Video Game / Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

What do you do when you find yourself without a castle? You build another.

"A new, vital heart, pulsing with the old blood."

—Pixel IGA

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a 2D Metroidvania (or as the Kickstarter calls it, an "IGAvania") game for the PS4, Xbox One, Windows, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android. It is directed by Koji Igarashi and developed by ArtPlay, DICO, and WayForward. Inti Creates also originally assisted with development until they parted ways and were subsequently replaced by DICO.

In times long past, there existed the Alchemist's Guild, masters of the arcane with great influence and power. When changing times threatened their reign, they created Shardbinders, youths infused with demonic strength, and through ritual sacrifice opened the gates of Hell. Demons were unleashed unto the world, and although the invasion was ultimately quelled, many lives were lost and the Alchemist's Guild was brought to ruin.

Surviving the apocalypse were two young Shardbinders: Miriam, who fell comatose before she could be sacrificed, and her childhood friend Gebel. Ten years after the demonic invasion, Miriam awakens from her slumber just as a mysterious castle from Hell emerges. When Miriam discovers that the lord of the castle is none other than Gebel himself, Miriam, with the help of former Alchemist and longtime friend Johannes, heads for the castle to seek answers about her friend's betrayal and put a stop to the demons once and for all.

The Kickstarter campaign was launched on May 11, 2015. The first wave stretch goals were reached within hours of the campaign's launch, and since then stretch goal after stretch goal was revealed and subsequently crushed. By the end of its campaign on June 12th, it had raised a whopping $5,545,991^note Not counting the additional $200,000+ from PayPal backers, becoming the most funded video game on Kickstarter, after Torment: Tides of Numenera held that record for over two years, and remained so for about a month before Shenmue III surpassed it. It is also the ninth most funded Kickstarter campaign overall.

The PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions were released on June 18, 2019, with the Switch version released on the 25th. A port for mobile devices was released on December 4th, 2020; this version features reduced graphics and an optimized mobile control scheme to better run on phones and tablets, with all existing and future post-release content bundled for free with the base $9.99 purchase.

Due to the absolutely massive amount of promised content, features are gradually added on to the game since its release through a regular update cycle. The game received its first major update on May 7th, 2020, adding Zangetsu as a playable character and a Randomizer Mode. Additional content added through updates includes Boss Revenge (where you fight both heroes and Dominique as playable bosses), a surprise playable character for the main game in Bloodless, and Classic Mode, a sub-game where you play through a reformulated version of the game in the style of Castlevania.

Inti Creates, despite leaving development, stuck around to fulfill a particular stretch goal to create a retraux spin-off title to the main game, which became the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon series.

In 2020, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Kingdom Two Crowns have joined forces. The Deadlands update for Kingdom has Miriam, Zangetsu, Gebel and Alfred as playable rulers. Meanwhile Bloodstained has a Kingdom DLC where Miriam goes to a short area from the Kingdom world.

Miriam's crossover adventures don't end there. In February 2021, she wound up in the land of Cvstodia as part of Blasphemous's second DLC, Strife and Ruin, enlisting the Penitent One's help in sending her back to her own world.

In November of the same year, Miriam was featured as a Guest Fighter in Mighty Fight Federation as part of a free update.

In 2022, the third planned playable character, Aurora from Child of Light was released, with mechanics derived from her own game. A new area crossing the game over with Journey would also be added that year.

In 2023, a second Classic Mode was announced, with gameplay similar to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest.

A sequel has been confirmed to be in development.

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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night contains examples of:

