#it’s no where near as bad but with a story like bloodborne little details getting fudged can mess with it

[humanransome-note]

Losing respect for a video game essayist YouTuber over how he interprets and presents Ghermin in bloodborne.

Specifically Gehrman’s relationship with The Doll and thus his relationship with Maria…

Like… if I told you an old guy made a person sized doll you’d already be “that’s sketch”. If I told you that doll looked like a young woman and was his only companion you’d be “…that doesn’t make it better.” Then I tell you that this doll was made to look like one of HIS STUDENTS! You’d want to stop hanging out with me because “why do you know this guy?”

“You’re welcome to use whatever you find. …even the doll, should it please you…”

Who hears this and sees this as anything other than unhealthy obsession and objectification? Who sees this and interprets it as ‘love’?

Like even before figuring out the whole *waves spooky tendrils around* that is Bloodborne… I want to kill Ghermin so The Doll has some company that isn’t an eternally old man in a blood pact with the moon who created her with the sole purpose of fulfilling his creepy fantasies.

[zombiescantfly]

Words About Games:  Bloodborne (From Software, 2015)

I wanted to finally do one of these for Dark Souls 3, but realized that I'd finally have to do one for Bloodborne first.  This is something I've put off for two years because I wasn't really ready to try to articulate my thoughts about it, but it's time to face these demons and cut them to ribbons in the process.

From Software's deeply, deeply flawed masterpiece of werewolf killing and beast chopping devoured weeks of my attention, and is to date the only game I felt driven enough to 100%.  Which is strange, because after two and a half years, I still can't tell if I liked it or not.  Let's try to sort through this mess.

I'll start by, as I did with Dark Souls 2, outlining my experience.  I played through Bloodborne on three different characters, took one all the way through New Game+, and got the Platinum trophy for getting all the other trophies.  I killed Ebreitas, I slogged my way through all the Chalice Dungeons, and I've gone through the game using each weapon for a respectable amount of time.  But I never ended up buying the expansion, and I wasn't at all broken up when a random brownout during a loading screen deleted all my saves.

Bloodborne is a game that feels more like two halves of very good but separate games inexpertly mashed together to form a perfectly serviceable single game.  It's enjoyable, don't get me wrong; I don't at all regret the time I put into it and have even entertained thoughts of starting over, it's just that I never follow through when I start to think ahead to the second half of the game.

See, Bloodborne starts off as and is sold to you the player as a Victorian-era werewolf/beastman hunting simulator.  And for the first chunk of the game, it is.  A very good one, too!  Combat is speedy and interactive, enemies are grotesque things that were once familiar but now are not, and the environment of a crowded turn-of-the-century English city is a perfect sell.  

The gist is that for currently irrelevant reasons, the city of Yarnham partakes in odd medical practices that involve consuming blood in some manner.  Can't really say if it's by drinking it, injecting it, or by smearing it all over themselves.  You do two of those things.  The blood is great at curing diseases, but has the unfortunate side effect of slowly turning people into a whole manner of gross shit, and occasionally the city locks itself up to allow a force of Hunters to come in and clear out the worst of them.  A perfectly reasonable setup.

So you go through some impeccably detailed environments, cutting down mutated townsfolk, wolfmen, weird birds, gross dogs, and big lumbering dudes who look like when Mr. Hyde wore a three-piece suit in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  

This is easily my favorite part of the game.  The level and environment design is among From’s best, with the twists and turns of Central Yarnham sprawling through sewers and into residential areas, over bridges and across areas you'd been in half an hour ago and didn't realize there was more to.  Capped off by a stroll through what I consider the best-realized “Spooky Forest” in a videogame that leads to a shortcut back to the starting area that made me relive taking the elevator down from the Parish church back to Firelink, the first big chunk of Bloodborne is expertly presented.

And then you get to Byrgenwerth.  Byrgenwerth is the game's Creepy Oxford; hyped up as a massive university where terrible experiments of alchemy and black magic are carried out.  It's supposed to be the place where this all started, where the old scholars got their ideas and unleashed this blood plague upon the city while trying to pursue immortality.  At this point in the game and pretty much until the end, the game tells you that there is no place more important than Byrgenwerth.

