[Daedolon]

I don't know why I didn't post this here earlier since I didn't see a thread on it, but Koji "IGA" Igarashi of basically every Metroidvania Castlevania fame ever, who recently quit Konami and founded his own independent studio is working on a new game.

There's not too much info on it, but judging by the teaser website for the game, Sword or Whip, it's not too hard to guess what he's going for here.

Here's an older article on it, before the site launched on May 4th, summing most of it up:
Nintendo Life: Rumour: Koji Igarashi's Castlevania Successor Could Rise From The Grave This Week

I'm a huge (to the point of it being just silly) fan of IGA's Metroidvania games and I couldn't be more excited to see the master at work once again. Especially with IGA leaving and after seeing how Konami's Castlevania "reboot" with the lackluster God of War and Shadow of the Colossus clones, Lords of Shadow, started tumbling down on a windy path, killing all hopes for the actual series to ever continue as grand it used to be.



If Destructoid's editor-in-chief Jonathan Holmes is to be believed, a Kickstarter for this thing is launching on May 12th.

I don't know about you, but I'm rooting for #ClanIronFlail. May this be a welcome and successful contribution from IGA!

[DustFalcon85]

Konami CEO - Kagemasa Kōzuki = The Satoru Iwata of Konami. (I think)

Let's see if IGA's new project holds a candle to his Castlevania series.

[MetHy]

As a kid I had only played CotM and HoD, but recently SotN-style Castlevania games are ALL i've been playing in the past 2 months and a half, I'm not even kidding. I did SotN, CotM, HoD, AoS, DoS, PoR, OoE and even Curse of Darkness. Then I replayed the Saturn version of SotN for the (great) extra content, I replayed AoS on Hard, DoS on Hard, and I'am now half way through replaying DoS (Julius mode) and CotM (Thief mode) and plan on replaying more.

I honestly can't stop to the point of being autistic about it too, and it's become one of my favourite type of games. So, getting a news like this, just as I'm done playing them all, is incredible and I couldn't dreamt any better.

[Daedolon]

I'm not following how Konami's current CEO is related to this in any way, except for the dwindling down of his company's video game division.

If you keep voting, IGA will at random state that "The final quarter looms, <your name>.". Apparently it's referring to the Moon's phases; the last quarter begins on May 11th, so I guess that's a revision to the upcoming Kickstarter launch date?

[Carl Winslow]

Konami's CEO is treating literally all talent in the company like dogshit. This has been happening since the end of the PSX days, but only recently has it gotten completely out of control. Nobody's really sure why the company's falling apart like this, but you could pretty literally start a brand new company out of all the people wronged by them over the years. (and has happened before, with the formation of Treasure and now Kojima's breaking Kojipro off from them) Everyone still left needs to get the hell out of there and do stuff on their own, or at the very least join up with one of the other groups.

Like, anyone who thinks Capcom is bad? Konami's been WAY worse. Gradius, Contra, Goemon, Twinbee, and boatloads of other franchises have been left to rot despite their immense popularity and track record. The Twinbee franchise was so popular at one point it had MUSIC CONCERTS specifically dedicated to it. And of course, the Jim Sterling video goes over how publishing wise, they don't even fucking advertise the games released under them in the first place. There's boatloads of games they've made that nobody knows about, simply because they don't fucking advertise or promote at all.
Their most popular toyline, Busou Shiki, they cancelled right as the anime for it came out. That's how fucking retarded they are with business decisions.

[Daedolon]

IGA plays Symphony of the Night with Double Fine Productions.

Game Informer: Watch The Creator Of Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night Play His Game

[MetHy]

That looks very interesting indeed. I'll watch at some point, not now though it's very long.

[MetHy]

It's here :

https://www.kickstar...al-of-the-night

In short:
- budget out of proportion ; and he says that this is only part of the budget too, which would allow him to have more financial support from big companies....
- not 2D, 2.5D.
- you have to pay 100$ 2 years in advance if you want the final version
- the game will be filled with all kind of bullshit "designed" by rich people willing to backe 5-10k or more
- the concept art look terrible

I don't know what to think. I'll probably bake 28$ anyway. I hope it won't turn out as bad as it sounds like.

Honestly having to pay 100 bucks 2 years in advance if you want the final version of a game is everything I hate about "modern gaming".

[Daedolon]

Eight (8)! hour livestream just started!

http://www.twitch.tv/kindafunnygames

[Daedolon]

I'm personally super excited about the artstyle, nicely put together 3D models based on carefully stylized concepts with an orthographic camera would look really swell. I was way surprised to see how well Pillars of Eternity or Tides of Numenera turned out to be without perspective.