• 100% Completion: As per IGAvania tradition, Ritual of the Night has players collecting many items, Shards, completing side-quests, fighting various enemies, and scouring through areas to attain 100% completion. Their efforts, however, won't go unrewarded, as they can unlock perks and earn special rewards for doing so.
• 20 Bear Asses: Fully exploring the game's crafting and upgrade system requires a lot of demon parts, where few drops have a starting drop rate that hits ~10%.
• 2½D: The game uses 3D models, but is played from a 2D platforming perspective where you can only move up, down, left, and right. The tower rooms play with this a bit more; despite moving in only four directions, the tower's architecture rotates and turns, which Miriam follows. The end of the shop corridor in Arvantville curves to store the chest at the foot of the photography studio.
• Ability Required to Proceed: As is standard for a Metroidvania game, especially one that draws so much from Symphony of the Night. Miriam needs, among other things, the ability to double jump and move as fast as light in order to completely traverse the castle.
• Abnormal Ammo: Through alchemy, Miriam can use ammo ranging from the mundane, such as the soft-point bullets, to the supernatural, including elemental ammo and bullets made from diamonds.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap is 99, when you can comfortably beat the final boss at around level 35. There's an achievement just for getting to level 50, at which point your HP and MP will be high enough that the items that increase your maximum health and magic will outright stop working.
• Achievement System: The Kickstarter featured one in which fans could participate in numerous multimedia projects during the backing campaign to unlock "Backer Achievments". Collecting enough Backer Achievements would unlock non-stretch goal bonuses, such as revealing stretch goals early, getting a 1" backer button, and adding New Game Plus and a special costume to the game.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: The enemy Shovel Armor is a large muscular man in a blue suit of armor, which is a far cry from the Super-Deformed little guy from Shovel Knight.
• All for Nothing: The Alchemists' Guild's horribly unethical experiments ended up having the complete opposite effect of what its members wanted. The goal of binding children to demonic power and sacrificing them to unleash the first Demonic Invasion was to convince the world that there were problems that only the Alchemists' Guild could solve, winning the people's trust and then profiting off of it. Instead, the complicit Guild members were found out and executed, and the Alchemists' Guild folded.
• Alternate Company Equivalent:
  • For a specific mechanic; the Shards system that gives Miriam new abilities is rather unabashedly similar to the souls system from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, including their method of acquisition (slaying enemies until they drop randomly) and the various subtypes in which specific Shards fall into specific categories of which a single Shard can be equipped at once. In addition, you can sacrifice Shards to craft weapons.
  • The same applies to Glyphs and the concept of a female protagonist having to fight against a brother figure who did everything for them but lost themselves to the power they have.
  • Quite a few of the enemies are very similar to classic Castlevania enemies. For example, the Morte, Bone Morte, and Dullahammer Heads function almost identically to Castlevania's zombies, skeletons, and Medusa Heads, respectively.
  • Zangetsu Mode hearkens back to Julius Mode, where you get to play through the game as a supporting character with an Unexpected Gameplay Change as well as fighting The Protagonist who has succumbed to their dark powers.
• Always Check Behind the Chair: Some collectible items are well-hidden in non-conspicuous areas, requiring some thorough search from the player. For example, you can find HP and MP Max Ups inside giant bells. You can either find these by accident, or if you intentionally jump inside those bells.
• Anachronism Stew: There are some things in the game which couldn't have been found in 18th-century England. Justified somewhat by O.D.'s explanation that the demons have surpassed humans in terms of technological advancement:
  • The steam train was invented some time during the Industrial Revolution, but admitting passengers using photo-ID passport was still centuries ahead of time.
  • One enemy, Tamako-Death, is a rocker chick complete with an electric guitar. Electric guitars only started showing up in the 1930s as a jazz instrument — the rockers appeared almost three decades later.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Shard abilities that are required to move through the castle (such as Craftwork's giant hand) consume very little mana on use. Miriam's MP naturally regenerates over time, so a player can't find themselves stuck by using these abilities too much. Other abilities, such as inverting or traveling underwater, don't require mana at all.
  • The Aqua Stream ability doesn't use any mana if it's used while underwater. The reason is because it's the only way to traverse past a few obstacles in the watery caverns. The alternative of waiting for mana to recharge just to move across the room would have been insufferable.
  • The Gold Bullet ability can still be used if you run out of money, it just can't be charged and it will fire at its minimum range and damage. Having to keep up your money supply is an inconvenience especially when prices at the shop are extremely high.
  • If a dropped item bag gets stuck in a wall, as long as you make physical contact with the bag, you will get the item when it despawns (either when leaving the room or simply waiting long enough).
  • On a non-Randomizer mode, once you craft an item with Johannes, it's automatically added to Dominique's shop in the next room. So after forging an item, you can just buy more of it instead of grinding for rare items over and over. Of course, this means that you have to grind for Alkahest instead, but that's a much more common drop.
  • Certain treasure chests will refill upon leaving an area of the castle, to help alleviate the need to grind for certain crafting materials.
  • Shards that are in finite supply (such as boss attacks and the Silver Knight familiar) cannot be sold.
  • There are certain rooms on the Bridge of Evil that can only be accessed on your first visit with Zangetsu (the opening section and where the Glutton Train is fought), and the time limit will probably prevent you from exploring the entire area. Once this section is over, the game automatically counts the entire map as being explored regardless of how much you actually uncovered, preventing the unexplored portions from becoming Permanently Missable Content.
  • During a Randomizer run, regardless of what the player chooses to be randomized, certain things will always happen in order to prevent runs from ending too early.
    • Miriam will always start with the Village Key in her inventory. Because a player could conceivably randomize key items, giving Miriam the key to the door prevents a player from getting stuck early in the run.
    • The Galleon Minerva’s first cannon will be treated as having already been fired to destroy the wall in a randomized run, since the player could randomize shards, leading to them having no fire attacks to light the fuse.
    • If you pick up a Waystone on the galleon and use it to teleport to Arvantville before fighting the first boss, you aren't locked out of that area, and can still go back and fight the boss.
• Anti Poop-Socking: If you visit Johannes when the system clock is near or after midnight, he'll ask Miriam if she's "staying up late tonight".
• Arc Symbol:
  • Roses, which are closely affiliated with Miriam and Gebel. The crystallization curse they both have manifests in a rose-like shape until it encases their body entirely. The promise that they made to each other (that is, to kill one another should they give into evil) is also one of the central plotlines in the game.
  • The moon is also this, as it's frequently seen in various parts of the game. It's a clue for how to get the true ending.
• Arrange Mode:
  • Randomizer Mode can shuffle a number of game variables, such as item drops, ability locations, and save point locations.
  • Zangetsu Mode is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Zangetsu retains the special moves he had in his boss battle, but it plays more like a straight side-scroller instead of a Metroidvania game.
  • Using a not-so-secret Cheat Code enables Bloodless Mode. She's mechanically distinct from either Miriam or Zangetsu, but unlike Zangetsu, she has the ability to upgrade her powers by finding crystals scattered around the castle, making her gameplay more of a halfway point between the standard and Zangetsu modes. She also starts in her boss room instead of in the Galleon Minerva, and the player is given free leisure to explore the castle at will.
  • Aurora Mode is probably the most thorough extra mode in the game so far, since it's been in planning for a good chunk of the game's development time until it was subtly hinted in 2020. She has her own story that's told with rhyming poetry like in her original game and her gameplay is a mixture of Miriam and Bloodless: she can collect and use a small selection of shards that represent the cursed forms of her friends that she can have upgraded with Johannes, and depending on which ones she has equipped, her stats will also change. The functions of some shards also differ from the one Miriam has. Finally, she gets a unique familliar in form of Igniculus and a fixed Directional Shard, both of which are upgraded with items found in chests and white shards that are found in shard holders and gotten from bosses.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Doppelganger: The Doppelganger can trap herself below the doors, and then can't escape, just trying to run at the player but is stopped by the stage geometry, allowing sufficiently long-range attacks to damage her without triggering any further attacks, which would eventually get the Doppelganger to Flash Step and free herself.
  • Adrasteia, the 2nd most powerful Firearm weapon, automatically locks on to any enemies nearby. But, there are lots of problems with this. Sometimes, it may skip more pressing targets (such an enemy closing in on Miriam) and attack another that poses no threat whatsoever. Sometimes, the enemy it targets may be well out of range, meaning it can't even damage them. Sometimes, it may target an enemy and miss, even if that enemy is standing still (ironic, given that its name means "inescapable"). And finally, every shot zig-zags away from the barrel the moment it's fired, meaning it can even be hard to hit enemies it's pointing at in point-blank range. This can make the gun infuriating to use reliably, and even more infuriating when missed shots waste expensive ammunition.
• Ascended Meme:
  • The Kickstarter campaign clearly references the narmful prologue of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Then there's this Word of God interview answer:
    Igarashi: A creator’s value is determined by his next game, but a creator unable to make the sort of games he wants isn’t really a creator at all. He is just a man… and we all know what that is.
  • A survey for kickstarter backers asking about cosmetic DLC ended with the question◊ "When you hit your foot on furniture, what is the correct response?". The three possible answers are "You miserable little pile of secrets", "EEEEEE.....OOOOOOOOOOOO" (referencing the death rattle of knight enemies), and "I'm going to kill that furniture dead!" (referencing the memetic line shouted by the demon-slaying quest NPC).
• Asshole Victim: The Alchemist's Guild started the magi-crystal curse and caused Hell on Earth because they wanted to selfishly stomp out the influence of science. They are dead at Gebel's hands before the events of the game, but are mourned by no one.
• As You Know: Averted. Miriam literally Slept Through the Apocalypse, so any exposition about demons, the castle, and what happened in the ten years between the intro crawl and now is actually news to her.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The game carries a few energetic rock-driven boss themes, such as "The Executioners", while others such as "Exorschism" and "Silent Howling" combine drums and guitar with other natural instruments.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Nearly all the boss shards qualify, as they are very powerful attacks that cost three times as much mana as regular shards.
    • The Jackpot shard from the Millionaire's Bane especially stands out, as its effects are entirely random. Sometimes it will inflict massive damage, but often it won't do anything at all. Plus, there's a delay of several seconds between when you activate it and when it actually takes effect.
  • Solomon's Ring, the ultimate reward given for completing all of Abigail's keepsake quests, increases the rate at which enemies produce Shards. The trouble is, the item required to get the ring can only be found in the final area of the map. Further, if a player doesn't know what it does, they're at risk of delaying its acquisition and not getting all that much value from it.
  • The Bloodbringer familiar. A floating sword that flies around attacking enemies sounds cool, but its attack animations have such lengthy windup times that most of the time you'll either have already killed the enemy or it will have moved in a way that causes Bloodbringer to miss. You're probably better off just swinging around Bloodbringer as an actual sword, which is unlocked when the familiar hits Level 25.
  • Familiars in general fall into this late in the game. Since Miriam doesn't actively wield the familiar, none of them gain benefits from any Passive or Skill shards that Miriam has equipped. In particular, the benefits of Augment LCK and Augment Gold don't apply to familiars. So if the player is trying to farm for something, the player has to to either equip Carabosse (which almost never attacks and has healing items in an emergency), or forego a familiar entirely.
• The Battle Didn't Count: The battle against Zangetsu has Miriam mention that she could tell he was holding back. Once you reach the train, you see why: he's capable of one-shotting everything. Zangetsu is also the only way to really damage the level's boss, as Miriam can only do Scratch Damage. In the second fight against Zangetsu, he holds back considerably less than before, but still does so, which Miriam notices.
• Beef Gate: Cyhyraeths block several areas in the early game that hold access to valuable items, such above the first save room in the cathedral, and they inflict Curse status upon contact, hit incredibly hard (including a grab attack that does triple-digit damage, which can blow off well over half of a lifebar in one shot early on), have a fair amount of HP, and are resistant to most of what anyone would likely have when they first encounter them.
• Behind the Black: This is how all three pieces of Valkyrie equipment are hidden:
  • The Valkyrie Dress is off-screen above where Valac is fought.
  • The Valkyrie Circlet is hidden behind a piece of scenery below Valefar's boss arena.
  • The Valkyrie Sword is below the screen boundary under the floor in Tower of Twin Dragons right before Valac's boss room in a spot you need Dimension Warp to reach.
• BFS: The greatsword category is all about large swords, but within that group, there are exceptionally large examples, including Carnot's Rebuke. There's also a katana called Honebami that's as wide as Miriam, though not especially long; Honebami was originally a halberd before being refashioned as a katana.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • The archive description for Carabosse describes it as a jealous, spiteful fairy that lays curses on people out of malice, which stands in sharp contrast to its classic pixie appearance.
  • And then there's Dominique, who turns out to be a traitor allied with Gremory, plotting to usurp God Himself and become a being higher than Him, in a Rage Against the Heavens for sitting idly by while those she loved perished in the first Demonic Invasion ten years ago. By the time of the present, Dominique has become She Who Fights Monsters.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the True Ending. Gremory, Dominique, and Bael are defeated, and the castle is destroyed. But the remaining villagers, Miriam, and Johannes are the only survivors of the ordeal. Gebel, Alfred, and presumably Zangetsu are all dead, leaving the two to mourn their deaths. On top of that, even with the castle destroyed, there are still demons loose upon the world and Gremory has seemingly escaped. There is a ray of hope for Miriam's future, though, as Johannes informs her that Alfred suggested some improvements that could be made to the methods used to stop the crystals from overtaking her body and now believes he can halt it permanently.
• Blade Reflection: In the official cover art, Gebel's face is reflected in Miriam's sword.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: Some monsters (i.e. Wolfmen) can do a defensive stance which will negate your damage. Attacking them in this state will display a "Guard" text instead of a numerical damage value.
• Body Horror: The crystallization Miriam and Gebel suffer from. Even though the spread on Miriam's flesh has been contained, getting powers still involves getting Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by the new shard. Miriam describes it "like uninvited claws scraping against my bones".
• Body to Jewel: The magi-crystal curse slowly turns its host's skin into stained glass-esque crystal. However, its progress can be delayed by surrounding the affected regions with magic runes, which stops the crystallization effect. Both Miriam and Gebel are affected by it, to varying degrees, and the end of the game reveals that Dominique has inflicted it upon herself to gain power.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • One-Handed Swords and Clubs. With reasonable attack power, an easily managed swing speed, and overlap between most of their available techniques^note Clubs cannot make use of the sword's Parry technique, these two classes of weapons can easily be used for the entire game. If one keeps up on the crafting system, it is easy to keep one of each up-to-date in your inventory, allowing you to switch out between blunt damage and slashing damage as you need.
  • The Passive Shards may not be as flashy as the other Shards, but the bonuses they provide are extremely useful. This is especially true if you get a Passive Shard to Level 9, because the Shard provides its normal passive bonus to Miriam without needing to equip it. Of particular note are the Passive Shards that make it easier for you to find or purchase new items and upgrade materials: Detective Eye (detects hidden walls and auto-collects items), Augment Gold (increases gold drops' frequency and value), Augment Luck (Luck determines item drop chance as well as crit chance), Money Is Power (you get a better deal when selling stuff at the shop), Pickpocket (chance of stealing an item drop from an enemy when hitting them), and Alchemic Bounty (you have a chance of getting extra stuff when crafting).
  • The Directed Shield directional shard does Exactly What It Says on the Tin — it summons a shield in the direction of Miriam's choosing. It can cause collision damage, but at such a low value that it's extremely impractical to use it for that. However, what it can do is neutralize any attack that it comes in contact with (even if the animation for the attack still goes off). Not only that, but it's one of the most affordable to level up — when Miriam first meets the enemy that drops it, she likely already has the materials to upgrade it to rank 7 from both random drops and blue chests, and she's not far from where she can get the materials to get it to rank 9. By that point, it becomes larger than she is, and proper use of it can block anything that comes at her. There's a reason that nearly every guide to fighting bosses without taking damage relies heavily on this shard.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • The gambling boss Valefar has a move that causes him to absorb all your money to restore its HP once you deplete all of it. The amount of HP restored is determined by how much money you currently have (up to 9999 HP). Of course, if you have no money in your pockets, the boss will exclaim, "What!? You're flat broke!?" and just die instantly.
