whereas for me, killing that boss took about as many attempts as any boss in any souls game that I’ve killed. I think the reason this game never clicked for me is because it encourages you to play fast, which I have no interest in or aptitude for
I agree. The bosses I had trouble with were Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia, and Darkbeast Paarl – all beast bosses with aggressive and fast patterns and lesser differences in tells. I tend to play these games by poking at all the maze outputs before committing to a boss, and with these three in particular I returned several times every six hours or so to check if I could take them – then scurried away after a half-dozen defeats.
I think it’s less that Bloodborne is fast and more that it doesn’t let you set the rhythm yourself as much as Dark Souls does.
There’s always a rhythm to take in these games; or in any action game, really. Dark Souls lets you control it with shields, a wider array of ranged attacks, and so forth. Bloodborne, not so much. There’s no way to buy time, or to change the flow of the fight, you have to match yourself to the opponent.
I don’t think of games as ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ but in terms of their pacing; you have to grasp onto their pace and play along with them, at the rate they are asking of you. Bloodborne does not give you much, if any, control over it on its more aggressive bosses, for better or worse.
Souls has always pretty effectively telegraphed “this is one of the aggressive bosses” though
like I can usually tell immediately when defensive strategies aren’t going to work and adjust accordingly because there simply aren’t that many other options
Weirdly bsb and Paarl were hell for me but Amelia was a cakewalk. I think I was just in “the zone” for that one
Amelia was a cakewalk for me because I played at launch week and there was a bug in the 1.0 where the boss AI forgot all its moves except one if you put the PS4 in sleep mode. I think some players never realized they benefited from that bug (not sure if that might include you or you played it later).
Amelia was my favorite fight of those and the one I could most easily learn – if I remember right, she has a pretty clear divide between ‘aggressive rampage’ mode and ‘considered lunges’, and she steps back every once in a while. I love how panic-inducing her least-aggressive move is – the strong heal.
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well that’s the same thing. in bloodborne you run at the thing and attack it until one of you dies, because there is no other option and attacking heals you anyway. I mean, I think that’s kind of a dumb mechanic anyway, but to me it’s not natural to enter a new area with new enemies and just run at them to see who kills who. in dark souls I’m wearing a shield, because if you can wear a shield you should wear a shield if you’re not an idiot, it only makes sense. wearing a shield is literally never the optimal way to play dark souls, but it’s the way that makes sense, it’s what you’re going to do if you’re not good enough to do other things. it’s what you’re going to do if you want to poke around an area to see what’s up. it’s what you’re going to do when the big guy swings his giant axe at your head, because your instinct isn’t “ah ha, if I just frame perfect roll against the grain of this giant fucking axe swing that will kill me if it hits me, I will gain an advantage!”
Ya I played it quite late–I think the healing phase prompted me to be way more aggressive than I was normally being with other bosses, plus unlike Paarl it was easier for me to keep the whole monster on screen at once to track… something about having to run up underneath paarl always made me confused.
Dunno what my issue with BSB was but I think at that point I was still playing too defensively.
amelia’s animations gave me the impression of someone who is not used to fighting, as unsure of what she was doing as i was of why it was necessary for us to fight, letting the beast in her run on instinct but not confident or trustful in it
and in bloodborne you don’t run in and mash, you space them out. same thing you would do if you played dark souls shieldless (which i did). it’s not about rolling at the correct times and using invincibility, it’s about just Not Being There when things go bad. you can just dart in and out of range to whiff punish easily most of the time, the enemies that lurch forward you can pull back to give them room to kill themselves.
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i wanted to talk about setting and stuff and we went off into how the game is played
'cause I think the game’s structure is the most interesting thing about it by far
think i’ll revisit that after i finish the game (which will probably be sometime january at the pace i’m going)
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i played through most of Bloodborne poking around every area slowly like i would in any ol Souls game, the only real difference is i wasn’t holding down L1 the whole time
Paarl and Logarius were the bosses that gave me the most trouble (not counting dlc)
i dodged backward a lot in most fights and it seemed to work. there’s your professional tip.
i’m playing it now with the sword that turns into a bigger sword, and building up a lot of arcane so i can use space magic or whatever it is.
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paarl i figured out pretty quick, probably because i just went ‘this is just the big rat from dark 2 isn’t it’ and ran underneath its legs whenever i had the chance. two-handed kirkhammer charged r2 was doing 700 and frequently flinching it so i could do another charged r2. so, uh, rip that dog.
rom gave me a lot of trouble. didn’t feel like any of my weapons were actually any good there so i had to patiently make room each wave, which meant more mistakes.
I hate rom so fucking much
Posting from my phone and rom kept correcting to from lol
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Rom in the lake is evocative and appropriately mournful.
Rom in a dungeon closet is trolling the player.
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i treat everything in the chalice dungeons as non-canon
meta-canon, or dream-canon, or mirror-universe canon
It feels canon to Bloodborne as a human on earth in 2018 thinking about playing it in 2015; or, literalizing the maze of twisty passages, all alike in the Yharnam’s architecture, it’s a reflection of thought.
With enough insight, you can find yourself wandering those tilesets forever. You quest to diagram all potentials, to map it entire, but you are lost in inconsequential detail
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i haven’t delved too deep into them, but i read it as the chalice being about wanting to go deeper into the dream, rather than wanting to wake from it.
the deeper substrates are canon in the sense that they are canon to their own realities and universes, errant thoughts and beliefs given form and structure through those who have walked the upper paths entirely too many times. their purpose never existed to begin with, they simply exist as halls of memories.
that’s my interpretation, anyhow
meanwhile my game designer sense just says they thought it was cool and wanted to do it.
No, that’s a good read and I agree with it (both of it).