The wait is finally over – today, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night releases on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, with the Switch version due out next week. It’s a journey that began with the launch of the Kickstarter back in 2015 – although, of course, the journey began well before that, when Koji Igarashi began working on the Castlevania series during his time at Konami, and put his own imprint on these beloved games. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night stays true to that, and the early signs are promising. We’ve only just got code, and our review will be with you shortly – for now, here’s a discussion we had with Igarashi during Kyoto’s BitSummit a couple of weeks back.
You recently had a trailer which showed off the revamped look for Bloodstained. It went back and showed how the game looked – it seemed to almost cast shade on how it looked beforehand! Did you sit down with your design team beforehand to give them a heads-up what was going to happen.
Koji Igarashi: Well, I think that both trailers had their good spots and bad spots! The interesting thing is, the previous trailer was immensely well received in Japan, and not as well received abroad. The new trailer, it was incredibly well-received abroad, it wasn’t so well-received by the Japanese fanbase. It’s kind of a ‘you can’t please everyone’ kind of deal. Which one’s better? You can’t really know. It’s interesting how the Japanese perspective and the Western perspective were so different. That’s the thing about Kickstarter projects – I want to really respect the opinions of everybody, and there are a lot of foreign backers.
Source: Eurogamer Igarashi returns: 'If I had the opportunity to do another Castlevania, I'd do it'