Bloodborne • Analysis (Full Commentary).

hello everyone and welcome to this very special commentary video on bloodborne in it i'll be playing through the entire game and commentating over it as i go talking about dispersed topics as they become relevant so one moment i'll be going over a specific character and then i'll maybe talk about an isolated piece of gameplay or a visual motif a fun piece of level design etc it hopefully goes without saying that there will be no suppression on spoilers going forwards so if you've never experienced the game yourself this is the obligatory instruction to do just that before watching any further additionally since i'm going to be drawing on mata from software's pre bloodborne library and some post bloodborne stuff as a point of reference it wouldn't hurt to have some grounding on those games either i spent the better part of 2020 putting together breakdowns on the king's field games and demon's souls so if you feel uncertain about any of those titles be sure to check out those videos links have been provided where appropriate a final note before getting started i'd like to thank matthew matosis for giving me the go ahead to make this video his commentaries on demon's souls and dark souls are excellent and weren't watching on their own additionally my love goes out to sinclair lore richard pilbeam and loki for all of the help they've provided me with in making this video with all of these formalities out of the way let's begin talking about bloodborne starting with the menu cinematic it plays unprompted and does such a good job of setting the mood early on that if not for the player character appearing in it i'd feel it should have played after the game begins as a sort of mandatory introduction to the world take note of how the cinematic concludes because i will be talking about this in about 7 hours right before winding the video down bloodborne's menu doesn't contain any mysterious hints to the happenings to come and there's no creation myth opening cinematic like in demon souls and in dark souls but the game sets up its premise with its first piece of dialogue oh yes well you've come to the right place yarnum is the home of blood administration you need only unravel its mystery with these words we have our heading for basically the rest of the game additionally talks of a mystery sets up the tone and talks of the player being an outsider sets up our role the idea of blood ministration is not over represented enough in pop culture to be overlooked as a throw away line so it also sets the setting apart from anything else the player might have experienced before hirataka miyazaki the creative lead on the game likes outsider protagonists for his action rpgs as they assumably allow him to leave character building to the player with certain vague pre-built set for them at the start the victorian era evokes the draculas and assorted gothic horrors of the past but the game to follow is such a mind-bender that it truly carves out its own niche and the opening cutscene i think really does not get enough credit for the work that it does if we include the tonal setting done with the menu cinematic then after the opening cutscene practically every core component of the game has been condensed into the opening which is very impressive considering it clocks in at under 6 minutes without loading screens and including character creation with a werewolf called skirt's beast stepping out of a pool of blood bringing up imagery from gothic horror to these strange messengers giving us an early indication that things really are not that simple side note that the skirts beast in the opening is defeated with fire is not just a cool visual it's practical knowledge which the player will take with them as they begin to experiment with the do's and don'ts of how to play this game finally after the beast is dead and the messengers have climbed all over our powerless body we hear a voice familiar to all demon cells alumni in eveta muradasilova who says ah you found yourself a hunter this is the point at which we are given control over our character hereafter referred to simply as the hunter and sitting on a chair nearby is a note which tells us to seek pale blood to transcend the hunt bloodborne leans much more into the mystery ankle than fromsoft's previous two franchises and this idea of seeking pale blood is a good example of this in the beginning we have no idea what pale blood is in this universe we have no idea why we are seeking it all we know is that prior to the blood administration our character must have asked about it and that in the medicines the game places a heavy emphasis on it and for me that makes it all the more enticing also knowing from the opening cutscene that this universe is not operating on the same laws as our own there's intrigue built into the game right from the get-go the scourged beast fight at the start is winnable if you have the patience for it which i don't but you really are supposed to die to this thing miyazaki likes to include a definite death point in his tutorials and the purpose of this one is to get the player to the hunter's dream where they can pick their starting gear bloodborne is a bit unique in miyasaki's lineup in that the player is expected to die to the very first enemy they face its predecessors demon souls and dark souls comparatively had very easy grunt enemies at the start which lead to an encounter with an enormous demon boss economically you could argue that bloodborne has the best tutorial in his lineup considering how much it does with his short segment but i think dark souls once tutorial etches it out in pure craftsmanship for this run we'll be piloting an arcane strength build but to illustrate some points i'm going to go with the saw cleaver as my starting weapon bloodborne has notoriously bad loading times even after all of the patches so i'll be cutting all of those out in this video and i'll also be cutting out most of my visits to the hunter's stream simply because i have a limited amount of things to say about it as souls likes have come and gone i've noticed that it has seemingly become lost to time just how big a shift bloodborne was at launch i distinctly remember picking the game up and being odd at just how far the soul's formula could be stretched like in demon souls and dark souls movement is pretty intuitive move the hunter with one stick the camera with the other shoulder buttons for combat d-pad and face buttons for more specialized uses such as talking to npcs right now i'm starting the yosefka quest line and all i want to really say about it at this point is that i think this conversation is a bit botched uh placement wise the door leading to the stairs needed to ascend to talk to yosefka is where the player came from originally and given that players aren't able to talk to her until after they've died and picked up their weapons i think most players are going to miss her on their first run the direction in this scene really pushes the players to confront the skirts beast again rather than re-explore the area and i wonder if this conversation had been made more accessed that is if yosefka was located after the spawn point rather than behind it or if players would have been able to talk to her before dying to the skirts beast i wonder if it would have gone some way to make players interact more with villager npcs in the early game anyways on the topic of gameplay combat wise the two biggest shake-ups from souls is that we no longer have a shield so we are expected to dash around much more and we now have trick weapons and combat is often a question of which mode of the weapon is the correct one to use the saw cleaver can be used as a short range serrated saw and it can also be extended to be more like a long handled cleaver for dealing with the skirt's beast the short range variant was preferred as beasts are particularly vulnerable to serrated weapons another shake-up meant to encourage more aggressive play is the rally system when enemies deal damage health is not lost immediately because we have a short window of time to deal enemies damage to minimize the amount of health we lose this mechanic is a double-edged sword in that while players are given a hand in healing should they play well enough they are also being pushed to be a bit more brash which comes back to bite them with some of the more aggressive bosses oh you must be a hunter gilbert over here is a nice npc with a tragic quest line and for our purposes he's a guide during the beginning of the game he gives curious players their heading to go to the cathedral ward and he's also the first mention we have of the healing church the healing church was established by lawrence and it serves as the major political mechanism in yharnam while it served as the major political mechanism in yharnam ever since burning all the arnhem down the church hasn't been so popular the story goes that lawrence was a scholar of byrgenwerth when they found old blood in the chalice dungeons which they sought to use to evolve but consuming the old blood resulted in undesirable consequences and birgenworth wanted to guide the process this was the split which lawrence had with willem the leader of bergenworth willem looked to the great ones cosmic beings because he saw the problem being the limitations of the human mind he reasoned that if only humanity could awaken to the elder its truth they could evolve to the next stage of evolution lawrence saw the merit of this argument but rather than meditate to gain insight like his master he sought to experiment his way to the end goal after splitting from byrgenwerth lawrence established the healing church and began feeding yharnamites who were already thirsty for blood some of the old blood they found in the dungeons the arnamites quickly acquired an appetite for this potent blood and this propelled the healing church into the force it was except the blood came with the spread of beasthood the arnamides have come to regard foreigners with disdain as a result of having allowed the healing turrets to set up operation and that xenophobia is the in-game reasoning given for their animus towards the player character as the hunter is an outsider no matter what yharnam seemingly always had a beast problem but prior to the old blood it was mostly contained the old blood put things into overdrive because it makes the physiology of those who consume it super malleable and eventually transforms people into beasts in the beginning of the game this was shown to have almost happened to the hunter with the skirts beast stepping up from the puddle of blood being symbolic of them turning into a beast the interference of the messengers stopped the creeping beasthood though as the hunter is tied to the dream they are immune to the onset of beasthuit there are mechanics in the game which allow players to leverage that immunity to be stood for added damage or to spice up their builds but we'll get to those once they become relevant in bloodborne is much more aggressive than in both previous souls franchises but the fundamentals underpinning it are mostly the same