I’ve been using the gun QUITE a bit for visceral attacks. Practising on the pair of trolls (?) near the bridge yielded a lot of blood vials and I’d kinda been farming the wheelchair guy for bullets (I think I’m playing this game much more methodically and maybe grindy than the souls games maybe cuz I’m slightly paranoid about approaching this kind of game after being away so long). When I got to the Cleric Beast, the adrenaline fuelled panic reminded me that I’d accrued quite a bit of fire bombs (I forget what they’re called in BB at the moment) and found that I could stun it with those and then visceral. Anyway, I am sure the next big guy will rock me hard. I’m excited.
1 Like
so rather than talk about how relieved i was to finally dispatch mf-ing father gascoigne, i want to just note how amazingly horrible the non-choice you are given about returning the red brooch. it’s just one example among many of how these games gamify their grotesqueness–the girl who gives you the music box that stuns f.g. asks you to retrieve her mom’s red brooch. If you refuse, she goes after it herself and gets eaten by a giant pig (apparently? I didn’t do this). If you say you will, she lives. But then returning it to her gives you no reward whatsoever, keeping it for yourself is the only option that offers tangible benefit to the player. I love the way the game both shows that being a jerk is devastating to friendly NPCs, but being nice to them doesn’t give you anything in return. It’s better than 100 bioshocks.
edit: apparently I’m wrong about this? it seems more complicated than that actually. oh well.
1 Like
it is more complicated than that, but not really meaningfully. i mean, there’s no way for you to make it turn out well, or anything. i remember watching a friend of mine replaying the game and obsessively clearing a path from the girl’s home to the safe place he was sending her to, sure that there must be a way for her to survive. it’s sort of interesting that he thought that was even a possibility, because it never crossed my mind and i even thought he was sort of silly for thinking it might work.
Still, I think what you described fits some Soulsborne tones, and npc interactions here and there anyways. The outcome of your most well meant actions might not amount to anything, or worse than if you’d done nothing.
Aside from specific missions/objectives that tell you to clear an area, or escorting someone and doing that beforehand, I have to wonder about any games that actually utilized something like this. I feel like the closest recent examples might be Bethesda style open worlds?
i simply adore those “Morality System” defying Soulsborne NPC interactions. Like setting Yurt/Lautrec free, or telling Laurentius about chaos pyromancy. Or Siegmeyer’s entire arc. Or, in a weird sort-of opposite way, Patches.
Replaying Dark Souls for Hallowgaming, and because i dont have a ps4 ): and gods it is just so good that most of the NPCs end up dead/hollowed if you treat them like, well, NPCs – if you finish up their questlines, or buy out all their spells, or use up all their dialogue.
My understanding is that Bloodborne has an entire questline that is devoted to the proud Yurt tradition of “read between the lines or get fucked” (the Iosefka subplot)
Quite the opposite – if you keep the brooch, you get a crummy early-game blood gem. If you give the brooch, you get Fashionable Apparel for your cute Messengers. The choice is clear.
2 Likes
Still don’t have this (friend, where are you), but I have been reviewing some stuff – some horrific, some not, a lot of it architectural – that I think shares interesting and unexplored commonalities with Bloodborne.
A set from The Golem: How He Came into the World, a horror film from 1920, designed by architect Hans Poelzig, who meant to reproduce the medieval Jewish ghetto of Prague. It’s not just the basic elements of the architecture itself but its organization and warpage which can be compared to the rural buildings in Hemwick Charnel Lane (DrkS3’s undead settlement, too) and maybe the fishing hamlet, which also has Japanese elements.
Las Lajas Sanctuary, a Colombian church built inside a canyon. For me it’s a concentrated symbol of Yharnam, built atop the old labyrinth and expressing stylistic developments that although indebted to the source are striving for something new and vertically forceful. This is an interpretation where architecture is an analog to geologic strata.
An interior designed by Frank Furness. Furness’ stuff is an inexhaustible expression of in-betweens, drawing from Gothic/romanesque/Persian/Egyptian/etc. tropes and developing a new, once-scandalous typology. It’s also the unending ornamentation that makes Furness’ extant buildings, inside and out, still striking, even shocking. This experience of being visually overwhelmed is something I felt when first playing Bloodborne.
One of artist Filip Dujardin’s photographic manipulations. This feels like more a stretch than other things because inaccessible bunches of architecture are hardly unique to Bloodborne – it’s just a standard limitation of videogames – but there is something about the obsessive design of Yharnam that makes me feel like a lot of it was built simply to fulfill an esoteric purpose rather than to house anyone or admit entry, giving that general inaccessibility a subjective and fictional meaning. And you do come across signs of inhabitance, and, later on, a sort of mass petrifaction, and the horrific question may come to mind: how many of these buildings are in fact spiny vertical caskets?
EDIT: Thought of a couple more things while writing this post.
^The city and some of the narrative aspects from Angel’s Egg.
^Those etchings I posted in an axe thread that’re by Gérard Trignac.
12 Likes
I’m still not very far but I was getting some “German expressionist” vibes from Yarnham. Particularly the dark density of the town in ‘Faust’ (again, I’m not too privy to what is actually going on in the game’s narrative yet but my mind went to the pestilence theme in that film as to why everyone is shut in their homes).
The sets of ‘Dr. Caligari’ are pushed much further stylistically that anything I’ve seen in BB, but there’s that same sense as you mention of creating these spaces that don’t give a damn about inhabitability or functionality so much as the mood itself. I was even thinking about ‘M’ and various scenes throughout that film but I’d have to go back and watch it to see if I’m onto anything or just projecting.
