Cooking? And usefulness/relevance of mechanics

Absolutely not. Why would this be desirable in a Metroidvania game? Another guy mentioned Odin's Sphere and Zelda BotW for good games that implemented cooking...but first of all, those were different types of games entirely, and second of all, I argue that those games were good primarily because of other reasons aside from their cooking systems.

Metroidvania is about exploration with platforming, and getting new equipment/abilities while exploring so you can access new areas and have new ways to handle enemies. A cooking mini-game would not benefit the game at all. It's just outside of the scope of the game. At least with games like BotW having a cooking system makes sense, since you're surviving in the wilderness. Do you think Symphony of the Night or the other similarly styled CV games would have been better with a cooking system too? It would make no sense in those games, and it would/will make no  sense in this game either. Why don't we have a tennis mini-game in Bloodstained while we're at it? That makes about as much sense as having a cooking mini-game.

I'm sure someone will say, "Well, if you don't want a cooking system in Bloodstained, you don't have to use it." However, this logic falls flat when you consider that the player will be at a disadvantage if they do not use the cooking system, and if they're not at a disadvantage as a result of not using it, then the cooking system is pointless to begin with and development time would be better spent on other things like making the castle bigger and/or making more equipment anyway.

 mmm i think it was just fine with your first answer were you just said NO because that means you are not interested. i dont want to argument and its not necesarily a minigame maybe it will be as simple as it was in ooe (deliver the ingredients and buy at the general store) but for what i seen so far you are not waiting for bloodstained, you are waiting for SOTN2. sotn didnt have character customization so i guess bloodstained doesnt need it same thing goes for forging. because SOTN was so good theres no need for Bloodstained to innovate or to not be SOTN2?. dont take it as an attack but honestly thats the way i see it.

dont take me wrong i hate the idea too, im more a potion guy but why not give it a try? food has always been a reminder for players that the game has some comedy involved like the super awkward food you found in SOTN (frankfurter, modern lunches, peanuts, ice cream, cakes and many other oddities). 
also its an igavania so im pretty sure the game will be easily beaten by experienced CV players with or without food buffs. in SOTN we had buff potions and i even made a thread about how these were NEVER necesary to finish the game. 

I don't see how "bizarre things" like cooking would detract from the game being good. If anything it adds yet another thing to do in the game and could benefit the gameplay by supporting a boost in powers/stats/etc.

Also find it hilarious that you're ok with the souls/crystal farming gimmick used in plenty other games (like Devil May Cry), yet a less impactful feature of cooking is scoffed at.  
I say let the designers design, so far they have been doing great.  Go Cooking go! 

Because some things should not be added to a game. If a game tries to stretch itself too thin by including tons of things that don't relate to the core gameplay, it ends up being a bad game. Things outside the scope of a game should not be added, and a "cooking mama" minigame is certainly getting close.

I didn't mention Devil May Cry, as that has nothing to do with Castlevania or Bloodstained. I did, however, mention the crystal mechanic from Bloodstained and the souls mechanic from Aria/Dawn of Sorrow. The reason I'm okay with such a mechanic is because it's not outside the scope of the game. Metroidvanias are about gaining new abilities to use and progress, and the souls mechanic is a certain way to do just that. I'm not sure what your argument is here.
Designers are not infallible just because they're professional.

Let me be abundantly clear: I have no problem if cooking itself is in the game. If it's just a menu where you instantly combine other food or materials (like milk) to make better food, that's great. However, that doesn't mean I want this: 

Haha, it's mostly that some folks want more of a 1:1 SotN 2.0 experience, while others enjoyed the later games and want more elements from those added + new things, as well. I kind of fall between those two camps.

Dragon's Crown's cooking was one of the coolest parts to me of the game, and it was pretty much completely unnecessary. Since crafting is 1000% a thing in Bloodstained, it would follow that you could craft food, too. Crafting macaroni, too, perhaps? A...masterKraft?

Yeah, they would give you buffs, but they were quite temporary. I liked it more just because the food looked nice (like the rest of the art) and it was fun to do. What you could prepare was from the stage/monster you'd beaten, and in this video looks like they just fought the kraken. It just added further personality to the game, but was pretty much just .jpgs vibrating around and sound effects lol.

And I completely disagree with you.

Your point about the Souls mechanic adding a "gotta catch them all" theme isn't really relevant. In order to get those souls, you have to play the game. There's no mini-game where you collect souls to be used in the main game, and the only way your analogy would work is if that were the case. You seem to act like the Sorrow games are collect-a-thons, but they aren't. Also, it was Harmony of Dissonance that had furniture collecting, not SotN, and that game is easily the worst of the GBA games with its garbage OST and how it artificially expands the castle with its "Castle A" and "Castle B" nonsense (even lazier than SotN's inverted castle).

If cooking is made useful (if the designers adhere to good game design which entails making mechanics they add in either useful or mandatory), then the game will be designed in a way that the player will be at a disadvantage if they do not partake in this "optional" cooking mini-game. So yes, it would technically be optional, but that's not good enough. This is like saying, "Oh you don't HAVE to put money towards microtransactions in this single-player game, you'll just be at a disadvantage without doing so. See? It's optional!"

