Since Dark Souls and Bloodborne came around, the games industry found the courage to be hard again, to be niche again, and to be weird again. Our 2011 Zelda was Skyward Sword, our 2017 Zelda was Breath of the Wild. One of those games takes an hour to get started, has a trillion tutorials, and sticks you with an annoying helper who will repeat all instructions twice. The new game just dumps you naked and clueless in the woods and is so much better for it. I never directly played a From Software game before, but I have played games with Dark Souls influence and loved them. Shovel Knight and The Witcher 3 are two of the best games of the decade, and Hollow Knight made my Top 5 in 2017. I am grateful to the Soulsbornes of this world.
And yet, I've never liked what I've seen in Dark Souls. It is an entirely personal problem, I admit. I don't know how useful this post is going to be for anybody other than myself. There's a blank misery to these games that really puts me off. A lot of it is the color pallet. Dark Souls games are gray and muted, and Bloodborne has one color: brown. The game worlds are truly joyless. The developers do not create characters or really much of a story, so there's no personal connection I can draw from whatever I'm doing. Everything is doomed anyway it seems, so why should I bother? Plus the difficulty is "fair" but also incredibly cruel. I said before in my Celeste post that I have a low tolerance for cruelty. I like a proper testicle cruncher of a hard game, but not one that's actively against me.
So having played Bloodborne now (thanks to it being free with PS+ in March) my opinion is unchanged. I still don't see the charm to the atmosphere or the design. Bloodborne has no story progression and no arc, everything looks the same no matter where I go. There's incredibly vague lore, but since this setting is full of jerks who hate me, I don't care. Youtubers make hour long posts to decipher the lore, but lore only matters if I care. The mystery is just a mystery for its own sake, not any kind of depth. Hollow Knight was dark but full of cutesy bug people and friendly NPCs with personality. Bloodborne has one personality: deathly dark death dark, which then mutates into deathly dark death dark but now with an H.P. Lovecraft theme.
However the combat is good, which only tortures me more. Because I haven't mentioned the real problem here: the grind.
Now immediately somebody is going to yell out "GIT GUD" because that is the instinctive reaction to criticism about From Software games. It's a perfect defense against all possible complaints. "If you don't like you just must suck at it." And yeah, I have trouble with the combat, because everybody is going to. These are hard games. However I am a Keyblade Master, the Hero of Time, and a veteran of Platinum Games, so I eased through the first couple of bosses after only a few tries. You can still reply "git gud" because I haven't beaten this game. (And even if I had, you would anyway.) But a troll catch phrase doesn't excuse the oppressive browness of the world and it doesn't excuse my actual issues with the gameplay.
So anyway, let me talk about the things I like in Bloodborne. First off this game is very much a 3D Metroidvania at heart. Your task is to explore the world, find save points, and open shortcuts. Levels are complicated and intricate with a lot of vertical space to get lost in. (You also get lost because you start off on a brown street and everything in this game is a brown street.) But there's a great sense of accomplishment when you do open a locked door or find a new save point. There's also a paranoid sense of dread exploring the world because enemies are always waiting to ambush you. The world is full of treasure and secrets, so even if you're afraid, you have to explore. I should love this game, brown or not.
Heck, I've seen videos of people playing Bloodborne with a whip weapon, so it literally becomes Castlevania. The streets are populated with spooky brown werewolves and crazy Amish guys all dressed in brown. All you needed was to blare something up-tempo and exciting like Bloody Tears and this could be awesome. Brownborne actually doesn't use much music at all outside the boss fights, which only makes things that much drearier and unpleasant.
As for the game being actively against you, it does not explain much of anything when you start. Combat is only taught through text boxes, which isn't personally how I learn. I need to do things myself organically, not be told how to do things. Even now I'm still lost with a lot of mechanics. I have no idea what "Insight" does. At first you can't even level up until you fight the first boss, so the opening is brutal. I must have fought the same pack of Amish dudes in the same brown avenue a dozen times. Without a guide or helpful friends the start of Bloodborne is an impossible wall. This is what I mean about the difference between "challenging" and "this game hates you". A challenge gives you all the tools you need, a game that hates you dumps you next to a killer werewolf without a weapon.*
The star of the show though is the combat and this is where I have to admit I'm addicted. Now addicted doesn't mean "good", I was addicted to Final Fantasy XIII. In the real world, people don't usually get addicted to positive things in their lives. You aren't addicted to your sweet puppy, you're addicted to opioids, gambling, or freaky Eastern European porn. Bloodborne is a negative thing in my life.
