Note: this was written literally eight years ago, but my opinion on the game is pretty much the same, so very little changes were made to the review. No mention of Sekiro or Elden Ring, and honestly even within that context my criticism of other Souls (and by extension, Elden Ring) games still stand (Sekiro is now my favorite, but only by a smidge!). Also not sure whether this needed to be nearly 8,000 words, but I don’t think I am known for subtlety or brevity, both back in 2016 and now.
Goes without saying, but also…I’ve given up on the pretense of shoving Scripture into things for no reason. I did end up putting something at some point, but it does shows that I had mined the caverns dry in that regard and it became very perfunctory in my later writing for the blog. That’ll be the standard going forward – only if it makes sense will I include it, never shoehorned in. I leave it in for posterity, and also to show you really can’t write millions of words about this stuff forever without your brain leaving you high and dry.
This is the least spoiler filled Bloodborne review I could possibly come up with, many years too late. I had originally planned to write a whole lot about the lore of Bloodborne in a more theological sense (H.P. Lovecraft would have come up often). Alas, real life has a way of preventing things from happening. Anyway, enjoy!
After playing through Dark Souls III, I said something like this:
But, to know that you are done with a game like this isn’t a bad thing! I appreciate and enjoyed my time with the Souls games (though I’m still interested in giving Bloodborne a shot), and I wouldn’t say that Dark Souls III is horrible by any means in comparison to its predecessors. Its failings are really impossible to fix unless something fundamental changes about the series, which I assume will never happen. I’m content to say I had a good time with Dark Souls III, but the formula’s starting to wear thin.
At that point, I didn’t own a PS4, and didn’t expect to own one for a long time to come. Fate and circumstance, however, conspired together! I picked up Bloodborne at a Redbox for $8.99, at which point it promptly sat on my desk, taunting me. Without a PS4 to play the game on, what was I to do? One extremely large coupon discount later (thanks Dell!), and somehow I was playing Bloodborne – probably the cheapest amount of money I’ve ever spent for what is (now) one of my favorite games of all time.
Fundamentally speaking, Bloodborne is a Souls game – it retains many of the features of its immediate spiritual predecessors that it’s difficult to separate Bloodborne from them. But, the excellence in Bloodborne arises purely from the details and the implementation of those changes. Having played through 3 of these kinds of games in the past half year (wowzers, that’s a lot), you can see a stark contrast between the more open design of Souls and the constrained, focused intent of Bloodborne. That intense focus towards a particular end finally makes Souls into something fresh, and that makes all the difference.
Exploration
To begin: the Souls series are often a simple game based on a simple premise – fight stuff, explore, move on, beat game. The difficulty does not often arise from actual dexterity and/or reflexes, but knowledge. I imagine that’s why everyone has their favorite in the series, and it’s usually the first one they play. Because so much is obscured, strange, and new, and since the game doesn’t bother to actively teach you, you figure things out as you go. If you’ve got a strange build, you may find boss X harder than boss Y, and that’s part of the fun for new players.
However, once you do have a general knowledge of how the game works, everything becomes very, very easy as long as you’re paying attention. That’s why Dark Souls becomes so easy after Ornstein and Smough – there’s really not much more they can throw at you after that point, and leveling up/equipment upgrades turn cheap and easy at the end. Since it’s an RPG, they can’t really balance it in the same way a strict combat-action game has to work, and so there’s always going to be a problem with the back end of Souls games.
Every boss has a weakness, and you can figure it out once you’re familiar with everything. Then again, some people might not have access to an ultra great sword due to stats. Experimentation is key, as is knowing your options. That goes for story and lore too, as it mostly doles out in cryptic dialogue, environmental clues, and item descriptions. You gotta work for your story and your understanding of this mysterious world.
So the basic tenet of Dark Souls consists in exploring in a number of ways – fine and dandy. Bloodborne turns the formula on its head in this sense by NOT operating in this fashion at all. In Yharnam, you don’t have the option of choice – you’re a Hunter, and a Hunter must hunt. Like Dark Souls III, your initial path is fairly linear; you awaken in Central Yharnam, You quickly meet a guy named Gilbert, a “fellow outsider” who’s sick for some reason. Tonight is the night of the Hunt, where the citizens of Yharnam cleanse the streets of the foul beasts that seem to continually invade the city of the Healing Church. But something’s not quite right here – it’s difficult to tell who’s a man and who’s a beast. Normal common citizens attack anybody in range, and creatures attack from everywhere. You may have traveled here to seek some sort of healing, but tonight’s probably the worst night you could have picked. But that central question remains: what in the heck is going on?!