The lead character concepts look amazing to me, reminds me of Shanoa and a bit of Juste and maybe a touch of Charlotte, which coincidentally are my favourite Metroidvania characters.

That white outline on Miriam, the lead character, is something I'm super glad to see doing a return from Harmony of Dissonance. I guess I'm just a sucker for IGA's stuff, but it's been consistently rewarding to play.

[MetHy]

I don't know, maybe I'm just seeing the negative aspects.

Mighty Number 9 is a good example of a very similar case, Inafune quit Capcom to make a (crowdfunded?) "clone of his own games", except in 2.5D this time because it costs less, and imo the end result look terrible; and gameplay looks sluggish too.



There is very few modern 2.5D games I enjoyed. Something doesn't click for me.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Great pitch video and I'm happy to see it's already funded. While I love Symphony of the Night and Castlevania 3, I can't get on board with anime. That really undermines the atmosphere for me. I bet it will look great in motion from a technical perspective (they're using UE4), but the art style is like nails of a chalk board for me. Yuck!

[MetHy]

1 mirrion dorrar in half a day.

oh and as if it wasn't enough, I just noticed that the co-op mode, made only if it reaches 1,250,000, is LOCAL co-op. In 2017.

Sounds like they don't need my money after all, and since I seem to dislike crowdfunding so much I'll probably just buy the game at release... and pirate the ultimate version made for those who baked 100 bucks.

Seriously what do they do with all that money, hookers and coke all day every day?! Is there even any system that checks that all the money is for the project itself and not half for the pocket of some random guy?!

[Mr. Tibbs]

So a publisher is putting up 90% of the scaled planned development budget. Backers are just subsidizing a multi-million dollar company efforts.

[MetHy]

with 90% of the budget already secured, he shouldn't need 500k, let alone the 1,5 million 2-3 millions he's going to end up getting. The less a publisher is involved, the more freedom the devs have, but still, this is fucking ridiculous.Plus nobody's sure that he will refuse publisher money now that he has enough money from backers.

To me the worst about this all is that he claims on the page that the game will be 2.5D because it's easier and cheaper to make. With all that money this shouldn't be a concern anymore and the game should be 2D....
I am really scared of the shift to 2.5D, imo it did not work for Rocket Knight, Bionic Commando, Mighty Number 9, etc

Also there is already more than 50 backers who are going to "make" a secret room in the game because they've paid enough for it. 50 in less than a day.
With 30 days left, how many secret rooms will the game end up with, 1500 ?!

The game system, according to the explanations, seem interesting though.

P.S. : I had no idea that programming cheat codes into a game was as costly as 150,000$.... But I'll try to cut it with my dislike of the bullshit side of crowdfunding.

P.P.S : I said I tried to cut it but... I've also got to say that in this case crowdfunding a shitty excuse for gutless publishers. The job of publishers IS to believe and support a project, and to take the risks; but in this case the publishers DEMANDED to be sure that the project will work, thus using crowdfunding as a proof...
Crowdfunding was supposed to be for people who can't find publishers; or for people who didn't want to deal with publishers. Now it's for publishers who don't want to do their jobs.

[Daedolon]

On "2.5D";

Doing an explorable platformer game in 3D can work out really well. One of my favourite games on the Xbox 360, and possibly my favourite metroidvania outside the Castlevania series follows this style, and I think it works well. It's an example of a more traditional 3D platformer game that's a metroidvania.


(sorry for people who don't like IGN, just grabbed the first link on YouTube)

But for something that's more relevant to Bloodstained, secretly I'm hoping they'll ditch the perspective view, though, in favor of an orthographic camera view, since it's one of the prettiest way of doing old-school like visuals without having to do massive sprite work. It looks amazing in Guilty Gear Xrd (below):


With properly stylized 3D models rendered without the perspective as in the above example, I think Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night could look amazing.

[Daedolon]

The 8-bit spin-off game, now titled Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, has been released today.

https://store.steamp...se_of_the_Moon/

[Zaxx]

Daedolon, on 24 May 2018 - 07:16 AM, said:

The 8-bit spin-off game, now titled Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, has been released today.

https://store.steamp...se_of_the_Moon/

Honestly so far it seems better than the main game. Here's hoping they show us something cool soon because even though I love Iga and SotN Bloodstained is yet to wow me with something.