.
  • Accessories:
    • The Recycle Hat, the ultimate reward Miriam receives for completing Susie's cooking quest. Putting it on makes all ammunition infinite. Equipping this, and one of the endgame rifles loaded with Diamond bullets, makes Miriam able to one-shot the vast majority of enemies in the entire game.
  • Shards:
    • Invert is undeniably one of the coolest mechanics in the game (essentially a weaponized version of the Plot Twist from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night), but it also has the effect of making some boss fights completely busted (in particular: Gebel, Valefor, Zangetsu 2, and O.D.). Their attacks are scripted to only work in normal gravity, so Miriam attacking from the ceiling with a Great Sword or some other attack with great reach makes her almost untouchable. Fittingly enough, you'll be at the receiving end of this tactic at the end of Zangetsu's playthrough when fighting possessed/evil Miriam.
    • Riga Storæma, the fire spell shard. It's not very powerful initially — it's a column of flame that only hits twice. However, upgrading the shard increases the number of flame columns that shoot out in front of Miriam. At around level five, the shard can create so many columns of flame that it's nearly impossible for enemies to avoid it. Also, the spell has two hits per column, meaning that bigger enemies can get hit multiple times. Riga Storæma also never increases in mana cost with level, making it a very cheap go-to spell for clearing rooms and damaging bosses from afar.
    • Teps Oceus, the Chain Lightning shard, allowing you to strike enemies multiple times (even striking the same demons twice or more in one cast), anywhere on the screen, without having to aim at all. Not only you can acquire it rather early in the game, it is decently powerful right when you get it, and it is very easily farmable. Once you have it upgraded (better save your emeralds for this), you will be able to kill most demons in one or two casts, and exploration will be a breeze (and it is not half bad against bosses either). The one and only drawback of this spell is its rather higher casting cost (50 Mana points), something that can be solved with enhancing Miriam's mana regeneration and the Words of Wisdom shard, which reduces Mana Point consumption.
    • 8-Bit Fireball is one of the secret Shards gotten from the 8-bit Nightmare minigame in the Hall of Termination. It's a tiny, slow-moving fireball that doesn't seem all that impressive initially. However, after fully upgrading it, the maximum number of fireballs it fires goes up to six, and while they still move rather slowly, each fireball hits like a truck while costing a pittance of MP. At point-blank range, the fireball becomes a very effective substitute for melee that can demolish bosses in only a handful of shots.
    • The little brother version of the 8-Bit Fireball is the True Arrow, which you can get as early as the Entrance. It may deal only a fraction of the Fireball's damage, but it's damn useful for the early game.
    • The pretty decent cousin of the Fireball is Throw Spear. While it consumes double the MP and doesn't hit as hard, it hits through targets, and it's a Conjure shard, meaning you can equip this and 8-Bit Fireball for two devastating attacks at your disposal.
    • Bunnymorphosis. Miriam being able to turn into a sexy demon bunny girl is one thing, being able to turn into a sexy demon bunny girl that hits really freaking hard is another. Its damage output is vastly superior to anything in your kit at the time you're able to access it ^note You can get Bunnymorphosis as early as after the Garden of Silence, even though you don't have full access to the Bridge of Evil until much later even without enhancements, and you can earn additional moves out of it via Rank Ups like a cartwheel maneuver and a dagger throw. Due to being a Shard, its damage scales based on your INT, and by the time you have access to conventional weaponry that out-damages Bunnymorphosis, you're pretty much at the end of the game anyway. The icing on the cake is that it costs a very negligible amount of MP to maintain and can be toggled on and off at will with no downtime, meaning you can stay in the transformation for an excessive amount of time and switch off in a snap to conserve resources.
    • Upbeat Heat. It only gets better as you increase its rank and grade as this will allow Tamako-Death to play her theme much longer. While some bosses, namely True Zangetsu and Dominique, are too nimble and mobile to be hit effectively due to its arc, others, like the 8-Bit Overlord, Gremory, and especially Bael, are so slow or spend so long being stationary that their HP will just get shredded instantly. For added fun, against smaller enemies, combining Upbeat Heat with Invert means you can cover the entire floor in gouts of fire. Rubella, Aurora's version of this shard, is even better than the normal version since it heals her for 55 HP at Rank 1 and 150 at Rank 9, whenever you summon her and since she gains back large chunks of MP when she attacks an enemy with her sword, she rarely has to worry about survival even without access to any healing items, and she can cover the battle arena in flames, even for the nimble and mobile bosses.
