Recent reviews by frogew˚*✧

they didnt give me hikari :(

Blasphemous 2 made me realize how much of a masterpiece this game is in comparison. I hate to put one game down to lift up this one, but it really does imbue me with more appreciation for this game. I wouldn't even say this game is perfect from what I remember - I dreaded the Bloodstained RotN crossover levels (despite loving Bloodstained), really didn't like the Amanecida DLC bosses, and remember raging at the hidden boss(though, honestly, she was completely fair and well designed looking back,,) but there was so much to love that none of that really matters in my memory of the game.

In my opinion, definitely weaker than the first game, but still worth playing if you love blasphemous. Most of my "critiques" are nitpicks, but there's quite a lot that genuinely add up into a relatively disappointing experience when measured with the first game, but its still a pretty solid game.

What it does right:
1) Altarpiece system is very fun to experiment with
2) Combat still feels good, & the 3 weapon system adds a well-engineered twist on it that allows you to feel like you're speccing into specific things you like doing, or mixing up your style midway through without too much of a grind/resource sink
3) Level design, movement, collectibles (to a point) feels like a slightly fresh take while still rooted in the series past successes

My nitpicks:
1) Overuse of collectibles leads to exploration fatigue very quickly compared to the first game
2) Lacks interesting characters and quests, patched over by mores collectibles that barely give an okay item at the end
3) Environments are a lot more boring; There are a few unique areas, but overall the color palates of many settings look way more same-y. The DLC helps in this regard
4) Rosary beads are really boring this time. I don't remember if they were entirely like this in the first game, but they're almost entirely stat defense boosts, with the only utility beads being increase in tears/marks and one that slightly helps you find secrets
5) The animated cutscene style is a massive downgrade (in my opinion) to the first game's fully pixel art cutscenes. We went from a beautiful style that reflected the game's overarching style itself and went onto what feels like a really cheap animation style that tends to feel underproduced (lacks sound in some of the cutscenes, for instance).

Overall I'd recommend the game if you played the first one and liked it

Before I get into the meat of my review, a PSA - The gold lump questline is still bugged, you should probably wait until you've collected all of them before turning them in to ensure you get the final item. For some reason, I got the gold lump quest item @ 18/20 gold lumps and it didn't let me deposit the final 2. but I've heard reports of some people having random altarpieces get removed by the gold lump quest line, soft locks, and worse.


Real review:

Went in hopeful despite seeing the percentage of negative reviews.
You'll notice 70% of the negative reviews are either:
-Too vague/Meme level reviews
-A couple solid long long reviews
-Rage reviews about the difficulty of the final boss

Likewise, I have to admit, the final boss was quite frustrating to the point where my initial review was a Not Recommended rant about how I despise the kind of difficulty he is emblematic of in current game design.

But, truthfully, after beating the boss & thinking about it for a while, I think most of my issues with the DLC are more about the overall cinematic "experience" of Mea Culpa rather than the gameplay itself. If we were making a head count of issues with the basegame vs dlc, I would honestly say the DLC does more, better, than the basegame. Environments are generally more varied and interesting, the first boss is more inventive while less frustrating than the basegame's "bosses" to me, the NPCs are more interesting to me, and there's an actual sidequest NPC that I enjoyed interracting with (something that felt SEVERELY lacking in the basegame).





---SPOILERS BELOW NOW---


The main purpose of the DLC seems to be a fantasy of rebuilding the Mea Culpa, refining it into the ultimate weapon, and dueling the boss & beating the game again with it. It's a great idea (a quick look at the reviews for base Blaspheomus 2 will show you quite a lot of people simply wanted to wield the Mea Culpa again), but it's just undercooked. The first cutscene where you acquire the hilt of it and get assassinated by the recurring boss of the DLC is truly great stuff...but afterwards, after solving many of the puzzles with it, I think 90% of players will just go back to using weapons they're more familiar with.

One of the biggest issues is that I think the Mea Culpa lacks interraction with the Altarpiece system that makes it satisfying to use. All the other weapons have accompanied you on a long journey where you've had to re-hash ideas and strategies, gradually refining the ways you like to use them, figuring out what each does best, discovering altarpiece combos and upgrade trees that whole-heartedly change their functions, and just none of that is there with the Mea Culpa. There's 2 altarpieces INDIVIDUALLY that synergize with the Mea Culpa, and no resonances.

But, to be fair, to compensate the Mea Culpa has increased base stats and a unique function in and of itself with its projectile (which is similar to what a resonance might have been for it). But I still think that it just feels kind of underdeveloped and weak in fights. I ended up using it against the basegame's final boss (mostly for cinematic feelings and vibes), but I think I would have killed the boss quicker by just throwing down a flask & spamming Sarmiento and Centella attacks.

I think it's always a tough situation when a game focused on build variety has an "ultimate weapon" like this. Another great example is Breath of the Wild. It has a great variety of weapons, but they still want you to Just Use The Master Sword by making it very overpowered in the final fight, because it's what Zelda games are supposed to be. It's the lore, it's what Link is supposed to do, it's the prophecy, etc. But I think its still reasonable to take issue with the implementation of this. I would honestly say basegame BotW does quite well to give you options while still making the master sword the "clear" option for beating the game, while Mea Culpa honestly feels underwhelming, even in the finale duel bossfight that the final DLC boss says "your sword of guilt versus mine".

