Bloodborne Review: Interesting, but Ultimately Disappointing

Dark Souls has been one of the most influential video games over the last decade, with its unique gameplay formula and entire presentation becoming a standard of comparison whenever people talk about melee combat, level design, and difficulty in other video games. The Souls series has been such a cultural phenomenon that it's essentially become its own sub-genre of games, with the "Souls-like" term catching on as a way to describe other, similar types of games who've taken clear inspiration from Dark Souls. In 2015, between the release of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, developer From Software released Bloodborne, a main-entry "Souls-like" (or Soulsborne) game, which is basically just a spin-off from Dark Souls, taking the core gameplay concepts and mechanics from Dark Souls and giving them a complete make-over with a whole new setting and a bunch of mechanical tweaks on the familiar formula.

Speaking as someone who's played all four of the Souls games in order, starting with the original Demon's Souls, Bloodborne breathes a lot of new life into a gameplay formula that's become a little too tired and repetitive over the years, but ultimately doesn't set itself apart from the Souls series as much as I would have liked it to. In practice, my experience playing Bloodborne started with excited optimism as I relished the positive effect many of its changes had on the core gameplay formula, until about halfway through when I started to feel like I was just playing Yet Another Version of the exact same game I've already played four times previously over the last decade -- this now being the fifth. And the more I played, the more I started to feel subtly disappointed and underwhelmed by some of the game's other design elements, and by the missed opportunities to do something more with the potential that a spin-off game could have.

Bloodborne takes place in a Victorian Gothic setting called Yharnam, where some of its scholars have discovered an eldritch race of alien gods, and have begun to worship them and enact blood rituals in order to commune and become one with the Great Ones. As a side effect of these rituals, portions of the population began to turn into literal beasts, and so Yharnam has periodic "hunts" where so-called "hunters" seek to eradicate the beasts. You play as one of these hunters, an outsider come to Yharnam in search of "paleblood" who undergoes a blood transfusion to become imbibed with Yharnamite blood, signs a contract, and becomes bound to the Hunter's Dream, a transient dream-like place from which you awaken to slay the nightmares of the real world. The rest of the game has you exploring Yharnam and learning about its history while fighting grotesque beasts and monsters in the process of seeking out the "paleblood."

There's a lot of really interesting things going on within this world, but in true Dark Souls fashion, the backstory, lore, and even the current events to which you are witness throughout your actual playthrough are so heavily obfuscated behind vague hints and clues that it's hard to really decipher what's actually going on. Bloodborne uses the classic Souls style of storytelling where there isn't much overt storytelling that explains what's happening or why you're doing the things you're doing; rather, you have to piece everything together yourself by reading item descriptions and interpreting random off-hand comments made in passing by other characters. In contrast to other Souls games, however, Bloodborne gives you practically zero introduction to any of its characters, locations, or concepts before thrusting you right into gameplay on a main quest to find some nebulous MacGuffin known as "paleblood" so that you can "transcend the hunt," an objective which is only given to you by a scrawled piece of paper when you wake up. The introductory cutscene gives zero explanation of Yharnam's history, what blood ministration is, what the purpose of a contract or a blood transfusion is supposed to be, what a "hunter" is and why you've become one, what the "hunt" is supposed to be, what those zombie-children are or what they did when they crawled on top of you, why a beastly monster spawned from a pool of blood and was set on fire, and most importantly, what paleblood is and why you should care about finding it.

This sort of cold-start intro where you're dumped into the world and gameplay with zero explanation can be good for creating a more interesting and compelling mystery for inquisitive minds, since it forces you to seek out answers to these questions and can make the world seem more alluring when you don't know anything about it upfront, but that can also backfire and make the player less interested when you're given zero context for what anything is or why you should care. Consequently, I spent my first several hours just feeling confused and awkwardly stumbling around, viewing everything from a purely gameplay-oriented mindset, mindlessly killing enemies and advancing to new areas just so I could beat the level and move on to the next one. It almost took me out of the world, in other words, instead of helping to immerse me within it. Demon's Souls, in contrast, explains the plight of Boletaria to you and how it came to be, while also giving you a clear goal and motivation for what you're trying to accomplish, all before you ever set foot in its world, so that you can move through its world with purpose and understanding, even though the intro holds back many of its details and still expects you to figure most things out for yourself. Having at least some context at the start of a game can make it easier to get into it and find motivation to continue, as opposed to what Bloodborne does which is like starting a movie 30 minutes in and having to figure out what's going on without any of the first act exposition.

Despite my contempt for the lack of any sort of exposition whatsoever, I ultimately prefer the story elements, themes, concepts, and imagery of Bloodborne to those of the Dark Souls games. The Victorian Gothic setting feels more unique and interesting to me than Dark Souls' take on the usual "dark fantasy" genre, and I feel like there's a more interesting backstory of what's happening in Yharnam than there is (or was) in Lordran, Drangleic, or Lothric. The Dark Souls games are all about rekindling the Age of Fire, which I guess is supposed to be the spark of life and prosperity or something, as if the fire has simply burned out over time, whereas Bloodborne is all about the horrifying consequences of humanity trying to ascend to a higher plane of existence by communing with ancient eldritch gods. The other games have their moments of horror, but they ultimately feel like fantasy games; Bloodborne, on the other hand, takes a much stronger turn towards the realm of horror, with its story feeling like something from an HP Lovecraft novel that's been adapted to film by John Carpenter. As a fan of the horror genre, and of the concepts Lovecraft explored in a lot of his stories with cosmic space gods being so alien and unfathomable to the human mind that their mere existence is enough to drive one insane, I found the story elements in Bloodborne really interesting, once the story actually got itself going in the second half of the game.

