What's everyone currently playing?

I played this game on and off, but never sat down to fully complete it. I'm so happy that I finally did. Everyone talks about the amazing control and the visuals of this game.  I don't think that does this game any justice.  These controls are fantastic and they really went ham on the mode 7/visual trickery.  I think this game might have one of the best versions of Bloody Tears.  I love the percussion in that piece.  It is on the easy side...in fact it's very easy, I still don't see why this style of game couldn't have been improved upon and given more challenges.  A Doom 2 to the original Doom, if you will.  It's a shame we never got anything to fully follow this up.

I had originally played this and got to stage 5 or Stage 6 and never finished it saying I would come back to it.(That's going to be an ongoing theme, by the way)
I wanted revenge, and I finally got it!  This game is extremely underrated.  I never understood why it was never ported.  I mean, yes there's a ton of blood and gore(a surprising amount, but it was rated General Audiences.     I love swinging and super jumping in this game.  The fact that I'm traveling across Europe gave me this idea that Eric and John have some sort of cool car or an airship.  I know that might not be the case, but it gave me funny to think about.  I also love the sound effects in this game, even the extreme twangs of the Genesis.  The whip noises for me are a highlight.  It's easily in my top 5 CV games and that music is still blasting in my head as sit down to write this.

AKA the real reason I went back to Bloodlines.     This game is a mess, but I still really like it.  Why do I call it a mess?  Out of all the DS Castlevania games, this one froze on me the most.  A grand total of SEVEN TIMES, this game froze on me.  Not only that I hate this game's art style.  Weird that the one game that features a story involving paintings and they chose NOT to use Kojima's art.  What a weird missed opportunity and I hated the art style they used for Dawn of Sorrow as well, so I'm not solely picking on this game.  Maybe it's just me, but I find it weird that the only character to have a real arc is Johnathan.  He starts out weak, dumb, and has this whole "my father was a dick" arc that by this point I had gotten sick of.  Also his subweapons start out as trash...in addition to finding them.  You have to level them up...also he can't use the Vampire Killer until he proves his worth.  So, if you do all this and progress in the story he becomes the better character story-wise.  Charlotte starts out perfect and ends perfect.  Other than finding her spells, there's no real progression with her.  The whole not wanting to be treated like a child isn't  a character flaw, it's a quirk at best and simply requires showing her some basic respect.  I like her, but she's the unofficial mentor seeing as how most of the "Talk" conversations are either her teaching Johnathan how to play the game or scolding him for not doing good enough.  One last thing, I hated every Circus level.  The music, the color palette, the enemy locations, and overall level design came together to give me the biggest headache.(I'll go more into this for Symphony of the Night)
Now that I'm done with all that, let's talk about what I actually liked.  Johnathan's subweapons, once leveled, became my go-to MP use in the game.  I had a ton of fun finding and trying out the new weapons.  Richter Belmont's weakness...is a banana cream pie.  I can't even begin to make this up.  I started off not caring for the music much, but then I kept running into different paintings and being floored by some of the remixes.  Cross your heart(crucifix your heart?) and Iron Blue Intention are the clear highlights.  The latter of which hammers home the whole "Sequel to Bloodlines" feel the game has.  The boss fights, save one, were all fantastic.  My favorites were The Creature(NOT THE ONE FROM THE NEST OF EVIL WHERE YOU HAVE TO FIGHT TWO), Death, The Sisters, Brauner, and Richter.  While I found it weird that John and Eric weren't playable as Gaiden characters in a sequel to THEIR game, the extra playable characters were fun too.  I enjoyed this game a lot more than Dawn of Sorrow and I think it functions better as a direct sequel to a previous game.  It's the second best DS CV for me.  This game didn't make my top 5 though.

As I said earlier, I've restarted this game more times than any other Castlevania game.  The reason why had nothing to do with the difficulty.  The reason why, is due to laziness and boredom.  
The game IS NOT BORING in the least, but my attention span back then and even these days is weak.  I'm working on it slowly but surely and this genre of game can be played piece-meal, I think the real fun is binging the hell out of it.  That's when my chance to finally put this game to rest came with the PS4 re-release.  I had always thought that the so-called most popular and best game in the franchise didn't get a steam release or multiple ports by now.  It got ports, but not the ones you would think.  The 360/XBLA one was the one that introduced the game to me, so thankfully I avoided the load times.  I did get to experience that AMAZING voice acting.  A fun tip about that, apparently the voice director was telling the actors to inflect their words in weird places rather than how they would naturally say it.  My friend told me that was why the original voice work in that game was so weird.  A good explanation that I accepted, because the voices in the game never struck me as bad.  Robbie Belgrade is still my go-to Alucard.  This is why it pains me that they went with the PSP voice work instead.  I know the PS4 port was a port of the PSP port...(say that 10 times fast), but come on.  That original voice work is legendary and I still find myself quoting it.  The PSP acting is fine, a bit wooden, but fine.  Yuri Lowenthal is NO Alucard.  Patrick Seitz is a generic Dracula; he's nowhere near as legendary.

