Bloodborne: Fear And Loathing In Yharnam

I never got the Souls series. While others swooned over Demon’s Souls, I felt a quiet discomfort when it dawned on me, some 10 hours into my experience, that I didn’t enjoy playing the game. Thinking back, I can honestly say that it’s likely the game’s (many) boss encounters that did it for me. I’ve never enjoyed bosses in action games, largely because I genuinely feel as though most developers don’t know how to balance the power and challenge levels of a boss well enough to justify including it in a game.

The Souls games in particular have had some notoriously infuriating boss fights. Thinking back to Dark Souls, the Capra Demon comes to mind. The boss fight takes place in a ridiculously small area, and forces the player to use very specific tactics to overcome the obvious and infuriatingly claustrophobic space. Other bosses can easily replace this Capra Demon.

Mind you, games should be hard. They should make you hate yourself for enjoying handholding and all manner of tutorial-saturated linearity. Granted. But some of these bosses are utterly bewildering in their design. Who in their right mind gets excited when they have to fight two, three or even four bosses at once?

Anyways, I never got the Souls series. And it’s likely because a part of me hates boss fights. But Bloodborne is different, for a number of reasons. For one, the game feels leaner and more focused than either Demon’s or Dark Souls to me. The overall sense is that every play session I commit, I feel as though I am making tangible progress. Each hour is often filled with unlocking a new shortcut; encountering a new boss; or discovering a new lantern (checkpoints which allow the player to return to a safe hub world). The pacing is tight, and the sense of discovery creates an addictive feedback loop.

Another key point is that the game’s setting and Lovecraftian tones go a long way toward making the game feel fresh. The rather obtuse storytelling fits nicely into themes of the unknowable cosmic horror, and the game’s mechanics do justice in elevating the game’s plot.

Lastly, the game’s trick weapons are curiously inventive in their design, a point which Adam discusses rather eloquently in his piece on the Hunter’s Axe, a starting weapon so disarmingly strong that I often wonder why every boss in the game doesn’t wield two.

I guess Bloodborne just feels fresh, despite being largely the same experience first introduced to series fans back in 2009 with Demon’s Souls (and arguably, even further back with King’s Field in 2001). Factoring out the game’s bosses (some of whom will induce fits of rage so pure, you’ll forget that you’re playing Bloodborne for fun, in your spare time, when you could have been doing something else), Bloodborne is a rich and worthwhile experience. Most importantly, it’s tuned well enough to appeal to someone like myself: a fringe fan whose appreciation of the series has been superficial at best. Guess director Hidetaka Miyazaki  is doing something right, eh?