I particularly enjoyed the ending and the implications it had on the entire game, where after vanquishing the nightmare I refused Gehrman's final wish to help me awaken from the Hunter's Dream, and an Elder God descended from the moon to embrace me, putting me in Gehrman's role as the new First Hunter for a new cycle of a new Hunt. It was fittingly appropriate that I was wearing a Mensis Cage during the final boss fight with Gehrman, and thus was wearing it while bound to Gehrman's wheelchair in the final cutscene. I don't know if that's considered the "bad ending" or whatever, since apparently there are multiple endings, but I feel like it sets up the cyclical nature of the Dream and Hunt, and the eldritch gods' control over these realms, in a far more concrete way than Dark Souls' usual depictions of the cyclical Ages of Fire. Plus, it's a bit of a dark, depressing ending where it feels like the elder gods ultimately won and that I was just a pawn in their grand scheme, and I tend to like those sorts of dark endings in entertainment media. The ending felt incredibly anti-climactic, however, because it seemed to come out of nowhere to me. It did not feel like that moment, when you're confronted by Gehrman in the Hunter's Dream, was what the whole game had been building towards. The whole time I was supposed to be seeking out the paleblood to transcend the hunt, but it was never really clear that I had found the paleblood, or what the paleblood actually was, and so the ending just seemed really abrupt to me. The only reason I even refused Gehrman at the apparent end of the game was because I thought I still had to find the paleblood and that there was still more game left to play, and so I didn't want to go through with what seemed like a definite Game Over cutscene.

The game's obtuseness with the storytelling extends to the gameplay mechanics as well, which again is par for the course for From Software but yet again it feels like they exceeded themselves with Bloodborne. Unlike other Souls games, there's basically no tutorial area -- you're dropped right into the first level with floor messages that tell you how to do light attacks, and how to lock-on to an enemy, and that's about it. There's no gradual buildup as the game introduces mechanics and concepts one at a time in a safe testing environment so that you can really understand how the game works before "the true Demon's Souls Bloodborne starts here" -- it just pushes you right into the deep end of the pool. Any and all tutorial messages about how the combat works are in the hub area of the Hunter's Dream, so at least there are messages somewhere, but they're given to you completely out of context with no way to test them out. Other things, like Insight (what it is, how it works, why you would want it), how to upgrade weapons and unlock gem slots, and even super important things like invasions or how to level up, are never explained to you. I played for four hours before figuring out how to level up because it wasn't even an available option to me, and had to be told how in a YouTube comment, and still never found out how to invade other players because I was apparently expected to buy a co-op item first, which I had no interest in, before the PVP item would even become available to me.

Quests and other important world interactions are likewise incredibly obtuse. At one point a character sends you looking for her sister, who's apparently gone missing, but with no indication of where she might have gone or where you should even start looking. Apparently, to resolve this quest, you have to play the game for a while, kill a boss in a separate level several stages later, then come back and re-explore an area you had previously cleared and kill an enemy you've probably already killed a few times before, with no real indication that this enemy would now drop a new item. Many of the character interactions, in fact, have really obtuse and highly specific trigger conditions that can be incredibly easy to miss, even for thorough explorers; even though I'd discovered every location, killed every boss, and felt like I'd explored every area, I still missed several characters and questlines that I feel like I just never had the opportunity to even trigger because I didn't psychically know that I had to backtrack through previous areas after killing a requisite amount of bosses to trigger extra content. To my credit, I did try to seek out those extra interactions, but after a few failed attempts that led nowhere I gave up because I wasn't getting any sort of positive feedback and didn't want to continue pointlessly wasting time on wild goose chases or barking up the wrong trees in a fruitless effort to seek out extra content that, for all I knew, might not even exist.

A similar thing happens with the summons letter to Cainhurst. At one point you find an invitation addressed to you personally, with a vague message about seeking a stagecoach in Hemwick Crossing -- except that Hemwick Crossing is not an actual, named location in the game, and there is no physical stagecoach anywhere that you can actually discover in Hemwick Charnel Lane to help you find where you're supposed to go. The stagecoach only appears when you've already found the exact, specific location you need to be in to trigger the cutscene that transports you to Cainhurst, and the activation area to trigger this cutscene is so narrow that you can be standing at and walking all around the crossroads in Hemwick Charnel Lane and never trigger the cutscene. I, for instance, correctly guessed where I had to go and ran right past it, missing the cutscene entirely, because I didn't realize I had to be practically touching a random spire for the cutscene to trigger until I looked the solution up later. There's plenty of other examples of weird, inexplicable things that seem like they should be important but about which you're given zero hints, such as a spider-like altar that you can interact with after beating a boss but with the only option being to "do nothing," with no indication of what else you might possibly be able to do at that location or why you can even interact with it at all, or when you get the "Make Contact" gesture in a highly suggestive area that apparently doesn't work in that level at all -- only in a much later level in a completely optional, hidden area after you've long forgotten that you even have that gesture.