  • If you defeat Gebel normally, you will get the Bad Ending. However, if you obtained the Zangetsuto from defeating Zangetsu for the second time and use it against the moon in the background when it turns red halfway through the battle instead of defeating Gebel, you'll unlock the path to the True Ending.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: Standing behind or on the axle in the Master Carpenter's room stops his only attack that could functionally hit the player character to be blocked by that very axel, indefinitely, so long as he isn't on the other side of the room and Miriam's not inverted.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Kunekune's creepy Jump Scare entrance aside, it doesn't get treated as anything more than another standard enemy in the game. However, it is extremely dangerous, especially at the point when you can first encounter it. It has relatively high hp, inflicts the very dangerous Curse status effect, and deals a lot of damage just by making eye contact with you.
• Boss Remix: "Exorschism", which plays during the second Zangetsu battle, is a fast-paced remix of his character theme.
• Boss Rush: Two courses of this get unlocked once you finish the game. The bad ending only unlocks the first course, but the true ending unlocks both courses.
• Bottomless Magazines: Miriam's gun weapons can continue to fire an infinite amount of normal shots even after special ammo types are used up, but these are much weaker than any type of consumable ammunition. The final reward for completing Susie's sidequest is the Recycle Hat, which grants infinite special ammo when worn.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • Defeating the game's strongest superboss gives you the "Standstill" shard, which gives Miriam the ability to stop time. O.D. will also let you borrow every stat-boosting book from his library at once as proof of your accomplishment. But seeing as how you just defeated the strongest enemy in the game, you don't need your stats to be any higher. You definitely don't need the power to stop time, either. But if you feel like making the final boss into a complete joke, seeing as it lacks Contractual Boss Immunity to the time stop, there you go.
  • Acquiring every shard in the game gives you Gebel's Glasses, which is an accessory that gives infinite MP, much like the Chaos Ring from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow before them. However, by that point, you have every spell in the game, have defeated the optional superboss, and in the process likely had done enough Level Grinding to such a ridiculously high level (or found the right weapons) that combat's not a challenge anyway. So all that's really left is to carry it into New Game Plus to have fun destroying everything (or to spam techniques to master them).
  • The Adversity Ring won by completing Benjamin's subquest increases Miriam's stats if she is currently afflicted by a status effect. However, the ability required to find and reach him the third time can only be gotten by the last boss you can defeat before completing the game. By that point, the ring's usefulness is very limited, outside of carrying it over into a New Game Plus playthrough.
  • Randomizer mode can subvert this, however, as these items are part of the shuffle. They have the potential of showing up in the very first chest.
• Brown Note: Kunekune, the secret enemy in the train, is apparently so horrifying that just looking at it will immediately Curse Miriam and stunlock her to death without it even having to touch her, requiring that Miriam face away from it and use directional shards in order to kill it, or rely on her familiar to do all the work. Or use Standstill or a convenient platform to cheese the hell out of it.
• Calling Your Attacks: Among the many shard abilities are various "spells" that even non-Shardbinders are shown to be able to use, all of which seemingly require the caster to shout out the spell's name upon casting. In addition, Miriam and Bloodless both call out the Blood Steal ability by name whenever using it, and Miriam also does this with Dimension Shift (although the boss you get it from does not).
• The Cameo: Shovel Knight from Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight appears in Bloodstained as the enemy Shovel Armor.
• Cap: Nine is the cap for both healing items and Shards.
  • Miriam can only hold of each type of healing item / Poison / Waystones.
  • Shards' Grade and Rank can only go up to 9 before they stop.
• Captain Ersatz: Has enough ersatz versions of Castlevania characters and enemies to have its own page.
• Cast from Money: The Gold Bullet shard will fire a ricchocheting gold coin which takes a certain percentage from your total Gold. Enemies such as Valefar and Millionaire's Bane will also take money from you to fuel a power.
• Character Customization: One NPC hidden in the castle can change Miriam's hairstyle, along with the colour of her hair, eyes, clothes, and skin tone. Not all of the options are completely normal.
• Checkpoint Starvation: A common occurrence in the later areas. Of particular note are three instances of this:
  • The first two revolve around the Forbidden Underground Waterway zone, which connects to two other zones: the Secret Sorcery Lab and the Hidden Desert. Getting to both of these zones requires a long gauntlet of dodging underwater obstacles and enemies to make it into these two zones, followed by actually making it to a warp room or save point.
  • The entirety of the Oriental Sorcery Lab is one of these, with a warp point found midway into the area and a save point right at the end, directly across from the boss. Getting to this save point requires walking through at least four rooms of powerful enemies and surviving, a task easier said than done.
• Cheat Code: Included courtesy of a stretch goal. Alongside traditional cheat codes and joke cheat codes, there are also special cheats for unlocking the Let's Player-designed cosmetic gear and joke mods.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • One of Miriam and Johannes' conversations early in the game is about the Alchemist Guild, the facilities they used to have, and the fact the demon castle is situated right where the guild once stood. These guild facilities later show up as castle areas you get to traverse.
  • In the Garden, there is a gigantic red moon pulsating with sinister energy. It will be a long time before the player finds out what that is or what it means.
  • When Miriam encounters Alfred for the first time, he's writing on the floor of the castle. During the ending, it's revealed that Alfred had been writing in Enochian script all over the castle so that he would be able to use the Liber Logaeth to destroy it. With Alfred gone at this point, Johannes finishes his master's work.
• Chest Monster: Mimics and Deathtraps disguise themselves as treasure chests. There is also a Mimic Chair, which starts hopping around when you sit in it — and is usually placed right next to spiked or otherwise damaging floors.
• Cooking Mechanics: Miriam can cook various foods from the items she gathers while exploring Gebel's castle. Most of the foods act as healing items, but they also provide a one-time boost to her stats the first time a particular food is consumed.
• The Chosen One: Miriam, obviously, though why is the kicker, as she's not the chosen one by fate or divine decree, but rather the Alchemists and Gremory and later Dominique. However, none of this is revealed unless on the path to the true ending, where Alfred explains to Johannes that Miriam's powers as a shardbinder would account for half of the necessary power needed for the ritual to bring demons to the world during the Alchemists' plot to convince people to keep their faith in them, explaining why Alfred put her to sleep for a decade. Later, it becomes obvious that Gremory and Dominique want to use Miriam to bring Bael into the world. Miriam, despite this obviously meaning she also has the power to kick ass either way, isn't particularly enthused by it.
  Miriam: I'm not sure that's something to be proud of...
• Clockworks Area: It's a Castlevania game in all but name. Of course there's a clock tower level — the Tower of Twin Dragons.
• Collision Damage: Most enemies will deal damage if the protagonist touches their model, but not the enemies of the "giant horned cat" model, Nyabon, Macaron, and Kamikaze, which can be ran right through safely.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Torches that Miriam can attack to gain mana and items are always purple.
  • On the map, red rooms are save points, and green rooms are warp zones.
  • Shards are different colors based on their type: Conjure shards are red, Familiar Shards are green, Directional shards are purple, Manipulative shards are blue, Passive shards are yellow, and Skill shards are white.
• Color Coded Timestop: The secret superboss O.D. does an inverted-color version with their Standstill ability, and you can too when you get their shard after beating them.
• Competitive Balance: Despite being a single-player game, each weapon class has its pros and cons:
  • Boots can attack quickly, but have a short range. They don't have many special techniques, but equipped boots add their attack to normal slides and divekicks.
  • Daggers have the shortest attack range, but the highest attack speed and often have secondary effects. Their special techniques are good for crippling enemies or striking from safety.
  • Rapiers are a middle ground between knives and one-handed swords, able to strike quickly and repeatedly while allowing for more range.
  • One-handed swords and maces are the Jack of All Stats weapons. The two benefit from the same boosts and share all techniques (except for Parry, which only swords can use), allowing players to essentially swap between slashing and blunt damage whenever the situation calls for it.
  • Two-handed Great Swords have a slow attack speed, but the overhead swing arc gives them a lot of coverage, and they hit hard.
  • Whips are fairly slow to attack, but do so at a good range. Both the weapons themselves and their special techniques tend to have a variety of secondary effects.
  • Polearms have a long, albeit narrow attack, and do piercing damage, which is otherwise hard to come by. Their techniques include several defensive flourishes or attacks from even further away.
  • Katanas are the middle ground between one- and two-handed swords. The basic attack is nothing special, but they have the most techniques of any weapon type by far.
  • Guns can attack at very long range and can switch ammo depending on the situation, but Miriam can only carry a limited amount of ammo at once and the Emergency Weapon infinite bullets are among the weakest attacks in the game.
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • Downplayed. While bosses are immune to the Stoning status effect, unlike many other games of this type, other status effects can affect even boss enemies. For example, it's easy to poison Bloodless to get an easier time in whittling down her health.
  • Nearly every boss in the game is immune to Standstill, although their projectiles are still subject to its effects. Ironically, the only boss who is not immune to it is the Final Boss.
• Cooking Mechanics: There is a fairly extensive food system in this game. You can prepare a variety of food and drinks, and consume them to restore your HP and MP, and gain a permanent stat boost the first time you consume a particular dish.
• Cosmetic Award: Following in the footsteps of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, defeating any boss without taking damage earns you a medal proving that you did so. Miriam will also say "Congratulations!" after the boss goes down. However, just like Ecclesia, the medals don't provide any reward other than the satisfaction of earning them.
• Counter-Attack:
  • Katanas and one-handed swords have access to the Parry technique, which, when used successfully, blocks the enemy's attack, briefly freezes it in place, and follows up with a horizonal iai slash or a teleporting helm breaker, depending on the weapon type used. Zangetsu's version of Parry has no automatic followup, but the enemy is frozen in place for a longer period of time, allowing you to follow up with whatever action you want, which is further emphasized by the fact that a successful Parry also restores 50 MP.
  • Aurora's melee gameplay also emphasizes making use of her counters, as her normal swings are either slow or short-ranged depending on her form and using Oengus as her bullet shard massively increases her counterattack damage.
• Creative Closing Credits: The Classic Mode's ending credits take the form of gameplay demos of Miriam fighting various enemies and bosses, which then transition to animated line drawings of the same scenario from a different angle with credits listed alongside them.
• Creator Cameo: Game director Koji Igarashi appears in the game as a DLC Superboss. His likeness is also on a portrait in the room that leads to the 8-Bit Nightmare.
• Creepy Cathedral: The Dian Cecht Cathedral area. Complete with the good ol' fashioned stained glass windows, church bells, and Ominous Pipe Organ plus a One-Woman Wail.
• Crossover:
  • Miriam and some of the other characters are in Kingdom Two Crowns and in return Bloodstained has a DLC where Miriam takes a short trip to an area from Kingdom where she'll fight the Breeder boss and win the Archer familiar from it (you can keep returning to this area and refight the Breeder for additional Archer shards).
  • Miriam would also make an appearance in Blasphemous, being added as an NPC in the 'Strife and Ruin' DLC after having been summoned to Cvstodia through a portal that broke behind her and needing The Penitent One to recover the shattered shards of the portal so she can return home. If they do so so, she gives them a special Prayer that allows them to briefly summon her to aid them with a powerful magic attack. However there was no return crossover with Blasphemous content appearing in Bloodstained this time.
  • On March 31, 2022, Aurora, the main protagonist of Child of Light, was made a playable protagonist in Bloodstained via free DLC.
  • On August 22, 2022, a new secret area was added as part of a crossover with Journey , including a boss based on the Guardians and a scarf based off of the scarf of Journey’s playable character.
• Crossover Combo Villain: The Guardian at the end of the Journey area is a War Machine from said game, but resembles the dragons in this one.
• Cute Monster Girl: Most of the relatively few explicitly female monsters and monster lines appear as attractive yet inhuman women.
  • The "Fairy" line consists of Carabosse (a classic pink-colored female sprite... with four arms), Sidhe (a green-skinned Carabosse), and Titania (a blue-skinned, red-eyed Carabosse with a bee-like stinging abdomen).
  • The "Harpy" line consists of Aello, Celaeno, and Ocypete, each of whom is an attractive half-girl half-bird creature with slightly different colors.
  • Rul'sha and Vul'sha are winged, whip-wielding succubus-like demon girls.
  • Lili is a succubus Playboy Bunny.
  • Lamashtu looks very similar to Lili, but has a Cat Girl motif instead.
  • Tamoko-Death literally just looks like a cute Japanese girl punk rocker... until she starts launching fireballs from her guitar.
  • Bosses Vepar and Gremory are more on the monstrous scale, but still kind of attractive-looking.
  • The boss Bloodless is an attractive and entirely human-looking female vampire.
  • Subverted with Cyhyraeth, a banshee-themed enemy who, despite her bosom, has a hideous face trapped in an eternal scream.
• Cutting the Knot: You could scour the entire castle for the one specific spot you must use the Invert ability to obtain the Aegis Plate in order to pass through the two spiked passages in the Entrance, or you just optimize for speed with the Tailwind Tome and Speed Belt, and use knockback to push yourself along the passages and run during the invincibility frames, and maybe some form of healing for a buffer, in case you take more than the 6 or so required hits of 15% of Max HP the spikes do which would sap 90% of your HP, or more. This is after an attempted mitigation by the addition of the second Iron Maiden in an update, requiring the Craftwork shard to carry it along while walking through the spikes, making it slightly more precise to tank through.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Stone locks a character in-place and causes them to take double damage from attacks.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: The Rhava Velar sword has weak damage, but it strikes five times for every press of the attack button ,and has the fastest attack rate of any weapon in the game on top of that. And if that weren't enough, it's also one of the few weapons^note the others are Rhava Búlar, Flying Edge, and Oracle Blade in the game that don't prevent Miriam from moving while attacking. As a result, the Rhava Velar has the highest DPS of any weapon in the game, albeit only showing up relatively late in the game and having a short range.
• Deface of the Moon: To reach the best ending, you're going to need to cut the moon under specific circumstances. Zangetsu's katana is required for this, and the real reason this works is because Gremory's power is tied to the moon.
• Degraded Boss: Not one of the first bosses, as is tradition in the series it's based on, but rather one of the mid-game bosses, the Abyssal Guardian, shows up in the second-to-last area of the game.
• Dem Bones: Compared to the Castlevania series, skeletal enemies are a rare affair in Bloodstained. Apart from the Outsider line of enemies (which are large, heavily-armored skeletal warriors), there isn't really any humanoid skeletons (although the Bone Morte is described as engulfing a hapless human and reducing them to bones), but there are the Living Fossils, which are reanimated dragon bones, and Valefar is a huge gaudy demon who hides his skeleton behind mounds of coins.
• Demonic Vampires: Implied. Most of the supernatural creatures encountered in the Hell-Hold are very explicitly called "demons", but two of them are also vampires: Orlok Dracul, librarian of the Livre Ex Machina, and Bloodless, a boss who grants the Blood Steal shard (allowing Miriam to consume blood shed by her enemies to heal herself).
• Depth Perplexion: One boss fight takes place in a small circular arena. The ground is uneven specifically to prevent to player from cheesing the fight with guns or long-range shards. This doesn't change the fact that Miriam could trivialize the battle if she would just aim into the background. Even more infuriating, the boss will happily cast a spell into that space.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • One late-game ability, the Invert Shard, allows Miriam to flip the game world upside-down so that she can walk on the ceiling. Should the player happen to do this in one of a handful of game areas that have no ceiling, which would leave Miriam "falling" forever, Miriam will simply cast Invert again once she reaches the top of the screen, casting her back down to earth.
  • When talking to O.D in the library, he'll give a not so subtle hint that you need a photograph first before he can make you an ID card. If you've already taken Miriam's picture beforehand, she'll interrupt the conversation and present him with her photo.
  • When Valefar's health is depleted, he will steal all of your gold and regain health equal to the amount of gold stolen this way. If you have no gold on you when this happens, Valefar will instead say "What? You're flat broke!" and immediately die, skipping the second half of the fight.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Parry and Eleventh Hour Techniques. When inputted, Miriam holds up her blade in a defensive position for a brief moment. The parry window is rather tight for a command block (not to mention it requires you to shuffle forward a bit), but if you successfully block an attack with it, Miriam will automatically perform an extremely powerful Counter-Attack.
  • Upbeat Heat has an awkward arc, barely fires out three projectiles initially, and has some positioning issues given Miriam summons Tamako-Death directly above her head, initially setting the ability up to be a faulty anti-air weapon. As the ability is upgraded, however, Tamako-Death summons more fireballs, summons them faster, hits harder, and plays her guitar for a longer period of time. Once the positioning and arc are mastered, it becomes far and away one of the most efficient boss-killing abilities in the game, and if used in concert with Invert to instead direct Tamako-Death's projectiles along the ground ends up utterly melting rank-and-fodder enemies. Aurora's equivalent also heals her, making it by far one of her absolute best abilities.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The ominously-named Hall of Termination is situated at the uppermost portion of the castle and surrounded by regal decor that befits a Final Boss that presides over it. Indeed, at the end of a long set of stairs sits a throne room where Gebel awaits. But he's not the final boss. To continue further, the player must acquire the Zangetsuto and use it to force Gremory out of hiding.
• Discount Card: Dominique sells a Discount Card, which gets you a 10% discount in her shop. It costs 100,000G, but if you're aiming to craft everything, it'll pay for itself.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Weapons:
