Recently I went on vacation to Traverse City, a lovely town that is about two or three hours north from where I live. The people there were getting ready for the yearly Cherry Festival and positivity was higher than ever. The last few days have been nothing but misery and nonstop rain, because this is Michigan after all. If you expect wonders to come from the glove state then I hope you like disappointment as an answer. I’m just glad the sun is finally out and it doesn’t feel as bad to go outside. Now we just have to wait before the heat waves start kicking in and some guy passes out from a stroke. Michigan. You are what I describe as “a person who is both beautiful and horrifying to be around”. While in Traverse City, I went to this small donut shop that made neatly decorated miniature donuts. Visited one of my favorite ice cream shops in the town, Milk & Honey. Ate some fried fish and chips, a barbeque sandwich from a street vendor, a fat stack of pancakes alongside some bacon, and a vietnamese sandwich to help balance out all the grease I ate the past few days. Took a walk at the beach, visited a historical fishing village, drove to a historical lighthouse, gazed at the fields of a winery, and took tons of photos of the entire place. Why am I describing how the last few days were spent? Don’t know. Felt like my vacation to Traverse City would be a fun thing to bring up before we start today’s review, because it ties in with how I played this game.
The drive from Point A to Point B for me is at least two and a half hours and that’s enough time to pick up a short indie game and enjoy it between both car rides. What would I play while strolling along the road? The reason why my family went to Traverse City is because one of my mother’s friends flew all the way from Texas, and my mother wanted to show her what the cherry city looked like. My mother’s friend also gifted me a one hundred dollar Nintendo Eshop gift card and I used it to buy a small handful of cool indie games that I’ve been meaning to get to eventually. The first game I decided to buy using the digital currency was Bloodstained: Curse of The Moon, a short linear platformer that would be followed up by Bloodstained: Ritual of The Night and it’s own sequel one year after ROTN. During the Kickstarter campaign for Ritual of The Night, one of the crowdfund goals was to have a standalone spinoff be developed to help support the anticipated project. It probably shouldn’t have been a thing, because Koji Igarashi and his small team was busy making a metroidvania that was wide in scope and had tons of content. However, the crowdfund goal was met and Igarashi didn’t want it to be a scam that hundreds of people dumped their money into.
He hired Inti Creates and tasked them to develop a short quality standalone spinoff. If you don’t know who Inti Creates are, they are a small Japanese studio that develop a lot of retro styled sidescrollers. This includes the Azure Striker Gunvolt, Blaster Master Zero, some of the Mega Man Zero games, and Mega Man 9 & 10. I think their experience with creating retro side scrollers mainly comes from how they helped Capcom with the Mega Man series before they had to take a long break due to how many entries were being churned out from the Mega Man labeled butter churner. Mega Man is a franchise I still like though, because of how I grew up playing the classic series and some of the Mega Man X games in middle school. It’s really nice to see that Inti Creates are still active and developing quality games, especially since they partnered up with the legendary Koji Igarashi, the guy who practically invented the metroidvania genre alongside Nintendo. We really need to think of a better genre name.
The plan Inti Creates had was, “Curse of The Moon wouldn’t be connected to the story or timeline of Ritual of The Night”, but Koji Igarashi did occasionally intervene to tell them what to do for certain levels and scenarios. Igarashi still wanted Curse of The Moon to be related to the Ritual of The Night, and he wanted people to know that Bloodstained would go on to be a series that would succeed the Castlevania franchise. Which we all know is being driven into the ground and left for dead by it’s publishers, Konami. The spinoff standalone was released out of nowhere in early 2018 and reception for the game was pretty good. There were a lot of positive review scores and this spinoff showed backers of ROTN of what to expect in the upcoming future.
Bloodstained: Cure of The Moon is a pretty good action platformer and even though it does have some problems, I would say my time with the game was pretty good. I did two playthroughs of the game, on the normal setting and on the nightmare setting which is unlocked after beating the game once on the normal setting. Figured why not make the most of this game while away from home? It’s a nice nostalgic trip and falls into the nice category that retro themed indie games like Shovel Knight and The Messenger are under. Today we’ll be taking a look into why I liked Bloodstained: Curse of The Moon and why it deserves your attention. So brandish thine blade, prepare thine spells, and venture through a land only fit for the greatest of demon slayers.