And, at that point, Bloodborne bites into your subconscious as you continually wonder what, possibly, awaits beyond the next door, the next reveal of a dark secret kept from a populace too scared or too dense to ask questions. The game drops little clues in both tiny letters, item descriptions, and environmental details as you explore this impossibly ornate, Victorian Gothic society on the eve of its own apocalypse. I don’t think I’ve played a game quite so compelling in a long time where the motivations of your character actually match up with those of the player, but Bloodborne certainly fits into that category. The search for power and knowledge turn equally into an incentive for exploration into the heart of some terrible secrets.
Bloodborne has a definitive “mood” to it – it begins as a horror movie in one sense, and ends in another, but the journey there remains enthralling throughout. Or, as Tim Rogers would say:
In as much as darkness and mood impacts a player’s psychology, graphics are often game design. I can’t think of that being more evident than in a Souls game.
Exploration is tense in this dark place where creatures scream and yell at you – but it’s never done for cheap jump scares. The game’s world and metaphysics contain a definite consistency that lends a believability to the universe – that it could be an actual place. And, contrary to Dark Souls II’s “torch” segments, Bloodborne is a DARK game with DARK areas that require a torch. Make no mistake – Bloodborne tasks you with exploring an uninviting world in the middle of collapse, and it will NOT make that easy. But, that lack of ease makes it continually compelling. I can’t say I’m a real horror movie guy (I jump out of my chair at the first sign of tension or loud sounds), but Bloodborne makes it work (despite being unable to sleep very well after particular areas, lol).
In sum: Bloodborne finds a way to motivate the player into exploring its strange world through both its atmosphere and its mystery – something that Dark Souls often lacked. You’ll still work for understanding and for the narrative, but Bloodborne will feel positively straightforward by comparison with the opaque drip feed of a Souls game! That’s partly what makes it so engaging – you know what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, assuming you pay attention to everything. That sometimes makes all the difference in video games, and Bloodborne manages to merge its story and narrative into the game design very effectively.
Level Design
Of course, much credit goes to the level design, which helps to heighten the inquisitive atmosphere and mood of the game itself. A dark game with dark themes deserves a dark setting, and Bloodborne delivers.
Every level at the beginning of the game seriously attempts to give off a “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” vibe. This is actually part of the level design itself – misty side streets give way to dangerous ambushes, and dirty sewers hold all manner of evil creatures waiting to take you by surprise. Darkness turns out to be a problem, as the torch removes one of your main weapons too – when do I whip out the torch? That’s not really a question I ever had in my mind while playing a Souls game! The levels add further tension when you realize that there’s no “shields” or safety nets for the player, so From Software designs these level to force caution in every step. Heck, this is as close as you’ll get in exploring Jack the Ripper’s nightmares, I’ll say that much. Enemies also respawn upon each death, so it looks like Dark Souls II will be the perennial outlier in that regard.
Somehow, this even applies when you start realizing that the world itself is dense, though actually somewhat small. The weird thing about it is that Bloodborne will, at first, appear very linear. The beginning of the game sets you in Central Yharnam, through which you will travel to the Cathedral Ward. However, you’ll soon realize that there’s a ton of optional areas for those who explore enough, and tons of different ways to the same destination. Several areas remain completely hidden to the player without some thorough exploration (or a guide of some kind), and that content is totally worth the effort to find.
Regardless of this possible flaw, I’ve not yet encountered a more densely packed set of levels than in Bloodborne. Unlike in the last two Souls games, you tend to work for every inch of progress in the beginning (due to, of course, the new combat system – which we’ll get into later). The high spires of Yharnam eventually starts working that familiar From Software magic, where you map out the area in your head due to the excessive repetition. Despite the possibility of such a consistent setting – mostly Gothic architecture – from getting stale, I don’t think I ever found myself remarking that Bloodborne’s setting become “too repetitive”. They find subtle ways to differentiate areas even with the same theme (and notable re-use of assets, if you’re looking for it). It’s an accomplishment, to be sure, in making a consistent world that doesn’t turn into boring video game stuff, but there’s enough variety in Bloodborne’s environments and challenge to keep you engaged. Add a just-right mix of vertical and horizontal layouts, and the levels never feel boring (aesthetically either!).
