It looked promising, but the further I went the worse it got, until the third chapter shit the bed completely. Barren corridors filled to the brim with repeating, annoying enemy combinations. At that point it was better to just run past them and rush to the ending. Well, at least the trailer was cool and the OST is probably the best part of the game. The ending reedemed it a little and the final boss of this game was the only final fight where I actually had to use nearly every potion and resource I had gathered throughout the entire game to win. Hoarders rejoice.

Easily the most overrated souls game and I'm disappointed to say this since it was one of the main reasons why I even bought a ps4.

I'll start with my biggest gripe with it, the story or the absence of it. I know it's a souls game and not having a real story is kinda their thing but they all at least give you some basic exposition and a reason why you're there, Bloodborne does not. You start as a nobody and end as a nobody. What little story there is is being told in as much roundabout way as possible, which was conscious decision since it was inspired by Lovecraft's works but once you figure it out it feels more like it's a cover for its lack of depth. The lack of interesting NPCs is another big issue. Most of the time you're talking to doors and windows and to add insult to injury such an important character as Master Willem gets reduced to living roadsign (that pissed me off to an unreasonable degree). Having played a different lovecraft inspired soulslike with a complex, puzzling narrative, better written characters and a better sanity mechanics before playing BB, everything about those aspects was a downgrade. Speaking of sanity mechanics, insight is criminally underutilised. There could've been so much more done with this, unlocking additional dialogue, revealing secret paths, different enemies and weapon effects, playing with a high insight would be like playing a different game instead of that it's basically being used as a glorified currency. And this game really needed that because it feels extremely short, especially if you miss the side areas, which is weird because in reality it takes a few dozen hours to beat. But you don't feel like you've progressed because most locations are very similar to each other and most of the time you're just stumbling around in the dark, which can be done well, but here it wasn't. If the game didn't teleport me back before the door to Yahar'gul after Rom I would have had no idea where to go next. And then you go to Mensis and the game ends just like that. Granted, at least the endings were cool. Your enjoyment of Bloodborne really relies on that cool factor to make you overlook its flaws. If you dig this kind of dark victorian/gothic aesthetic and it's something new and fresh to you, you'll love it, it wasn't new to me so the charm didn't work. I still appreciate it but in my judgment I did not let style overpower the substance. Gun parrying and restoring health by hitting the enemies back were great ideas but other than that it's not the revolution I was expecting and heard people talk about, (I had to wait untill Sekiro for that) it still plays like any other souls game. It has different mechanics but in practice it's less complex than DS. The way you play depends more on the weapon you use than your build, but to use those weapons effectively you have to have the right build, but really it doesn't matter because most of them are kinda shit anyway so you can beat the whole game with your starting saw cleaver and the first armor set you find. Weapon transformations are cool, but the transformation attacks are useless in an actual battle (at least with the weapons I tested, haven't tried all of them so maybe there is an exception somwhere and I just haven't found it), they killed me more times than they helped me, because instead of pulling out a gun I got stuck in an animation and wrecked by a combo. They are just a fancy way of simply swapping to a different weapon. The shortage of upgrade materials doesn't incentivise you to experiment with weapons either. (You don't even upgrade your equipment in this one, seriously why do you only get 2, max 3 stones per playthrough.) All the armors are just sidegrades of each other and you don't have to worry about poise or encumbrance, at best you'll switch to something with fire resist for the Watchdog and Laurence and frenzy resist for winter lanterns, so it doesn't really matter what you wear, so of course you pick what looks best, cool, so again, style over substance. People like to shit on DS2 because of broken hitboxes but I've never had as many problems with it as I did with Bloodborne. The rocks that explode for additional 3 seconds after hitting the ground, those hook guys in the chalice dungeons and some of the chalice only bosses were the most annoyingly broken. Enemies hitting you through walls is a common occurrence, but hey at least you can hit them back through that wall so it's not all bad. Getting stuck on environment happens too, not as common but noticeable, and you can cheese Gascoigne with it. The pig charging through a hole half of its size in Yahar'gul takes the cake, with an honorable mention to another pig doing a tokyo drift on the stairs in Mensis. There were some funny AI blunders like Djura randomly commiting suicide without me even touching him as I climbed the tower, younger madaras twin getting eaten by his own snake and the beastclaw hunter doing a jumping attack and getting stuck behind some boxes. On a less jolly note, blood vials are shit, I get what they were going for with them, scavenging for supplies insteading of backing away like when you're too low on estus is more fitting and it works most of the time. The exception is when you get stuck on a boss which forces you to go back to central Yharnam every once in a while to farm blood and bullets and ruins your focus. I didn't notice it at first, but having to go back to the hunter's dream every time you want to reload an area or go somewhere gets on your nerves after a while. On the topic of bullets, I know Mitsubishi hates ranged weapons but for god's sake a gun should feel like a gun, just a little dmg buff and a rune that would raise the cap on blood bullets would've made a gunslinger build actually viable.
The worst for last, chalice dungeons. They were supposed to always keep the game fresh thanks to randomised content but ended up being nothing but a chore. ,,It's just side content" some would say, except it's not. You want platinum? You have to slog through them to get to boss Yharnam. You want the best gems? You have to go the chalice dungeons. You want upgrade materials or to at least farm insight to buy them? You have to go to the fucking chalice dungeons. Sorry, but I put off the last 2 of them for last so they left an especially sour taste in my mouth. And watching all the cut content videos later deepened my disappointment even more.

But thankfully The Old Hunters DLC fixes most of the problems I've had with it. Playing through it was such a redemption arc for the game. Combined with the endings it saved BB in my eyes, if not for it I would've rated it lower than DS2. For a moment I understood what others have seen in this game but then I realised, people were already praising it to high kosmos even before it came out. Which made me wonder, did the earlier copies of the game came prepacked with Oedon himself? Because calling the base game a masterpiece is nothing but madness.