Bloodborne: An Analytical Review

May. 9, 2015

Bloodborne: An Analytical Review

Bloodborne, what freaking awesome game, I think one of the things I enjoy the most about it is probably the combat… And the art… And the music… And the creature design… And the atmosphere created when all of those things are combined. It’s interesting to me because I never have before and even now probably would not say that Souls games are my favorites. If someone asked me to make a list of my top 10 games, I probably wouldn’t include them.

They don’t tend to impress upon me in the quick and shocking way that action games like Devil May Cry and Metal Gear Rising do, but at the same time, they are the type of game that I can’t really forget. They have such a strong underlying structure, with less emphasis on flash or style and more so on just solid design. It ends up as a game that sticks with you, subtly, quietly, but it’s always there in your memory when you go back and dig through it.

It leaves a lasting impression that is not so bombastic, but powerful and steady. Bloodborne in particular is probably one of the only games I’ve played that truly induced dread in me. It wasn’t fear of dying or even fear of monsters necessarily, because the player character is quite powerful, but the atmosphere created by those monsters and the architecture and the color pallete eventually become so oppressive that I started to dread playing it for a while. And yet, I could not help but be drawn into it further. It really grabs a hold of your attention, building a world that feels so fleshed out and completely realized that when horrors are revealed, you actually start to feel it.

Now of course, for some people, this will never be the case because everyone reacts to fiction and stories differently. For some it’s just simple entertainment, or just systems, or just the PvP. But for others, it can also be a world to be pulled into and explore. And I think it’s the latter type of person that will enjoy this game the most.

Perhaps with the exception of Dark Souls II, every other Souls game is like this, but I don’t believe any of them have reached the extent that Bloodborne has. While I can understand not being into the art styles they chose for the clothing, places, or monsters, the cohesiveness of all of it together is, I think, undeniably strong. The city of Yharnam feels surreal, with it’s half mad hunters shambling about, near zombified hunting dogs, and people taking shelter in their homes but quite obviously teetering on the brink of insanity themselves. It’s alive, but diseased, firmly established, but old and ready to break apart. Then, while playing the game you start to see things even stranger than just monsters and werewolves, but statues of lovecraftian style, inside something similar to a church no less. It is instantly recognizable as inhuman in a place that would normally be considered holy. This is where you start to see how close and yet far from reality it is.

As you go further in, finding out more and more, you see the insanity of their world for what it is and what’s taken them there and it is positively dreadful.

And again, despite all this, you can’t help but be drawn in and want to know what’s going on and get to the bottom of everything. And if possible, to find out how to fix it all. But it’s never quite as simple as “fixing” things.

The combat in this game, for those familiar with it, is very similar on the surface to previous Souls games. Most of the controls are mapped to the same places and the overall game plan against enemies is relatively the same, but without shields and at a much quicker pace.

For those less familiar, the combat is focused on tactics and overall battle strategy, learning to utilize your weapons and tools, and managing your stamina to overcome odds that will at first seem insurmountable. It punishes playing brainlessly and lazily, even for long time players. If you don’t pay attention you will die in this game, pure and simple. Yet death is not the end, but in fact a learning experience. It can be frustrating to die in this game but if you calm down and think about why you died, calmly and fairly, you’ll soon realize why and be able to come up with a different tactic or learn what skills you need to practice. Do this enough and eventually you will succeed. Fail to improve your tactics or skill, and you will get stuck.

The combat in this game moves at a quick pace and enemies are powerful, but you are given equally powerful tools with which to survive. First is the various weapons with multiple attack forms to deal with a wide variety of situations. Some with wide attacks for many weak enemies to keep them at a distance, some with slow but strong attacks to prevent larger enemies from counterattacking, and some quick but with small ranges for single targets.

