K-SCORE: 75
Developer: From Software
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Creator: Hidetaka Miyazaki
Designer: Kazuhiro Hamatani
Programmer: Jun Ito
Artists: Makoto Sato, Nozomi Shiba, Hisao Yamada, Yoichi Akizuki
Spoiler Level: Minor
“really vague, dark, and creepy again”
Keeping the format of the Souls series, creator Hidetaka Miyazaki and his band of talented artists and programmers looked to a new universe, a new realm in which to impress fans with fast-paced, brutal, challenging combat and stupendous character and enemy design. I imagine they had a nice brainstorming session, considered the options, and eventually decided, “Hey, let’s go with really vague, dark, and creepy again. Let’s throw in some inexplicable monsters again, more dreams, more blood, more eerie NPC laughter at times when nothing is funny. Instead of keepers of primordial flames let’s do ancient old ones maintaining the never-ending beast hunt. Instead of “souls” as a currency and experience we’ll do “blood echoes.” Instead of crestfallen warriors and delicate women sages that offer up the weakest threads of plot, we’ll have wheelchair-bound hunters and an animate doll that says she loves you even when you beat her to death with a giant wheel. Ah ha! New direction!”
Bloodborne is a very good game in almost exactly the same ways that Dark Souls is a good game, but in all the ways Dark Souls struggles, Bloodborne is as bad or even worse, or maybe I’m just that much more tired of this content. I can summarize the difference between this new franchise and the souls series with two words: blood and guns. Bloodborne does away with shields and instead inserts guns as a means of interrupting and parrying enemies. This makes for more dodging in a combat system that already had a ton of dodging, but parrying is functionally identical, it just looks different. You’re still timing an L2 button press at exactly the peak momentum of an enemy attack to parry that enemy. Just because a gun is going off instead a shield being raised or a sword held up in defense doesn’t mean the gameplay mechanic is all that different. And as for the blood, well, all the themes of souls, collecting them, consuming them, losing them, finding them, trading them for small pebbles and ammunition, are replaced with the liquid red themes. That’s it. Otherwise it’s a straight port over.
The thing is, the combat system and diverse enemy design in the souls series coupled with the tremendous difficulty and sense of accomplishment as you advance is more than enough to warrant multiple games. So I can’t complain about Bloodborne too much. All of the artists and designers they have that are tasked with creating the world, weapons, and bosses do a fantastic job. It’s thrilling to explore and conquer these areas, and I was excited by whatever it was I was facing and would face next for all eighty or so hours it took me to get the platinum trophy. The weapons in this entry are especially creative. Each weapon comes with two separate movesets that usually equate to two separate playstyles. Ludwig’s holy blade, a small slashing sword and huge staggering sword in one, was my personal choice, but I also liked the saw weapons, the sword-scythe combo, and the giant wheel. And the enemies and bosses are even better. Father Gascoigne, Vicar Amelia, Martyr Logarius, The Watchdog of the Old Lords, Amygdala, Ebrietas, Mergo’s Wetnurse, and Gehrman were all fights that I struggled with, that I found fun each and every attempt, that created a thrill when I eventually won, and that were nearly completely distinct from one another. Other games can succeed with half or fewer the number of cool boss fights that Bloodborne has, and even the best of those games recycle mechanics or can’t maintain a level of challenge all the way through.
The world of Yharnam and the nightmares is also very cool with tons of detail and unique areas and enemies to discover. It’s just not as good as Dark Souls. A problem I had with Dark Souls II persists in Bloodborne, which is that, with the hubworld area and ease of access to teleporting, you don’t have to get to know the maze of streets and passageways, sewers, bridges, and shortcuts between all the locales. You can just zip magically between them. In Dark Souls you have to physically travel so much that you become attached to the world, likes it’s yours after a while because you know the whole thing, because you know the fastest ways to get from the little fireplace with the few friendly people to the deep dark woods with the scariest monsters and you’re the one willing to brave that journey over and over again. Yharnam feels disconnected in Bloodborne, and though it’s well-designed both artistically and from a gameplay standpoint, the constant teleportation cheapens it.
“if I’m going to do the work of grafting an actual story onto the feeble skeleton they created, they really should pay me”
It’s a problem not helped by the biggest gripe I have with Bloodborne and the Souls series as well: the narrative, or lack thereof. This time I was tired of going around killing enemies and slaying bosses for reasons unexplained so I took to the internet for fanboys so obsessed with From Software’s games that they’ve filled in narrative holes themselves. Lunatics. I am sorry. There just isn’t nearly enough there. And if I’m going to do the work of grafting an actual story onto the feeble skeleton they created, they really should pay me. The NPC’s say essentially nonsensical things that occasionally reference nonsensical item descriptions which occasionally refer to nonsensically place names where you can occasionally find nonsensical bosses. Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos means nothing to me. How cool would it be if there was a story where that name and villain description was set in the context of a narrative with character motivations and conflicts and goals? Instead you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re wandering around killing things and the game doesn’t offer you much in the way of choice. If you’re playing then you’re playing with the plan of killing mostly everything you find. Yes, you can tell me that Yharnam is a city that was corrupted by an old healing blood and that the blood was a discovery made from a group of scholars from another place called Bergynwerth and that those scholars learned about ancient old ones who lived in a place far below, but that doesn’t actually set up characters, timelines, or motivations. It’s just a number of weakly linked disparate elements. So when I read about people theorizing about the meaning behind the baby crying in Upper Cathedral Ward when you reach 50 insight or when I watch a video that postulates on the importance of Arianna, the lady of the night, and the blood vial she offers you, I can’t help but feel those people are crazy and they’re grasping at straws. They’re grasping at straws and trying to use those straws to build an entire civilization. Don’t you see? When you consume three umbilical cords the great Moon Presence rejects you and tries to kill you for it doesn’t want you to awaken as a slug in the arms of the sentient doll!
