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Spoiler tag that map, brocephus!

Thanks. I didn't think it would be a big deal since you'd really have to study it to spoil anything, at which point just don't look at it. But you're right.

@Ziggy: Did you fight one of the secret super bosses? Not any of the ones in those locked rooms. You go back somewhere...

Boss was harder than the final boss by a long shot to me.

Ha. I just looked up a video. The premise is hilarious!

Yeah, so you probably know who it is.

Ziggy587 wrote:So I'm sure I'm not the only one to figure out this easy potion farming method, but check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCDyg8B4t_A

I have Augment LCK and Augment Gold leveled up fully, so those stats are both applied. Luck helps item drops, and the Augment Gold helps to gain more money when gold drops instead of an item. Any luck boosting equipment will help as well. I have a somewhat leveled up Shuriken conjure shard, and somewhat leveled Accelerator manipulative shard. These two shards really help speed up the process, as you can see.

Basically, you wanna pick up small webbing and melting bones to make potions, and then 4 potions makes a High Potion. But with the Augment Gold shard you will gain a little money as well. And any other items that are dropped, or shards collected, can be sold for even more cash (if you have no use for them). I sped up portions at 10x speed just to get to the point, but this entire segment only took about 5 minutes real time. And that's including going back to the save point once to refill the MP. The Accelerator shard really helps!

OK, so I tweaked my potion farming method a little bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXV1w5kDoxc

Basically, if you collect the MP restore item from the nearest candle each time then you will never deplete your MP. That way you can do this continuously without having to go to the save point to restore MP. Well, at least, that's what I can do with my current stats. You can see the stats of the equipment and shards that I'm using for this, but IIRC I also have a book checked out that boosts luck. Now the only limitation is the amount of potions you can carry at a time.

PSA: Bloodstained got added to Gamepass last week, which is nice.

Anyway, I've played quite a lot of it this week and overall am pretty positive on it even if it does have its share of flaws.

My main bugbear is with the bosses, less from mechanical standpoint and more to do with the fairly obnoxious amounts of health they have. I get it's hard to balance in what is nominally an action/rpg but I have been on level and well equipped but they are still a slog.

I don't really like the shard system either. It's not egregious but I find most of it fairly pointless. I found similar systems in Circle Of the Moon, Aria and Curse of Darkness a bit whack as well so maybe that is just me but I find these systems add a lot of grind and RNG where there perhaps shouldn't be. The water blast power is a prime example, it's a random drop from an enemy you would likely avoid but is essential to get the better ending.

And yeah, even this version is buggy and poorly optimised, still have the bug with loot bags getting stuck in the walls, has crashed my xbone twice, long reloading times after death, etc. Nothing game breaking fortunately but still annoying.

Finally I also understand Gunstar's thoughts on how it's possibly too similar to older Igavanias. While I can understand that's what people wanted, I also felt like the game was walking the line too often. I mean the Catherdral is so similar to the one in SotN it's kind of lazy. Having played SotN through recently there was a touch of disappointment in seeing so much stuff reused in a game 21 years later. Again I know that this is what people backed but still.

I am enjoying it on the whole though and looking to get 100% if not later then sometime this week.

I got it on gamepass this week as well, overall was very disappointed, I didn't finish it, I got lost, bored, more lost, more bored, and eventually just uninstalled it, glad i didnt pay for it.

It probably didn't help that one of the last games I beat was Guacamelee 2 which was hands down one of the most amazing metroidvanias I have ever played, after riding that high bloodstained just seemed stale and boring. Circle of the moon is still amazing though.

Sload Soap wrote:PSA: Bloodstained got added to Gamepass last week, which is nice.

I got three free months of Gamepass with my Ryzen CPU, so I've been playing this for about the past week or so on there. Honestly, I feel pretty similarly to you about it, except I don't really think the shard system is useless. I'd actually say it's pretty OP if you figure out how to use it. There's pretty easy access to high Luck stats early on, and just a few shards, like Dragonic Rage, Borride Blast, Teps-Oshius, etc make you a demigod. Farming a few (or even all nine) for the extra damage, and then ranking them up for added effects makes them lethal. Even Dragonic Rage at base grade, and just a few ranks is stupidly OP in the middle of the game. The issue I have is that there's just too much of it all, and all of it requires grinding like crazy to power everything up. At base levels, most of the shards are pretty useless.

