I got my platinum trophy several days ago so I've had time to think of Bloodborne as a whole and how it compares to to Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. Killing the Moon Presence was my final trophy and there is a funny situation I'd like to point out about that fight before I go on. The red laser move leaves you with 1 HP. I didn't know that. I was fighting the Moon Presence with my transformed Chikage that continually drains your HP. I thought it was an impossible to dodge move that killed in one until it happened to hit immediately after my HP was drained so i had a fraction of a second to see myself still alive and then collapse due to the HP drain. I killed it right after that.

With that out of the way I want to make it clear that Bloodborne will most likely end up being my GOTY, but I feel it dropped the ball in a major way. I had hoped that From had learned this lesson from DS1 and DS2, but they still don't know why people are so attached to the bosses from Dark Souls 1. The answer? They hyped their bosses within the lore of the game.

Dark Souls 1 SPOILERS ARE COMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What did Bloodborne have in the way of an ultimate goal that you were trying to achieve? Seek the Paleblood to transcend the hunt? That doesn't mean anything to someone who just starts the game. What about the bosses. Do you you know who or what you're going to fight in any given area? Do you know anything about any given boss before you see them? The bosses look cool and they're fun to fight, but you can't look forward to any boss if you don't know what to expect.

I completely understand that that world of Bloodborne seeks to enhance the world itself as you slowly come to terms with the Eldritch presence that's been there from the very beginning, but it would have been nice to have the bosses take a more prominent role in the lore. It would have made their fights something to look forward to.

I feel like they did it a few times in Bloodborne (Logarius, Micolash, Ebrietas, Amygdala, Rom). Though I read ahead, so maybe I had knowledge I shouldn't have when the bosses hit.

In any case, having context is cool and something these games should do a better job of. Finding lore as a community after the fact has its fun and is an ingrained part of the series, but maybe give players some more understanding on the first playthrough. Then fill in the deep lore in more obscure places.

The last boss I fought for my platinum was Yharnam in the Chalice Dungeon. I thought it was a cool final boss for me, given that you see her a few times in the main game but she's incredibly enigmatic. It certainly doesn't get to Dark 1 levels of diagetic hype, like you mention, but it was pretty cool. She's a total pushover, though. I killed her on the first try, which was disappointing. Same with the Moon Presence.

Yes, there were a couple of bosses that do get introduced in a small way before you eventually fight them. You know that Gerhman is a guy that you can talk to a couple of times during the game, but his time to shine is during the cutscene when you already know you are going to fight him. The whole set up for the scene in the flower field, the stare down, the weapon transformation, and his final line, "Tonight, Gehrman joins the hunt..." is absolutely amazing, but we had nothing like that throughout the game.

Queen Yharnam comes close to what was needed, but it never truly materializes. Her introduction after the Rom fight is great at producing a sense of mystery and her 2nd appearance in the nightmare does lead one to believe that she has a connection to the child that get's brought up in the lore. The problem is that the conclusion fizzles out in her boss fight. You kill her, get her stone, and it's over.

Amygdala at the very least has a surprising appearance once you hit 40 insight. I knew that 40 insight was important, but I didn't know what to expect. Patches provides a tiny bit more of background info, but that's it. Logarius is mentioned in passing and Ebrietas gets an item description in the Augur of Ebrietas before you fight her.

The most frustrating part is that there was plenty that could have been done for the bosses to sprinkle in more parts of their story leading up to their fights. Gascoigne and the Tiny Music Box was like the first step, but you only get the first step and then you kill Gascoigne.

The only thing I need for my platinum is getting to the blood queen in the chalice dungeons and honestly I just don't have the energy to do it. If I could just go through each dungeon, maybe? But you actually have to farm materials to open some of those dungeons and thats way too much.

I enjoyed the game, beat it three times and left the submit ending for last, just so I wouldn't have to fight Gehrman again. It's fun and I hope they make another one in this style but expand on the classes and possibilities. Magic seems completely pointless in Bloodborne, or rather it takes on a very auxillery role but requires a serious stat commitment at the same time. Also having bullets as the currency for spells is a terrible idea and in a way doesn't really make narrative sense. Like am I slamming bullets into this old bone to activate it or something?

