Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Saw this game on Xbox Game Pass, and was blown away by how good this game is. Similar to the "of Sorrow" castlevania games.

Not even a fan of Symphony of the Night but I really enjoy this. There's a good amount of loot, depth and action, plus the music is really cool. Story is hit-or-miss, the beginning took way too long to get to the point.

Just for fun and to mix it up I decided to record gameplay/write/voice/edit a review of this for my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1swAiXvjZw (spoiler alert I like it)

Starts off strong with the Zangetsu fight and goes downhill from there. Balance in the game is skewed towards the player to the point boss fights are trivially easy, not to mention bosses can have weird attack patterns and bad hitboxes. Progression and world design have some cool moments but it can be annoyingly vague made worse by an amateurish presentation. While the weapon/spell system has some cool stuff in it, there's an extreme bloat of worthless shit and overly contextual crap.

A decent enough Castlevania, but got too hard for my tastes compared to those. Either that, or I'm getting too old for this type of game.

I like the exploration of this game. Although the graphics kinda suck, the spirit of castlevania exploration is still there. I like that there's no instant death pits compared to other castlevania games or side scrollers. Bosses are pretty basic and lame compared to cursed of the moon 1. And the hints on what to do next is very obscure and requires a guide which I don't like. I spend quite a lot of time just circling around finding the next path and just give up and use google.