Before we get started I have to answer one very important
question, “Is this a Souls game?” Of course it is, I submit this irrefutable
evidence:
Bloodborne is a lot better than I thought it would be, and
yet for some players they might not ever even see the best content in the game.
A very interesting design, though I respect the commitment to making Chalice
dungeons superb while still making the main game solid. Most of the issues I
had on Day One were adjustment issues, though there is some oddity to having
bosses where locking on half the time and then not locking on for the other
half is the best way to fight them just because of how dodges work. On the
other hand it’s possible (don’t know how this would happen blind) to mainline
the game and not even fight the final boss.
Additionally there’s
the added obscure layer of Insight, which is basically a difficulty meter; more
insight = more getting murdered essentially and at some point you will have a
preposterous amount of insight if you play enough with not much to spend it on.
So is the game harder than Souls game X? Dunno depends on your insight/how many
bosses you fought/doing the chalice dungeons/blah blah blah. It’s a curious
thing. Some areas are also much more difficult when done out of order.
The main route after Blood Starved Beast (who is optional as
far as I know) is very obscure, even for a Souls game. Thankfully I did find
this one on my own, but there were certainly several areas to come where that
was not the case. Basically they took the obscure path to Drangleic Castle and
put it in 4 or 5 different optional and main areas in this one, not really sure
why but if you’re going totally blind be prepared to get lost. There’s a couple
of ways forward but the main one seems to be falling down a ton of beams on the
way down to the other side of the Cathedral Ward.
This is actually one of the only spots in the game where
falling to death is a serious issue, and this is one thing that Bloodborne does
amazingly well that pretty every previous Souls game has had problems with;
very little potential for falling to death in most situations. Gravity no
longer being the gravest enemy is a shock and a delight at the same time,
though perhaps not as amusing as a spectator. There’s still plenty of
ridiculous setpieces and towering areas. However for the most part you’re safe
in a way you might not have been in a prior game. Even in pitch black Chalice
Dungeons you can easily pull out a torch and light the area up nicely, torches
are very well implemented in Bloodborne while they were mostly an afterthought
(though thankfully so) in Dark Souls 2; despite not being in any of the
promotional material.
After you’ve finally unlocked the other areas of the
Cathedral Ward the game finally splits in a reasonably satisfying way, offering
several different routes though some of them are still ultimately blocked off;
however it stops feeling as suffocatingly linear as the first 5 hours or so of
the game can. Players are faced with fighting a very difficult boss or going on
side routes to explore different areas, though admittedly one of the methods of
exploration is pretty bizarre. Dying to a “Bagman” as I like to call them
transports you to a lategame area that you can’t access otherwise and faces you
with difficult enemies as well as an optional boss (who I didn’t find
particularly challenging); but there’s some pretty cool stuff in this area and
it’s totally different than when you go there later so I definitely recommend
going there as soon as possible. In my case the death was non-intentional
though I was aware of the consequences of dying prior to it happening thanks to
the magnanimous Bradley Shoemaker.
This is one of the big times where I felt the game was
feeling a bit static but dying to one enemy fixed this and suddenly I was in a
new place to explore with new, challenging enemies and some environmental variety.
It is very bizarre trying to figure out what the developer’s intended path for
players is in the game as it quite clearly isn’t simply to get straight to the
ending. Yet even when the game feels a bit stagnant there’s still something
oddly compelling about it, no matter where you are.
I think it’s mainly the atmosphere, which holds up strong
throughout. This is probably the creepiest game I’ve ever played. Incidentally
I watched Event Horizon shortly before Bloodborne’s release and that was a
reasonable approximation of the insanity to come. There’s something here that
is extremely interesting but yet totally intangible and it definitely isn’t the
metroidvania-esque quality of the first Dark Souls. In Dark Souls you’re
exploring the world and it feels interesting and alive. In Bloodborne you’re
exploring a nightmare and it feels horrifying and unsettling and unmistakably
detailed. Even when the game takes weird to another level in ways that would be
flat out comical in other games it still works somehow, it’s just a perfectly
crafted creepy ass universe.
 |
| It wasn't me, I swear |
After the Hypogean Gaol as it were I went off to the woods
adjacent to the Grand Cathedral. The first area here is really fantastic,
there’s a very large area riddled with snipers and dogs (they really like dogs)
but if you approach it carefully enough you’re never in an unfair situation and
pretty much always able to seek cover from enemy fire while still making
progress. As far as the main game goes this is probably the best “room” as it
were and it’s definitely something I’ll look forward to every time I go through
the game with a different weapon.