As with the Dark Souls games, you basically have to play this game with a guide, or else waste dozens of hours through tedious trial-and-error trying literally everything possible to get the most out of it. To be clear, I'm totally on board with the game having hidden secrets and not spelling everything out to you, because there's genuinely rewarding satisfaction in discovering some of these hidden things for the specific reason that they are so well-hidden -- some discoveries are actually pretty mind-blowing, and it's pretty refreshing playing a game that isn't dragging you by the nose to show you all of its content, where you have to put in actual work to figure out and discover its secrets -- but at the same time I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect players to be able to figure some of this stuff out on your own without any sort of reasonable clues (or even positive feedback when you're on the right track) from the game itself. Mind you, this isn't an issue unique to Bloodborne, since every Souls game has had heaps of obtuse gameplay designs that necessitated a guide to figure out, but that doesn't really excuse or justify these design elements just because the other games did it, too -- it's something I've taken issue with ever since Demon's Souls' utterly incomprehensible "world tendency" system, and it's something I wish could've been less of an issue in Bloodborne, as opposed to being seemingly even more extreme in some cases.

The level design in Bloodborne is, fortunately, some of the best in the entire series. There are a ton of different areas to explore, and it always feels like you have two or three different areas unlocked at any given time, which you can explore in whatever order you wish -- a pleasant change of pace from Dark Souls 2 and 3, both of which often felt a little too linear and restrictive in terms of how you explored levels or how you progressed from area to area. With Bloodborne, I felt like I spent most of my playthrough just trying to keep track of all the different side paths and alternate areas that I noticed but had to make a mental note to come back to, because the game is always putting you in situations where you have to decide between this path or that path, and for every path you choose there are two or three others you've had to ignore for the time being. Some areas of the game, like Central Yharnam, the Forbidden Woods, Yahar'gul, the Nightmare Frontier, and pretty much everywhere in the Old Hunters DLC, are absolutely massive and harken back to the level design of Demon's Souls, where each area is a sprawling web of interconnected pathways where you make progress by unlocking a variety of shortcuts from a more centrally-located focal point, a task that takes a bit more thinking and observation than simply following the path forward to the next bonfire.

Despite the deeply complex and engaging level design, exploration feels really lacking in discovery. That is to say, you don't find much in the way of interesting loot while exploring levels because it's all mostly consumable items, most of which are blood echoes, blood vials, or quicksilver bullets. It feels like there are significantly fewer weapons and armors in Bloodborne, as compared to the Souls games, which already hurts the feeling of discovery somewhat by the sheer fact that there are fewer pieces of equipment to actually discover, but making matters worse is that a lot of them are only obtained by buying them from a merchant after beating a boss, or completing a quest, or obtaining a "badge," all of which unlock new items from the merchants in the Hunter's Dream. So most of the time there's no moment of fanfare where the new item is bestowed upon you immediately after getting past a difficult foe or after keenly wandering into a hidden area as a direct reward for that accomplishment. Most of the time your reward is a few extra blood echoes, or maybe some Bolt Paper or Madmen's Knowledge, while the major rewards are withheld until later and relegated to the merchant windows, where the new items become dissociated from the environment and the task you accomplished to unlock them. It is, I believe, less inherently satisfying to overcome a tough challenge and be presented with what is essentially a voucher to be able to buy a reward at a later time, as opposed to getting the thematic reward then and there, and that can make long portions of the game feel mechanically unrewarding. It's usually pretty satisfying to defeat a boss and clear a level, and that inherent satisfaction should be all the motivation you need to continue, but there's not much mechanical reward for doing so, other than being able to progress to a new area to repeat the process with new enemies and a new boss at the end.

The bosses, meanwhile, aren't always that fun. As with the Souls games, Bloodborne's bosses should be its highlights, but they range in quality from super intense and exciting, to clunky and awkward, to weird and gimmicky. It's unreasonable to expect every single boss to be a home run, but it's at least fortunate there aren't any that I particularly disliked, except for a somewhat uninspired design pattern I noticed where it felt like almost half of the bosses were over-sized, beast-like, rampaging blobs of flesh. The prevalence of beast bosses makes sense considering the nature of the story, but it made a lot of them feel a little too similar to the point that I couldn't even identify which boss was which when going down a list of names in a wiki article. Many of these bosses seem to have pretty similar movesets (stomping at the ground underneath them, charging straight forward, doing wide arm swipes in front of them, or otherwise just flailing and thrashing and smashing about wildly), and fall victim to similar strategies where it felt like I was always just getting up underneath them, attacking two or three times, and dodging away to avoid a predictable counter-spam maneuver, and then going back in to repeat the process. For some, like The One Reborn, Ebrietas, and the Amygdala, I was able to basically just stand behind or underneath them the whole time spamming attacks. These similar appearances, similar movesets, and similar overall combat techniques made many of them blur together in my mind.

The more enjoyable bosses, to me, were the ones that would probably be considered the gimmick bosses, like the Witch of Hemwick, who turns invisible and so you have to listen and watch out for subtle signs of her whereabouts, or Micolash whom you have to chase through a bunch of labyrinthine corridors, or the Shadow of Yharnam which has three mages shooting fireballs and summoning giant snakes, or the Living Failures which is a type of mob boss that occasionally drops blue meteors from the sky, or Rom the Vacuous Spider which summons hordes of spiders. While these bosses aren't particularly challenging, they're at least memorable and interesting to me, as opposed to a lot of the others that end up looking and feeling pretty similar. Some of the more satisfying bosses like Father Gascoigne, Martyr Logarius, Gehrman, Lady Maria, and Orphan Kos (all of which seem to be some of the more popular ones), are all fairly standard humanoid enemies with more player-like movesets, which is what the Soulsborne combat system is designed best for, mainly because the camera actually cooperates with you and lets you see what's actually happening in these fights. The main challenge with the larger beast bosses is that they take up so much screen space that, once you get in close enough to attack, they end up going almost completely off-screen so you can't see what they're doing. If you use the lock-on system then the camera tends to pan up towards its center of mass, which then makes it so you can't see yourself or your environment, so you're just kind of screwed either way.