    • Standstill, which allows you to stop time. It's not much of a Game-Breaker on its own due to its absurd mana drain. But when combined with Gebel's Glasses, which give you infinite MP? You can stop time for as long as you like, completely trivializing anything that isn't a boss. The only downsides are that you only get Standstill from beating O.D. in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and the glasses are rewarded after acquiring every obtainable shard in the game.
    • All Passive Shards when upgraded to Rank 9 will be transformed into Skill Shards, which you can have active all at the same time. As one might imagine, this will result in a massive stack of bonuses.
    • Augment Gold increases the amount of gold dropped from torches. It can be crafted for only a single gold once you find the Augment Luck shard, can be fully upgraded to Rank 9 for a handful of ectoplasms, holy waters, and one extra gold (so about $30,000 in total), and at this level makes it so the lowest a torch will ever drop is $100 and makes them commonly drop $500, $1000, and even $2000 bags. Or you can double-stack it by setting it as your passive shard as well to make $500 bags the smallest possible gold bag that can drop. This is when enhancing shards and crafting new weapons becomes trivial since it takes maybe 10 minutes of running back and forth between Johannes' and Dominique's room slashing torches to save up around $100,000, meaning you can just buy stuff and alkahests to get whatever ingredients you want.
  • The Jump Kick in and of itself can easily break most enemies and bosses, as the majority of them have no anti-air attacks and stand still often enough that you can get a lot of damage in by just holding Down and hammering the Jump button over and over until they decide to move. This is especially pronounced with the Bunnymorphosis Shard, itself already verging on a Game-Breaker (see above).
  • To wit, most of the weapons and Shards listed above (with the exception of Invert and 8-Bit Fireball) were deemed so notorious that a dev update on 7/19/19 announced they (and several other notably powerful yet not quite as "broken" pieces of equipment) would be subjected to a Nerf come the next patch (much to the chagrin of several players).
  • Bloodless Mode has the charged Crimson Thrust, which is found right in front of the boss door in 8-bit Nightmare, and thanks to her greater mobility over Miriam and a starting location that's a lot closer to it, Bloodless can reach the Nightmare a lot sooner than Miriam can, although it does come with the obvious caveat that you can't leave 8-bit Nightmare with the upgrade unless you're skilled and/or strong enough to actually beat 8-bit Overlord, since you can't backtrack out of it and because Bloodless doesn't have access to Waystones to teleport her out without having to fight the boss. As for why the upgrade is so strong, it's essentially a massive wave of blood that does twice the damage per hit of the normal version, reaches all the way to the end of the screen, hits enemies multiple times, pushes them back, goes through walls, takes barely any time to charge, doesn't consume any more MP to use than the uncharged version (which is already the most MP-economical move in Bloodless' arsenal), and if used against a slope or a wall, it also leaves behind multiple bloodstains which can then be absorbed back with Blood Steal, essentially making the move cost little to no MP to use.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The game not only takes cues from the descriptions of demons in the Ars Goetia to design the enemies who bear their names (such as Vepar; the original book states Vepar looks like a mermaid who commands the seas, while this game instead makes her a Sea Monster), but also include some additional tidbits related to said demons. For example, you may notice some magic circles on Valefor's boss room floor. The middle circle is the actual Valefor seal◊ as stated in the Lesser Key of Solomon.
  • Many players were taken aback by the sudden appearance of an ice cavern for the game's final area, while others recognized it as a fitting reference to the Ninth Circle of Hell as mentioned in The Divine Comedy, the deepest level of hell that is said to have its inhabitants frozen in ice, and is reserved for those who have committed the sin of treachery, which couldn't be more fitting for the game's antagonist.
  • The alchemic ingredients for gunpowder are sulfur and saltpeter. These, along with charcoal mind you, actually do make gunpowder in real life ^note If you grind them to a fine powder and mix them in a ratio of 2 parts sulfur, 15 parts saltpeter, and 3 parts charcoal, as the sulfur ignites the charcoal fuel which gets so hot it literally tears the saltpeter molecules apart creating an exothermic reaction.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Bats, while merely annoying to Miriam, are an extreme hazard for Bloodless. Besides Bloodless's much weaker defense, the game alters the enemy ratings to adjust for Bloodless's different starting location. This makes a bat into a much higher level enemy that does not do the Scratch Damage that the other characters take when getting hit.
