A few people care what I think about Bloodborne

In which the author resorts to republishing to accomodate her ravenous public

I’ve been meaning to publish my wordpress essays on here instead, so all of my games criticism is in the same place. Hopefully this piece on Bloodborne is unfamilar to some of you

Playing the Hits, an examination of the Fromsoft Soulslikes, p.1

With the pieces I’ve written about soulslikes, it seemed to make sense to write something on the original Fromsoft soulsborne series. This is a somewhat frightening task as fans of Fromsoft are incredibly well-informed and opinionated. And if there is an acceptable way in the fandom to analyze the Fromsoft soulsborne games, it is to discuss the games through the lore perspective such as youtuber VaatiViddya does.

When I find a game that I love, as much as I like to understand and appreciate it, I also want to examine its flaws. This examination often deepens my love of the work itself. This might be because I don’t know what love is. But my interpretation of lasting love is where you know the flaws of the person you are with but accept them for who they are. This is how I approach the art that I love.

This being said, the souls series and especially Fromsoft games tend to be difficult for fans to accept criticism of because their standard of being “hard but fair” games often turns attempts to discuss them as works of art into forums for individual male egos. A certain segment of hardcore Fromsoft fans seem to treat their mastery of a video game as a way they have built character, suffered, and triumphed alone. Thus, attempts to discuss the games in a critical way instead of being seen as analysis is viewed as whining about how hard life is, despite what happens in Fromsoft games having little to do with real life.

The metric of skill that is acceptable to discuss these games is also confusing because there is a lot of variances in difficulty even within individual games. For instance, the first “Dark Souls” is (with our current knowledge of much more difficult entries) pretty easy until you get to Ornstein and Smough. And the game, I’m going to discuss first, “Bloodborne” is actually not too hard until you get to the mid-point of the game.

Souls games tend to become easier or harder on how much you engage with each games mechanics. I’ve said that “Dark Souls” was actually pretty easy up to a point, but this perspective is based in having an understanding of the game’s mechanics. For instance, if you didn’t understand how parrying worked in the first game, you would have a harder time fighting a lot of the more difficult enemies as parrying them makes fighting them easier.

This difficulty is also subjective, based not only on skill but on individual playstyles. I’ve seen streamers who have speedrun Elden Ring get their asses handed to them by Dark Souls 2, technically a much easier game but one that penalizes aggression and rewards a more cautious playstyle. Whereas the style of Elden Ring’s combat is the opposite, rewarding risk and aggression.

Not only is it highly subjective but the very metric of skill is problematic on many levels not least of which if this is accepted then each person trying to analyze these games has to then prove they are good at video games. This can only be proven in esports or speedrunning these games not through analysis. And if we want to talk about Fromsoft games as great works of art, then we can’t make the discussion entirely about purported skill because there’s much more to the games than skill.

Fromsoft games are tight and difficult action RPGs. They are also about understanding esoteric mechanics. As well, they focus on exploration of a hostile and terrifying world and a philosophical viewpoint which uses fantasy tropes but subverts them in interesting ways.

This started in “Kings Field” and has continued to the present day, but Fromsoft has in most people’s estimation hit its stride with the “Dark Souls” series. Each game has reached a wider audience and has created in that audience’s minds the soulslike genre. We cannot say that Fromsoft is entirely responsible for the soulslike genre as many of the ideas were floating out there in many disparate games. But what Fromsoft did was bring together these disparate ideas into a series of games that solidified the idea of soulslikes. Jorge Luis Borges (writing about Kafka) said that a great artist creates his own precursors, and this definitely applies to Fromsoft.

Hidetaka Miyazaki is an undeniably important figure in Fromsoft and the director and writer of all of the games. Without minimizing his importance, I have a hard time crediting all of Fromsoft’s genius to Miyazaki. There is an unfortunate tendency towards auteurism in the fandom’s examinations of Fromsoft’s games. Part of the problem of taking an auteurist view is that just like filmmaking, modern video games tend to be made by such large groups of people that it feels ridiculous to credit an entire game or a series to one person.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue that Miyazaki has genius as well as being a skilled writer and video game designer. But a big part of this genius consists of employing many talented people and letting them experiment with what they want to create on these games. This culture of experimentation has led to an amazing series of games.

The greatness of Fromsoft as a studio lies with constantly trying new things and experimenting. A lot of this experimentation doesn’t work but you can see the results of the refinements of the same experiment again and again.

While watching a video about early Fromsoft games by youtuber ThorHighHeels, they made an interesting comparison of early Fromsoft games (such as Echo Night) looking more like they’re programmed rather than artistically created. While it would be hard to say this about current Fromsoft games (which are quite beautiful), I think they have kept the iterative model of programming in the way they innovate.