But just because you’ve hit an enemy doesn’t mean they’ll allow you to continue to do so. Often times enemies attack quickly, can dodge your attacks, or can take a hit but keep moving, taking the damage but ignoring it to continue their attack. For these situations you have the roll or quickstep. Tied to the same button, they both allow you to avoid enemy attacks. They both have a very short period at the beginning of their animation in which the player character is totally invincible to any attack. By timing dodges correctly, and doing them in the right directions, you can avoid enemy attacks while gaining an advantageous position. Time them incorrectly or dodge the wrong way though and they’ll end up hitting you after that invincible period ends.

Through this back and forth of attacking and dodging, the player learns that they must improve their timing and spacial reasoning in order to succeed. Dodge just before an attack hits, and do it against the direction of their attack to minimize the risk, and then quickly counterattack if you are within range, still paying attention to what they are doing and being ready to make another defensive move. Equally as important is learning to attack when you are within a range that is advantageous. With the whip form of the Threaded Cane weapon, it is great at hitting multiple enemies, but time spent recovering the whip between each swing is longer than it would be for smaller weapons, so you must learn how far your whip reaches and try to keep enemies right at that range. If they get too close then you should switch tactics because it is highly likely they’ll be able to attack you before you can attack them.

Both attacking and defensive maneuvers use a resource called “stamina” represented by a green bar. This bar recharges over time, but every time you attack, dodge, or run, it consumes a certain amount of it. If you run out of stamina, you will be unable to do any of those things, leaving you momentarily defenseless. Smart play in this game requires you to know when to back off not just because of danger but also because your character is low on energy. Fortunately, your stamina recharges quite quickly, so it’s rare that you need to completely retreat from battle to be safe, but you do need to bide your time and make sure you don’t get too greedy and keep attacking an enemy recklessly. The flow of combat combined with the management of stamina forces your mind always be ON.

When all of this fails and you make a mistake, a new recovery mechanic comes into play called the regain or “rally” system. When you take damage, the red bar indicating your life will be reduced but it will leave an orange bar in the amount that it was reduced by. After a few seconds this bar will gradually decrease to the amount your red bar is at. But, while this “orange life” is shown, if you hit an enemy with your right hand weapon, a percentage of the damage inflicted will be restored to your red life, up to the current length of the orange life.

What this does is encourage the player to not back away for making a mistake, but stay in range and counterattack. Now, at first, it is easy to misconstrue this system as a reason to go in swinging without thinking about defense, but you’ll very soon realize that this will almost always get you killed. Although you regain life when doing so, the amount you regenerate is almost never enough to make up for the additional hits you will take, and in the end this will result in wasted healing items or death. What you should be doing when you get hit is to first off, not panic, and be ready to dodge another strike to get to safety. Upon successfully doing so, judge carefully whether or not it’s safe to counterattack. If it is, then when you DO counterattack, don’t get greedy and keep swinging, keep watching them and make sure you can avoid further attacks. Think of it like this: when you get hit, it’s rarely because you could do nothing about it. You should have either been ready to dodge or avoided putting yourself in a bad situation because of running around blindly for example. So, since you got hit, it’s probably your fault, and you should accept some punishment for it and just be happy with getting SOME health back, rather than trying to get all of it back. Of course in some situations you can in fact get all of it back, and if so great, but don’t let the lure of potential healing distract you from the potential danger still present. Once you learn all of this, you see that this system forgives small errors and instead rewards patience and a cool head should a mistake be made. The heightened speed of battle does not mean you just attack attack attack, it means the pace of battle is quicker, but you still need to play calmly and smartly.

