Quick Critique: Bloodstained Curse of the Moon (Patreon)

CotM's greatest strengths and weaknesses are the same thing. They absolutely successfully made a new legally distinct not-Castlevania 3. So total kudos to them for proving they understand the old Castlevania games. The downside: all they made was a not-Castlevania. You can find an analogue to so many moments or enemies in the game to the original Castlevanias, so CotM feels like a creatively bankrupt project. If you want to play Castlevania 3, you can totally just go do that right now. It's on the Virtual Console for only $5. So CotM is just a knock-off that's twice as expensive and has way worse music.

CotM does one of the best takes on the "modern NES" aesthetic. It evokes the pixel art of the era and uses its strengths and lessons but expands on them in visually interesting ways to pull off far more than the old system could, so it has visual flair and pizzaz. There are multiple routes through the game (but it does a poor job of explaining where one route ends and a new path begins when they meet up so you might wind up walking in circles a few times if you dare to explore and puts the map under the dumbest menu option) but the big draw is that there are multiple endings that are significantly different. You can play through the game collecting allies to build your team, ignore the team and go it alone, or straight up stab them in their faces and harvest their souls to create one souped-up member and the story wraps-up appropriately. Unfortunately, most of the routes involve heavy emphasis on the default character, playing him alone or without companions, and he's the worst character in the game.

For all its visual flair, CotM doesn't actually fix the problems with the gameplay of the old Castlevania games, which would be the main reason I would want a reimagining of the series to exist. The first half of the game is fun, but the back half is loaded with trial and error moments, cheap shots, enemies that can kill you in one hit, and poorly telegraphed boss fights that all but require you to die to the boss at least once so you know when you need to be standing in a specific point of the arena to dodge a super move. The final boss feels like it's more a test of luck than skill. It took me four or five attempts but I don't feel like my victory came down to me being better. You can also rarely hurt the boss's final form if you're not using a specific sub-weapon, which just drags the process out. They also didn't fix the general sluggishness in how characters react. The most deadly enemies are still the ones that run quickly, fly, or bounce because your character is completely unable to turn around and attack in a smooth motion. The bootleg-Fleamen can still wreck you because of the delay from when you duck or turn around to when you can swing your sword. Even among its own enemies, there's little creativity (outside of its take on succubi [I think that's what they are], they're funny). There are some "big" class enemies of multiple kinds of golems, a manticore, and a hippogryph but you fight all of them exactly the same way. They stand in one spot, you whip them three times, walk back, they send out a wave attack across the ground, and you jump over it back towards the enemy to repeat the cycle. They're just time sinks, not challenges. The same goes for a few of the bosses. One boss near the end of the game, when you'd think they'd start becoming more challenging, has a super simple pattern but a ton of health so the fight drags and another early game boss all but forces you to go out of your way to get hurt by it so the only challenge in that fight is the minions it rarely spawns. The hardest non-final boss is just a knock off of the Death fight from Rondo and that fight goes on far too long because the boss spends most of the fight in the air.

If you've played through Castlevania 3 to the point of boredom or just want a more complex version of it, you should absolutely play Curse of the Moon and you'll probably love it. It's a really good one of those. If you want to see an evolution of the franchise or something new and exciting, you'll have to look elsewhere because CotM is creatively stale. It doesn't fill me with great hope that the main Bloodstained game is going to be what I want it to be, but it might be successful in having lowered my expectations to the point that as long as Bloodstained is just competent, I'll consider it a win?