Create something, fail, try the same thing again a little better but fail again until eventually they reach something called success or the concept has to be junked. We could see this from the Prowling Magus and the congregation becoming the Deacons of the Deep, two fairly disliked bossfights eventually becoming the pattern for Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon, a fight that might not be loved but hard to deny that it’s the best execution of the concept.

It’s then not surprising to me that so many video essays about Fromsoft games follow the template of Joseph Anderson’s video essay “Elden Ring: A shattered masterpiece”. (And equally unsurprising that a vocal part of Fromsoft fans called Anderson a scrub) While this idea of a qualified masterpiece is particularly resonant with critiques of Elden Ring, it could apply to any Fromsoft game.

Fromsoft as a studio is about taking daring leaps more than it is about consistency and technical polish. Even their best games have puzzling interludes of mediocrity. Fromsoft could just do what we know they’re great at but what makes them an interesting studio is that they try new things, even when some of those things are debatably successful.

Bloodborne: the first soulslike

While working on my series on soulslikes, I had also been replaying Bloodborne, having been unsatisfied with the ending I got. “Bloodborne” followed the pattern I have for most Fromsoft games; I sped through my first playthrough, fueled by frustration and finished the game with the thought: never again! Before long however, I’m drawn back in for another playthrough, and only in this secondary playthrough that I start to get a deeper insight into what makes the game tick. It is then that my true appreciation begins.

“Bloodborne” has followed this pattern, I’ve started a third playthrough to do a Bloodtinge build but I think so far, the Strength/arcane build I did as my second playthrough was my favorite.

What continually drew me back was the stylish combat system, the way your character deftly sidesteps injury and responds with a charged visceral. I loved learning each weapon’s unique moveset, gaining the feeling of mastery especially as I started to learn how use transforming attacks.

Fromsoft are masters of coming up with compelling movesets for different weapons. These movesets really make you feel attached to individual weapons. I fell in love with the Amygdala arm and kept using it even though I discovered that it didn’t scale with arcane very much. The Heavy attack is so great with the arm hyperextending into hinged thrust downwards.

The best Fromsoft combat is stylish and artificial. This is what Bloodborne excels at. Youtuber ZeroLenny’s video titled (see! I told you guys!) “Bloodborne: A Flawed Masterpiece” mocks the very janky ai of a lot of the enemies. Part of this might be because in Fromsoft’s technical limitations at that time but it is also integral to the combat system. Enemies seem very aggressive but after their initial combos, they will often just stand there and let you backstab them. This is because Fromsoft had changed how backstabs worked in Bloodborne, so in order to do a backstab you have to charge up a heavy attack which requires enemies to hold still for longer for it to work.

This may be silly but it feels incredibly good when playing the game, much like in Dark Souls 1 and 3 how when you parry someone you knock their weapon out of the way and then they just stand there as if awaiting punishment.

Dark Souls 2 didn’t seem to realize how iconic the parry animation was and created an entirely new parry animation where the enemy is knocked onto the floor as you stab them. This looks cool as well but it kind of misses the point, the parry and riposte animations are artificial but this artificiality is what makes it exciting.

Bloodborne is best when it gives you an arena to use these compelling movesets. Think of the fights between Lady Maria or with the second phase of Martyr Logarius, the feeling of a combat that you thrilling triumph by the skin of your teeth. The Bloodstarved Beast is a boss that a lot of people dislike, but I love the style and aggression of the fight. Someone said that combat in Bloodborne is like a dance, as you dodge to the left and let the beast do his solo then your character responds with their own flourishes.

And as well, Fromsoft gives you the option of mastering these fights, adding a stylish brutality to them by learning the correct timing to execute parries and backstabs.

“Bloodborne” is often compared to “Sekiro”, and the two games have a very similar strengths and flaws. In both games Fromsoft designed an amazing combat system and then made most of the game around it. But then being Fromsoft, they got bored and started just doing some weird shit.

My theory is the better a Fromsoft game is, the more weirdness and dips of quality there is with it. Demon Souls has the world tendency system. The original Dark Souls has lost Izalith, the tomb of the giants and the crystal cavern, experiments in level design that are unfun. I could go on but you get the idea. The truth is the strength of Fromsoft is also their weakness; they are dissatisfied with making a simple masterpiece.

Part of the greatness of “Bloodborne” is the story and how it really speaks to Miyazaki’s obsessions. Bloodborne might be the purest expression of the philosophy of Miyazaki or Fromsoft as a studio. The more I play Fromsoft games the more I see a heavily Nietzschean outlook from their games, specifically the Nietzsche of “ The Genealogy of Morality”.