I do like killing things in Bloodborne. I like getting killed in Bloodborne too. It was usually my own mistake or more often I was caught by surprise. You learn more about the levels every time you play and even when you die. Soon enough you build mental maps of these places, remember where the asshole Amish guy is hiding in the corner, and can breeze through. You learn how to be strategic, back-up in a fighting retreat, and break the enemy groups into nice single file lines. Combat prioritizes speedy offense but you need to watch your stamina. You can even recover health if you're fast and aggressive.
I realized that the secret to every encounter was the kill the enemy in front of you, then immediately turn around and attack. Even if you don't see an enemy, there is one. There's always somebody in the corner waiting for you.
"Gitting gud" is a real accomplishment here and that's what tortures me about Bloodbrown. It is so close to being a truly great game for me. And then it goes wrong.
The problem creeps up in the boss fights. Ironically the boss fights are the best part of Bloodborne by far. I don't care about my character (who is a blank slate) or the brown city I'm in or the basically non-existent story. But I do care deeply about finding the bosses, kicking their asses, and mounting their heads to my wall as a trophy. I could humble brag to friends "yeah, Blood-Starved Beast was a nuisance but you know you can stun him super easy, right? The shotgun crushes him." I've beaten four bosses in Bloodborne and another three or four Hunter minibosses. It would be a solid experience if you could just fight them, but Bloodborne won't let you "just" anything. "Just fighting" would be too convenient, wouldn't it?
"Convenience" is the real wrinkle here that spoils Bloodborne's face. First off, in typical Dark Souls fashion you don't just restart outside the boss room, you have to run back through the brown level to get to them. This seems totally unnecessary since the brown enemies are remarkably slow, so you can dash through them with ease. The only thing stopping you from just restarting a fight is about a minute of sprinting with no danger. But then there's the other issue, the bigger issue. The issue I mentioned before. The grind.
You see, in Bloodborne you can only heal with potions, called "Blood Vials" because everything in this game is oh so edgy. You can carry twenty max potions, which you either buy or you grind up from enemies. When you die you lose all your "Blood Echoes" which are the currency and EXP in this game, so it's best to spend them all when you can. That means you lose to a boss, you lose all your money... which isn't that bad. This happened in Hollow Knight, you simply just got it back when you fought the boss again. What is that bad is that you also lose all the items you used during that boss fight. So if you die against say, Vicar Amelia after a long fight and used all twenty potions, you can't just run back and fight her again, not unless you want to try a perfect run without your gear. Now you're back to the brown streets, regrinding for money against the same brown trolls, and hoping they drop potions.
So much about Bloodborne feels Western. From Software is Japanese but their game does not feel like a JRPG at all. It's stark and brutal, even the characters are entirely European. Well, I found where the JRPG in this game: it's in the grinding.
This is awful and basically a deal-breaker for me. It isn't just potions that don't come back, you also lose the more expensive items you might have used. Fire Paper is this item that sets your weapon ablaze for double damaga (more Castlevania for you), but it costs like 2,000 Blood Echoes. It's great to have but I find myself not using it against the boss because I'm afraid I'll stumble into a one-shot and then it's wasted. I started giving up and letting the bosses kill me if they hit me once during their first phase, because why waste resources into a ruined run? So it what should have been under an hour of fighting a boss to learn their patterns and "gitting gud" wound up taking three times that.
What's so frustrating to me is that Vicar Amelia isn't a bad fight. She has issues but this should be a fun boss. Ammy is a giant werewolf in mummy wrappings with a huge health pool and attacks that are hard to predict. You have to be really safe and only attack from behind or after she's done a combo. But the camera is zoomed in too close and the bandages get in the way so it's hard to see what Ammy is doing**. Worse, I swear to Azathoth that some of her swipes have a hit box issue because they swung two feet behind me somehow I still got hit! And then, boom, I'm back to grinding for potions. Again. Considering the penalty for losing, the camera and hit box should be 100% perfect and they are not. Which is why the penalty shouldn't be so damn steep.
