The Grand Airing of Grievances

hmmm

most intriguing

Curiouser and curiouser. Guess I’m gonna have to follow the white rabbit down the hole.

Yeah that's what I'm trying to stress.

Like when Angel-Corlux said "If I had been around since the very start I would've recommended to not be cute and just call it the "Iga's biggest game" stretch goal, so there isn't any confusion."

That's what I'm not happy about. It's not the biggest game.

To be fair, Mourning and EB, the campaign goal said it would be IGA's biggest castle, not "game" specifically. Going off the letter of the promise, Bloodstained's castle is the biggest individual castle, with SotN's larger number of rooms being attributable to having another version of a smaller castle. And in terms of area, as Purify and Angel have said, this is objectively and indisputably the biggest castle because the way the map is organized means individual rooms are considerably larger in RotN than they were in SotN

Now, you could say this is a very legalistic interpretation, and I can understand being disappointed that there's not as many individual rooms as there was in SotN, but to technically fulfill a contract is still to fulfill it, and given some of the drawbacks of SotN's approach (such as *repeated* uses of Finale Toccata and Lost Painting), I'd say Bloodstained went quite a ways to fulfilling the spirit as well. And in fact, in terms of shards, abilities, etc., it is the biggest game. So I don't think it's especially legalistic either ;p

gunlord500

In my defense, angel literally just said " If I had been around since the very start I would've recommended to not be cute and just call it the "Iga's biggest game" stretch goal, so there isn't any confusion." And indeed that's been the narrative for years now. Biggest game.

Like, there's not a whole lot of gray area with that. And again, going off of how these games have literally always been measured, RotN simply is not the "biggest game"

Also just going to reinforce once again that RotN is also "smaller" than PoR but everybody is ignoring that since it can't be written off as easily as SotN's second castle.

purifyweirdshard

It's *fine* if you're okay with the what the size of the game is. Seriously. But the whole schick of you acting as if there's no real reason for anybody to be disappointed regarding the size of the castle is getting really old. I appreciate angel giving me a real number here. RotN is 1.78 times the size of SotN's castle. Which is a nice way of saying it's not as big as the entirety of what SotN has to offer. Ergo, not the "biggest game." There's literally nothing to argue about here. I personally wouldn't go so far as to say that they broke a promise, but dealing with the paragraphs of mental gymnastics to defend it that have been thrown at me is a bit much.

"It's more damaging to the game if I treat it as fact" ?? Come off it man. Besides the fact that it is, well, a fact: If you want to defend the game this hard you're better off trying to argue that the game offers more density than any other game in the series instead of ... whatever that last post was. I mean this as kindly as possible, but you aren't getting paid to PR this game. Relax a bit. There's reasonably defending the game and then there's weird super apologist territory.. If you insist on debating about the size of the game I'd rather see you talk about the worth and density of the game instead of arguing against unchanging, objective numbers.

Like, I wouldn't be so weirdly annoying about this if I didn't have about twenty replies of people arguing against a measuring system that's been used for 20 years now and basic math. I'm not trying to claim that it's a small or barren game. I'm just pointing out that in terms of explore-able game world, it's not the biggest. I fundamentally don't understand why everybody wants to fight tooth and nail against that fact.

I'm a bit late reading this, not sure how I missed this thread but I have some serious issues with many of these comparisons.
I don't want to get into a heated argument since you did state you are mostly satisfied with the game overall. But I just want to point out some things I noticed that seem to be skewing your metrics.

#1 Comparing the number of map segments is nonsence, They are inconsistent across all of Iga's games. Map segments are even inconsistent within a single game. But what I can guarantee is that you can take a room from RotN that took up 3x6 map segments; and if you put it into SotN it would show up as a 4x9 room.


#2 "The placement on the map doesn't make a lick of sense". Where would you put this sub-space area exactly? You travel through a portal to get there so it's not like it's directly connected to the castle.

Otherwise I agree, there have been multiple signs that the final two areas were thrown together at the last minute. There is a lack of concept art for these areas, and signs that the den of behemoths was originally planned to be something else entirely. [Discussion on the topic here].
But I happen to be a sucker for giant versions of pathetic enemies, and I had a good chuckle when I almost died to bats and frogs this late in the game. I JUST WISH THE GIANT MOCCO WEEDS WERE MORE LIKE ALURA UNE'S!