“The Genealogy of Morality” most remembered section is on “master and slave morality”. To give a bowdlerized explanation is that Christian morality, and specifically the priest class created a kind of “slave morality” out of fear of the people who naturally ruled the earth. The warlords and violent brutes who naturally dominated the meek had to be legislated out of existence by the creation of a “slave morality” which made their domination immoral and made the sexless and peaceful lives of the priest class ascendant. The meek inherited the earth or were supposed to.

Nietzsche’s philosophy appealed to me when I was young but the concept of “slave morality” always felt weak and confused to me. And as I’ve actually studied a little of the history of knights as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that Nietzsche’s whole idea was somewhat backwards. The aristocratic warrior class of knights were required by the state to exercise violence in order to earn their greater privilege.

I don’t believe by any means that Miyazaki is as much of a social Darwinist as Nietzsche could be but there is a lot of confluence in their views. Dark Souls, for instance, had the initially hidden element of Gwyndoline, the effete priest character who secretly rules the world behind the illusion of Anor Londo and is the mastermind of your quest to sacrifice yourself to prolong the cycle of the fire. We could see Gwyndoline as the architect of a kind of slave morality to which your character falls for unless you go to the trouble of destroying him.

Bloodborne, because of its Lovecraftian cosmic horror is perhaps the most effective evocation of these Nietzschean themes. The dream that you’re a part of involves killing werewolves is really just a fiction created by the elder gods so they can feed on humanity. In order to transcend, you have to supplant the moon presence and leave your humanity behind.

To me this is the perfect sumnation of Miyazaki’s obsessions both with Nietzchean transcendence and abasement.

“Dark Souls” infamously had the gigantic buxom princess that Miyazaki said was inspired by a staffer who was obsessed with gigantic women. Now it’s not my job to psychoanalyze this staffer or to make the case that when Miyazaki talked about an unnamed person he was perhaps trying to avoid outing himself…. but this fixation on giant women is not out of place in someone who has described themselves as being a masochist. ( Miyazaki in a New Yorker interview)

That’s the genius of the true ending of bloodborne because when your character kills the moonpresence and supplants them, they become a tiny baby squid and are held by the malevolent looking doll as a baby. Miyazaki gets to have his cake and eat it too; your character becomes the most powerful being in the dreamworld but also a gross subhuman infant.

Another example of Fromsoft’s Nietzschean bent would be Djura’s character, who realizes that the beasts that you are hunting are actually human. Instead of continuing with the hunt, Djura sets himself up as the protector of the beasts of Old Yharnam. In any other fantasy universe, such a character would be a hero but in Bloodborne’s universe, Djura is a slightly ridiculous and tragic figure. This fits in with other characters such as the dung eater in Elden Ring, who the narrative sees his attempt to achieve radical equality in the lands between as an example of nihilism something that Nietzsche also attacked the left of his day with.

The grey morality of Fromsoft games makes heroism much more interesting than the often-simplistic versions of goodness we see portrayed in most video games. Djura may be right in wanting to protect the beasts from the mindless violence of the hunters, but no one would describe Old Yharnam as some kind of paradise. Conversely, the Dung Eater is one of the grossest characters Fromsoft has ever created but his vision of anarchism is a lot more egalitarian than the more aristocratic Fabian socialism of Ranni’s quest.

Perhaps because of its gothic horror setting or perhaps because the Victorian period is known in the popular imagination for its warped sexuality, “Bloodborne” seems more comfortable exploring more openly Freudian and sexual territory than its predecessors.

Not only are areas given titles which openly allude to male fears of the feminized body (ie:” the nightmare of mensis”) but the plotline of the death of the queen of the vilebloods has elements that feel almost ero-guro in its sadism. The vilebloods are one of the factions in Bloodborne which has largely been destroyed through the church’s persecution. What remains of their stronghold Forsaken Castle Cainhurst is a ruined castle inhabited by the vengeful ghosts of a religious massacre conducted by Martyr Logarius and his executioners, an inquisition style faction the healing church.

