Sidequest #8 Bloodborne - Thoughts Prior to Playing/Fan Reactions

Welcome to Yharnam bitches

Ever since I played Dragon Age: Origins back in 2009, I’ve always taken care to do some research on the numbers behind every RPG I’m interested in before actually purchasing it. This was originally done to avoid having to deliberate over every single level up and item I acquired in the actual game. However, later on, it served the incidental purpose of allowing me to (at least partially) assess the quality of the game’s mechanical soundness - how balanced the game is, so as to judge whether or not I should even buy the game in the first place. So, as with the two Souls games before it, I took a look at Bloodborne’s numbers and deemed that it was absolutely functional in terms of its character progression and items.

But, while I was scouring the Internet for information and building my tools to help analyze all of the game’s data last week, I also noticed quite a bit of community backlash that seemed to betray the 92/100 average rating the game has garnered on Metacritic. Doubly curious was the fact that most of these disappointments seemed to stem from the (apparent) failure of the title to meet the expectations set by  2011’s Dark Souls. So, for tonight’s post, I’d like to offer my pre-game theory as to why the insistence on comparing Bloodborne to Dark Souls in particular is a bit fallacious.

The Threaded Cane switches between a sword
and a serrated whip. It is, naturally, my chosen
starting weapon.

The first and most common complaint I saw floating around Gamefaqs last week was that the game has a dearth of weapons. For those who didn’t keep up with the pre-release info, Bloodborne takes a quality over quantity approach to its weapon design by making every melee weapon a “trick weapon” that can switch between two forms or, more accurately, two weapons. While the game does only contain about a third of the amount of distinct weapons as Dark Souls, each weapon has vastly more mechanical depth and combo potential to it. More important, however, is the apparent fact that many seem to have forgotten that Demon’s Souls, the first real entry in this franchise (I don’t care if it operates under a similar game design philosophy, King’s Field is NOT a Souls game), adopted a similar approach.

Sidenote: I love how this game openly mocks
the BFS trope endemic to Shonen anime  

There were noticeably fewer total weapons in Demon’s Souls compared to its spiritual successor and its accompanying sequel. All generic weapons in Demon’s Souls could all be acquired very early on in the game or by simply purchasing them, and each generic weapon had (usually) 2-3 weapons with identical movesets that were tiered according to their strength & weight. Consequently, players worth their salt would only use the strongest weapon of each category rather than all of them (e.g. Kilij>Falchion>Scimitar, Knight Sword>Longsword >Short Sword, Winged Spear>Short Spear, etc.). Dark Souls also borrowed this means of weapon tiering, but also added weapons that were statistically contradictory (e.g. Murakumo primarily scales off of the dexterity stat, but has an extremely high strength requirement to wield) and functionally sub-par (The man-serpent greatsword is slow, has short range, and inflicts almost identical damage to the Claymore), further exacerbating the growing issue of “fluff.”

However, despite the lower total amount of weapons, the boss weapons of Demon’s Souls allowed for greater build variety in terms of weapons than both Dark Souls and its sequel. Though both Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls follow a trend of making the boss and unique weapons wholly distinct from the standard fare, in Dark Souls most of the boss weapons are gimmicky such that only a handful are actually viable in a build, whereas in Demon’s Souls nearly all of them allow for specific builds, encourage new playstyles, or have a special utility (e.g. The Large Sword of Searching increases the item drop rate). Of particular note there is no:

Talisman of Beasts - enables utilization of the entire spell pool, regardless of one’s magic stat

Blueblood Sword - allows for balanced builds that use the normally neglected Luck stat

Northern Regalia - a powerful stat-agnostic magical weapon

Phosphorescent Pole - constantly Regenerates MP for more sustained spell casting

Meat Cleaver – a heavy weapon with high mixed melee stat scaling

Scraping Spear - devastatingly effective for PVP, but mediocre elsewhere; an anti-invasion tool.

Lava Bow - A ranged elemental weapon, acquirable early on, with cheap ammo, and low stat requirements.

Morion Blade - Drastically raises power when low on health and combinable with other similar tools.

Baby’s Nail - A reusable means of inflicting horrific status ailments (literally called “the plague”)

Istarelle - Means of negating most status ailments, while also inflicting high magic damage.

or

Dark Silver Shield - General purpose light shield that completely nullifies magic regardless of stat investment.

None of these have equivalents in Dark Souls, nor is there a comparable assortment of new weapons to replace them in the standard game [Note: the Dark Souls DLC that was released a little over a year later amends this somewhat by adding several weapons with similar functions to some of these Demon’s Souls weapons]. And that isn’t a criticism of Dark Souls.

Dark Souls: "$#&@% THIS!!!!!!!!"

In a game where you are expected to overcome increasingly harrowing adversity using the (seemingly) inadequate tools at your disposal, having a more limited (usable) arsenal for most of the game helps inspire the emotional high achieved from defeating a boss, or reaching a bonfire after a desperate, harrowing venture. In this sense, the game’s limitations help immerse the player into the game’s story, and is largely what inspired the annoying as hell community slogan “git gud.” In Demon’s Souls however, none of this is applicable.