The game's overall visual design follows a more consistent style and tone than other Souls games, meaning that the levels adhere to the game's setting more closely and thus give the world a more coherent look. That makes sense, seeing as the game is mostly set in one city -- Yharnam -- and its surrounding areas, all of which took direct inspiration from the city itself, but that does have the consequence of making a lot of areas look and feel somewhat similar to other areas because you spend so much of the game exploring Victorian Gothic architecture with the same cold, de-saturated blue color temperature and a bunch of repeated graphical assets. After a while, it didn't really matter to me if I was in a city, or a mansion, or a church, or a college, or a castle, or a clinic -- it all started to blur together and made it difficult to feel like I was in those specific locations because the interior of the college looked and felt a lot like the interior of the castle, which felt a lot like the interior of the upper cathedral ward, and so on. I'm sure for some people "sticking to the theme" would be considered a positive aspect in Bloodborne's favor, but one of the things I appreciated most about the first Dark Souls was how much thematic and aesthetic variety it had between its levels, with the scenery changing dramatically as you went from Anor Londo to the Duke's Archives to the Crystal Caves to the Darkroot Basin to the Demon Ruins, and so on. These changes helped to keep the game feeling fresh and interesting to me, whereas Bloodborne gets to feel a little stale and monotonous over time.

The monotonous visual design can make even navigating the levels themselves a bit of a chore, since even places within levels can start to look pretty samey. Central Yharnam is probably the worst offender since a lot of it takes place in cramped city streets and back alleys, all of which recycle the same assets and have the same general look. If you're trying to get back to a specific area, either for the sake of a quest or just to explore another path you had to save for later, it's even more difficult because many of the back alleys and side paths are hidden around sharp corners, with tall buildings everywhere literally hiding places from view so that you can't actually see places or how they connect until you're already at your destination. Mind you, this is the area of the game with about a half-dozen or more NPC's who're all hiding in their homes as disembodied voices whom you don't actually see, and whose presence as an interactive NPC is only denoted by a red lantern outside their building. So when you get a quest from someone asking for you to find them a "safe place" and you later have to return to that NPC once you've actually found one, good luck remembering which red lantern it was, since all the lanterns and all the buildings look virtually identical. Even if you remember which specific building it was, and what the streetview around it looked like, it can still be a challenge to remember how to get back to that specific one since these interactive buildings are all tucked away in all different spots of the level. Maybe it's just a personal issue I had with having to take sporadic breaks, but it felt like a perfect storm of confusing level design, homogeneous visual design, and non-existent character design leading to a whole bunch of near unmemorable blurs.

The combat system plays almost identically to Dark Souls, except with a few key twists. For starters, everything feels a little faster; attack animations start and play out more quickly, and roll-dodging (or quick-step dodging, as it functions when you're locked-on to an enemy) moves you a greater distance at a faster rate, increasing the general pace of combat by giving you shorter windows of reaction time in which to avoid an attack or to execute an attack of your own. The other major change is the almost complete removal of shields, which have now been replaced with guns in the left-hand equipment slot, effectively removing highly defensive combat tactics like shield turtling and promoting a stronger degree of offensive gameplay, with the left-hand gun being able to perform ranged attacks that damage and stagger your opponent and, if timed correctly to interrupt an enemy attack, can function exactly a shield parry leaving your enemy vulnerable to a high-damage counter-attack riposte. Critical backstabs, likewise, take more deliberate effort to pull off since they only trigger by staggering an enemy by hitting them in a weak point with a fully-charged R2 attack. Other tweaks include a quasi-return of the magic meter in the form of silver bullets, which fuel guns and other arcane attacks, a "rally" system that allows you to recover lost health after being hit by an enemy if you successfully hit them back within a limited time window, and a move away from the old Estus-based healing system to something closer in style to the farm-able Moon Grass healing system of Demon's Souls. Right-hand weapons also have more dynamic stances, similar to how you could one-hand or two-hand a weapon in Dark Souls, except now the weapon "transforms" into a completely different weapon with a radically different moveset.

Generally speaking, these are all excellent changes that I enjoy. Ever since the original Dark Souls first came out, its combat felt much slower and more sluggish to me, compared to Demon's Souls, and Dark Souls 2 kind of continued that trend, and so I find it extremely refreshing for Bloodborne to go back to the faster speed and more aggressive style of Demon's Souls. It even seems to one-up Demon's Souls in this department, considering the overall increase in speed and the complete absence of shields. Some people may consider the lack of shields to be a knock against Bloodborne, but I personally never used shields in any previous Souls games because I always found timing dodges to be more satisfying and rewarding, as opposed to just standing there with a raised shield. Backstabs were always ridiculously broken in the previous Souls games (Dark Souls 1 PVP was basically a cesspool of backstab fishing), and so it's nice that it takes more time and careful positioning to set up a backstab. The rally system, in particular, creates a really engaging element of "risk versus reward" where it encourages you to jump right back into a fight and keep attacking after you get hit so that you can get some free health recovery, but that also puts you at greater risk to take more damage in the process. You can play it safe by backing away and using a blood vial to heal, but those are limited and so there's a possibility you might eventually run out. It's therefore always tempting to try to get as much free healing as possible, but if you're too reckless it could backfire and get you killed.

