Reviews
[Review] ‘Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2’ Serves Up More Familiar ‘Castlevania’-Style Action With a Side Order of Weirdness
In Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 teamwork makes the dream work.
The dream in question, though, involves slashing through hordes of demons and felling screen-filling monsters. The team in question boasts a master swordsman, a spear-wielding priestess, an irreligious marksman, and a dog in a mech. The surprising presence of that robo-dog is a pretty good representation of Bloodstained’s whole thing. This series is deeply traditional — slavishly devoted to the 8-bit action-platformers and early Metroidvanias that came before. But, it’s also, at times, out-of-the-blue gonzo weird.
That was, for me, the most endearing quality of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the 30-hour 2019 mothership that has now spawned two spin-off adventures. Kickstarted in 2015 by longtime Castlevania lead Koji Igarashi, Ritual of the Night was a Symphony of the Night spiritual successor that, structurally, hewed a little too closely to its ‘90s inspiration. But when it broke from tradition, it really broke from tradition, putting players through a righteously weird ringer of photorealistic cats and flying attack portraits of Kickstarter backers.
The Curse of the Moon series is comparatively understated. The first game, released in 2018, was created by Ritual of the Night support team, Inti Creates, as a stretch goal for ROTN — the idea being that eager backers would get two games, each celebrating a different era of Castlevania, for the price of one. Curse of the Moon 2, also developed by Inti Creates, continues that trend, bringing back Curse of the Moon’s hero, Zangetsu, and introducing a trio of new characters with unique abilities.
Our master swordsman is joined in this outing by Dominique the priestess who can use her spear to bounce on enemies, a la Duck Tales, and cast spells to deal damage or restore health. Robert the rifleman can hit enemies from a screen’s length away. Hachi can briefly hover, pummel opponents with piston fists and turn invincible for as long as his weapon points, which power the party’s secondary attacks, allow. Each character has a separate health bar, but shares a common pool of weapon points. Knowing when to sub a character out for another is a key skill that Curse of the Moon 2 teaches. When a character dies, the other three remain alive and, until you finish the level or suffer a party wipe, you won’t be playing with a full deck.
As in the first Curse of the Moon, COM2 can be played on Casual, with infinite lives, or on Veteran, which limits the number of continues and introduces knockback — a frustrating dynamic that will be familiar to anyone who tangled with the older Castlevania games. These difficulty options are a smart way to provide players with either a modern experience, bereft of ‘80s bullshit, OR an authentically tough-as-nails action-platformer, infuriating warts and all.
However you decide to play, quickly swapping between characters, and learning to get by when they die, is the heart of the Curse of the Moon series. While Ritual of the Night doles out new abilities via equippable shards, these spin-offs abilities are tied to the characters who can use them. And, for the most part, the abilities of Curse of the Moon 2’s party members complement each other well. With his invincibility skill, Hachi can soak up damage, then swap out to let Zangetsu go in for a bevy of slashes. Dominique can stay above the fray with her spear-bounce, then sub out to make room for Robert’s sniping. It’s a good balance, overall (though Hachi’s ability to withstand damage and dole out massive amounts of pain may make the lineup slightly more overpowered than the one in Curse of the Moon).
Varied abilities make levels significantly more interesting to traverse on a return visit. For the first few missions of my initial playthrough, I thought that Curse of the Moon 2’s level design wasn’t all that interesting. And, when you only have Zangetsu to work with, it isn’t. But, as you unlock additional characters, new paths open up. Hachi can ground pound through cracked slabs of floor and punch through certain walls. Dominique has a high jump. Robert can go prone and crawl through tight spaces. The game really begins to click about halfway through, once you have access to all four characters’ unique skill sets. And while none of the levels are especially memorable, they do become progressively more fun to explore.
Inti Creates’ creative flair shines through most in Curse of the Moon 2’s boss battles. The game’s 8-bit pixel art, overall, is quite strong — I especially like the animation as Hachi transforms from a hulking mech while standing into a miniature choo-choo while crouched. But, the boss battles are consistently inventive. They don’t do much that’s new mechanically; they’re mostly about pattern recognition. But, aesthetically, these were the moments when I felt I could most clearly hear COM2’s weird, beating heart.
After completing the campaign, a second “episode” unlocks. As far as I can tell, after playing through half of it, this second episode is just the first campaign again, but a little harder and with a slightly different narrative framing the opening and closing cutscenes. Significantly, though, your party composition for this second run (and for any that come after) is determined by your playstyle in your initial playthrough. For example, I relied heavily on Dominique’s revival abilities in the final (frustratingly difficult) boss battle, which — for spoilery reasons — meant that Dominique was out of my party for the next go. The first Curse of the Moon took a similar approach, but the fact that Curse of the Moon 2 has a bunch of unlockable campaigns suggests more room for interesting, play-determined narratives to emerge over time. (Time, incidentally, which I just didn’t have to dedicate to New Game+ before writing this review).
In the end, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 does little that’s new. But, it’s another solid action-platformer from Inti Creates with a steep challenge for genre fans and interesting character abilities and honeycombed level design that will attract newcomers. Teamwork made the dream work this time around. Next time, I hope Inti Creates has a slightly more ambitious dream.
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 review code provided by the publisher.
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 is out now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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