so, you guys were trolling me right? when the collective masses declared this game to be a masterpiece, it was just one big joke, right? we were having a joe schmoe moment; there's no way this game got universal mass appeal down pat. you all had to have been fucking with me when you said this game was flawless.
bloodborne is an incredibly frustrating game. it's frustrating not just because of it having moments of great difficulty, but it's frustrating to play and just not get it. i do not get bloodborne, i will say it upfront. i do not get why people love this game so much, what about it speaks to them and gives them a good time. i wish i did! i truly wish i did. i went into this being prebiased in its favor; i did not start bloodborne wanting to dislike or even hate it.
but here we are.
this game inspires a lot of confusion out of me on a mechanics level because so much of it just does not work or mesh well, especially in the context of coming from people who made previous souls games. so many fundamental basic things are wrong, like having little to no player self-expression, refinements like equip load being nonexistent, and the absence of depth in mechanics (no magic whatsoever, there's half as many stats as previous souls games, etc.). hell, even the items feel culled and the lore feels less impactful. it's one thing to get only a handful of lore entries, but to make them all feel even more vague and esoteric? it doesn't help me with a setting that i just can't place in my head. maybe you're not supposed to get it, that's fine, but that doesn't work for me and feels like an artistic dead-end.
going back to player self-expression, that's probably the most incensing part to me! you get so little gear to work with, both in weapons and armor, and overall it feels as though you're going to be doing a lot less thought and exploration when it comes to builds. i would've much rather they just axed the stat system entirely, locked you to a handful of weapons, and focused more on making it an action game. instead, stats feel like they don't matter until you run into the enemy that has 309 billion HP and you're staring down the barrel of a damage race.
that's another thing that i dislike about this game: the bosses are monsters when it comes to HP. i'm willing to acknowledge that hey, maybe i'm just Bad at the Video Game! but also i found it remarkably frustrating that every boss took an obscene amount of damage to kill until basically the endgame. standouts include bosses like vicar amelia, who, combined with the blood vial system being so incredibly shallow and poorly thought out, made me want to stop playing the game entirely.
but, i did trudge through. i persevered. and i tried extremely hard to see what everyone sees in this game. there are good pieces of design smothered to death in a game that has environments that are incredibly generic and difficult to distinguish from each other and amateurish mechanics like frenzy. i like that bosses have forms to them, it makes them feel as though they're reacting to the player in an organic way. i like the trick weapons because they make dual-wielding feel much more dynamic and balance out taking away your gun by having more varied movesets. i like the graphical fidelity of the game, because even though i saw the same shade of black several thousands of times, i never once thought it was an ugly shade of black.
playing this game has really vexed me because i just cannot bring myself to say that my net experience with this game was a positive. i really, really disliked a lot of sections in it because there was frustration without any of the highs i would've gotten from a build becoming better or an enjoyable boss fight. this game felt like a chore, like something i was obligated to play rather than something i wanted to play. i don't begrudge anyone for liking this, but much like games like nier automata and ffviir this is something that just doesn't work as an action-JRPG mash-up and makes me wish the game had just leaned entirely on action. or been good.
i walk away from this one twisted up in disappointment. dark souls was a game that i had my reservations about, but came back to recently and fell in love with. maybe when this game inevitably gets a PS5 remaster, i'll revisit it and have fonder things to say. maybe i'll even enjoy it.
but, i never want to play this game ever again.
bloodborne is an incredibly frustrating game. it's frustrating not just because of it having moments of great difficulty, but it's frustrating to play and just not get it. i do not get bloodborne, i will say it upfront. i do not get why people love this game so much, what about it speaks to them and gives them a good time. i wish i did! i truly wish i did. i went into this being prebiased in its favor; i did not start bloodborne wanting to dislike or even hate it.
but here we are.
this game inspires a lot of confusion out of me on a mechanics level because so much of it just does not work or mesh well, especially in the context of coming from people who made previous souls games. so many fundamental basic things are wrong, like having little to no player self-expression, refinements like equip load being nonexistent, and the absence of depth in mechanics (no magic whatsoever, there's half as many stats as previous souls games, etc.). hell, even the items feel culled and the lore feels less impactful. it's one thing to get only a handful of lore entries, but to make them all feel even more vague and esoteric? it doesn't help me with a setting that i just can't place in my head. maybe you're not supposed to get it, that's fine, but that doesn't work for me and feels like an artistic dead-end.
