Bloodborne: First Impressions

Whetting your appetite! (with blood)

     I haven’t been this excited about a game in awhile. Since, well, Dark Souls II. I’d say my excitement level for Bloodborne has matched what it was for DSII. My excitement was quenched, then quelled, then a bit tempered, then flared about again, all in one night. I played from roughly 9:45pm to 2:15am (a nice chunk of change there) last night, and I, like many who dove in for the first time yesterday, have some first impressions. I wanna keep this short, because I still want to post a “Week 1 diary entry” for probably Friday, March 27. In fact, I just decided right now, in real time, to just make this a bullet point list. I love bullet point lists. They give you all the neat and tidiness of a normal list, plus the aggression of bullets (Bloodborne features bullets heavily, so that’s a third whammy right there!)

(SPOILERS MAY ABOUND! READ WITH CAUTION!)

• The game looks gorgeous. I’m still in the first main city (Central Yharnam. Yikes, what an awful word to spell!), and it has that very Gothic look (and feel) that they’ve shown in all the press releases and screenshots, but I like it. Pretty different from most Souls games
• Enemy variety is decent. It’s mostly villagers of various types. There are some wolf/beast kind of guys, plus some weird birds. There’s also a gigantic pig that looks so good I’d say he’s my favorite enemy of the game so far
• I love all the blood. Copious amounts of the stuff. Your character gets coated with it too, which looks really badass
• I’ve discovered two bosses so far. The first, The Cleric Beast, was fairly easy. Beat him my first try, matter of fact. The second boss, Father Gascoigne, is HARD AS HELL and has killed me at least a dozen times so far.
• Cleric Beast was a gigantic monster. I have missed monster boss designs. I loved Dark Souls II (more than most it seems), but it had way too many human/knight-type bosses
• Some negatives now: Yes, the loading times suck. After death, it takes anywhere from 30-40 seconds to reload. I am stunned that load times are a problem in the year 2015. Isn’t this PS1-era garbage? I hear it is going to be addressed in an upcoming patch. Let's all cross our fingers
• I have read of people complaining about bad frame rates. I haven't encountered anything like that. Game runs smoothly.
• So far, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot in terms of weapon or armor variety. You can pick one of three weapons to start with (an axe, a cane, or that saw-blade thing everyone has seen by now). I played for close to five hours last night, and I only found one weapon (albeit a killer sword/hammer combo), and I found no armor (you can buy a set from the merchant in the Hunter’s Dream)
• I’m loving the gun. Seems so weird to have a gun in a Souls-type game, but it fits perfectly. It makes parrying a thing I can actually do!
• Also, even though there isn’t a huge weapon variety early on, you can still attack with your normal heavy/light attacks. Instead of two-handing weapons (which I miss), you can transform your weapon to something different. My small axe transforms to a larger axe that I actually do two-hand, ironically enough. Plus, this new formation has unique light/heavy attacks. Plus, you can do “charge attacks”, which are powerful, long-winded, stamina draining attacks where you hold down the heavy attack button (R2) and then attack. So that’s six unique attacks with one weapon. Not too shabby
• Speaking of combat, when you are locked on to an enemy, when you hit circle to roll, you instead strafe. This is effective, but it isn’t as effective as just being able to roll. Gonna take some time adjusting to it
• I don’t miss shields at all
• You seem to receive a pitiful amount of Blood Echoes early in the game. Tough to really bank them so far
• I found very few of the red spectres (similar to the bloodstains in previous games) actually worked. I would click on one, and it would just disappear. Disappointing, but I guess understandable, given it was the first day the servers were up.
• At first I thought that the enemies dropped a very generous amount of Blood Vials and Quicksilver Bullets. But after being stuck on this boss for awhile, I’ve basically exhausted my supply.
• Which brings me to this: farming (so far) sucks in this game. That’s due to one thing: those dag-nabbid load times. Very tedious. I kind of miss the days of killing enemies then running back to a nearby Bonfire to revive them all.
• Being able to recover health with attacks to enemies after YOU’VE received damage is a nice addition, but I don’t find myself fully utilizing it. I need to stop being so passive and just be as aggressive as the game wants me to be!
• Not that it's too surprising, but I have no real idea what's going on with the story
• Lots of dream references. I'm hardly breaking new ground, but I like this. I LOVE dream-stuff

    My biggest takeaway from my time spent playing on my first night is this: This is undeniably a Souls game, yet it’s also not really a Souls game. So much is almost identical to the previous three titles (walking/rolling animations, health/stamina bars, the very look of the game, the way items glow on downed enemies and bodies throughout the world, being able to leave notes/messages and being able to see the final seconds of someone’s life before they were killed, etc), yet there is a LOT of new/different stuff (guns, Blood Vials, scaling back of the number of stats, the emphasis on faster, more aggressive combat, etc) . This is gonna be a game that I play for awhile, and I see myself playing through it a few times (also to hopefully nab the Platinum trophy. I have it in the previous three, might as well get it for this one too). For my first hour or so, I was ready to call this easily the best game in the series. I'll have to really reserve that judgement until I've put more than 5 hours into it. Some of the quirks/inconveniences/unlikable things in the game started to show through after my first hour of playing. I know I'm going to (most likely, anyway) love this game, and I am already obsessing about it the way I've done with the past three games. It's just great to be playing a brand new adventure from the Dark Souls director. Happy hunting, everyone! See you all soon!

A professional-looking screenshot! I love it