I eventually realized I had killed the same pair of brown trolls who drop potions about a hundred times. I had spent more time grinding for the boss then I had actually fighting the boss. At this point, this isn't a challenge. At least, not the challenge I was promised. Bloodborne is a tedious busy work simulator that occasionally will kill you when you're a good boy and do your chores. Fuck this. You can't even save scum around the Game Overs because From Software hates me, it hates you, and it hates life.
I'm sure the super Soulsborne fans have some excuse for all this. About how tedious busy work is "atmosphere". About how save scumming is cheating. About how "deep" the story is if I just watched the right Youtube videos explaining it all. They'll even tell me that the game isn't all brown streets, there's also brown swamps, a brown castle, and brown caves. Sorry, I just don't care. This isn't for me. While I expected little from Bloodborne, I ended up very disappointed.
In the end I beat Vicar Amelia out of sheer pigheaded pride and then I was done. I could have beaten this game, but I no longer wanted to. I deleted Bloodborne off my PlayStation 4. I left my main character hanging outside the one safe zone, dressed like a doll, hanging with the only helpful NPC in the game, which I have decided is Bloodblone's canonical ending. She is going to live a life of peace. And I will a life without Bloodborne.
* Who I still almost beat with my bare hands... almost. He actually isn't hard even without a weapon, you just need to know how to stun him from behind with a heavy attack. You can then follow up with a critical strike. Otherwise you're like me and you swipe at him impotently for single digit damage until you screw up.
** See also the Cleric Beast fight, where I died twice because the camera got stuck in geometry.
And yet, I've never liked what I've seen in Dark Souls. It is an entirely personal problem, I admit. I don't know how useful this post is going to be for anybody other than myself. There's a blank misery to these games that really puts me off. A lot of it is the color pallet. Dark Souls games are gray and muted, and Bloodborne has one color: brown. The game worlds are truly joyless. The developers do not create characters or really much of a story, so there's no personal connection I can draw from whatever I'm doing. Everything is doomed anyway it seems, so why should I bother? Plus the difficulty is "fair" but also incredibly cruel. I said before in my Celeste post that I have a low tolerance for cruelty. I like a proper testicle cruncher of a hard game, but not one that's actively against me.
So having played Bloodborne now (thanks to it being free with PS+ in March) my opinion is unchanged. I still don't see the charm to the atmosphere or the design. Bloodborne has no story progression and no arc, everything looks the same no matter where I go. There's incredibly vague lore, but since this setting is full of jerks who hate me, I don't care. Youtubers make hour long posts to decipher the lore, but lore only matters if I care. The mystery is just a mystery for its own sake, not any kind of depth. Hollow Knight was dark but full of cutesy bug people and friendly NPCs with personality. Bloodborne has one personality: deathly dark death dark, which then mutates into deathly dark death dark but now with an H.P. Lovecraft theme.
However the combat is good, which only tortures me more. Because I haven't mentioned the real problem here: the grind.
Now immediately somebody is going to yell out "GIT GUD" because that is the instinctive reaction to criticism about From Software games. It's a perfect defense against all possible complaints. "If you don't like you just must suck at it." And yeah, I have trouble with the combat, because everybody is going to. These are hard games. However I am a Keyblade Master, the Hero of Time, and a veteran of Platinum Games, so I eased through the first couple of bosses after only a few tries. You can still reply "git gud" because I haven't beaten this game. (And even if I had, you would anyway.) But a troll catch phrase doesn't excuse the oppressive browness of the world and it doesn't excuse my actual issues with the gameplay.
