The Grand Airing of Grievances

I'd like to personally congratulate you on being the only person on earth with this opinion.

So, you have asked all the people on earth and come up with that conclusion or you are just spouting nonsense?

Somehow, I got all the medals in OOE on my first play through.
the crab - took me a few tries to learn the pattern
the giant - he is so slow and I just spammed all the arrows on him
the fish - took me a few tries to learn the pattern too, not so hard
sea monster - easy
man eater - easy
centaur - iirc need to watch out for the crossbow?
albus - jump to the back and absorb acerbatus
barlowe - this one gave me some problems, I wonder why the third hit of the teleport punches always got me. 
blackmore - i think this is the hardest boss as i died too many times and there is no where to run

This is how I feel with regard to the "aspect ratio" thing when talking to you about it. I can only think of Sunraiser having the same thing to say a while back about the map being too small and she was probably reading it the same way. It's like you're purposefully ignoring something everyone understands as a given. anonthemouse 's post is another way of illustrating it - it's not a strawman, it's addressing things as directly and literally as I can. It wasn't part of the conversation before mostly because "why isn't it bigger" wasn't a conversation or just being a fact that many forgot or didn't consider regarding the screens being bigger, but things like this did come up here. Here's one instance:

bloodstained.forums.net/post/64860

To PM's post, you said "That's a bit of an odd way to look at it. Presentation doesn't really change anything in a practical sense" - but what him and I are saying aren't really about "presentation", it's like what I'm meaning here in that the game is actually bigger, regardless of how many blips can be counted. Here's another way to think about it in the most practical way that occurs to me right now - picture a sandwich at a sub shop. They're only measured in inches, right? However, isn't it well known and understood that a sandwich from your local deli is going to have much more meat and toppings than one from Subway who rations their meats in thin triangles? For this example, let's say the deli sandwich is also *wider* which is not taken into consideration of the inch length measurement.

What happened was Koji Igarashi promised you a sub that was at least 12" rather than the 10-11"s you were used to that had less width, and less meat and toppings in them. What arrived was a bit longer than 12" (as with a bit over 1600 as was the promise), which may at first look and sound disappointing because it's not the grander length you expected, but the sandwich is wider and has more in it that such that you're getting considerably more food than if you'd gotten a 20" Subway sandwich with evenly spaced thin meat triangles (SD squares). Because of all this, "inches" of a sandwich is just as ineffective of a true measurement of how big it is just as a map having x squares when comparing SD to HD. If I walked into Subway right now and they told me they'd give me a 24" sandwich for the cost of a 12" from the deli/sports bar etc, I'd still pass because there'd still be less actual food.

He was saying that OoE *normal mode* is harder than RotN *hard mode*, not comparing the hard modes themselves.

purifyweirdshard

anonthemouse

I'm not sure how to break it to you guys, but room count has in fact been the standard of measurement for Iga's games the entire time. If you want to introduce relative character size into the discussion, you end up with strange arguments like Circle of the Moon being one of the larger games just due to the small protagonist, and Harmony of Dissonance being even smaller because Juste is a bit larger. And here's the thing, I'd bet you all the gold in China that if Bloodstained was in a 4:3 ratio, the castle layout and room count would be the exact same thing as what we have now. The screen being a bit bigger in a relative sense does not make the game bigger. It does not make the game longer, nor does it add more content. It is simply the size of the screens. It is a bizarre defense of a game that has failed to meet one of it's promises.

Bloodstained does not have the most rooms, areas, enemies, bosses, or anything that could be reasonably used to explain how big the game is. The screen being wider does not magically make it the biggest game Iga has ever made in spite of everything else. If the game had half the amount of rooms, but double the amount of depth and stuff in it, then it would be a pitifully tiny game with a lot to mess around with. The goal was "Iga's biggest castle" not "Iga's most in depth game." You're a bit of a literalist when it comes to the stretch goals Purify, so tell me, where was aspect ratio officially introduced into the discussion regarding this stretch goal?

I'll bring up the point of the save room again. Bloodstained has a bigger save room than SotN because of the aspect ratio. But what does that mean? Absolutely nothing. A 30% "larger" save room does not offer 30% more content. If Bloodstained matched SotN's aspect ratio, then we'd see the same map layout, the same enemy spread, and the same amount of content. Bloodstained doesn't have bigger screens to offer more content, it has bigger screens because it's not 1997 anymore and every game for the past decade has been 16:9. Nobody has ever made the claim that games nowadays are bigger and offer more content because of the aspect ratio. If the game had Miriam and the enemies half the size they are now while not touching anything else, would you be claiming that the game is now over twice the size of all of SotN?

Also unfortunately for you I'm a sous chef in a restaurant that offers gourmet styled sandwiches, and I'd probably be shot if I sent out a sandwich that wasn't cut to the proper length regardless of how much "stuff" is in it. Bad analogy.

I will reiterate. The standard measurement for the size of Castlevania games has been room count. Always. That doesn't change now to try and fit a narrative.

The fact that this conversation can even be had, and aspect ratios needing to be brought in to defend the smaller size of the game, shows at the very least that they were cutting it very close with this stretch goal. And honestly, if the Den of Behemoths didn't exist and we had two or three actually interesting areas instead, I'd probably overlook the room count. But unfortunately the game has about 100-150 rooms of literal, actual, nothing, so I have a problem. Bloodstained shouldn't need the white knight brigade flying in. I should have finished the game and thought "Wow, that was definitely the biggest Castlevania I've played. I'm satisfied." Not ... "wait, that was the last area?" like I did.

Even if I wanted to cede on this argument that's gone on way too long, my opinion would then rest at "well even if it's the biggest game he's made, it really doesn't feel like it."

mourningxsun Dude, shut up about the room count. Right now, you're the guy being presented with a footlong sub and a hoagie and going, "But they're both just one sandwich."

No need to be rude.

Bloodstained has less rooms that sone other of Iga's. That's it.

No need for all the goalpost moving and unrelated comparisons. Just take the L. This series is measured in room counts. Bloodstained is no exception. The end.

Enough with the metaphors. They suck.

For your argument to work, you would need to provide some kind of evidence that these 30% longer "rooms" provide 30% more content compared to previous games. Of that I am unconvinced. The way to prove that would be to take the starting area of Bloodstained, and the starting area of another Iga game, probably DoS, and figure out density.

This would be accomplished by counting the amount of rooms in each area. Then one would count the enemy spawn points, items, chests, and whatever other quantifiable "thing" in that area. Then the numbers can be turned into a ratio (something like "Bloodstained has 1.2 enemies per room square) and if Bloodstained's ratios are about 30% bigger than the other game's, then you'd be correct, and I'd be wrong. It's the easiest way to objectively answer this one way or the other.