Story
If any of you reading this have played Ritual of The Night prior or at least know how a Castlevania game starts out then imagine a similar scenario. A giant ominous castle pops out of thin air and a darklord who rules the castle is sending out an army of demons to terrorize the land. Everything is in complete shambles and only those who are strong and brave to venture into the castle will possibly bring an end to this age of demons and darkness. Luckily, there just so happens to be a brave soul capable of sacrificing his life for others. Zangetsu, a skilled swordsman who has traveled from the east and has the power to cut down a fierce foe in one blow. Zangetsu has been inflicted by a mysterious curse when the castle popped up, and he fears that the curse will either kill him or transform him into a rampaging demon.
To stop the curse from, he ventures into the demon infested castle hoping by slaying the demon overlord he can lift the curse. Unfortunately, he is several miles away from the castle and has to find other means to quickly get there overnight. He catches a ride on a local train which is then overrun by demons, and he soon slays the mechanical demon that is driving the train towards the tower. Once he slays the living furnace, he frees a young woman named Miriam who turns out to be Shardbinder. The Shardbinders were once regular human beings that freely roamed the earth, but from the shadows they were kidnapped by a group known as The Alchemy’s Guild and experimented on. They were implanted with crystals that allowed them to wield magical abilities that only demons can perform. Some of these Shardbinders were killed during their mutations, while others went mad. The Alchemists disbanded the guild and the Shardbinders that lived are assumed to be demons.
Zangetsu plans to kill Miriam since she is technically related to the demons that now terrorize villages, but Miriam then convinces Zangetsu to bring her along for his journey. She too wishes to stop the demon overlord and bring peace back to the world. Zangetsu decides to let Miriam live and together they begin to battle their way through the demon hordes. Along the way they also team up with an ex-member of the Alchemist’s Guild named Alfred, and another Shardbinder named Gebel. Now up to a party of four, Zangetsu prays that he can slay every demon that stands in his way and bring this demonic castle crashing towards the ground.
Gameplay
Ritual of The Night was more focused on exploring an interconnected world and giving the player more options as they grew stronger over the course of the game. Curse of The Moon is kinda the opposite. It’s more focused on carefully navigating through linear levels full of obstacles and testing the player’s skills with scaling difficulty and scenarios. It’s a platformer. I could have just said that instead of having to explain the different gameplay structures of ROTN and COTM. You have four characters to play as, and each one comes with their own unique abilities and traits.
Zangetsu is the basic start off character. He has a short ranged sword attack that can be spammed in quick succession, and a decent jump height. Miriam has the most abilities between all four characters, and personally she was the character I gravitated towards the most for how useful she was. She is equipped with a long ranged whip which is nice if you don’t want to risk taking damage up close. She has the highest jump height which allows her to have more midair traction and get over tall obstacles easily. She has a slide which can let her reach cramped areas. She’s basically the female adaptation of a Belmont. Next there is Alfred who has a very short ranged attack and doesn’t do as much physical damage as other characters, but he has a variety of spells which are good with offering protection and downing foes easily. Finally there is Gebel, who has a short but wide spread attack that scatters a bunch of bats and the ability to turn into a bat and fly towards areas the other characters can’t reach.
All four characters have their own individual life bars and if one dies then you get kicked back to the beginning of a section with another character. If all four characters die then you get kicked back to a checkpoint and lose a life. Once you lose all your lives it's game over. There are lamps that litter each stage and if you shatter them then they will drop one of numerous items. Treasure sacks which add up to your high score, hearts which can replenish your health, bottles of magic which replenish your magic meter, and sometimes an extra life which are hard to come across in each area. If your high score reaches a certain number then you may gain an extra life.