So it's a real shame when you get there and it turns out to be a single room.

Byrgenwerth marks the end of the grounded concept the game started with, as well as the end of my fascination with it.  Byrgenwerth marks a massive shift in how the game is presented, how the narrative unfolds, what your purpose is, and why you've come to Yarnham.

Byrgenwerth is where you start fighting aliens.

To be fair, you can do that a tiny bit earlier in the Spooky Forest, down a hidden side path.  But once you beat the boss at Byrgenwerth, you get a cutscene that basically tells you “Yes hello now it is time for weird shit” and then you get teleported to a new part of the city.  And there are aliens.  From this point on, the game ditches the werewolf-hunter angle entirely and makes it all about tracking down this weird baby who’s part alien god or something; Vaati can tell you more about the story if you really care.  

Design-wise, it all starts to wobble a bit.  Levels become smaller, bosses become less mechanically interesting, and everything starts leaning super heavily on Lovecraft.  Weird aliens, possible space-gods, literal body snatchers; it’s all so jarringly different from the first half of the game, and not in a thematically interesting way.  It’s just incredibly different.

Okay, so the first part of the game is, again, essentially a massive single level that spirals and crawls all over itself in a way that is extremely satisfying to go through.  After Byrgenwerth, you’re shuffled through smaller and smaller levels that are barely connected until you just kind of find yourself at the end of the game.  There’s a place called the Lecture Hall that’s supposedly connected to Byrgenwerth, but it’s not anywhere near there, and the two exits on either side of it lead to entirely disconnected areas in The Nightmare Frontier, a place made entirely of bleeding tombstones and poison water, and Nightmare of Mensis, an area that while technically better put together than Lost Izalith, elicits many of the same reactions.

The Lecture Hall is two floors of simple, boxy rooms.  Nightmare Frontier is an uninteresting, flat expanse filled with enemies throwing instant-kill projectiles at you.  Nightmare of Mensis is a big creepy castle guarded by some of the most annoying enemies in the game and populated with the others.  Neither are actually horrible, but the lack of connection to anywhere else is just disappointing.  Add in secret bonus areas that are supposed to have a pretty big amount of plot significance like The Orphanage (a single room) or Cainhurst (a big impressive castle that you barely actually go through) and it all just left a bad taste in my mouth the longer I thought about it.

I said at the beginning that the game felt like two halves of other games inexpertly stitched together.  What I mean by that is that the story of that first game didn't seem done being told.  There was still a lot of mileage I felt that could have been gotten out of the setting, and instead of giving it a satisfying conclusion that rolled naturally into the second half, it was rather unceremoniously cut short to make room for this new thing that suddenly came into existence.  And the problem then with that new thing is that it didn't seem to have nearly as much care and attention put into as did the thing that had just been yanked offstage Vaudeville style, complete with comically oversized shepherd's crook.

My personal preference, then, is that the entire game would have been about this creepy blood plague people get from drinking weird fluids they found in an ancient catacomb.  It could have even gone the alien angle later, maybe saving that for the last third or even the last quarter of the game rather than an entire half.  There just seemed to be so little to go around in the latter half, while the first part still seemed brimming with ideas.  Instead of having us get transported to a secret sealed-off part of the city, have us go down into those catacombs and find what started this whole thing; make the last bit of the game one frantic rush to just barely touch the surface of what's really going on in Yarnham.

But oh wait, they tried that.

Yes, enter the Chalice Dungeons, a system for making procedurally-generated maps and mazes to fight through!  Only the finest square hallways and maddeningly repetitive rooms here, filled full of enemies that didn't make the cut for the main game!  Grind for hours to gather materials to make a new map, all for a chance to find a marginally better Diablo 2-style insertable weapon gem!  Chase that +1.3% increased critical damage, good Hunter!

In a word, Chalice Dungeons are shit.  But they're ignorable shit, there solely for those who find joy in them and the treasure hunting they allow.  Or they would be, if the true final boss of the game wasn't locked in there four-deep.