While I like the rally system, I don't care much for the blood vial system. The Estus system introduced in the first Dark Souls was one of the single best improvements Dark Souls made over Demon's Souls, with the new limitations on healing adding a stronger element of survival to the core gameplay and forcing you to "git gud" enough to be able to make it through a particular level with only a certain amount of heals because you couldn't just farm Moon Grass and have a near infinite supply to help you get through a tough level or encounter. In addition, the Estus system also completely removed grass farming from the game because your Estus flasks always replenished back to maximum capacity any time you rested at a bonfire, so that you always had the minimum number of healing items From Soft intended for you to be able to have any time you attempted a particular boss or level. It was pretty rewarding, therefore, to find an upgrade that would let you carry more Estus flasks, or that would make them more effective. Bloodborne instead opts to give you a maximum allotment of 20 blood vials that can be carried with you into a level, right from the start of the game, with basically no way to improve them, but doesn't give you free refills when you rest at lantern. Rather, you have to farm more blood vials by defeating enemies, or by purchasing them from a store with blood echoes -- the game's currency analogous to souls from the Souls games. While you can only carry 20 at a time, your excess will be put in storage and automatically withdrawn when you return to the Hunter's Dream, the game's hub.

The problem with this system is two-fold. The first is that it removes a lot of tension from trying to make it through a level with only a limited number of healing items when enemies frequently replenish your supply -- they're no longer a limited supply and so you can easily find yourself at or near your maximum allotment while exploring a level because you just keep picking up more vials as you use them. The second problem is that you can easily run out if you find yourself up against a challenging boss that keeps killing you, because at that point you're only spending blood vials and never actually accruing more -- your supply just steadily dwindles until you have none left and are then forced to stop what you're doing to go farm more. I suppose this could be viewed as a fair consequence for repeated failure, but in practice all it does is force you to stop attempting to "git gud" at the boss and waste your time with tedious, mindless repetition, which is really just adding salt to the wound, kicking you while you're down. In practice, the blood vial system feels like it's on an inverted bell curve where you're always either at full supply or completely out, with very little in-between. I, for one, usually always had more than enough to get through any given level until I suddenly found myself completely out when butting my head repeatedly against a challenging boss. Throughout the whole game I only ran into a handful of occasions when I felt any sort of tension where I was running low on blood vials while exploring an unfamiliar area, anxiously hoping to unlock the next shortcut or reach the next lamp before I ran out, which was a much more prevalent feeling in the first Dark Souls and one of its better qualities.

Guns, likewise, are tied to a limited ammunition system where you can only carry 20 silver bullets at a time, with excess being placed in storage until you return to the Hunter's Dream. As with blood vials, enemies drop silver bullets and you can also buy more, but you can also forcibly replenish five extra bullets by sacrificing a portion of your health. Guns are another thing I enjoy in Bloodborne, since they add a ranged element to the combat system that synergizes well with melee combat by slotting into the left hand and being able to fire quickly and easily, even in the middle of a melee combo. Bows and crossbows always felt clunky and awkward in the Souls games, but I found myself actually desiring to use guns from time to time in Bloodborne, even though I was completely ignoring the Bloodtinge stat which governs their efficacy. I particularly enjoy how parrying is now tied to guns, which have an ammo limit, since it prevents players from endlessly parry-spamming in PVP, while also making the parry action a little less punishing if you get the timing wrong because you'll at least do some damage and might still get the chance to stagger your opponent and interrupt their attack, as opposed to simply whiffing with your shield and getting walloped for full damage. The bullets are also multi-functional and act as ammunition for arcane abilities, basically like magic spells in Dark Souls. This is a welcome change since it gives you a generic pool of "mana" to use however you wish, whether that be using a few powerful abilities a few times or using weaker abilities more often, like the old mana meter in Demon's Souls, as opposed to having arbitrary restrictions on each individual spell like in Dark Souls.

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be very many arcane abilities in the game. I've never been a huge fan of spellcasting in the Souls games, but I thought I might give it a try in Bloodborne, since it was a new IP and might handle things a little differently, but it was pretty disappointing to realize that I had literally zero chance to even try out arcane abilities before feeling like I had to start committing to a particular build, because arcane abilities don't even start showing up until almost halfway through the game. By that point I'd already invested so heavily into strength and dexterity that I couldn't justify branching out to the arcane stat just to experiment with a couple of highly situational-looking spells like AOE knockback, or a weapon buff that just added extra damage like any ordinary item. Likewise, I wanted to keep the possibility open that maybe I would try out Skill weapons -- although I normally like to play these games with ultra greatswords and giant hammers, I figured maybe the faster pace of combat would make Dexterity-esque weapons more satisfying -- but after several hours spread across multiple play sessions I simply wasn't finding any Skill weapons other than the Threaded Cane, which was one of the three starter weapons, and which I didn't like that much. But because I wasn't finding other Skill weapons I had no way of knowing whether I just didn't like that particular weapon, or if I didn't like Skill weapons in general.

It turns out there aren't a whole lot of weapons in Bloodborne, with only 15 melee weapons and six guns in the base game. To be fair, those 15 weapons effectively double to 30 since every melee weapon has two radically different forms; a single weapon equipped to the right hand can transform from a one-handed axe into a halberd, or from a blunt walking cane into a serrated whip. This is a cool feature, since it gives a single weapon slot much greater versatility -- instead of having to swap your stance between one-handed and two-handed to unlock alternate movesets, or completely switch equipped weapons, both of which interrupt the flow of combat, Bloodborne's trick weapons allow you to switch forms right in the middle of a fight, and even right in the middle of a combo with complete fluidity. This is an evolution that I wholeheartedly enjoy, especially since it allows certain builds to use weapon types that wouldn't typically be part of those playstyles in the Souls games (like a Strength character being able to make good use of a one-handed straight sword to back up his giant hammer against quicker foes), but I do wish there were a few more total melee weapons than just 15.

