Thanks for the info. I haven't reached that part, yet. But i think i must avoid it. Something will probably get stuck in my eyes again and i won't be able to focus for playing the game... :'(

It isn't very far into the game at all, I wouldn't even consider it a spoiler. Once you find the area where there are Scissorhand Guy Fawkes enemies, you're near the right room. It's near the teleportation room of that area.

Just finished the game, and currently at 99.30% completion.

Thankfully this game dropped in the same week I was off from work with my vacation time, because I was so hooked in that I put almost 24 hours into it in 2 and a half days.

Is this a masterpiece? Well no, by no means it is anything that we haven't seen done before in other metroidvania games. To me, something like SOTN qualifies more to that denomination because it was groundbreaking and innovating on top of being fantastically designed in almost every department. However, what this game is, is everything SOTN was minus the aforementioned groundbreaking innovation and perhaps with a few more technical hiccups. It certainly does a great job of piecing together many popular aspects from previous metroidvania games and refining them.

I feel like the game's only major weakness is that the shard system is too big for its own good, with many of the spells being useless, a problem that carries over from the Sorrow series. Also there are some balancing issues with some shards and weapons being extremely overpowered, while others are extremely underpowered. But to be fair, these are issues that were present even in SOTN. Once you got the Crissaegrim you could finish the game with your eyes closed.

This game is a solid 8 to 9/10 for the general public, and 9.5 for the SOTN starved players like myself. The music, the gameplay, the cheesy over the top english voice acting, the level design, all the visuals, the enemy design... it's all here. When I play it, it makes me feel like I'm 7 years old again and its 1997, when I used to play SOTN in the PSX.

Now, I wont praise this blindly. Nostalgia googles off, this game has technical issues. Not too many mind you, but still a few. There are performance hiccups despite playing this with an i7 processor and a 1070ti; also got a horrible sound bug when I finished the final boss... lightning sound effect from the battle was stuck on a loop throughout the entire ending and up until the credits started to roll. Playing the battle again showed no issue, thankfully. No crashes though, so there's that.

Hoping for a patch to fixed some of the rough edges and with supposedly 13 free dlcs coming up, I have some hopes that it could get even better, despite already being pretty damn good.

So yeah, not perfect, but still quite good.

I can understand everything you've written until the end part. I'm sorry, but I STRONGLY dissagree on your last statement.

This is precisely how you DO NOT do ANY protagonist!

SoTN worked with Alucard, because he is the silent type. He is not expressive. Myriam, on the other hand, seems so - she speaks loudly of her opinions, but then 90% of the time she has nothing to say. And when she does - it's something absolutely obvious, she's constantly put in the shade of others and the entire gameplay halts, so we can wait and witness her trying to be a badass. Which doesn't work when you have your Protag look like she does - like an innocent japanese clickbait loligoth. I'm 100% sure that they wanted to have her innocent and vunrable when designing her and then switched to her being old Lara Croft when times started changing. I hate Myriam and I cant wait to play as literally anyone else in this game.

Other than that, about the game itself:

Coming back to this threat after finishing the game. I'm currently at 98% and about 20 HRS in. I've done a lot of post-game stuff too.

The best thing I can say about this game is that it's fun when it works. It keeps calling me back to it and the more I stay, the more I enjoy it.

I have my gripes and some of them are the Dev's fault. Like making the call to have weapons work in a 3D environment was retarded, some weapons don't do anything because they swing in other ways than forward, which means that you miss even if the weapons passes through the enemy. Take most small swords and whips.

Also the Day-1 DLC (which was TOTALLY not worth it after I did it) really left a bad taste in my mouth. But at least they gave us FLAC files for the OST. Which is growing on me, it's not a masterpiece, but it's pretty cool at times.

Overall, I think that this first installment is a great foundation for things to come. If we see Bloodstained II or III, and we will see at least one of those in the future, I'm sure that a lot of things will be bettered. I trust Iga.

I just wish He'd find better devs to support and challange his vision...