To begin, I mostly stumbled across Bloodborne because of its high rating and under that premise assumed that it has to be somewhat decent, which it is. On the whole though, it didn't strike me as spectacular as some people made it out to be for reasons I shall explain below.

The game handles woefully poorly, with often unresponsive controls particularly if you need to use a potion to heal yourself. It feels sluggish to play, which in a game that requires you to have fast reflexes just doesn't work well at all. This could be exacerbated by the awful framerate, which often can dip below the game's 30fps cap. 60fps would have been a much better framerate to aim for.
Bloodborne removes all magic/miracles and replaces them with hunter tools. These uninspired tools are completely useless. Instead of a mana bar or a usage amount, Bloodborne's hunter tools utilize your quicksilver (QS) bullet stock . The problem is, you also use your QS bullets to parry enemies. So you are faced with the choice of using either a completely weak and utterly useless tool, or use your bullets for parrying... I'll use them for parrying.
Instead of having dozens of weapons to choose from, From Software decided to go with a more stream-lined approach and decided to include 15 "trick" weapons. These trick weapons are pretty much just 2 weapon categories from the Souls series made into one weapon. For example, Bloodborne features the Hunter's Axe which is just a 1-hand axe and when transformed, is essentially a great axe (It's pretty overpowered). Some trick weapons don't even feature a transformation like the Tonitrus and the Chikage, they feature a buff making them nothing more than a mace and a katana (respectively) from Demon's Souls/Dark Souls. These weapons can be modified with blood gems which are dropped by enemies or found in chalice dungeons (more on that later). The effects of these gems vary from adding fire damage to your weapon, adding poison damage, increasing physical damage, etc. At the end of the day you'll end up using whichever gem you have in your inventory is the best, making this game mechanic essentially useless.
Chalice Dungeons are randomized dungeons that supposedly offer replayability... I found them to be a complete drag (Not to mention the framerate is consistently lower in chalice dungeons than it is during the course of the main game). You will receive a chalice from defeating a main game boss which you can then place on an altar in the hub world (Hunter's Dream). Your first set of chalice dungeons will not be procedurally generated, you can only access those through the use of what is called a root chalice. The dungeons will vary with different handicaps and difficulties, but ultimately they all look the same and play the same. I slogged my way through them to earn the platinum trophy.

Bloodborne's boss design is atrocious. The majority of the bosses are giants that have sweeping attacks, and there is 2 optional bosses that are nearly identical, on top of that adding the awful camera.
Writing, its the same type of story telling like other from software games - there is an absolute lack of it, its minimal lore, lack of interesting characters and development, NPCs are as shallow as they were in Dark Souls 2, they literally have no stories at all.
Such an overrated game, Bloodborne was a huge disappointment.

Took me fucking forever to get into because I kept bouncing off in the opening area since I didn't realize that the game wouldn't accept being played like the Souls games and actually rewarded me for playing it like I usually play action games, but once I did... holy shit, this was just one of the most downright incredible games that I've ever played and is just oozing with a thick atmosphere that I can't get enough of while also having what's possibly the most satisfying combat I've experienced in any game.