You are introduced to the idea of the vilebloods by a follower of Logarius, Alfred who asks for information about the sect with the idea of redeeming Logarius who ultimately was lost at Cainhurst castle. Fromsoft plays a bait and switch with the character of Alfred who is voiced by one of the few friendly NPCs of Dark Souls, Solaire. Solaire was available in Dark Souls as one of the NPCs summonable at different boss fights. Alfred initially plays the same role in “Bloodborne”

After a tough fight with Logarius, you find Annalise the queen of the vilebloods in a secret chamber behind the boss arena. If you alert Alfred to her presence, then the next time you return, the immortal queen of the vilebloods has been reduced a pile of grue on her throne and a bloody and raving Alfred is in the chamber now dressed as an executioner:

Master, look! I've done it, I've done it! I smashed and pounded and grounded this rotten siren into fleshy pink pulp! There, you filthy monstrosity! What good's your immortality now! Try stirring up trouble in this sorry state! All mangled and twisted, with every inside on the outside, for all the world to see! He heh hah hah Hah! He heh heh ha ha ha ha!"

“Every inside on the outside” could be an area of examination for a more Freudian critic or it could be a commentary on the way the male establishment plumbs the supposed mystery of the feminized body by reducing it to a collection of diagramed organs. Even for the dark world of Fromsoft games, this is pretty gnarly. Perhaps backpedaling a bit from the abyss, the game allows you to resurrect Annalise by putting her queenly flesh at the altar of Ebreitas.

Much like the Nietzschean philosophy behind Fromsoft’s lore, this scene of eroticized violence could have been simply crude and embarrassing. But in both cases, it works well in the context of the work of art that is “Bloodborne”. Your friend and guide in the world is revealed to be just as insane as the enemy you are fighting against. And this simply adds more depth to the dark fantasy of the game.

“Bloodborne”, in action, engine and in the fulfillment of Miyazaki’s preoccupation, is maybe the most complete statement Fromsoft has made. Nevertheless, the game has a lot of large issues that make it really difficult to not see it as the sort of “flawed masterpiece” of Anderson. But Fromsoft being the kind of studio they are, the closer a game gets to perfection the more multiple and interesting its failures are.

Fromsoft doesn’t make simple tight and polished games, they insist on adding rambling parts, systems that don’t work properly. Much like “Sekiro” later on, Fromsoft introduced a nearly perfect and addictive combat system only to get bored with it and start throwing weird ideas against a wall. “Sekiro” is a lot less weird than “Bloodborne” because it actually has an integrated stealth system and not just an item (“Blue Elixir”) than you can use to be slightly stealthier. So, when stealth sections come up such as Mist Noble boss fight, you actually have tools as a player to deal with them.

Bloodborne doesn’t have such tools. The Upper Cathedral Ward is kind of retread of the Tower of Latria from “Demon’s Souls” relies on stealth without giving you stealth gameplay options. The Upper Cathedral ward is a creepy area and has some of only ambient music in the game as your character encounters the alien horror that enters into what has been a traditionally gothic game. Yet the actual gameplay is pretty unfun because the enemies are tanky, rely on grab attacks and homing beams. Thus, the only way to take them out is to sneak up on them or past them as opposed to the Tower of Latria where the Mindflayer enemies were very scary but as long as you attacked them from close range, you were more than able to dispatch them without too much trouble.

The insistence makes sense in a certain way, your character has been coasting through the world on top of their own primal violence but when they encounter the actual old ones, your violence is primitive, and silly compared to their arcane power. Maybe it wouldn’t have made sense thematically to give you a combat challenge that is easy to master. But why then, when you get to Ebreitas, you just have an actual fight that is pretty traditional? So, it leaves me confused as to why you have to rely on stealth to take out Ebreitas’s underlings whereas the goddess herself can be taken out with violence.

I think a lot of people would agree that the Upper Cathedral ward is an area that doesn’t fully work. It’s an experiment but one tossed off at what could have been a really climactic point in the game which instead ends up being something which makes sense only on paper.

Another example of the flaws of Bloodborne would be the hunter fights. Not the great ones like Father Gascoine or Lady Maria but the annoying shmoes who slap you down when you encounter them in the world.

As I’ve said “Bloodborne” has a great combat system, so why are these NPC hunter fights so disappointing? I think it’s for several reasons, one is that Fromsoft has often struggled with these kind of NPC battles with them either being too dopey in terms of their AI and easy or making them so ridiculously overpowered that they are just an unfun nightmare to fight.

“Dark Souls 2” has both. Asatiel of Mirrah, whom you encounter after your last meeting with Lucatiel, would be one extreme. Lucatiel describes him as the “greatest swordsman in the land of Mirrah”, the youtuber ZeroLenny made this into a joke quoting the line and then showing Asatiel stupidly walking into several thrust attacks to his doom.

The opposite extreme would be Armorer Dennis. Iron Keep is a notoriously difficult area of “Dark Souls 2” and it opens up harshly with two separate NPC invasions, Fencer Sharon and Armorer Dennis. Dennis has magic attacks that devastate from range and is as far as you can get from a willowy DND mage up close. Granted, I think that Armorer Dennis was a sly joke on twinking invaders (i.e.: players who deliberately make themselves overpowered to dominate at PVP) but the joke is a cruel one.