exceptions for one-on-one affairs enemies and mobs will generally move slowly but deal heavy damage penalizing reckless players in one-on-ones the player's ability to dash around and stun enemies is leaned on for engagement the ramification this has on level design is that areas are more open than in preceding souls games and because they are and because bloodborne was running on better hardware enemies have more dynamic behaviors in demon cells for example enemies had a spawn point which they rarely ever moved from unprompted whereas in bloodborne they go on patrols meaning players can strategize a bit more as well as get caught unaware from a mob crossing a corner patrols in general are a big shakeup even though they might seem like very mundane inclusions not necessarily because they change where enemies attack you from but because the knowledge of patrol paths means levels are designed for different kinds of encounters and to host all of the newly possible combat situations we get the wider levels compared to souls there also seems to be more of a willingness this time around to mix more enemy types together in areas and that is another aspect of the game which is facilitated by the more open level design because areas are more maneuverable it means sharpshooters can have significant influence on combat if they catch you unaware it also means that acroing a mob might get you the attention of dogs which you hadn't planned on and suddenly retreating whilst fighting them off as the challenge rather than swiping in a group of yarnamides and because of the rally mechanic after taking damage you're constantly in a state of haste because the alternative is digging into your resources since we don't have shields anymore parrying has been updated functionally it's still a question of timing the use of the left-handed weapon when an enemy's attack is right about to hit but instead of brushing the attack aside with a shield a move which makes players vulnerable if they don't time it correctly they can shoot enemies right before their attacks hit leaving them open for visceral attacks which are location sensitive strikes which grant the player invincibility frames while they do massive damage to the struck enemy the advantage of the gun over the shield is that it can be fired from a distance allowing players to parry without locking them out of their dashes and it has fringe applications like luring a single enemy at a distance towards you in fact the ability to lure single enemies is so much fun that i wouldn't be opposed from software dropping pebbles and ceramic shards in favor of a specific button to pick up a rock and throw it at someone fun utility of the gun is that it has many variations which open up how you play the game somewhat and enemies also respond differently to being hit if a dog is running at you for example shooting at it will knock it to the ground the downside of the gun is that it offers the player no ability to trade stamina for defense and it also locks the player in a vulnerable animation while used the fight i'm currently fighting is a good example of this deeper focus on environmental awareness this time around compared to the game's predecessors and that's not because those games didn't have this but because bloodborne raises the stakes in major ways for one elevation based combat is viable this time around with the only growing pain being visceral attacks which are locked to when you're in the same basic elevation as the stunned enemy but zooming around on steps is way more palatable this time around and it seems like the attacks are coded to accommodate for a difference in elevation in say dark souls your ability to hit enemies in different elevations was a question of the moveset the weapon came with weapon move sets are also very important to bloodborne but as i displayed mlg style side swipes on steps can get the job done here another change from souls one which i have mixed feelings about is armor so armors in this game are sort of a joke once you've gotten a good mastery of the mechanics but it's vindicating in a way because it lets you put those number crunchings aside and focus on the only thing which really matters anyway the fashion and bloodborne carries the torch from miyasaki's previous games in this department quite well the armors in previous souls games especially dark souls 1 are some of the most beautiful i've ever seen in video games and i think it has to do with rich use of fabrics and details and since bloodborne's outfits are almost all fabric and since this game came a console generation later than dark souls both the rich use of fabrics and the details were amped up one way i would describe the fashion in bloodborne is flowing another is portrait-esque as in most of these outfits have seemingly no regard for function and in gameplay terms this is actually significant bloodborne dropped both the armor weight classes from previous games and did not bring back the poise mechanic from dark souls so the builds aren't really classified with armors i'm sure that at the high end of competitive play it matters but the average player is allowed to pretty much wear whatever they want a missed opportunity some say is that the outfits do not carry more other types of ramifications there is of course the adela quest which can only be activated if you dress like a member of the church and i tend to agree with this assessment on paper in practice making this sort of stuff is always more difficult than it seems and coding enemy behaviors or npc willingness to assist you to the clothes you're wearing might have just killed the game outright considering how the elegant moon cycle changes were reversed last minute more than that later but on paper progression significant clothing is an area which i would definitely like to see expanded on if bloodborne 2 is ever a thing because i'm a fan of unconventional ways of telling stories in games miyazaki rationalized the changes to the armor system by explaining that in demon souls once players got to the late game their innate defense stat was more relevant than the armor and since the armors were static players would eventually ditch them for the improved rolling speeds this led to dark souls having upgradable armors so that their percentage role in defending the player from damage wouldn't shrink this went some ways towards balancing out the armors but bloodborne fundamentally rethinks how armors are calculated into the defense the problem in dark souls was still that there was a point at which players would just roll around naked everywhere and the formula used to calculate damage wasn't refined enough for balancing to be proper bloodborne's armors do not lock the player to specific animation frame speeds so that disincentive to ever wear them is gone and the defense is now calculated with percentage reductions so even if the player's own innate defense improves the armors still have a role because static percentage defenses don't lose their relevancy i'm currently opening up the shortcuts before tackling the cleric beast and since i wanted to talk about combat some more i thought it'd be cool if i did a clean run until i reached it to show you what the game looks like when i'm actually putting effort in in all seriousness the reason i decided to get intentionally hit there was to showcase the rally mechanic some more because it had a knock-on effect on the game which i don't think was intentional the souls games have always prioritized situational awareness over trigger finger reactions even the bosses and demon souls were mostly about watching your step but as these games have gotten more plentiful fromsoft leans more and more on the combat to drive the experience for a newcomer healing in bloodborne is mostly done with vinyls but as they get more acclimated to the game they'll realize that the rally mechanic is the optimal method of healing the knock-on problem with this has to do with how environmental hazards cannot be recovered from without eating into the player's blood vials if you ever wondered why traps in bloodborne are more reliant on the players stumbling into enemies than triggering arrows or things of that sort like it was in demon souls and the dark souls it's likely because bloodborne primes the player to expect being able to recover from damage and it might have played really badly to have areas where that's not possible additionally since the player has so much snappier movement this time around i can imagine that the old sorts of traps would have had a much lower hit rate than before thankfully though the player is still given enough incentives to thoroughly explore and familiarize themselves with the environments with items strewn all over the map and npcs especially in the early game who stay behind locked doors or windows and can give the player direction or some piece of world building gilbert would have done both if i'd have exhausted his dialogue he'd have instructed us to reach cathedral wards through the aqueduct and he'd remind us of what's happening in the world since we spend most of our time in the game inset world it probably doesn't need repeating but it's not like him reminding us that there's an ongoing hunt is hurting either i'm about to fight the cleric beast and for the sake of brevidev i'll be skipping the enemies on this bridge in this fight i intend to make liberal use of the molotov cocktails i wasn't joking when i said i like to throw things in these games but i want to bring up that the player should know that this is a smart strategy at this point in the game the bridge leading to the cleric beast has two skirts beasts on it which should invite flame attacks if the player paid attention to the opening cutscene and the players should also know fire is effective against beasts if they've paid attention to how the level so far has heavily emphasized fire as a weapon against beasts in the giant strung up corpse we walked past earlier the torches wielded by the villagers and by reading the in-game description of the cocktail itself fire is a particularly powerful weapon against beasts which is always sort of weird in these games because aside from the watchdog in the chalice dungeon and lawrence in the nightmare no enemy in this game seems like they'd have a good time against fires but nitpicks aside it's a go-to weapon against beasts the cleric beast fight is triggered when the player reaches close enough to the wall it jumps down a setup eerily similar to the tourist demon fight in dark souls these two bosses also share the distinction of being their game's most commonly accepted first boss tutorial in dark souls aside both are massive hairy beasts with horns and humanoid physiques and both are fought on these linear pathways gameplay-wise however the cleric beast harkens more so back to manus from that game's dlc but with all of the jumping around and having one oversized hand manus was an impressive boss in that game and it almost seems like the cleric beast is miyazaki's way of letting players know just how much higher the stakes are this time around recycling the strongest boss of the last