    • The Spiral Sword, a greatsword which can be acquired very early on from the Blood Grinder Knights in the first part of the castle. While its base damage is fairly average, its real strength comes from the fact that it hits three times per swing, allowing you to deal large amounts of damage. Its only downside is that, like all greatswords, its swing speed is slow.
    • The Thorn Whip. It's the very first reward from Susie's questline, so you don't even need to farm for materials to craft it, it deals both slashing and blunt damage, allowing it to reliably hurt practically everything, and to top it off, the Critical Swing technique it teaches is easy to master, guarantees a critical hit, and once mastered, can make whips a very reliable weapon type for most of the game.
    • The Flying Edge, a magical thrown sword that can be acquired as soon as a player starts climbing the tower. It shoots in front of Miriam and returns in a high spiraling arc, resulting in the blade hitting most enemies twice. On top of having great range, Miriam can also attack while moving. The Flying Edge also goes through walls and obstacles, allowing Miriam to safely engage targets from a distance for no mana cost. The downside is that the weapon's damage is somewhat low. It can be upgraded into a stronger version, but this requires a recipe book that is found very late in the game.
    • The Rhava Búral can be found relatively early as a drop from Killer Barbers. Its relatively low damage is compensated by the fact that you can hit most enemies absurdly fast. It can get even more broken once you are able to upgrade it to the Rhava Velar, which is most definitely not the Crissaegrim/Valmanway.
    • An 8-Bit Coin can be found right before entering the castle by going under the drawbridge. Said coin can be used to craft one of a number of unique weapons. While all of them are good for that stage of the game (though they are quickly outclassed), some of them also have special abilities that ensure they stay useful for a long while. The God Cross in particular is a potent early-game weapon since it has a chance to petrify foes, as is the Blood Grinder Sword, which can inflict Curse, even on some bosses. Furthermore, all of them can be upgraded twice with the 16 and 32-Bit Coins for sale at the shop. At their strongest, they are only outclassed by the Infinity +1 Sword of their respective weapon type.
  • Shards:
    • Flame Cannon, provided from the first area's Cannon enemies. On its own, it's just a fireball; what qualifies is its upgrades and how easily they are acquired. You can get it to Rank 7 as soon as you get to Arvantville by buying 2 Sulfur and 2 Saltpeter to make 6 Gunpowder. The remaining 2 Ranks require Rubies, which can be obtained as early as Livre Ex Machina, and Cannon Scrap, which is dropped by the same enemy that gives you the shard.
    • Heretical Grinder, also provided by the Blood Grinder Knights, provides a directional attack that hits any number of enemies in its path with several hits per second. It makes fights against smaller/faster enemies trivial, and can deal tons of damage to any boss who stands still long enough, making them laughably easy. Its major weaknesses are its short range and MP consumption, which are not nearly enough to discourage its use. By late-game, the player has access to far more efficient sources of damage, but that's a long time off. Even in the late game, it remains useful simply because it inflicts many rapid hits with a bladed weapon, which will cause the enemy to bleed a lot, making it synergize very well with Blood Steal.
    • Welcome Company, gained from Poltergeists first encountered in the Cathedral, creates a barrier of paintings around Miriam that deal minor damage to enemies. This is useful for dealing with enemies that try to get close or swarm Miriam from multiple directions, and it's also useful against bosses, as each painting can land multiple hits in short order. It's also useful for breaking torches and hidden breakable walls.
    • Summon Bat, obtained from the bats all over the game, spawns bats that move forward. Alone, it's not much, but rank it up with the plentiful bat drops, and you'll summon more bats with each cast. Even with only one shard, Summon Bat on a high rank can destroy minor nuisances and bigger demons for a long time.
    • The Abyssal Guardian boss of Livre Ex Machina has a chance of dropping the powerful Void Ray Shard. This is the earliest you can obtain the Shard, since Abyssal Guardians don't show up again until the second-to-last area. Upgrading it a few ranks (and it's possible to get it to Rank 7 just by farming Dragon Scales from the Dragon enemy also located in Livre Ex Machina) turns it into a darkness-based Wave-Motion Gun.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: If Miriam tries to fire a gun, it stops her in place on the ground; however, she remains mobile while airborne, so she can fire them while jumping towards her foes.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Bloodless, being a character who is entirely themed around blood, is affected by the option that changes the color of blood in the game. If you decide to change the color to yellow or white, this can result in playing as or fighting against her becoming...very awkward and uncomfortable.
• Doom Magnet: The "Dark Curse" that the Alchemist Guild claimed would come was of their own making, infusing "pure" orphans with dark magics that would turn them into beacons that would draw demons to earth.
• Double Jump:
  • Defeating Andrealphus grants Miriam the ability to jump twice.
  • Miriam has this as a default ability in Classic Mode, but unlike the standard double jump she has Richter Belmont's somersault technique, which can, if you're not used to it, send you straight into a pit if used in the wrong location.
• Downloadable Content:
  • Thanks to meeting every one of its stretch goals from the Kickstarter campaign, the game will feature 13 free post-launch downloadable content packs, which includes a Classic Mode, Chaos Mode, a Speedrun Mode, a Randomizer Mode, a Boss Rush Mode, Boss Revenge Mode, local and online co-op multiplayer, two extra playable characters, and a "Pure" Miriam outfit. Late into the game's development, a formerly backer-exclusive DLC, which features IGA himself as a superboss along with a special shard and the Sword Whip weapon as a reward for defeating him, later became available to all players as the "IGA Back Pack" DLC. Additionally, there will be various cosmetic DLC packs players can purchase to further customize Miriam's appearance.
  • A sequel to Classic Mode, Classic Mode II: Dominique's Curse, was announced as a major paid DLC expansion, added onto the game following positive reception of the original Classic Mode. This mode is a sequel to the main campaign where you play as Dominique following the events of the main story and is directly inspired by Castlevania II: Simon's Quest.
• Dracolich: Living Fossils are skeletal dragons encountered in one of the late-game areas.
• Dueling Player Characters: The Final Boss of Zangetsu Mode pits Zangetsu against Miriam once again, except this time you're in Zangetsu's shoes.
• Early-Bird Boss: Vepar, Zangetsu, Craftwork, and Andrealphus all take advantage of Miriam's limited weaponry and movement abilities (specifically Double Jump) to make their battles difficult. Case in point, both Craftwork and Andrealphus have platforms on their stage to help Miriam evade and/or attack them, which Double Jump would have made superfluous. Fittingly enough, Andrealphus is in fact the last boss you'll fight without it, as it's his Shard which gives it to you.
• Easter Egg:
  • A small visual one, but every weapon type has a unique animation if you use it and then stand still for a moment, such as resheathing a katana or brandishing the whip after it's used.
  • Two familiars react to Miriam sitting on a chair or the sofas in the Save Rooms: Carabosse sits on her shoulder, while Dantalion opens its book in front of her, which she starts reading.
    • Also when you save with Dantalion as the familiar:
      Dantalion: Another page in your story... written.
  • Sit at the piano in the garden with Carabosse as your familiar, and Miriam will begin playing the piano as Carabosse sings a song in English or Japanese, depending on your settings. There's even an achievement for listening to the whole song.
  • The game is integrated with your system's internal clock, which the game subtly acknowledges. Johannes will give special messages if the game detects you've been playing late at night, early morning, or have been playing continuously without a break.
  • The clock located at the top of the Tower of Twin Dragons will display your current time and chime on the hour.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Most of the basic mooks aren't too difficult once you figure out how to upgrade your shards to clear rooms and there aren't a lot of in-level obstacles such as spikes, as well as a lack of pitfalls. The bosses, however, have a large array of attacks that drain your HP.
• An Economy Is You: There's one shop in the game, which sells stuff Miriam needs... because the town is destroyed and all the survivors are living in a cellar, and the "shop" in question is Miriam's personal broker, trading loot from the castle for supplies Miriam needs.
• Empty Room Psych: The game has several of them. The biggest example by far is Celeste's Room, a special room inside the Livre ex Machina. It requires a key to open it in exactly the same way as the Optional Boss rooms. Inside there's a lot of cool stuff: a painting to look at, several music boxes to listen to, and a pair of chairs that the player can sit in, which causes a ghostly figure to appear in the opposite chair after a few seconds. The room doesn't do anything else, however. Many, many players spent a lot of time in frustration trying to figure out the non-existent puzzle.
• Enemy Scan: The Gauge Glasses transform damage numbers into enemy HP numbers when worn, displaying the enemy's remaining HP with each hit.
• Energy Weapon: Laser-like abilities are used by several enemies, and Miriam can likewise use them after absorbing the required shards. The most literal example is the required, non-offensive ability Reflector Ray, which creates a beam of light that will even shine off of reflective surfaces and provide a pathway for Miriam to instantly travel across. The Tiz Razïn and Void Ray Directional Shards also count, starting out as a thin constant beam of energy and finishing as a massive Wave-Motion Gun style sustainable blast of light and darkness respectively at Rank 9.
• Engineered Heroics: The Alchemist's Guild, fearing they would become irrelevant in a post-industrial revolution world, planned to summon demons into the world and then banish them, hoping to show the world there were threats that only they could deal with. Unfortunately, they brought too many demons through at once and couldn't control them, leading to a full-scale demonic invasion of the human world.
• Epic Fail: The Alchemy Guild—with the sole exception of Alfred—were Too Dumb to Live and decided to unleash Hell on Earth by implanting children with shards receptive to demonic power and sacrificing them in a ritual, all for the purpose of proving the superiority of spirtualism over industrialism, and intimidating the world into continuing to give them financial support. Millions of innocent people were killed, and after the Church eventually succeeded in vanquishing the army of demons, the Alchemy Guild were found out, arrested and executed, rendering their attempt to gain more money and power All for Nothing. To firmly establish what an Epic Fail this was, the criminal charges against the Alchemy Guild were led by Gebel, the one survivor of the very ritual they initiated to release the demonic army.
• Epic Flail: The massive Dullahammer enemy wields a chain that has his own giant spiked metal head on the end. Miriam herself can acquire one with the Shard dropped by Dullahammers with enough Ranks.
• Equippable Ally: Like the sword familiar in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the Bloodbringer Sword Familiar becomes equippable once it has leveled enough. Level it more and it becomes stronger still.
• Evil All Along: End-game events reveal that Dominique has been manipulating Miriam and her allies from the start. She wants Miriam to absorb Shards so that the latter becomes receptive to Demonic Possession by Gremory, who is merely using Gebel and actually working for the former. Dominique also buys Shards from Miriam so that she can use their power to summon Bael, as a back-up plan.
• Evolving Weapon:
  • Bloodbringer, the sword familiar gained by defeating enemies of the same name, is equippable once it gains enough levels. As long as the familiar continues to get stronger, the Bloodbringer sword will do the same, gaining a new form every 25 levels; capping at 54 ATK at level 99 for the familiar.
  • In a similar manner, the Infinity+1 Katana Grand Izayoi increases in power the more Miriam uses Blood Steal, capping at 58 ATK.
• Expy: Valac is essentially the Gaping Dragon as an eastern dragon instead of a western one, with a mouth that runs the length of its body and most of its internal organs either exposed or hanging out entirely.
• Fan Disservice: Cyhyraeth is a demon with a half-exposed bust of very impressive size... surrounded by every other part of her, which is deeply disturbing.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • Averted with the main game, in that the game never forces you to take damage. A post-release interview revealed that before Igarashi would sign off on each boss, the boss monster's designer had to beat it with just a dagger, and without getting hit.
  • A randomizer run does not start you off with any weapon in Miriam's inventory, meaning you'll only do Scratch Damage to the demons you'll come across. Even if you do obtain a few attacking shards during this time, your limited MP pool this early on makes using them hugely impractical. If items are completely shuffled and a weapon isn't found by the time you confront Vepar ^note unless you're lucky enough to find a Waystone to warp to Arvantville early, it's best to re-roll another seed.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The Dullahammer. It's big, covered in Spikes of Villainy, and has a powerful attack for something so early in the game. It's also immobile, the attack — while having good coverage — can be easily avoided due to how slow it is and the big blind spot you can slip into, and it can be poked to death with your starting shards. It even has a tender spot that's extra-vulnerable to weapons. IGA claims that he's a fan of these kinds of enemies.
  • Subverted in Classic Mode, where a titanic Dullahammer (and its head) serves as a boss fight.
• Feminist Fantasy: By deliberate design, Miriam was chosen as the protagonist to capitalize on a demand and need for strong female video game leads. In addition, this story is wholly about Miriam, rather than her simply being a passive character in someone else's story or merely being used as a Third-Person Seductress. Despite her main goal being tied to a major male character, this is because he is the Distressed Dude and Miriam is setting out to save him in fulfillment of a promise they made long ago (and even then, it's later revealed that he was just bait and Miriam was the true target all along). The other male characters either act in a supporting role or wind up putting all their hopes in Miriam after their own plans go awry. In addition, the two true villains behind the plot are both women; the True Final Boss they both seek to revive is gendered male, but is more of a demonic force than an actual person, and you have to defeat his summoner in order to actually beat him.
• Flat "What": Miriam's response to being told that Zangetsu has learned how to FLY. Somehow.
• Flechette Storm: The Chisel Barrage Directional Shard, dropped by the Optional Boss Master Carpenter. Once fully upgraded, it shoots a near-continous stream of chisels out, giving it one of the highest DPS levels of any shard.
• Foil: Miriam and Dominique are eventually revealed to be this to each other. They have both endured a lot of suffering in their lives no thanks to the Alchemist Guild and the Demonic Invasion they instigated out of petty avarice. What makes them different is that Miriam is a genuine Nice Girl who uses her suffering as a reason to help others, whereas Dominique's Nice Girl personality is revealed to be a façade to conceal a power-hungry sociopath, using her suffering as an excuse to gain power at the expense of others.
• Foreshadowing:
  • O.D. notes that "your kind hasn't discovered it yet" when telling Miriam about photography, suggesting that the creatures of the night are at least slightly more advanced enough to know how to utilize photography. Dominique being the only other one who knows about photography raises some red flags in hindsight. It's mitigated by O.D. also noting that if anyone among humans have come close to figuring out photography, it would be the Church, and Dominique was sent by the church. So a first-time player probably wouldn't suspect anything.
  • Another encounter with Dominique later in the game, after the Bridge of Evil's train sequence with Zangetsu, Miriam points out that she and Zangetsu had worked together to get through the train and its challenges. Given that Dominique has been clearly very agitated with Zangetsu's unwarranted hatred of Miriam for simply being a shardbinder, it comes as a bit of a surprise that she actually becomes very visibly concerned that the two were working together. Even though she simply explains it away as annoyance at Zangetsu blowing off his priorities of hunting Alfred, the truth of the matter is revealed when Zangetsu points out later that Dominique feared Miriam and him teaming up to take out Gremory and ultimately exposing her treachery.
    • During this encounter, Dominique also mentions that she had asked Zangetsu to go to "the underground sands", and is concerned that he would choose to disregard her request because Alfred could prepare a trap at any moment. When Miriam reaches the Hidden Desert, Alfred is found there.
• Former Friends Photo: Promotional materials contain an old photo of The Hero Miriam, her aloof ally Johannes, and the Big Bad Gebel chilling out as friends during happier times.
• Four Is Death:
  • No.44 in the Demon entries, Kunekune, who can quickly curse and kill you if you're not ready due to somehow ignoring Mercy Invincibility.
  • The Jackpot shard's slot machine has a triple-4 result, which summons a massive bell to attack.
  • Gremory is Level 44 and gives exactly 4444 EXP upon defeat. Also, her HP is 6666. In Boss Revenge Mode, her attacks deal 4, 44 or 444 damage, which become 6, 66 and 666 when they crit.
  • The final boss has 4444 HP.
• Friendly Enemy: Rul'sha can be found in a few rooms. If attacked immediately, she will become angered and retaliate before flying off. However, if left unharmed for a few seconds, she will cast a blessing on Miriam that enhances her STR momentarily. Killing her can bestow a Shard that allows Miriam to rapidly burn off MP to temporarily enhance her stats.
• Funny Background Event:
  • When Miriam makes it to the deck of the ship at the beginning of the game, the player can spot Zangetsu in a rowing boat making his way to the castle, powering through a storm that's throwing a fully-sized ship around like a toy. And he's moving faster than the ship.
  • If you have the game set to 21:9 resolution, you get an Easter Egg during the ending which reveals that Zangetsu is alive and is sneaking up behind Miriam, in a nod to who his English voice actor is.
• The Gambler: Two bosses have a clear gambling theme. The first is Valefar, an enormous gambling demon who attacks by throwing rebounding coins and trying to crush Miriam with walls of poker chips. The other is the Millionaire's Bane, a literal slot-machine monster whose attacks depend on where its spinning reels stop at. Hitting 7-7-7 causes the boss to self-destruct instantly, dropping its Shard, its item, and a lot of money.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Downloading the 1.02 patch moved some items around, and in doing so changed what flag said which chest had been opened. This rendered several progress-critical items in pre-patch saves unobtainable, making the save file unwinnable. The only solution was to start a new game. 505 Games said they know what happened and promised that it won't happen again, but it's unlikely that old saves could be fixed.
  • PlayStation 4 players also ran into a bizarre and fatal bug caused by using the Lethal Boots after 9 hours of play time, which causes Miriam's head and some of her body parts to go missing, and their stats suddenly dropping to obscenely low levels, making the game Unintentionally Unwinnable.
