It’s ’vania mania on PS4
Koji Igarashi talks Bloodstained as a slew of titles releases
WE’RE ABLE TO MAKE FIXES WHILE HEARING THE FANS’ OPINIONS.
06With the recent PS4 release of Castlevania Requiem and the upcoming 2019 release of Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night, we’re trapped in a midpoint between Koji Igarashi’s past and his future – but both are proving to be huge successes for the creator, or perhaps definer, of the Metroidvania genre, and he’s happy to discuss them with us.
The former rerelease from Konami collects together Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood (released in the West for the first time), and its direct follow-up, Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, which introduced the now-distinctive open-form exploration approach that helped define Metroidvania as a genre. You uncover new pathways in Dracula’s sprawling castle, push yourself to level up, and constantly unlock new powers to explore previously inaccessible areas. Igarashi acted as producer on successors that took cues from SOTN, but big releases in that vein began to taper out. (The Metroidvania genre became the domain of some fantastic indie releases – more on those in a bit.) To continue the tradition, then, Igarashi turned to Kickstarter.
NO STAIN, NO GAIN
The Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night listed $500,000 as its target at its launch back in 2015, but quickly amassed more than $5.5m. Fans were hungry for Igarashi to get back to his roots with a side-on Symphony Of The Night type of game.
And the gamers who love and support Castlevania aren’t just helping to fund the game, they’ve helped to shape it too. “I think the major difference between having fans that have direct contact with us versus working behind closed doors is that we hear their opinions during the development,” Igarashi tell us. “The great part about this is that we’re able to sort of change or make fixes, adjustments, while hearing the fans’ opinions.”
Even after creating debatably the best game in the genre, Igarashi is striving for a lot with Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night. “If we were to say release SOTN today, I think
there’s a lot of parts that would need more improvement in comparison to other games,” he says. “In regards to how we’re improving that with Bloodstained, we’re improving a lot of the responses, the controls – a lot of things that might not have been a problem back then, we want to improve upon that using the same sort of foundation.”
CASTLE-MANIA
As influential as Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night was, Igarashi hasn’t let his part in forming a genre go to his head. He’s more than happy to talk about other games, and he tells us the comparison with the Metroidvania genre’s other namesake “is really like an honour for me. That’s something I’m really happy about.” He’s passionate about games – “I loved playing videogames even before joining the industry. I used to mod a lot of games on PC, so that’s what I used to do.”
This year alone has seen many smaller indie developers release games in the Castlevania mould. Most are fantastic additions to the PS4 library – we’re thinking of the likes of Chasm, Death’s Gambit, Guacamelee 2, Dead Cells, and Hollow Knight, and even the retro throwback Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon (a companion to Ritual Of The Night). None of them play exactly like SOTN, but undoubtedly most owe it a massive debt for revolutionising gameplay design. While it might be easy to think you’re getting an overload of the same thing, look a little closer and you’ll find unique twists and features that makes each worth playing. The thing they share is that exciting sense of exploration, of unfurling a space, and slowly gaining mastery over your environment. Even with the involvement from Igarashi-san himself, Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night is sure to differ in its own ways. 20 years on, the future of the genre that’s inspired so many has never been brighter.