Throughout the game, you're occasionally given new chalices from boss encounters.  They don't do anything on their own, and are there only to participate in this system.  But you can't just put them on their little altars and hop over to the maps they control, no no no.  You need crafting materials to make the maps, even the ones that aren't procedurally-generated that make up the four story-relevant ones.  You get . . . most of them along the normal course of the game, either through drops from specific bosses or as out-of-the-way item pickups.  Others drop from enemies, so draw your own conclusions there.

The story-relevant dungeons are at least hand-crafted, but it doesn’t do a lot to get rid of the issues.  There’s no real theme beyond “blocky dungeon,” even when mildly-different tilesets add environmental decals and different decorations.  You have a short hallway, a long hallway, an L-shaped hallway, three or four flavors of rooms with enemies in the same places each time, two different trap rooms, and two different big setpiece rooms.  To their credit, they do (sometimes) populate the dungeons with unique enemies and bosses, but as I said above, a lot of the stuff you can only find in Chalice Dungeons feel like leftovers from scrapped main-game content.  

I don’t know what the Chalice Dungeons were supposed to be.  Maybe they were supposed to be a side project that got rolled into Bloodborne when the deadline started to loom, maybe they were supposed to be way more involved and part of a more complex post-game, or maybe they were just supposed to be a neat distraction for people who wanted more.  But the problem with that last one is that you are forced to go through four of these things to get the true final boss, and they are anything but short.  Each dungeon is pretty sizeable, certainly larger that some lategame areas in the main game, and the challenge they pose is on par with the rest (unless we’re talking about Cursed Pthumerian, holy shit that was painful).  I could understand having to go through one heavily-curated dungeon as a way for From to say “hey, come check these out!”  But that there are four of them that make a hefty demand on your time and resources, I just don’t know.  To make it even worse, enemies in Chalice Dungeons only drop materials for crafting new dungeons.  No dungeon-specific weapons or armor in the four of them to reward you, only dungeon crafting materials and those randomized weapon gems for nigh-inconsequential bonuses.  There’s just no tangible bonus for doing these things past what it takes to fight the end boss.

And speaking of resources, let’s dive into that.  The game does away with Dark Souls’ Estus Flask - the rechargeable, always-available but limited healing option.  Instead, we’re taken back to Demon’s Souls-style consumable healing items, with a couple caveats.  There’s only one type, you can only carry 20 at a time, they increase in price from vendors as the game goes on, and later-game enemies, for the most part, simply do not drop them.  

I realize I’ve not actually spent much time on the game’s mechanics, so let me jump back a second to talk about the Regain system.  Combat in Bloodborne was, at the time, much faster than anything in any of the Souls games.  Rather than focusing on slower, more cautious and methodical combat, Bloodborne fully expects you to trade hits with the enemies.  Combat is rapid; your roll is replaced by quick-stepping in any given direction, leading to dodges that cover less distance but that treat avoiding damage as secondary to repositioning.  Even the largest weapons swing quickly, and most hits stagger enemies just enough that the game wants you to dance around groups of them, using a series of unrelenting attacks to manage the crowd rather than waiting behind a shield for your opening.  So when you do inevitably get hit, the game doesn’t want you retreating, it wants you to jump right back in there and earn your health back.  For a short but generous-enough time after taking damage, hitting the enemy will heal you for up to the amount you were at before, and it’s absolutely possible to fully negate the effects of a swipe to the gut.  

So with that in mind, having 20 Blood Vials that instantly-regenerate 40% of your total HP seems reasonable, and it is for much of the game.  Coincidentally, the first half of the game.  Early on, you often face groups of 5 or so enemies at once, or individual ones that are slower.  There, the system works great.  Do a bit of damage, trade a few hits, dash back and use a single Blood Vial to give yourself a safety net, hop back in to finish everyone off.  Get a couple vials back off the enemies as a prize.  Later though, you’re facing down enemies mostly by themselves or with only one other, and they hit much harder while still being fast.  It becomes a lot riskier to try to get the full heal off the Regain system, so maybe you want to dash out and pop a vial.  As you go on through the later levels, it can be a pretty common occurrence to see your Blood Vial counter dwindling; not out of any real fault of your own for not playing well enough, but just because the game, again, expects you to trade hits, and has now changed how your damage matches up versus your enemy’s.  