No, if a side thing like cooking is causing a game to be worse, then it would probably be better off without cooking, or at least without the type of cooking currently in the game. No one is saying that we should blame a mini-game for the downfall of other aspects of a game. I don't know why you seem to think this is the case.

"Fans are not Designers just because they play the games" ...says the fan pretending he/she is a designer by claiming something is good from a design standpoint. I mean, if you're going to accuse me of acting like a designer despite never even implying I'm a designer, I can do the same.  Even discounting this hypocrisy, I totally disagree that fans don't have good design ideas. If IGA believed this, he wouldn't have polled us for the choice of shaders, or given us a familiars poll. This ethos argument has little to no merit. The fact that I'm not a paid professional means I have no idea as to what makes a good game? Ridiculous.

Cool, and yet cooking is in! Yay for us! Boo for you.


And yet getting 100% in Aria of Sorrow gives you the Chaos ring. "Gotta catch them all" is relevant. There is a point of being a collector.


And yet there are many faqs and videos of people collecting 100% souls.... and... Chaos Ring! 


You are correct, I meant Harmony of Dissonance. But I don't agree that it was the worst.
Garbage OST? Every game on the GBA had a crummy OST. That's because of the hardware's limitations to producing a wider range of the sound spectrum. Look at the Final Fantasy ports on GBA, they originally have some of the greatest video game music made, but on the GBA they sound terrible. This is why you see rom hacks out there that have converted the music to their original SNES versions for those who aren't playing the games on original hardware. Or hacks that help increase the levels of the bass of some games like Golden Sun for instance.

And to be fair, reversing level designs has been a norm in games forever. It's not lazy, it's economic...and if the levels are built properly they can be reversed/mirrored and still be able to be played and enjoyed. This is just good level design. It's akin to illustrators that mirror the image they're drawing to make sure the proportions of (face) features line up correctly. If done properly, reversing that image should still look great. Just like Level Design. Many games do this kind of mirroring of levels and because they're well built, they work. From a developer's POV, why not use it?  Why go through creating even more content when you can use what you've well built?



That's not how optional features works. Think of it like a fork in the road to a destination. You have choose either way to progress, and may choose one over the other for subjective reasons, but you will still get to the destination. It's all about what kind of journey you want to experience.
In games that have Cooking done well, like the aforementioned Odin Sphere, you could spend your time doing either path and still end up in the right spot. In Odin Sphere you could grind experience by fighting enemies, leveling up by collecting their Phozons en masse. Or, you could use those collected phozons to grow plants to make ingredients to cook with, then eat the cooked food for even more EXP.

But the trade off is time. Time spent killing, or time spent growing. It's still ends up in the same destination. That's true balance.



Yes. The fact you haven't made a game for the masses to enjoy means you most likely don't have all the information needed to what goes into making a game completely and well balanced.
You sited HoD having a terrible OST, but did you even know about it's hardware constraints? Is it in your opinion that it's terrible because of the arrangement of notes? The usage of rhythm and timing? The ambient filler or texture of the sounds? Lets have a discussion.

And I sure don't think I'm a designer, but I do know what I like and why I like it.

We can agree to disagree I guess, but at the end of the day I will be happy with the cooking feature in.

opt2not

With something like this, you really just seem like a troll, or otherwise someone who engages in schadenfreude. Are you sure you want that image?


Yeah, but collecting souls is built into the rest of the game seamlessly. I find it hard to believe a cooking mama mini-game will be built into Bloodstained seamlessly. We'll see, I guess.


I'm guessing you don't know: those hacks are completely usable on original hardware. In other words, SE was just being lazy with the conversion process. The GBA is perfectly capable of good sound, and Aria of Sorrow has a great OST (especially compared to Harmony of Dissonance).


It's still lazy.


Yeah, a big if. I have yet to read in any interview where anyone on the SotN dev team states that the inverted castle was planned from the beginning.


Except it's not. False equivalence much?


Yeah it is, though. If optional content is bad, it's not okay so long as the other content is good. If level design, OST, visuals, and gameplay in a RPG are all 10/10s and the optional content is a 5/10 in comparison, that's going to negatively affect the overall quality and experience of the game. It is content that is within the game, and therefore it should be factored into a judgement of the game.

Forks in the road are nice, as options are nice in general, but it's pointless if one path involves actually playing the game and the other doesn't.


No, the fact that I haven't made a game just means I haven't made a game. If I don't have all the information needed to make a game "well balanced", then it's due to a lack of knowledge rather than a lack of being a paid professional. This argument is objectively fallacious. writingcommons.org/open-text/information-literacy/rhetorical-analysis/589-fallacious-ethos


Yes, I do know about the GBA's hardware constraints. I also know that HoD could have sounded a lot better. See my earlier response to your mentioning of the FF sound patches.


What, and I don't? I've already explained in detail why I don't like what I don't like, as well as why I like what I like.


I'd love to have a discussion (in fact, I was under the impression we were having one already), but it doesn't appear to me as though you want a discussion. With statements like "Cool, and yet cooking is in! Yay for us! Boo for you. " it seems to me you just want to troll. It's a good thing that you're tapped out on the debate anyway, because I really don't want to debate with someone who engages in schadenfreude.