I had zero expectations and was still underwhelmed.

I'll get the positives out of the way first.

Visually the game is beautiful. The environments perfectly capture a dark Victorian aesthetic. The lovecraft and Angels Egg imagery is apparent. The texture work is phenomenal, with details like grooves and scratches in metal, cracks and rots in wood etc. The particle effects wowed me and the fog was a marvel to look at.

Now for the negatives.

The story is nothing special. If you've played previous games you'll have a good idea of what to expect. You have your realm ruined by human and god (Great ones in this case) hubris and malice, NPCs that are crooked etc. But it does nothing interesting with the standard souls story formula. The Lovecraft influence here is incredibly shallow, and is mostly window dressing over a standard souls plot. The endings are just DS1 but lamer. The premise of a bloodborne plague is dropped around the halfway point in favor of a blatant rehash of DS1s "Preserve the world or Become a God" 2nd half. I was astounded at how the game fell on its ass so bad in this regard.

The DLCs plot is a very shallow story about the cost of secrets and not digging them up. And then it just ends.
I was told that this game and its DLC had intricate lore and a compelling plot but it was already done far better in Demons and DS1. One of the redeeming qualities of these games sans DS2 was the stories and lore, so to see it botched so badly here is baffling.

The music was a jumbled, bland mess.
Demons and DS1 and 2 had a distinct style that contributed to their atmosphere and setting. With Demons having a TV composer bringing a dark brass style and Dark 1 and 2 having industry veteran Motoi Sakuraba's bombastic-somber flexibility flurishing.
Bloodborne bungles this by having at least a dozen composers. None of the OST stands out or feels stylistically consistent. It's all bland, dark orchestral sound.

But I don't blame you for thinking there isn't OST because unlike previous entries. Most bosses for what ever reason, feel the need to constantly scream and drown out the ost and sound effects. This becomes incredibly annoying to outright aggravating when fighting bosses like Amelia and Kos. If the intent was to contribute to a horror atmosphere, my eardrums were certainly shook for the wrong reasons.

The gameplay was further Streamlined from DS2, stats were combined or removed, leveling up costs way less this time as the combat has been streamlined to be very melee focused. This makes the common joke of Soulsborne being a press circle and R1 sim very accurate to this game. The rally mechanic entices players to get aggressive and mash R1 to regain health, but this becomes moot once weapons with long reach are found.

The dodge covers way more ground this time to compensate for the shift in combat focus. But as stated earlier. A long two handed weapon lets players safely wail on mooks and not have to focus on on the rally mechanic as much as the devs intended. This is made very egregious when the player finds Ludwig's Holy blade. As not only does it have the best stats in the game (and you find it in the first 15 hours), it also has generous hitboxes in two handed mode and is good enough for the entirety of the game.

Magic was mostly removed in favor of fire arms. But Fire arms are mostly useless since you can just spam Charged R2s and zip around enemies with the generous dodge distance. Parrying with firearms can open up visceral attack chances, but this can be also done by Back stabbing fully charged R2s anyway. Making Quicksilver bullets mostly redundant until one gets powerful guns like the canon that can topple smaller bosses.

Boss fights are once again mediocre to terrible. They still aren't designed around co-op and one can simply summon help to distract the boss while they spam charged R2s. They once again try and balance this by giving bosses extra health to compensate, but the DPS of NPC summons and Player summons are so massive it makes little difference. And the player will be constantly gifted insight by the truck load for each new area and boss discovered, to the point where at the middle of the game players could have over 60 insight to summon and never have to worry about tough bosses.

What also doesn't help is that the camera is probably the absolute worst it has ever been in the series up to this point. Since 90% of the bosses are huge, and the combat is melee focused, the camera goes berserk when they get in close when locked on. And most of the damage from bosses you'll take will be from bosses eating up the entire screen with their character model while you can't see.

Remember when I said magic was mostly removed? Well, you do get certain items late game like call beyond that let you cast powerful spells in exchange for bullets. This brings back the classic problem of enemies being designed around melee builds and being unable to handle ranged magic. And while you can only manage at most 3 casts with certain runes equipped, the DPS on melee weapons with co-op partners will simply exacerbate this classic flaw.

One redeeming quality of soulsborne that is still somewhat present is the level design. Yharnam feels like a real place with how shortcuts are designed and checkpoint placement is smart and non annoying. But this doesn't help the fact that most of the level layouts are just long narrow hallways or big open spaces. While the shortcuts are logical in how they work in universe. They don't fix the bland, unimaginative room layouts.

Leveling up and fast travel has for some reason been made more tedious by forcing player to return to the hunters dream hub to do both. This is exacerbated by the games long load times, some lasting up to 20 seconds.

For reasons beyond us, fromsoft felt the need to bring back vertical menus when one of DS2's few fixes was making horizontal menus. Why they decided this was a good idea is bewildering. As menu navigation is a complete chore.

The healing system still has not been fixed. DS1 and 2 had the right idea with the Estus system but fell on its ass by having Humanities, life gems and Healing miracles. Bloodborne's blood vials half copy the estus system but instead of having them refill at a lamp, you have to grind for them and can run out after the hunters dream refills your stock after heading to and from it. Why this team keeps getting so close, but so far in regards to this mechanic is baffling.

When I mentioned two paragraphs ago that the level design was mostly good, I was meaning to use that as a way to lead into describing how atrocious the chalice dungeons are. If you wanted to play the same 8 rooms with different textures and particle effects for 15 hours, this is the segment for you. The level design here is barebones, boss fights are 30% new, 40% regular enemies with more health, and 40% reused bosses from the main game with extra health.

The chalices make searching levels in the base game somewhat redundant, as you can input custom codes for specialized dungeons with rare items, you can even get a weapon from the final boss early this way. Making much of the "reward" for finding rare gems and weapons in the base game moot.

The DLC level design is very underwhelming, which is surprising as both DS1 and 2s DLC was excellent and actually transported you to brand new worlds and lands. The Old hunters reuses assets from the base game for 40% of it's 12 hour runtime. With the first area just being cathedral ward covered in sand. And it follows the same under designed narrow hallways and big rooms of the base game. Yet another case of Bloodborne blowing its tires and not even living up to soulsbornes standards.

There is genuinely nothing special about bloodborne. The gameplay is a boring loop of R1 circle for 40 hours. The story is rehashed, unpolished and unoriginal, the lovecraft and angel egg imagery is 95% window dressing, the music is a jumbled bland mess.

The bosses are still mediocre to terrible, and co-op still breaks them. The chalices are blatant bloat that makes exploration of the main game mostly redundant, even the series usual stellar DLC is a letdown.

If this is the only PS4 game as the jokes say it is, you'd be better off not touching this with a ten foot pole. It's one of the most bland, boring games on the platform (and that is saying something, when it comes to 1st party ps4 games) and there are hundreds of better RPGS on other systems better worth your time.

4/10.

I love this broke-ass game. That you can exploit the mechanics and one punch man your way through the most difficult battles is a strength, not a weakness. I love how each class has its own growth mechanics. I love all the bizarre effects your equipment can have.

Uematsu is in fine form, wringing out memorable melodies from the GB sound chip. The art design is strong. Everything reads really clearly and the enemies have fun, cute designs.

Overall it's a really impressive release for year one of the Game Boy. Mechanically I like this better than Final Fantasy I and II. Kawazu is a mad genius.