game aside from maybe calamite to be the first boss in this game seems to me to communicate as much anyway when we triggered the cleric beast boss we were granted one inside and when we killed it we were granted three more having insight makes us able to see and interact with a doll in the hunter's dream the inside mechanic is a modification of the humanity mechanic from dark souls with some call of cthulhu sanity stats thrown in for good measure the is the level up lady of this game and she's probably the most popular one in the from software lineup she was constructed by german to be a replica of his old student maria which seems to have been retconned in with the dlc and i think the reason she's the most popular level lady has to deal with how unique she is in this lineup because of how much time we spend with them some characters can naturally come to take the role of supporting cast without the game telling you that that's what they are and i feel that the doll really benefits from how deeply she is tied to the world as in this character could not function in any other game so many of bloodborne's deviations from reality and game design conventions are utilized in telling her story i've noted my affinity for this sort of storytelling before and i'll talk about it again in this video later the way leveling is contextualized in this world is very different from how it was in the souls games but functionally it's not all that dissimilar from demon souls both games have the player go to their safehop where they level lady transforms their xp slash currency which they got from killing enemies or using items into level ups both games also had a static character in the safehop the monumental in demon souls german here and you can tell that it's german by how it's him i am gammon i really like german he doesn't feel any mechanics role gameplay-wise up until the end but he gives us some lore and some context for the happenings in the story additionally him being the first hunter makes him sort of impressive of a figure even considering his seemingly people's stature at this point i can't remember ever thinking he was anything else than a final boss waiting to happen throughout the game the players will unlock a bit more of his dialogue and in a way i've always felt like he was kind of like the hunter's mentor in this game there's no training moment or anything like that but he's the old guy you keep coming back to in between levels and that role to me just sort of wraps itself on top of him which goes back to what i said about how some characters naturally slot into the supporting cast even if he wasn't a main game boss i think german is a character players would have very much had an affinity for the hunter's dream picks up where demon souls nexus left off what with it being where players will usually go for upgrades and merchants except that the word usually does not apply here in demon souls the nexus had merchants and blacksmiths but here these functions are not available on the overworld additionally merchants blacksmiths and stockpile thomas from demon souls have been replaced by mute messengers and items the hunter's dream does not allow for any new npcs to come and so there won't be many avenues for chit chat here outside of the doll and garmin the final comparison between the nexus and the hunter's dream for now is that these are both the meeting place between all of your checkpoints in the game and it's always from here that you teleported the next one after you've talked to the level lady and cast in your xp in demon souls the maiden in black absorbed our held souls to grant his power in this game things are a bit more complicated the arnamites hemlock people and cain hirstians and perhaps some of the other humans are the descendants of thumerians and the appetites humans have for blood is a carryover from this genetic lineage thumerians are basically underground vampiric creatures as the ages have gone on however and as humans have built their cities above the chalice dungeons they've not only forgotten their origins as the marians but they've also had their lineage somewhat tainted as they've been removed from the old blood and this thinning out of the blood resulted in humans losing the thumerian features like the tall cheekbones lanky frames and pale skin although these features can re-emerge if the humans become familiar with the old blood again see cainhurst yharnam is said to produce more blood than alcohol since the former is more intoxicating and his intoxication can culminate in blood drunkenness which might have been better translated as blood lust as humans are exposed to more and more blood their old nature begins to take hold and they eventually tip over into a madness this blood drunkenness is represented with the blood echoes as you kill you spread blood as you get blood on you your akkos begin to stack up and eventually blood drunkenness will claim you except the hunter has access to the doll who can extract these echoes and transform them into strength because of her we need not fear the ravaging effects of blood drunkenness and blood drunkenness plays a vital role in the npc questline for eileen the crow oh a hunter aye i'll have some choice things to say about some of the npcs included in this game but eileen i think is a great inclusion not only does she have the second coolest fashion sense of the hunters we meet bloody crow of cainhurst is better but she's also got the most useful oath rune in the end of her quest and the item she gives us here the bold hunter's mark is one of the more useful items this early on for newcomers and familiars alike as they allow the player to immediately warp to their last checkpoint eileen is a hunter of hunters and the way her quest builds on the idea of blood drunkenness is that just as the hunters hunt beasts eileen hunts blood drunk hunters i liked how involved with the functions of the world the doll was and i like this about eileen as well and she's also a more involved npc than any we've met outside of the hunter's dream thus far yosefka's only job going forwards will be to be transformed into a small celestial emissary and gilbert's only job is to gift the flame sprayer and turn into a beast eileen is more dynamic she has stuff to do in the world and your interactions with her matter as to how her story progresses there's now only one character in this map i haven't talked to yet and that's gas coin's daughter while i get to her i'm going to use the opportunity to talk about level design i've already given some thoughts on how combat required that the areas be a bit more open but there are other needs being serviced by the current layout for one since fromsoft had the idea of the hunter's dream hop in mind from the get-go it made little sense going for a world as interconnected as dark souls was the interconnectedness of the world there was a tool to help the player get from a to b in a palatable amount of time since they had to actually walk the distance in the first half but here's the thing for bloodborne even though they had to the warp from the get-go fromsoft still went the extra mile to make the game world connect somewhat sensibly together there are seams here and there which are clearly breaking the geometry but as it relates to yharnham specifically if lanterns worked like the bonfires did in dark souls 1 i think the setup as is would totally work imagine the tomb of erden being firelinks ryan and you have a hub which connects to upper cathedral ward old yharnam central yharnam and cathedral ward proper which itself connects to yahar ghoul the latter half of dark souls gave players the lord vessel and the ability to warp between select bonfires in order to have the late game not be a slog to get through since the levels needed to be distant enough from each other to allow them to have their own visual style while also being long enough to pose a challenge if you look at dark souls 1's level progression it's kind of like a tree with the early game being interconnected but still fairly straight forwards for a first timer and the late game being splintered off into different directions bloodborne's map layout has these little tangents where the player is asked to go down specific dead end paths which they'll warp from but aside from the road through the forbidden woods to byrgenwerth these are all optional hemwick the nightmare frontier kanehurst and upper cathedral ward don't need visiting and if you could cut them and the bergenworth trip from the game the dark souls early game structure could have been maintained all throughout the music box which were gifted by gascoigne's daughter has a few uses in this game but most players only use it to stun gas coin in the boss fight the music will remind him of home so it helps subdue his blood drunkenness his wife went to find him but she left the music box at home so she'll have a tragic outcome actually this whole family it seems will have a tragic outcome but what i really want to talk about here is the use of children in these games i don't know if it's the publishing standards at sony and namco or some japanese thing but from soft really goes out of their way to not show children the emerald herald in dark souls 2 was supposed to have an appearance as a child before that game was rewritten gascoin's daughter is never seen mergo is never seen and ocelot in dark souls 3 is never seen we're now on the bridge leading to gas coin and it has the distinct honor of housing the mandatory from software rolling boulder trap which is actually doubling as the from software fire on a bridge strap which used to use dragons briefly going back to discussing the map layout as is bloodborne is i think best likened to the map structure of kingsfield 3 or shadow tower one with with the sequence shiftable semi-free roaming areas choked off with narrative bottlenecks which lead to the next of these sorts of areas but unlike kingsville 3 and shadow tower one once you begin to look at bloodborne closely you really start noticing that the progression through the world was messed around with after the world design was mostly finalized data mining has shown us that in one build the game began in hemwick and it wouldn't surprise me if yoseph kiss clinic was originally designed as the end gauntlet of a path rather than the beginning seeing as there was a large part of the clinic which was cut once you know how the levels were cut up and glued back together in development it's really astonishing how well the world comes together here we'll be fighting gas coin in a bit and he is just about the strongest early boss opener fromsoft has ever given us so we really should talk about him the cleric beast has certain exploits which make that fight winnable by novices not just the molotov cocktails either some lucky dashing and careful aiming of your gun is enough to render that fight into a breeze but gascoigne is a real choke point you're not getting past him without having grasped the fundamentals of the game the tombstones strong around the area punish players who don't take their environment seriously gascoigne's hard-hitting