Bloody Spell

Bloody Spell is an interesting case study on the gradual improvement of games from China. That said, Bloody Spell falls short of its contemporaries.

To answer the question "Is Bloody Spell worth buying?", the best answer I can give is Maybe, because it depends on the player. While the presentation in most cases is great, thanks to high quality character models and textures, and an actual Orchestral soundtrack, the construction of the game just doesn't compare to its inspirations and is obviously low budget and indie. Bloody Spell takes clear inspiration from Dark Souls, Nioh, and Ninja Gaiden, in which it even directly compares it's Hard difficulty to Ninja Gaiden. The majority of the gameplay features hack and slash combat in an Ancient China setting, with sections separated by platforming segments, puzzle solving, and boss battles.

The main menu immediately presents the scantily clad "box art" priestess swiping her hand in a feminine pose causing her boobs to shake like a Dead or Alive game while other parts of her outfit dangles and sway in reaction, showing off the tertiary animation the developers are proud of. Most of the text is in a plain Arial font - it works, but feels "under-designed" compared other artistic aspects of the game (which is a common case in the game). The "Play" option includes the story Mode, Online mode which I assume is Co-op and barely has concurrent players, a LAN-Mode that doesn't work. "Other mode" includes "Bloody Arena (Reset)", enabling your Story Mode gear and giving you limited time to kill enemies in rounds and gain time after killing all foes, Survival Mode - an almost Dynasty Warriors-esque, multiplayer style Deathmatch against normal enemies and NPCs, an Arena Mode to face off bosses with your Story Mode gear, and a Practice Mode to play in a Bayonetta style loading screen empty area to practice your attacks against enemies you're free to spawn in with the keyboard. There's also a grayed out "Rogue Mode" hinting that there is a future Rogue-lite mode potentially. I forgot to mention Priestess Exam - a challenge mode of sorts to fight against randomly selected waves of enemies for unlocks. I've read the waves can be purely random, meaning you could face off any enemy type from the starting enemy up to bosses in any round. It wasn't clear what "(Reset)" meant in Bloody Arena, but I was allowed to exit the mode and come back to where I left off and I didn't lose progress with my Story Mode either, so I just assume its another translation failure.

Probably the biggest draw to Bloody Spell is the fan service by sexy characters and the Workshop. You have the titular Priestess, featured on the game art, DLC skins, and screenshots, The Damsel in Distress Little Sister in which the story is seemingly centered around, and of course the player character older brother YeJin. There's nothing too interesting about Yejin, other than being able to equip a female character. Yes, I said Equip - not change your gender pre-game or transform your look from an NPC or terminal, but literally the option of suddenly and inexplicably changing the skin and voice of Yejin to a sexy, buxom female that looks nothing like Yejin with in the pause Gear Menu. It has nothing to do with the story as dialogue never recognizes "female Yejin", often still referring to her as "Brother" and is clearly there to titilate the player thanks to tight and skimpy skins. Generously, some if not all of the DLC skins are apparently unlockable by gameplay from what I read.

The Steam Workshop is chock full of well modeled character skins and voice packs ranging from a vast selection of properties - Seeing 2B from Neir Automata and Street Fighter characters were no surprise, but I was impressed to multiple versions of Shanoa from Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, one of which I have never seen before and was probably fully custom made or exists on an asset store I haven't seen. The options are impressive.

My curiosity with the existence of this game lead me to immediately checking out Photo Mode within the first area of story gameplay. You can literally pause all action, and change the parameters of the graphics such as filters, camera angles and even poses and dances. I saw "Dance" and was able to make my Ancient Chinese Swordsman perform modern feminine K-pop style dances complete with potentially licensed music, a platform and particle and lighting effects for some stupid reason.

Bloody Spell is hard for me to recommend because of much of the foreign indie, low budget jank.

On the one hand, If you have already played ALL the other Souls-like games and difficult Spectacle Fighters, then maybe you can give it a try for something new. On the other hand, if you have played all those games, you'll definitely see lacking quality in comparison to those games. I made a 3 page long document of notes that I don't have enough room in this review to mention. Performance issues, poor translations, no translations, ugly mini-games, inconsistent level design quality, and ultimately spammy, button mashing combat despite amount of game mechanics and skills available to the player.

Bloody Spell isn't bad all things considered, but you need to be willing to forgive its many short comings to make it worth your time.