  • Aurora Mode: In the Gebel fight, if Aurora just stands in place and attacks with something that can deal damage from where she entered, like Oengus, then, when Gebel grabs her and tries to slam her against a wall, he'll instead carry them through the boss door, leaving her stuck outside when the attack finishes, then if she attacks Gebel again, he'll try and slam her again, but can't, leaving the game stuck mid-animation, with no escape and the only escape is to force quit the game, like Alt-F4 or something.
  • Classic Mode has one involving Gremory: since Miriam walks to the left automatically after they're defeated to enter the door leading to the next area, if you manage to die at the same time as the boss, she'll stand up and start walking left but the game still thinks you died and you're sent to the previous checkpoint and from that point onwards, the same thing will happen whenever she dies. This will, however, lock the game's controls, forcing you to quit out of Classic Mode and restart the level from the beginning from your save file to end the effects of the glitch.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Zangetsu gives Miriam his sword, saying it's the only thing that can cut down Gremory. While this obviously isn't true for the sake of gameplay, the weapon is ridiculously effective should you use it against her during her boss fight, striking twice with each swing and both being guaranteed critical hits (though the latter is attributed more so to Zangetsu littering the entire room with ofuda meant to weaken Gremory than the Zangetsudo on its own). This is even present in Zangetsu Mode, and combined with his moveset, the whole thing really helps to emphasize that Zangetsu is Gremory's natural enemy and that she was very justified in avoiding him at all costs in the main game.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Miriam is repeatedly warned that absorbing Shards en masse is dangerous and potentially fatal, since her body may not be able to handle such a massive influx of demonic power all at once. You can pretty much streamroll everything in the castle and cram Shards into Miriam's body as much as you please and she won't be any worse for wear. The source of this information is unreliable, since Dominique wanted Miriam to absorb enough shards to render her susceptible to Demonic Possession. Johannes was the first one to raise the concern, but he was just being cautious.
  • If you fight Gebel after fighting Zengetsu a second time, the ending reveals that Miriam has now absorbed enough shards that Gremory can now take control of her instead. This happens even if you have a minimal amount of shards. Similarly, you can have obtained a massive influx of shards prior to this point with no impact.
  • Zangetsu's message regarding how to reach the Den of Behemoths and Miriam's reaction to it, still occurs even if she's entered it already, but the cutscene acts like she's never been, and this is some new revelation.
  • Likewise, even though Dominique supposedly used the shards Miriam sold her to research how to turn herself into a Shardbinder, Dominique's power at the end of the game is unaffected by how many shards the player sold her, and she acquires the power of a Shardbinder even if the player never sold her any shards at all.
  • In the Randomizer mode, Dominique is needed to figure out how to get into the Underground Sorcery Lab, but she starts vanished in that mode. Yet the cutscene revealing the need for Silver Bromide can still occur as if she hadn't disappeared at all.
• Gem Tissue: The experiments performed on Miriam and Gebel caused their flesh to start crystallizing as they absorbed demonic shards. Miriam has multiple patches of crystal on her body, most prominently a rose-like one over her heart, and a blue crystal flower growing out of her back. Dominique shows even more impressive growths just before her boss battle, where it looks like a good portion of her limbs along with part of her face is now crystal.
• Genre Shift: Zangetsu mode, which plays more like a classic Castlevania game than the post-Symphony Of The Night games by trading the RPG and soul-hunting elements for a much more arcade-y playstyle. Zangetsu starts out significantly stronger than Miriam and with all his moves unlocked, allowing for massive amounts of Sequence Breaking and the power to plow through early and mid-game enemies straight out the gate. His moves use Street Fighter-esque button combos similar to the weapon special attacks, there are no crafting or side-quests (or anyone non-hostile to interact with at all), and he can't use any items or shards.
• Glamor Failure: The Mimics and Deathtraps quickly fall victim to this, as they have unique color patterns not found on any real treasure chests.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Downplayed initially. Miriam can heal herself with the Regeneration and Healing Shards, but they aren't available until the halfway point of the game and the amount of health that you can heal with the Healing shard is small compared to how much magic you need to use, and while taking no magic, the Regeneration shard recovers health very slowly. With the Amphibious Speed shard, Miriam actually gets a fairly decent regeneration ability as a bonus — the problem is it only works underwater. This changes when you max out the ranks and levels of the Regeneration and Healing Shards; then they become good enough that you'll likely only need healing items during boss battles.
• Goomba Springboard: After Goomba Stomping an enemy with the double jump kick, you can perform another midair jump. Some rooms have torches or enemies laid out in ways that allow you to exploit this to Sequence Break.
• Goomba Stomp: After a Double Jump, you can press Down + Jump to do a Diving Kick that damages enemies. If you have boots equipped, it adds their attack stat.
• Gotta Catch Them All: Get all the shards and Gebel's Glasses become available in a chest near Johannes. They give infinite MP. Though it's a Bragging Rights Reward, since getting every shard also means defeating the Superboss enemies, so you've got nothing left to use it on.
• Gratuitous English: IGA himself will speak to players in this while fighting against him. This is, in part, a deliberate send-up of the (in)famously hammy voice acting in Symphony of the Night (and the Castlevania series as a whole).
• Gratuitous French:
  • Miriam punctuates the special combo for the Kung-Fu Boots with "Un, deux, trois!"
  • The castle's library is called Livre Ex Machina. This is gratuitous on two fronts: Livre is French but Ex Machina is Latin, and livre means book instead of library. The OST does a better linguistic job at naming the area: Bibliotheca Ex Machina, a complete Latin phrase meaning "library from the machine."
• Gratuitous Ninja: They turn up in the Oriental Sorcery Lab. Why are they in a castle in England, in the 1790s? Why are they trying to kill Miriam? Who cares? They're ninjas, and ninjas are cool; go beat them up, and watch out for the Shuriken., And they're a based on "Assassins" on the Train and in the Underground Sorcery Lab.
• Gravity Screw: Miriam can eventually acquire the Invert skill, which inverts gravity for her alone, causing her to walk on ceilings. As the developers themselves put it, now you can play the inverted castle at any time!
• Grievous Harm with a Body: How the mostly useless Buer familiar works. The Buer has poor attack A.I. plus mediocre regular attacks, and even when it upgrades enough to breathe fire, it'll end up aiming in the wrong direction. To effectively use it, Miriam can hit the Buer at enemies for decent damage. Also, Miriam can use the Buer as a springboard by doing a double-jump stomp on it to bounce off for more height.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Acquiring the true ending suffers from this a bit. To even begin it, you must acquire the Aqua Stream shard so that you can traverse the Forbidden Underground Waterway for the first time. Anyone used to how progression works in Castlevania games could be forgiven for thinking that by doing this, they're Sequence Breaking rather than following the intended route. After this eventually leads you to the Invert shard, you must then return to the Twin Dragon Tower, use it in a rather specific spot, and acquire the Aegis Plate to render yourself immune to the spiked passages in the Entrance. This finally allows you to reach the Oriental Sorcery Lab and gain what you need to finally progress past Gebel without killing him. The game provides little to no help with doing this.
  • One might want to farm every enemy for at least one of each of their drops. You can easily miss a required ingredient and have no idea how to find it. For example, the G Bone Steak is a drop from flying enemies while most meat drops from monsters resembling livestock. In addition, some ingredients (Black Pepper and Soy Sauce, for instance) are part of random loot drops gained in blue chests, and considering the sheer number of blue chests in the game, it's likely that you will forget which ones drop what items by the time you're grinding out the final materials.
  • Recipe books are sometimes hard to find without being told exactly where to look. They're required to finish Susie's cooking sidequest, and are tucked away in corners of the map which make them easy to walk right past. If a player already has 100% map completion but doesn't know the specific corner of an area to check or which wall to break, they'll need to search every nook and cranny of the entire map to figure it out.
  • Finding #44 on the demon list, Kunekune, involves this. You have to go back to the train on the Bridge of Evil and find the one chair on the entire train that lets you sit in it, and do so. Then you just sit there and wait for an indeterminate amount of time, until Miriam starts to fall asleep, only for Kunekune to appear and Jump Scare her awake. Once that's done, good luck actually killing it, since merely looking at the thing will cause Curse and likely stunlock you to death. ^note You can cheese it from a platform with Tiz Rozain, Void Ray, Heretical Grinder, or any similar Directional Shard.
  • The Valkyrie Sword is one of the most well-hidden items in the game. It requires using Dimension Shift in a specific spot in the Towers of Twin Dragons to access a hidden chest that doesn't even show up on your map like all the others to clue you in to its location. To make matters worse, there is an identical-looking spot elsewhere in the Towers of Twin Dragons that doesn't let you use Dimension Shift at all, so you might try that spot first and assume the other spot won't let you either. As a bonus, it also has an exclusive, unlisted special move (d, d+attack to perform a standalone version of the Parry counterattack teleporting slash) that's not recorded under Techniques which is only useable after you master every other Technique in the game.
  • People have had to resort to guides to figure out how to proceed after gaining the Double Jump. You need to find the Silver Bromide to give to Dominique so she can take a picture of you, find O.D. in the Livre Ex Machina so he can make you "Credentials" to use in the train station, then go to the train station in the bottom-right with said Credentials.
  • In true Castlevania fashion, item descriptions are vague at best and rarely, if ever, tell you any special abilities that the item has until you actually fiddle around with it or look it up online. While many are shown by books around the castle, they are by no means exhaustive. The game also doesn't explain what mastering a technique actually does (it allows you to use that technique with any weapon of the same type).
  • The game never actually explains how to do a dive kick. (Down+jump after a double jump.)
  • The way to access the new area that works as a crossover with Kingdom Two Crowns is also very obscure: after you beat Bathin, a new crown item is added to the shop that only costs 1G to buy. Buying and wearing it while boarding the train in Bridge of Evil from the left side then allows you to enter a new area by reaching the right side of the train and opening the door that would normally let you skip to the end of the train ride.
  • Classic Mode has a number of unlisted moves: on top of the backdash that's visible in the control settings, Miriam can also perform a Richter-style backflip when you press jump while ascending from a jump and like him, her whip attacks can also be powered up by tapping forward at the right time when holding attack, something she can also do while jumping or crouching.
• Hail Fire Peaks: The Livre Ex Machina is both a Spooky Silent Library AND an Eternal Engine.
• Hand Cannon: These are what Miriam's guns amount to. There are no real BFG type weapons, but firearms like the Tanegashima and Blunderbuss are two-handed weapons. Miriam, however, uses all these firearms with only one hand, treating them as a longer-than-normal pistol.
• Harder Than Hard:
  • Nightmare Difficulty. Its enemies have the same stats and locations as Hard difficulty, but the level of Miriam and her familiars are permanently set to 1 for the entirety of the game.^note Essentially, this is similar to Portrait of Ruin's and Order of Ecclesia's Hard Mode Lv 1.
  • The already difficult Classic Mode has what's called a "1986 Mode" that's unlocked via Konami Code which essentially removes all modern concessions and makes the gameplay just as restricted as the original Castlevania (ie. no additional moves, uncontrolable jump arc, no jumping off or on stairs and no crouching or standing up in the middle of a whip attack).
• Healing Boss:
  • One of the bosses of Dian Cecht cathedral is named Bloodless. She has an ability she can use called Blood Steal which when activated,allows her absorb blood from around the room Miriam fights her in and use it to replenish her health.
  • Valefar has the ability to heal himself once he's taken enough damage by using the ability Plunder to steal Miriam's money and replenish his health. The amount of health he recovers is determined by how much money Miriam is carrying.
• Heal It with Blood: Bloodless, a boss based on Elizabeth Báthory, is a vampire who has the ability to heal herself during the fight by absorbing the blood in the room. Defeating her allows Miriam to do the same.
• Heart Container: Throughout the castle, there are items that permanently increase Miriam's maximum health, magic, and ammo capacity. The HP and MP items also restore their respective stat to full upon collecting them.
• Hint System: One Loading Screen messages says:
  Sometimes, when you visit the shop, you will receive hints about how to proceed.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Miriam can cook various meals that can replenish health with ingredients she can find from enemy drops or buying them from a shop. In addition to restoring health, eating the meal for the first time can grant her permanent stat boosts.
• Hypocrite: The true Big Bad is Dominique Baldwin, who shows herself to have been Evil All Along, which is revealed right before they become the Final Boss. Among the boss's many flaws is the blatant hypocrisy with which they've been acting.
  • The Big Bad delivers a Motive Rant which reveals that she was devastated by the loss of her parents to the first Demonic Invasion, and decided that any god who was willing to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their followers while they suffered did not deserve to be acknowledged as a god. While Dominique's pain is understandable, she says this in the same conversation where Dominique reveals that she has an Evil Plan plans to summon Bael, the Ultimate Demon, cause an even larger-scale Demonic Invasion in order to become a higher being than God, and dismisses anybody who dies as a result as too weak to deserve sympathy. Miriam is not impressed at how twisted the Big Bad has become, and calls out what happened to them as tragic, but in no way justifying their plans.
  • The Big Bad also expresses anger at a supposed "betrayal" when they themselves are a traitor. Dominique said that Zangestu betrayed her by giving Miriam his sword to surprise-attack Gremory. This coming from the same individual who has been manipulating Miriam and her allies since the very beginning. In fact, it was Zangetsu becoming suspicious of Dominique's true motives and inquiring with Alfred to learn the truth, that led to him "betraying" her in the first place.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Miriam and Gebel made a promise to each other that if there ever came a time that one of them turned evil or somehow lost control, the other would find and kill them. When Miriam finds that Gebel has gone rogue, she tells him that she'll honor her promise. Gebel is so far gone that he not only doesn't remember it, but refutes any claim that he's lost control. That's because Gremory is controlling his mind, and the longer he talks to Miriam, the more she's at risk of jogging his memories.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Hall of Termination totally sounds like a good place to hang out. The castle itself counts, as it's referred to in-game as the Hellhold.
• I Let You Win: A non-villainous example. After the second duel with Zangetsu, Miriam acknowledges that he could have easily killed her if he wanted to; the fight was to see if she was strong enough to wield the Zangetsuto and go after Gremory.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: New Shards impale themselves into Miriam before she shoves them in and gains their power. Players, however, can turn this animation off if they feel like it eats up time or tire of seeing this sequence.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Treasure chests may be found in a variety of bizarre placement choices. For example, in conspicuous ledges or corners that mandate the use of a movement ability such as Double Jump or Deep Sinker, encouraging you to backtrack to these spots later on after you acquired the necessary abilities. The Hidden Desert area also carefully hides some chests in quicksands, though the mini-map icons may easily reveal their presence. There's also the fact that previously-opened silver treasure chests are inexplicably refilled after a significant time has passed.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: One journal entry is about a man trapped in the castle praying that he'll find some, because he's running out of food.
• Infinity -1 Sword: While the best gear in this game is made with Item Crafting, there are a couple of powerful weapons that can be obtained through relatively simpler means.
  • The Valkyrie Sword has a respectable attack rating of 54. While this is lower than the attack rating of the strongest one-handed sword, Blue Rose, the Valkyrie Sword is still a very good weapon that is much easier to get if you know where it is.
  • The Bloodbringer Familiar can become an equippable one-handed sword (though you can't have it and the Familiar active at the same time). The sword's attack power increases as the Familiar levels up, to a max attack of 55. The only issue is that leveling it up to level 99 will take a long time.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Rather than a singular ultimate weapon, the crafting system sees to it that there are Infinity +1 variants for all of the weapon classes, meaning that the player can create an excellent weapon regardless of their preferred playstyle. This is evened out from usual examples of the trope, as by the time the player has access to the needed materials to craft the weapons, they'll be in the final stretch of the story and as a result won't completely break the game, with the possible exception of the Rhava Velar. Special mentions to Blue Rose, the sword seen being wielded by Miriam in promotional art; Eternal Blue, a greatsword version of the Blue Rose wielded by Gebel during his boss fight; Andromeda, a whip imbued with the almost-always useful Holy element; and the aforementioned Rhava Velar, the infamous Crissaegrim/Valmanway from Symphony of the Night in all but name.
• Informed Ability: The Archive description for Carabosse describes it as a jealous, spiteful fairy that lays curses on people out of malice, but its attacks on Miriam don't inflict the Curse status effect.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • After fighting the Abyssal Guardian, a quick look at his bestiary page makes it obvious that he will return as a Degraded Boss, since his actual location is still unknown.
  • When passing through a particular room of the Garden of Silence, sharp-eyed players might notice that the lighting of the room and Miriam don't quite match. The reason why won't be apparent till near the end of the game when Gremory's gate into the Den of Behemoths appears in the form of a blood moon, causing the red haze around Miriam to match the rest of the aesthetic.
• Item Crafting: Johannes establishes a field alchemy lab at the base, allowing new items and weapons to be synthesized from materials Miriam brings back. Unlike most IGAvania games of the past, where you typically found newer and better weapons around the castle as you explored, the crafting in this game is the most consistent form of progression the player will have outside of a lucky drop of an enemy.