shotgun punishes players who take their eyes away from their foes too quickly his heavy attacks punish greedy attackers and that he uses a trick weapon on top of everything else pushes players to adapt to the enemy rather than go in with a script as the great mike tyson put it everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face in the last part of the fight gascoigne transforms into an incredibly aggressive and mobile beast so this need to adapt your strategies to him is underlined once more but if you approach this fight with a cool mind you'll see that the scales are actually tipped in your favor his shotgun freezes him in a vulnerable animation the tombstones might make maneuvering a problem but that goes both ways his attacks are very variable in the music box we got from his daughter if the player figured to fetch it can be played to stun him and if all of these advantages aren't enough the arena has stairs leading to urden chapel and a broken railing which gives you a little loop back to the fighter so if at any point you need to recover you can run away from gas coin and do just that there's also to consider the narrative ramifications of this fight as this is the first time we see what eileen talked about with blood drunk hunters this fight guarantees that the players understands that idea whether or not they met eileen i'll be breaking continuity up a bit to quickly wrap up their daughter's questline now the red jeweled bruce located in this area was dropped by gascoigne's wife viola which he killed and if we crack it open we get the red blood gem which boosts rallying potential judging by viola's fate that rally boost wasn't enough and this bruce is better spent advancing their daughter's questline if we return to grasscoin's daughter and gift to her the bruce she'll cry and eventually leave her house only to be eaten by the gigantic pig in the sewers as is made evident by the pig dropping the red messenger's ribbon this quest is very strange to me because it seems like it should go into more directions than it does i know we can talk to guest coins older daughter after this part but i'm talking about things like we can't kill the pig before talking to the little girl doing so will do nothing to shield her from death but going back to what i said about fromsoft being very hesitant to show children in their games it might just be that having her die off screen was preferable to having her die on screen later in the game's story we're back on the proper path after defeating gascoigne we'll be able to go to cathedral ward i'm going to be finishing every quest in the game to come with the exception of the earthen chapel dwellers because i don't have a lot to say about characters who just sit around while the world around them goes insane this note hints at rom in birgenworth which players won't see for a few more hours i find these notes scattered around the world very interesting because most players won't read all of them and most players won't even retain the information they contain so many hours after once they finally become relevant that being said the same can be said for the item descriptions which players get lore from and these notes being scattered around are very easy to access so i think more players wind up reading them then do the item descriptions bloodborne leans more on being a mystery than the souls games ever did and it's not only a mystery for the player character but the player as well if you go hard enough into the role playing you can figure out what's going on in the world on your first playthrough but the success of lore channel says to me that most players don't i like these notes because they are more accessible while going through the world than stopping and reading the description of every item you pick up and i also remember when i first replayed the game and the notes finally made sense to me those were very rewarding video game moments very sorry the incense must have masked your scent we're in the urden chapel now which is an interesting place i noted already how structure-wise this could have been bloodborne's firelink shrine seeing as it's in the middle of every other path in yharnam but that's not the extent to which this location is interesting to me the hunter's dream is bloodborne's version of demon souls is nexus a completely safe area which exists to give players a reprieve from the difficult levels and where they interact with characters except oops you can't send the npcs you save to the hunter's dream you send them here or to yosefka's clinic that seems like a vestigial element from another build of the game to me because as is players will have no mandatory reasons to return to this area after they've killed vic or amelia and the quests here don't really get interesting until even later than that so the npc stories are going to have less impact than they did in dark souls where firelink shrine was not only a gathering place for the npcs but was a place you constantly came back to it feels to me like bloodborne tried to have the best of both the nexus and firelink shrine but it's fumbling things up a bit and adapting them to this game if we were to consider urton chapel to have been a more central hub of the game then all of a sudden it makes a lot of sense that we're sending characters there like we're currently doing with the old lady because we constantly come back to meet them and see how their stories play out while we were away but because the hunter's dream is the real hub of the game for most players i imagine that the urden chapel stories unfortunately take a backseat and get overshadowed by the dynamic ones we find in the game world actually the main game has one significant reason to return to the cathedral ward lantern in urdun chapel and that reason is also used to make the player want to return to yosefkiss clinic whose quest line we're currently advancing and that is the third umbilical cords we pick up in the end of the game if they are yet human we know from data mining that before the game's currency was changed from actual physical blood into the more nebulous idea of blood echoes that the game used to have npc merchants in the world so it's possible that those were at some point located near the cathedral ward lantern which might have given the player another gameplay reason to go there it seems like the perfect storm may have arrived to undermine earthen chapel as a significant help now i'm not telling anyone how to do their job i am fully aware of how lucky we are that the game turned out to be as good as it was but maybe if urton chapel was to be beefed up a bit maybe if the chalice dungeons were accessed here rather than in the hunter's dream or if the npcs here were less jerks and more helpful players would have a reason to stop by more often from data mining and reading all interviews we know that the chalice dungeons currently are very different to how they were supposed to be so this suggestion might have been considered and i also know that the impulse to make every character you meet be rude is very strong so these changes might not have been feasible even under the best of development circumstances i'm currently programming a video game and after getting myself more involved with the nitty-gritty of game design i have a much more profound appreciation of developers ability to scale back and adjust to reality rather than just executing high concept stuff the bloodborne we got might not be half the game it was meant to be but it's still bloodborne which means it's probably twice as good as most other games are enemies get a level up past the cathedral ward lantern which progression wise makes a certain amount of sense the enemies in cathedral ward will be fought more than once since we'll come back to this area later but we've also proven at this point that we're capable enough at the game for the added challenge to be merited i said as much when we fought gascoigne that fight made sure that players had a good grasp of the fundamentals enemy moveset wise souls games pre-sekiro didn't really get more complicated as they went on some of the early enemies in dark souls have a more complicated movement set than the black knights at the kiln who closed that game's experience out and likewise the bar set by the skirts beast in yosefka's clinic at the start won't really be raised as we proceed at least not in a progressive manner from cathedral ward and up until we've killed the blood-starved beast the complexity of the enemies isn't dialed up but the abundance of tougher enemies has increased and enemies are given boosts to their health and damage outputs and this principle of increasing numbers rather than making the game play more complexly will be maintained right up until the menses ritual is complete at which point things go crazy in the best way but more on difficulty scaling in a bit alfred here is an executioner whose purpose in the world was to destroy the vile bloods in cainhurst right up until a few weeks before release the executioners were called the choir but this got shuffled around and has led to a bit of lore confusions in the current build these guys are an army of the healing church that summon objectives are attached to in-game functions is very cool because you might summon a player to help you only for them to be a member of an enemy faction which will change your objective to killing the other player i really like this because it makes your covenant have a significance without locking you out of any of the typical online play so just because you joined one covenant doesn't exclude you from playing the game like a normal person admittedly there is something lost in having faction objectives not be localized like summoning executioners to help you tackle cainhurst or invading players as a vileblood within cainhurst defend analyse but considering how few online covenants we have the setup we have might have been the best one suited for the game alfred is a deliberate play on gamer's affinity for dark souls's lair design notes specifically mentioning to make him like solaire and he is voiced by solaire's voice actor daniel flynn like solaire was alfred is on a mission to find his own son no wait he's trying to find a path to cainhurst castle yeah to destroy queen annelise so that his master logarius can be canonized as a saint and just like eileen alfred gives us a wonderful item in the fire papers which we'll make liberal use of in slaying the blood starved beast for that reason alone it really is a good idea to talk to alfred but i find myself drawn to meeting him early on in my playthroughs having more to do with that after we've talked to him once already once killed he'll drop the wheel hunter badge which enables players to buy the logarius wheel which is one of my favorite weapons in the game for the sake of completing his quest i won't be showing that though before we got to alfred i was talking about how the progression of difficulty in these games is less about mastery of mechanics and movesets and more about accommodating ever growing enemy health and damage numbers i should have noted though