  • The Dullahammer Heads and Maledictions, close cousins to the Medusa Heads of Castlevania infamy. They are oftentimes placed deliberately in rooms that emphasize platforming, and they're even more common on Hard and Nightmare difficulties.
  • The Toads, as they are on the ground so it is difficult for Miriam to hit them with most weapons and Poison Toads can poison her on contact.
  • The monkey-like enemies like the Simian and Gusion are incredibly annoying to deal with due to how erratically they jump around, making them hard to hit. Worse, when they're not fighting alongside tougher enemies, then they're Zerg Rushing you.
  • Elementals. They have an irritating habit of hovering into walls or offscreen where you can't hit them with conventional attacks and zapping you from afar with spells.
  • Ghosts and Amys. Similar to the above, but focus on ramming into you. While not strong, they can be annoying, with Amys inflicting slow.
• Good Bad Bugs: The infinite jump exploit known as the "kick jump" (not to be confused with the Jump Kick) allows Miriam to jump in midair indefinitely by using the Flashing Air Kick, then cancelling with backstep, cancelling backstep with a Directional Shard, jump, and repeat. It's extremely Difficult, but Awesome, but if mastered, allows you to get to places you aren't supposed to get to very early in the game, such as the top of the enormously tall room in the Entrance area.
• Guide Dang It!: Trying to find a Scythe Mite and Kunekune, both which require unconventional means to spawn. The former requires blood to be spilled on a specific room of the Towers of the Twin Draongs, which depending on your loadout might not happen. The later requires the player to sit in a specific chair on the train and wait for it to jumpscare you.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A lot of fans and interviewers like to pit IGA against Keiji Inafune, since both were behind some of the most beloved side-scrollers ever (Castlevania and Mega Man, respectively) and both began hugely successful Creator-Driven Successor-themed Kickstarters. When jokingly asked if he would "call Inafune to gloat" about beating his record, IGA humbly turned aside the joke and said "I'm sure his next Kickstarter will blow mine away." A few weeks later, Inafune launched a Kickstarter for Red Ash, based on Mega Man Legends, which ended up being immensely controversial, and failed to meet its goals by a rather large margin. It's also hard to think about this act of humility when Mighty No. 9 ended up being widely considered a major disappointment both shortly before and once it released.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the stream hosted for the initial campaign's ending, IGA briefly abandoned his humble nature and challenged future Kickstarters to "Bring it on" regarding Bloodstained's record-breaking run. A joke was made "There will be a Kickstarter next week that'll beat you guys". Less than a month later, Shenmue III had its launch at E3 and proceeded to make 6.3 million, beating Bloodstained's record.
  • One fan drew fan art of Dominique holding a book over half a year before the game came out. Viewers who felt that Dominique looked rather sinister in that fan art were probably laughing when they found out that she is the villain of the game, trying to summon the demon king Bael using the Liber Logaeth book.
  • Zangetsu being voiced by David Hayter in English becomes this if you set the resolution to 21:9 and watch the ending, which shows that Zangetsu survived the events of the game and is seen sneaking behind Miriam and Johannes as they walk off. "Kept you waiting, huh?", indeed.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Critical reviews of the game called it a solid piece of work, its scores generally falling in the range of "eight out of ten." However, it was also criticized for following in the footsteps of its predecessors a little too closely.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Miriam has been shipped with pretty much every male character in the game: Zangetsu, Gebel, Alfred, Johannes, and of course O.D. And some of the women too, especially after The Reveal.
• Les Yay: If you repeatedly visit Dominique's shop on a single visit, she'll get just a little flirty about it:
  "My, my, you're giving me a lot of attention on this visit."
• Like You Would Really Do It: This has been a common reaction to Zangetsu's "death". Not only is it heavily stacked with Never Found the Body and Uncertain Doom, but he is seen as way too cool and unique a character to die off. An Easter Egg that occurs only if you set your resolution to 21:9 (Ultrawide) and watch the ending reveals that, yes, Zangetsu is alive and well, observing Miriam from afar.
• Memetic Badass: The Kickstarter pitch quickly made Koji Igarashi into one by turning him into Dracula, so much so that he even became a (then backer-exclusive) superboss for players to face, and defeating him earns a special shard that give players the ability to toss a volatile wine glass based on Dracula's famous opening scene from Symphony of the Night as well as the Sword Whip weapon from Lindsay upon clearing her vengeance quest.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Kill those murderers DEAD!! ^note Lindsay's overly hammy delivery of this line and the fact that she repeats it every time you accept a quest from her quickly led to the line's popularity.