• Jiggle Physics: Used in a subtle fashion, but it's there. This can be seen more prominently with female bosses such as Vepar (even after the bust reduction in the final game) and the physics of Miriam's longer hairstyles.
• Joke Item: Quite a few items are meant to be silly or useless (or both), but the pinnacle is probably Summon Chair. It, er... summons a chair. You can sit in the chair. That's it. (Well, actually, it speeds up your MP recovery for a while, while sitting in it, the boost lasts longer the fancier / comfier it is.) If you upgrade it, you can eventually make fancier chairs that restore your MP within a few seconds, but it's still a rather niche utility.
• Jump Scare: On the train in the Bridge of Evil, there is a particular chair Miriam can sit down on. Choose to do so, and the perspective switches to first-person, looking out the window. Miriam begins to fall asleep, but in between her blinks a Kunekune can be seen approaching, until it's suddenly right in front of her, staring at her with its Nightmare Face, letting out a high-pitched scream in the process.
• Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Dominique collects a rather stiff markup on the supplies she sells to you, preventing you from buying materials from her and reselling finished goods for a profit. This is averted in the case of rice, however; if you buy a Rice Seed for 100g, after planting it and waiting a while, you get ten units of rice that sell for 16G each. However, this isn't a serious moneymaker.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Katana are available for Miriam to wield, and utilize a unique one-handed "swing and sheathe" animation mo-capped from IGA himself. As the result of the vote from the "Sword or Whip" teaser site, one Katana is also the game's Infinity +1 Sword. One katana in particular, the Zangetsuto, is crucial to get the best ending. Katanas also have the largest number of learnable Techniques in the entire game out of any weapon type, giving them access to a Counter-Attack, a Three-Strike Combo, a Sword Beam, a jumping slash that reduces enemy defense, a dashing Diagonal Cut, and a powerful short-ranged circular slash that creates a crescent moon.
• Kill It with Fire: One of the first Shards Miriam obtains allows her to fire a flame blast from her palm that deals minor magical damage. It can also be used to ignite certain environmental elements, such as cannon fuses.
• Kick Chick: When unarmed or using Shoes, Miriam delivers swift martial arts style kicks to handle enemies. Notably, one piece of Starter Equipment are Kung-Fu Shoes, which are slightly stronger than the initial Long Sword.
• King Mook: The Abyssal Guardian behaves like a larger version of the Dragon enemy, though with more powerful attacks and a different element. And *then* there's the Den of Behemoths, though in that case, the way it's drawn makes it more like the whole world got bigger.
• Knockback: Getting knocked up to a ledge by a Demon's flame pillar is the only way for Aurora to return the way she came in, if at the first chance she gets, she enters the Forbidden Underground Waterway via the fountain and reaches the first save room inside.
• Konami Code: The teaser site reacted to this if you tried it. In the game proper, however, inputting said code before starting Classic Mode will put you into 1986 Mode, a Harder Than Hard version of Classic Mode.
  Pixel IGA: "Did you really think that would work here?"
• Lag Cancel:
  • Miriam can use her backdash to cancel her normal attack. Well-timed jump landing can also do this as well.
  • There's a jump canceling trick during underwater fights after you acquired the Deep Sinker shard. Normally, a jumping attack with a Greatsword forces you to wait until Miriam lands on the floor before you can perform another downward strike. However, mashing the jump button while underwater allows Miriam to spam the downward strike without waiting for the entire recovery animation.
• Laser Blade: The Encrypted Orchid sword. It's even in the description. ... Well, once you decrypt the message. Which is "a light saber with immense power".
  • If successful, the Parry Technique (and the Valkyrie Sword's hidden Brynhild's Blessing Technique) has Miriam projecting energy over her sword to give it massively increased size before teleporting and bringing it down on enemies' heads.
• Last Lousy Point: Getting Scythe Mites to spawn in the Twin Dragons Towers after the player has completed the area can be annoyingly hard to accomplish, since they're lured by any bloodstains on the ground and walls. The problem is that the only enemies in that area that actually bleed when damaged with a slashing weapon are the Wolfmen and Buers thrown by Buer Armors, and chances are that you're either using a form of attack to kill them that doesn't draw blood, or kill them in a single hit in a spot that doesn't result in a bloodstain. But when first visiting, players are typically too low-level to have weapons/abilities that can easily defeat these small, quick, venomous insects without having their health decimated by poison. The result is that the Scythe Mite is commonly one of the last Shards players need to find in order to get 100% Completion.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • One of the most expensive items in the Supply Post early on is a pair of bunny slippers. They are more powerful than comparable claymores, guns, and spears, have among the fastest attack speed of any weapon (since Miriam's kick animation is among the fastest of her attack animations), and turn Miriam into a Lightning Bruiser.
  • Summon Chair is such a useless Shard at first glance that even the description questions its own effect. What the Shard actually does is to enhance your MP regeneration rate while sitting in the chair it summons. As you enhance the Shard, you get access to better and better chairs, and by the time you get close to max rank, you get absurd MP regen for relatively negligible cost and time.
• Level Limiter: The Harder Than Hard, "Nightmare" difficulty. Its enemies have the same stats and locations as Hard difficulty, but the levels of Miriam and her familiars are permanently set to 1 for the entirety of the playthrough.
• Level of Tedious Enemies: Tower of Twin Dragons, full of Dullahammer Heads, which are there to disrupt Miriam while she's trying to jump her way around the moving parts.
• Life Drain:
  • In a twist, Miriam's Blood Steal Shard can drain blood from enemies to restore her health, but it doesn't work if the blood is still in the enemy. You have to hit the enemy to make it bleed first, then use Blood Steal to suck the blood off the bloodstained floors and walls.
  • The Drain passive Shard is a straighter example, with each hit Miriam lands with a weapon or power having a chance to heal a small amount of health. Sadly, the amount that it heals is so low that even if maxed out, it tends to be more of a "make Miriam lose health slightly less quickly" effect than actually healing her in a pitched battle.
• Literally Shattered Lives: All demons suffer from this upon defeat, although the effect is pronounced clearly only on bosses (especially huge bosses like Vepar and Valefar). Killing a demon turns their entire body into crystal, which then shatters, and a shard of this shattered body may then be absorbed by Miriam.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Averted, in a distinct departure from the series that inspired this one. Defeating Gebel nor Bael will not destroy the castle in which the game takes place. Because unlike in those games, the castle is a separate entity and not an extension of the Big Bad. It has to actually be demolished from top to bottom for that to happen.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Besides the protective shards Directional Shield and Beast Guardian, Miriam can shield herself with the Shield Weapon (one of the 8-bit coin weapons). After you attack, Miriam will go into a blocking stance and stop anything that hits the region of the shield. Against bosses like Zangetsu, it can really be devastating.
• Macro Zone: The Den of Behemoths features enemies from earlier parts of the game, just gigantic. Even the treasure chests are bigger. Said enemies simply being copies of earlier models with size values cranked up leads to entertainingly glitchy visual interactions with some shards, like how Shurikens will quintuple in size upon hitting their target.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Food Bonuses. Individually, most food items confer small permanent stat bonuses when eaten for the first time. There are a lot of food items, and amongst the bonuses include boosts to the experience earned in fighting and the rate MP regenerates. Once you've eaten your way through even about a third of the possible food items, the permanent boosts to Miriam's stats will get fairly impressive. Once you've tasted everything once, you'll have substantial stat boosts and an additional +8.0 MP recharge rate. Johannes was right, eating well will make Miriam much, much stronger.
  • The Silver and Gold Power rings, which grant greater damage based on how many enemies Miriam has killed and how much gold she's carrying, respectively — by the endgame, they become some of the strongest accessories Miriam can equip.
  • The Traverser Ring, which grants bonus damage equal to how much of the map Miriam has unlocked. By time the player reaches the 40% mark, it becomes better than any other accessory for any player focused on physical attacks. It's immensely powerful once you finish the map, and even better, the player can equip two of them.
  • The Ruinous Rood shard. The level one grade is a small projectile that goes a little ways and back. Upgrading it makes it larger than Miriam and hit multiple times with a single throw. It also travels through walls, making it good for chasing enemies hidden behind map geometry.
  • The Dullahammer Head familiar shard starts off with only a single low-powered head protecting you. But as you gain more shards and increase their ranking, the number of heads will be up to 5 and the damage goes up tremendously. Other than a few strong bosses and enemies that can guard, your little drone army will wipe out anything without your input.
  • Passive shards in general. Upgrading them to the max level transforms them into passive Skill shard that no longer require a slot. Diligently doing this makes Miriam a Multi-Melee Master with permanent stat buffs to everything and resistance to all forms of attack that not only reduce the damage she takes, but also give her a chance to No-Sell every attack.
  • Of particular note is the Alchemic Bounty Shard, which grants a chance of creating 1 or 2 extra items when crafting, depending if it's max Grade or not, meaning, at max Grade and with two copies active, it grants a chance of creating five of whatever item you are crafting. This includes the Infinity +1 Sword weapons and Bit Weapons. The extra gear can then be either sold for gold or dismantled for more crafting materials.
  • The Augment Gold Shard. Initially, it just makes enemies slightly more prone to dropping money and slightly improves the chances of them dropping higher-value amounts. Once maxed out, enemies and lanterns will drop only coins worth $100 or sacks of coins worth $500. If you have both the Passive Shard and the Skill Shard active, it will cause enemies to start dropping sacks worth $1000 or $2000 on a regular basis, thus making it easy to earn as much money as you could possibly want in a very short time.
• Magic Versus Science: The industrial revolution caused people to start turning against magic and alchemy in favour of more grounded sciences. The alchemist's guild unleashed Hell on Earth in response.
• Magitek: Some of your high-end guns are supernatural and you have the Steampunk weapons like the Steam Boots and Carnot's Rebuke, plus many of your crafted bullets are magical. Enemies like the Shield Outsider and Bloodgrinder Knights carry mechanized weaponry that don't appear to have any power source.
• Malevolent Architecture: The castle is difficult to navigate and laid out in a way that makes perilously little logical sense. Becomes a Discussed Trope when Miriam brings this up during a shop visit early on. Dominique posits that the castle did come straight from hell and was likely intended to be occupied by demons, if at all.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The "stained" in "Bloodstained" describes the stained-glass appearance of the crystallizing curse affecting the bodies of the main characters. The "Blood" part is just there because Igarashi likes blood. Maybe.
  • Zangetsu's name means "cutting/sundering/beheading moon". Very appropriate for a hunter chasing a moon-themed demoness.
  • Dominique's name sounds eerily similar to "demonic", foreshadowing her true allegiance. If you remember the similarities between this game and IGA's previous Castlevania titles — in particular, Order of Ecclesia — also notice that Dominique shares a root word with Dominus. You know, the Dominus glyphs, which contain Dracula's power, giving more incentive to suspect her.
• Mercy Kill Arrangement: Miriam and Gebel have one of these with each other, requiring them to kill the other if they ever believe they're being deprived of their free will.
• Metroidvania: A side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements, just like most of IGA's Castlevania games. Interestingly, Igarashi has decided to coin the term "IGAvania" for this type of game, as it's kinda his thing, as well as to avoid Trademark issues from mentioning the Metroid series.
• Mirror Boss: An IGA staple, one boss is a powerful Doppelganger that can use Miriam's shards and weapons against her. And it's not the only one: Alfred the alchemist and Gebel the shardbinder can also use shards that you can use, and Dominique not only uses shards that Miriam can use, but also has a fighting style near identical to Miriam's, including a slide kick, dive kick, and weapon usage.
• Money for Nothing: Averted. Money can always be useful (even if it's just used as a power-up for some shards). While it's possible to grind out every ingredient you need for alchemy/food prep, it's a slog which can easily be averted by spending the gold you've been finding. Additionally, useful healing items and bullets for your guns are only available in limited quantities and these need to be topped up. Finally, there are abilities that make use of your money to do damage or gain bonuses to doing damage. There's also the fact that over the course of normal gameplay, money is generally difficult to amass, as breakable objects only drop Gold if you have full MP, monsters rarely drop Gold without the Augment Gold Shard, and money drops are relatively low value until said Augment Gold Shard is acquired. In fact, most of the items needed for efficient money farming don't become available until practically the end of the game, including Augment Gold and Accelerator^note Gebel's Glasses are also highly recommended, but requires 100% Completion in Shards, meaning you've already beaten everything the game has to offer by the time you get it, the latter of which is only found in Den of Behemoths, the penultimate area of the game.
• Model Museum: Enemies and bosses that are defeated in the game have their entry in the bestiary unlocked. This allows their model to be viewed as well as providing some additional information about each monster.
• Monster Protection Racket: The Alchemy Guild's plan in a nutshell. When they started losing patrons to industrial pursuits, the Guild warned that disaster would follow if people lost their spirituality. It didn't work, so they summoned an army of demons that they could "save" the world from and make their point. They failed to acknowledge that Evil Is Not a Toy, and the whole of England paid the price.
• Monstrosity Equals Weakness: Without fail, the humanoid bosses like Bloodless and the Doppelganger are far more challenging than the giant monsters.
• More Dakka: The Rapid Fire Technique allows Miriam to continuously fire as long as you hold the Attack button. While the initial firing rate is as fast as your standard attack, the longer you hold the Technique, the faster and faster Miriam fires. If held long enough, Miriam will begin cranking out bullets like an automatic, but the major drawback is its steep cost of 80 MP per second (in addition to limited ammo if it's equipped). However, if you have Gebel's Glasses plus the Recycle Hat, then you're free to pump out as many bullets as you please.
  • Miriam has other rapid-fire abilities such as Chisel Barrage, Upbeat Heat and Flying Dagger.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • Pretty much any of the Cute Monster Girl enemies, but Bloodless and the Playboy Bunny-themed Lili and Lamashtu definitely take the cake.
  • Miriam herself counts as well with her short skirt and partially open top to reveal body parts that have crystal growing on it.
• Multiple Endings: In true IGAvania fashion, defeating the Disc-One Final Boss without performing a series of certain steps beforehand ends the game then and there.
  • Defeat Gebel without acquiring Zangetsu's sword: Gebel returns to his senses long enough to thank Miriam for doing the right thing just before he dies, but Miriam still has a bad feeling since the castle is still around. Unfortunately, there's nothing she or Johannes can do now, since Dominique and the Church have stepped in.
  • Acquire Zangetsu's sword, but defeat Gebel anyway: Same as above, but the game ends right there in the throne room. After it fades to black, Gremory can be heard saying how easy Miriam will be to possess now that she's absorbed so many shards.
  • Acquire Zangetsu's sword and use it to attack the moon while fighting Gebel: Gremory's control over Gebel is broken and Alfred steals the Liber Logaeth in the confusion, fleeing with Gremory hot on his heels. Gebel finally returns to his senses and thanks Miriam for keeping her promise, but without Gremory keeping his corruption in check, he crystallizes completely. The game continues as normal, with the player now locked into the path for the Golden Ending.
• My Name Is ???: The "???" that screams after Miriam gets her first shard of the game, belongs to an unnamed ship crewman who is dragged off-screen by tentacles.
• Nerf: In certain pre-patch builds, such as the Xbox One 1.0.0.2 version, the Millionaire's Bane would release several coins with each hit. Using fast weapons such as the Rhava Velar could cover the entire floor with coins, enough to temporarily freeze the game, which made farming for the $500,000 achievement much easier. The Bane would also go into slot mode with every few hits, allowing you to force it into one place as money poured out of it. Later updates would remove the money output almost completely, and made it able to withstand several more hits before the slots would operate, forcing you to stay on your toes.
• New Game Plus: Once you beat the True Final Boss, you can start off a new game with nearly all your items, shards, and food bonuses intact.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Besides her randomly working resistances, if Miriam has the approriate shard upgraded then she gets Mercy Invincibility while performing an action such as double jump. This can be exploited in situations such as the fight against Valefar where you can constantly do high jumps while shooting him so his attacks won't be able to harm you.
• No Hero Discount: Justified, as Dominique explains that she's cut off from the Church's supply lines, and has to charge Miriam so she has some capital to keep the store stocked. That said, the fact that there is a hero in town trying to deal with the monsters in the castle is the only reason the store is open at all, as Dominique is there to aid Miriam. However, players can purchase a Discount Card that cuts 10% of every item's cost, for a high price of 100,000G.
• Non-Malicious Monster:
  • Rul'sha is a winged demoness who will not attack Miriam unless attacked first; in fact, she will cry out "How could you?!" if Miriam does. However, if Miriam waits long enough, Rul'sha will bless her with a stat boost and then disappear.
  • Harrier is a unique Ninja "enemy" in the Den of Behemoths who challenges Miriam to a race. If she wins, he will die on the spot and relinquish the one-of-a-kind Accelerator shard.
  • Orlok Dracule is a vampire found in Livre Ex Machina who will actually help Miriam, as well as allow her to take out books, over time allowing her to take more books and even granting her an especially rare one. However, if Miriam travels to the endgame area with that book still in her inventory, Orlok will become a hostile Superboss. If beaten, he begrudgingly goes back to being non-malicious and, in fact, regards Miriam as his new mistress.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Defeating Gebel without taking the steps to Earn Your Happy Ending won't make the credits roll. It will instead cut to a "Game Over" screen to make it abundantly clear that you've made a mistake.^note This was previously done in a few IGA-produced Castlevania games, including Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.