Now, while this hit-and-away play style was possible in previous games it was not designed or balanced for that. In the decision to remove the ability to block, they decided to give the player a more offensively minded defensive tool, in the form of guns. In the previous games you used shields to block, but you could also use them to parry, opening up the enemy for a counterattack, a riposte, that does significant damage. Since there is no shield this time around, they included a mechanic where, if you fire at an enemy in the middle of it’s swing, just barely as it starts it’s motion after rearing back, it will stun the enemy into a special animation allowing for a counterattack, now called a Visceral Attack. This alone is a very powerful defensive tool. However additionally, and unlike shields, they are of course also a ranged attack that can be used on the move, with minimal startup, and interrupts enemies. They are used as a form of active defense, giving you time to ready your more powerful right hand weapons, stalling or preventing enemy advances from range, and of course it can be used to finish off dangerous enemies from a distance. It compliments the higher speeds of combat very well and gives a more preemptive option for defense. Additionally, should you be low on ammo, you can even create “blood bullets”, using up a percentage of your HP to gain five bullets. This used HP leaves orange life, so a skilled player can create ammo near an enemy then quickly attack them to effectively reduce the cost of their ammo. It provides an interesting problem to the player where, you can spend your life, which is generally your most important resource, but in doing so, you can gain a very powerful multi-purpose tool which could actually turn around a bad situation if used effectively. It should be noted also that while in a level you can only pick up ammo as a drop from enemies, and only from certain types. So having the extra options are useful.

There are even new unlimited use items that essentially act as magic but use up your gun ammo. However if you combine that with the previous mechanic you can essentially reduce the cost of those items. For example, your maximum ammo is 20 bullets, but some items(and some guns) take more than one bullet. Some take up to six. So normally, you’d only have three uses of this item, but if you create blood bullets, which give you five, you can essentially reduce the cost of that spell to one real bullet, leaving you with 19 afterward. Of course, using this tactic uses up health, so while it is powerful, it has to be used with care. Still, it’s a very interesting option.

Finally, the new “trick weapons” as they are called, are amazing. Almost every single weapon has an alternate form or mode in which they perform vastly differently and give them more adaptability. The animations for these weapons are amazingly stylish, useful, and cover a wide range of strategies, allowing much easier on-the-fly tactical adjustments. There are not a lot of them, but they cover just about every weapon type you can think of that has been in previous games. So in a way, having two right hand weapons to swap between gives you four different move sets to work with.

The enemies in this game are fairly quick overall and do well to teach the player how to approach the game. Many enemies such as the early zombie-like hunters and dogs are quick enough that if you attack them from straight on at point blank range, they can sometimes interrupt you. Considering the enemy density in this game, that can get very dangerous very fast. You soon realize through experimentation that the best way to take out these enemies is either with a much longer range weapon, or by evading to their sides or back to create a safe opening and attack from there. Much of the enemy design supports this general strategy of maneuvering to their sides or behind them. You can’t expect to always combo an enemy from the front until they die without getting interrupted, there are some weapons you can use vs some enemies that will let you do this but most of the time it’s not advisable.

There’s one enemy type in particular that I think does a very good job of training the player, especially for preparing them to fight other human players which can occur sometimes. They’re basically a hostile NPC that has all of a player character’s abilities, though they do have infinite items and stamina, and their stats are very different. Still, unlike most enemies in the game they can dodge and quickstep just like you, their guns are the same guns you can get, their weapons are the same weapons you can get, they can stun you with well placed gunshots just like you can, etc. Fighting them makes the player quickly realize how fast the game can actually move when playing with a human opponent and helps prepare them to get a general idea of what it’s like. For most of them, you can’t combo them forever because they’ll either dodge or have too much HP to kill them that fast, and they’ll be aggressive enough that if you waste all your stamina on attacks, you won’t be able to dodge away. Additionally, because they are as fast as you, you learn how well you have to time your gun shots if you want to stun them, and how useful they are even just for interrupting them. There is one early mandatory boss that is essentially a boss version of this type of enemy with a few special mechanics. You can’t over commit on your offense against him, but you can’t get too defensive either. You need to stay close and dodge around to blind spots, attacking when you can but not getting greedy. In this game, every encounter is a threat that demands your attention, and this is the hallmark of the combat design of this game.

Being an action RPG, the game’s character progression is done through leveling up your character using a currency called “blood echoes”. Defeating enemies or using certain consumable items gives you these blood echoes. When you want to level up, you can talk to a certain character in the game and you can select from six different stats to increase. Two of them are basically defensive: Vitality which is tied to your life bar; Endurance, tied to stamina. and the other four are related to attack: Strength and Skill, two attack stats that generally increase damage with right hand weapons; Bloodtinge, a stat that generally is used for guns; and finally Arcane which is generally used for special items.