Like all Souls games post-Dark Souls I, there’s a “bonfire” teleport system in place – for thematic reasons, you light bizarre-looking lanterns instead, but the principle remains fundamentally the same. Explore an area, light its lantern, and you can freely teleport to that lantern at any time. Like Dark Souls III, all the areas are connected to a player’s “safe zone” – in Souls, Firelink Shrine fits the bill, and in Bloodborne we have The Hunter’s Dream. Unfortunately, Bloodborne’s missing the bonfire-to-bonfire teleportation of its immediate “sequel”, so you must travel to The Hunter’s Dream at every teleport interim. This does incentivize you to spend your main currency of Blood Echoes (or Insight – but we’ll get to that), so it ends up being ok. After several patches, the load times have been severely reduced from their (apparently) horrific 50-seconds, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
The teleportation doesn’t ruin the game, though; Bloodborne’s level design hearkens back to Dark Souls I in a more powerful way than even Dark Souls III. Because of the lack of direct bonfire-to-bonfire teleportation, From Software instead designed Bloodborne’s various areas to “link” to a central lantern. Most of the time, you won’t just find a conveniently placed bonfire – instead, you’ll need to search an area thoroughly to find your path back to safety. You still get that brain-pleasing feeling of connecting two things that weren’t connected before (trust me, it’s awesome), but with all the tension of the original Dark Souls. This means that lanterns aren’t frequently dispersed, which means “finding the shortcut” is the real “bonfire” here – an active, rather than passive, discovery. Bloodborne’s all the more engaging for such a seemingly slight change!
That’s not to say that lanterns don’t appear after you defeat bosses, much like in Souls, but that you earn even the notion of a safe haven in Bloodborne more often than not – you don’t just teleport places, because travel is still an integral part of this game due to the limited number of lanterns. This ends up being a nice compromise between the bonfire teleport and having no teleporting at all until very late in the game. Do I prefer how Dark Souls went about this? Yes, yes I do. But Bloodborne’s method to implementing that same feeling of tension is merely “different” rather than outright “bad”. You still end up memorizing levels, and slowly working your way through its challenges (the combat being a notable highlight – again, we’ll discuss this soon).
Simply put, Bloodborne’s levels are as intricately designed and well-paced as any other in the Souls series, if not moreso due to the multiple paths. Bloodborne does feel smaller than the other Souls games, though. And that’s partly due to a new feature…
Chalice Dungeons
Chalice Dungeons are one of the most pleasant surprises in Bloodborne…provided you actually do them!
The whole process begins after you defeat the boss of an entirely optional area. Basically, you can travel to this area to open the Cathedral Ward gate from the other side, or buying the key to said gate for 10,000 Blood Echoes (Souls, currency, whatever) – that decision is purely up the player. Killing this foe yields an item, the Pthumeru Chalice, which you use to conduct a Chalice Ritual. Said Chalice Ritual requires a tombstone located in The Hunter’s Dream; once you actually figure all this out, the Chalice Dungeon system finally opens up to the player. It goes without saying that, in some sense, we can say From Software hides most of the Chalice Dungeon chalices in optional areas as a distinct path unto itself from the main linear game. As far as I can tell, you’re supposed to do each dungeon when you receive its corresponding chalice, since you tend to out-level enemies otherwise. Think of it as a break from the main game, some optional content for the more inquisitive.
And my goodness, is it ever a lot of optional content. Chalice Dungeons are filled with enemies that never even appear in the main game, from regular enemies to bosses. Seriously, entire bosses are simply locked from the player who doesn’t do Chalice Dungeons at all, which surprised me greatly! Of course, these areas do look a lot like interconnected square rooms and hallways a lot of the time, but considering the fact that you can randomly generate new ones once you obtain the appropriate chalice, that softens the blow a bit. Regardless of the aesthetics of such places, there’s literally half a game here that most people will never explore – and by the time they do, they’re going to plow through these new challenges without breaking a sweat. Unfortunate!
Anyway, to describe how this works: Chalice Dungeons are best described as a series of mazes, a labyrinth of tricks and traps, hidden objects, and lots of Souls-style combat situations. You explore them just like any other area in the game, with the requisite slow-pacing and lots of hidden objects. Each level contains exactly two lanterns, both of which sit at the beginning of the area, so it still requires a lot of caution to explore. You’re incentivized to explore, mostly because unlocking the next Chalice Dungeon requires it; most of the Chalice Rituals require crafting materials which pop up in the dungeons, so finding everything will prove to eliminate the grind a bit. Still, that’s a lot of area to traverse, but it’s more in bite-sized and focused form than most Souls games. I like to think of them as little challenge rooms, which is a cool and new idea for the Souls series. If they don’t want to make a Boss Rush mode, something like this will certainly do!