that in addition to the nightmare of menses stuff that the hunter's nightmare also features more complex enemies the topic of enemy complexity is interesting i think because bloodborne might be the endpoint of this sort of game complexity-wise our hutter doesn't really unlock any extra move sets for the same weapon so they are utilizing these same fundamentals all throughout but in the late game when enemy movesets get a bit crazier we find that the changes they bring to the combat more or less boil down to the player having to wait longer before dealing damage and being hit harder when damage is dealt to them sakura which i know is not universally beloved amongst souls fans like bloodborne is i think was a step in the right direction in this regard in that game you had agency over which moves your guy unlocked and when he did and you could pursue optional fights for upgrade points which gave you more chances one reason i think many people were turned off by sakiro was that game's extreme entry level sakura's combat blew every other miyazaki game out of the water depth wise and although that core might have been more than some players wanted to handle as it might have resulted in some unpleasant early hours and because it seems to deliberately punish players who rely on souls reflexes that game's extensive core wasn't necessary to allow the late game the freedom to get more expensive since it needed to not be locked behind specific upgrade paths the reason why sekiro's early game could not have been paced better to allow players to grow into the more complex combat was that the late game was built on top of the beginning since the upgrades in sekiro are mostly optional it kinda comes with the territory that the game can be completed without them and for sakiro to enable the complex late game without excluding any build it needs to be beatable without any optional upgrades which means everything in the late game must tie back to the core in the early game and since sakiro's late game combat is so much more complex than any other miyazaki games is the early game complexity is scaled up with it and this is relevant to our look at bloodborne bloodborne has a much simpler core than sekiro but because it does the late game has fewer dimensions to spread out into without forcing upgrades on the player's moveset in sakiro enemies start to vary not just in strength but in kinds late game enemies in bloodborne do this as well but i think sakiro's enemies had a much better transition because what enemies can do in combat is not as restrictive as it is in bloodborne while bloodborne has enough creative steam to make later encounters interesting i do think it is very noticeable that it's confined by the need to contend with accommodating a smaller range of viable enemy movesets and the need that the ever-growing amount of weapons all remain viable which puts even further constraints on what sort of enemy movesets can be made i only ever noticed this in retrospect though and even then i think bloodborne goes as far as it can and i'm actually kind of happy that it isn't much longer since i think the hunter's nightmare shows some definite telltale signs of reaching the end of what is palatable difficulty bloodborne takes its combat to a logical conclusion and had the good sense to not test its luck by being longer and that's a very beautiful thing because this did not need to be the case look to dark souls 3's ringgit city to see what happens when numbers are scaled too high the excessive difficulty sliding induced most players to run their way through that dlc and miss a lot of what they were clearly expected to engage with now that we're in old yharnam it might behoove us to talk a bit about it first of all it has maybe the best use of shadows of any area in the main game due to lighting changes many of the shadows in bloodborne tend to come out muted but here the transition is relatively alright because the enemies manage to blend in a bit with the environment level design wise i think old yharnam really embodies that the best levels in this game integrate the environments into the challenge directly so here we have a setup where we need to keep the camera somewhat focused on a distant ranged enemy while being assaulted by beasts which often hide in smoke the gunfire assaulting us is coming from a veteran hunter named jura who along with his allies has taken up the thankless job of protecting old yharnam from the prying eyes of those that would do the inhabiting beasts any harm old yharnam was the beginning of the healing church's downfall most of the enemies we fight here are designated as beast patients and can be seen wearing bandages and drop blood vials anti-totes and most peculiarly beast blood pellets beast blood pellets are one of these playthroughs go through items and their description reads large medicinal pellets supposedly formed of coagulated beast blood banned by the healing church due to their unclear origin grants a spurt of beasthood ripping apart the flesh of one's enemies and being rained upon by their splattering blood invigorates one's sense of beasthood feeding strength and euphoric feeling alike this references the effect of blood drunkenness and it's interesting that these things were banned by the healing church considering they are the ones who gave them to the populace and are still doing so in the forbidden woods these things are wild yharnam went to hell and after it became impossible for the healing church to continue halting the spread of beast hood in the region they went scored stirth literally burning all jarnam to the ground and finally earning themselves the ire of the yharnam populace they still manage to exercise great power in the city though since they're more of a cultist mob than an organized political spiritual body for this fight i'm utilizing a tactic as all this time which is to try and funnel the enemies into a meat grinder but i'm having a hard time because my weapon does not do enough damage to manage the flow of enemies so my stamina is being overtaxed since bloodborne dropped the shields and armor classes the role of stamina has shifted significantly it used to be mainly a means of minimizing damage you'd raise your shield to eat the attack and it'd drop your stamina instead of your health and the juggling act used to be in knowing when to block an attack and when to try to roll away from it to reserve enough stamina to feed your counter-attacks which were your rewards for playing the avoiding game right since the shields are gone stamina is exclusively used for attacks and dashes and the juggling act this time around is calculating whether you have enough stamina to dash your way around the flurry of attacks coming your way or whether you want to eat some of those blows knowing that the rally mechanic will minimize or even outright eliminate the damage done to you it might be useful to think of the alteration to stamina this way in souls stamina was mainly how you avoided damage in bloodborne stamina is mainly how you pursue damage and this is a very significant change player-wise considering how inconsequential it might seem on paper this translation for mainly facilitating avoiding enemies to pursuing them is one of bloodborne's biggest success stories and it's because this worked that the game manages to be more aggressive than sulz was i'm going to have a good time working my way through the skirts beasts in this area because my weapon of choice has specific qualities that lock them from starting an attack animation proper i'm able with a sauce beer to hit the skirts beasts as often as i want in full knowledge that each one of my hits will reset their recovery animation and since they have no invincibility frames while recovering the confrontation basically boils down to whether i'm able to avoid damage for long enough to recover the stamina i need to lock the enemies up again and since their attacks take longer than mine so long as i'm more aggressive than them i should come out ahead the property of my saucepier which facilitates this is that it deals serrated damage and sidenote the reason i swapped out the saw cleaver for the saw spear is that the saw spear deals serrated damage in both forms serrated damage is especially good against beasts weapon types is one of those unelaborated on mechanics of bloodborne which the community needed to experiment their way around to get and if you haven't gotten into the community's findings it's possible that this is the first time you're even hearing about weapon type mechanics the types are serrated and righteous the rule of thumb is that if an enemy has fur it's probably weak to serrated and if it connects to cainhurst it's probably weak to righteous exceptions exceptions and the way to tell if your weapon has rated or righteous qualities is to see whether it has saw teeth or not and whether it has a history of fighting the enemies of the church again exceptions here and there i won't bore you by listing the weapons here i just wanted to have this weapon type talk out of the way before i took care of the blood starved beast because this fight is a good example of rewarding expectations the blood starved beast is weaker to serrated weapons and is weak to fire and it has a poison stat so players might want to have some antidote on hand which is dropped in abundance in all yharnam finally like most beasts the bloodstarved beast can be made to follow pungent blood cocktails if you throw those out my strategy will be to cover the boss in oil by throwing oil urns at it which will roughly double the damage fire attacks do to it and then i'll be going to town on it with a saw spear on which i've applied fire paper to i've also bitten down on a beast blood pellet the way those work in lore is that they bring you closer to beast hood which makes you stronger in game this is a damage boost for and against us as we deal more damage to enemies in rapid succession we fuel a beast hood meter which signifies the multiplier of the next attack the damage amplifier against us is also calculated by the game looking at the beast with meter so the best way to describe these palettes might be to say that they enable high risk high reward plays funnily enough they work a lot like the rally mechanic in that they make players play more desperately the blood starved beast is a great fight if you want to get a bit experimental with the game but it's ultimately not that difficult even though i did die to it once because the controller misread my dash direction like you saw those sorts of technical fumbles are always annoying but i'm good enough that they'll only show up a few more times in this video when i die some more our next heading will be to reach the entrance to upper cathedral ward to pick up the radiant sword hunter's badge which will let us purchase ludwig's holy blade this area is ripe with enemies hiding in shadows so i want to talk a bit about enemies enemy placement generally seems more concerned with challenging the player rather than making sense not that enemies feel out of place where they are although one wonders whose genius idea