Shortly after this you’re in Hemwick Charnel Pass, an area
with some relatively nonthreatening enemies that become dangerous through their
sheer volume. Bloodborne isn’t scared of throwing dozens of enemies at you in
places where you might fight like 3 or 4 in a Souls game; you might be able to
methodically pull them all and keep it to a Souls-ish level but it really does
feel a bit more action-ey in these places. If you’re good enough at dodging you
really can run amuck through as many enemies as you want occasionally taking
potshots, you don’t have to play this game passively and you don’t have to be
overpowered to play a more active approach. Hemwick has a fairly unusual boss
fight which I suppose could be termed a puzzle boss. Not particularly
difficult, but interesting enough all the same (probably the least dangerous
boss in the game). The fight becomes a bit more interesting/tedious in NG+ with
high insight.
The boss of the Grand Cathedral, Vicar Amelia, seems to be a
bit of a trouble spot for some people and I think this is why the game opens up
a bit, as you don’t have to fight the boss immediately. Additionally the
opportunities for co-op are much more frequent. I personally didn’t have much
trouble with the boss but I had gone off and beaten 2 other bosses before I
even opened the door to her room, I suppose this highlights the value of not
just trying to bumrush through the game as fast as possible.
Of course after Vicar Amelia is where things start to be
very confusing. A very vague cutscene gives you an oath/password thing and
you’re meant to find a door off the seemingly vast number of spokes out of the
Cathedral Ward. Many people simply won’t find this immediately and thus not
find the way forward. For my part I looked it up and after some fuddling around
eventually found it, though I still got lost at this point in NG+. The
following door puts you in the Forbidden Woods, an utterly vast area perfect
for extensively long sessions of PvP. My first trip here all I did was find two
ways forward to other major areas and left through the ladder from Snake Eater
(probably the coolest shortcut in the game); come to find out much later that
both areas were optional and I had to continue down in the Woods to get to the
main area (which again isn’t really clear at all in the game).
The woods have a large-ish upper area with your typical
peasant barrage and then a much, much larger lower area with literal piles of
snakes and larger piles of snakes as your main opposition. This lower area is
pretty much impossible to find your way in without getting lost unless you
strictly follow the lamps in the area (which aren’t always apparent); but at
this point I started doing PvP and it was extremely fun invading other players
as well as getting invaded. PvP basically has an on/off switch now in the form
of beckoning or sinister bells, which will spawn a corresponding NPC in your
world to ring its own sinister bell and bring invaders. This means that
invaders have a tougher time of it but it also eliminates the many boring
sessions of PvP versus inexperienced players and isolates your experiences to
either someone with help or another invader; in either case using the environment
is an entirely viable option.
Whenever you finally find your way there you’re faced with
the Nazgul and presumably the longest walkback (could never figure out if I
missed a lantern here) in the game for every death. The Naz are pretty tough,
especially with high insight and in NG+, the fight is quite enjoyable though.
Each one has its own weakness and the enemies power up by how much damage you
have done to them instead of simply by when one dies (though there may be a
mixture for the last mechanic); this forces you to be tactical and pick a
specific target instead of just whittling them all down at once, however the
enemies really stay on you here so it isn’t always a simple matter of isolating
the opposition.
The two optional areas I visited both also had extremely
obscure methods of discovering their entrance; though immediately following the
snake-eater ladder is perhaps the most impactful area of the game. People might
say there’s no “Anor Londo” moment in the game but instead it has moments that
defy explanation and sort of just sit in your memory, horrifying and
captivating at the same time. This is one of those moments; you take a ladder
up and find yourself on the roof of the first area of the game, Iosefka’s
Clinic.