Clearing bosses and worlds can either be like beating your head against a wall OR taking a casual stroll through a sunlit park, entirely based on how you approach them and what tools you bring with you. This is why the Thief Ring (a reliable means to repeatedly avoid combat entirely) is available in the first area of the game AND again later on; why the Ring of Regeneration, Lava Bow, and Crescent Falchion +1 are all available in the first area of one of the game’s worlds (i.e. accessible almost immediately upon starting the game). Skill and perseverance do not matter in Demon’s Souls, only victory regardless of how it is achieved. If Dark Souls is a game about perseverance, then Demon’s Souls is about craftiness and creativity.

Demon's Souls: "Pffft, life threatening danger is for tryhards." 

And this is where Bloodborne comes in. In Dark Souls, From Software used the basic Demon’s Souls mechanics to make a completely new type of game - a true 3D Castlevania game (which for some reason Konami has STILL continued to bungle since the turn of the century). But with Bloodborne, From took the lessons learned from Dark Souls and repurposed them to make a larger and (arguably) more refined Demon’s Souls. In Demon’s Souls you only had two ring slots, while in Bloodborne you have 4 rune slots. In Demon’s Souls most magic (excluding weapon buffs) was bad or basic projectiles (unintentionally encouraging use of the Talisman of Beasts). So, in Bloodborne they removed magic entirely, added new dedicated projectile weapons that are always on-hand, and improved weapon customization to allow for consequence-free element shifting of the player’s existing arsenal. In Demon’s Souls locations were varied, but didn’t feel particularly connected, so in Bloodborne the world is now fully linked together, but the non-replenishable healing items and inability to level up at checkpoints still requires the player to periodically stop their journey and visit the Hunter’s Dream (safe area).

Versatility in terms of player character creation and specialization was priority number one in Demon’s Souls, so rather than containing a large weapon pool partially composed of figurative junk to sift through, they combined the functions of two different weapons into one while still retaining the two weapon slots (functionally allowing for 4 weapons in total). They also lowered the overall stat requirements of nearly every weapon and made one (of the three) versions of nearly all weapons acquirable around the start of the game, thus allowing players to use most of the game’s arsenal with almost any (sensible) stat allocation. And the list of Demon’s Souls expansions goes on and on, from the expansion of the gothic architecture to the new repeatable randomized areas separate from the story. So, as has hopefully become apparent by now, Bloodborne is not Dark Souls 3 or a wholly new property; Bloodborne is Demon’s Souls 2.

"Challenged" = Scared shitless

But with that said, through Bloodborne’s removal of shields, addition of Visceral Attacks (forward counter attacks), and hastening of the enemies, From Software also made the utilization (or at least understanding) of the player’s expanded toolset more important than ever. Unlike in Demon’s Souls, player skill is now a factor. And yet, the player is still in the same overarching role (i.e. greedy bastard) that they were in Demon’s Souls, so piecing together the context of the game’s prior events through loot isn’t all that important either. What results is a game that is specifically targeted at people who like a challenge and expressing themselves through the diversity in the combat, which granted, was an element of both Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls (and likely the strongest contributor of their extended longevity), but not quite the focus of either game like it is here. So, even though Bloodborne is ostensibly a sequel to Demon’s Souls that could only really exist after the creation of Dark Souls, the game is alienating to some fans of the games that preceded it. Note however that this was true of both of predecessors as well.

One of the biggest mysteries, tragedies, and thrilling tales of Dark Souls.
You'll get no spoilers from me.

For instance, I absolutely loathed Dark Souls when it first came out. In patch 1.00, the game frankly seemed too hard due to the dearth of souls dropped by enemies (as well as my insistence on playing it like Demon’s Souls without a shield), and the cohesiveness of the world, ironically, made the combat feel unrewarding as after every boss battle you were instantly reminded that your victories were fleeting and marginal - “things always get worse.” However, as the game progressed, I became sufficiently skilled at it so as to not notice the combat at all. Instead, I shifted my attention to the mysterious story gradually unravelling through the items I found and NPCs I met. Eventually, the exploration became the only thing I was interested in, and compelled me to see the game through to the end with a different sort of appreciation than I had for Demon’s Souls. Currently, the game is far easier and more accessible to newcomers, so my old issues shouldn’t be a problem for anyone now, and I’ve had nothing but an exceptional time replaying it since then.

It’s worth noting however that this new interest also led me to hate Dark Souls 2 (a topic for another day), as its story was irredeemable nonsense, and the gameplay still wasn’t enjoyable (read: fair) or refined enough to carry the experience. But, as I’ve already stated, Bloodborne has taken quite a few steps to make the combat more active and engaging, so if its story does end up letting people down, perhaps it won’t matter so much.

For those reading this who dislike Bloodborne, maybe you will find something else about the game to enjoy as well. But if you don’t, that’s fine too. It’s a different game offering a different experience than every game before it.