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.
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.