So anyway, let me talk about the things I like in Bloodborne. First off this game is very much a 3D Metroidvania at heart. Your task is to explore the world, find save points, and open shortcuts. Levels are complicated and intricate with a lot of vertical space to get lost in. (You also get lost because you start off on a brown street and everything in this game is a brown street.) But there's a great sense of accomplishment when you do open a locked door or find a new save point. There's also a paranoid sense of dread exploring the world because enemies are always waiting to ambush you. The world is full of treasure and secrets, so even if you're afraid, you have to explore. I should love this game, brown or not.
People have called Bloodborne "the prettiest game ever" in reviews I've read. All I see? Brown.
Heck, I've seen videos of people playing Bloodborne with a whip weapon, so it literally becomes Castlevania. The streets are populated with spooky brown werewolves and crazy Amish guys all dressed in brown. All you needed was to blare something up-tempo and exciting like Bloody Tears and this could be awesome. Brownborne actually doesn't use much music at all outside the boss fights, which only makes things that much drearier and unpleasant.
As for the game being actively against you, it does not explain much of anything when you start. Combat is only taught through text boxes, which isn't personally how I learn. I need to do things myself organically, not be told how to do things. Even now I'm still lost with a lot of mechanics. I have no idea what "Insight" does. At first you can't even level up until you fight the first boss, so the opening is brutal. I must have fought the same pack of Amish dudes in the same brown avenue a dozen times. Without a guide or helpful friends the start of Bloodborne is an impossible wall. This is what I mean about the difference between "challenging" and "this game hates you". A challenge gives you all the tools you need, a game that hates you dumps you next to a killer werewolf without a weapon.*
The star of the show though is the combat and this is where I have to admit I'm addicted. Now addicted doesn't mean "good", I was addicted to Final Fantasy XIII. In the real world, people don't usually get addicted to positive things in their lives. You aren't addicted to your sweet puppy, you're addicted to opioids, gambling, or freaky Eastern European porn. Bloodborne is a negative thing in my life.
I do like killing things in Bloodborne. I like getting killed in Bloodborne too. It was usually my own mistake or more often I was caught by surprise. You learn more about the levels every time you play and even when you die. Soon enough you build mental maps of these places, remember where the asshole Amish guy is hiding in the corner, and can breeze through. You learn how to be strategic, back-up in a fighting retreat, and break the enemy groups into nice single file lines. Combat prioritizes speedy offense but you need to watch your stamina. You can even recover health if you're fast and aggressive.
I realized that the secret to every encounter was the kill the enemy in front of you, then immediately turn around and attack. Even if you don't see an enemy, there is one. There's always somebody in the corner waiting for you.
"Gitting gud" is a real accomplishment here and that's what tortures me about Bloodbrown. It is so close to being a truly great game for me. And then it goes wrong.
Okay, I have to be honest, not everything in Bloodborne is brown. Some things are gray.
The problem creeps up in the boss fights. Ironically the boss fights are the best part of Bloodborne by far. I don't care about my character (who is a blank slate) or the brown city I'm in or the basically non-existent story. But I do care deeply about finding the bosses, kicking their asses, and mounting their heads to my wall as a trophy. I could humble brag to friends "yeah, Blood-Starved Beast was a nuisance but you know you can stun him super easy, right? The shotgun crushes him." I've beaten four bosses in Bloodborne and another three or four Hunter minibosses. It would be a solid experience if you could just fight them, but Bloodborne won't let you "just" anything. "Just fighting" would be too convenient, wouldn't it?
"Convenience" is the real wrinkle here that spoils Bloodborne's face. First off, in typical Dark Souls fashion you don't just restart outside the boss room, you have to run back through the brown level to get to them. This seems totally unnecessary since the brown enemies are remarkably slow, so you can dash through them with ease. The only thing stopping you from just restarting a fight is about a minute of sprinting with no danger. But then there's the other issue, the bigger issue. The issue I mentioned before. The grind.
You see, in Bloodborne you can only heal with potions, called "Blood Vials" because everything in this game is oh so edgy. You can carry twenty max potions, which you either buy or you grind up from enemies. When you die you lose all your "Blood Echoes" which are the currency and EXP in this game, so it's best to spend them all when you can. That means you lose to a boss, you lose all your money... which isn't that bad. This happened in Hollow Knight, you simply just got it back when you fought the boss again. What is that bad is that you also lose all the items you used during that boss fight. So if you die against say, Vicar Amelia after a long fight and used all twenty potions, you can't just run back and fight her again, not unless you want to try a perfect run without your gear. Now you're back to the brown streets, regrinding for money against the same brown trolls, and hoping they drop potions.