You can store up to 600 extra vials in your storage box at home base, and your personal stock of 20 is replenished from that total when you respawn or go to a different area, so it’s not like you have to rush back to buy 20 more every time you use them up.  But you do definitely find yourself running out faster at the end of the game than you were previously.  You can only Regain the effects of the most recent hit you take, and nothing past it.  So if an enemy has, say, an uninterruptable frenzy attack that does multiple hits you can’t escape from for a small amount of damage each hit, well . . .  Blood Vials are the only way to regenerate health you’ve fully lost.  In Dark Souls, topping yourself up before a tough enemy encounter was a reasonable thing, because you’d get that estus back at the next bonfire.  In Demon’s Souls, chowing down on some Half-Moon Grass beforehand was fine, you were carrying 80 of the damn things, plus dozens of the other types.  Dark Souls 2 gave you Lifegems to make up for a smaller stock of estus, and even the King’s Field games had refillable health potions mixed with findable and buyable Earth Herbs.  Plus, each of those games had healing magic.  Bloodborne has “fight for the health you just lost” or “heal 40% of your HP, 20 times.”  Yes, as I said before, you can in fact buy more vials, but the increasing price combined with the carry limit make it difficult to rely on getting them that way.  

The game treats bullets much the same way.  Oh, right, you have a gun in Bloodborne.  You use to parry enemies, don’t worry about it.  Like Blood Vials, you can carry 20 on you at a time.  But you don’t just use them to shoot stuff, you also use them as ammunition for certain special attacks, or to cast spells.  So I’ll just come right out and say it, doing “a mage build” in Bloodborne is pretty much a waste of everyone’s time.  You don’t get useful spells until halfway through the game, and you cannot reasonably hope to defeat enemies with magic because you simply don’t carry enough bullets to make it happen.  

So, bullets.  Enemies at least drop them a little more generously than they do vials, and there’s a nifty little thing From put in the game to help you out.  At any time, you can press a button to sacrifice 30% of your health for 5 extra bullets.  It’s a neat system, it plays nicely with Regain, and it helps you conserve resources.  No complaints there.  

Alright, I’ll be honest here.  I’d taken a step away from this massive wall of text for a few weeks, and I think it’s best to just close the book on the whole thing.  If I haven’t been able to show you that my thought on Bloodborne are super conflicted by now, it won’t happen even if I write another five pages.  

Bloodborne is a great game.  Combat is fast and responsive, the graphics are superb, the aesthetic is wonderfully realized, the level design starts off so strong, and the difficulty feels natural.  But Bloodborne is also a mess.  Some systems feel half-baked, the superb graphics combined with too much post-processing leads to slowdown fairly easily, the level design turns to garbage in the lategame, Chalice Dungeons were a mistake, and the game clearly has no idea what it wants to do with itself.  For the third time, it feels like two different, unfinished ideas were mushed together to make a technically finished product, but it just ends up feeling like you’re awkwardly stepping from one to the other.

What I’ve felt about Bloodborne from the first time I finished it is that From had a lot of ideas, but spent far, far too long fleshing them out before actually considering how they would function as a game.  They allegedly started working on it while Dark Souls 1’s Artorias of the Abyss expansion was being made, which gives them around three years to have put the entire thing together.  Quite long for a modern game, but considering that so much changed from the Project Beast trailer that came out 7 months prior to Bloodborne’s release, I just don’t know.  

So much stuff feels like it was cobbled together at the last minute.  It feels genuinely unfinished on a conceptual level.  The actual mechanical gameplay doesn’t suffer for it, but something definitely feels missing from every other part of the game.  Maybe we’ll see it again some day, like March of 2016, or April if you don’t live in Japan.  And then two weeks later on PC for no reason.

[thesaint-jimmy]

GET TO KNOW MY HUNTER

OC answering meme curtosey of @princeofmorley

We all know Bloodborne can be a difficult fandom for OCs given the vagueness of the lore, but a lot of us still enjoy coming up with stories for our hunters. I hadn’t seen an OC meme for Bloodborne so I figured I’d make one myself!

