Bloodborne -- A Wolf in Souls Clothing

BUY.


If you aren't a Souls fan, or aren't sure? RENT.

I've been flip flopping a lot on this game, and for very good reason. There's a lot I don't like in Bloodborne, and there's a lot that I don't agree with design-wise, but over all I do have to recommend this game. It's fun, it's just so far from what I was expecting and there are so many dissapointments along the way, I almost didn't know if I could recommend this.

I'll start with something I loved -- the atmosphere and story. This game is a love letter to Lovecraftian Mythology, all the way through. From the way you start the game, to the very ending this game was picked out his very brain. It's fantastic, and I love it. It caught me off guard -- all the promo material made it look like "a werewolf game" much like The Order 1886, and I thought that was just the new "theme" we were chasing -- boy was I wrong!

The game has nightmarish hellscapes that take places in dreams, beings outside our understanding to whom we are nothing but a nuisance, and the maniacs who beg them for knowledge and power. The central hub takes place in a dream, with beautiful flowers and fantasy scenery, an escape from the nightmarish world you're trying to navigate through. A bit of a disappointment, however, is that there isn't really much variety in the world. The majority of the game takes place within the city, with the only other areas you visiting being a forest, and a nightmare realm. Everything is beautiful, and the scenery is done masterfully, but it gets a bit boring when compared to previous games by From Software, which took you across multiple spaces, each more fantastic than the last.

Combat feels just like it did in previous Souls games, with you needing to carefully watch the enemy for an opening, and strike when you can. The health regain system is interesting, but if you try to use it too liberally, you'll find yourself taking even MORE damage, and wind up dying, requiring you to pace yourself, and play a bit more safely than you'd think otherwise. Overall however, it plays more or less the same as before, with your dodge roll being replaced by a little hop while locked on, which makes it much harder to use your dodge to distance yourself from an attack, and requires more that you use the dodges i-frames.

Bosses were probably the biggest disappointment in the game, quite honestly. There are a number of optional bosses whose mechanics and difficulty are perfect: They're challenging, have a variety of attacks, and require you to be ON YOUR TOES in order to succeed, much in line with previous games' Souls bosses. In Bloodborne, however, a lot of the Story bosses (aside from father gascan and his blunderbuss) are pretty lacklustre, almost as if they were afraid if the maingame was too hard, no one would finish it, and so they removed a lot of challenge from them. It's a very stark contrast between the story bosses and optional bosses, where with one, you'll likely steamroll them your first try, only to be confounded when you stumble across an optional boss, who completely obliterates you. It almost feels as if they were done by two different teams, one whom has been working on souls games for a while, and one who hadn't, and were given vague outlines for what a boss fight should be.

Said boss disappointment primarily occurred towards the end of the game -- one of which literally sits there, passively, until you attack them, one who has no weapons, and can barely fight you once you get past their gimmick, and the final one who moves so slowly, you can just sit back and cast "spells", to completely obliterate them. It's incredibly sad, and I got no satisfaction from beating them. It almost felt like "everyone gets a gold medal!" so that no one felt bad for struggling in the game.

This is further evidenced by the incredible removal of many core mechanical systems, (no more encumbrance, many stats stripped away, and all armor being roughly on par with eachother, as well as a smaller pool of weapons) many of which added to the games complexity and difficulty. It almost feels as if Bloodborne wanted to trend more towards a character action game, but was afraid to lose the core souls audience, so it tried to meet in the middle somewhere. The result was a generally satisfying experience, however an experience with limited replay value, and much shorter length (compared to previous Souls games).

