The second "classic mode" DLC for Bloodstained effectively functions as its own game. The first classic mode was a short linear-style action romp with Miriam taking on foes from the base game, while this one adds a bunch of entirely new areas/foes and gives you a totally different character to play. Far as I'm concerned it's a new game. I'm impressed because they didn't have to go the extra mile with it, they could have just cranked out another regular classic mode with a new character. We even have new items, and this one is styled to be as much like Simon's Quest as possible which makes for a pretty interesting game.
For this one, we're playing as...
...Dominique, the statuesque blonde that lurked around in the original game.
Yep, there she is. It's like they decided to try and out-do themselves on Miriam's design.
Dominique is the master of the spear, and the most gorgeous of dragoons. She distracts her foes with her hips, then takes them out with a dragoon jump.
....except in this game she doesn't use her powers/weapons from the base game, she just uses a traditional Belmont-style whip.
Previously on Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night...
WHO'S THAT POKEMON?
Following the events of the main game, Dominique is trapped in Limbo, with a curse. Our mission is to cure it and get back to Earth.
The whip starts out very meager. Short range, low damage, kinda pathetic. I was afraid it'd be like this for the whole game, but no need to worry: There are a bunch of powerups throughout the game that permanently increase the damage and range on it.
Much as I like her dragoon form in the base game, I gotta say, wielding a whip really suits Dominique and her "step on me" vibe.
I mentioned that this is a sort of rebirth of Simon's Quest. All of the areas are interconnected, though still pretty linear and left-right. Looks like there are five dungeons altogether, with various overland areas leading to each of them, and the objective is to clear those five.
It'd be real easy to get lost in this game, so it's probably a "keep a walkthrough open" sort of game. Not my favorite type of game, but it's simple enough.
There are also several town areas, with NPCs that talk. And they're all daemons, because this is Limbo. Everyone here is some sort of weird-ass imp or succubi.
We also have shops. Some of these items are one-use, some are permanent upgrades. Potions are particularly OP, and function as nearly a full heal. You can't buy more than 3 of them (or any other consumables) though.
Can buy multiple, consumable
Potion - Heals you, breaks boss fights.
Ether - Gives you back MP for special weapon attacks (Dagger, Holy Water, etc)
Horus Eye - Changes from the cursed full moon back to normal time, and vice-versa. Can also just wait a few minutes for it though.
Waystone - Warp to any save point you've activated. Good for getting to and from towns and dungeons. Or for quickly getting around the world while you're hopelessly lost.
Can buy one, permanent
Runes - Permanent passive increase to the power of your whip.
Dagger - Gives you the Dagger weapon from Castlevania, which fires straight ahead like a shot in a normal game.
Backstep - Lets you leap backwards away from an enemy strike with L2. This one is super useful because Dominique is SLOW. So much so that it nearly breaks the game. There's no Speed Booster in this game either.
Every few minutes, the moon changes, and you get a "terrible night to have a curse" type message. There are two phases, and during the bad phase (cursed moon), more powerful enemies appear. They tend to drop a lot more currency though. Also, town NPCs all stop being friendly, including the shops, during the cursed moon. So farm during the cursed moon, travel and shop during the normal moon.
I immediately set about whipping every corner in sight to try and find heals and secret passages. ...there are none of either. Well, later there are, and they're all clearly-marked, glowing walls, once you get the ability to break blocks.
Editor's Note: I'll get more than my fill of breakable walls when I get to Vampire Killer. That game is basically 30% breakable wall.
I get through the first dungeon I found, and face this extremely nasty boss. Only got through the fight due to Potions. Turns out this is a dungeon you're "supposed" to do later, not first. Here I thought the game was just really hard. This would end up being the only time the game really gave me any grief, due to the lack of preparation and the foe being unexpectedly strong.
This was basically a Mega Man boss transplanted into a Castlevania game with a much-slower main character.
