I love the Metroidvania genre of video games. Typically taking place in 2D, these place you in a platform adventure game in one huge level, with new areas slowly revealed as you unlock new powers and abilities. On paper Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night sounded like the perfect game, heavily influenced by the Castlevania series. Unfortunately, I wasn't a fan of the game, I found it to be pretty dull. It did have a retro spin-off (inspired by the earlier more traditional level based Castlevania games) titled Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon that was thankfully quite excellent. A sequel was released in 2020 - Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2, that I excitedly began but then bounced right off of. Recently I gave it a second go, but the game for whatever reason didn't grab me the same way.
You play as a variety of characters, with you able to swap between them at will to take advantage of their unique powers and abilities. Main protagonist is the demon hunter Zangetsu, and he gets initially joined by exorcist Domonique, Robert who is armed with a rifle, and Hachi - a comedic steampunk mech suit piloted by a corgi! The barebones story has Dominique discovering a tower that has been used to summon a demon castle. Over eight levels you battle through castles, forests, volcanos and towns on your quest to reach the castle and defeat its master. Each level is made up of a load of different areas and all culminate in an impressive boss battle. Characters have different abilities to help you take shortcuts and find secrets. Robert for instance is able to crawl on his belly through tight spaces and bounce off of walls, while Hachi is able to destroy special walls and is impervious to damage from spikes. Towards the end of the game your team are joined by the protagonists of the original game with their abilities added to the mix.
The first one had you going through the levels twice to get the true ending. I felt Curse of the Moon 2 goes too far. It is split into three chapters, each chapter has you going through the same set of eight levels for various story related reasons. On occasion it will lead to a different boss battle and areas you couldn't previously travel to but mainly it felt the same. This leads to my confession of not actually having truly completed the game. I was getting bored by my third run and ended up abandoning the game at the final level. Also, I admit I played on 'Casual' so that I had infinite continues and didn't have to keep replaying levels. The levels are fine but not particularly memorable, and the soundtrack was a disappointment. One thing it does get right is the amount of unique enemy types and some fun boss battles. Favourite boss was a giant bug infested sarcophagus, and the fire dragon I grew to like. Others, particularly the final boss for the first chapter were not so good.
It looks and feels like Castlevania but the level types also reminded me a lot of Mega Man. I thought the retro pixel graphics worked well and the gameplay was decent enough but I just wasn't feeling it as much. Especially with the three chapters being essentially the same. I couldn't help but be disappointed, both by the increased difficulty on the default mode, the lacklustre music, and the uninspired level design. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 was a fine game, but not an essential one to play.
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