These are all the questions I could think of without getting into the nitty gritty of the lore. Of course, all questions are optional. You can remove any question you don’t want to answer, or add questions I might’ve forgotten!

Feel free to use this template as you wish! I’d love to read about other people’s hunter OCs, so be sure to tag it as #bloodborne oc meme so I can read yours!

(Artwork created by the lovely @esuerc )

Name: Templeton Kingsley Nickname(s): Temple, Temp Age: 26 Gender: Female Sexuality: Bisexual Height/Build: 5″1 and very thin

Personality description:  Usually nervous, Templeton seeks the approval of others like its going out of style. She’s trusting and loyal though, not the kind to back down from a difficult task or a friend in need. She can find hope even in the darkest times which is rare in the world of Yharnam.

Physical description:  Templeton wears the starting set you get at the begining of the game, little baby caplet and all. She’s got messy orange hair, brown eyes and wears glasses. Her skin, like most residents of Yharnam is fairly pale from never seeing the sun.

BACKSTORY

Introduce your hunter and their backstory. Templeton’s rise to being a hunter isn’t anything dramatic.  She grew up near Yharnam around the time of the hunt and was trained in the ways of the hunters. She became close friends with a huntress called Frigga who was a lot more skilled, and worked hard to try and be like her. Templeton was constantly fascinated by the wrong things, reading books when she should’ve been sparring or looking at the stars when it was time to clean weapons. Unbeknownst to her she gained a ridiculous amount of insight while perusing her own little whims and has been known to get feelings about things before they happen, though often they go unlistened too. Frigga was fast friend and constant protector, the two forging a fairly deep bond despite a few major mishaps. Now they are part of the same small group of hunters.

Which class/origin did you choose for your hunter? Does this tie into their backstory? I chose violent past. It’s not accurate.

Where is your hunter from? What brought them to Yharnam? A little city a few miles from Yharnam, the name of which was never relevant. Templeton forgot it due to growing up in Yharnam and never really looking back.

Did your hunter know any of the characters from the game before they entered the Hunter’s Dream? They had heard of a few of them. Eileen and Executioner Alfred, but never actually met them.

Had they fought beasts before entering the Dream, or is this their first experience as a hunter? They’ve fought beasts before

CHARACTER DETAILS

How do they react to first waking up in the Hunter’s Dream? Do they remember anything about their life before the Dream? Templeton remembers most things and assumes this is just another stage of the hunt.

Do they align themselves with any Covenants or other factions (the Healing Church, the Choir, the Old Hunters, the Unseen Village, etc)? Nope, just whomever seems trustworthy. This sometimes leads to bad decisions being made.

Do they befriend any NPCs in particular? Make enemies of any NPCs? Templeton tries to befriend whomever she can. Things go well with Alfred for a time, but then it ends poorly.

Are they in a relationship? If so, with whom? Nope.

How does your hunter feel about the Healing Church? About blood ministration? Positively. Blood ministration is kind of essential to a hunter.

Do they fear the scourge? Are they afraid of turning into a beast? Afraid of becoming blood-addled? Of the unknown Cosmos? What are they afraid of? Templeton is afraid of most of these things. She does all she can to banage cuts and prevent infection and has been known to keep charms to ward off evil on her person.

Does your hunter relish in the Hunt or revile their bloody work? No but she knows she has too do it, and is desperate for an end to the hunt.

What is your hunter’s attitude towards Gehrman? Do they resent being trapped in the Hunter’s Dream? She finds him very creepy. Does not wish to spend time with him, but is an admirer of his book collection.

Does your hunter sympathize and associate with fellow hunters, or are they more of a loner who avoids other hunters? Do they leave notes for other hunters? Templeton leaves all the notes, happily offering help whenever she can. She wants to do whatever is in her power to assist the others out on the hunt.

Does your hunter worship the Great Ones? Do they worship blood? Or do they have a different belief system? If they’re not devout, what do they value or prioritize in life? She’s got a dim faith in the great ones, but it doesn’t rule her life. She says prayers when she needs luck or strength but mostly that’s just for her own reassurance.