  • The knights' long death rattle, a.k.a. Voice #813 in the Sound Menu. Hear it enough and it goes from funny, to annoying, and loops back around to being hilarious:
    EEEEEEEEEE. (long pause) OOOOOOOOOOOH.
• Moe: Miriam can be a deceptively endearing character at times. She's mainly a confident Action Girl both in gameplay and in cutscenes, but her friendliness to the villagers, teasing tone of voice and trust in Johannes, and the adorable pose she makes when she cooks is really quite cute.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Some players will stop to listen to the knights' amazingly drawn out death rattle, even mimicking the sound whenever it comes up in discussion over the game, having firmly become memetic by this point.
• Narm: The piano piece that Miriam plays in the Garden of Silence is simply the theme of Bloodstained arranged as a piano composition. If she has the Carabosse familiar equipped and present, Carabosse will sing lyrics with her. In Japanese, it's very apparent that her voice actress is a practiced vocalist and the whole piece sounds gorgeous. In English... not so much. With everything from a shaky translation to her voice actress clearly not being anywhere nearly as practiced as her Japanese counterpart, the English version of it gets a lot of flak and was left out of the official soundtrack entirely in favor of the Japanese version. The kicker? The singer is Rena Strober, best known for providing Azura's singing and voice performance in Fire Emblem Fates, who is a professionally trained singer.
• Narm Charm:
  • Most of the paintings are retouched photographs of the backers and some of the development team, who are clearly modern day people judging from the faces and hairstyles, wearing period appropriate dress. Even funnier when they, as Poltergeists, start to fly and attack you (and you can get smaller versions of those as a protective spell). Aside from being fun to look at, it's also a heartwarming tribute to the fans that kickstarted the game.
  • As a general rule, it can take exceptional skill for a North American actor to successfully pull off a truly convincing British accent. In this game, the entire cast is American, playing characters who are British. The results wildly vary from decent to barely noticeable. It helps that in a prior franchise known for its cheesy voice acting, Bloodstained's cast comprises several respected voice actors that can emote through the shaky accents. Miriam's accent in particular is regarded by many players as an endearing part of her character.
• Obvious Beta: While this was most pronounced with the Nintendo Switch port, which was widely regarded as a complete trainwreck on release, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports had their own share of issues, including both systems being prone to crashing, the PlayStation 4 Pro having graphics that somehow looked worse than on the original model (albeit a considerably better framerate), the Xbox One systems having a broken HDR implementation, and certain boss fights on both systems being prone to causing the framerate to tank to near-unplayable levels.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Nintendo Switch version was widely lambasted for its numerous serious performance issues. While many expected its lower resolution and slower FPS, the other issues were less acceptable. The numerous graphical issues and borderline 3DS-level graphical performance, input lag, regular crashes, Loads and Loads of Loading, and extremely dodgy framerate that often dips into the teens and frequently stutters or hangs have all greatly soured the fanbase's opinion of the Switch version, and many fans seriously wondered if they even tried to make the Switch version good. Furthermore, several details suggested that they were well aware of the Switch version's issues (the Blatant Lies about the reason for its poor performance at E3, plus the Switch version shipping out a week late in what appeared to be a transparent ploy to get it to fly under the radar and not drag down the initial review scores), which pissed off the fanbase even more. The general mood among backers who chose the Switch version has been one of anger, and, at best, people are hoping that they will actually listen to them regarding the game's issues and address them via patching. IGA and 505 Games responded swiftly and promised a fix by reallocating their resources and programmers majorly to fix the Switch issue.
  • The mobile port suffers from significantly worse graphics than any of the other versions and is still poorly optimized despite this. It also did not release with controller support at launch despite it being a port of a PC/console title, restricting the control scheme to the touchscreen controls. The only major upside is that it costs much less than other versions at $10, but many will tell you that it's worth shelling out more for a better experience over paying for the worst version of the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Deep Sinker, the shard that unlocks underwater walking/jumping mechanics, in which the slow, plodding controls Castlevania is known for make a return. Unlike other games in the Castlevania franchise, here Miriam moves as nimbly as glacial drift, and you need a few other shards to make it bearable, such as Glashtyn's Amphibian Speed. When you first receive the Aqua Stream shard that allows you to move underwater, you actually have to "push" Miriam through the water, which makes it a pain navigating past high-damage spike traps to get to Deep Sinker.