it was to have a wheelchair-bound citizen man a tower accessed with steps and ladders but but rather that consistency at times is sacrificed to deliver on the exhilarating gameplay one reason this might be is because many of the enemies don't have a really solid origin because the story they were supposed to appear in was cut from the final version of the game and they had to be repurposed if we're solely going by the placement in terms of challenge provided bloodborne is perhaps the best outing fromsoft ever delivered for the most part they've managed to call the generally unfavored tactics out of a bunch such as enemies seeming to have endless stamina or not caring about being hit and there are some new behaviors enemies display here which makes interacting with them interesting i've already noted that they go on patrols but they also have attacks which aren't really meant to hurt the player but rather interrupt us mid-swing to leave us vulnerable this is hitting the hunter with a torch and this is the huntsman's minion pushing us considering bloodborne's emphasis on speed these tactics make a lot of sense since they penalize unattentive players and makes recovering health and managing groups more difficult we're gonna go fetch some things in the abandoned old workshop now and i swear if miyazaki had an unlimited budget he'd just make a game where players precariously fall down differently elevated beams over a dark chasm the hunter's workshop was constructed by gurman long ago and after the healing church's experimentations with old blood began spawning more beasts than could be handled the operation of the hunter's workshop was massively expanded upon as somebody needed to put these things down and german was their man he standardized the practice of beast hunting and those who followed were largely inspired by him trick weapons guns nimble dashing all of this was his work he didn't create this stuff independently though as we can see in the chalice dungeons that the thumerians of old had already created trick weapons but that's sort of a running theme in the game anyways that what is happening in yharnam has happened before and not only that but that individual microcosms are returning with the yharnam human enemies often reverting to archetypes which we can see in the chalice dungeons as well the workshop was assumably german's base of operation and it's notable that the stairs which would have been the entrance to it have been destroyed we can find three significant items in this area which are the dolls get up that is her outfit and a small hair ornament the doll's outfit isn't a standout stacked wise but it's incredibly valuable platakos wise this early on in the game so it can be seen as the developer's way of refunding the blood echoes the players undoubtedly lost dying numerous times trying to fall to the abandoned old workshop on their first attempt at the game the ornament can be given to the doll in the dream to have her cry a health regenerating blood gem another important finding here is the old hunter's bone which we can assume to have belonged to maria as it is buried in the grave where we warped to the hunter's nightmare that's an interesting item because originally the bone didn't belong to maria it belonged to an unnamed nebulous apprentice of germans whom we assume built the doll which is why the doll tends the grave where we found the bone in current continuity the doll is being drawn to the grave because it's linked to the nightmare where maria is located and or because in the waking world it's where maria is buried so it still makes sense but i thought i'd just throw this out there anyway what's happening the final item of note which can be looted from the abandoned old workshop is the third umbilical cord and man-o-man is their lore attached to that thing the story goes that the chord originates from a stillborn infant great one which lawrence used to back in the moon presence to have the hunter's dream be created this was so that the hunters would have a true safe haven from the beasts so that they could more effectively work to keep them at bay the moon presence agreed to construct the dream but held german hostage until lawrence could return with a viable infant great one that was many years ago and since this happened lawrence has unbeknownst to german passed away leaving german to linger in the dream unable to escape the influence the moon presence exerts on him this third chord was extracted from the child of anneliese queen of the vileblots which i'll get more into once we reach knurst right now the story of the hunters takes center stage so after some time of beast hunting it became obvious that the tactics of the church needed updating since the beasts had gotten bigger and since garmin had disappeared this was where ludwig came in the weapons associated with him are things like the kirkhammer and my new sword lutvik's holy blade and notably these weapons all are standardly used by the church and are much bigger than what the hunters under german used sock leavers and rakios might be fine against your standard beasts but once they get large you really want something big to attack them with i'll be making a conscious effort in the rest of the playthrough to continue experimenting with items and i think that's noteworthy because lutwick's holy blade unfortunately can easily turn the game into one where you just browbeat everything in your way as its two-handed variant is an optimal tool for most of the game funnily enough though once it becomes my main weapon i'll actually be making a downgrade because unless you really want to argue tiny details the saw spear is arguably the best weapon in the game it has excellent gem slots its damage is respectable its move set is incredibly versatile and it does not lock players from using their left-handed weapon once it's been transformed it places no limitations on weapon buffing like a certain arcane moon sword the community seems to love and it's also perfect for one-on-ones and groups the reason i'll be making the shift has to do with wanting to illustrate some points with the build long time followers of the channel will remember that from time to time i've elaborated on a very very niche thing i like in games and that is when they provide an experience outside of our in opposition to their wheelhouse that is to say silent hill plays very claustrophobic so i really like it when those games go into open spaces as the claustrophobia is maintained with the tank controls and fog another example i frequently point to of this phenomena is when souls games do platforming which is probably best exemplified in this game by the area connecting this place to the abandoned old workshop and another example of bloodborne going against the grain with its challenges is seen in this little alleyway area and that is that bloodborne plays best in the open spaces and this area is pretty cramped the move sets in these games are incredibly archaic if you run into a wall the hunter will run into a wall and not stop even though it goes against every law of physics the game makes little effort to limit your freedom of movement for the sake of realism or immersion and in that sense bloodborne is very primitive but here's something the less a game concerns itself with realism the less players mind when expectations of realism are broken because they never really developed those anyway and the souls games have always managed to elegantly walk the tightrope of silliness and grit i like the platforming in these games not in spite of their primitive movement schemes but because of them and i like the relatively tight level design in this area for the same reason no part of the movement was developed to make for good maneuvering and tight alleyways and so when the game presents you with that level layout the challenge can become more interesting because we're being asked to rethink movement asked to consider how to overcome the lack of dedicated mechanics to solve the challenge at hand sadly bloodborne does not feature as many of these moments as dark souls 1 did but it still manages to have some of them crop up from time to time and make the three people in the world me included who enjoy when a game willingly grinds against its own core gameplay giddy we have now opened up the path back to the cathedral ward lantern which means i'm going to be completing the optional stuffing cathedral ward before fighting vicar emilia the most important thing is picking up our npcs and unlocking the entire area to get eileen's quest line to advance this will take a bit of time to complete so i think i should have the hp lovecraft talk here rather than delay it any further since i'm going deep into lovecraft spoilers here and since much has already been said about his stories and how they tied to bloodborne i won't hold it against you if you want to skip this section jump to this to hear our talk about the henrik part of eileen's quest now that those traitors are gone let's get into it first off my credentials as your guide to eldritch horrors i've read every story lovecraft ever wrote at least twice and i've also hunted down and read every one of the collaborations he did that i could find and as it relates to bloodborne the five most obviously important are the shadow of insmith at the mountains of madness the call of cthulhu but not necessarily for the reasons you think the color out of space and the dream quest of unknown kadath and actually with kadath you could probably lop in the rest of the randolph carter stories i'm a bit sad that i could not work out any connections to my favorite story of his the whisperer in darkness but as a consolation prize maybe the original intent with the chalice dungeons was that they acted a bit like the great race of yeth from the shadow out of time another one of lovecraft's best what with the seemingly non-paradox inducing time travel interestingly although bloodborne borrows a lot of ideas from lovecraft there's not a single outright mention of any of his works cthulhu and the gang are all public domain but fromsoft opted to create their own mythos and i think the game is richer for it it means fewer preconceived notions of where the story is allowed to go uh i don't think people would be very happy if we could kill nyarlahotep or yogg-sathoth with a boomhammer it also means that the fundamentals underpinning cosmic horror needn't really apply to bloodborne to the few humans still uninitiated lovecraft's work deals with the insignificance of humanity in the face of grander beings whose existence makes us look like mere amoeba our survival in the face of their existence is not out to our adaptability resourcefulness or will or anything like that but because they just haven't wiped us out yet even though they easily could we still exist because they don't care they are so far beyond us that they might not even care to separate us from the house flies we look down at in the face of all of this all of humanity is small and insignificant and all those who come into contact with the altar rich truth go mad lovecraft's protagonists are usually