The dark souls 2 modder Half-Grown Hollow has been working on a Dark Souls 2 mod “Absolution” to correct what they feel are the errors of Dark souls 2. They often tweet about issues they find when working on the “Dark Souls 2” code. One of the issues they pointed out is that the NPC invaders all have the maximum amount of adaptability so they can roll and heal much faster than most player characters. This to me feels like an error on Fromsoft’s part. And it’s an error that continues in the NPC enemies of the main game of “Bloodborne”.

While it’s not entirely fair to compare these two styles of fights as one is clearly designed as a boss encounter, and one is designed as an example of the type of PVP you might encounter online. Nevertheless, the reason Lady Maria is fun to fight, and the NPC hunters are not that Lady Maria has an interesting moveset that is fun to learn whereas the NPC hunters mostly don’t. What they have is unlimited bullets, unlimited stamina and attacks that do ridiculous amounts of damage. In other words, in the base game the hunter fights are all Armorer Dennis and no Lady Maria.

Perhaps these NPC hunter fights were a sign of growing pains at Fromsoft because when you get to “The Old Hunters” DLC, the hunter fights you encounter while just as hard are actually really fun to fight because they’re designed as enemy encounters. And though there is a bit of goosing the numbers such as the gatling gun hunter having unlimited ammo for his machine gun, the fights are mostly a huge step up from the base game. Perhaps Fromsoft looked at the original NPC hunters with a more critical eye and thought they could do better. And indeed, fighting the hunter enemies in the DLC is hard but never feels like bullshit.

This creation of difficulty through turning up the dials uncreatively is my main issue with Bloodborne. Maybe Fromsoft is against making an easy game or realizes that making a game that was easy would have alienated a large section of fans. But it feels to me that in the second half of the game, Bloodborne often goes for lazy difficulty rather than well designed difficulty.

The game severely vigor checks you by the time you get to the back half of the game requiring almost Elden Ring levels of vitality to avoid being instakilled by certain enemy attacks. Certain boss fights such as Ebreitas are hard but not because they are well designed but because they have several attacks that do way too much damage. Ebreitas does a janky charge across the arena that will usually damage you if you are locked onto her.

My final gripe about the game is also something that winds up being quite interesting, the Chalice Dungeon system. This part of the game is actually incredibly ahead of its time in many ways but also in my experience not very fun.

We are all a bit sick of the action roguelite boom, but Fromsoft anticipated this trend by creating randomly generated dungeons where you can farm loot and continue combat challenges when you were sick of playing the main story.

This is a great idea, but the actual execution is pretty sloppy. The chalice dungeons are not only tediously large, but they also tend to rely on large mobs of respawning enemies. And despite there being some decent blood gems to acquire, the majority of loot one finds is just materials to allow you to create more difficult chalice dungeons.

Fromsoft pretty much improved the chalice dungeon experience across the board by “Elden Ring” with the many catacombs and heroes’ graves. While these were not universally successful, they were at least fairly short and might have at least an interesting boss or some loot that was worth getting.

I also think the many roguelite attempts at soulslikes have shown us that it’s pretty hard to make a satisfying randomly generated soulslike. I definitely don’t want to say that it can’t be done because there’s quite a few that are interesting but most of the time, you end up missing the tight level design of a well-crafted soulslike. It seems even in Fromsoft’s first attempt at a soulslike they struggled with this issue.

The Chalice Dungeons get especially onerous as they continue. If one wants to get the best runes for your character and some of the more overpowered Blood gems, you will have to do the Fetid Cursed and Rotten Chalice Dungeons which have such impositions as having one 1 hp or other status effects. Granted, this content is optional and there’s nothing in the base game or DLC that requires the kind of DPS that these kinds of gems can add to a weapon.

But what I find inspiring is the way players found an interesting workaround for this challenge, using hacked PS4’s people created alternate versions of the Chalice Dungeons which made it faster to acquire the necessary blood gems and runes than if you were taking the story route. It’s a testament to Fromsoft that they haven’t attempted to clamp down on this type of thing. In general, the studio has allowed a lot of exploits and cheeses to continue to exist despite it being easy enough to patch them out.

So perhaps “Bloodborne” despite being Fromsoft’s masterpiece is ultimately a “flawed masterpiece”, I personally think this is a fitting tribute to the oddness of the studio. Fromsoft is always going to have the weird eccentricity of systems that don’t quite work, the small issues you wish were different but that you still love because they’re part of a game that’s engaged you so deeply.