Just like with Dark Souls they introduced a lot of novel concepts that will probably get refined in the next game. Dark Souls 2 took all the terrible things from Dark Souls like not being able to warp between bonfires, upgrading your estus or the generally horrible world design and basically fixed them. I'm hopeful they will do the same with Bloodborne because at this point I rather keep going in this direction than go back to how the previous games played because I already had 3 entire games of that..

I kept hoping that you'd eventually get to fight Ludwig, specifically because of how his name just keeps popping up in item descriptions. I mean I guess you technically do if you go with the theory that Cleric Beast = Ludwig, but I'd love to somehow face against Ludwig as a Hunter ala Gascoigne and Gehrman via DLC or something. Would love to see what sort of unique Hunter attire someone as important as Ludwig would be rockin'.

@yummylee: If I had to guess it would probably just be robes similar to those that Alfred wears.

Allow me to massively disagree with that one.

Warping between bonfires was already fixed in the Artorias DLC and being able to do it from the start is a negative if you ask me. Upgrading estus is straight up worse in DSII with having to go back to Majula and talk to Emerald Herald every time. Sure kindling bonfires could get tricky in DaS but I think it's a far more interesting and logical system. Needing fire keeper souls to strengthen your estus was also a good idea. The only estus-related thing I think DSII does better is that you get less of them.

And I don't think I even need to explain how flawed the "generally horrible world design" arguments is since one of the biggest criticisms of DSII is exactly that. Even the unfinished state of the Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith will not change that one bit.

As for Bloodborne needing an Artorias of the Abyss DLC of its own. I wouldn't be surprised if it received one.

I think part of the allure of Artorias (other than it simply being a very enjoyable boss fight) comes from the fact that he wasn't in the vanilla game. There were all these stories about his legacy, but you never got to see him. That allowed players to speculate and create their own image of the character, which naturally made people far more excited to fight him when he appeared in the dlc. It's the same reason I was excited to interact with Vendrick in the Dark Souls 2 dlc. And if Bloodborne is to get dlc, there are characters referenced in the game that could potentially get the same treatment. Laurence is perhaps the most talked about character in Bloodborne that doesn't appear in the game, so I could see him appearing in a dlc.

But I also think that's not what Bloodborne was going for. Like you said, and true to its Lovecraftian roots, I think Bloodborne was more focused on the grand reveal of the Eldritch horror. You could almost compare it to the way Dark Souls told the story of Ceaseless Discharge. It's not about creating all this speculation leading up to the encounter, but more that it presents you will a monstrosity and then gives you the context after the fact.

@dudeglove said:

@hassun: I had written out a bunch of stuff in response but I think thats just derailing the thread so I deleted it out will just accept that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Obviously people hold that first game near and dear to their hearts. The point stands that I really do hope they iterate and innovate on Bloodborne because as much as it throttled the player into a single playstyle I did find it oddly refreshing after playing three games that for the most part felt very similar.

As for the Artorias thing and hyping of bosses I don't really agree there either. Artorias is built up and it's interesting to see a different version of him but I don't think a majority of the other bosses are anything more than things you encounter along the way. You learn the lore afterwards. This is where Bloodborne falls short in that bosses don't drop boss-souls anymore and you no longer get that immediate bit of lore revealing what fallen creature you've just slaughtered. But apart from that I enjoyed the way the game builds on things perpetually as you play it, instead of giving you a sizzle reel at the start. Hopefully the DLC will be something really interesting, and not some terrible Chalice Dungeon add-on.

@humanity: As long as you don't write it off as "oh people just like that more because it was their first Souls game" or some other irrational reason. :V

It's really weird that you'd put spoiler tags on information from a 4 year old game but start the post with a video of the final boss of Bloodborne which came out like a month ago.

So I never had any of these moments of the bosses being hyped up in DS1. I didn't read many item descriptions after a certain point (probably after picking up the hundredth piece of gear in the first few levels). I had no idea who Artiorias was or what "The Abyss" had to do with anything. It was long enough ago that I don't remember if I just wasn't paying attention, but the lore never felt as "complete" as it did playing Bloodborne.

I liked what they did with Gascoigne, where elements of his story were woven into the level itself and not just in the item descriptions, and I wish there was more of that. It did a good job of setting up a ruleset and tone for how that world works, so that when they start to mess with that world it's actually engaging.

Just to add clarification... Uh real spoilers so... yeah...