In comparison, Dark Souls had over 100 melee weapons; Dark Souls 2 had almost twice that many. To be fair, a lot of the weapons in those games were essentially clones of other, similar weapons with only minor variations in stats, which rendered many of them objectively obsolete or inferior to other weapons that were the exact same but better, and only a few weapons within a particular subcategory had unique or slightly different movesets. So the total number in Dark Souls is a little inflated, but at least that gave you a sense of anticipation as you explored and progressed through the game, because you knew there would be more weapons to acquire down the road, but not exactly what, where, or when. It also meant there was actual variety and choices to make when it came to build diversity. If I wanted to use a Great Hammer in Dark Souls 2, I had a choice between 12 different options, as opposed to exactly one in Bloodborne, and that choice could be based on any number of factors from stat scaling, damage values, weight values, movesets, upgrade paths, reach, or even just how it looked. That choice added an extra strategic element to the gameplay, especially in terms of equipment load, because you had to weigh the pros and cons of each weapon -- a strong weapon might deal a ton of damage but weigh so much that you'd lose mobility, or have better range but weaker stagger ability. With Bloodborne, those types of decisions are streamlined to such a degree that there's barely any choice.

It follows logically that, the fewer total weapons exist in a game, the fewer choices you have, but the choice gets even narrower when you consider that the selection of weapons is further narrowed by their stat-scaling, meaning that about half of the weapons available will likely not scale well with whatever type of build you're specializing in. I chose to focus on Strength, for instance, meaning that only five of the 15 weapons had B-scaling or higher with Strength. Of those five, I never found one of them because it was a reward for an NPC questline that I never followed up on because I forgot all about him, and I absolutely didn't like another one, so in practice I only ever had a real choice of three weapons, one of which was a starter weapon that I got near the very beginning of the game, meaning I really only got to discover two new fun, interesting weapons that I enjoyed and that actually worked well with my stats. Eventually I started putting points into Skill because I was getting diminishing returns on Strength, but by that point I was near the end of the game, and too locked in with my choice of weapons and didn't have enough materials to upgrade any Skill weapons to the point that they'd become as viable as my primary weapons. At least, not without a bunch of tedious, repetitive farming.

Which brings up another minor complaint: the relative lack of upper-tier upgrade materials further narrows your decision space of what weapons to use because there just aren't enough Blood Stone Chunks to experiment with weapons willy-nilly. And since they're restricted towards the later stages of the game, it's possible that you may find new interesting weapons that just aren't viable because you've already upgraded other weapons and aren't able to upgrade any more new ones. Some of the Old Hunters DLC weapons are pretty cool and exciting, for instance, but since the DLC is considered to be more of a late-game area you don't get any of them until near the end of your playthrough, which by that point meant I only had enough Chunks to upgrade a single DLC weapon and not much time to actually enjoy it. The Old Hunters helps to rectify some of the game's equipment issues, however, since it nearly doubles the total melee weapon count from 15 to 26, and unlike the base game you acquire them as actual rewards for defeating bosses or thoroughly exploring levels -- you don't just buy them in a store at a later time. It feels more like Dark Souls in that regard, and that makes exploring the DLC areas a lot more rewarding because there are actual things to discover.

Armor sets, likewise, are equally limited, which puts a serious damper on the game's Fashion Souls potential, especially considering many of them seem to implement similar styles with long-flowing overcoats. In other words, there's basically only one style of armor in the game, two if you count the fact that some of them look more like robes; as with the rest of the game's visual design it feels like a bunch of different flavors of the same thing. They all have pretty similar stats, too, so most of the time it feels like your decision of what to wear doesn't really matter unless you're trying to stack a specific resistance like frenzy, poison, or fire, or something. Consequently, every time I discovered a new armor set I was a little underwhelmed realizing "Oh, it's a little better in some ways, and a little worse in others." Which I guess is actually to the benefit of Fashion Souls when the stats have so little variation that you generally wear whatever looks coolest, and you don't even have to worry about equipment load anymore, either. But just like the weapons, it took away from the feeling of progression because it rarely felt like I was discovering better armor sets; I played a lot of the game wearing the basic starter equipment because it seemed reasonably well-rounded, and found it hard to justify spending tens of thousands of blood echoes buying new armor just for the looks, since the stats on them never seemed that enticing either.

Another good change from Dark Souls is the rune and gem system, which sort of replace weapon infusions, ring slots, and covenant items. Rune slots function similar to rings, with you being able to equip up to three, which typically serve as passive modifiers to stats like increasing your health or stamina, letting you recover more health during rally attacks, letting you carry more blood vials, increasing certain types of resistances, and so on. A fourth slot is reserved for covenant runes, which signifies you as being bound to a particular covenant for online multiplayer purposes while also granting a particular bonus associated with that covenant, like how the Executioners get more powerful blood vials, or the Hunter of Hunters get increased stamina recovery, or the Lumenwood Kin get to transform into an eldritch monster, among others. Gems are used to upgrade weapons -- each weapon progressively unlocks three gem slots, which you can freely swap gems in and out of by using a workstation in the Hunter's Dream. These function similarly to infusions from Dark Souls, since you can use the gems to convert damage to different types of elements, or to add extra stat scaling, or to simply increase the damage, among other possibilities. This is a fun system because it offers a lot more freedom and flexibility in terms of weapon modifications, since you aren't permanently locked in with one specific choice of infusion, and you can even combine different types of gems for a variety of simultaneous effects. Finding new gems is therefore probably the most rewarding aspect of exploration, but it's unfortunate that many of the better, more powerful ones are tucked away in the Chalice Dungeons, which are some of the least interesting content that From Software has ever put into a Soulsborne game.

