Castlevania Creator Successfully Kickstarts Bloodstained
Former Castlevania developer Koji Igarashi, creator of what’s regarded as the best Castlevania game of all time (Symphony of the Night), has been forced to strike out on his own, but he should be okay. He’s developing a new, Castlevania-like Gothic platformer called Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night for PC, PS4 and XBox One (Wii U would require making two versions of the game, Iga claims). The game has outside funding sources, but Iga wanted fan help to polish the title. He asked for $500,000 and got it all in four hours.
Igarashi, if you don’t know, was responsible for every good game in the Castlevania series. Konami will continue with the Castlevania brand, but it has had trouble in the past putting out good content Igarashi was not behind, and it definitely will have more trouble in the future.
There has been a rash of these lately, due to the recent ugly trend of behemoth AAA publishers (especially in Japan) unceremoniously firing the talent that made them famous, for unexplained and unannounced reasons. Quite often the ousted developer has then founded his own company and commenced work on a similar-but-not-the-same game, attracting massive Kickstarter dollars from a fanbase that is still perfectly willing to throw money toward them as Fry would in a meme.
After Mighty No. 9, Yooka-Laylee and now this, you have to wonder how many public displays of affection and massive monetary donation the conglomerates have to stare at before they realize how much of that cash could have been theirs. I would not be surprised if Kojima joins this crowd in 2016 with some kind of stealth game, with a hero that looks like Michael Biehn again only in a slightly different way. Or better yet, he takes the ideas he had planned for Silent Hills and makes a new, innovative horror game that rakes in millions and shames Konami massively.
If Bloodstained doesn’t do the trick, that would.