4/5 ★ – AaronElWhite's review of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

I sadly never appreciated Castlevania when I was a kid, so my history with the series is minimal despite my love of the genre. Getting the chance to play a modern take on it by the series' creator, though, was a total blast. My favorite thing about the game is probably its shard system, where every enemy has the potential to give your character the ability to wield its own actions or something similar. Earning these and seeing what kind of neat things it could allow my character to do was always exciting. I also very much enjoyed exploring the castle, complete with areas that couldn't be discovered until a later traversal ability was acquired. One of those in particular really flips the gameplay on its head in a unique and very fun way! Overall movement and navigation was fluid and satisfying with enough fast travel and save rooms around to keep me from getting frustrated over backtracking. And while the story is pretty bland and barely there, I'm a huge fan of the visual style and playing as an anime baddie whose appearance I could slightly tweak was appealing. Unfortunately, despite having a plethora of build options because of all the various aforementioned shards and a host of weapons, I was able to use a special coin very early in the game to unlock a special weapon that I loved so much I ended up almost never changing it. Same thing happened with my main shard setup. Bosses looked cool but weren't interesting mechanically at all either, as practically none of them had any environmental or platform effects to worry about and thus all felt extremely similar. So I guess for a game that has so much potential depth to its combat, I never felt like it required me to dig in and use it, which is a bummer. Still, I got my 100% map completion (my usual Metroidvania goal) and took out all optional bosses over about 23 hours, and my desire to play never once wavered. I may not grind to complete every recipe/collect every single shard/etc. for the Platinum trophy, but I'll be hoping for a sequel and looking forward to it if/when one gets announced.