Some people have claimed that Bloodborne stands as one of the best games of all time, and that it's by far the best Fromsoft game. While I'm not sure I completely disagree with those statements, I feel like there's still a debate to be had on whether it actually is better than the Dark Souls games. To paraphrase the rest of this review, Bloodborne is amazing, but it's not completely flawless. There are certain problems with it's systems and content that could be done better.
The feel of Bloodborne's gameplay is great. It's difficult to go back to souls games after experiencing Bloodborne's faster pace and quicker controls. You probably already know this, everyone does at this point. The game encourages you to "rally" health you've just lost by attacking, which is a supposed to be a bonus for being aggressive. The problem with this system that I found, is that, often, you're better off regrouping and healing rather than rallying, because the amount of health you gain from rallying is marginal and will often get you hit by a follow up attack anyways, requiring you to use more of your precious blood vials. You can never seem to rally enough health back to make a real difference. This leads into the blood vial system, probably my single biggest complaint and the cause of most of my frustration in this game. It's a crime that this game was given a health recovery system that encourages grinding and farming. The estus system is so much better because it doesn't punish you for dying the way Bloodborne does. When you run out of blood vials, the only way to get more is to go find enemies that will drop them, or buy them from the hunter's dream, and in order to buy them, you'll need to get blood echoes. It's a system that isn't as bad in the late game as it is in the early game, but it's still inferior and I see it as nothing other than a waste of time.
As for the bosses, they can be either beasts, nightmare horrors, or humanoids. The beasts are, in my opinion, the worst types of bosses. I didn't enjoy the thrashing, unpredictable and wild nature of the beasts. You can spend a lot of time standing around waiting for a series of attacks to end instead of actively trying to dodge the attack you've memorized. You can't exactly learn as easily with the beasts because many of their start-up animations don't give good tells to what attack they're going to do next and it causes a lot of moments where you just accept that you're going to get hit and hope the right attack animation lines up so that you can hit them, instead of learning the attacks the way you would with the other bosses. The hunter and great one bosses are mostly excellent. Some might say that the parry system in Bloodborne makes hunter fights trivial, but I would argue that it only becomes a problem if you're severely overleveled and go into the fight trying to parry their every attack. It's certainly a downside when an epic boss can be dealt with in a matter of a couple dodges and around four well-timed pistol shots, it's a bit underwhelming, but I don't see a way to fix the issue without making them un-parryable. The Great One bosses are some of the most visually impressive in the game and most of them have movesets that are enjoyable to fight against. These are the Lovecraft-inspired nightmares from the cosmos that we were promised and they deliver.
The level design is excellent. Shortcuts, hidden paths, and mazes inside of interconnected levels is Bloodborne's bread and butter. The game is basically gothic arcitecture porn and much of the game is spent exploring city environments which happen to be my personal favorite type of area. I'd like to mention that the Nightmare Frontier and Castle Cainhurst (optional areas similar to Dark Soul's Painted World of Ariamis), feel like they needed to be bigger. Just when I was beginning to get lost exploring the environment, they ended with their respective bosses. They're fine as is, it just would have been nice to see them expanded on a bit more.
This leads me into my last complaint about Bloodborne, the length. Bloodborne's base game has 17 bosses, the lowest in any Fromsoft game. You can make the classic quality over quantity argument, but there are so many underwhelming bosses in Bloodborne that I don't think this really holds up. Micolash, One Reborn, Witches of Hemwick, Rom and Celestial Emissary stand out as some of the worst. Just as it feels like Bloodborne is going to enter its epic third act, it ends before the climax. After beating Mergo's Wet Nurse, I didn't feel like I had reached the endgame and while I know that it's kind of deplorable to ask more of a game with this much quality content, I wonder if the developers or producers purposely cut the Old Hunter's DLC out of the base game to sell for additional revenue, because the Old Hunter's DLC is the missing element from Bloodborne's base game that feels like the climax to this spectacular adventure into a nightmare-ravaged world of beasts and hunters, and it's disappointing that it's locked behind a paywall. So many of the figures you hear about in the lore and game world e.g. Ludwig, Kos(and her orphan), Lady Maria and Laurence, have been sentenced to DLC-land. That'll be $20. The counter argument to this is that "every one of the Dark Souls games have DLC as well, so why is it so bad in Bloodborne?". The difference between the Souls DLC and Bloodborne is that those games feel complete even without the DLC. Bloodborne sadly, does not.
This is still one of my favorite video games and despite my problems with the blood vial system and underdeveloped side areas, I still can't commend the game enough for successfully "granting us eyes" into a late 19th century fantasy world seeing the influence of entities beyond our comprehension. It's a game with both a horrible and beautiful aesthetic, and it's a masterpiece of its genre.

Favorite bosses: Gehrman, Moon Presence, Father Gascoinge, Martyr Logarius and Amygdala.

old opinion was wrong again. cool as fuck.

dlc has the problem every FROM dlc has where it starts good but reaches a point where they just go 'lmao' and shove 20 enemies the size of a small building that can kill you in 2 hits into an area that aggro alongside 30 smaller guys that try to pelt you from the sides.

that said micolash is the best boss fight in the game and if you disagree youre boring