Chalice Dungeons are basically randomly-generated dungeons where you have to descend through a series of floors with sprawling layouts of rooms, trying to find a special lever somewhere on each floor to unlock the way down to the next floor, with a boss waiting at the end of each floor. The actual layouts and contents of all these rooms can be somewhat randomized, with different combinations of rooms and enemies in each dungeon. I like this concept in theory, since it gives you a bunch of extra side content with enough randomization that you can't rely on meta-gaming foresight to know what to expect up ahead, and best of all it has several unique bosses that aren't found anywhere in the rest of the game. Plus, I have been known to enjoy more straightforward, sort of old-school style dungeon crawlers, so that concept crossed with Dark Souls combat seemed like a cool idea. Unfortunately, the dungeons just feel so stale, bland, artificial, and repetitive that I got bored and lost all interest after only my second one, though I did a third one just as an obligation, and then went back to do two more after finishing the game, just for the sake of this review. To put it simply, the Chalice Dungeons feel like some other developer had access to the Dark Souls combat system, but otherwise had no idea how to actually make a Souls game. They have the function of a Souls game, but without the actual soul of a Souls game.

The main issue is that they're just, so, damn, repetitive. Every dungeon has similar combinations of the exact same rooms and the exact same enemies, just pieced together in different orders and combinations, and so it always feels like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. Later dungeons seem to at least mix up the visual style, but it's basically just by re-texturing the existing rooms and layouts, which just feels like the cheapest, laziest way to mix up the dungeons. Making matters even worse is that rooms aren't just repeated between dungeons, but also between floors of the same dungeon, and even many of the bosses are just stronger versions of basic enemies or straight-up rehashes of other bosses you've already fought. And generally speaking, there aren't any satisfying rewards to find within these dungeons until you start getting into the later and deeper dungeons; until then, you're mainly rewarded with more ritual materials to create more dungeons, which you have to slog your way through in order to get to the later, deeper dungeons that actually introduce new equipment, interesting bosses, and more powerful gems. Unfortunately, the earlier dungeons are just so lame that I had zero patience to grind my way through dungeons just to get to the good part of it all. It's hard to complain about optional side content, but I really feel like they should have cut out all the BS earlier dungeons, or at least put more interesting bosses and rewards in the earlier ones so that there's some kind of actual incentive to do them, and some early indication of why you should consider sticking with them.

The gems that you get from these dungeons, meanwhile, are somewhat game-breaking in terms of their effect on PVP. Gems farmed from the deepest dungeons can increase your total damage output by 25% or more, and you can stack multiples of these gems for an insane boost in damage. That's all fine and good when it comes to solo gameplay, but creates a horribly imbalanced playing field when it comes to online PVP, since a player who has grinded through dungeons and farmed all of the best gems and gotten the luckiest drops through RNG will have a huge advantage over someone who hasn't put in that time and effort. Hardcore PVP'ers will go through that effort to get the best rewards, which means that if you want to be competitive in online PVP, and not get brutally destroyed, then you basically have to do so as well. The Souls games always had a "meta" element where players could do all the right things to give themselves a competitive advantage, but if you were good enough at the game then you could still get by and hang with the hardcore meta-PVP'ers with just the basic stuff you acquire through the main game, through skill alone, whereas Bloodborne adds an almost MMORPG-style grind element where, given two players with similar skillsets, the one who's effectively "higher level" by virtue of having higher-level gear will be able to beat the other through sheer stats alone.

Ignoring these potential statistical imbalances, the actual PVP systems in Bloodborne leave a lot to be desired. I've always been a big fan of the invasion system that Demon's Souls invented, where you can be playing the game by yourself and be invaded by another player trying to kill you, since other players can be more challenging than NPC's, and it can also lead to a lot of unique and memorable, unscripted experiences. Whereas you could be invaded practically anywhere in the other games, Bloodborne only allows invasions in a handful of areas with Bell Maiden enemies, whose bell-ringing calls to other players to invade, and only as long as those Bell Maidens are still alive -- once you kill the Bell Maiden, all invasions are off in that area -- which significantly reduces the potential number of invasions you might experience in a normal playthrough. Invaders also seem to be prioritized to match with hosts who've summoned co-op allies, reducing the frequency with which solo hosts get invaded. I played my entire game in Online Mode, never engaging in any co-op, and only got invaded four times, by only two different players (technically I got invaded at least five times, by a third player, but I fell of a cliff before he actually spawned into the world). Meanwhile, I experienced really bad latency issues in those fights, with obvious hits that I landed either not hitting at all, or not registering the damage until several seconds later, while I seemed to get hit by phantom attacks or not get damaged by attacks that looked like they should have hit me, making it basically impossible to fight with any kind of control because I may as well have been pressing buttons randomly.