It’s weird. I’ve had dreams that take place in cities that feel like Yarnham and I can’t think of any other games like that.
(that shaggy stage performer in Faust even reminds me of the way many of the mobs are disfigured in the game… For now I’m gonna pretend that this film is a prequel to BB :p)
3 Likes
I’m still a bit surprised that this movie hasn’t been released on blu-ray yet, especially considering that it is the third instalment in an unofficial series where the first two got lost over the course of the last 100 years. I have only seen a screening of that years ago, and (like caligari), loved it for how progressive it was back then, when compared to contemporary movies. Maybe i should get the DVD before it gets hard to obtain …
anyway, as @Polygonzo outlines, caligari pushed the expressionist style way more than anything I’ve seen in BB so far, yeah. Still, i guess that some of that creeping, uneasy feeling you get when wandering around yawnham is partly influenced by my obsession for expressionist stuff. media. content.
Having slept on it now… I was probably stretching it a bit with those films >_>
are @polygonzo and i the only ppl playing this game for the first time itt? i feel like there is kind of a weird shift (down) in the difficulty and intensity of the game after you reach old yharnam, does it pick up again quickly after this or what. i feel like i’m being lulled into a false sense of security
I don’t think Old Yharnam is less difficult than Central Yharnam. I think you’re probably just getting better at the game.
Yeah I think so. Most people with interest in this have played it already. I thought about participating in this thread, but I’ve completed about 5 playthroughs by now and I don’t think I can muster another casual one, it would feel too much like going through the motions without any element of exploration or discovery, which I’ve realized is the main thing that keeps me motivated in this series.
that’s a relief
[quote=“diplo, post:47, topic:2994, full:true”]
Still don’t have this (friend, where are you), but I have been reviewing some stuff – some horrific, some not, a lot of it architectural – that I think shares interesting and unexplored commonalities with Bloodborne.
A set from The Golem: How He Came into the World, a horror film from 1920, designed by architect Hans Poelzig, who meant to reproduce the medieval Jewish ghetto of Prague. It’s not just the basic elements of the architecture itself but its organization and warpage which can be compared to the rural buildings in Hemwick Charnel Lane (DrkS3’s undead settlement, too) and maybe the fishing hamlet, which also has Japanese elements.
Las Lajas Sanctuary, a Colombian church built inside a canyon. For me it’s a concentrated symbol of Yharnam, built atop the old labyrinth and expressing stylistic developments that although indebted to the source are striving for something new and vertically forceful. This is an interpretation where architecture is an analog to geologic strata.[/quote]
These are really good references, but don’t they apply even more to Dark Souls? The first one resembles Undead Settlement, the second one is sort of a fusion of Drake Valley and the Undead Parish church. I don’t disagree with your application to Bloodborne, but I think it just shows how the same influences have percolated through the entire series. (I think the Furness and Trignac are the more distinctly Bloodborne influences.)
Also, even though this is the Bloodborne thread, I thought it might be interesting to repost these well-known visual reference points on Dark Souls, since they’re too rarely mentioned. The real secret of From Software is their research and wide inspirations, unlike some other studios that tapping the same well of fantasy inspirations over and over.
Duomo in Milan
Angkor Wat in Cambodia (some influence here on Bloodborne’s chalice dungeons, too, I think?)
Chambord Castle in France
6 Likes
You’re taking the reference in a visually literal way, though. I was pretty clear about interpreting it as a symbol. I also mentioned the undead settlement. Kinda feels like you just looked at the images in my post, read the first sentence for each, and then decided to respond.
A few more:
Charles Bridge, Prague
https://www.bluephoenixyacht.com/dev/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Myra_Rock_Tombs.jpg
Myra Rock Tombs, Turkey
Sure, but at that level, I think the vertical strata theme is also above all present in DkS1 and relatively less so in the rest of the series. The Chalice dungeons underly Yharham only at the level of item descriptions/lore and not in any experienceable way. (In general, I would say the hub structure of Demon’s and Bloodborne harms the sense of global structure of the kingdom. DkS1 and DkS3 are the most inspiring from that angle. The tradeoff is that Demon’s and Bloodborne gain beautifully isolated, diaroma-like spaces like Boletaria Palace and Nightmare Frontier.)
2 Likes
I agree, but, again, I’m taking a symbolic view of this, and I’d like to restate the possibility that the establishment and naming of Yharnam was a response to scholars’ explorations of the subterranean labyrinth. In the image of the church you can clearly see a formal relationship between the two halves, but the upper half has turned much more ornate, while the lower half is like an ancient husk, a discarded skin. Dark Souls doesn’t really have this formal relationship between its terranean level and its underworld, even if the physical relationship is way more developed.
Some more screenshots I took a while ago. The trick to framing these was sitting down right in front of an obstruction, like a wall or balustrade, so that moving the camera closer would allow it to push right above my person.
6 Likes
Ok so the bosses at least are still pretty dang tough
I feel bad that I don’t really have anything more insightful to say itt, but diplos posts are vastly enriching my experience w this game.
I guess one of my problems with games like this is when I play something that is this hard but still engrossing I tend to get tunnel vision and just not really look at the graphics
because of this I have a theory that FROM has realized this happens to everyone, so they just make everything gnarly and ornate as hell to force you to snap out of gamer mode and actually pay attention to your surroundings
