Bloodstained: Dead Lands

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).

"Meta can’t buy TikTok, so it hired GOP operatives to run a smear campaign"

Kind of funny (not in a "ha ha" way) that after the GQP has been using Facebook to spread disinformation for many years now, Facebook turned around and started using the GQP to spread disinformation.

That said, I don't give the slightest fucking shit about TikTok either, because TikTok is shit, too... but they don't deserve to be falsely maligned like that, at least.