I try not to let contrary opinions about media affect me. It's an awful trait, one that stems from tying part of your identity to a product. There's plenty of games I care deeply about, but if someone else doesn't like them, that's not a personal slight against me. Likewise, if someone enjoys something I passionately dislike, it doesn't make their opinion any less valid than my own. Of course I'm not perfect, I slip up sometimes. We all do. The important thing is having enough self-awareness to catch yourself doing it, pull back, and evaluate whether it's worth it. 99.99% of the time, it's not.

Bloodborne is the .01% exception.

I've beaten this game about four times now, and each completed run has only reaffirmed my belief that this is the worst entry in the Souls series. I'm sorry, I mean "Soulsborne", because apparently it's so good that it's now suffixed at the hip with the overarching franchise's namesake. Despicable. Feels about as good rolling off the tongue as "Metroidvania," and is about as unearned. I genuinely cannot enter into the same headspace as everyone else. Have we played the same game? This is one of - if not the best game From has ever put out?

Bloodborne feels like the byproduct of a rushed development. Locations and mechanics are so woefully underdeveloped that it simply feels incomplete. Take combat, which is designed to be more fast-paced compared to previous Souls titles. Trick weapons provide more utility and varied movesets, making each new weapon more impactful than the myriad swords you loot in Dark Souls, and gone are shields (ThEy EnGeNdEr PaSsIvItY har har har) in favor of sidearms, which can be used to initiate parries with a very generous window. A quick step was added in place of a roll, at least while locked on, making dodging and weaving between enemies more snappy. All of this contributes to a combat system that feels more aggressive than previous Souls titles, one that asks the player to unlearn the tired strategies they've relied upon for three games now.

The problem is that very little about the game is actually balanced around these drastic changes, and it's apparent that From is not nearly as willing to evolve their approach as they expect their players to be. The camera and targeting system become even bigger liabilities here than they have been. Lock on to any large aggressive boss and you'll see what I mean, it just spins around like a whirling dervish, all chest fur and particle effects. Apparently Dark Souls 2 is bad because of the way enemies track you, something Bloodborne doesn't do? Blood Starved Beast would like a word with you, and he'll pivot 180 degrees on a dime to tell you. To be fair, this is only really an issue with a few late game bosses, whereas most encounters seem to be reused or rejected concepts from previous Souls games. I was surprised to see people had trouble with Rom or The One Reborn when they're quite literally Phalanx and The Tower Knight from Demon's Souls, only now you can run around them like Sonic the Hedgehog.

The lock on system is more consistently problematic with mobs. Boy I sure do love targeting the guy to my right instead of the one immediately in front of me. Hey this guy is charging right at me, I should lock on and side-step him and oh no, I'm now locked on to something on the other side of the floor. A lot of Bloodborne's difficulty feels imbalanced, if not artificial, like the solution to the game not being hard enough was to just overwhelm the player with a bunch of bullshit ambushes in areas where the geometry and camera do not get along. The advice I often hear is "well then don't lock on," except the game clearly wants me to by including the quick-step as a targeting-only feature. Also, completely disengaging with a system that is bad isn't really the solution people seem to think it is for the system being bad.

I'm going to invoke Dark Souls 2 again, that rascal, that perennial black sheep. It's remarkable to me how the B-team had the wisdom to let the player warp to any location from a bonfire, and while removing the ability to level up at them as well was a step in the wrong direction, at least jumping between areas didn't feel sluggish. Bloodborne, on the other hand, makes you warp back to the Hunter's Dream for everything. You can't even rest at a lamp post to restore blood vials and quicksilver bullets. Want to replenish your inventory before a boss? Fuck you, back to the Hunter's Dream. The original Dark Souls may not have let you warp until halfway through the game, but that at least made sense with how its world was laid out, how it was meant to be explored. Bloodborne is just inconvenient for no reason.

One of the more interesting deviations from the norm, however, is its setting. Yharnam's makes a solid first impression. The opening "dungeon" is vast, and similar to the Painted World in Dark Souls in that it feels as if it was designed in tandem with Bloodborne's core mechanics. The city streets are laid out in a way that presents satisfying arenas to test out Bloodborne's snappy new combat, and its non-linear design allows you to just get lost, find some sub-quests, and take on one of two different bosses in any order you please. Unfortunately, the game immediately loses this sense of design, reverting back to very rote by-the-numbers dungeons that feel more at home in past entries. There's a distinct lack of location variety too, with some of the more interesting dungeons either being painfully brief or entirely optional. Most of your time will be spent in the streets of Yharnam, and god damn does it start to drag. If you need a break, you can always check out the Chalice Dungeons, which are randomly generated excursions featuring high value loot and challenging new encounters. Except that's a lie, most of them are not randomly generated and are designed to appear procedural, which is to say they're made to be shitty on purpose.

Well shiiit, what about multiplayer? Everyone loves multiplayer in Souls games. Well guess what, there isn't any. And no that's not because I'm replaying this in 2022, long after Bloodborne could reasonably be expected to be active. It was always like this. There's like, maybe two covenants and they they lack any interesting conceits. You can still invade or summon, but even at release it didn't seem like anybody was bothering. I'm not sure I've ever been invaded in this game, and I could probably count the amount of real living breathing co-op partners I've found on one hand. Of course it also suffers from some incredibly bad netcode, but hey, that's par for the course.

Look, I'm a Dark Souls 3 apologist. I was singing Dark Souls 2's praises before it became vogue to reevaluate it. I just don't "get" the appeal of Bloodborne, maybe, but I just wrapped up getting the platinum trophy and played this game to completion at least three times before that and I still find myself walking away thinking it's just a bad game. It feels like it needed another year in the oven or at least two dozen community mods before it approaches playability. And yet, everyone eats this game up. They can't get enough of it. So good it's not just Souls, it's Soulsborne. I feel like my head is a gigantic tumorous mass of eyeballs that permit me to see this game for what it is, though the truth has only driven me to madness, leaving me a derange piteous creature waiting to be euthanized.