I'm also not sure how I feel about guns in PVP. Earlier in this review I mentioned that I liked having an ammo limit tied to the parry ability, since Dark Souls PVP was often ruined by passive, reactionary parry-spammers, but with Bloodborne adding ranged damage to the parry skill, it seems like a would be even easier to punish reckless offense by just keeping your distance and only attacking after the opponent attacks. If you do it right, you'll either be out of range of the attack, or can sneak an attack in during or after their attack, and if you're lucky you'll even get a parry off and can then run in for a critical riposte. One thing that I've absolutely detested about Souls PVP is how much it rewards passive, reactive play styles while punishing aggressive offense, because then you get into fights where both of you just awkwardly dance around never actually attacking or doing anything risky. That seems to still be the case with Bloodborne, which is a real shame considering it was supposed to be all about promoting faster action and more aggressive playstyles. One of my two invaders, for instance, was using Simon's Bowblade to spam arrows at me, and I felt like I had no real chance to land any attacks because they were playing that passive, reactionary game and shooting me with arrows the whole time. Granted, I was years removed from Souls PVP at that point and had practically zero experience PVP'ing in Bloodborne so of course I was doing terribly, but it seems like you could just spam the gun with near impunity; even if you don't time the parry right, you'll still deal damage and stagger the opponent. At the very least, R1-spamming a gun seems a lot more feasible than R1-spamming a melee weapon.

This is all theoretical, of course, and I could be completely wrong about this, but I have very little desire to experiment with or "git gud" at PVP in Bloodborne because I just don't find it very appealing, whereas the other Souls games usually had me interested in trying out different PVP builds and doing end-game duels and setting up characters to invade specific areas. Maybe it's because the covenants seemed so obtuse and I had so little exposure to PVP in my first playthrough, but it kind of feels like PVP in Bloodborne was a bit of an afterthought. There's no PVP arena, no PVP-related boss (like the Old Monk from Demon's Souls, or the Looking Glass Knight in Dark Souls 2), only three areas with Bell Maidens, no way to re-spec your character for different builds, and seemingly no leveling up covenants. I can't even begin to describe covenants properly because they made no intuitive sense to me, based on the in-game item descriptions, and I never really understood what purpose they even served in the game.

Other technical things bother me, too, like the fact that Bloodborne felt the need to implement a bunch of redundant loading screens that weren't previously in any Souls game. The lamps act like bonfires from Dark Souls, allowing you to warp to and from them while also serving as check points, but you can't "rest" at the lamps to restock your supplies or to reset the level, so any time you want to do either of those things you have to warp back to the Hunter's Dream, sit through a loading screen, then walk over to a tomb stone and cycle through a list, warp back to the previous area, and sit through another loading screen. When, previously, restocking supplies and repopulating the level happen instantly when you sat down at a bonfire, so I'm not sure why they needed to change things in Bloodborne. Next up are issues with the controls. The primary issue is that the jump function is forcibly mapped to the circle button -- the same as the sprint button -- meaning it's really easy to find yourself in situations where you're sprinting and suddenly have to dodge an attack, only to find yourself doing a silly jump which not only makes you more vulnerable to attack because of its lower (or non-existent) invincibility frames but also moves you much further out of the way and locks you into a much longer animation. This is another area where From Soft took a step backward, since they'd already "fixed" this issue in Dark Souls 2 by letting you jump by clicking the left stick, instead of the sprint button.

Meanwhile, I find the game's input queueing system a little frustrating sometimes, since it can often lead to a lot of unintended, extra actions happening after the situation has changed. For instance, I might dodge a boss's attack and press the attack button twice, planning to perform two attacks, but the boss recovers faster than I expected and suddenly I need to dodge an attack, and even though I've pressed the circle button the game still thinks I want to attack again and so I get stuck attacking, which leads me to pressing the circle button again to try to dodge, which just queues up a second dodge that I didn't want to perform and puts me too far out of position to attack. This has been the case with every Souls game, so maybe it's more of a "feature" than an issue, but it's annoyed me in every other game and it annoys me here, too. Then there are random issues where the controls either don't queue at all, or simply don't register, like when I'm dodging out of an enemy's attack and press the triangle button so I can heal, only to find my character calmly walking around and not healing, or I'll queue up an attack with plenty of stamina and watch as my character stands perfectly still while getting a sword in the face. Often times while trying to dodge, I'll indicate a particular direction like "diagonally left" or "to the right" only to find my character doing something different like "straight forward" or "straight back." This one could conceivably be my fault, if my angle on the joystick was a little bit off and the game registered it differently, but it felt a little too prevalent to just be occasional user error, like the trigger zones on the joystick are a little too narrow or unforgiving, or lock you into only eight directions on the cardinal axes and their diagonals, as opposed to having full reign of the 360-degree radius. I don't know, it just frequently felt off to me.

My overall feeling on Bloodborne is that it's a game I want to like since it has some good ideas and improves on the Dark Souls formula in some key ways, like with the rally system and the cool functionality of trick weapons, but at the same it also changes some things for the worse, which had been perfect (or at least decent) as they were in the previous games, like the new blood vial healing system and the way online PVP works. Other things, like the lack of equipment variety and the fact that there isn't much in the way of rewarding discovery when it comes to exploration, feel pretty underwhelming, while new features like the Chalice Dungeons feel like wasted potential. While I absolutely love the theme and setting, it all started to blur together as the game went on, and the lore and backstory, while vastly more interesting to me than that of the Souls games, lacks any sort of focus or direction, which is made worse by the complete lack of any sort of expositional grounding in the intro cinematic or early stages of the game. I'm maybe also starting to grow a little weary of these games, having already played all four of the Souls games and even The Surge (a surprisingly good Dark Souls clone by Deck 13) before playing Bloodborne, and so the experience is no longer the unique, refreshing, eye-opening experience it once was, and the whole thing is maybe starting to become a little stale to me. With Bloodborne being a brand new IP I guess I was hoping it could change things up more substantially, instead of just being "more of the same" with a new coat of paint on it. Maybe Sekiro will satisfy that craving, but the end result of Bloodborne is somewhat disappointing and underwhelming to me despite (or perhaps because of) its great potential.