going back to player self-expression, that's probably the most incensing part to me! you get so little gear to work with, both in weapons and armor, and overall it feels as though you're going to be doing a lot less thought and exploration when it comes to builds. i would've much rather they just axed the stat system entirely, locked you to a handful of weapons, and focused more on making it an action game. instead, stats feel like they don't matter until you run into the enemy that has 309 billion HP and you're staring down the barrel of a damage race.
that's another thing that i dislike about this game: the bosses are monsters when it comes to HP. i'm willing to acknowledge that hey, maybe i'm just Bad at the Video Game! but also i found it remarkably frustrating that every boss took an obscene amount of damage to kill until basically the endgame. standouts include bosses like vicar amelia, who, combined with the blood vial system being so incredibly shallow and poorly thought out, made me want to stop playing the game entirely.
but, i did trudge through. i persevered. and i tried extremely hard to see what everyone sees in this game. there are good pieces of design smothered to death in a game that has environments that are incredibly generic and difficult to distinguish from each other and amateurish mechanics like frenzy. i like that bosses have forms to them, it makes them feel as though they're reacting to the player in an organic way. i like the trick weapons because they make dual-wielding feel much more dynamic and balance out taking away your gun by having more varied movesets. i like the graphical fidelity of the game, because even though i saw the same shade of black several thousands of times, i never once thought it was an ugly shade of black.
playing this game has really vexed me because i just cannot bring myself to say that my net experience with this game was a positive. i really, really disliked a lot of sections in it because there was frustration without any of the highs i would've gotten from a build becoming better or an enjoyable boss fight. this game felt like a chore, like something i was obligated to play rather than something i wanted to play. i don't begrudge anyone for liking this, but much like games like nier automata and ffviir this is something that just doesn't work as an action-JRPG mash-up and makes me wish the game had just leaned entirely on action. or been good.
i walk away from this one twisted up in disappointment. dark souls was a game that i had my reservations about, but came back to recently and fell in love with. maybe when this game inevitably gets a PS5 remaster, i'll revisit it and have fonder things to say. maybe i'll even enjoy it.
but, i never want to play this game ever again.
9 Comments
filtered lawl
on a serious note, I disagree with bosses being tanky (in main game at least. late chalice bosses are awful) but i do believe the beginning of the game is really unbalanced and can land you shit weapons to deal with them. going threaded cane your first time around is certainly horrible while you can go saw cleaver+beast pellet and melt through most bosses' health bar within a minute. and nowhere is this really explained
on a serious note, I disagree with bosses being tanky (in main game at least. late chalice bosses are awful) but i do believe the beginning of the game is really unbalanced and can land you shit weapons to deal with them. going threaded cane your first time around is certainly horrible while you can go saw cleaver+beast pellet and melt through most bosses' health bar within a minute. and nowhere is this really explained
You bitch about self expression through mere armor not existing (which I do think is a misstep for Bloodborne, just not as irking) yet you also moan about not existing equip load... which would make a chunk of the already scarce clothes useless for certain builds...?
There IS magic in the game, I do think is quite limited to a basic arsenal but there is magic. Like I'm sure you didn't take time to find the arcane spells but there's at least 6 you would find in your playthrough. The setting being so "out of touch" I definitely think it's not true, it's quite puzzlying yet it constructs a noticeably gothic/victorian dark fantasy setting - it does bend itself a lot and make meta-situations like the Hidden City, but that's on-plot, since it's all a dream. In fact, replaying Bloodborne makes you notice how the game directly tells you first minutes you're actually on a dream realm. Maybe you're just trying to grasp it in the same way as Dark Souls? Part of what makes Bloodborne so great is how surreal yet ingrained on its tropes it is. You know what's around you, it's pretty clear, but you don't know exactly how it all came to be. It's less comunicative than Dark Souls in mere theme only.