All that aside, I think lore wise Bloodborne is fine but agree with @yummylee, they should bring Ludwig out for the expansion. Also Ludwig is not the Cleric Beast, that theory is nonsense.

I didn't really want to go into all that detail about it but like I said "there were other baby options around" (also I guess I end up going into pointless detail anyway). Also don't take this the wrong way, but I really don't like the guy you are referring to and From dumped the whole story in his lap so he didn't have to interpret anything. But to clarify something ...

@dudeglove: I used to avoid that guy purely because I thought "Epic Name Bro" was the stupidest, most modern-meta name anyone could ever come up with. But I gave his videos a chance after I beat Bloodborne and he's actually a pretty stand up guy and likewise I found some of his musings pretty interesting. Even though I've beaten the game I found his playthrough interesting because of all the hidden little things he points out that I never noticed - for instance I never got killed by any of the bagmen during my first playthrough and never had a chance to meet the nun character. Sometimes I think he's honestly pulling a whole lot of lore out of his ass and sometimes he gets hung up on like the tiniest of things but still a pretty cool guy to listen to. On the flipside I tried listening to the Vaatiwhatever guy once and could not stand his melodramatic theater voice - it's a game, it's not a religious experience.

I watched a lot of ENB's stuff and he definitely talks in a more real sense about matters than Vaati. Although I wouldn't hold it against the latter as his product is on a more theatrical subject. When you're talking about lore I've no problem with telling it in a campfire, storied way.

And the only reason I'm holding off on Bloodborne is because I want the complete experience. From's track record on DLC means I'm prepared to wait.

See here is the thing. These people are not part of a "community", they are professional youtubers doing it for money. Also, no, seriously, ENB did not start the "lets learn the lore of Souls" at all. None of these people even gave a crap about these games until they saw a chance to make a dollar off of them. Also I have seen an ENB video someone told me was the most insightful thing ever.... and he was talking about a random statue for 15 minutes and completely making stuff up out his ass about it. It was clickbait in the purest sense of the word.

So please, don't overstate their importance, or the validity of half the nonsense they post.

@karkarov: I agree ENB can start pulling stuff out of very scarce clues or start speculating heavily. In one video he was extremely impressed that even the horse corpses didn't have eye balls and went on quite a lengthy theory about how this ties into the lore of the specific area he was in. Later in the game he encounters live horses and more horse corpses in completely different levels and admits that they probably just used the same model for everything. Still other times he made some fairly well thought out guesses about what happened.

The big problem, or boon for some, is that all anyone can ever do is speculate. It's not like From Software ever goes on record to really confirm or deny any of this. They release the games and thats it. It would be the biggest "cosmic" joke if they didn't know themselves because they didn't actually flesh any of these stories out. Demon's was a little more straight forward, but Dark Souls and onward these games have been very open to interpretation. The lore is so sparse that no theory is wrong, because there isn't enough concrete evidence to prove or disprove anything.

I think it would be cool if Miyazaki would do a post mortem like 2-3 years after each game and release a detailed plot explanation for each game. This would be cool on many levels as it would not only provide answers and much needed closure but would be a neat way to see who was the closest to the truth. As it stands it's just crazy people spinning webs out of circumstantial evidence and claiming their insane theory is obviously the right one. For Bloodborne the newest fad I've heard was that you're ingesting menstrual blood because (insert 3 pages of theory) and yah..

I kinda like that speculation as some of it can be very entertaining. Its why I watch conspiracy videos. Its why I posted on GameFAQs many years ago a theory that Revolver Ocelot was definitely Big Boss. Its awesome to find a nugget and go off on a tangent. I also wonder what a post-mortem would do with regards to the story.

The most insightful thing he could say would be something he's already said with regards to how he made his own stories up when reading books because he wasn't capable enough in English to finish them. Its a story that they've purposely elected not to finish. There is no concrete answers.

No not really.

Not really an Artorias of the Abyss equivalent, but the same approach that the AotA DLC took to boss introductions and the way the world hyped up the boss fights before you encountered them. You knew about Artorias, Manus, and Kalameet and why they were cool before their actual boss fight.

Bloodborne needs a hype man like Gough.

@humanity: i think that the silver bullets are supposed to act like the mana bar from demon's souls but unlike demon's souls we can't completely restock silver bullets and we can't increase the amount of bullets beyond 24 which kind of sucks for arcane builds.