MrPopo wrote:There's nothing in the game that makes this obvious; I thought my copy was bugged when I burned some materials on the regeneration and see invis shards and then I was getting the effects without them

Yeah, I thought this exact same thing, but for me it was with the Detective Eye. I didn't know what had happened, because it was still there after restarting the game. I eventually realized that it had been added to the list of abilities I could toggle on and off. It was kind of a relief, but it is a bit annoying that the game does such a poor job of explaining the shard systems.

Ziggy587 wrote:Here's a minor thing. You know how there's tips shown when loading? Well my loading screen goes by so quick that 2 or 3 tips are shows but they change so fast that I can't even read them! Seems like it was set up for (I'm guessing) console load times, but not my blazing fast new PC.

Same here. I can sometimes read half of the first tip or something if I'm really paying attention, but usually it's just gone in the blink of an eye.


So, would you believe that I have my locale set to Japanese, and that it causes most of my software to default to Japanese language? All right, well, If I mention a name of an item or something that sounds a little funky, that's probably why.

I've got just over 81% of the map explored. Like I said, I've been playing for the past week or so, and have put almost 34 hours into it. Most of that has come in two or three serious marathon sessions. I was not enjoying the game a great deal when I first started playing it. It felt all right, but I was sort of just going through the motions, and not really compelled by anything other than vague curiosity about how it stacks up to SotN. I started to really enjoy it around the middle of the game, but honestly, I don't think it does stack up. Not even a little bit. I've been kind of playing it as if I didn't have the internet, though. So I feel like there's a lot of bad signposting, but I've just been going hard on the Luck stat all the time, and grinding out shard drops, and alchemizing, while wandering around trying to figure out what to do next. I don't think I will ever play this game again, after I finish it. I don't see any reason to. I'm just constantly reminded of why I would rather play SotN again instead. There's a few things in particular that make me feel like Bloodstained can't hold its weight in the face of SotN: Little details like enemy death animations in SotN are something that really stand out for me, and Bloodstained doesn't have any of it, really; The gating, and actual path through the map feels a bit careless, and I find the abilities to mostly just be kind of odd, and uninspired; The grinding is honestly just ridiculous, even though it really fueled those marathon sessions I put into it so far; The small bits of story are not very compelling, and Zangetsu feels really out of place. I want to like Miriam more than Alucard, but I kind of don't.

So visually it's not in the same ball park, it doesn't have the Castlevania brand to lend more intrigue to the story, and it's just a worse castle, with less interesting enemies, and is not as well crafted in general. I think the idea that Bloodstained is significantly more difficult than SotN is just because it's new, and people are playing through it for the first time. Also, I find it just doesn't control as well. The hit stun is atrocious. Early on, I would very often get locked down by enemies because they just walked into me, they'd do damage, and wouldn't let me get away because the stun kills all of my input; can't attack, can't backdash, can't use attack shards, can't jump. So they just sit there whaling on me with their presence, I guess, and it just kind of sucks. Same kind of thing happens, very briefly, when landing after jumps. The base attack speeds for a lot of weapons is extremely slow, and at certain points in the animations, you can't even backdash cancel them. I still pieced it together with a few different weapons (mostly boots) early on, until I got the Yagrush, which made the game way more fun to play. The base movement speed also feels stupidly slow. I would constantly have to slide just to make myself feel like I might actually be moving at a reasonable pace. It's better with the speed belt, and now I have the movement speed book, too, but even then, I don't feel like it's as fast as it should be.

The sequence in which recipe books open up seems very careless, also. Literally, they give you the crystal and steel/gold weapons way before they give you access to the recipe book for the damascus weapons (even though they show up in the shop), because they put it in one of the spots you can't get to without one of the late game abilities, unless they actually meant to put a platform up to that doorway, or something. There were also plenty of those treasure chests in those just out of reach places that ended up having complete junk in them (a fucking Pirate Hat?!).

I know I've been harsh. I don't dislike the game; It's good. I like it. It does a lot of really weird, silly things, though. I've had it crash on me four or five times, also. Most of those were in the first of the twin towers. Other than that it's been pretty stable, despite some of the chains on enemies wigging out all over the place, and body parts of dead enemies stretching all over the screen.

Right now I'm pretty stuck, though.


So part of the prickly sentiments are probably brought on from this more recent annoyance of not knowing what the hell to do, and of course, Dominic and other guy are no help. They were so chatty early on, when I didn't need anything from them, and now that I do, they've clammed up. Anyway, I thought I was going to be done with the game, like, last Friday, but I guess it had other ideas.

The hint for your spoiler is this is a Richter Belmont in SotN situation. You were given a hint when you received the weapon, but you might have glossed over the text, and there's no way to see the hint again.