The cool part, though, isn’t the fact that these exist (and that there’s a lot of them). The neat part is the randomly generated Chalice Dungeons. This sounds like the silliest idea ever for a series that emphasizes hand-crafted, well-paced level design above all else. How do you make areas with random generation that could ever equate to the stellar, interconnected worlds of a Souls game? Apparently, it’s not as difficult as you think, provided you have enough limiting factors to make sure the level turns out well. It dawned on me that the relatively staid aesthetic design (i.e., a maze!) turns out to allow for a variety of level layouts, and there’s enough room diversity (with whatever enemy combinations chosen) that it almost always proves to be a delightful challenge.
All of this surprises me because I usually hate random level design with a passion. I am sure you’ve seen almost no games involving such mechanics on Theology Gaming, primarily because I think it’s lazy and defeats the purpose of playing a video game on some level. If I’m going to pay money for a video game, I want a level that somebody put some work into at a very deep level, understanding the player and their predilections. I want a game designer to nudge me in the right direction, and make me feel smart like I figured something out – despite that being his/her intention all along! Usually games with randomly generated content fail on this level, both in making for a “fair” game and also in lacking a certain sense of guided experience.
And yet, Chalice Dungeons work. They never feel random, and that’s an important point. I think, though, that’s there is a balance here that restricts the possible combinations that can occur in any one room or dungeon structure. Clearly, a lot of work went into the preset Chalice Dungeons – I would guess they were the best and most accessible results from the system they devised. From there, the random Chalice Dungeons are determined by the strength of the crafting materials used to make them and the kind of themed chalice used (Pthumeru brings different hazards and enemies than Hintertomb, just for example). There’s a lot of design already happening here, but it’s being configured in interesting ways for players who want to exacerbate the challenge. And, of course, you can play some particularly nasty dungeons that other people happened upon, provided you know the appropriate code for them.
All of this usurped my expectations for randomly designed content; Bloodborne’s combat, solid as it is, provides an excellent backdrop for new and surprising situations that emerged from a tightly-wound set of rules in Chalice Dungeons. And somehow, this feature didn’t make it into Dark Souls III in some way, shape, or form, which absolutely baffles me on so many levels. This is good stuff, and yet I dare say I’ve not read a single review mentioning it in any great detail, or bothering to tell the reader how much original and new content is there. From Software does like to hide content deep within their games to the point where you need the collective Internet to figure it out, but these were a highly touted feature before release that nobody seems to care for.
I guess I just like discovering new things, really. This sense of genuine surprise is not something I’ve found often in video games, but here we are! Sometime it takes a slight variation on something, a twist, or turning something on its head to make it more enjoyable or more meaningful. In the same way that Jesus turned the Law on its head by fulfilling it, so too are video games which turn your preconceived notions on their head a delight. It may not look like something you want to try at first, but game designers know best…right? At least in God’s case, we know it works!
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. 40 If anyone wants to sue you and take your [a]shirt, let him have your [b]coat also.
Matthew 5
Combat
I’ve mentioned this “combat” a lot without actually saying anything of note about it. Let’s remedy that, shall we? First, let’s take a look at a description of the only shield in the game:
A crude wooden shield used by the masses who have arisen to join the hunt.
Hunters do not normally employ shields, ineffectual against the strength of the beasts as they tend to be.
Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity.
Bloodborne, in a similar way to Bayonetta, removes that most powerful of basic defensive options – blocking. Every Souls games, from Demon’s Souls onward, always required the use of a shield for pretty much every build. Whether you used it to parry, for magic defense, or some other purpose, you could usually walk forward into the darkness with just a shield on hand. The most you’d usually lose was stamina, and that’s not much of a punishment for a resource that continually regenerates if you lower that shield between the hits you take.
Bloodborne doesn’t want you to be a wimp, is what I’m saying. And the way that it does this is by removing the ability to block and adding a heightened sense of mobility. Your character now moves fast and gracefully – with no equipment burdens to speak of, your character’s movement speed always gets set to “fast”. You can still dodge, of course, but now locking onto an enemy gives you a dash move in any direction that expends very little stamina. Dodging in sequence makes your character very fast, which lends itself to a notable speed increase in Bloodborne’s combat. This lets you duck, weave, and avoid enemy attacks while charging right into the face of combat when an opening presents itself. All that stands between you and death is a keen understanding of the invincibility frames on your various movement options (I’d say about 10 frames, give or take).
