Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

About

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an upcoming gothic, exploration-focused action platformer being developed by Inti Creates. The game is also being designed by Koji Igarashi, best known for making most of the Castlevania titles in the past, most notably Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

History

In 1997, Konami developed and released a new title in the Castlevania franchise for the Sony PlayStation 1, 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 simpler. 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”. This lead many people to believe that Mr. Igarashi was inspired by Metroid when designing the game, however, in May 2015, in an interview with Double Fine Productions ^[10], Igarashi said that he was actually inspired by the The Legend of Zelda franchise. After it’s release, the game was critically acclaimed and loved by many, being considered as one of the best entries in the series, and most of it’s 2D successors would follow the same formula, however, the last game in this style in the franchise was Castlevania: Portrait of Ruins, as Konami decided to stop making games in this formula, as they believe players don’t want more games in this style. Future games in the series were more action based, and much different from the style that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night introduced to the series, and they were received with mixed reactions by critics and fans. In March of 2014, Koji Igarashi left Konami, as he wished to make more 2D exploration action platformers.

In May 6 of 2015, Mr. Igarashi released a site called Sword or Whip,^[1] in which a pixel art of him asks “Sword… or Whip… You decide”. This lead many fans to believe that IGA would soon make some kind of announcement. In May 11, Koji Igarashi launched a project on Kickstarter^[2], called “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night”, and similar to projects like Mighty No. 9 and Yooka-Laylee, it’s a spiritual successor of Castlevania, being made in the same fashion and by some of the same minds behind the past 2D non-linear games, and is 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.

Gameplay

No gameplay footage has been shown as of May 14, but it’s Kickstarter^[2] page describes that much like most of the games Koji Igarashi has worked on in the past, the game takes the formula that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night first introduced in 1997 and will take it further. 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, 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 quicker 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

In 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.

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 the previously mentioned subredit /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.