Game Overing cuts your gold in half, so you don't want to carry too much of that (the other currency is never lost, at least, and you can trade it for gold if need be). The key to actually progressing this thing was to go and farm during the cursed moon, then get all available upgrades and stock Potions. Do that and pretty much nothing is going to pose any huge threat...except medusa heads and pits, of course. The controls here are as stiff as an NES game.
The Groundskeeper is the other merchant, and he takes the second currency. He's got permanent upgrades along with your standard consumables, and pops up all over the game. Generally you want to keep your coins low, so I'd spend those first at regular merchants before buying things from this guy. It's worth noting that you can convert whatever this is into coins, but not the other way around.
The backgrounds in this game look awesome, but I really wish the character and enemy sprites were bigger. They went for the NES style of having your character take up a tiny portion of the screen.
In this graveyard, you have to kneel by a particular gravestone for a few seconds to create a path forward (yeah, like Simon's Quest). Lightning strikes the ground, leading to...
...this food dish, which causes the merchant in town to sell another whip upgrade. EYY!
The graveyard in question also happens, during the cursed moon, to be one of the best farm spots in the game. Run back and forth and whack these giant wolf-men. It's easy because you can take them both out without getting hit, and they almost always drop 5 of the Groundskeeper's currency.
Eventually I max out at 999 currency, so I should be all set for the rest of the game. If anything this is overkill.
Journeying on, there's a swamp area full of those turret things from the NES 'Vanias that fire 3 fireballs in a row. Eventually I find the Bone and the Unholy Fire, rounding out the trinity of special attacks (the Bone flies in an arc, so it's your Axe, while the Unholy Fire functions the same as Holy Water)
Whoa, an ice area. The graphics of this game almost look like an evolution of what Donkey Kong Country games might have looked like if they kept being made in the same 2D ACM graphics style well into the 2000's.
Next shop has Unholy Fire, which is our Holy Water weapon for this game. It's pretty bad though, with a short range and a persistent fire only at the area that it landed on. No "fire rolling forward" or anything cool like that, like some of the other 'Vanias have had.
Protip: Highly recommend cleaning out every shop you find as you go. There's possibly one exception (the second-to-last weapon powerups) because the best aren't too far after that and they don't stack or anything. I went for them regardless because I had plenty of money by then.
Next "dungeon" I take on is the Clockwork Nightmare. They knew what they were doing when they named this one. It immediately strikes fear into the player.
It's your normal 'Vania clock tower level, and it's a nightmare. They didn't skimp on flying Not Medusa Heads either.
All of that said, the toughest part wasn't the typical vertical ascent...it was this horizontal area near the end with tiny platforms to ride. Once Dominique leaps, she's locked into that leap. No control over your direction. Yep, it's one of those. So any sort of platforming involving small moving platforms is rough.
Next boss is this giant robot that fights you on a casino wheel and spins you all over the place. It's a pretty cool/memorable boss, and flips coins that shatter all over the screen.
"Damn, look at that ass!" says the boss.
It was a cool enough fight that I actually recorded it.
The next area is the Sunken Ruins, a bunch of ancient temples buried in the desert.
I'd like to know what the story is with this place. It's an interesting idea for a location... with no explanation. Reminds me of Portrait of Ruin and how it had some fascinating places that existed as sub-worlds inside of paintings. No painting area ever had any real explanation, but they sure were interesting ideas for levels.
The third dungeon (of five, I think) is the lower levels of the sunken city. Here we've got a mermaid statue that isn't quite as fetching as the garden mermaid statue the neighbors have:
There are collectible parchments strewn about the game that have lore on them. Not sure if this is lore about the boss of the dungeon, or just random better-than-it-needs-to-be lore that isn't attached to the game (kinda like those areas I was just talking about).
The boss is this leaping bastard that attacks with water waves. It's the easiest boss of the three so far, making me wonder if I'm doing these dungeons in entirely the wrong order.