Clearly, the game emphasizes a radically different shift on Souls combat – rather than passive waiting, Bloodborne wants the player to become aggressive in their assault on enemy hordes. This is reflected in several ways: first, the “Regain” system rewards smart, not reckless, attacking. When you take a hit in Bloodborne, some of your health disappear forever, but some of it remains as orange life. By attacking an enemy, any enemy, while the orange meter still remains, you can Regain that health back. That health can only be Regained for a few seconds after being hit, so there’s a constant juggling act of risk and reward. Should I jump right back in? How far is the enemy into his attack windup? How fast are my attacks? Can I nab him before then? All of these split second decisions makes Bloodborne’s aggressive style a bounty of endless entertainment – especially with multiple enemy groups parading everywhere.
If Dark Souls II started the “multiple enemy groups” trend, then Bloodborne uses its combat mechanics to capitalize on this change. You shouldn’t stay locked onto a single enemy for the entire time – if you get surrounded, you usually die in this game! All that’s happened is that the stakes rise without a safety net of a passive defense option, so it makes such encounters much more harrowing than they would be otherwise. But there’s a catch – most enemies stagger easily, so you should attack them as much as possible. The best defense is a good offense, and that goes directly against my ingrained play style. Against multiple enemies, that principle still holds true! The Regain system also plays into this as well, since it doesn’t matter what enemy you hit – you’ll still get the health back. The temptation of risk and reward adds some additional, maddening decisions into every combat encounter, and incentivizes smart, yet risky, plays.
It goes without saying that health recovery also takes a notable turn in the form of Blood Vials. In contrast to Estus Flasks, which provide the player with a set number of health boosts, Blood Vials are a finite resource of which you can carry 20 at any one time (and store up to 600 in your cache to replace them). Each one restores 40% of your maximum health, which sounds like a lot until you start dodging poorly or making a mistake! Blood Vials split the difference between Lifegems in Dark Souls II – of which you could carry far, far too many – and Estus Flasks, which makes them into a precious resource all the same. Most people hate that you have to grind them out, but I don’t think of it as grinding; if I was good enough to get through the level, I’d have plenty of Blood Vials to replace them. Bloodborne wants you to get good at the combat, and here’s yet another incentive to “git gud”, as it were.
And “gitting gud” requires taking risks, of which the Parry system shows in full display. Unlike in previous Souls games with shield parrying, Bloodborne does it one better with the addition of sidearms – literally, in this case, pistols and guns. If you time a gunshot at an enemy right before they hit you (or at predetermined points in their attack windup animation – this differs by enemy, of course), they’ll become stunned and vulnerable for an extremely damaging Visceral Attack – this restores ALL orange life, and usually kills most enemies in one shot. Not surprisingly, this is a high risk/reward maneuvers – miss, and you might end up in an inescapable combo chain, but a successful parry (even on bosses!) could lead to a turning of the tides. Add yet another decision to the ever-increasing combat mechanics pile!
One more? Why not! Bloodborne also eschews ranged weaponry almost in its entirety. In your first playthrough, you probably won’t find magic items of any kind that let you cast spells – in its place is a diverse range of melee weapons, each with different attack animations, combos, ranges, and speed. It’s really remarkable how much the weapons differ from each other – yeah, they all technically kill things, but they do so in very different ways. This gets even crazier when you realize each weapon can actually transform into a new weapon with a new move set, and that you can swap between these forms in the middle of combos! The versatility of the weapon system literally boggles my mind with the variety of choices on display, and I can’t help but commend From Software from making something that could be boring (only melee? Yawn) into something they bothered to design the game around! Every single weapon is useful and interesting, so you probably won’t feel left out no matter what you pick (I used the generic Saw Cleaver and the big Ludwig’s Holy Sword, but I really messed with all of them!).
To head off a particular claim in advance, some might complain that removing magic or ranged builds “lowers the complexity”. In this case, I think that removal proved a great decision. In a lot of Souls games, the AI doesn’t even seem to understand ranged magic or how it’s taking damage from afar; most enemies spazz out as if they’re being attacked in melee, and end up dying without you taking a single hit. They’ve taken steps to improve this and balance the game for melee and ranged builds alike, but they never struck the balance quite right. Bloodborne, on the other hand, doesn’t need to make a single concession in its level designs or enemy layouts for this balancing purpose. The only optimal combat solution comes from measured, thoughtful aggression right in an enemy’s face, and that makes for a much more focused, well-designed set of challenges. The complexity was bad complexity that offered “choice” at the expense of balanced challenges. Bloodborne removes that problem entirely, allowing for constant melee with the endless hordes of creatures out for your head.