• No-Sell: Resistances give Miriam a chance to take no damage from the appropriate attack (note that Resistance to Strike treats enemies that bump into you as a strike attack). Instead of a damage number, it'll say Guarded. The Directional Shield and Beast Guardian shards will also stop all damage provided that you use them in the right direction and the demons they come from, the Werewolf and Shield Outsider, can do the same to Miriam. The Silver Knight familiar will sometimes fly in front of an oncoming attack and block it, negating the damage.
• Notice This: For crackable, breakable walls:
  • The Carabosse familiar, after her Grade is upgraded enough, will start literally pointing out breakable walls. She will fly near the breakable wall, say either "Look here!" or "This looks suspicious..." to you, and then point at the spot in question.
  • The Detective's Eye shard will reveal "secret walls" by making the cracks yet-to-be-made into a bright blue and white shimmering, if the wall is inside the radius shown on screen.
• Not the Intended Use: The Invert shard is basically the Inverted Castle from Symphony of the Night, but manually activated by the player. The main idea is to use the shard in order to access areas not previously accessible to the player. However, you can use the shard to make certain boss fights easier than they're supposed to be, as their patterns are not intended to deal with someone who's standing on the ceiling.
  • Certain areas require the Double Jump Shard in order to reach certain areas. However, clever use of the "Flashing Air Kick" Technique from the Kung-Fu Boots can let you access some of these areas earlier than intended.
• Number of the Beast: 3 of the 4 Superbosses have 6666 hitpoints, while the fourth has 6660.
• One-Hit Kill: This can happen when Miriam uses an attack that can inflict the Stoned status effect. The enemy is changed into a statue regardless of how many hit points they have. This makes the otherwise weak Godcross into a Disc-One Nuke.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: While all stats are important, Luck is king in this game. Miriam gains much of her powers and improvements through item crafting and shard drops; the more stuff that drops in her lap, the quicker she can grow in power. Also, luck has a role in combat, as it determines how often you can land a critical hit.
• Our Monsters Are Weird:
  • Some enemy designs can be quite baffling. For example, there is Valac, gigantic twin serpents with teeth along their bellies and multiple arms that make them look rather centipede-like.
  • One enemy, simply called "Puppy," is a giant toy poodle or shih tzu dog head. It has a variant called "Rocky", which is a giant, disembodied rottweiler or doberman head.
  • The Nyabon, Macaron, and Kamikaze are giant horned cats.
  • The Gusion Cannon is a late-game enemy that consists literally of a living cannon that fires demonic monkeys at the player.
  • Flying cows (Zagan and Haagenti) and pigs (Plume Parma) are some of the threats you'll overcome in this game.
• Permanently Missable Content: Two of the trophies are linked to bad endings. One of the trophies requires sitting through the entirety of the ending credits only after beating the final boss.
• Player Nudge: One late-game hunting quest involves slaying some weak common enemies (by now, these quests are usually for sturdier targets), and quite a few of them. That demon's shard is required to get anything but the worst ending.
• Playboy Bunny: The Lilis, a race of half-human, half-rabbit demons that have exceptionally busty and curvy figures, wear skin-tight bunny girl outfits, and attack with kicks, knives, and a whip. Miriam can claim the Bunnymorphosis Shard off them, which allows her to transform into a Lili.
  • The Lamashtu is a Lili variant who can be best described as a "Playboy Kitty", with lion-like ears, a lion's tail, and a crimson version of the Lili's blue outfit with a stylized "mane" around the collar.
• Poor Communication Kills: A late-game twist reveals that Miriam, Zangetsu, and Alfred were all on the same side from moment one. However, Dominique was lying to Miriam, Zangetsu has a disdain for Shardbinders, and Alfred assumed that Miriam wouldn't have listened to him anyway since Dominique had put the idea in Miriam's head that Alfred was a threat. Once Zangetsu realizes this, he sets things straight (though too late to save Alfred) and helps take down Gremory, while giving Miriam the means to reach Dominique and stop her.
• Power Copying: Taking cues from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Miriam can gain a crystal "shard" from slain enemies, which grant her various abilities and passive effects. These shards are split into the following categories: Trigger (special attacks), Effective (active abilities that be toggled or held down), Directional (functions similarly to Trigger shards, but Miriam can freely aim them with the right analog stick), Enchant (grants passive abilities or boosts), and Familiar (summons an ally). Collecting more of the same kind can also power up said shard's powers, and their unique properties can be boosted by enhancing them.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: One minor side effect of the magi-crystal curse is that it changes the victim's hair color. Both Miriam and Gebel were originally blonde. Looking closely, Miriam still has dark blonde/brunette tips.
• Power Up Letdown: It takes a long time to level Bloodbringer up to its max at 99, but once it's there, it's permanently capped at 55 attack power, with no elemental effects or special properties. This would be impressive if not for the fact that the strongest swords and katanas are 58. This makes Bloodbringer something of the "lazy man's substitute" — if one really doesn't feel like scavenging for supplies and crafting better weapons, Bloodbringer will eventually become the next best thing.
• Practical Taunt: By pressing and holding Up, Zangetsu taunts the enemy with a "bring it" gesture followed by putting up his guard, which functions identically to his Parry technique, but it costs no MP to do. Also, while doing dive kicks to bounce off the enemies is something that can be useful in any Metroidvania to potentially reach some locations early, it's rarely a viable primary means of offense and it's mostly done because of how silly it looks and yes, as a way to taunt the enemies: Zangetsu, however, not only has a noticeably powerful dive kick which can kill many weaker enemies in a single hit, but just performing one restores 5 MP and connecting with one on an enemy or a candle restores another 15 MP, giving him a practical way to refill his MP on the fly while speeding through the game.
• Promoted to Playable: Zangetsu, a prominent character in the story and recurring boss, is a playable character in his own right in a post-launch patch. Slightly downplayed, since Zangetsu was the main protagonist of the non-canon prequel Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. Played straight with Bloodless.
• Rare Random Drop: 1% drop rate items, which might even be rounded up from their actual rates, because for example, Dark Matter from Darkness Elementals, even when boosted by Luck and other effects, drops its 4% items much more than 4x as much as Dark Matters.
• Random Drop: As one might expect in an RPG, but special note goes to the Aqua Stream, a key item that lets Miriam swim, which is randomly dropped, at a base rate of 10%, by common jellyfish enemies.
• Resource Reimbursement: Wearing Gebel's Glasses causes Miriam to be refunded the full mana cost of shards immediately after using them, but she still needs enough mana to cast it first.
• Retraux:
  • One of the areas in the castle is the 8-Bit Nightmare, which is basically one short level presented in 8-bit style even as Miriam is still in her 3D self.
  • The January 2021 update added Classic Mode, which essentially reformulates the entire game into an NES/Super NES-style Castlevania game while reusing the same 3D assets. The mode goes to great lengths to emulate the "Classicvania" experience as much as possible, including a near-identical UI, a traditional subweapons and magic points system, and the same stiff physics. Miriam's usual running animation is even replaced with a copy of the Belmont clan's infamous walk cycle. A sequel mode, Classic Mode 2, is in development due to positive reception of Classic Mode.
• Reverse Polarity: The demon summoning rites used by the Alchemist's Guild were originally angel summoning rites. Reportedly, it only took a few rudimentary changes to make them summon demons instead.
• Roboteching: Adrasteia's bullets fly out at improbable angles as they seek their targets. For one, they fly in a z-shape pattern when they leave the barrel by default. That's not getting into the 60°+ turns that its bullets tend to make.
  • The Chaser Arrow Shard will launch 1 to 5 (depending on Rank and Grade) Magic Missiles that will all curve and circle towards the nearest enemies on the way to the main target.
• Rivals Team Up: After their first meeting turned into a Boss Battle, Miriam and Zangetsu team up and fight their way across the Train together. This marks the point where Zangetsu begins to respect Miriam and starts to defrost.
• Rockers Smash Guitars: Unless she imparts her shard to Miriam, Tamako-Death swings her guitar to the floor upon death, only to completely disintegrate before the guitar hits the ground.
• Rocket-Powered Weapon: The greatsword Carnot's Rebuke has a powerful steam engine built in. If you charge the sword, the engine kicks in and fires up a jet of steam to propel the sword deeper into an enemy.
• RPG Elements: Comes with the Metroidvania territory. Alongside the standard elements common to many of IGA's past works, a revised loot system will also be introduced to accommodate the new Item Crafting mechanics, where enemies can drop materials and magi-crystals needed to create new gear, as well as the standard items.
• Runic Magic: Rune circles of Enochian around the magi-crystal areas on someone's body, when written correctly, is basically guaranteed to stop the crystals from growing, if the affected don't increase their magi-crystal load through absorbing shards like Miriam does.
• Scarf of Asskicking: In addition to weapon, body, and accessory equipment categories, Miriam can equip Scarves as their own category.
• Scenery Porn: The background for every room is absolutely stunning.
• Schizo Tech: The forces of hell seem to be a few technological generations ahead of the game's time period (which is right at the verge of the industrial era), with the Bridge of Evil being crossed via steam train, with an automatic passport reader, and while Dominique flaunts the old-fashioned flash photography setups as a technological marvel, O.D. dismisses it as something he's been familiar with forever.
• Schmuck Bait: The Den of Behemoths' blue chests are all worth 500g, which is pretty good considering that money is a little hard to come by. Turns out the boss Valefar has an attack that heals himself by robbing your money.
• Self-Deprecation: The lengthy delays on the performance update for the Switch version are parodied by the update's launch trailer, which initially states "AVAILABLE 2025" before changing to "AVAILABLE NOW".
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: If Aurora gets the bad ending, her ending poem ends on the idea of undoing her mistake by time travel:
  Could she turn back the clock, this battle redo,
  Aurora'd find a method to break his curse too.
• Sequel Hook: Unlike every other enemy, Gremory doesn't crystallize, but gets sucked into a portal.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • Mere hours after the game's release, very skilled players, especially speedrunners, had already figured out techniques for gaining access to items and locations long before they're supposed to be able to get them, particularly with Miriam's Diving Kick attack.
  • The Hall of Termination can be reached as soon as you have the Double Jump shard by divekicking on a series of candles to the right of the mirror puzzle you would normally use to get there, skipping two and a half major areas and several boss fights. Finishing it is a quick path to Nonstandard Game Over, but it makes a good Peninsula of Power Leveling before facing Bloodless.
  • New Game Plus attempts to prevent this as much as possible by taking away most progression-related equipment, such as mobility Shards and the Aegis Plate. However, if you obtained the Valkyrie Sword and learned Brynhild's Blessing by Mastering every Technique, it is possible to access a vast portion of the Forbidden Underground Waterway at the start of the game by abusing its special ability to navigate underwater. Enough of the area can be explored by this method that you can access the Hidden Desert early and fight Alfred as the second boss.
• Shout-Out:
  • The entire game is one to the Castlevania franchise, it being a Creator-Driven Successor. Many of the game mechanics are similar if not identical, and many of the enemy designs and attacks pay homage to traditional Castlevania enemies.
    • Miriam can equip Whips, as with many of her spiritual predecessors. Unlike them, however, Miriam delivers a swift overhead crack that has relatively slow attack speed, but great range.
    • Several of the dead villagers whom Lindsay requests revenge for are named Simon, Soleiyu, Mathias, Rosaly, Trevor, Sypha, Lisa, Juste, Annette, Richter, and Dario.
    • The first eight notes of the theme music for the Hall of Termination are the same as that used for the "lose a life" jingle in Castlevania 1.
  • Hold up on the controls long enough, and Miriam will strike two different JoJo-esque poses.
  • Just like in Castlevania, the Stone Mask makes an appearance as an accessory. The Time Stop shard produces the same kind of Colour-Coded Timestop effect as The World. The Gambler's Ring has flavor text that directly references Luck and Pluck, although the weapon itself doesn't show up for Miriam to wield. There's also a Hyperventilator identical to the one used for Hamon training in Battle Tendency. Combine this with certain familiars (like the very Silver Chariot-esque Silver Knight) resembling Stands and the Idle Animations mentioned directly above, and...
  • The Ribbon head armor bears a resemblance to Lumen's hairpiece. Notably, Lumen's hairpiece was originally intended to be in the game proper.
  • A certain set of non-default hair and clothing options make Miriam greatly resemble Shanoa.
  • One enemy is an animated set of turquoise armor with a horned helmet. Its weapon of choice is a shovel. If that wasn't enough of a hint, the exclusive armor it drops is known as the Ex-Shovel Armor (which describes said enemy in the manner of a Fallen Hero).
  • One of the trailers has Igarashi, seated on a throne in a Slouch of Villainy, drinking A Glass of Chianti which he then dramatically tosses to the floor à la Dracula's introduction at the end of Rondo of Blood and the intro of Symphony of the Night.
  • The Easter Egg involving the Carabosse familiar is a direct nod to a similar event in Nocturne in the Moonlight (the original Japanese version of SotN) accessible if Alucard sits in a chair while accompanied by a Level 8 or higher Faerie. ^note Though the song ("Nocturne") was left out of the overseas PS1 release, the Saturn version of SotN (also titled Nocturne in the Moonlight) as well as the tweaked ports featured in The Dracula X Chronicles and Requiem retained it (and even translated the song into English for the latter two), albeit under varying circumstances. (The Saturn release requires players to first obtain the Song Lyrics Card item before the Fairy — a different but similar familiar — can sing. The ports found in DXC and Requiem allow both the Faerie and Fairy to sing "Nocturne" once they've reached Level 12.)
  • Orobas, the boss who grants the "Invert" shard, strongly resembles, of all things, Shin Godzilla with its body structure, and the purple flames on its back resembling the big guy's spines. It even shoots multiple purple beams from its back and when it fires from its mouth, the horns resemble Shin's dislocated jaw when firing to make it even more blatant.
  • A Superboss can use a Color Coded Timestop with projectiles as one of his attacks, with the visuals and audio cue referencing none other than DIO. In fact, it's important to note that he's voiced by SotN's Alucard (in both langauges), known for his name spelled backwards being his father's. Do the same trick here, and...
  • The stained glass panel used as a Warp Whistle is a portrait of a blonde man with a green hat and clothes playing a flute.
  • There are a number of items accessible through cheat codes belonging to backer "clans," which reference notable gamers. These include the Vine Sword, The-Baz Mask, the Guardian Egg Helm, and the Grump and Not-so-Grump accessories, among others.
  • When you fight Igarashi as the DLC Superboss, he fights like classic Castlevania Dracula on steroids, teleporting around the room, throwing fireballs (among many other devastating moves), and only being vulnerable in the head. His shard gives you the ability to chuck glasses of wine on the floor.
  • The entrance to 8-Bit Nightmare is in the highest room ^note in the Hall of Termination to the left. Much like you would find Dracula in the classic games.
  • The Accelerate Shard causes Miriam to run at extremely high speed. It also envelopes her in a blue aura that does weak damage to anything it touches, which causes the move to resemble the effects of the Black Panther Soul from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.
  • Lasting Wound is a rapier technique that has Miriam make 3 rapid slashes in a Z shape.
  • All over the place in the backer messages, but the most obvious is found in a sound test where Orlok's voice actor says "Well, congratulations! You got yourself caught! Now what's the next step of your master plan?"
  • The final level of the game, Glacial Tomb, is a frozen-over area of Hell with numerous demons trapped in the ice and where you confront a traitor to your cause, Dominique, right before facing off against the ruler of the demons sealed in the lowest part of the level. It's basically the Ninth Circle of Hell from The Divine Comedy.
  • The Sansetsuzan technique for Katanas is a sequential series of three advancing Action Command slashes that is basically Genjuro Kibagami's Sanrensatsu.
  • Dantalion's head has a bald, fleshy appearance making it resemble Hell Chaos or Nemesis.
  • The friendly Killer Barber who can customize Miriam's appearance is named Todd.
• Shovel Strike: The Shovel Armor enemy (which happens to look like a large, buff version of Shovel Knight) naturally attacks with one. They also have a chance to drop one, which Miriam can use as a spear type weapon of reasonable power, and also their armor, which will turn Miriam into a Shovel Armor.
• Shown Their Work: The opening cutscene mentions that the first Demonic Invasion took place in the midst of the Laki eruption of 1783. While there obviously was no invasion of demons in Real Life, the Laki eruption is a real historical event that took place over the course of June 1783–February 1784.
• Silliness Switch: A Big Head Mode can be accessed via a cheat code, much like the backer-based items mentioned under Shout-Out. For that matter, most if not all of the backer-based items qualify for this trope as well. There's also the Voice Changer accessory that can be found during normal gameplay, which gives Miriam Helium Speech while it's equipped. This pitches up all her dialogue, including story scenes. And there's also the Toy Boots, which as their description says produce a cute squeak with every step.
• Skippable Boss: After Andrealphus, it's possible to skip Valac, Glutton Train, and Bathin and go straight to Bloodless then Gebel by using the Double Jump Kick off certain torches. You still need Bathin's shard to get the good ending, however.
  • Bloodless is completely optional even if heading to the good ending, as the area under the blood fountain can be accessed with a glitch involving Reflector Ray and a summoned chair.
• Something about a Rose: The predominant motif. Miriam's crystal skin takes the appearance of blooming roses, and rose petals and roses are featured heavily in various concept art. The logo even contains a rose, and blue roses appear as the replacement for Hearts to restore Miriam's MP.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Given a discreet justification. Gebel wants Miriam to absorb shards to further her crystallization. So putting his minions in increasing levels of strength will allow her to absorb stronger and stronger shards.
• Stance System: Zangetsu's gameplay mostly revolves around this: he can enchant his attacks with fire, ice, and lightning, which not only naturally changes the element of his attacks, but also how his special attacks and kunai function: fire results in an explosion and a group of 3 kunai that explode after travelling around 1/3rd of the screen, ice results in a frozen shockwave that travels along the ground and kunai that are aimed downwards and create icicles on impact, and lighting results in a large lightning orb that rapidly damages anything near it and kunai that create vertical lightning bolts from where they hit the ground.
