Bloodstained: Overall mediocre with a crescendo of shit!

Spiritual successor to Symphony of The Night aye? I think bloody not! Bloodstained Ritual of the Night has to be one of the most infuriating metroidvania games I have ever played. It sweeps you in at first, it plays nicely, feels familiar and enjoyable. But it's all one big ruse, the deeper you go, the worse this game gets. By the time I wanted to quit, I had put in so much I felt compelled to finish the damn thing and I can say I have, true ending and all!

The reason why I have so much anger towards this game are as follows: firstly, bosses have far too much HP and deal far too much damage. The battles drag out for a fairly long time and don't give the best tells for attacks. You take huge chunks of damage from any of their attacks, it's really new or casual unfriendly.
The hit boxes are wrong, getting hit by air, hitting enemies but the game doesn't register it's just rough as hell and forced me to use greatswords as they have such huge range they're the only weapon that reliably hits anything.
Loading times, dying to a boss results in a 10-15 second load screen. Just rushing through rooms incurs load times of anywhere 5 to 10 seconds, it's really frustrating, even accessing the menu freezes the game from time to time. I found it really jarring and really broke the flow.
Too many enemies fill the areas and drop low amounts of exp or anything and yet take an absolute pummeling to beat. 
Lastly, bloated level design. The rooms are fairly large but most of the space is just empty. Then you'll come to some tiny room or corridor and it's packed to the gills with bad guys.

The crafting system was convoluted in my opinion as well, other than enhancing shards I rarely seemed to find anything for crafting any useful equipment. As for cooking ingredients, forget about it. I think I only ever crafted one thing. One meal! Out of about 30 meals. Doesn't feel well thought out.

And if you asked me about the story, I couldn't tell you what it was about, I skipped every cutscene. Sounds bad but the way the story was told at the beginning just didn't interest me in the slightest. Too much dialogue for a start that was underwhelming in the compelling writing department.
It's an odd game too, you can finish the game and get one of the rubbish endings halfway through the game. The game world isn't very intuitive either, other than a few moments, there was nothing that clued me how to proceed the game to it's true ending. I used a guide. In order to swim you have to farm a specific enemy for a shard that allows you to swim. Which you need to use to access an area that allows you to learn a permanent ability that allows you to walk under water so that you can use another traversal ability underwater to get where you need to go. That in itself, is convoluted and stupid.

I was happy to finish this game and get that amount of vindication from it, but I have to say this is probably the worst metroidvania I have ever played, granted I haven't played many from the indie circuit. But I've played all the Castlevania games that are based off Symphony of the night and this is by far below the standards of those games and even the later entries (Portrait and Ecclesia) which were weak in regards to Aria of Sorrow for instance.

I wouldn't buy this game, so it's just as well I got to play it via the Xbox Game Pass. I don't think I'll ever think of coming back to it in future either. It's an experience, that's it. Nothing more.