Bloodborne (2015)

I have tried Bloodborne twice already, both times I get a little further, then I get stuck, get frustrated with wandering around and dying constantly, and then quit.

This third time I actually have been doing really well, 3 bosses down, and none of them have needed more then 1 try. The beginning parts of the game, minus boss fights had zero deaths too! In the segment I am in I have noticed a dramatic difficulty spike and am dying more, but not perpetually. I think playing some older games and 3D mario stuff has given me better perspective on how to play Bloodborne, both are dodge attack, dodge again games.

I love the city and monsters in this game. I am starting to grasp the story, and I have decided whenever I get lost to just look up where to go next in a walkthrough! Lets see how far I can get now!

I had a dream today.

I was at this Rite Aid looking ass store looking for stuff to ease my back. Then I go to the cashier and I see copies of Bloodborne for the PS5 there. I was screaming, the cashier was screaming, a guy behind me was screaming. We all were from the top of our lungs. Just when I was about to make my purchase of the game, I wake up. Please end my suffering Sony. Give me a way to play Bloodborne at 60 FPS.

Grinding out the Platinum on this one and hoo-boy I never realised just how abysmal these chalice dungeons are, especially the rotten one.

Putting the big dumb dog and the amygdala in here with ridiculously huge health bars while also cutting mine in half is one hell of a choice. Glad this whole aspect of the game never got carried forwards, yeesh, this is real bad!

Bloodborne wins for Coolest Weapon in the series, the Beasthunter Saif!

The transforming attacks on the Saif afford the player options for advancing and retreating mid-combo that are unlike anything else in the Souls games to date. What's more, a killer running attack with an advancing follow-up, solid horizontal attacks for unlocked camera fighting, and an incredibly quick and far reaching light attack for initiating mean that the Saif always has the right tools available for every situation.

Unfortunately it's stuck in a game where the solution to most fights is just to quickstep behind the enemy and spam light attack, but that's not the Saif's fault.

I didn't realize just how much that the DLC, though accessible extremely early in the game, is very, very much balanced for lategame equipment. So I had to go crawling back to the main game to at least get a better option than my +3 starting weapon... I decided to skip replaying a bunch more main game areas, and partially accomplish upgrade material collection through the Chalice Dungeons, which I never touched in my original playthrough.

These dungeons are not the best content in the game, but they are totally fine, featuring a lot of unique stuff that's not in the "main story," and having a fun level-based structure that's decently repeatable for loot. The whole system feels really complicated, to a point where it seems very clearly designed for the community to figure out together. And figure it out they have, as I found all kinds of resources online to plot my path toward farming the things I needed. Really gave me a greater sense of just how much there is to this game and how many types of players it caters to.

This was all very interesting, and I enjoyed doing it as the kind of person who enjoys poring over wikis and reading up on strategies and things, but still, back to the main point... I do long for From Software to handle their DLC like a few other games (such as The Witcher 3, which has just about the best DLC ever, to boot) and just let us pop in from the menu with a pre-made character. Guess we'll see how they handle expansions and endgame/NG+ states in the more open-ended Elden Ring very soon.

Bloodborne, one of my favorite games of all time, #11 highest rated game on this site, blah blah blah needs no introduction. Well, I have never played the DLC for this game, partially because you have to replay a bunch of the game to access it, and partially because of its notoriously extra high difficulty.

So anyway I finally bought it and started a new character and blasted my way through surprisingly resistance-free until the third boss. After a few one-shot deaths, though, I hit my first roadblock, this game’s biggest nightmare: its consumable economy. Out of fire items, out of the beast distraction thing, out of antidotes (on a poison boss), out of heals, out of bullets, out of insight, out of money. Uh-oh.

Battle and status items aside, which like yeah, those are going to be limited—unlike the nearly perfect healing system established in Dark Souls a few years earlier, this game chose to follow Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 2 and have heals as a finite consumable. And especially in this of all those 3 games, for a new or somewhat rusty returning player, I don’t think there is any way to avoid at some point having to stop all progress and grind out healing items and bullets to literally be able to continue playing the game.

I will never fathom the rationale for this design decision, which makes the early parts of the game potentially extremely annoying and disheartening if you get stuck. It almost single-handedly killed my initial attempt at the game back in the day before I came back a year or so later to power through. Is it the biggest deal ever? No, but I see a frustrating early game as this game’s biggest overall flaw over the other modern FromSoft games. It’s a shame because the actual parts of the game early on are so awesome, I was having a blast, until next thing I know I have nothing left. Oh well, back to the grind soon I guess.