Bloodborne

I ended up clearing Bloodborne NG6 today and am finally done with the game. A pretty fun game. I liked it more than the Souls series, mostly due to the faster pacing and the focus on dodging and more offensive playstyle. It's clearly more functional as an action game than the previous titles, and it was fun doing additional runs of the game (even though the last few started getting a bit repetitive, and I'm a really inconsistent player so some of the OHKOs/extremely high damage at times was pretty harsh).

Starting the game was a pretty rough experience for me. I take a long time to learn/get used to new games and I got destroyed by the first boss really bad (Gascoigne). This boss caused me by far the most deaths in the game... Before that I also ran into Cleric Beast and gave up (the completely fucked up camera when lock-oning it scared me). At this point I pretty much detested the game: it seemed really, really poorly made at the first glance. I was really bad at the game. The AI was really dumb. The camera seemed to be completely fucked. Why does anyone like this game? I didn't know. I think the start is kinda poorly planned. The idea of Gascoigne is, as far as I can tell, to introduce people to the way the game is played. It worked. Sort of.

The problem with the start of the game is that if you have a lot of trouble with it, a lot of problems (that never really go away, but they're not as later as they are in the beginning) are really noticeable. I said the AI is bad. What I mean is that a lot of the enemy units don't recognize obstacles, walls etc. properly and can get stuck. This happens a lot. Gascoigne is really frustrating because the AI looks completely fucked and dumb running against trees and graves and hitting walls everywhere, but also manages to slip a few attacks through them hitting you and it's insulting that this level of AI is beating you up.
Not Gascoigne, but what the fuck is this for example https://clips.twitch.tv/tsukaip/ExuberantSandpiperPeteZaroll . Another AI related thing is that some enemies really need to stop spamming one attack over and over again. The worst offenders are Micolash, though this one is probably intended and you're just supposed to hug him to prevent him from casting that ranged homing shit constantly, but it feels very cheap doing that. This https://clips.twitch.tv/tsukaip/CleverPorpoiseNoNoSpot . It's hard to get back in (even if I eventually died to just being bad at dodging). Another one is Logarius recasting UBW immediately after you destroy it.

Another general issue is the camera in the game. It can get really bad. Sometimes you just can't see what's happening. This really hits you in the beginning when you go against Cleric Beast and make the mistake of activating lock-on. You can't tell what the boss does. You can't see yourself. You just see a incomprehensible mess. This almost made me just give up on the game immediately. It's fairly easy and doable boss if you just don't hit lock-on, which people eventually learn, but it's a pretty bad way to start the game.

Final early game problem are the non-replenishing healing items. If you suck in the beginning you'll have to grind for healing items, which is just really frustrating and unnecessarily punishing. This is the one problem that completely disappears after you get through the start since the price of blood vials will become completely trivial.

It was not until clearing Amelia, or around that time that I started to actually enjoy playing the game. I had gotten weapons that were more fun to use than the starting one (rifle spear, saw spear) and had got used to how the game is meant to be played. Well better than in the beginning anyway. It really took me very long to find the weapons I really liked in the game (Rakuyou and Chikage). Getting these weapons so late was what motivated me to play NG+ since I wanted to test them. This escalated to clearing Chalice and the main game up to NG6.

One of the nice new mechanics in Bloodborne is the rally system, which allows you to regain your health after getting hit by hitting the enemy back. In the start I found this really hard to use, but later on it became a proper option to gaining distance for healing, making the game more aggressive. Sadly in the later NG+ runs the enemy damage starts getting so high that even if you don't get killed immediately, you lose too much HP to regain with the rally ability and are most of the time forced to take distance, or otherwise gain safe time for healing items to regain enough health for it to be meaningful.

When you start getting into the general playstyle it becomes a nice, fast paced action game with some really interesting bosses. I personally liked a lot of the smaller sized bosses (that actually fit on your screen so that you don't have to half-guess what they're doing at any given time. Fuck Laurence). Especially Maria and Kos are really cool bosses. The DLC of Bloodborne in general is pretty good, actually it's probably the best part (aside from Laurence), but it also has one big problem. When should one play it? It's considerably harder than anything in the main game, so I'd recommend people to play it before the final boss. This however has the problem that the final bosses will feel like jokes. The amount of health they have is miniscule in comparison and you'll probably roll over them. After the main game would be good, but the game immediately throws you into NG+ after beating the final boss so you can't do this. You can access the DLC rather fast on NG+ if you want to, but this means that your first experience aganst DLC bosses is on NG+ and you really don't want that, especially if the main game felt challenging. Something should've been done about this, but oh well.

A lot of the larger bosses can be hard to keep track of and you'll end up in situations where you can't properly react to stuff since you can't see the boss properly. This is very apparent against bosses such as Laurence and Amelia (being behing her will just fill your screen with her fur). This made a few of them rather frustrating to fight against (like this one boss called Laurence). Some of the mid-sized bosses you can see most of the time like Ebrietas are pretty cool. Some people seemed to have problems with her since they hugged her, making it not very obvious what she's doing. My tactic was to stay away so I had very little problems with camera here.

Chalice dungeons felt really lazy. It's like playing Path of Exile, except there is only one map and it just has harder enemies (the same ones too, mostly) and really grindy. Almost all of the new "bosses" are pretty worthless zakos at this point too. Cursed dungeons are just objectively shit design with their -50% HP modifier. The final extra boss, Yharnam, was pretty cool, though at that point way too easy. Anyway I'd prefer just having a straight up boss mode or... normal extra areas instead of this.

In the previous souls games I always felt that the zako between bosses were an enormous chore, especially near the end of Dark Souls 1 I just wanted them to stop, but with the faster pace and more aggressive combat of Bloodborne it was never really bad. On the subsequent playthroughs (or when going back to a boss after dying) I just ran through them though.

RPG elements:

The RPG elements were considerably less major in Bloodborne, which was a very welcome change. The unique weapons and simple upgrade system saved me a lot of trouble. Fiddling around with all sorts of armor/weapon crafting and upgrading always gave me a headache in the previous games. I could've probably looked up a lot of that stuff and just done what's close to an ideal all-around weapon for a given weapon type, but I don't really like relying on internet too much for this stuff. Then again the games tend to go out of their way to obscure how certain stuff works (lol the poise thing with DS3) so I don't think anyone should feel bad if they check this kind of stuff online...

One RPG element complaint I do have however is with stat builds. Early in the game you basically have no idea how you should build your character since you only have access to a couple of starter weapons and no proper idea how anything works. The safe bet, and what I did, is to focus on HP/stamina before you unlock a few weapons. After finding a weapon I was comfortable using I started putting points into the stat that boosted that weapon. End result was pretty good. I later changed to other weapon using the stat (and leveled bloodtinge on ng+ onwards for chikage). It ended up working well for me, but I think it's rather easy to just fuck up the stats entirely with how bloodtinge and arcane have what seems like very limited amount of weapons to really use, not to mention the arcane resistances some of the bosses have. Having a respec or something would be neat.

Closing:

A lot of this probably sounds very harsh and negative, but I enjoyed the game quite a bit. If From Software decides to make a sequel to it, or something similar, I'm definitely playing that. I had very low expectations since I've never really managed to get into Souls games, but this one worked pretty well for me in the end.

Bloodborne FPS lol
https://clips.twitch.tv/tsukaip/CheerfulSharkOhMyDog

Also the story was told in a way I can't get into and tbh I hardly know what happens in the game... sorry