So much about Bloodborne feels Western. From Software is Japanese but their game does not feel like a JRPG at all. It's stark and brutal, even the characters are entirely European. Well, I found where the JRPG in this game: it's in the grinding.
Come on guys. Can't you dress in anything other than browns and beige?
This is awful and basically a deal-breaker for me. It isn't just potions that don't come back, you also lose the more expensive items you might have used. Fire Paper is this item that sets your weapon ablaze for double damaga (more Castlevania for you), but it costs like 2,000 Blood Echoes. It's great to have but I find myself not using it against the boss because I'm afraid I'll stumble into a one-shot and then it's wasted. I started giving up and letting the bosses kill me if they hit me once during their first phase, because why waste resources into a ruined run? So it what should have been under an hour of fighting a boss to learn their patterns and "gitting gud" wound up taking three times that.
What's so frustrating to me is that Vicar Amelia isn't a bad fight. She has issues but this should be a fun boss. Ammy is a giant werewolf in mummy wrappings with a huge health pool and attacks that are hard to predict. You have to be really safe and only attack from behind or after she's done a combo. But the camera is zoomed in too close and the bandages get in the way so it's hard to see what Ammy is doing**. Worse, I swear to Azathoth that some of her swipes have a hit box issue because they swung two feet behind me somehow I still got hit! And then, boom, I'm back to grinding for potions. Again. Considering the penalty for losing, the camera and hit box should be 100% perfect and they are not. Which is why the penalty shouldn't be so damn steep.
I eventually realized I had killed the same pair of brown trolls who drop potions about a hundred times. I had spent more time grinding for the boss then I had actually fighting the boss. At this point, this isn't a challenge. At least, not the challenge I was promised. Bloodborne is a tedious busy work simulator that occasionally will kill you when you're a good boy and do your chores. Fuck this. You can't even save scum around the Game Overs because From Software hates me, it hates you, and it hates life.
I'm sure the super Soulsborne fans have some excuse for all this. About how tedious busy work is "atmosphere". About how save scumming is cheating. About how "deep" the story is if I just watched the right Youtube videos explaining it all. They'll even tell me that the game isn't all brown streets, there's also brown swamps, a brown castle, and brown caves. Sorry, I just don't care. This isn't for me. While I expected little from Bloodborne, I ended up very disappointed.
In the end I beat Vicar Amelia out of sheer pigheaded pride and then I was done. I could have beaten this game, but I no longer wanted to. I deleted Bloodborne off my PlayStation 4. I left my main character hanging outside the one safe zone, dressed like a doll, hanging with the only helpful NPC in the game, which I have decided is Bloodblone's canonical ending. She is going to live a life of peace. And I will a life without Bloodborne.
The one remotely pleasant element in this world is this one Doll girl who will bow back to you.
Also is that a muted green I spot? No way! COLOR! YOG-SOTHOTH BE PRAISED!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------* Who I still almost beat with my bare hands... almost. He actually isn't hard even without a weapon, you just need to know how to stun him from behind with a heavy attack. You can then follow up with a critical strike. Otherwise you're like me and you swipe at him impotently for single digit damage until you screw up.
** See also the Cleric Beast fight, where I died twice because the camera got stuck in geometry.
Git gud
ReplyDeleteI haven't tried this series yet (because I want to get a discount on Steam that never comes), but your experience is what I fear could be my own. To be fair, as long as I can manage to improve on my last performance that should be enough to keep me motivated. That said, maybe the faster pace of Bloodbourne makes it less compatible with Dark Souls' death mechanics.
ReplyDeleteBloodborne is one of the greatest stories ever told In a video game in fact most of it's plot is implied which is how all the souls games are .
ReplyDeleteOf course you don't like bloodborne story lol you didn't bother even trying to learn it . Souls borne demands attentiveness not blatant disregard for attention .