I absolutely hated Demons Souls, but figured I'd give the series another shot with Bloodborne. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. The lack of hollowing, more active combat and better designed areas made me enjoy the countless hours I sunk into it. I won't give the Dark Souls games a chance, but I'll definitely buy a Bloodborne 2.

I'd still take Dark Souls' better world design and diversity thereof, over Bloodborne's more consistent one though. As a side note, the combat is only more active in Bloodborne if you purposefully chose to make it less active in the previous Souls games.

Just finished it. Given Dark Souls is one of my absolute favourite games, it was always going to draw some unfair comparisons, but I think for the most part Bloodborne stacks up to DaS, with some crippling flaws keeping me from liking it as much (with it probably fitting in my personal rankings as such; DaS > BB = DeS > DaS2)-

Pros

• Pretty much every weapon feels fantastic. Compared to how many stinkers were in DaS, it was a joy to just love the feel of a bunch of different weapons here (though I did end up with my trusty Hunter Axe most of the way through)
• Excellent world cohesion and atmosphere. Disparity was sort of the entire point of DaS, so I think it has a fair excuse for its super eclectic visuals, but I do love how BB has a specific aesthetic vision that it sticks to for the entire run. It might feel a little drab-Victorian-alley until around Old Yharnam, but even up to that point the atmosphere is positively spine-curdling, with the eerie silence, pitter-patter of footsteps and distant bell-ringing really making me feel uneasy at times.
• Good length. I haven't heard this brought up much, maybe because others didn't feel the same way, but I loved the length of this game. My playthrough having landed at around 40 hours (many of which were spent messing around in Chalice Dungeons), I neither felt like the game ended too abruptly nor that it left me fatigued and just waiting for it to end (which DaS2 certainly did around the time I reached Castle Drangleic).
• Music is superb. Sort of runs with my praise of the atmosphere, but I feel like the soundtrack is a marked improvement on DaS. It's still not so wonderful as the DeS soundtrack, but I felt like half the bosses were accompanied with some really memorable pieces (highlighted by two of the best being for the last two bosses of the game).

Cons

• Blood vials. I have no idea what they were thinking, but From decided it'd be a good idea to revert one of their most inspired design changes by removing Estus Flasks and basically forcing the player to spend half an hour grinding for health whenever they get stuck on a boss or a particularly hard zone. It's not even that I had to do much of the aforementioned grinding, really only three or four times by my count, but knowing after each death that I was one step closer to just wasting my time on completely joyless health-fetching put me on a downer I never had getting into the DaS rhythm of smacking my head against a boss.
• Loading times and World reloading. I put these together because I feel like both must be something From would've had trouble doing anything about, but they did have a dramatically negative effect on the game. Waiting up to a minute to respawn after a death, and having to sit through two loading screens just to repopulate the world, was suuuuuuper lame.
• One-hit kills. This one is very much subjective, and it probably didn't frustrate people who were used to playing offensive builds in Souls games. I've always gone tanky and defensive in my builds, doing my fair share of rolling but usually holding well-timed guards and good Poise as high-priority for play. With Bloodborne offering nothing of the sort, and even kind of mocking shield-users with the Wooden Shield, I got very frustrated by how often i'd be doing fine against a boss only to see them strike a pose and whip out a OHKO on me. I have to admit I don't know how they'd fix this without completely changing how the game worked but man, that was not fun for me. As a related critique, I hate how completely irrelevant armor is in this game; they might as well have just put all Effect Resistances in Runes and made armor purely cosmetic, with how little it matters to the game.
• Chalice Dungeons are boring as fuck. Or at least, the first three Depths are boring as fuck. You know, the ones you basically need to do to get any of the resources you need to get to the more fun ones later? The enemies and room designs were far too limited, and it's way too easy to generate dungeons with no decent loot in them, meaning that the whole thing basically becomes incredibly tedious and samey. I hit a point where I found a big empty swamp with a bridge over it, and I was actually bummed out by how excited it made me just to see SOMETHING interesting in a Chalice Dungeon.
• Amygdala is a pretty lame boss. Looks great, but it feels more luck-based than almost anything else in the game, with how it just stomps all over you with the camera freaking out whenever you get close to it and how incredibly broken the lock-on gets during that fight. For the record, I actually beat it on my third try with relative ease, with bosses like BSB and Ebrietas taking me well over ten, but I still think Amygdala was the most glaringly flawed mechanically.