unreliable narrators as they are detailing events which cost them great psychological trauma and their retellings aren't meant to rouse people into proactive collective action but rather serve as warnings that it would be better for humanity to continue its ignorant insignificant existence than to go to the places where dead gods may still dream bloodborne twists this central pillar of cosmic horror because here interacting with the great ones is what the characters want they make deals with the game's great ones and hope to one day have the shackles of humanity removed hoped to elevate their beings so that they themselves may become great ones the humans in bloodborne seek the elder its truth rather than turn their gaze away from it like in lovecraft's writings that's the core difference between the two but the writings of lovecraft are still the base on which much of bloodborne was built we see that the chalice dungeons drawn lovecraft what with them housing sleeping gods looked after by a slave race they created kind of like how in the call of cthulhu cthulhu lies dead dreaming and how in the mountains of madness the ancient ruins of a long gone civilization houses the still-living slaveries created by greater beings though the thummerians never went genocidal on the great ones uh well actually they they kinda did in the sense that humans are sumerians and went on a hunt for them though admittedly we don't know if all humans in this universe are the descendants of sumerians um more on this later we see that these statues around yharnam never quite capture the likenesses of the amygdalas or great ones kinda like how in the call of cthulhu once cthulhu awoke the artists of the world began creating works unconsciously inspired by him we see in some promotional material talks of a yharnam look an obvious reference to the insmith look from the shadow over insmith which described the fist-like appearance of the residents of innsmouth which was cast by them being hybrid offsprings of humans and the sea dwelling deep ones the arnhem look isn't described as large unblinking eyes flat noses white mouths hair loss and graying skin but rather as yharnamites being asymmetrical as you can see in their limbs and faces and them being hairy and it's not because they are the descendants of fish but because their exposure to old blood is reawakening their temerian heritage and inducing beast hood tumerians are also seen to be very asymmetrical the beasts are all very hairy also just like the residents of insmuth gyanomites are very suspicious of outsiders and just like the protagonist in that book we can hear if we bother checking the doors a lot of guttural screams all throughout the town but if there is one story with bloodborne leans on more than any other it is the dream quest of unknown kidath so lovecraft's writing has been categorized into three phases first was his early horror writing then the cthulhu mathos and finally his dream cycle his earliest stories were macabre but not as out there as the later ones god the cthulhu mythos saw the establishment of cosmism and then the dream cycle saw lovecraft sort of conquered the cosmicism man is nothing to the elder gods sure but in the dreamlands they can meet and negotiate with one another and the cool thing which i've never seen anyone talk about is that this game's plot unfurls exactly like the literary career of hp lovecraft the beginning is all about the gothic horror then we get to bergenworth and things get cars and unknowable but once we enter the nightmare of menses we literally will be able to trade blows with great ones and that's lovecraft talk for now because we're gonna go find henrik and then enter the next stage of the game i said i wasn't going to do every npc quest in the game and i meant that but i still decided to get every npc i could to urden chapel so that when the time comes i can illustrate some things eileen's quest will require me to go back to where we fought gas coin and kill his now blood drunk old partner henrik is a much tougher fight than guest coin was but not because of his own innate strength or anything like that but rather because eileen joins the fight shortly after it begins and half of the battle is trying to chip away at henrik while leaving eileen unharmed if she dies here then her quest line is over and since i really wanted her oath rune i needed to allow myself to die a few more times than i might have wanted totally intentional this was the most clutch moment of gameplay in the entire recording because this was the moment i needed to get or else i had to restart everything thankfully i did enough pre-recordings and test runs that i'm able to get henrik down i don't do it exclusively for the material rewards from eileen though once henrik is dead i can purchase his outfit from the inside messengers in the hunter's dream and since i'll be going up against dark beast paul soon that outfit is a smart investment considering it has very good vault protection wearing it will trigger some yharnam villagers to yell death to the minister the lore explanation for this is that henrik was the hunting partner of gascoigne who is the minister in question i already said that i'd really like it if more of the game responded to the getups and items you used even if it was just changing up the small stuff like that so it should fall on me to acknowledge when the game does this because the vicar amelia fight is up there are things i need to talk about because near the end we'll be diving into a significant piece of cut content which i need to set up in this area first of all there's an often missed message near the entrance to the boss arena which tells players to inscribe lawrence's adage upon their flesh this is flowery language for touching his skull at the altar which will reveal the bergenworth adage which stubbles as the password to the forbidden woods leading to birkenworth lawrence's skull at the altar is clearly that of a beast and with amelia's incoming transformation the fate of the helling church is just about sealed as it will be without any vikkar though they managed to linger after losing lauren so maybe i'm underselling their capabilities regardless the menses ritual will probably get them amelia is the final main game beast boss so after defeating her is when i'll be making the main weapon drop the same tactics that worked for the cleric beast gascoigne and the blood starved beast work to make this boss into a breeze that's oil learns to increase the damage she takes from fire fire papers fire gem equipped weapons and molotov cocktails to deal set fire damage and if you want to risk it these blood pellets for some damage increases and of course serrated weapons another strategy i'm employing is to use the art of quickening which i got from the old hunter's bone this changes my rolling and dashing animation into smoky teleports and also increases the speed at which i can do this activating the old hunter's bone costs four quicksilver bullets and the effect lasts for 16 seconds since we can gain 5 bullets by using the blood bullet mechanic provided players can recover the help they paid for it the old hunter's bone can be almost free to use it's kind of a shame that its effect is only active for 16 seconds though because i can imagine this being a much more used item if it lasted longer a bloodborne design motif which is repeated with vicar amelia is wrappings covering ice we saw this design in gascoigne and we'll see it more still this connects to the idea of inside long ago master willem who also has eye coverings concluded that beast hood represented not a failure of the scientific part of inducing human evolution but of the spiritual one that without proper wisdom the old blood would ruin humanity that humans were becoming beasts literally because their minds could not operate on grand enough thought to warrant grander designs and so the blindfolds came the idea was to close off all external visual stimuli so that eyes may begin to grow on the inside in other words they would focus their mental energy within and in doing so could elevate their thoughts could gain insight and judging by the characters we've seen thus far wearing these things there seems to be a lot of truth to this gas coin and amelia both transformed into beasts in front of us sure but they were able to ward off the transformation for some time and the game goes out of its way to show that gascoigne actually manages to be pulled back briefly when the music box is played which reminds him of his family it's not enough to cure him but it shows that there's hope to fight back the beast likewise amelia was clutching a pendant when we came in and she was reciting a prayer and it's possible that her faith was able to hold back the transformation in an interview miyazaki explained that one of the core themes of the game is the inner clash within beast enemies in his words the urge to transform into a beast is in conflict with the basic sense of humanity we all have that humanity serves as a kind of shackle keeping the transformation in its place the stronger the shackle keeping that urge to transform in places the larger the recoil once that shackle is finally broken the results cause you to transform into a larger creature or a more twisted one the struggle between these two arches is one concept here you see that pretty clearly with the beast characters designed early on especially the cleric beast which serves as their icon of swords that connects with the idea that the cleric is really the most fearsome beast of them all the longer one pushes back the transformation the bigger the blowback becomes but here's the thing lawrence may not have been all wrong to embrace the old blood old blood makes bodies malleable so if transcendence must have a physical aspect then old blood might be the best tool which humans have if the trajectory of transformation could be realigned from beasts that is and we see in many instances of the game that certain characters attempt just that and willem is then probably on the right path when he talks about ice on the inside when he talks about inside when vicar amelia dies the world state changes tonight different levels are loaded with some enemies getting buffs and some enemies being put into a sleeping idle animation which they wake up from once confronted by the player in the late game the illusion of a cohesive world is somewhat undermined what with areas like bergenworth and old yharnam not getting a red moon and this is because the changes to the world are not variables which can be flipped on in every level it used to be like that as i briefly talked about earlier but late into development this feature was scrapped and we got the more caveman approach to changing of the world we have now that is instead of having one cathedral ward level which can look inside of the game's code and see where in the story the player is and adjust itself accordingly so like if the player has just killed emilia activate this skype box this lighting script these enemies get these functions activated etc instead of doing that the game just loads an