Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

About

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a gothic, exploration-focused action platformer developed by Inti Creates. The game was also designed by Koji Igarashi, best known for making most of the Castlevania titles in the past, most notably Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The game released on Windows, PS4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch in June of 2019.

History

In 1997, Konami developed and released a new title in the Castlevania franchise for the Sony PlayStation called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The game was notable for being much different from past titles in the series, having more focus on non-linear exploration and RPG elements, while older games were more linear and simple. The one responsible for this change was Koji Igarashi, the director, writer and designer for the game. This style of gameplay is very reminiscent to that of the Metroid series, and because of that, most people recognize this style as “Metroidvania”. After it’s release, the game was critically acclaimed, considered as one of the best entries in the series, and most of it’s 2D successors would follow the same formula. In March of 2014, Koji Igarashi left Konami, as he wished to make more 2D exploration action platformers.

On May 6th, 2015, Igarashi released a site called Sword or Whip,^[1] in which a pixel art of him asks "Sword… or Whip… You decide." On May 11th, Koji Igarashi launched a project on Kickstarter^[2] called Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Similar to projects like Mighty No. 9 and Yooka-Laylee,, Bloodstained is a spiritual successor to a classic video game, in this case Castlevania, being made in the same fashion and by some of the same minds behind the past 2D non-linear games. It was initially scheduled to release in March of 2017 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. In less than 24 hours, the project was funded and raised over 1,000,000 dollars with over 12,000 backers.

As of May 26th, the Kickstarter had raised more than 2.75 million dollars with 35,000+ backers ^[12] and most of it's stretch goals has been reached, including the Classic Mode stretch goal. The page has been updated with eight new stretch goals, six of which are 8-bit song composed by Yamane, Yamada and Virt, a stretch goal for IGA to design the biggest castle he ever has (according to the Kickstarter page, at least), one for a Wii U port of the game, and a mysterious one that fans still don't know about at the moment.

In March of 2017, Nintendo released the Nintendo Switch, which led Igashi to cancel development on the Wii U and focus on the Switch,^[13] delaying the game. On June 18th, 2019, the game was released on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Windows, and on June 25th, the game was released on the Switch.

Plot

The game's Kickstarter^[2] page describes that like most of the games Koji Igarashi has worked on in the past, the game takes the formula that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The player will be in control of Miriam, a girl that was picked as an orphan in her young ages by an Alchemist, she became the host of the dark Alchemists' curse, by being fused with the magi-crystals, leading her to sleep for nearly 10 years while the curse would grow in her body. She later wakes up with a form of amnesia, not fully understanding what happened to her. Meanwhile, someone by the name Gebel, which was the original host for the magi-crystals curse and the only one to survive it's effects, realized he was no longer a human and had no place on earth. He then summoned a demon castle from hell and many beasts along with it, with the original purpose to give Miriam a place of her own, but being surrounded by hell-spawn, the magi-crystals engulfed his body. He continues to plot the downfall of man, and how to best convince (or use) Miriam to achieve his dark ambition.

Online Presence

On the same day the Kickstarter project was revealed, the /r/bloodstained ^[3] subreddit was launched for discussions and pages like Operation: Akumajo ^[4] were highly supporting the project and releasing information about it.

Backer Achievements and Unlocks

To help promote the game on social media, the Kickstarter project implemented what they call Backer Achievements. Asking the backers of the Kickstarter to submit fan art, comics, pictures of them cosplaying as Bloodstained characters, among many more.

In completing these tasks, the Kickstarter would reward the backers with additional content, unlocking stretch goals, and even having the creator Iga cosplay. As part of this, Inti Creates released a companion game, Bloodstained: Curse of the Blood Moon on May 13th, 2018.

Zangetsu

One of the game's characters, Zangetsu, was originally revealed during the 2015 Gamescom convention. It was not until the 2015 August Backer Update^[2] on August 19th that the name and backstory of the character were revealed. It reads:

"Coming from a small country far away in the East, Zangetsu specializes in fighting demons. He makes his way to England when the demons first show up 10 years before the main story of Bloodstained begins
He uses a dual katana fighting style along with Japanese “ofuda” paper incantations to destroy his demonic foes.
During his long battle to keep the demons at bay he loses his left eye and right arm. Using a special Ofuda spell he is able to animate a wooden prosthetic arm to nearly the same level of mobility as his original arm. The Ofuda that covers his missing left eye grants him the ability to see both auras of both the living and dead.
He lost a great deal of friends during his 10 years of fighting, creating an absolute hatred for not only the creatures themselves but also the Alchemists that brought them to the Earth"

Creator IGA has gone into a little bit more about the character's creation:

"Zangetsu is a character I came up with when trying to answer this question: What happened in the lost time between the appearance of the demons on earth and Miriam's awakening 10 years later?
In all my games I’ve never had a Samurai character appear, much less a character from Japan, so I’m using the opportunity of working in this new universe to try something new.
The character is an interesting blend--he wears a Western coat, reminiscent of the era, but has it half open, which is a very Japanese style. I wanted to show off a bit of his wild nature with the design. We are still working out the Ofuda concept, so please bear with us.
It’s kind of ironic--I was able to come up with Miriam, Johannes, and Gebel’s name rather easily, but landing on a good Japanese name ended up taking a long time."

Reception

After the game's announcement, many gaming sites started to discuss the future of Igarashi's new game, such as IGN^[5] and GameSpot,^[6] as well as many members on message boards of forums like NeoGAF ^[7] and /r/bloodstained.^[3] Many YouTubers started to discuss about it as well, most notably YouTubers AlphaOmegaSin ^[7] (shown below, left), which made a vlog discussing the potential of a project like this, and GameXplain^[8] (shown below, right), which discussed about the project's future along with SomeCallMeJohnny and Nate.

Critics gave the game high praise following its June 2019 release, receiving Metacritic scores in the mid-80s across all platforms except the Switch version, which gained an aggregate score of 75.^[14] Most critics felt it was a worthy spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, though critics cited performance issues on the Switch.

Fan Art

External References