Making your way across the roof you find a way into the
mysterious upper floor. Strewn about the hallways are some extraordinarily
bloody operating tables and a complete absence of enemies or NPCs. Going
further in you make it back to the original room and see a mysterious grey who doesn’t
react to your presence at first, of course you kill him because it must be
done. And then there’s a letter on the table that tells you you’re invited to
Cainhurst Castle… but yet you must fully explore this area. Eventually you wind
up in a room and are greeted by a perhaps familiar voice; rambling for a bit
then telling you to leave or face the consequences. Undeterred surely you climb
the stairs and fight Iosefka, who just has even more crazy nonsense to spew. I
should note it’s possible to send NPCs here to be “treated” and you might even
get rewarded for it, basically you could have sent NPCs to a weird looking guy
or a friendly sounding voice in a creepy building to get dissected for the
benefit of uhh… moon aliens or something. The fuck is going on in this game.
Alright well enough of that, time to get dressed and go to
the ball! Ah Cainhurst, that land of noble elegance and “Nothing but sobbing
here” messages. This whole area, save one sore spot, is fantastic and is
basically Gothic Snowy Anor Londo, complete with obscure methods of advancement
via perilous ledges. The first part is pretty dangerous as there’s
incomprehensible spider enemies and snakes (fuck snakes); but just ignore them
and you’ll be on your merry way to the much more satisfying screeching ghost
ladies. Essentially if you rush in this area without knowing where to go you
can get easily decimated, but if you take your time none of the enemies inside
are overly threatening, even at low levels. A cool mechanic here is there are enemies
that shoot “Red Eye Ring” darts that give you a much larger aggro radius,
forcing you perhaps out of your comfort zone for those sections.
There’s also gargoyles here that supposedly can drop Chunks,
I've yet to see it, in fact I’ve never seen a chunk drop off a normal enemy
period. Sadly there’s no preposterously numerous gargoyle boss, though a lot of
the places where you fight Gargoyles could be deemed similar to their heritage.
They’re pretty easy though, just knock them on their ass for double damage.
Toward the end I couldn’t figure out where to go and then it hit me, of course
hug the tiny ass ledges and drop down onto more tiny ass ledges. Yessss…
despite this it isn’t really that much of a falling hazard as there’s no Anor
Londo archers to screw you over.
And now for the weak part of Cainhurst Castle. The boss here
(one Martyr Logarius) is fantastic, with one severe issue; he somewhat randomly
becomes impervious to bullets. I believe this is actually a mechanic in the
game and not a bug which is even more concerning, but for the later portions of
the fight you’ll have a hail of swords flying at you and no way to achieve
invincibility frames, so essentially the boss is a giant pain in the ass just
because of the anti-parry mechanic. However if you stand in for his transition
phase it seems to negate one entire sword section of the fight and that at
least resolves some of the issues, though the parry problems still persist. At
higher levels I’m sure the fight is relatively easy even without parrying (even
on NG+) but it just seems like that’s how you should fight him, like that’s the
cleanest way to do it and the game just doesn’t let you 75% of the time. This
isn’t like Gwyn where it trivializes him, the boss is still difficult even with
parries at lower levels but From decided otherwise for some nebulous reason.
After this you get a nice hat and can then reveal the way to
the first (at least, first for me) covenant of the game, which doesn’t do a
whole lot other than let you buy more stuff from vendors. However the covenant
NPC is interesting and uh… well… you see I may or may not have gotten her
killed. Not to worry though I still get covenant items from slain players/NPCs
masquerading as players but a little old friend with his wheel and funny hat came
to say hello. And gave me another badge for getting a fantastically silly
weapon! This is another one of those moments I was talking about earlier, this
normal looking guy was apparently a psychopath all along, that’s just what the
hunt does to you man.
Fresh out of Cainhurst I went down another route I had been
blocked on before and a mysterious portal took me to Byrgenwerth at last!
Except not the Byrgenwerth I was supposed to go to. Nope this is just straight
up dream world with real world items and general weirdness. Hurray! At the end
of this rather excellent little area is a door to another section of the
Nightmare; a vast and pretty nice looking expanse with perhaps the least
offensive poison swamp in the Souls series to date. This is one of the larger
pvp areas in the game because there’s already a sinister bell lady to start
with, but the thing is hardly anyone knows where everything is here so you can
pretty much hang out wherever you want and mess with people that way. This
zone’s quite fun.