Winning that fight gets me the ability to breathe underwater, which is useful for getting to a lot of areas I couldn't get to before.
Speaking of new abilities, Double Jump is a huge one, and bought in a store. This game feels like it should have had a double jump from the beginning.
As the whip gets more powerful from shop upgrades, it gets longer and fancier. At this point it shimmers with gold.
All of that said, the final upgrade shop follows shortly after that last one (meaning if you know what you're doing, it's better to skip the second to last shop's weapon upgrades and book it onward to the next one)
The final form of the whip is the fire whip from Simon's Quest, basically, which is awesome because I've been wanting to see that whip return for ages. It doesn't look quite as cool as the fire whip though. It's more like a series of explosions that crackle out along the strike, rather than the whip really being made of fire.
Fourth dungeon is the Infernal City of Dis, and it's a fiery castle ruled over by Gremory, a boss from the base game.
This is tougher than the other three castles by a good margin, so saving it for last was the right move. Lots of platforming, and it's difficult because of how stiff the controls are.
Gremory is the big boss here, and like every other boss in this game, it can be overpowered by just bringing a few Potions. Winning this fight gets me the Dimension Shift, which lets Dom here warp a short distance in any direction (through thin walls, long as there's space on the other side). This lets you skip past a lot of enemies. It's similar to the warp-dash in Metroid Dread, which they were 100% copying since this came out 3 years later.
Completed area list for returning via the Waystone. Yep, that's all the areas. They really went above and beyond with this little game (even though about half of these are towns, much like Simon's Quest)
The next optional world-boss I find is this undead whip-swinging zombie who I'm pretty sure is supposed to be them making fun of Simon Belmont.
A monster nearby tells the tale of Atlantis, except here it's Megiddo (also a probably-real place of legend)
Will Dominique ever escape from Limbo?
Pretty soon, yeah, because with the four palaces cleared, the way to the final palace unlocks. This is a lot like that room in Super Metroid with the four gold statues.
The final palace is Pandemonium, and it's very regal.
This is the toughest area in the game by a mile, and it's crucial to get through it without burning through items too fast. Using the Time Stop spell (seen here) to freeze enemies in place and take them out will save a lot of resources. Also there are healing items in the walls in a few specific places, and knowing where they are makes this place much easier to traverse while saving Potions for the boss (which wasn't even necessary for reasons we'll see in a moment, but YMMV)
Towards the end, the palace gives way to a hellish lava-scape. This would be more impactful if the Infernal City of Dis hadn't just done a very similar theme.
The final boss is the same as the main game (only without the fight with Dominique right before it, obviously). At this point I unleash my five saved Okuda Charms (invincibility for ten seconds) and win the fight without even needing any Potions. If I hadn't been hoarding those charms all game, though, I would have needed to burn through the Potions.
The items really break this game, because without any Potions or Charms the game would still be doable yet pretty hard. With those items, you basically can't lose.
Win and you get one of three endings, depending on how much of everything you found along the way:
The Medium Ending - What I got. Dominique escapes Limbo and gets back to Earth, only to keel over from how much energy she has lost. If she made it, it was barely. Also what is this freakish picture?
This looks like the bad ending, even though it isn't.
The Bad Ending - Get to the end while doing very little, and Dominique stays trapped in Limbo forever, blasting demons to waste away the days.
The Good Ending - Do everything, and Dominique not only escapes Limbo, but also survives, and is carried away by Miriam. No word on if they then spent the evening engaging in tender lovemaking. That's probably the secret ending.
If one is thinking this DLC is setup for Bloodstained 2, it isn't. Looks like that game is going to have entirely new main characters. I'm sure it'll be good, and the Bloodstained series is now carrying the mantle of the Castlevania series. It might be going forward without me though, as Order of Ecclesia is my fated final battle with 'Vania.
Speaking of which...I've got two 'Vanias left to cover, so it's time to finally wrap that series up. Vampire Killer next.
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