Magic is very important, because it allows your characters to perform special abilities. There are the normal lamps and the blue lamps which may drop abilities for your characters. Zangetsu has a whip which attacks diagonally upward, and a card that moves diagonally downward and spawns fire. Miriam has a small knife projectile that can be thrown forward, a knife attack that is aimed upward and fires three knives at once, a cyclone projectile that comes back like a boomerang, and an axe that takes time to charge but deals tremendous amounts of damage. Alfred can spawn a shield of fire to protect him or allies from projectiles or firey attacks, a frozen shot that freezes an enemy and allows you to shatter them within a single hit, spark balls that home in on whatever is on screen, and the ability to spawn a clone in front of him to attack enemies from a distance. Gebel doesn’t have any magical attacks besides the ability to turn into a bat which is his default ability. If you use some of these magical abilities during the right scenarios, you will either make entire sections easier or gain access to alternate pathways through levels. There are also upgrade pickups which can increase your maximum health, magic capacity, defense, and attack power.
At the end of each stage there is a boss which will test your reflexes and ability to analyze attack patterns. They will take numerous attempts until you understand how to dodge each attack. Near the end of a fight they will perform a powerful attack that has the ability to knock off a huge chunk of your health, but once they perform it they then die afterwards. They are basically kamikaze attacks. Usually you just have to switch over to the character with the most health and you’ll survive, because sometimes these attacks are unavoidable. Besides all of that, there really isn’t much else for me to say about Curse of The Moon. The game is basically classic Castlevania modernized. Hopefully you can defeat the castle ruler and bring peace back to the land.
Thoughts
Bloodstained: Curse of The Moon is a really solid action platformer and it does a good job modernizing the original Castlevania setup. Everything feels very “at home” for me. The 8-bit pixel graphics and how they used a color palette similar to the one they used for NES games like Mega Man and of course Castlevania. The soundtrack is also “at home” as well with how up beat each one is. Now onto actually criticizing how the game is set up. You progress through levels in a linear fashion, but there are times when you get to choose alternate paths. Only certain characters can access these alternate pathways, so it’s kinda the game's way of rewarding the player for going through sections carefully and saving up characters for when they are most useful. I like how when you die with one character you don’t immediately get a game over and swap over to another character to pick off seconds from where you were. That’s nice, especially during a platforming, because it doesn’t feel as bad as losing a life and getting kicked back really far. However, up against bosses it is very annoying especially when you need specific characters for specific moments during the fight but are stuck with the characters who are just useless against that given moment.
There’s also the cheap design choices that Curse of The Moon carries over from the older Castlevania games. You can’t change the direction your character jumps. You also can change the arch for which your character jumps. So you are always going to line your jumps up correctly for if you miss a single pixel your character plummets into an abyss. Enemy knockback is still here and it is really annoying during platforming sections. I wish Alfred had a stronger physical attack and his ability is really useless. Big tip, “Do not use Alfred’s clone ability because it is pure dog sh*t”.
The way they handle nightmare mode is kinda a mix bag for me. You have to replay the game with only Miriam, Gebel, and Alfred. You can no longer use Zangetsu and you lose all the upgrades you have from the first playthrough. That sounds cool and all, but the developers didn’t really do anything to change up how a player navigates through each level. Enemy placement is still the same, nothing new is added, upgrades are still in the same location, and bosses still fight the same. There are a few changes I guess. Pathways you couldn’t get to before are now reachable. You now have more knowledge on how to get through each level and can hopefully have an easier time. The final level has been completely changed and is a level that tests each character’s abilities. The true final boss is an epic confrontation and the way the game ends is very cool. I can’t tell whether they jacked up enemy attack power though, because bosses still killed me at the speed they did during the first playthrough.
Now just because I’m complaining doesn’t mean Curse of The Moon is a bad game. It’s good. Really good in fact. My time with Curse of The Moon was well spent as said in the intro and I don’t know whether to say I liked it more or less than Ritual of The Night. I feel like both games succeed in different areas. One game is wider in scope and another one is more condensed and simpler to understand. It all comes down to preference really. In the end I’m going to have to say that I do recommend Bloodstained: Curse of The Moon. The first playthrough should take about two hours, and add the nightmare mode you have about four to five hours of playtime. For ten bucks I say that’s worth it. I give Curse of The Moon an 8/10 for being pretty good.
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