I’d say the most important stats early on are your Vitality and Endurance. Your HP is basically your most important defensive stat as it will simply allow you to take more hits before dying. There are different types of clothing you can wear with different defensive stats but they can’t be upgraded, so the only form of defense you actually can upgrade is your HP. Stamina is the second most important, but since it’s tied to your ability to attack and dodge it’s both offensive and defensive. Having a larger pool of stamina means you can attack more before needing to recharge, dodge more, run longer, and therefore helps your survivability.

There are also “Runes” that can be equipped on your character that have passive effects like increased HP, more blood echoes gained from defeated enemies, or even regaining health when landing a Visceral attack. What’s nice about this system is that once the key item that allows you to do this is obtained, you can equip or unequip any of them in the hub area, giving the player versatility for different areas of the game.

To equip weapons in this game you have to meet minimum stat level requirements in some of the four attack stat categories. Some have a requirement only for two of them, some require three, and some require all four. As such the next most important thing is to get your stats up the minimum requirements of the weapon you want to equip. After that, you’ll notice by examining the weapons and stats screens that the damage of weapons scale up depending on how high certain attack stats are, so lastly would be increasing the relevant stats to increase your damage further.

When you have a certain material, you can use them and spend some blood echoes to upgrade a weapon. This improves it’s damage and increases it’s scaling ability with your stats. Overall the damage increase you get from doing this is far more important than increasing the related stats, at least early on.

In addition to straight upgrades, you can also equip Blood Gems on your weapons which have specific effects such as increased physical damage, elemental damage, adding poison effects or reducing stamina costs on attacks. Similar to runes, once you get the key item associated with them you can equip or unequip these any time you are in the hub area, again giving the player more options and ways to prepare for an area.

Compared to some other games, and indeed, previous games in the series, the RPG elements are much lighter in this game as it is more focused on straight combat and less on a variety of builds. It is still possible to make different builds, but it is definitely limited. I personally prefer to focus on the combat more so, but it’s certainly a negative for some people and worth considering.

Bloodborne has both asynchronous and slightly more traditional multiplayer. The former comes in the form of Notes; messages left by other players to inform of tactics, secrets, or even to troll if so desired; which can then be up voted, restoring the writer’s health, or down voted to show others it may be distrust worthy, and Spectres; a red, sort of ghostly, recording of the last moments of another player which can be used to give a hint as to what possible dangers are coming up. If you see a path that suddenly has many specters, then you know to tread carefully. And lastly, white specters; these are other players who are playing through the game at the same time as you. What’s so interesting about all this is that, despite the desolation and loneliness you can feel in these games, just seeing that other players are working through the same struggles can be a source of encouragement, and this is something you don’t really get from any other game.

The more traditional multiplayer elements sort of revolve around a currency called “Insight”. This is used to summon another player for help and for a special shop in your hub area that has some unique items. It has some additional effects on the world outside of the hub but that is a whole different topic. The ways you can gain “Insight” are to use a certain consumable item, encounter a boss for the first time, to defeat a boss, to help another player defeat a boss in their world, or to invade another players world as an enemy, and defeat them.

To summon another player who has made themselves available for co-op, you use a special item that consumes one point of insight and then the game looks for other players who have used a different special item to make themselves available for co-op. Once you’ve connected with another player, doing so makes all the enemies and the boss of the area gain a small health boost, but of course with two players progression can be made much easier, both in damage and scouting out areas so the hosting player can stay safer. If the co-op partner succeeds in helping the host kill the boss, they gain one point of “Insight” themselves. Note that the game itself does not support voice chat either. Sure if you want you can use the PS4 to send messages or join a party chat but the game doesn’t support that because it wants even co-op to be an extension of the single player experience. It’s an effort to not break immersion too much even when playing with others, and I really appreciate that.

