"A Masterpiece To Some, Just Good Enough For Me"

I was so excited to revisit this game. From Software has gone ahead and created a whole new subgenre of RPG's focused on atmosphere, difficulty, and general mystery with world building over the last decade or so, and I've never really covered them since I've starting writing reviews. "Bloodborne" has been viewed as their best game outside of the recently released "Elden Ring", and I haven't played this title since its release. Reflecting on this game, I remembered it as something I enjoyed a lot, but there was something tainting this memory that I couldn't quite remember clearly. Having replayed this "beast" of a game recently, I can finally say this - this game's atmosphere is fantastic, but the game itself isn't.

My first game "from" this company (I guess we're doing puns now...) was "Dark Souls", and I along with many others found that title to be strange and completely fresh for its time. I hadn't really played a super difficult game of its style beforehand and immersing myself in that world as a kid got me quite addicted to From Software's style. However, I hadn't remembered a whole bunch from their games, so revisiting "Bloodborne" first was destined to be either a complete treat or a nightmare as unenjoyable as the one within the world of Yharnam. Turns out, it was both!

Yharnam is a decrepit, disgusting, and entrancing city to behold. It's Victorian infrastructure, chaotic layout, and bleak design are already unwelcoming enough, but the sheer horror within its walls, behind its locked doors, and throughout its darkest corners leads to some of the most immersive worldbuilding and visual design in a game I've ever played. It's fantastic! The game is dripping with dread and Lovecraftian horror, but unfortunately it doesn't capitalize on this at all by providing a coherent plot or narrative.

I can't speak on their titles post-"Bloodborne", so I'll say that From Software, in this current era of their studio's life, couldn't write a competent video game story. They had their visual design perfected by this point, but I always found their fragmented storytelling and surface-level character design (not enemy design - that is well-done) to be pointless nonsense. This game is no different, with your personal quest about curing a mysterious disease feeling aimless in nature. About a third of the way through the game though, I thought the gameplay would hold it up enough to compensate, but of course I had to be wrong...

"Bloodborne's" gameplay is different from the "Souls" games in many ways, but it's generally still the same thing yet again. You have high-damage, generally low-health, opponents, and combat is focused on timing, positioning, and attack pattern recognition. It's never been super deep to me personally, but "Bloodborne" tried to shake things up by increasing combat speed and stripping the player of defensive maneuvers outside of dodging. This created a combat system that supported the game's lore, a system that is "bestial" in practice. Unfortunately, I think this scrapped a few things that I enjoyed a lot about the previous games.

The biggest aspect I felt was stripped back in this title is build variety, and I blame this on the weapon design. The dual-mode aspect is neat, but I didn't really find it to be a good replacement for the sheer variety of weapons in a game like "Dark Souls". Each individual weapon has much more depth here than in a game like that, but it's still not very involved - you have a light, heavy, and charge attack, and you can transform it to another mode (an attack in itself when dodging) that will provide a new set of moves. At no point throughout my playthrough did I comment "this has depth", since most encounters lacked a reason to swap between the two modes. All it felt like I was doing was swapping between two weapons, and while this was stylish, it never convinced me it was anything more than that. I see that they wanted the player to view their weapon as something more "unique", but it felt that they simply squished two weapons together to create one versus designing an inherently complex, "fun to use" weapon.

I'll also say that this game suffers from being too long and having too many areas to go through. The whole "Nightmare" zone felt annoying to traverse, and I felt like I was just fumbling around getting to the end of the game. It was frustrating, and really soured my playthrough a bunch. I found boss difficulty to be generally fine, but normal mobs were stupid in combat design. Most enemies are helpless to your attacks, at least until you find those few enemy types that are just blisteringly broken beyond comprehension (looking at you specifically, Winter Lanterns!). It never felt good to interact with most enemies outside of the first third of the game, and this is because I think the combat design in this game just sort of fell apart.

If I have to take my experience with this game as a sign of my enjoyment of the "Souls" series, I will have to say I'm currently concerned of the outlook. Combat in this game felt cheap, with single mistakes being punished heavily, and then it just...didn't. I would leave an area to do something else really quick, or even attempt a fight a few more times, and I would get through 95% of the obstacles I faced. Maybe I'm just getting impatient as I get older (which I don't believe - you should see some of the games I've played through recently for proof), but I don't find much appeal in replaying sections of a game over and over again due to trivial difficulty spikes. I need...more?

That's why I don't seem to want to pin it all on "Bloodborne", but rather on From Software. The atmosphere in this game is fantastic, and for a good chunk of it I was finding it to be a masterpiece. However, this is the same frustration that led to me never beating "Dark Souls" or its sequel as a kid/teenager, and now I was finally able to experience it with a "functional memory". Grinding to increase my fairly uninteresting stats, hunting for incrementally stronger relics in a stupid Chalice Dungeon (an absolutely shlocky game feature), and feeling like I have to cheese an encounter versus figuring out my own path to victory (similar to puzzle games with the genre's, at times, "limited" scope to problem-solving)...

...all of this feels unfun at the end of the day.

I wanted to like "Bloodborne" as much as I felt I used to. Hell, I wanted to love it and praise it as a masterpiece like so many "hardcore gamers". But I can't. It wasn't that fun, and I don't know if I would want to try it again in the future. It has some artistically magnificent aspects, but when you strip it down to a core video game, it's divisive as all hell. I guess I just found myself on that "other" team that couldn't really get it...

Final Verdict: 8/10 (Great)

i deeply appreciate that it lets you do whatever you want in any order you want. the problem is halfway through i just started gliding around skimming the map for shrines and grabbed korok seeds that happened to be nearby because, well, those actually had permanent rewards. while its open world is more meaningful than most (i actually bothered to finish it unlike any far cry game or whatever) there is still so much left undercooked. also the ui feels like it was designed by someone who had never seen inventory management in another video game ever.

One of the best uses of ludonarrative I've seen. Every cultural subtext about the context of the game industry at that time — which unfortunately remains current — intrinsically connected in the narrative and gameplay.

I gave you lives.
So that you make good progress.
But you couldn't understand.
You must do it over again.
Why can't you see?

Against the self-destructive gaming industry, a symbolic and apotheotic representation of the Earth and the cycle of warfare and violence that we insist on perpetuating.
Let's be better people.

1: Be praying
2: Be praying
3: Be praying