The boss here is Amygdala, who I’ve now fought 5 or 6 times
all told between chalice dungeons and NG+, for your first playthrough the boss
is relatively non-threatening but it quickly becomes much more dangerous in
different environments and when you only have half health and so on. Hell the
very size of the boss seems to increase every time you fight it (not really it
is just super fucking huge). My tried and true method of the moment seems to be
bait specific attacks from the front and punish accordingly, but when the boss
expands its range by twice as much things can get a little hairy.
Back on the main route of the game, ye old Byrgenwerth. This
is a fantastic zone I think, very brief but has nice scenery and unique enemies
that fight just a little bit differently than your average foes. I believe this
is likely to be your first point facing Frenzy in the game which is sort of
like bleeding and perhaps the most annoying status effect. Presumably it isn’t
the entirety of the campus, just a lone “Lunarium” as it were complete with a
telescopic room. There’s a reasonably difficult NPC fight here but nothing too
hard, also you could probably just bypass him.
At the end there’s an old guy in a chair (one assumes this
is “Master Willem,” but he never says shit so who knows) and a lake with a moon
reflection. I think if you’re playing offline this will be very puzzling but
the friendly neighborhood online messages tell you to take a leap of faith and
you wind up in this gorgeous lake area with a cuddly pill bug or something a
ways off. Naturally you just wander around aimlessly for a bit before the
beasthood takes you and you attack the poor bug. This is Rom, one of the most
difficult fights in the game (though fairly easy to overlevel for the first
playthrough); basically Rom calls down little spiders that hit unbelievably
hard and are heavily armored against frontal attacks, so to fight them you have
to dodge behind them. Rom does nothing at first but eventually starts casting
massive, difficult to avoid spells that do large amounts of damage. My first go
around all I did was Rambo the boss and that worked well enough but for later
playthroughs and especially in Chalice Dungeons that’s not going to cut it.
It’s a brilliant fight, totally unique in the series and basically takes the
concept of Freya and makes it much more interesting.
As you wake up after this fight having seen some weirdness
you discover even more weirdness has begun. The moon is now red and a giant
ominous door is now open. Now you descend into
Yahar’gul for real. The first part of this area is a giant pain in the
ass pretty much, but it is relatively brief and easy enough to bypass; I’m sure
this is where most deaths will be incurred in general and it does feel much
different than the rest of the game. Basically there’s a ton of infinitely
respawning enemies (think Catacombs except the enemies aren’t pathetic and
there’s a lot more of them) and your standard “spawner” types that are also
annoying and often very well hidden. To progress forward you have to run past
an Amygdala that shoots a giant laser beam of death which is our equivalent of
the Hellkite Dragon/Bridge Dragon/Blue Dragon in previous Souls entries (Hydra
doesn’t really count), this isn’t too bad once you get used to it but I could
see that taking a few tries; and considering this can be a hotbed of invasion
if you’re not playing solo it can get to be a bit tricky.
After this the area becomes much more tame, you still have a
couple more infinite spawners and a new, bizarrely fast giant blob coming out
of a box enemy (as well as sniper variants). You might be inclined to just rush
through this area but there’s also a ton of blood chunks around if you explore
and those are extremely hard to come by in this game; so have some patience.
You might notice that past the big door in
Yahargul that you weren’t able to get through there’s literally hundreds
of petrified corpses piled up against the wall trying to get away from
something; a very reassuring sight to be sure. While this area might not be the
most fun to play it’s certainly extremely atmospheric.
As you come to the end you’re faced with a boss fight, a
preposterously large entity of corpses strewn together in weird ways. I think
the intention of the fight is that it’s like Tower Knight and you go up and
fight snipers and stuff but at least on base difficulty the boss is simply too
easy for that; you’ll take damage for sure but nothing you can’t just heal
through. On NG+ it’s a bit dicier but it still worked out the same, I’ll try
out different strategies on my next go of it. Basically this boss is the
Rotten/Nito in terms of visual design except not as challenging, I don’t really
have a problem with it because if they made it harder it would probably just be
really annoying given the often continuous attack motions it has.
After this you wander into a building and see an assembly of
skeletons in chairs with bird cages on their heads; evidently the high council
of idiots that let loose whatever fucked up everyone in this area. You approach
the main one and are back in the lecture building for a bit. At this point you
can go say hi to Patches, or Spider Patches as it were; same voice actor and
demeanor, different looking thing. Still seems like a nice enough guy though.