#3 I also would enjoy this game with higher difficulty. BUT as diehard fans we are the minority, even among the kickstarter backers, and the game should be balanced for the majority of the playerbase. I constantly hear OoE being bashed for it's high difficulty. I myself found it's hard mode to be more tedious than fun, (largely due to gold medusa heads being added to so many early areas). But perhaps I'm just fine with this viewpoint since I'm used to doing self-imposed challenges, such as only using the crappiest spells and items that you would never normally use.

I really enjoyed doing "boxer" playthroughs that require you to get dangerously close to each enemy. This game has me scratching my head on that front though since it doesn't have any offensively bad skills, and punching isn't even an option. (kicks have much more range than punches). For now I'm hopeful that there will be some more difficulty mods added in the future. Hopefully doing a co-op area solo will be a good challenge. Or maybe that Procedural generated castle mode will have some nasty difficulty options.


#4 I agree, almost entirely.


#5
- Heads up! My response to #5 is mostly by feel, which is not how I like to do things. I wish I could crunch some exact numbers and ratios but It is already way past my usual bedtime...

"This is the most reskin heavy game that Iga's made by far."
This is only true when viewed in a vacuum. If I were to count enemies reused from a previous game as reskins, (which I do), then RotN blows out every Castlevania by a country mile... (I say that hesitantly because I don't remember exactly how many of SotN's enemies were reused from RoB, Bloodlines and Castlevania 4).
My first and biggest praise I gave RotN when recommending it to Castlevania vet's is that the reskinned enemies have significantly different movesets. I remember going through AoS in particular and saying, "ANOTHER GIANT ARMOUR? SERIOUSLY? CAN'T IT AT LEAST HAVE A NEW ATTACK?". But in RotN, the Archdeamons have new spells, the new archers have seeker arrows, the cannons start to move, the flying toads... glide. It's not that they have one or two extra attacks, bur ALL of their attacks are different and have to be dealt with in all new ways. (I'm aware there are some exceptions, like the ghosts and the lava morte's but I feel there are more good examples than bad).

The final word is that unlike SotN this is the first iteration of a new franchise with all new assets. 3D models doesn't always mean cheaper assets. In fact I'd dare say it just means you can do reskins which are much better than recoulors.
The switch to 3D is a big deal for a fighting game where each character has HUNDREDS of frames of animation. But where common Castlevania enemies have 1-20 frames each, it is probably easier to make the game in 2D. That said I think the team took advantage of the 3D graphics well with the in-game cutscenes, the re-skinning that you disliked so, (again much preferred to recolours), camera zoom, and round areas that are actually round, (causing projectiles to fly into the foreground/background). I loved the Alfred fight and that just wouldn't work as well in 2D.


#6 The weak sidquests are actually my biggest complaint about RotN. SideQuests can add a lot to a game based on exploration and collection. Sidequests are my favorite thing from OoE and it's sad to see this basic skeleton of a village dolling out quests in RotN. At least the villager lost in the castle was done well though.


#7 The waterfall area with all of the shovel armours is 100% optional. I actually ended up severely overleveled after farming the shovel armours there, (and I got really lucky, so I wasn't there too very long). I actually didn't get to see the next 2 bosses full movesets because I killed them too fast So I don't really see the appeal of optional areas.

That said, I did love the non-linear feel of SotN. But the problem is that I'm always going to end up ridiculously overleveled for many of my encounters in SotN, and I hate that. Every time I go back to SotN I always lose interest as soon as I'm strong enough to take on the final boss and the rest of the castle is left unexplored. Maybe I'm missing some upside to that?

I suppose my only complaint would be that the 8 Bit Overlord should have a drop rate similar to the rest of the optional bosses (12 or 15 %). He currently only has a 4% drop rate which is infuriating since you always need to go through a special level just to get to him. I have one shard and have been grinding against this guy for hours.

i killed it 77 times to upgrade the shard to grade 9. It was a nightmare