And on that note, I should probably mention the melee-focused boss fights! I don’t think there’s a Souls game with a more consistent set of bosses in the whole series. Some of them shouldn’t be categorized as boss fights at all (and to name them both probably will spoil them on some level), but the vast majority of them present a wide variety of interesting challenges. They do fall into tropes – small, quick enemies, big tough monsters – but they all utilize the quick, fast-paced tone of Bloodborne’s combat to their own advantage. As such, this means you must present constant awareness of the wide-range attack strings that can persist for a while. As well, each boss comes in multiple phases which will turn the boss more aggressive and difficult as it loses more health – that’s almost universally true, and that forces you to take more risks to finish the fight. I absolutely love that you can never feel comfortable that you’ve “learned” the patterns; their wide movesets and phases almost ensure that you’ll always be making a calculated risk on them.
One of my favorite boss fights, Father Gascoigne, almost perfectly matches the pacing of the fight with three distinct phases and musical cues to match. The music begins at a low gear until the boss switches phases, and at that points it switches dynamically. The closer you get to killing the boss, the most intense does the music become until it reaches a crescendo of unbelievable portions. As your heart is pounding trying to get the boss down at his last sliver of life, panic sets in, and the musical theme behind you only exacerbates this. I can’t say a theme like Father Gascoigne’s made me feel that way in a while! I’m guessing it’s supposed to represent his bloodlust when he turns into a beast (there’s definitely some nods to it), and the music box you find is a contrast to it. Still, I would say most people should play Bloodborne just for this fight!
Gascoigne becomes prototypical of the “Hunter” fights you’ll also encounter throughout the game. Like Phantom invader from Dark Souls, Hunters present a “PvP” challenge in the generally PvE world of Bloodborne. However, unlike a typical PvP situation, the Hunters roll all their possible health recovery items into a single giant health pool with (I’m guessing) unlimited bullets and stamina. Both of these make most Hunter encounters tense affairs with a constant push and pull – they do take advantage of mistakes. One particularly memorable fight involves 3 hunters with completely different weapon sets out for your blood! These can be more difficult than some of the boss fights, and I appreciate how they take advantage of the swift combat to up the difficulty.
Still, the combat does prompt one complaint, despite me liking the new faster pace. First, there’s still a problem with “giant” bosses. I’m not sure why I didn’t have this problem in earlier games, but this one came about especially in the first fight, Cleric Beast. Some bosses, even when you lock-on, are simply too tall. As such, if they start an attack above where you can see them, you either need to hear the audio tell or just become psychic with a total guess roll. That especially applies when big enemies leap above your head, and they simply fall on you. It’s just strange, and there’s a lot of normal enemies and bosses with this ability in the game for whatever reason. I suppose that’ll be a common theme of every Souls game forever, but I’ll still note it here.
So, in summary: this is the best combat system that a Souls game has yet produced. Even with a noticeable 30 frames per second cap (an unfortunate casualty of being a PlayStation 4 exclusive, still not augmented for PlayStation 5 unfortunately even as of 2024), the game still manages to best its influences in nearly every conceivable fashion. All it takes for a game to improve comes from a few simple tweaks, and the speed of Bloodborne seems unmatched by its contemporaries.
RPG Elements
The RPG elements return in Bloodborne, but almost all of this busywork happens in The Hunter’s Dream, so have no curiosity there. That means any and all buying of stuff happens in one location, which makes carrying a whole lot of Blood Echoes quite treacherous! I can only think of one other time I saw a vendor of any kind, and that was deep into a Chalice Dungeon run – I like that you can’t just spend the Blood Echoes you get without making all the enemies respawn. That makes even the choice to use them a pretty important decision, assuming the area you just traversed kicked your butt the first time through.
Not surprisingly, those tweaks to the Souls formula also extends to Bloodborne’s statistical distributions. Some things, of course, remain the same. Like in any Souls game, Vitality increases your overall health pool – and, because of Blood Vials and Regain, a VIT increase also constitutes a healing power increase overall. Endurance performs a slightly different function than it did before, as equip load no longer exists. Its primary purpose now lies in letting you attack continuously for a longer time, and how much you can run/quickstep/roll. Since both of those functions keep you alive, think of Endurance as a way to make you more effective in combat, no matter the build you take.
Once again, From Software makes a clear division between slow/fast weapons with Strength/Skill. Strength weapons tend towards the heavier, more damaging single hits, while Skill weapons tend toward many fast strikes; those are generalizations, but each weapon benefits from one of those stats more than the other, so you’re encouraged to stay with one of them until you obtain enough Blood Echoes to build up both (those are just Souls, literally the currency of this game).
