Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Catch-All

Has anyone played with mouse and keyboard?

As I noted in the Switch Games thread, been playing this, and overall I think performance is improved, but you can tell it's in part due to a lower resolution and other details than competing platforms. I'm also playing Docked, so while it's pretty good most of the time, it still chugged at Twin Dragon Towers, which means that area is probably unbearable in handheld mode.

Best played on other platforms, most likely.

Going back and rereading some of the first page is kind of funny, including the optimistic 2015 release window. It's also kind of funny to me given how apprehensive I was due to my rough introduction to Symphony of the Night. There's elements of that sort of "where am I going, I just walk through doors and I keep going I feel like there's no direction", but Bloodstained seems to wall you off much more clearly than Symphony of the Night did.

I did start over, partially because it had been a bit of time since I last played. I remapped the back-step to the A button on the Switch Pro controller and that has made a difference in my approach to combat, though I can't really say I'm any good at it. I'm not awful, but I feel like I could be doing better on all the bosses. What really has helped, though, was realizing there's a farmer and burial lady with quests that help give you stuff that can result in food items, which can contribute to bonus stats. Also: broke a wall by accident and discovered that some walls hold hidden items, including HP and MP upgrades.

Zangetsu is likely a sort of "difficulty barrier" to see if the player is using Miriam's basic abilities right. Back-step dodges a lot of his attacks, and positioned right the slide-kick can actually break his guard (at least, it worked once for me, and then... it didn't, so I'm guessing the second time I was just positioned wrong).

If I had any complaint it's that bosses have an unnecessary amount of health. Also: I couldn't get the timing right to dodge the Twin Dragon's fire breath when both of 'em were trying to incinerate ya, and when you took a hit you flew right into the other dragon, resulting in a ping-pong effect. With a bit of modification to either the speed of the flames or the space between 'em, I feel like that battle could have been a lot better. As it was, most of my damage came from those segments of being bounced back and forth because jumping around to try and dodge the flames or just walking back and forth between them wasn't effective enough. The flames seemed to move faster than Myriam herself could.

Zangetsu and Randomizer updates came out yesterday, except on Switch. Zangetsu if the usual bonus character, powerful up front and no story at all, just a different, and unchangeable, set of skills to play through the game with.

Randomizer is the replacement for the rouguelike originally planned. It lets you randomize just about anything having to do with where and how you acquire items and shards, even ones necessary for progression! It's pretty fun and really mixed up the way you progress through the game. They promise that you can't get stuck with it, but if you don't get a weapon in the very first chest it can be near impossible on hard to get past the second room.