When Koji Igarashi announced the kickstarter for Bloodstained Ritual of The Night, many were excited. It was a spiritual successor to the Castlevania games he worked on, that so many fans love to this day and more was wanted. When a Wii U version was announced, some were skeptical, and then felt relief when it was cancelled on Wii U and a Switch version was announced in its stead. Then the game came out and many found issue for another reason.
Players soon found that the Switch version had numerous issues and bugs, and was the worst running version of the game. 505 Games promised fixes were coming, and the game has received numerous patches to try and improve things over the course of a period of time. Playing the game now though, is it any better or is the game still a mess? Playing it for myself, I found the game is still not exactly up to snuff. The game does play a lot better, and I enjoyed the immersion as much as I could. Collecting shards and exploring the castle was a great thing and I instantly felt flashbacks to Aria of Sorrow, my favourite in the Castlevania series, and favourite game of all time. Then I tried some of the shards and saw problems. The game would have immediate and noticeable framerate drops and slowdown when using the grinder shard for instance, and the music would glitch out at times.
The thing is, this is still a vast improvement over what came before, when the game was unplayable at launch. I backed the game on Kickstarter for the Switch version, and felt some regret over my choice at the time. Playing it now, a lot has indeed been fixed, but there is still a ways to go before the game is up to par. Fortunately, the developers have agreed on this and have noted that more optimization patches for the Switch version are coming with each update. I want to like the game, as it is my favourite type of game, and I love the game on PC, but the Switch version should have gotten more care and attention. A lot of the issues could have been fixed before launch, and it feels like Switch was just an afterthought at the time.
The game also had a tendency to crash before, and that is fixed now, but not completely. The game did crash on me once since playing again, and I have found numerous graphical bugs, including at the starting area of the game. I feel that rather than just continuing to optimize, it may be worthwhile to do a massive overhaul of the Switch version to truly repair the damaged state it is still in. There is still room for more sales after all, and that should motivate any developer and publisher.
In the end, while Bloodstained is better, it still is not acceptable and that needs to change.
In addition, for access to an extensive variety of active retro gaming groups on Facebook, visit Retro Gamers Hub.