There was one awesome thing about the PSP port, some of the extra content from the Saturn version was brought over.  I capitalized on this by going after the extra familiars and making the Fairy sing.  Nocturne the english version is still a beautiful song.  I could listen to either version and be enraptured.

I've been beating around the bush a bit, so I'm going to get into it for real this time.  I completed the game with 198% castle completion and I used about 40% of Alucard's moveset.  I didn't use spells, fists, most of the familiars, or good portion of the weapons.  The second I got the shield rod, it changed how I played completely.  I used that until I got to...that second part of the game.  That's when I found the Crissaegrim and I proceeded to ignore every other challenge in this game.  
My restarts had nothing to do with difficulty, I would just stop playing thinking I would go back to it...and never do.  Then I would come back 6+ months later...forget what I was doing and figure I wasn't that far in the game anyway so I'll just restart.  Rinse and repeat.
I love the spritework in this game...though at this point I had played later games in the series of Metroidvanias/Igavanias so I was already used to seeing the monsters re-used.  The music in this game, is really good.  Not my favorite OST in this series, that goes to Rondo of Blood, but a lot of great compositions.  My favorite track is Wandering Ghosts.  It's funky as hell and just like Opus 13 and the Ghost ship theme from Rondo of Blood, it never showed up in the series again...*sigh*

By the way, I didn't bother playing Richter or Maria mode. I started them up just in case I get the bug to try them out, but I don't like how they feel like extreme glass canons...especially Maria. I'm also no good at the button inputs. I'm a fighting game player, but having to press up messes with me. I'm used to quarter and half-circles. That's also why I didn't use spells that much.



I'm going to talk about the inverted castle now.  I hate it with a passion.  I told my friend this and he sent me this image:


I'm still laughing about this. The inverted castle comes across as lazy. It's only challenge is in the enemy placement, which went from fair and balanced to stupid. I didn't like having to constantly turn into a bat for mundane traversal. I didn't like having to turn into a wolf just so the cavern levels would register the water sections on my map. It feels like broken pieces of level design slapped together...just like the circus levels from Portrait of Ruin.(What, you thought I forgot about that?)

THIS is why, I'm hoping...PRAYING that Bloodstained doesn't borrow every single element from Symphony. Symphony is still fantastic and it is definitely in my top five CVs, but that inverted castle is a low point that I never want to see repeated.

I am so glad, to have finally beaten Symphony of the Night. If I ever come back to it, I'm playing the 360 port or the PS1 classics port because I NEED "DIE MONSTER".

PS: Fuck Galamoth.  What an asshole he was, even with the Crissaegrim.  How could the nicest guy on this forum be such a dick.   ....justkiddingIloveyouGalamoth

I'm not finished with this game yet.  However, I did restart it multiple times as I did with SOTN...the second most I believe.  Why is this?  Emulation across different computers...until I finally had the money to grab a physical copy which the price finally eased off.  So far, I'm having a great time.  Due to my experience with these types of games now, I'm a lot more comfortable with the difficulty than someone just starting out.  The art style is fantastic, Shanoa and Albus are great characters so far, and I love the music.  The glyph system was a bit weird, but it's made me catch the completion-ist bug as I want to get as many glyphs as I can.  I don't really care for the magnetism mechanic.  It's ok, but I would have preferred the super jumps of old.  My favorite part of this game is the 3 glyph set slots.  This is what I'm hoping caries over to Bloodstained.  If there's a button unused, use it to switch between equipment/shard sets.  I am either half-way through the game or a good quarter in, but I have no intention of stopping ever again.  I'm hooked.

I did like the twist that Dracula didn't transform in this fight. I'm sure the story reason is that "he was resurrected too early or too incomplete" or some such other. I was surprised to see him walking towards me with the Frankenstein Jr/Monster skeleton model. That was legitimate scary and funny.

PS: I'm well aware of the recent trailer, I'm hoping that's either a gimmick for one area or a joke area. I'm also well aware that I'm in the minority of not liking the inverted castle.