“Eventually you just don’t care.”
It’s twofold frustrating. One, after a while the game feels meaningless, even with the sense of accomplishment that the combat offers you. I sunk hours into the experience and yet was never surprised when I found yet another item that made no sense to me, that I didn’t know how to use. Hour seventy I found my first “Bastard of Loran.” I read the item description, shrugged, and kept killings stuff with my lightning-infused greatsword. A little before that I’d pulled a lever that sank a giant brain into a darkened pit where even my torch couldn’t create light. Then, because the internet told me to, I used a gesture (you know, like the things you can use to wave to other players or bow to them in PVP or PVE) to “make contact” with the brain, and it gave me a “Moon” rune. Wha? Then I killed the brain for a “living string” and because it didn’t fight back and not killing it seemed to have no repercussions. Eventually you just don’t care. There’s always another giant brain, or creepy tentacle bug beast or bloodied queen with no subjects who laughs about loyalty and none of it makes any goddamn sense and you don’t care because you lost faith that it will make sense ages ago. Second is that with a new universe from the Souls series, Bloodborne had the opportunity to go in a different direction with its narrative style. It could have opted for something other than the shreds of fabric masquerading as clothing that is the Souls’ storyline. And it didn’t. Miyazaki could have given far more base information about who your character is, what they’re fighting, why they’re fighting it, and what he/she and anyone in the world is trying to accomplish and he chose not to. Either that, or he’s not able to do so. It could be that he and his fellow developers just design random people and monsters and put them in random places they’ve drawn up and all the little ‘hints’ to a story that you can find in there are his weak means of connecting them.
“gear... going from borderline disaster to just significant problem”
The one area that Bloodborne is a noticeable improvement from Dark Souls and Dark Souls II, while very much staying within the established framework is in the gear. But there we’re talking about going from borderline disaster to just significant problem. There are fewer options for armor and weapons and there are fewer types of damage and resistance and no weight, encumbrance, or poise. This makes for a gear system that is easier to understand, almost within the realm of possible. Still not realistic to understand all the hidden mathematical formulae that go into bloodtinge scaling, frenzy resistance, and fire-infused serrated damage, but it’s closer. I wasn’t able to have fun acquiring new gear, apart from a few choice weapons, but I also didn’t find myself buried in menus, hating myself for trying to maximize defense to resistance ratios. Their biggest problem is that they want to make all weapons viable, but still create a progress system on your gear, so they do that with upgrade materials. The materials are so scarce though that choosing a weapon to upgrade is essentially choosing it to be your weapon for the entire game, which totally ruins the concept of having all the weapons stay viable. And the weapons you get later on in the game can’t be selected because you get them to late; you’ve had to upgrade something else already and you can’t go back on that choice. I can think of a bunch of creative solutions to this issue that maybe the devs will implement in future entries. A small weapon selection at the start, distinct to the character creation process, that upgrade more or less together. Giving all the weapons at the beginning and letting you try them out. Incentivizing using weaker weapons for various reasons to increase challenge. Weapon tutorial sections so you can practice movesets without committing to a weapon’s upgrade path. Or just, no upgrade materials. Let your character’s stats dictate effectiveness and that way the players could tinker with their tools at their discretion.
Bloodborne is what I’ve come to expect from From Software, which is brilliance at a cost. Sometimes the game is so thrilling that I wonder if I have the right to complain about it, and other times so stupid that I wonder why I’m playing at all. I’ll give a little example. The penultimate trophy I earned involved exploring the chalice dungeons, these somewhat weakly designed procedurally generated endgame sections with new bosses and recycled areas and enemies in a place not really linked to the rest of the game. The trophy was to kill basically the last of these bosses, Yharnam, the Pthumerian Queen, or something like that. In order to do this, I had to complete eight dungeons, each with three or four in them. It was like thirty bosses that I killed to get all the way down to this last enemy. What I found was a bloodied woman who had appeared in sections of the main game, never with any semblance of explanation, who now decided to fight me, and she did so with ENTIRELY different mechanics. There was even an attack that sent my character flying high into the air, flailing in ways that I’d never before seen. What poor animator had to design that only to have that work seen by less than ten percent of players? What poor gameplay designer created such an elaborate and well-balanced, challenging boss encounter only for the crazy small subset of people willing to push through all that adversity and sink all that time into the game’s late late content? On the one hand, it’s brilliant. I love that I’m rewarded with new fresh content even after all that time I’d given the game. On the other hand, how much better could the whole thing been done if From Software had some basic tenets of structure and story down?
This was the one thing that didn't attack me on sight.