I won't discuss the blood vial thing, it's already a beaten dead horse and it was very annoying the first hours into the game. It's not AS bad of a grind as people make it out to be, but I hope you don't like gacha AND don't like Blood Vials, because otherwise... Also, bosses are fine. Apart from the Blood Starving Beast, which can be a fucking trainwreck even though it's an optional boss, every early-game boss has a quirk you can easily exploit without taking too much time to kill them. I honestly think you weren't vibing with the upgrade system and expected the exact same Souls progression, which is not your fault to be honest. When you upgrade your starting weapon (and every starting weapon can be good) and dominate the parry system, bosses are a complete joke. I suck at these games and didn't have too many problems with them having gazillion lives.
There's a lot of wrong I can pinpoint on Bloodborne (still being very enjoyable for artsy smartasses like me) but a lot of these complaints seem to come from a lack of understanding on what Bloodborne wanted to be. It uses the Souls system as a mere catalyzer, because it doesn't want to actually be a Dark Souls clone. I do think it could have benefitted a LOT more being a statless action game, but that doesn't inmediately mean the system got broke. It's From Software following its own "let's repeat the same shit again but a bit different" ethos they've practiced since they exist. You know, like how Doom compares to Strife: Strife is quite a different ethos, it just uses the same run-and-gun engine as Doom and certainly exploits it.
There IS magic in the game, I do think is quite limited to a basic arsenal but there is magic. Like I'm sure you didn't take time to find the arcane spells but there's at least 6 you would find in your playthrough. The setting being so "out of touch" I definitely think it's not true, it's quite puzzlying yet it constructs a noticeably gothic/victorian dark fantasy setting - it does bend itself a lot and make meta-situations like the Hidden City, but that's on-plot, since it's all a dream. In fact, replaying Bloodborne makes you notice how the game directly tells you first minutes you're actually on a dream realm. Maybe you're just trying to grasp it in the same way as Dark Souls? Part of what makes Bloodborne so great is how surreal yet ingrained on its tropes it is. You know what's around you, it's pretty clear, but you don't know exactly how it all came to be. It's less comunicative than Dark Souls in mere theme only.
I won't discuss the blood vial thing, it's already a beaten dead horse and it was very annoying the first hours into the game. It's not AS bad of a grind as people make it out to be, but I hope you don't like gacha AND don't like Blood Vials, because otherwise... Also, bosses are fine. Apart from the Blood Starving Beast, which can be a fucking trainwreck even though it's an optional boss, every early-game boss has a quirk you can easily exploit without taking too much time to kill them. I honestly think you weren't vibing with the upgrade system and expected the exact same Souls progression, which is not your fault to be honest. When you upgrade your starting weapon (and every starting weapon can be good) and dominate the parry system, bosses are a complete joke. I suck at these games and didn't have too many problems with them having gazillion lives.
There's a lot of wrong I can pinpoint on Bloodborne (still being very enjoyable for artsy smartasses like me) but a lot of these complaints seem to come from a lack of understanding on what Bloodborne wanted to be. It uses the Souls system as a mere catalyzer, because it doesn't want to actually be a Dark Souls clone. I do think it could have benefitted a LOT more being a statless action game, but that doesn't inmediately mean the system got broke. It's From Software following its own "let's repeat the same shit again but a bit different" ethos they've practiced since they exist. You know, like how Doom compares to Strife: Strife is quite a different ethos, it just uses the same run-and-gun engine as Doom and certainly exploits it.
I do appreciate dissenting opinions though, since you do bring up already talked but nonetheless intriging points
ok
cringe
i love this game but i do agree the smaller amount of gear to choose from is really disappointing compared to dark souls. but as for self-expression at least it has a funny create-a-character
Don't really like bloodborne much either but I thought the environments were pretty memorable/distinct. They were probably my favourite thing about the game tbh
I don't have a Playstation 4. The only game I wanted to play on it was bloodborne. For context, dark souls is one of my favorite games. The amount of hype I've built up in my mind because of the cult following of Bloodborne is insane and when it eventually does come to pc, I can't help but feel like It would fall short of my massive expectations.
MultiGenre
2 years ago