The level design is quite good in this game. There are very few checkpoints but lots of winding paths and shortcuts to be found to help alleviate time lost from deaths, but you have to explore to find these. However, exploring is what you should want to do anyway. There’s lots of items or areas that are off the beaten path, and sometimes those paths are safer, so even for survivability you should take your time and check your surroundings. One small issue I had with it was that sometimes the shortcuts becomes too obvious, however I would much rather deal with that and have the levels be as maze-like as they are than making them linear with tons of checkpoints. This way it feels more like you are in a real place. There are a few areas in particular, like this forest area that really feel huge and quite easy to get lost in, especially your first time around. It’s a great feeling that immerses you in the world that’s been created. Which is of course helped by the absolutely superb art design of the locations. Everything feels cohesive and a part of the same world when it’s supposed to, and the otherworldly areas are appropriately creepy. More than once toward the end I was put off by how creepy it was, and even though I can’t say I “liked” it, I think it’s a testament to how powerful the art is in this game.

The art in this game is incredible, from the designs of Yharnam, the main city you will be playing in, to the creature designs which are full of personality and backstory just from seeing how they act, animate, and sound, to the costume designs, all of it is believable as a nightmarish version of the world. The city of Yharnam is well established but things are just slightly crooked, and everything is uninviting and hostile with spires and iron spikes and winding paths. The trees are gnarled and lifeless, hats and luggage are strewn about, along with rows and rows of coffins, like people were in a hurry to leave but never made it out before insanity or beasts took them. The few people that you can find are either hunters, like you, or have already barred themselves inside their houses, and none of them are very trusting, rightfully so I might add. Outside of the city there are the sewers, dank, wet, and diseased, forests with winding paths, obscuring mists and strange statues, hinting at what could be going on behind the scenes, massive graveyards with people gone mad from grief and sickness, nightmare worlds with unearthly geography and equally hideous monsters, and even haunted colleges and castles long abandoned by anything but the inhuman.

The monsters are anywhere from seemingly majestic creatures gone awry to total nightmare fuel. There are some bosses I can think of in particular that have so much character in them that is starts to stir up emotions in you, even as you are desperately trying to survive them. Their designs have details that you can analyze and start to put together theories of their backstories or even personalities before they became the monsters you are fighting. The animations they have are absolutely nuts and appropriately vicious, sickening, or just down right weird when appropriate.

Costume and character designs are not as varied as previous games so you won’t see many outlandish designs and shapes, but the move to a higher def system has definitely allowed them to put much more work into the details. The silhouettes are very strong, having an iconic look that is congruent throughout all of the outfits where appropriate. Nothing feels out of place or from 1000 years in the past relative to the era it takes place in. True, it’s a bit one note, but everything that is in here feels like it fits right in. There are no joke costumes to break the mood and atmosphere of this game, something I GREATLY appreciate. Everything is old, cracked leather belts, corduroy coats and wooly scarves, gold chain watches and big collars, embroidered hems and intricate wood and metal work.

And finally, music is used sparingly but in times where it supports the emotions of the game best, tying together some of the most intense moments both in boss battles and in certain special events.

All in all it’s an experience with cohesiveness at it’s core, at some points to the detriment of the gameplay experience however. The way checkpoints work, you cannot just restock your items, restore your health, or respawn your enemies manually anymore. You must go back to the hub area, which is past a 30 second loading screen, then select the same area you were in to return after getting restocked, and then going through the same loading screen. It’s the same process if you want to warp to a different area. Now, I get why they did this for thematic reasons, but they should have just come up with an excuse to allow us to reset the world at a lantern checkpoint instead of needing to jump through hoops. I also have issues with there being no way for people who want to PvP to do it in a fair and simple way. The invasion system where people can come into your game to impede your progress and gain rewards if successful is fine, albeit in it’s current form results in far fewer invasions than previous games, but for two people who want to PvP against each other willingly, there is no halfway decent system in the game that allows for this, and that is just a real shame. There are other nitpicks I have but they are just that, and not a big deal. There are many other topics I could talk about in this game but in conclusion, overall I think this is the best game they’ve made in this style, and if a strong, fleshed out world is one of the reasons you play games, this will almost assuredly be one of your favorites.

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