Why Bloodborne has me hooked
By AndyLonn 13 Comments
I love Resident Evil 4, The eerie feeling that game gives still sends a chill down my spine. From the starting village where it feels like everything used to be normal but something went horribly wrong to the creepy castle of the main antagonist. The game just embodies dread in a way few games do.
I also love Castlevania. I've spent hours upon hours in Dracula's castle, painstakingly learning each of the enemies patterns and dying over and over again until I got it just right.
Now, when the Souls games came out I didn't pay them much mind. Over the years I've gotten soft and have felt that my time was better spent with games that welcomed my presence more than those games did. While I later got into Dark Souls and even started to like it. It wasn't until the sequel I really started loving the games. Dark Souls still feel to oppressive to me, and if I ever sit down and play it, I turn off the audio and instead pull up one of my favorite Tv shows or Giant Bomb videos (Metal Gear Scanlon represent) on my second screen to keep me from going insane.
So when Bloodborne came out little over a week ago I started to wonder where the game would place on the Frustration vs. Enjoyment scale and I've now, before I've even finished the game, come to a conclusion.
I love it
I'll probably write a review somewhere down the line, but I thought it was about time to write a few words about what makes me love the game so.
Bloodborne does everything RE4 did well even better. The enemies aren't as frustratingly difficult, the combat feels much smother to me and the "rinse and repeat" style of gameplay invokes the feeling Castlevania did back in the NES days. The Cane/Whip weapon also goes along way of making me feel like one of the Belmonts.
Back in Demon Souls, and to an extent Dark Souls and it's sequel, Dying wasn't just a defeat, it came with it's fair share of punishment aswell, whether that being me loosing a chunk of my health bar until I filled certain requirements to gain it back or making me cursed so I had to grind the right enemies to get an item that would free me from said curse or backtrack large chunks of the world to find the specific merchant that sold the item for a very steep price.
Seethe The Scaleless made me finally give up trying to beat Dark Souls, just because of the enormous "corpse run" and the annoying pattern I had to follow to get freed from the curse he put on me after I died.
Hardcore Souls players, like some of my friends might brush this off as "part of the game" but it really got to me and I only felt the whole thing detracted from an otherwise awesome game.
Some might say that Bloodborne is too casual to be counted as part of the Souls series, and some might even call me out on that in the comments and I welcome it. Yes the game isn't as "hardcore" as the rest and it comes of as a bit more arcade-y than the others but that doesn't matter to me
Because I really love Bloodborne you guys