Bloodstained: Dead Lands

[kane_magus]

Okay... there is a new area in Bloodstained that wasn't there the last time I played it and about which I had no clue, until today. So, after you beat the boss that gives you the Reflector Ray shard, go back to Dominique (on the map there will be a strange yellow icon there) and buy the "Crown of Creation" for 1G (which is what the map icon looks like). Wearing this, go back and ride the train (starting from the Garden of Silence area). When you get through the train, rather than appearing on the other side as you normally would, you will instead appear in the Dead Lands (though, oddly enough, the map says "Galleon Minerva" when you bring it up, rather than "Dead Lands"). There's not much to the area; you just fight a couple horse enemies (the same one that's in the room just before the entrance to the 8-bit Nightmare area, among other places) and then a new boss called a Breeder that, when you kill it, gives you a new familiar shard, Archer. When you kill the boss, you're immediately sent to the east/right side of the train station area, as you would if you went through the train normally. And you can return to the Dead Lands again to get more Familiar: Archer shards, though apparently only when the train is traveling from west/left to east/right.

(EDIT) Ultimately, the Archer familiar is more a novelty than it is actually useful. Maybe if you were fighting against a particularly beefy, particularly immobile enemy, it could be useful to plink away at it while you damage it, but even at Rank 9, Grade 9, it's still not that great. Yeah, it shoots a bit faster and does a bit more damage, but even at around level 30, it was still only doing maybe around 15 damage per arrow. Worse than that, it has the really bad habit of stopping and firing a full eight arrows, one at a time, at the spot where an enemy was, a second or two after I've already killed that enemy myself and have moved on to other enemies. (/EDIT)

Basically, it is a crossover between Bloodstained and Kingdom, because that is the same pixelated graphical style of the Crown of Creation and of the Dead Lands area unlocked by it and of the boss you fight there and of the Archer familiar you get from beating that boss.

Apparently, all of this was added in an update back in January 2021. I'd never heard about it until now, when I happened to see that weird yellow icon on the map at the area of Dominique's shop and found the Crown of Creation in her shop inventory for 1G (then I just looked up the rest online to see what the heck that was all about). It has nothing to do with the new Aurora/Child of Light stuff (which I haven't touched yet, by the way, because I just said fuck it and decided to play through first as Miriam on Normal yet again).

Comments

[owsf2000]

I still haven't gone back to the game since they added the first extra playable character, or rebalanced all the skills for their online multiplayer thing. (From what I heard they were nerfing all the popular skills in singleplayer because they were too op in multiplayer) No idea if they actually went ahead and did that afterwards, or if they did the smart thing and just separated the skills from singleplayer and multiplayer. I suppose I could check at some point.

[kane_magus]

I played it a bit after playable Bloodless came out and had been playing through a New Game+ Miriam game on Hardmode prior to that[1], but all of that was back in 2020, before the Dead Lands stuff was added to the game.

As for nerfing stuff, in my current playthrough, I haven't noticed anything being remarkably weaker than at any other time I played it before, but then I'd never really messed with the stuff that was supposedly "too OP plz nerf thx" to start with (Welcome Company, etc.) so I wouldn't even know if it had been nerfed or not. As for multiplayer, that still isn't even in the game yet, after all this time. Not that I actually give a shit about that, as I'm mostly uninterested in playing multiplayer, especially if it's a versus mode where "balance" would possibly actually matter. Co-op could be potentially interesting, I guess, but I don't know why they would've needed to nerf shit for that.

In any case, in my current playthrough, I'm focusing on running a luck build (i.e. doing everything I can to increase luck stat as early as possible, either via equipment or food or whatever [which, at least so far, has required wearing that ugly-ass Stone Mask accessory that you get from a early game enemy, though I know there's better, less ugly LCK accessories later]) and grinding a bit as needed to get the better shards and item/equipment drops earlier than one probably would otherwise, playing normally. Even though I'm currently only around level 30-something (EDIT) ...47, actually, as it's my familiars that are in the 20-30 range (/EDIT) at the moment at 50%-ish completion, I'm feeling pretty strong. (Having Grade 9, Rank 9 Greatsword Expertise, with both the shard itself and the passive skill obtained for maxing the shard equipped, which doubles the effect, will tend to do that.)

Basically, my current play style is that whenever I come upon an enemy I haven't encountered yet, I repeatedly kill said enemy until I get at least one each of their shards and various item drops, so that they'll show up in the archives, and then if I ever need said drops for crafting/cooking purposes later, I'll know where they are more readily. And if they have a good shard, such as something that boosts a stat or weapon expertise or a familiar, I might consider grinding that until I get nine of them. So far, though, I've only done that for the Bloodbringer (sword) and the Carabosse (fairy) familiars. And Alchemic Bounty, of course. (Greatsword Expertise doesn't really count, since that's gotten via crafting, rather than enemy drop.) I'll do the same whenever I find the enemy that drops the Augment LCK shard (I'm pretty sure it's one of the mimic enemies, though I haven't yet reached the area where I remember it being), and then enhance that as much as possible via crafting. If I do any other shard farming beyond that, though, it will only be after I get the ring via quests that increases shard drop rate. (Or, maybe, two of those, if I start a NG+ after beating Normal, though I'd be more likely to start an Aurora playthrough instead.)

[1] - Had gotten the boss medals (i.e. no damage victories) for all the bosses up to, but not including Gremory near the end of the game, which is where I had stopped. Granted, getting the medals even on Hardmode is fairly easy via cheesing most of the bosses with the katana Jinrai technique, at least for the bosses that ever get near ground level, which is all but a few. The only bosses that were troublesome were ones you couldn't use that on (such as Gremory), but there are still ways to cheese most of the others, even so. But now all of that shit is gone due to my saves disappearing (which looking back I think was probably just a result of switching to SSD drives, as I likely simply didn't bother to transfer stuff like that to the external drive from the old HDDs) and I have no real desire to try that again. Whenever I finish this Miriam playthrough, I'll probably try Aurora, and maybe Bloodless again at some point, but Zangetsu mode just didn't interest me all that much. And I really don't care about the other extra modes like speedrun or classic or whatever. Boss Revenge sounded vaguely interesting, but it's basically just a boss rush mode, except that you play as one of a few selected bosses against Zangetsu, Dominique, and Miriam... and that's pretty much it.