Seems to be considered FromSoft's masterpiece by many. Certainly Bloodborne has the most impressive art direction of the Soulsborne games, which is saying something considering this is one of the strongest aspects of the series as a whole; the realm of Victorian England, nightmares and lycanthropy, eldritch at its most icky and slimy and wet, leads to some stunning and haunting imagery throughout. The level design here is similarly superb, both visually and in regards to how FromSoft manage to take the principles of Dark Soul's wider world design and apply it within individual areas.

I appreciate the more kinetic, fast-pace of the combat here, and the rally mechanic is a lot of fun and offers a very different flavour to the other games in the series, whilst the trick weapons are incredibly cool to use and visually stylish. I also think that stripping back the rpg mechanics a little bit helps Bloodborne craft itself a reasonably unique identity compared to the other Souls games; the weapons you start with remain feasible options all through the game, you can dress your character however you want without having to worry too much about stats (and there are some incredible pieces of fashion here), and even the stats system has been noticeably streamlined to encourage towards focusing on the hunt.

Despite all of this, Bloodborne does fall short for me compared to my favourite FromSoft games, even though I did enjoy it immensely. There are a scattering of smaller issues that contribute to this. Much has been said about the blood vial system, and whilst I can appreciate the thematic way that grinding for blood vials represents you literally being bloodthirsty, desperately searching for sustenance, as hunters are prone to being, the reality is that having to stop attempting the exciting boss fight you keep dying to in order to go grind together some vials is a painful pace breaker; this didn't affect me too many times as this was the final game I played from the Soulsborne games but I can only imagine how frustrating this must be to someone less experienced with these when contrasted with the estus system where you get to keep making attempts and learning.

Chalice dungeons suck. Whilst Bloodborne does have have more enjoyable combat than the games that came before it, the reality is that the big draw to these games is their atmosphere, worldbuilding and level design, and chalice dungeons strip away so much of this in an effort to be a roguelite-esque jamming together of the same ten rooms over and over instead. I tried playing these for about three hours or so, they never meaningfully improved outside of a couple cool boss fights and I swore to not touch them again. The worst thing about chalice dungeons is it's not like you can even totally ignore them because they actively effect the main game too; there were many times where beating a boss or getting to a hard to reach treasure chest in the main game would give me an item whose only use was for a chalice ritual, content that I was never going to engage with, which would feel disappointing every time.

I also found Bloodborne's collection of bosses honestly very uneven? Early phases of human bosses are very prone to getting stun-locked which both feels weird and also makes having to repeat those early phases boring, and I found wrestling the camera against the game's various different giant, savage, relentless, constantly-screaming beasts to be frustrating (the fight against Ebrietas was ruined by this for me). As with everything in the game, the visual design of these bosses are so good that it's hard for me to be too upset about any of this, or even call any of the bosses bad; even fights like Rom, Micolash, The One Reborn and Celestial Emissary are all very memorable in their own ways even if the gameplay itself wasn't great. Still, the number of bosses I'm actually enthusiastic about here was not terribly high and that makes me a little sad.

Probably the biggest problem for me is that the lore and storytelling in Bloodborne didn't connect with me as potently as it does in the Souls games. I wish I had been given a clearer motivation for what I'm doing at the start of the game, rather than just being told some stuff about locating paleblood (which meant so little to me due to a lack of context) and Gerhman hand-waving the very notion of me worrying about why I'm doing what I'm doing; compared to the Souls games I found myself feeling weirdly purposeless here, like I was just going through the motions on some level. On top of this a lot of the game's thematic content fell flat for me; I loved its look at madness, dreams and nightmares and found a lot of the material surrounding this very compelling in large part because of the places the game gets to go aesthetically as a result, but its look at the evils of the church felt very old hat, and I couldn't find much more to grasp onto here beyond all of that. It's perhaps harsh of me to be contrasting this against the excellent thematic content in the Dark Souls games and their look at entropy, decay, patriarchy, cycles of life and death, and maintaining determination in the face of adversity, especially as Bloodborne is certainly ahead of a lot of games in this regard, but I find myself reminded of another review I read earlier this year that commented about how Bloodborne's storytelling ends up feeling too elusive to connect with, yet also too specific to function as a mood-piece.

It feels like I'm ragging on the game needlessly harshly here; Bloodborne is great, I loved my time with it, it just happened to fall a little short for me in some regards and it takes a lot of words to justify why that is the case when a lot of what FromSoft is doing here is so impeccable and exciting.