Misc. Comments

• The story was simultaneously fantastic and profoundly disappointing. I think that it really wouldn't have taken much effort to give me more of a moment-to-moment appreciation of the narrative (for example, just make it more explicit through a cut-scene or something that i'm trying to get to "the Paleblood" rather than leaving it on a note in the corner of a room), nor give me more meaningful interactions with the Plain Doll and especially Gehrman. That said, the more I think and read about the narrative the more I really like it. Can't wait to see people piece everything together over the coming months.
• The hardest boss for me was Blood-Starved Beast, which took me around eighteen tries. I get what people mean when they say it was easy though, because on my last go against it something seemed to click and I didn't need to use a single Blood Vial during the fight. Oddly enough, I beat him on my first try when we met again in the Chalice Dungeon. Other bosses that took a bunch of tries: Ebrietas, Logarius, Gascoigne, Bloodletting Beast.
• The easiest boss for me was either The One Reborn or Darkbeast Paarl. Darkbeast was literally the easiest, with it doing barely any damage against me while I cracked its face in within a couple of minutes, but I feel like I must've been over-leveled or something because I took it down when I went through Unseen Village proper instead of when I first got kidnapped by bag-boys like most people. I don't even know what was happening with The One Reborn; he just stood in a big goopy pile, I kept dodging in a circle taking swings, and a minute later he was dead. Other bosses I took down in one or two tries: Vicar Amelia, Cleric Beast, The First Hunter, Moon Presence, Celestial Emissary, Wet Nurse, Witch of Hemwick, Micolash.
• Favourite boss was Micolash, just because I love how his mumbling cries seemed to tie together so many aspects of the narrative. Plus his design was great, as was his accompanying music. Least favourite boss was Amygdala, for reasons explained above. Not a fan of Celestial Emissary either, but that guy just felt lazily-made.

@rubberbabybuggybumpers: Wait, so you "gave up" on the game after beating it once and getting halfway through it on NG+? I'm not sure how a game can "lose you" when you not only complete it, but continue playing after that. There are games I absolutely adore that I haven't bothered playing a second time.

@lackingsaint: yea pretty much all the "giant thing" boss battles were rough due to the camera. I'm currently fighting Ebrietas and the camera just goes insane if I get close to her. It's the one thing, even more than the load times, that I wish From would fix in this game and future games.

@gaminghooligan: For Ebrietas I can say definitively that never locking on was a huge help, but yeah it's a pretty glaring design issue they really need to work on. Good luck on the boss, duder; she was the only one to make me really lose my cool, pull the PS4 power-cord and send me off to bed in a huff. Don't lose hope!

I think the designs for the AYY LMAOs and their environments were largely uninspired and completely stereotypical Lovecraftian stuff. It was a sharp and marked step down compared to the variety of places they took things afflicted with the Beast Plague, from the bizarre and macabre BSB, to the wholly otherworldly Darkbeasts, and even the traditional but fantastically terrifying Lycans.

The Nightmare Frontier, though, manages to push past its dreary reality of being yet another Poison Swamp just based on its sheer aesthetic alone. It has a very alien, geometric feel to it while also being littered with oddly familiar items that make the overall experience very unsettling the first time you go through it.

I wish they had done more with Formless Oedon and the terror it evokes regarding deep waters.

On some level I sympathize with people who feel that build variety has gone down, especially in regard to weapons. But it is also very, very difficult to feel too bad when the ultimate outcome is that every accessible weapon is viable to some degree, compared to a whole 3-4% of all the weapons/builds in Dark Souls 2 being even remotely usable in PvP. Yes, yes, 'get good,' 'everything is viable if you learn it,' that didn't change the frustration of facing Hexers before their nerf. Nothing in Bloodborne, so far, feels flatly inferior and unusable compared to any other weapon, with the exception of the starting torch. Being able to go into combat with someone of equal level and contest them with actually usable gear feels phenomenally more satisfying, and I get the distinct feeling I might actually engage in PvP this time around just due to how eminently fair it has felt so far.

Fhew. Just finished it a few minutes ago. Level 110, although I was below 90 for everything except the last couple chalice bosses. Overall, I enjoyed it just as much as all the other games.