  • The one method not available for sorting items? Alphabetical. If you know the name of the item you're looking for but don't know where it is in your collection, you'll be spending a long time scrolling through lists to find it, especially if you're a hoarder.
  • If a demon drops a Shard, but you leave the area before the animation of it binding to Miriam is complete, then it doesn't count as being obtained.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Beating the game while staying mostly in Lily form. As YouTuber Nyarly attempted in this video, it requires the help of a Game Mod to acquire the Bunnymorphosis shard in a "fresh" file. It's doable (even in Nightmare difficulty), save for a few instances where Miriam has to temporarily undo the transformation to be able to use Aqua Stream, and to slash the red moon using Zangetsuto.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: Make no mistake — this is a Castlevania game in everything but name. Not only does it share a significant portion of its development team with such classics as Symphony of the Night, the plot points follow near-identical beats,^note A protagonist with a long-standing relationship to the apparent Big Bad braves a castle full of monsters to stop him from ending the world, only to discover that there is a woman behind the man who is really to blame; there's even a bad ending you can get by failing to realize that this is the case, and a specific item you need to get in order to see through the true villain's deceit. The only thing missing is the Inverted Castle. and it incorporates gameplay elements from essentially every post-Symphony Castlevania title. Of course, given what Konami is and isn't doing with the Castlevania IP right now ^note general neglect of the franchise outside of using the property for a much-maligned pachinko title (CR Pachinko Akumajō Dracula) and a mobile sidescroller-slash-gacha of decent quality but with seemingly little fanfare to it whose service only lasted for about a year (Grimoire of Souls); there is, however, the highly acclaimed Netflix series, which Konami oversaw and was actively involved in the production of, this is very much the whole point.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: The two most vocally opposed shipping groups are Miriam/Zangetsu and Miriam/Johannes, mostly coming down to whether the person prefers a manly badass or a Non-Action Guy.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Bloodstained can be a collector's worst nightmare or paradise, depending on player investment. The game features an extremely varied Item Crafting system with dozens upon dozens of unique weapons, armor, accessories, and recipes. It's entirely possible to spend the entirety of a New Game Plus still crafting new gear. Not to mention the several cosmetic accessories Miriam can wear for fun, on top of the many changes Todd the barber can make to Miriam's appearance.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • "Luxurious Overture" sounds similar to "Crucified" by Army of Lovers.
  • The intro of "Exorschism" sounds similar to that of "Machtkampf" by Arch-Enemy. Further exemplified by this mashup.
• Tear Jerker:
  • In the prologue cutscene, Miriam and Johannes are talking about Gebel and how he was a good person. Johannes laments that the torment he went through "would break even the best of souls" when being cursed by the alchemists. Then we have this...
    Johannes: "Miriam, I want you to know that I'm sorry. What my brothers subjected you to... There's no forgiving it."
    Miriam: "It was their transgression, not yours. You...you always took care of us."
    Johannes: "Obviously not enough."
  • Further down the line is the first meeting with Gebel. We learned beforehand that the crystal curse was agonizing to gain, and he sounds like someone who is abused who wants to take vengeance upon their abuser. Perhaps the saddest thing is that he fully believes that he is a monster and even getting him to recall good things seems painful on his end.
  • Gebel's death in the True Ending path. He finally comes to his senses and Miriam believes she's finally saved him, but his corruption begins growing at such a rapid rate that it becomes clear he's not going to make it, and there's nothing Miriam can do to help him.
  • Alfred's death. Miriam finds him mere moments after being mortally wounded only for Zangetsu to arrive with Johannes to explain that Alfred had been trying to protect Miriam from Gremory. When she insists he could have just said something, Zangetsu reminds her that Dominique already had won her over by the time they met and even if he did say something, it wouldn't have stopped Miriam from trying to save Gebel anyway. Either way she's been told that the closest thing she had to a father was innocent of the crimes leveled at him by even Miriam herself and has seen his suicide mission to protect her through to the end. The last dagger to the heart is Alfred's final words to her are pleading for her forgiveness, blaming himself for everything that has happened to her... and then he passes away mid-sentence before Miriam can say anything back.
