Igarashi's take on Castlevania, Symphony of the Night, is hands down my #4 game of all time. So when the man announces he's making a spiritual sequel, you bet your sweet ass my dick is rock hard. Luckily, I had a few days off in July and I literally sat in my underwear and played this game for like 8 hours straight. It's a fever dream.

Dozens of weapons, powers, great enemy variety, solid boss fights, all wrapped up in a giant gothic castle... fucking amazing. They gimmick here is every single enemy has a "shard" that they will randomly drop. There are an absolute shit ton of them, and they have different effects like increasing stats, or letting you shoot fire, or summoning an enemy type, or shoving shit out of the way... the sheer amount of work that went into making every single enemies abilities viable to the character is astounding.

Some shards are permanent enhancements, like a double jump or ability to push large objects. Others are only useful during certain boss fights or encounters.

In addition to the power-ups, there's a large variety of weapons you can equip. Everything from the classic Castlevania whip to swords to giant axes. As I played I found myself equipping different weapon/shard sets to tackle new challenges.

The game works exactly like Symphony of the Night in the sense that it plays like a simple action platformer with literally one move and a jump and eventually you become a fucking god and are blazing through the castle ripping enemies apart doing dozens of attacks per second. It's hard to describe this to someone whose never played this type of game, so watch the first like 10 minutes of this and then skip ahead to the end somewhere to just see how nuts this type of game gets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9TsJGvg9w.

One of the few games I squeezed every single drop out of. Worth the wait.