Chalice Dungeons were a bit of a letdown, but very interesting in concept -- they're randomly generated dungeons (well, the Root versions of the chalice dungeons are -- base chalice dungeons are just premade "story" dungeons, in a sense) which you work through in order to unlock "materials" to open new chalice dungeons (or root dungeons), as well as to unlock other chalices, allowing you to progress into increasingly difficult chalice dungeons. In my experience, there are typically 3 floors, with a boss occuring on each floor after you unlock the gate to proceed deeper in. The random nature of the dungeons is supposed to allow for infinite re-playability and fun, however due to the fact that it's all completely random, they have to have a template for how a dungeon should be assembled, which ends up making them all feel a bit samey. It doesn't help that they all look like the same dungeon, with the rewards being gems for your weapon (I'll touch on that next), Alternate versions of any weapons in the current game, and more materials for you to do other dungeons. Overall, just a bit meh. No reason to keep doing them as there's nothing challenging enough in the game to require you to seek out the strongest possible gems, except maybe for some other chalice dungeon bosses.. (which ends put you in a loop of "Why am I even doing this, again?")

Weapon Modifications were pretty interesting, on the other hand. Your weapon has 3 "gem" slots. Which slots it has can vary, but there are 3 types of slots -- a "droplet", a "triangle", and a "crescent". The third slot in your weapon can be changed by delving into the chalice dungeons and finding a "Lost", or "Uncanny" version of that weapon -- for example, if your weapons third slot is a crescent, and you find a Lost Saw Axe, the third slot will be a triangle, instead. It can be incredibly useful, especially depending on what you want to do with your weapon. The gems have varying levels of strength and bonuses, and the stats are completely randomly generated; one gem type that provides a bonus to Physical Attack may give you +3%, or it may give you +20%, all depending on if the RNG gods bless you.

You're allowed to remove gems from your weapons any time you'd like, from the central hub, and you can re-use them in other weapons. This allows you to experiment with other weapons, and if you find you enjoy a certain weapon more than the one you're currently using, you don't have to worry about losing anything in the process. It's very interesting, and a different take on the enchanting system of the previous games, which I enjoy very much, and would love to see put in their future games.

"Jim, wouldn't those weapons and gems be more suited for PVP?" what a fantastic point you bring up! Too bad From doesn't really enjoy the invasion mechanic in the games anymore. This is a huge stick in my craw, because PVP was one of my favorite parts of the Souls games. In Bloodborne, you can only invade another player if there's a bell maiden (which spawn in certain areas of the map, or if you're trying to co-op, there's a chance you'll spawn one) or if you use a bell to bring in an invader yourself. If someone is co-oping, and you get summoned in, you're likely going to get kicked around pretty quickly by two guys. If you manage to find one guy on his lonesome it'd be more desirable, but even so, the odds of actually getting into a PVP match are incredibly small. It takes so long to find a match (I waited an hour before I finally gave up) that it's not worth the effort. Co-op is almost as bad, where you can spend upwards of 20 minutes ringing your little bell, hoping someone comes along to help you with a particularly troublesome (optional, of course) boss, before you finally say "fuck it" and jump back in yourself, because there's just no point in sitting around waiting. I don't know why they'd destroy one of the most important aspects of their previous games, but it's completely shortsighted of them, as the Souls games typically have so much life and love through the community constantly playing, trying new builds, and PVPing.

This game is just so much different from a Souls game, I hestitate to even call it one. Hell -- they even removed "Souls" from the games title itself, and it's obviously because they don't consider this a core entry in the series either, but a creation of it's own. In their own right, none of these things make Bloodborne a particularly BAD game, and I won't say that it is -- it's a very enjoyable game, one of which I've put a lot of time into, and will continue to do so for a small chunk of time atleast, it's just so very different from what I, and many others were expecting, I think it just caught us off guard.

All in all, I do recommend people purchase this game, and give it a fair shake, trying to ignore what its predecessors did, and treat the game as a new IP. It deserves a fair chance, and I think if you let yourself be open to it, it'll surprise you. If you've never played a Souls game before, this is as good a starting point as any -- if you're a vet? It's definitely worth taking for a spin. Just keep in mind that this isn't called Beast Souls for a very good reason.