Things aren’t that simple though. Two more weird stats, which you may never build up, also appear for your perusal: Bloodtinge and Arcane. Suffice to say these two exist for very, very particular builds, and I wouldn’t mess with them unless you know for absolute certain you want to create a very off-kilter character build. In general, Bloodtinge scales with ranged weapon damage – since the bullets you use in the game are literally made of blood (seriously), Bloodtinge as a stat increases their damage. It goes without saying that at least one melee weapon also benefits significantly from this stat (Chikage), although several other gun-like melee weapons do scale with it. Arcane, on the other hand, suffices for the “magic” builds in Bloodborne. Magic doesn’t work in the typical way; instead of accruing spells, you accrue items that let you cast spells instead! Many of these use Quicksilver Bullets as a resource, so think of it as an alternate set of tools rather than a thing in themselves. Several melee weapons, unsurprisingly, also benefit enormously from high Arcane stats, so it may be worth your while to upgrade it depending on the primary weapon you select.
Both of these attributes tend to complicate the level up process in subtle ways, and this also lends itself to the “Blood Gem” system found in Bloodborne. Each weapon has a certain number of gem slots available; gems found throughout the game have different attributes you can use to upgrade your weapon, from increase physical attack damage to additional stat scaling to who knows what else. There’s a ton of customization options available as you accrue additional gems; since slotting gems isn’t permanent, you can swap and move them between weapons at will, which makes for an interesting set of customization tools.
Of course, weapons also contain the generic “upgrade system” – this time, rather than variations on Titanite, we have Blood Stones of various rarities that will bring a weapon from +0 to +10, provided you’ve got the gear. Upgraded weapons, as in all From Software games of this ilk, benefit you immensely, so it’s wise to make a commitment and upgrade your favorite. Like Dark Souls III, equipment cannot be upgraded through the use of stones – that doesn’t make it unimportant, as certain gear gives you helpful resistances, but it’s mostly for style. I just like wearing the different gear for no reason most of the time!
The customization continues with Caryll Runes. These items offer you specific bonuses to particular parts of your character. Want more Blood Echoes per enemy killed? Equip a Moon Rune to get some more! Want more Blood Vials when you’re exploring the world? Equip a few Communion Runes! To limit the potential impact of these runes, you can only equip three at a time, but that’s just another interesting choice. I like playing with three Moon runes equipped, simply because 60% more Blood Echoes is nothing to sniff at, but there’s plenty of interesting choices at play here! As well, there are runes associated with the game’s various PvP covenants, but these ones actually provide in-game stat benefits so they’re also worth collecting.
The more interesting, and strange, part comes from the resource known as Insight. Arriving in particular places, meeting particular characters or seeing certain…things will grant you Insight points. In a way, these represent your knowledge of the world; functionally speaking, they offer a whole new set of items you can buy from a shop vendor, which sounds pretty uninteresting. However, it also functions as a “difficulty” adjuster by reducing your maximum damage multiplier – the more Insight you obtain, the less damage you deal overall. It also makes you more susceptible to Frenzy, a particularly nasty debuff which acts as a sudden burst of unavoidable damage after the Frenzy bar fills to full. Thus, the game encourages spending Insight at times, but you can be like me and not bother to do anything with it until very late in the game! Again, this is one more interesting choice to add to a pile of them!
So, I’d say I like Bloodborne’s streamlining of the far-too-many stats you usually manage in these games. There are complications to this system, admittedly, but it’s much easier to simply grasp it and forget about it. Clearly From Software decided that Bloodborne should present a more accessible experience, and that seems clear in this part of the end product. You can’t even respec, for goodness sake, but you don’t need to since the soft/hard caps for stat increases are so low – just go play NG+. Probably the only thing I don’t like is that I can’t just upgrade every weapon to play around with them!
Online Play
I’m honestly not very good at PvP, but I feel that the online experience adds a lot to Dark Souls. There’s always the sense of danger that someone, somewhere wants to invade your world and kill you. Even safe areas like a bonfire turn off during such invasions, so you need to kill the invader or lose all your Souls. That’s what makes Dark Souls tense even when the situations lacks tension – invasions could happen.
I am going to imagine that my PvP experience partly came up short as a result of my playing the game over a year after it came out, but Bloodborne’s PvP seems rather dead. It seems like invasions involve an enemy called a Bell-Ringing Women, who can summon invaders into your game. Weirdly enough, she only managed to do this successfully when I played solo exactly once. In that fight, which I was not in the mood for, I realized what I didn’t like about Souls PvP: it just takes forever to fight anybody else. Sometimes it just feels like an endless slog rather than an interesting duel between two combatants. Five games in, I’m feeling like this system is a little bit stale for my liking.