If you go out of order his dialogue doesn’t really change that much so don’t
bother. A door at the end leads to the next area.
This is the final grandiose area of the game, Mensis’
Nightmare; and it is rather sizable. Rivaling and perhaps surpassing Lost
Izalith in scope this area can be very frustrating and is another hotbed of
invasions; but in general you should be alright assuming you’re not
extraordinarily low level. Basically Mother Brain has taken up residence in a
tower overlooking the first area and you’re pretty much perpetually faced with
constant frenzy status until you make it through or take cover. After this you
get a giant room full of spiders (which are a lot more annoying than you might
expect), as well as the bell lady who’s pretty close to the entrance all things
considered. Then there’s Harry Potter, who seems to reck a whole lot of people
from my experience in invasions; I don’t think he’s that bad but who knows.
After this you have a reasonably clear route to the boss,
the trolliest boss who ever lived (except one boss in the Chalice Dungeon of
course). Meet Micolash, apparently some still alive version of the dead guy who
teleported you here. This guy seems to be just a little bit insane, but as long
as you’re losing a fast weapon he doesn’t get many attacks off; then he runs
away and you have to find him in this relatively elaborate labyrinth of
hallways and fogginess. I didn’t really have much trouble here and I think the
design is interesting enough, however if you opt to use a slower weapon this
fight can get extremely annoying in new game plus with high insight, as he has
spells that will pretty much one shot you no matter how much arcane resistance
or health you have; oh and they have a huge area of effect. This won’t be a
huge issue for most, no doubt, but fair warning to all my wheel brothers out
there.
At this point I went and recovered a ridiculously obscure
key that opened up the Upper Cathedral Ward, a troublesome area with some of
the most annoying enemies in the series. Meet “Brainsuckers” as the game so
wisely calls them, these enemies send instant stun projectiles at you then
implant enormous pulsating tentacles into your brain and suck out 2 insight
whilst doing a bunch of damage. Oh and you have to kill them to progress in the
area. At this point I was still in the “exploit
the 2 hand axe charge attack’s wall invincibility” mode and killed them off
very slowly. However I eventually learned the best way to fight these guys is
to get close and parry them, the timing isn’t difficult but avoiding the
projectiles can be.
When you finally make your way out of that infernal room,
finding the key and the door it goes to (challenges in and of themselves) you
make your way into a large open plaza, home to the next boss fight against a
bunch of Roswell Aliens. Yep. Roswell Aliens. People seem to have problems with
this design choice but the game is so fucking weird anyway it doesn’t seem like
it matters. The fight’s just Royal Rat Vanguard in a larger area, fairly easy
but novel nonetheless. After the boss there’s a lamp and not much else, except
if you’re online you’ll notice a message that says break a window, and there’s
another boss almost immediately.
Ebrietas is either the second or most difficult boss in the
main game despite appearing relatively simple from the outset. Essentially the
boss has a ridiculous charge attack that’s not only hard to spot but virtually
impossible to evade if you’re too close to him, so to negate this I never lock
on and always roll toward the camera and to the right. The boss also has a very
slow head smash attack that’s simple to punish, so even though you’re not
always in melee range it isn’t too difficult to get some damage in. After it
reaches 50% the shit more or less hits the fan and now the boss has insanely
powerful projectiles that prevent you from using the previous strategy. At this
point I just lock on and go nuts and hope for the best, dodging and healing as
best I can. If he uses the projectiles (only rarely at short range) you have to
use audio queues when close and time the dodges perfectly, it’s not easy but if
you do it you sort of feel like a Jedi Master so there you go. This variant is
far from the most difficult version of Ebrietas in the game, but still quite
challenging on weaker characters.
At this point I was actually kind of bored since I was
spamming invasions incessantly and while the combat is better the players are
still pretty tedious to fight. But there was one saving grace remaining and
that’s Chalice Dungeons. I’m going to write a much more extensive post on them
within a few weeks but you can safely say they’re the best part of the game and
ultimately the most compelling thing to do repeatedly ad nauseum as well. If
you ever find a main portion of the game tedious just go hang out in the
chalice dungeons for a bit and reinvigorate your interest so doing. There are
is a rather large number of totally unique fights in here as well as several fights
that vary between themselves, and easily the best normal enemies in the game
reside here as well; the most terrifying being the Crazy Screaming Bitches
(canonical title) that are just fucking murderous when you have half HP. The
most fun perhaps being the naked fat guys (a type of Merciless Watchers) that roll
around as you wished the Ironclads did in Dark Souls 2.
