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

Where to begin with this wonderful Metroidvania? It at first felt odd, it had a 3D art style for the characters where they had a slight cartoon aesthetic and each weapon just had one swinging animation. But the music is absolutely astounding. I cannot say it enough or good enough: **the music in this game is beautiful, astounding, powerful, creative, immersive, and more**. I ran around for hours in the castle just enjoying the music. The music carries you forward on this rocking ship among some odd demons. You don't start off against just zombies, but against like a cannon with a mouth, some harpies, a giant ghost armor before fighting some abyssal water creatures and a giant Kraken-esque siren as your first boss. The enemy and level variety already started strong, but once you beat the bot you get access to its shard. What's a shard? For your powers this game has a wonderful shard system. Nearly every enemy drops a unique shard that gives you passive bonuses, let's you summon demons, gives you a friendly familiar to follow you like haunted armor or a fairy, or just gives you crazy magic. Rip open a dragon's head from another dimension to scorch your foes, spin blades out of your hands, zigzag in rays of light, all on top of wonderful normalized magic like fire and lightning and poison and wind but all in these tight Metroidvania corridors. The possibilities of a few weapon types open up to massive proportions with over a hundred different shards to help you maneuver or fight. Even the weapons, where I thought you just mash the X button, have abilities and techniques to make them unique, such as a blood-red parasol shooting arcs of blood at your enemies. The enemy variety dips a bit as you go later into the game, with a lot of simply different variations of enemies, but I never found it boring. Especially with the bosses included and the different lay outs of levels and enemies. The mobility options also change how you fight the enemies, such as having the ability to invert gravity for yourself to run along ceilings. The story is a bit basic in its inception. A castle was raised from hell and now demons are pouring out. Destroy them all to save the world! But you're not traversing the world. In this wonderful love-letter to Castlevania you spend most of your time in this hellish castle. One that seems too elegant for fire-dwelling demons, really making you question if this castle is from hell or not. Your character has these stained glass-inspired crystals in her, really adding to the vampiric castle feel. The voice acting for Miriam was fantastic and she never felt like a generic character despite being simply a determined hero. The customization on her is really fun as you can change her hair, eyes (the whites of her eyes were black for me), and give her some cool hats, although she only has one set of actual clothes you just change the colors on. The gear variety is really fun, including a spiked breastplate that push and damage enemies, or a greatsword that casts lightning down as you swing them. I had way too much of a blast playing around with shards and weapons and demons and to be honest I spent most of the time just enjoying the music. The boss variety was fun and unique with some being easier but with some sort of tough gimmick to get used to--like one who turned himself into a zigzagging laser beam--but the developers did a great job of never making this game feel unfair or too frustrating. Except for one part: monkeys. There is a strong hitstun in this game, and there is a hilarious corner where there's about seven damn monkeys jumping at you... I both loved and hated this game at times, in all the right ways. To put it simply: this game was divine. Fun to explore. Fun to fight. Fun to listen to. I wouldn't put it up there with what I consider to be the best of the best Metroidvania (Super Metroid and Hollow Knight), but I do think it is just below them. I eagerly await a potential sequel!