☆Mirai★

The thing I really appreciated about Bloodstained is that it had what I thought was actually good about SoTN: all the weird one-off wacky stuff. The confessional booth, sitting down in that one room in the library and having the fairy sing a lullaby, the meal ticket producing like two dozen needlessly bespoke food items. The charm and whimsy, as you put it.

Also vaguely remember some interview video right after the end of the kickstartere where Iga was playing SoTN and they kept asking him questions and he kept answering along the lines of "oh I didn't do that part, that was some other guy's idea, he was good at his job"

my favorite Symphony of the Night bits:

• the Peanuts item, description "Difficult to eat". Pressing the button makes Alucard toss it in a high arc and you need to carefully maneuver yourself under it and hold Up to eat it. If you miss it then it falls on the ground and is ruined. The inverted succubus room has unlimited peanuts if you keep reloading the room, the only respawning item in the game.
• in the telescope room at the bottom of the Outer Wall, there's a bird nest hanging from the bottom. Come back a little later and you see a bird flying to it and roosting. Come back a little later and you can see two birds. Come back a little later and you see eggs, and the eggs hatch, and there's just this ridiculously lovingly-animated pixel art masterpiece of the entire bird lifecycle in which you only get to see 10 seconds at a time and only if you keep coming back to this room that otherwise has no reason to ever pass by it again.

it was at that point i realized "i need to make a game like that" and now i'm doing it! 😄

SOTN makes the world worth exploring 😌 While I like a handful of the other "igavanias", that lack of REAL weird stuff is what makes them always fall short. I feel like the Souls system tries to solve that like "you can find these things that could do ANY WACKY WILD THING" but it almost makes it expected so the impact of an attack where you smash things with your giant demon tail is lost. It's way less cool then like "Wait if I do a hadoken motion I can throw this sword as a boomerang?? What the fuck???"

As the map structure nerd, for a long time I'd say stuff like "Super Metroid is the Map game and SOTN is the Stuff" game or "SOTN is the maximalist Metroid" or w/e but I still think that version of dracula's is so important and I didn't give it enough structural credit in the past. Both in how gently leads players around if they get lot but how it also gives freedom like you totally CAN get to the clocktower with just the wolf without speedrunner magic. No really a sequence break -- SOTN has very little of a real sequence outside of its beginning and point -- but just... the game is permissive. It wants you to wander everywhere and see the cool stuff. It wants to throw weird waterfalls and chapels at you. SoTN has so many TYPES of setpieces its wild and that, mixed with how many area of the game have their own unique type of micro-strutures, so you get areas that look different, sound different, an have you move through them differently. Just bookending the whole castle with the chapel and outer walls, two super distinct areas, is great and I love it.

The structure of worlds doesn't need to be about golden pasts or handholding the player, sometimes you just wanna help em get around so they can see your fun quirky stuff.

Haven't played RoTN tho but I'm glad it has more of the weird things!

ROTN's shard system is weird like that. I don't suppose you encountered the shard ability that turns you into one of the bunny girl demon enemies and kick things, which is the best one clearly