  • Zangetsu Mode is bereft of story, save for one surprise at the end. After beating Bael, you'd expect the game to end right then and there, right? Well, then Zangetsu is whisked away to just outside of Gebel's room. With a new Final Boss where Gebel was: Miriam, who became corrupted by her own powers after what appears to have been the game's Bad Ending. Zangetsu, naturally, is horrified at this. After the fight, the game ends with Zangetsu saying "Miriam..." Even Zangetsu, who is normally gung-ho with killing demons and those with demonic powers, was saddened by Miriam's downfall. Roll credits.
• That One Achievement: The Gilded Youth achievement/trophy for getting 500,000 gold. To earn it you have to actually have 500,000 gold on-hand. Considering how often you'll be purchasing supplies, crafting materials, and other gear, this can take a very long time. It doesn't help that the Augment Gold Shard that allows enemies and candles to drop 500 Gold bags doesn't show up for a while. It can take even longer to earn it if you're also going for the Item Collector achievement/trophy, which itself isn't easy to obtain. It also doesn't help that one late-game boss is much, much harder to beat if you have a lot of gold on-hand.
• That One Attack: The Death Seal attack that True Zangetsu performs on you on Hard Mode and higher is a One-Hit Kill attack that, once summoned, cannot be avoided and will likely kill any newcomers who don't know how to deal with it. Although some use the Directed Shield to withstand the attack, others have made use of the Reflector Ray to escape.
• That One Boss:
  • Zangetsu. He serves to let you know that the game isn't taking it easy on you anymore. Zangetsu is capable of teleporting, throwing fast-moving projectiles, and knocking Miriam all the way across the screen. On top of that, his attacks all have a tremendous amount of power behind them. It requires a player to learn how to pick and choose when to attack, lest they get cut to ribbons. The other main issue is that he has a few attacks that share their initial tell before changing at the end; whenever he grapples to the top of the room, for example, you have to wait a moment to tell if he's coming from behind you or in front of you, which will likely go against your instincts in this fight given how otherwise fast-paced it is, because if you guess wrong and do the wrong dodge (running under him when he's behind you, sliding when he's in front), he will slam you and easily do upwards of 60 damage if you're at his level (11). Finally, he's a bit of a damage sponge; while he only has 400 more HP than the previous boss, 1,000 is a lot to chip off at this point in the game, and he generally only allows you to hit him once per his own attacks.
  • Bloodless serves as a way to show what endgame bosses are going to be like. While her attacks are telegraphed quite a bit, they're so big and hard to avoid that it really doesn't matter. Bloodless can create pillars and tornadoes of blood, throw parasols that track Miriam, and has homing blood projectiles. All of these moves are aimed at severely restricting your movement, and Bloodless is very good at it. On top of that, Bloodless averts No Cure for Evil, as her Blood Steal ability recovers a massive amount of health when she's close to death the first time. The fight against Bloodless is the moment that serves as a Difficulty Spike for the rest of the game.
  • Doppelganger. While other bosses are cheap, and while their attack patterns restrict movement, Doppelganger's attacks are incredibly difficult to read and she moves incredibly fast, meaning that you can be sliced through in moments before getting any offense in whatsoever. Worse, one of her melee attacks does critical damage to you every time it connects and is difficult to avoid.
  • Depending on whether or not you've been stingy with your money, Valefar has the potential to become this. At the start of his second phase, he drains you of every single penny and adds it to his health. For players who have been hoarding cash, the fight now becomes an endurance test as you try to whittle down Valefar's now astronomical health, and while his attacks aren't too hard to dodge, the potential length of the fight means that the possibility of slipping up too many times and dying is all too real. Using an Invert + Aegis Plate combo so that you can stand on the spiked ceiling out of range of a few attacks helps ease the pain a little, though it comes at the cost of being able to take less damage due to the Aegis Plate being fairly sub-par at that point in the game. Thankfully, a patch has since given Valefar's money drain a well-deserved nerf, capping his health gain at 9999 HP.
  • Dominique when playing as Bloodless. She moves fast enough to prevent you from using Blood Steal and is also very good at avoiding your Blood Rain, uses very damaging holy attacks that can kill you in only a few hits from full health (and Bloodless, being a vampire, is naturally weak to holy with a -25% modifier), and if by some miracle you win there's still Bael to deal with afterwards while you are likely very low on both HP and MP.
• That One Level:
  • The Oriental Sorcery Lab. While even getting there is tricky enough, the level itself is a sprawling area with enemies that hit hard, confusing exits and exploration that require thorough use of the Invert ability, and a lack of checkpoints compared to the previous areas.