Do they have a special place where they feel safe or “at home”? Is there a place they’re afraid of or that they avoid? Templeton feels very at home with a book in her hands and a wall at her back. She often worms her way between candle holding statues to get in some time to read and believes that the statues will look out for her. She HATES Yhar’ghul and avoids it at all costs.

Are there any particular items your hunter holds onto for sentimental reasons, or items that serve to comfort them? She is quite protective of her glasses.

Do any of the discoveries in the game (about the old blood, the Healing Church, the Great Ones, etc) shock them? How do they react to these revelations? Most things shock her, but the whole process of trying to birth a great one she finds particularly revolting and unsettling.

Does your hunter want to discover the secrets of the Healing Church and the origins of the scourge, or do they just want to kill some beasts and escape the Dream? What motivates them? She’s very much interested in finding the source of the scourge and a way to stop it. To end the plague is her foremost goal.

How does your hunter feel about being effectively immortal? How do the unending deaths affect them over the course of their time in the Dream? She’s not really come to terms with that yet, and deals with it by being in deep deep denial.

COMBAT AND STATS

(I’m answering these ones more based on how I play then how I write Templeton in my bloodborne stories. Hope that’s alright)

Which primary stat does your hunter most rely on (Strength, Skill, Bloodtinge, Arcane)? Do they prioritize Vitality or Endurance? Strength and Vitality over everything. That’s where all the blood echoes get spent.

What are your hunter’s trick weapon and firearm of choice? Why? Whirligig saw is the best one, two handed wield style with no gun needed.

Do they make use of any hunter tools? Not very often

What type of armor do they wear? Why? When it’s nessecary to change out of the typical outsiders clothes for something a bit more flashy she prefers the decorative old hunter set, complete with a top hat. She thinks all the charms will bring her luck.

Describe their fighting style. Hit it until it dies.

Which Caryll runes does your hunter keep equipped? Vision. The star shaped one.

How much Insight does your hunter have? How does this affect them? Lots of insight. They want to notice all the little details they can.

Does your hunter take advantage of Beasthood to fuel their attacks? How does it affect them? No she is very afraid of the effect that might have, that things would turn out to be irreversible.

Is there a beast or type of enemy your hunter likes to fight? An enemy they avoid? When she has to choose she doesn’t mind fighting darkbeasts like Paarl. Something sparking and glowing so it can’t sneak up on her. She hates the brain sucker/cthulu guys.

Do they often summon the Old Hunters or hunters from other worlds to aid them? Yes, quite the one for jolly cooperation. Strength in numbers as of were.

PLOT DECISIONS

Does your hunter’s story deviate from the central plot of Bloodborne? In what ways? Oh yes. There’s a lot of deviations as most of what happens to Templeton in my cannon takes place before the game and I see the world of bloodborne a bit different then other people do. It’s way too many to list.

Does your hunter try to rescue any of the civilians of Yharnam? Are they successful? Yes. They manage to rescue none of them though and end up making mistakes that lead to the death of each one.

Does your hunter kill the Impostor Iosefka or let her continue her work? Templeton is completely unaware of Iosefka (as I was) and lets her carry on.

Do they fight Djura or befriend him? What about Eileen the Crow? Fight Djura, brefirend the Crow

Do they choose to side with Alfred or Queen Annalise? ALFRED

Does your hunter enter the Chalice Dungeons? Heck no

Does your hunter enter the Hunter’s Nightmare? Do they defeat the Orphan of Kos? in all actuality of me playing yes, in her story no

What is your hunter’s final choice at the end of the game? To be reborn as a great one

If they accept Gehrman’s offer, what does your hunter do once they’re free of the Hunter’s Dream? n/a

If applicable, how does your hunter die? As of now I do not know.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your hunter?

Yes! You can read about Templeton and her adventures through my weird Yharnam cannon here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6655885/chapters/15223582

Also I have lots of other hunters if anyone would like me to fill this out for one of them!

I’m going to tag @tetsuna-chan for Fwahe @focsle for Obediah , @skelephibian for Bloodborne au Antares and @lycheeberry17 for Aditya Lupei 

If you guys have the time it would be super cool to learn about ya hunters