I get that I’m supposed to win via the perfect combination, the perfect parry into Visceral Attack, among other things – that’s a given. Getting there is just about patience, and sometimes you just want to go on with the single-player game. I always get invaded in end-game areas, for whatever reason, and when I see them I just roll off a cliff to continue playing the game where I left off (I mean, I got invaded right after a boss fight after I spent all the Blood Echoes, so no harm done there). There’s got to be a way to improve this.
That goes for the covenants as well. Unlike in previous games, there’s no direct rewards associated with actions you perform with covenants (joining them gets you stuff, actually doing stuff for them doesn’t – it makes no sense). Frankly, it’s weird and incomplete yet again, which is expected but still in need of some fundamental improvement, I think. At least the Runes associated with them give you a stat bonus!
Unfortunately, the problem of an expanded messaging system in the game remains. In Souls games, online play offers you the benefit of other players leaving hints here and there. The limited text system meant that, at best, the hints either confused the heck out of you (what is a beanpole or a fatty?), gave you useful information (bonfire ahead), or simply trolled you beyond belief (illusory wall ahead). This meant that, while players could help, you still needed to piece together the solution. Bloodborne contains a similar level of hints to Dark Souls III, which massively expanded the vocabulary of the messages. Sometimes they’re just far too clear and provide way too many hints. It breaks the sense of surprise and dread when you see a bunch of messages saying “Don’t You Dare” right before a switch. You lose the fun of figuring things out. If I had to go back and do it again, I’d just play the first time offline to avoid the massive spoilers. Sometimes you’ll just activate them by accident though, and you’ll wish you hadn’t. It’s much less of a problem in Bloodborne, since the game’s secret areas are hard to convey through vague text, but it’s still there and annoying.
Furthermore, don’t summon other people or NPCs for regular play or boss fights. I realize that they want to encourage people to play together, but trust me. Any sort of summons on bosses basically trivialize the encounter, even when they get a larger health pool. When they focus on another player, they ignore you entirely, giving you free reign to do whatever you want. I followed that advice to the letter this time, and fought every boss solo – I recommend you do the same! This time, I helped a friend play through the game cooperatively. While I can say it was fun, the challenge almost completely disappears when playing with other people (for the most part). My criticism still stands despite enjoying a friendly night of beast slaying!
Conclusions
But, I can’t say the accumulation of tiny flaws really affected my enjoyment of Bloodborne at all. In fact, I think one word sufficiently covers how I felt playing the game: enthralled. I can’t really quite explain it, but all of Bloodborne’s minute changes to the Souls formula really resonated with me. Finally, the game fixed the niggling issues with combat, upping the speed and complexity of its in-game decisions. Finally, they removed some of the overly complex stat choices that didn’t give a clear understanding of what I was even upgrading (heck, I’d prefer if they get rid of them entirely – this is barely an RPG at this point). Finally, they can focus their levels around a single specific build, just like it seemed the Souls series balanced the games around all along.
Somehow, they also managed to make the setting an integral part of the game design. Yes, the seemingly generic “spooky scary” theme makes for a good spot for jump scares, but that same design also means the developers keep you on your toes constantly. Dark areas make for dangerous areas, and a new challenge lurking around every corner is a feast for a video gamer player. When one of those crows make a horrifically loud sound as it attacks you in the middle of the night, you’ll know exactly what I mean – quickly reacting and solving problems is a basic pleasure, but Bloodborne elevates it to an art form. Every part of the game works together with the rest, and it’s rare a game does this so well.
Better yet, Bloodborne gets to be a sequel without the baggage of being a sequel. It can bring new ideas to the table; it can be a wild and crazy video game experience. Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team earned enough goodwill from people with lots of money that he can make games with an uncompromising aesthetic and mechanical vision – Bloodborne wouldn’t exist without that free license to simply make something holistically original and amazing. We end up with a unique world with a wonderful lore and a continual descent into madness as you battle weird, unfathomable creatures. Dark Souls must remain in the realm of dark fantasy, but Bloodborne can go in any direction its creators willed it – that makes all the difference in making for a surprising, unique experience.
At this point, I should note that I’ve gone out of my way to avoid spoiling anything at all, and that’s for good reason – I think the best way to play this game is to know almost nothing about its story. I spoiled it for myself, of course, but I can imagine this game producing a far larger effect on its players if they didn’t know anything going in. Alas, I am a scholar when it comes to these things, and so I inevitably ended up messing this up when I did research for my Dark Souls III review. Even on a pure gaming level, Bloodborne still excels.
And, I suppose, that’s why it gets a five star rating. I would prefer you enjoy it blind before anything else, so consider this my wholehearted recommendation to buy, play, and enjoy Bloodborne!