  • The underwater section of the Forbidden Underground Waterway that leads to the Hidden Desert, which also suffers from Checkpoint Starvation. You need to use the Aqua Stream shard to push Miriam through the water and past a series of spike traps that inflict a lot of damage if they connect. There are no save points in this section, and the closest one is near the boss of the Hidden Desert, which also has some very powerful enemies throughout. If you're low on health and items, chances are the enemies there will do you in before you reach it.
  • Inferno Cave. The floor literally is lava for the most part, and it hurts like hell. It's also crawling with incredibly irritating and frustrating enemies, many of which take advantage of the limited means of egress and tricky terrain to box you in and repeatedly hit you with extremely damaging attacks, often also knocking you into the lava. Oh, and Checkpoint Starvation is a huge issue — you have to trudge through the vast majority of the Secret Sorcery Lab just to get there, and you won't find a single save or warp point until you get to the area right before the boss chamber. Thankfully, Orobas itself is something of a Breather Boss (at least in comparison to some of the other mid and late-game bosses), but it's small comfort when you're burning through healing items like crazy and are only two rooms in. This is especially the case in Nightmare mode, where your HP is usually around 1000 throughout the game. Any environmental hazard will damage you around 400HP. If an enemy knocks you back and you touch the lava, you're basically toast.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Gebel. He's set up as the main antagonist of the game and is seen twice before you fight him in his throne room. Following that, he dies regardless of your actions, and the remainder of the plot focuses on Alfred, Zangetsu, and Dominique, who all get more screen-time than he does.
  • Dominique. One reason why she is a Base-Breaking Character is because she isn't confirmed to be Evil All Along until near the very end of the game, leaving the writing with little to no time to explore her background or motives beyond a single Motive Rant. This has left some fans wishing that her true alliegance was confirmed earlier than it was.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many players were hoping that Zangetsu's campaign would shed some light on the ending of the main story, specifically how he survived and escaped from Gremory's void. But like many Castlevania games before it, his mode doesn't have any story elements until his final boss, revealing an alternate scenario in which Miriam has been fully corrupted and has embraced the darkness. Not that taking pages from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (and even Curse of the Moon) was necessarily a bad thing, but many were hoping that his mode was connected to the main story somehow.
• Too Cool to Live: Zangetsu. Subverted if you have your resolution set to Ultrawide, which reveals that he survived the events of the game. A later update also hints at it with a sequence showing Miriam leaving the Zangetsuto in the ground, followed by a shot of the sword no longer being present as a shadow departs from the scene.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • Several demons, such as Nyapon, Macaron, Kamikaze, Puppy, and Rocky, are the photorealistic heads of real cats and dogs, and look disturbingly unnatural next to the more stylized designs of every other creature and character.
  • Poltergeists are framed pictures of real-life Kickstarter backers and other key people (and animals). The first time they're seen, it's immensely creepy... especially when they start moving toward the foreground and attack the player.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Dimension Shift. You gain the ability in the last area of the game, after beating the second-to-last boss. You need to use it to progress only once, and aside from that, it's required for a few sidequests and chests that are inaccessible otherwise, but other than that, it doesn't see much use. The area based on Journey added in August 2022 requires it, but is still a purely optional area.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Bloodless actually becoming a playable DLC character outside of Boss Revenge Mode.
  • The announcement of just who the surprise DLC character promised back in 2020 finally arrived on March 30, 2022: Aurora from Child of Light caught everyone off guard, with several thinking it was an April Fools prank.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • While the game had a good, positive following at first, the first reveal of the graphics of the game made people think twice, declaring it as ugly. This was reversed when they showed off new, improved shaders for the game and some updated graphics, which many people declared looked downright beautiful. Igarashi even appeared in a video announcing the change, which showed a lot of the critical comments onscreen and then cut to him reenacting Dracula's famous Dramatic Shattering of his glass goblet while promising to prove them wrong.
  • The E3 demo, which, despite being alpha, was so well-received for its visuals, gameplay, and music that any fear of Bloodstained "pulling a MN9" has all but vanished.
  • Some time after WayForward Technologies joined the development to help with finishing the game, an announcement for an actual release date finally came, accompanied with a trailer that shows how many refinements the graphics have received over the months. Fans joyfully looked on as the developers proved they did in fact listen to the criticism and delayed the game to genuinely improve it.

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