Is this a D&D term? You used it before itt and it’s confused me. Cuz the room you fight Rom in within the chalice dungeon is pretty big. Just feels smaller when you compare it to a gigantic dreamlake’s perimeter.
If the concern with the chalice dungeons’ canonicity is the reappearance of certain bosses I think it’s pretty easy to treat them as canon if you can accept the idea that just because you defeated in Yharnam does not mean you’ve defeated their true form; you’ve only contested one manifestation. That seems especially appropriate in the case of great ones who may exist on another/other plane(s) and project themselves onto Yharnam or elsewhere.
I’m exaggerating the smallness of the room for effect. I certainly think it’s very small in context of how Rom is designed; the minion spawn is incredibly dense as are the falling ice blocks. The game’s not playing ‘fair’ or within its own rules for how much visibility and maneuvering room the player has with these attacks.
Now, I certainly think there’s scope for pushing the game systems past their breaking point (I spent November building a frustratingly hard difficulty mode and cackling as my QA buddy died, trying to twist the experience to fear and suspense over power fantasy). A boss in an optional dungeon is an excellent place to do so. The Rom fight was reinterpreted from its ethereal dreamlike feel into a rude beatdown – and I hated her in that room, feelings I never had in the core path.
It didn’t feel like a betrayal of design to me. You can use the columns as shower negaters and it’s pretty doable to keep one bunch of spiders along half of the room’s floor. I find the fight frustrating in both contexts.
I would say that that is the case with the Loran Darkbeast, which lacks the minor camera adjustments relative to the boss’ attacks Paarl had that somewhat lessened the camera’s general inadequacies when it comes to bigger opponents. I go back and forth between caring and not caring about whether or not a boss is best fought without locking on, but it does seem like a real problem if the camera can handle neither at all.
This sounds believable. Imo it’s generally true of videogames that you lose some inhibiting barriers once you stop feeling intimidated, and Bloodborne’s bosses are very good at intimidating. Thing with the BSB also is that it has its aggressive final phase where it’s trailing poisonous fumes around, and even if that phase isn’t particularly difficult in itself the panic-inducing effect it has, comparatively, can lead to make worse decisions. Parrying also becomes more of a gamble. So my opinion about the earlier comment re: “easiest bosses” is, well, what does that actually mean. It’s not as self-evident of a claim as it aims to be.
difficulty, as people traditionally consider it, has little meaning.
you can win any game if you perform the correct actions, at the correct times, in the correct orders.
all you have to do is know what those are and be able to perform them. different people will excel at different parts of this, from ascertaining the correct actions faster to being better at putting them into practice at the correct times.
and if you don’t know things, or cannot keep your composure, or cannot have consistent results, then things are challenging. and again, every player has a different level of ability here.
difficulty is not a linear scale. it is a wide scattering of skills, of which a subset will be applicable to the challenges laid in front of you.
drawing from this, all games are fundamentally knowledge games, about the acquisition and use of knowledge to further yourself towards a goal.
defense is defense and offense is offense, adding some mechanic to conflate the two is artificial, it just looks like something they came up with because they decided that bloodborne was going to be the aggressive souls game because PREPARE TO DIE was a successful marketing slogan for them, don’t get me started
demons and dark 1 are pure games, bloodborne is a a bunch of answers to the question “what if we made dark souls, but X instead”
I still plan on going back to it at some point in the relatively near future, I don’t hate it and the floor for this game is higher than the ceiling for basically any other game I’d find myself actually playing, but the part where it’s supposed to be the best game in this series to literally everyone is eluding me.
This game finally clicked with me after starting over with an axe wielding lone surviver. Died stupidly once but then I got all the way to the cleric beast and took em out on the first try.
game time 28 hours. level 83, primary weapons: hunter’s axe +9, kirkhammer +9, hunter’s pistol +5, hunter’s torch +5. really basic stuff, nothing fancy. used only the big two-handed hammer on mergo’s wet nurse, which only took two tries. first try i backed myself into a corner at a bad time, more than anything else going wrong.
took one try at gehrman, first phase was easy, second phase i wondered how i used up all of my bullets and vials so quickly and then i died. and then i woke up to having no vials left, so guess who’s going to go run around central yharnam for half an hour or so!
went low-to-no spoilers (the most influential was finding out that i could charged R2 enemies to get a free punch on them), but now i think i’m going to go spoil myself on everything i missed at this point, as it is abundantly obvious that this is the end of the game, and try to figure out what it is i want to do. stuff i know i missed:
never finished the DLC, of course.
never bothered with chalice dungeons, though i gather i could do these on NG+ just fine.
never found my way to cainhurst.
never went back for the item on the body in the cage in yahar’gul, which is apparently a key.
found the enemy in the nightmare that was inflicting frenzy, but only took one try before frenzy killed me and decided i’ll come back later.
turns out i can get the conditions for the True Last Boss! so let’s do that.
i will have more to say on the game’s setting in a little while.
debating just finishing the game and doing it all on the second loop,
DLC final boss is really fucking hard, even for you perhaps (hardest boss in the entire series IMO), so I wouldn’t want to fight him for the first time on NG+.
that’s never stopped me before, really! though this game feels like it starts at NG+ difficulty. that’s confidence in game design for you.
i’m leaning towards going back and mopping up a bit first. i kind of want to know more about the world before i start going on long rambles about the game’s setting/world like iw ant to.