I think the story/lore went in a direction that I feel indifferent on. I have to go look up discussions and see what people have put together to make sense out of any of it. It's the alien/cosmic/god stuff that I feel a little meh on. I guess it provided a good twist and tonal switch off the regular old wolves and ye olden town stuff but it feels so random to me.

Unlike other people, for me the game felt just as long as the others. Maybe DS2 felt the longest, to the point where I was like "omg.. when does it end.." Bloodborne was more like "omg.. there's so many damn bosses, I just want this to end so I can move on.." I think I got through most of the game in about a week? Then it took me two weeks to get through all the side areas, secret bosses, and all the crazy chalice dungeon stuff. I have no idea how long it actually to me to beat it since I often left the game running when I took breaks for chunks of the day (my save game shows 160 hours lol). It definitely felt like 60 hours or more but no idea.

In terms of difficulty, I think it was maybe a tad easier than the other games? Not including the later crazy chalice dungeon stuff. I was able to make it through every boss without summoning help (it never worked when I tried) where as I remember getting a bunch of help through DS2 *I did use the suspend mode AI bug for the last couple chalice bosses so I could even stand a chance* The quantity of vials they give you is pretty generous. The combat system overall felt quicker, tighter, and more responsive. I bought DS2 for PS4 the other day and briefly fired it up and the character movement and attacks definitely don't feel as snappy. It kinda made me think that I won't be able to go back and play that. Back on Bloodborne, there was a definite difficulty spike for me from Rom on. The Unseen Village was a pile of shit. That first section of Nightmare of Mensis can go F itself. I found myself just sprinting through these areas because there was so much bullcrap to deal with and that feels like bad game design to me. The bosses from then on were pretty brutal as well.

I thought the weapon variety/design was pretty good. Armor style variety was lacking but they all had to fit within the style of the world so eh. The armor stat stuff is still frustrating. There is no, like, "good" armor or gradually better armor as you go through the game. Everything is just a balance of stats so it never feels important or exciting when you find stuff.

I enjoyed the game, even though I felt frustrated and I really wanted to get it done and over with because there is only so much time in the day and wanting to continue playing Pillars of Eternity and doing my usual nightly stuff in Final Fantasy 14. I don't like splitting my focus up between so many games.

Finally, I love the transformation you go through as a player with these games. After completing it, I went and started a new character to experience that feeling of seeing yourself blast through it and it felt great. I died so many times in the first area when I got the game (every time I play a Souls game, its almost like the first time because once I finish it, I'm done. I move on until the next release.) and now I was just wrecking everything. The confidence you feel, knowing where everything is and how stuff attacks. I almost made it to Cleric Beast without dying and within just 10 mins or so. Huge personal improvement compared to the beginning. I'm just missing the two other ending related trophies to get the Platinum and I'm unsure if I will try to get it. I only ever got one other platinum trophy in a game (GT6) so it might be neat to get another.

@gaminghooligan: 5th time is the charm they say

So I finally finished it and I finished everything besides the Eileen questline and the Ebrietas boss battle. Those two things were frustrating me so damn much they were risking me not finishing the game. I went against my obsessive nature and just finished the game, with the secret ending. My thoughts are easier to put in bullet points:

Pro

• HP Lovercraft is one of my favorite authors. His works like Dunwich Horror and Call of Cthulu were some of the first stories to really give me the chills. Setting this game in a world that is so heavily inspired by his writing made for one of the best game worlds I've ever seen.
• The weapons were limited but that made them all feel meaningful, same with the armor, and that's something I prefer over previous games.
• The characters and writing in general in this game was top notch. It had the charm of the souls games with more info to flesh out the world.
• The boss designs were all great, some of them like Micolash and the Witch of Hemlock were nice changes of pace.
• Chalice Dungeons are great.

Con

• I was an apologist for the camera in these games for a long time. Saying that they were still a fairly new series, but around the time Dark Souls 2 finished up I'd had enough. Now they're just frustrating and kind of inexcusable.
• I'm tired of weapon durability. Not just with this game, but in all games. When I'm already farming echoes to buy health vials and bullets, don't make me waste my time running up to the house to repair a weapon for pennies.
• They need to go back to the flask style health item, you can leave vials in as extra healing power, but respawning after fighting Logarius for the fifth time and having to break to collect health items is not something I want to do.

Overall I loved the game, but unlike Dark Souls 1 and 2 I don't see myself jumping back in to this game for a bit.