• Start X to Stop X: The Alchemists planned to summon the demons from hell in order to prove that only the Alchemists were fit to protect humanity. Emphasis on the word "planned".
• Stealth Pun: There's a lot of intricacies to the Revenant boss fight, more than just a Shout-Out.
  • A revenant is a type of undead that is neither alive or dead. Kinda like the Castlevania series currently.
  • The key needed to enter is the Warhorse key. A term for an old soldier.
  • Checking the map shows it to be located in the center of it all if you don't count the area after the Den of Behemoths. Which says that it is in the heart of the game.
• Steampunk: A lot of areas of the castle have this aesthetic, most notably the Livre ex Machina and Tower of Twin Dragons, where you get to platform on turning gears.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: Happens when you enter a boss room. The sudden silencing of the BGM is supposed to clue you in that something bad is about to go down, even if you don't immediately see the boss.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Once Miriam can travel underwater, she can stay under indefinitely — and even find a shard that regenerates her health while submerged.
• Superboss:
  • There are four rooms locked by extremely well-hidden keys throughout the castle, three of which hold extremely powerful optional bosses: the Master Carpenter, the Millionaire's Bane, and the Revenant. These bosses can also be farmed for their shards and items (which are needed to eventually craft the best gear in the game).
  • O.D. warns you that there will be consequences if you don't return his books to the library before the end of your journey and gives you an additional warning if you borrow the Tome of Conquest which combines the effect of several other books. If you have it in your inventory when you enter a specific room in the final area, O.D. himself shows up as a bonus superboss, capable of stopping time.
  • Koji Igarashi himself is available to challenge as a bonus to those who backed the original Kickstarter or as paid DLC.
  • There is also the Eight-Bit Overlord, the boss at the end of the secret Eight-Bit Nightmare area. Like the bonus bosses behind the locked doors, the Overlord can also be farmed for its shard and item. The item it drops is needed to upgrade the Eight-Bit Weapons to their strongest form.
  • The crossover areas both have their own bosses at the end. The boss of the area based on Journey in particular is strong enough to do significant chunks of damage to an endgame Miriam. And you need to have reached The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in order for the area to be available in the first place.
• Support Party Member: Dantalion and Carabosse don't have the same damage-dealing potential as your other familiars. Instead, Dantalion will periodically give Miriam a strength buff, while Carabosse can use powerful healing items and help you locate secrets by literally pointing out breakable walls.
• Supernatural Martial Arts: Miriam can learn special weapon techniques from books or discover them on her own with trial and error. These techniques are spectacular attacks that cost MP, and are originally restricted to specific weapons until Miriam uses them enough times to master them, at which point she can use them with any weapon in the same category as the one it is associated with.
• Suspend Save: The Options sub-menu allows you to suspend the game and continue from where you left off at a later time. The file will then have a tea cup icon to differentiate it from a regular save.
• Sword Beam:
  • One technique that Miriam can learn lets her fire elemental energy from her sword or club. The said energy's attribute depends on that of her sword.
  • A katana technique lets Miriam fire a large energy blast by slashing with her katana. Unlike the sword technique, it doesn't require the weapon to have an elemental power in order to work.
• Sword of Plot Advancement: The Zangetsuto, which is Zangetsu's personal katana. After defeating Zangetsu a second time, he gives it to her. During the boss battle with Gebel, if Miriam attacks the red moon with the Zangetsuto, it will free Gebel from the Big Bad's control without killing him.
• Take That!:
  • Lindsay's side-quests involve avenging the deaths of several characters who have the same names as Castlevania characters.^note For example, there are Simon, Richter, and Julius (who are Belmonts), Anette (who is Richter's girlfriend), Lisa (who is Alucard's mother), etc. This is a jab against Konami for killing the Castlevania series. To further drive this point home, the last demon in the base game you need to kill for this questline is "The Revenant", a zombified, Lawyer-Friendly Cameo version of a Belmont.
  • The players can kill an enemy known as the Millionaire's Bane, an evil living slot-machine, within an area that resembles a casino, complete with a Ms. Fanservice enemy in the background that occasionally fights alongside the Millionaire's Bane. This is another shot fired at Konami, whom also run a gambling business in Japan, and decided to use Castlevania, particularly Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, as a pachinko machine among other franchises they were killing off. An infamous trailer for said pachinko machine also featured copious amounts of fanservice that were never present in Rondo of Blood, particularly introducing a scantily-clad heroine that was never in the game, giving Annette an evil and half-naked makeover from succumbing to Dracula's influence, and ending the trailer with the words "Erotic Violence".
• Taking You with Me: Valac, the two-headed dragon boss of the Twin Dragon Towers, will attempt this twice after its hit points are depleted. First, it will perform one more attack in its current spot in its pattern (gouts of flame or tongue lashes), then after advancing a bit further down, the two heads will both lunge and bite the center of the stage. Miriam has to dodge/survive both to get credit for taking the boss down. Once you reduce its HP to 0, it'll try to grab her with one of its hands if she's anywhere near it in one last attempt to drag her down with it, but it'll crystallize and shatter or dissolve into nothing (depending on game mode) like all enemies before it or her hit the ground.
• Teleporter's Visualization Clause: Miriam gains a couple of such abilities, not counting the Warp Whistle type items or rooms. Early on she learns Reflector Ray that casts an aimable beam of light which can either be pointed to a destination or bounced off of mirrors, which quickly shoots her down the beam and to its target. Very late in the game she gains Dimension Shift that functions similarly, but can pass Miriam through solid objects rather than be reflected off of them. Both require Miriam to be able to "see" where she wants to aim her teleportation, a.k.a it has to be on-screen.
• Theme Music Power-Up: In a variation, equipping Zangetsu's sword during the first phase of Gremory's boss fight changes the music to his theme, and gives you a 100% critical hit chance against the boss.
• There Are No Coincidences: After meeting Dominique in Arvantville, she mentions the suspicious coincidence that one of two surviving Shardbinders (Gebel) would raise a demonic castle right as the second one (Miriam) is about to wake up from her 10-year slumber. Johannes acknowledges that it is suspicious, but is against Miriam becoming involved simply for that reason. Gebel later reveals that he specifically created the castle for Miriam, as he wanted a place where he and she could have free reign of their powers without persecution by normal people. This reason was a fabrication created by Dominique and Gremory — the two of them chose this moment to manipulate Gebel because Miriam was about to wake up, and her power was the only thing that could summon Bael, the King of Kings and ruler of demonkind.
• This Is a Drill: The Heretic Grinder shard and Spiral Sword are both drill-like attacks. Both are great early and even late game, the Heretic Grinder does constant damage while the Spiral Sword can do up to 3 hits per attack if you're close enough to the enemy.
• Title Drop: The opening text crawl mentions Gebel as being the architect of a "bloodstained ritual" that summoned demons back into the world. One of the game's achievements is also called "Bloodstained".
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Liber Logaeth that Alfred is seeking in Gebel's castle was used by the Alchemy Guild to summon the demons in the first place. It is later subverted, as Johannes in one chat reveals that the book is actually about summoning good spirits, but alchemists used that knowledge to summon demons instead for their purposes.
• Too Awesome to Use: Players are pretty averse to using consumable ammunition in general, but especially Diamond ammunition. It's incredibly powerful — some of the highest single-hit damage in the game — but it's also extremely expensive to make. This makes it, at best, something they're most likely to use against bosses. The most efficient way to use these is by equipping the hat rewarded from Susie's final sidequest, which gives Miriam infinite ammunition.
• Too Dumb to Live: The Alchemist's Guild decided to unleash Hell on Earth just to prove that there were crises only they were capable of stopping. Through journals, we learn that through years of research, they learned how to summon demons and abducted, experimented on, tormented, and sacrificed several innocent children to perfect it. When they finally managed to summon just one demon, that single invader almost single-handedly wiped out the Guild by itself before being killed and they still proceeded with the plan to bring over an entire army of them. One of their members, Alfred, repeatedly warned them against it, and when the ritual finally started, he sabotaged the summoning so that it was only half as strong as it should have been — and this still resulted in the deaths of millions of people worldwide. To cement this failure, when the world realized what the Guild had done, they were all captured and executed for their crimes — with the charge against them being led by Gebel, one of the very children they cursed to bring this about. You cannot fail more spectacularly than that.
• Took a Shortcut: Like Castlevania before it, other people often get to places ahead of Miriam, handwaved by the castle being an Eldritch Location. Or not. Noncombatants only follow Miriam into the early parts of the Entrance (and journals confirm that it's possible to just sneak by monsters), whereas the ones she comes across further in have traversal abilities like hers. When one character does get ahead of Miriam and acts surprised to see her, it's pretty significant Foreshadowing.
• Tuckerization: The highest paying Kickstarter backers got their likeness in portraits throughout the game. Some of them even got their pets included as monsters.
• Underground Monkey: Wouldn't be a Castlev-aerr, Metroidvania game without 'em! Several enemy types who appear earlier on reappear later with stronger palette-swapped and sometimes detail-tweaked variants.
  • The Dullahammer Head reappears as the Malediction, a golden-colored version that can potentially petrify Miriam on contact.
  • The "Harpy" line of Aello, Celaeno, and Ocypete and the "Fairy" line of Carabosse, Sidhe, and Titania are the most prominent examples of this trope. Each member of the two lines has different colors, with the most powerful having an obvious graphical tweak — the armored "boots" on Ocypete and the bee-like stinger on Titania, specifically. They share some attacks, but also have their own unique abilities.
  • Buer is a lion's head in a wheel of five lion's legs that rolls steadfastedly towards the player. Allocer is a crimson-colored and tougher Buer that can also breathe fire as it moves.
  • Nyabon, Macaron, and Kamikaze are giant cats with devilish horns that summon elemental explosions under Miriam's feet and make obviously telegraphed swipes at her. Nyabon is a white and gray tabby that uses fire, whilst Macaron is black & gold and uses poison, and Kamikaze is white whilst using wind.
  • The demon archers Leraje and Barbatos are distinguished by color and their different arrows; Leraje uses quick-moving normal shots whilst Barbatos fires a slow-moving homing shot.
  • Rul'sha and Vul'sha are almost identical winged whip-wielding succubi, save that they are clad in either white or black.
  • The Mimic, a bug that hides in a treasure chest, has a more powerful cousin in the Deathtrap, though both have the ability to Curse Miriam.
  • The Toad line, which consists of the Toad (green frog), Poison Toad (purple, poisonous frog), and Water Leaper (blue frog with little bat wings).
  • The Seema and Deeseema are both demon-squid things, but are distinguished by color and locale; Seemas climb onto the land to attack and occasionally spit bouncing water balls, whilst Deeseemas only attack underwater with jet-propelled charges.
  • The Assassin and Ninja use the same raggedy fully-clad human male appearance, but the Assassin is yellow and the Ninja is black. The Harrier is another entity using the same model, but it does not attack Miriam, challenging her to a race instead.
  • Lili is a blue-clad Playboy Bunny succubus. Lamashtu looks like a red-clad Lili with a leonic theme instead of a rabbit one. Both attack with a mixture of kicks, whip strikes and throwing daggers.
  • Gamigin and Glashtyn are both demonic horses with similar appearances, but Gamigin is only found on-land and Glashtyn only underwater.
  • The Ghost and Amy share the same appearance and attack methods, but Amy has a different color scheme and is tougher.
  • The Dragon has the Living Fossil (a skeleton dragon) and the Abyssal Guardian (a giant black dragon) variants.
  • The Gargoyle has a stronger, crimson-tinted version called the Gaap.
  • The Elementals all look identical, a clearly artificial mass of crystals bound together. The only difference is coloration.
  • The Wolfman has a tougher counterpart in the Silver Wolfman.
  • The lion-man demon Sabnock has a stronger, differently colored counterpart in Marbas.
  • The G. Axe Outsider is just a green Axe Outsider with a bigger axe and more health.
  • The Seeker and Tracer are both giant, disembodied eyeballs; the former is yellow, the latter red.
  • The "Demon" line consists of the Demon, Archdemon, and Demon Lord, with each having its own unique color palette to distinguish it.
  • Simians and Gusions are identical ape-demons, save for their colors and a small horn on the Gusion.
  • Buer Armor, Lance Armor, Shovel Armor, and Zepar all share the same base model, but with different colors, weapons, and attacks.
  • The Kunekune is, visually, just a silver Morte. But whereas Morte is the weakest enemy in the game, the Kunekune is one of the most dangerous.
  • Blood Bugs are black-and-red versions of Scythe Mites.
  • The Carriage Morte and Gusion Cannon use all but identical models.
  • Zagan and Haagenti are both winged cattle with weirdly human faces. The more powerful Haagenti is distinguished by its golden color.
  • The Volcano Morte and Hellhound are "fiery" reskins of the Bone Morte and Gieremund enemies from the Entrance region.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It's possible for a randomizer seed to be unbeatable, if key items are locked behind other key items or themselves, like if both the Aegis Plate and Craftwork shard, and / or the Zangetsuto is in the final two areas, since said areas are only accessible with said item. At least only Craftwork or Invert or High Jump are needed for the "Defeat Gebel" goal, while "Defeat [True / All] Evil" needs at least the spoilered item and Dimensional Shift to reach the final boss.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Only Normal difficulty is available from the start.
  • Unlock Hard Mode by beating Normal mode.
  • Unlock Nightmare Mode by beating any Hard Mode.
• Use Your Head: The Dullahammer uses its own head as a flail.
• Video Game Flight: Much like in her own game, Aurora's unique ability is unrestricted flight that she gets as early as the third area of the game: while Bloodless could explore upper parts of the castle first mainly because she starts the game from her boss room, Aurora has no trouble accessing any of them as long as height is the only obstacle. She's also the only character who can backdash while in the air to let her better avoid attacks while flying.
• Video Game Randomizer: A built-in randomizer mode was released as free post-launch DLC, in lieu of the Roguelike mode originally offered in the Kickstarter campaign. While the castle's layout remains the same, shard drops (including progression shards) and item placement (including key items) are randomly shuffled between enemies and chests. Shuffled progression shards and key items may make you take a very different route through the castle to reach the end bosses.
• Virtual Paper Doll: To an extent. Accessories, scarves, hats, and weapons will all appear on Miriam's model, and after finding Todd the Killer Barber players can also customize her hairstyle, hair color, skin color, eye color, and the colors on her dress. The cut of Miriam's dress, however, is not changed by equipment, with only a few exceptions.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Zangetsu is the first boss that is likely to give the player trouble. He's a formidable Lightning Bruiser that forces a player to pay attention to and counter his moves, rather than simply mashing the attack button.
• Warm-Up Boss: The boss featured in the demo, Vepar, is only somewhat stronger than the local mooks and can be defeated simply by employing Attack! Attack! Attack! until she dies.
• Warp Whistle: As standard of IGAvania titles, Miriam can use warp gates (taking the form of stained glass panels) to take her across the castle in a flash. Waystones also allow her a one-way warp back to base.
• We Buy Anything: Justified. Dominique makes it clear she'll pay for anything Miriam is willing to part with so she can barter to keep the store stocked, including Shards. When Miriam questions if it's even a sane idea to buy and sell pieces of demonic energy, Dominique agrees it isn't and won't sell any to her — but the church would like to know the shards are being purified and disposed of properly, and is willing to pay Miriam for her extras to ensure it. It's later revealed that Dominique is instead using the Shards she buys off of Miriam to gain the power of a Shardbinder for herself, though this happens regardless of whether or not you actually sell any to her in the entire game.
• Weak, but Skilled: Carabosse is an incredibly wimpy familiar; her sole attack is a tiny light arrow only a few pixels wide. And even if it hits, the attack barely tickles enemies. She makes up for it with a wide berth of utilities, such as being the only Familiar who can heal Miriam with Faerie-specific items, and detecting breakable walls while pointing them out to you.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The Zangetsuto, whose name means "to cleave the moon". Gremory is a demon with moon-themed powers. Do the math.
• Wham Episode: Arriving at the Den of Behemoths. The three people exploring the castle are in the same place at once for the first time. Alfred proves to have been Good All Along just before dying, and Zangetsu reveals Dominique has been playing everyone the whole time.
• Whip Sword:
  • The Sword Whip. It can be obtained by defeating the Superboss "Igarashi", who himself wields the Sword Whip. This boss is available only in the DLC pack or to those who backed the original Kickstarter.
  • Played with in Classic Mode; Miriam is seen wielding an iron sword that unfolds into a whip structure in the opening cutscene, but in the game proper she exclusively uses the whip function and not the sword.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Let's just say that anybody who is familiar with the plot of Symphony of the Night will probably figure out what's going on very quickly.
• Wizard Workshop:
  • There are three Sorcery Labs in the castle:
    • The Oriental lab is Japanese-themed, with ninjas and torii.
    • The Secret lab has traps, like spikes and swinging axes, and is darkness-themed.
    • The Underground lab is poison-themed, and home to poison toads and poison-inflicting Sidhe.
  • Johannes establishes a field alchemy lab in the secured section of Arvantville.
• Writing Around Trademarks: While the Kickstarter page makes several references to Castlevania, they explicitly make a point to never actually mention Castlevania by name, usually calling it "that game" or some variant thereof.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: The majority of lightning-based attacks in the game are either blue or purple.

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