Even with a "build" focused on trying to turn Mea Culpa into a great weapon, and all of the collectibles that upgrade Mea Culpa (which, another issue I have, feel very tedious to run around and collect, though I will admit this may be an issue of me waiting to purchase the DLC only after I had finished the base game and very much forgot where all of the red spines that indicate Mea Culpa puzzles were), it never really felt like the "weapon of choice" for fights. (TBF I also didn't really like the base sword. Take that as you will).

Another one of my issues with the Mea Culpa is the altarpiece that just turns it into a swiss-army knife of utility by allowing it to interract with all the other weapon's signature utilities. Now to be fair, you can just ignore this (and I did), but I still think its quite lame. A lot of the puzzles later on require quick thinking and quick swapping which leads to you feeling like a master of the various utility within each of the individual weapons. Turning mea culpa into a lazy "It does everything" stick kind of diminishes the weapon identity in and of itself, but not really in a satisfying way for me. This may sound like its contrasting my initial point of Mea Culpa not being a really "ultimate" feeling weapon, but I think it isn't. I think it's fine to retain utility and weird functionality in other weapons (and, in fact, should be encourage tbh), while I think the "ultimate" prophetic sword should be a lethal poison for the final bosses & naturally compliment the dodging styles and attack cycles of the boss, while not encroaching on the utility of other weapons as to preserve some unique identity within them.

A good way to do this would have been to allow Mea Culpa to parry the finale dlc boss in my opinion, which would have simultaneously cut back on a little bit of the frustrating difficulty of the finale dlc boss and give some more power to Mea Culpa.

& on that frustrating finale DLC boss - He was really annoying on my playthrough, but ultimately I think it IS a little bit of a skill issue. I think if the cinematic gravitas of the fight MATCHED the difficulty, it would be a bit more enjoyable. Equipping all the right rosary beads made the fight a LOT less punishing.

The last thing I want to comment on is the "true" ending you get for re-beating the basegame final boss. I think it's also kind of underwhelming. It's like, 5 seconds of new cutscene, as opposed to Blasphemous 1, which had a whole new boss phase and a truly circumspective ending cutscene for beating the finale after filling in a lot more of the boss.

So yeah. I would recommend the blasphemous 2 DLC despite all of these nitpicks. There's frustrations, but I think the core of what's here is better than the basegame, and it's disappointing, but not a major deterrent that there are some large ugly bits that detract from the overall experience in my opinion.

They tease a potential followup DLC/New game after the true ending. so who really knows what the future of Blasphemous holds.

Best way to describe the game is a 3d metroidvania in almost all senses of the word (utility-gated progression[though you can out-skill and sequence break quite a lot of things], backtracking, platforming, and combat).

Why did the ending make me cry q.q

i didnt like this game at first but its fire

This is the worst game of late 2024-2025

EDIT: Seems like most of these issues have been fixed! Good to know. I'll leave the rest of the review untouched, but I changed my recommendation to positive.

From a creative and design perspective, I wholeheartedly recommend the game; However, the game's lobby system makes the game genuinely unplayable. There will also be a dishonorable mention for the game's lack of dedicated servers and poor optimization in general, but I do understand this was an indie game made for a jam that's slowly getting built up into something better and the dev does plan to continue updates (though, last I checked, they were taking a break). But despite that I can't recommend the game while this is still such a massive issue.

It really pains me to do so but the absolute freedom hackers have to run around and just ruin lobbies, corrupt peoples saves if they don't know not to accept letters, throw graffiti on the spawn chalk (I had somebody who had a mod that would constantly replace the chalk with slurs), and also lack of QoL features in the lobby itself is almost a dealbreaker. It certainly stops me from wanting to boot up the game.

There are a myriad of systems they could put in place to prevent these things as well.

First up: There absolutely NEEDS to be hacker prevention systems. Ex. Just a system that prevents people from sending null letters that corrupt your save. This is absolutely non-negotiable.

Second up, there are several approaches to the hackers. A direct approach would be giving a game ban to the hackers themselves; I think that should happen, but obviously requires a lot of work to manually discover and manage them, especially for an indie dev. But there could be other systems: Ex., There really needs to be a proper ban system, or at the MINIMUM, steam ID blocks prevent hackers from seeing/joining your lobby. There are fan mods that auto kick steam IDs off a manually curated list[thunderstore.io], and there are people publishing big lists of steam IDs they claim are generally hackers/griefing lobbies[github.com], but this is not an official solution; the banlist itself that I linked directly admits that innocent people will be caught in the crossfire and they're open to appeals (thankfully), and all the banlist does is autokick people; Hackers have already started repeatedly trying to join anyways just to spam chat. There could be other great systems, like, as a lobby host, being able to see who is placing certain graffiti, a rules board, greeting messages, and such, that would greatly help communicate what is/isnt allowed, and speed up the process of discovering whose putting hate speech on the chalk areas.

I do think this game is worth playing, and also worth buying, because I want to support independent developers who make passion projects such as Webfishing! But these flaws definitely need to be put out there and it should be at least put out there as a warning for the time being as the game's moderation systems get reigned in.

They gave this game a good training mode.
It's the only popular platform fighter with rollback and a good training mode outside of melee
Go play it. Get off ultimate, that game sucks