Loving this game. It's a shame there was no fanfare.

I don't know why this game wasn't marketed at all. I'm having a blast with it, and I think it's better than the main Bloodstained game.

Same with the first game. Came out as a kickstarer reward and no one expected much from it. Had a great time with one and two seems to keep that going.

I think I probably also liked it more than main Bloodstained game but its close and they are just different things. At first I was little put off by Bloodstained, but hearing Giant Bomb talk about how crazy it gets towards and made me push on and liked it a lot more. It's such a great progression when you get all the powers and movement abilities and are just a blur of death at end of game.

Yeah this game is excellent, like the first. Having a hard time with the second episode, but it's a good experience. Honestly, I hope the main games in this series do well if for no other reason than we might get more of these little games as a result.

I really enjoyed the first one. I'm still working on the main game - stuck on the last two bosses so until that's done I'm holding off on buying the new one.

I don't think that it came out with "little fanfare." A huge number of big Youtubers and other influencers have done videos on this game. A game this size isn't going to get a big media blitz behind it, but it got great reviews and channels like Cinnemassacre (Angry Video Game Nerd channel) did very positive reviews. The Cinnemassacre review alone did 150k views. It's been reviewed or otherwise covered on all the major game websites.

What kind of marketing do you expect for a game like this? It's not like they could have done a trailer at E3.

I loved it.

While I enjoyed the first, this one really grabbed me enough to get all the endings (well, at least the 5 main ones). The level and boss design feels a little tighter to me, and the new characters feel more differentiated so I was switching around more. Cool stage art and music helps, and having some familiarity with the series made it more appealing to me.

I viewed the first as a demo fan game (which was wrong), but now I'm a fan of the series so I was happy to jump back in. I prefer the fluid movement of the more modern Bloodvania games, so going back to these rigid controls takes a little getting used to. Luckily, it's accessible enough with its checkpointing and ability to die one character at a time that it rarely felt frustrating.

I'll keep playing these retro versions, but I'm hoping a 3rd would go 16-bit.

I didn't even know they were making another one until it had already been out lol.

I didn't know they were making another one until I saw this post

Playdate on the schedule for Friday!!!

Aww yiss

Grab your whips!

Downloaded this over the weekend and currently a little more then half way through chapter 2. One of my favorite games of this year. Liking it better then the first. Hope they keep this franchise going.

The ramp is really interesting: going from pretty easy until you build the whole party, then straight up from that fire level onward.

And I'm loving the subtle changes in episode 2, where the bosses have mostly the same moveset, but arranged slightly differently and with tighter time windows.

It's rare that you can see the gears on HOW a game is well-made, but this is an exception because they tweak everything JUST slightly and it becomes much, much harder.

Also SO much more frustrating because you REALLY see just HOW the game is arranged to REALLY FUCK YOU OVER when you get hit.

Lots of vicious tricks in the game for sure. But with the full retinue of characters and all their different tools allows you to mitigate everything... mostly. The Chapter 7 boss of episode 2 is giving me lots of trouble.

@sawtooth: That one's really chaotic. The toughest of the recurring bosses, for sure.

Want to chime in one more time on here. Just completed the third ending for this game, and it's been fun seeing where it goes. This is definitely one of my favorite games of the year, and I hope it has found an audience. Everything in the game is so well done, except for the one section that gets thrown in out of the blue, but the comic element and fairly simple challenge of the section really didn't make it stand out too much, in my opinion. Well done Inti, and hats off again to Iga.

I'm sure it's great. I'm just soooo burned out on metroidvanias.

I managed to to do the zangetsu-only final challenge, which was pretty rad. They actually made a unique version of the final boss for zangetsu only, which is probably easier than the normal version of that boss, but still a good challenge.

I've been trying out singles mode now and then, and as neat as that is, I'm not sure it works super well in this game. In Singles Mode, you choose your difficulty and what version of the games levels to play (Ep 1 or 2), and then you see if you can beat it with a single character. More so than the first, this game feels designed in such a way that forces you to switch around to different members of the team to handle different obstacles.

In the first CoTM, I never really had any problems if I was forced to rely on someone other than Zangetsu as my only character for the rest of the level, but I've had a hell of time soloing as anyone other than Zangetsu or Hachi in CoTM2. For the life of me, I can't seem to beat the boss of level 2 as Alfred, even on Episode 1, and there are platforming issues throughout that entire game where Miriam and Dominique are concerned.

I dunno, this is a damn fine game, and singles mode is a cool idea, but I'm just not sure it meshes with the level design from this game as well as it would have with the first.

It was decent. One playthrough was enough for me, I'm not going back to it.