Bloodborne taken only by what is in the main game is going
to appear somewhat underwhelming to Souls devotees, that’s why you have to dig
deeper, pay more attention, and by jove (?) do those Chalice Dungeons. The game
is easily the most atmospheric in the series and is maybe even better at being
scary and unsettling than something superb like Alien: Isolation, so relish in
that, don’t just play through it and try to bumrush everything if you want to
really enjoy the game. The game has less builds for sure but they’re all so
different from one another that it doesn’t matter that much, and if Lords of
the Fallen can be a good game with 3 builds then Bloodborne can certainly be a
good game with 20-25 builds, just because there’s not 200+ builds in the game
like Dark Souls 2 doesn’t mean the game isn’t perfectly competent in its own
right; and in some sense actually being able to experience everything the game
has to offer within a 200 hour period is nice.
For my part at this point I just went on a 30 hour Chalice
adventure and it never got old in that time frame, yes the very early and
easier chalices aren’t quite as interesting as the later ones but that’s going
to be where you spend the bulk of your time anyway. This shit doesn’t get old
by the way, the loot is actually very compelling even though you’d think it
wouldn’t be; having access to some ridiculously overpowered gems and runes is
pretty damn cool to be honest. Finding a Blood Rock basically means you get
another +10 weapon on your present playthrough for free whereas normally you’d
have to play through the whole game again (a la Dark Souls); they’re rare but
so valuable when you get your hands on one. I’ve done around 50-60 hours of
Chalice Dungeons at this point and I’m still finding new enemies and variants
on rooms that I thought I had seen the limits of.
Eventually I decided to return to the main game, now around
70 levels higher than I was previously. Actually it was still reasonably
challenging despite this, which is testament to the overall challenge of
Bloodborne. I beat the next boss on the first try but it definitely had me on
my toes the entire time; and while said boss has gotten easier on future
attempts there’s something to be said for the first ever attempt being a hairy
one. I had become aware of the game’s ending structure by this point and
decided to go for the secret ending, however some previous deeds of mine had
locked out one option. Yet another option remained, and an NPC that I thought
had died had simply moved to a different location and had a very precious
item. Thus I was able to trigger the
secret ending.
After Mergo’s Wet Nurse you arrive back at the old homely
Hunter’s Lodge, now ablaze. Undeterred you surely walk into the burning building
and continue about your day; never mind that whole open gate and Metal Gear
Solid 3 arena. More Chalice Dungeons! Okay, fine game I’ll play along. So you
wind up talking to the old G Man and turns out he’s a crazy motherfucker too,
who’d have thought. Gehrman is actually the most difficult “required” fight in
the game and sort of feels like Gwyn with a more elaborate attack pattern. You
can parry him but it’s pretty difficult to get the timing down and he varies up
his attack strings quite a lot, so basically it’ll be dodge city and hope you
don’t get one shot in the process. He doesn’t seem to dodge projectiles much so
you can exploit that if you want but if you’re aiming for a melee dance it’s a
really fun fight and even reminiscent of the hallowed Vergil fights in DMC3. This
game does feel more action-y at times, though you have to really play well in
most situations to not get rocked if you’re going to be more aggressive; and
this fight is probably the ideal in that regard. Even the Bloodborne naysayers
like this one, that means it must be fucking incredible, as any Souls fan who
whines about whatever new game is almost impossible to please.
After Gehrman some ugly ass headless thing (who if you’ve
done Chalice Dungeons might look somewhat familiar…) descends from the moon and
trys to hug you, but lo your status of having eaten not one, not two, but three
umbilical cords has protected you! Of course! It all makes sense now. This boss
is difficult immediately after fighting Gehrman since you probably won’t have
much healing left, but on its lonesome isn’t too bad. The most interesting
mechanic the fight has is a “Megiddo Flame” attack that sets your HP to one,
however the boss kind of just sits around for a while after that and you can
recover the life and even get some attacks in later (or both simultaneously if
you prefer); I rocked his ass with the Wheel as any sensible person would do.
Begone moon creature alien thing, and let us live in peace while we all kill
each other and stuff. Roll Credits.
So, overall, I think the main game is around an 8.5-9/10 and
the Chalice Dungeons are 10/10; most of the problems I had with the game initially
were adjustment issues and not actual problems with the game. Basically the
game has a new learning curve even for long time players of the series, you
might avoid all the optional stuff and only die like 20-30 times or something
and then immediately walk away from the game for no reason, but that’s not how
you should play it. This is a game you should enjoy, explore, expand upon.
Chalice Dungeons await! Don’t just ignore them because you’re “above” random
generation or something, they’re there for a reason, that’s the best stuff in
the game by a reasonably wide margin.
Death Count:
Wolf – 1
Random Dashboard – 1
Wolf Guy – 1
Generic Guys – 1
Spaz Guys – 1
Cleric Beast – 3
Blood Starved Beast – 4
Father Gascoigne – 1
Bigass Axe Dude – 1
BP equivalent – 1
Sparkles and Shotty – 1
Fat Guy – 1
Molotov Lady – 1
Bag Dude – 1
Witch – 0
Paarl – 0
Amelia - 0
Hippos – 3
Snakes – 2
Spider Ladies – 2
Logarius – 5
Shadow of Yarnham – 2
Amygdala – 1
Rom – 1
Blood Villagers – 1
Laser – 3
Brainsuckers – 3
Celestial Emissary – 0
Ebrietas – 4
Rock Lobbers – 1
The One Reborn – 0
Fat armor guy – 1
Micolash – 0
Mergo’s Wet Nurse – 0
Gehrman – 2
Moon Presence – 0.5
Chalice Dungeons – 75
PvP Record – 40-5
Youtube Shenanigans
This section is just for comedic value/random interesting
things if you’re curious, it isn’t intended to promote my youtube channel or
anything. I’ve uploaded a lot of stuff in the past week from Bloodborne and
some of the videos have received large numbers of views, in a lot of the cases
the reason for this is entirely obvious; the video is good, it involves
something unique, and so on. However the most viewed video (
now sitting at13,000 views, I shit you not) is just a random ass video that I uploaded after
dying in an interesting way. I thought as I was posting the video "well that
seemed to be the first part of this area" and titled it “Forbidden Forest Entry
Area,” and instead of just going the way of any other random youtube vid and
having 50-100 views or whatever it just skyrocketed because no one knows how to
find the Forbidden Woods and some people search for entry area instead of how
to find or where is or whatever. Basically the video starts like 30 seconds
away from the actual entrance and this was enough to draw the extreme ire of a
wide variety of individuals, this video now sits at a whopping 67 dislikes to 4
likes.
Compare and contrast with this video of similar status.
Now, I’m something of a troll so all of this pleases me
immensely of course. As any good troll will know the finest trolling moments
always explode unintentionally and you kind of just roll with it, maybe this
was just a normal video but now it’s an opportunity to mess with people for no
reason; even without trying. Time will tell how this continues on but damn,
that’s a lot of traffic for no particular reason.
Okay, okay I do actually have good videos as well and the
most notable is this simple clip showcasing most of Logarius’ Wheel’s attacks:
The comments in this video were most inquisitive and wanted
me to show it off more so I did and eventually did a
whole playthrough using itif you’re curious. Something that I didn’t get out of Dark Souls II (which I do
think is a superior game) was the community aspect because the game just flat
out didn’t work online in my house, but with Bloodborne I not only have
messages, pvp, and co-op content to explore I also have the random youtube
audience and that has made the game considerably more enjoyable. So yeah, use
that share button if you like, it certainly has been a rewarding experience for
me. I’m far from the best Bloodborne player, but I am reasonably competent and
simply being so while being willing to listen to the demands of the people as
it were has led me in entirely new directions. For the first time I actually
feel compelled to play through a Souls game all the way to NG+7 right off the
bat and I’ll always have more chalice dungeons to explore to finally get a good
roll of an Abyssal Gem or what have you. If all else fails, remember Wheelchair.