altogether new level which looks like cathedral ward in night time early adopters of the game will remember it having some pretty infuriating load times and it's possible that these more flexible levels were dumbed down for the caveman approach we have now because they simply had too many variables to check for them to load in proper time the entire world map seems seamless but it actually dumps the areas you aren't in out of the memory the moment it's able to and if you could get an unpatched version of the game running it is possible to run fast enough through the levels that the game is unable to fully render the graphics leaving players standing on invisible collision boxes the solution to this then would either be segmenting the entire world off with loading screens or reducing the amount of stuff the game needed to do to render each level that second option was taken and i think we're all the pourer for it because it seems to not only have robbed us of some really interesting stories but we also lost the greater potential of the inside mechanic miyazaki's exposure to lovecraft seems to not have predominantly been the stories but rather the tabletop rpgs and bloodborne's deviations from lovecraft which we talked about earlier might just have to do with this the call of cthulhu is the most well known of lovecraft's stories which is strange because it's not really as strong as his best stuff but what it has is a good utility of many of his conventions and so when nerds in the 1980s wanted to make role-playing games out of his stories this one made the most sense cults elder gods creeping madness an unraveling mystery it's all here and if one didn't know better one might think the story was based on a playthrough of an rpg module rather than the other way around call of cthulhu is especially important for our medium because it was that book which game designers looked to when they were systemizing lovecraft and many of the systems they built for the original call of cthulhu rpg are actually in bloodborne kinda your traditional tabletop rpg will have the player's stats represented with numbers and will use dice to guarantee randomness in the player's interaction with the system as the player's stats go up or as they apply appropriate stats for tasks the chance of failure decreases usually there are some mechanics to reward role playing like special bonus cards given to players who do things which are varying character for their pc to do and contrary to video games the fun of tabletop usually doesn't come from the combat or from engaging with the system the game runs on but rather from the role playing that is facilitated by them it's harder for video games to accomplish this since technology is still a bit too primitive to function as a dungeon master which can adapt to the players fiddling around with the game world call of cthulhu was a bit different from your stock standard rpg even though it had stuff like stats and dice what made call of cthulhu different was that it was based on percentile dice so a player's stat would range from 1 to 100 and once they performed an action the stat associated with the actions so like making a sandwich would probably be a cooking stat for example that stat would be checked against the die if your cooking stat was 50 then you'd need to get 50 or lower on the die to succeed stats can increase with play and as they get higher the odds that the player rolls a dice and gets a lower number gets higher as well voila that's how they simulated probability but running alongside those stats was a sanity counter which would decrease as the player encountered the game's horrors because of that the games often ended with players going mad and being horribly butchered or going into asylums or something and that was the big difference between call of cthulhu and other rpgs call of cthulhu did not expect the player character to make it through in one piece and that's impressive if you ask me a very good adaptation of lovecraftian horror one which naturally produces plot progressions reminiscent of lovecraft's writings and the way narrative worked in those games was with onion skins that is interlocking layers of information are used to keep the players nested in a certain point in the narrative and as the player solves the clues left for them in the world or advances some quest lines those layers unlock this way a missing person's case can escalate into the player entering deep cyclopean labyrinths under brooklyn where an apocalyptic cult has their rituals what does this have to do with the changes made to the world of bloodborne a lot because bloodborne originally worked a lot like this instead of exclusively unlocking more areas they would also unlock more of the same areas and would see the world as it really was now functionally this is still sort of the case but since the levels aren't as adaptable to players as they would have been in the pre-caveman setup the effect of this is minimized bloodborne's inside mechanic is internally in notes referred to as son persanity but it's not as impressive in terms of delivering lovecraftian narratives as the sanity mechanic in the call of cthulhu role-playing games was but to be fair that's not exactly its purpose in the current build of the game there are some things locked behind the player having enough insight but it's very inconsequential stuff in the grand scheme of things i said earlier that the inside mechanic was an adaptation of the humanity mechanic from dark souls and i mean if you look at the code it's just it is the humanity mechanic but it was supposed to be more reminiscent of the world tendency mechanic from demon souls where more inside more knowledge of the elder rich truths would unlock more of the game whilst also rendering the player more vulnerable to cosmic horrors in older builds we've found evidence that certain enemies were at some point supposed to spawn into levels if the player had reached a certain insight threshold but as is inside is mostly a stat we have to check frenzy resistance against and a stat which enables us to play online if you don't care about online then there's no real downside to using insight to buy things in the hunter's dream as long as you have one insight you're good and out of every change bloodborne had internally this one and the moon cycle one seem like easily the most consequential insight is still granted to the player passively as they witness things relating to the elder it's truth that is first encountering bosses defeating bosses seeing certain areas and using madman's knowledge but it has practically no serious ramifications with the exception of being able to access the doll for level ups speculation is a bit outside the wheelhouse of these sorts of videos but humor me for a moment imagine a bloodborne whose narrative is propelled forwards not by random doors being openable but by your continually running around town to investigate a mystery which gives you more insight and gradually reveals more of the horrors a gameplay loop which goes explore discover horror find that the horror has granted you more insight and that there are now new avenues to explore leading to more horrors leading to more insight repeat i don't think bloodborne's current narrative is by any means weak but purely in terms of the systems which prop it up it isn't any more impressive than what fromsoft had delivered this far demon's souls locked progress behind bosses you grew as you fought enemies dark souls locked progress behind bosses and you grew as you fought enemies bloodborne could have done something different here because progress could have been more dependent on some actual role-playing with players being rewarded for curiosity but as is areas are locked behind bosses and yeah growers here to feed enemies it all works it's all polished but much like how bloodborne sort of reached the breaking point of this sort of combat which meant sakura needed to strike at it from a different angle i think bloodborne pushes this narrative progression to a logical conclusion as well not complaining about what we got i'm just really curious as to what could have been okay so a lot just happened while i was talking first the snatcher killed me and took me to yahar ghoul the snatchers are acting on behalf of menses kidnapping yharnamites taffy through their ritual in yahar ghoul i talked to adela which i was able to do by donning apparel connected with the church and we also saw my favorite note in the game the one which goes behold a pale blood sky i've also used this area to demonstrate ludwig's holy blade a bit i noted earlier that the two-handed variant of it is powerful enough to tackle most of the game and as you can see i wasn't kidding most enemies are stunned by any strike from it and so provided i can get one hidden i can usually take an enemy out without them being able to fight back this does come at the cost of not being able to parry so visceral attacks become locked behind breaking an enemy's damage threshold or successfully pulling off a backstab but since the weapon itself locks enemies up this isn't that big of a trade-off another great feature of lutvik's holy blade is that it offers almost unparalleled range if you ever come across a group of enemies this thing can tear through the lot of them with ease the weapon also etches the saw spear out in weapon type buffs since it gains a 50 increase to enemies weak to righteous weapons in both of its forms compared to the saw spears 20 damage increase to enemies weak to serrated weapons there are admittedly fewer enemies vulnerable to righteous damage than there are serrated damage but this is still very useful just because i think the saw spear is better overall i cannot stress that this is a very powerful weapon easily one of the game's best in addition to everything i've said thus far it has great arcane scaling every weapon in the game is locked behind certain stat requirements this forces players to dedicate their builds somewhat to their weapon of choice and as a reward for doing that weapons also have their damage scaled to certain stats usually the ones it was locked behind there is no arcane requirement for using ludwig's holy blade but since it has an a scaling with it when fully upgraded we get all of the arcane benefits without any of the costs admittedly this doesn't alter things all that much since this only begins to count when you slot elemental gems into it but free damage is never something to scoff at either additionally because of its big number damage output and its ability to stun lock most enemies it might be one of the best weapons in the game for rallying when rallying you recover hit points in proportion to the damage you deal out with some exceptions and the large range high damage and stun lock of ludwig's holy blade means that once you get one hit into an enemy or group the battle is yours until you run out of stamina parl is the first boss in the game which uses elemental damage against us so as i said earlier henrik's outfit to the rescue this boss seems to come out of nowhere considering players can just walk from the yahar ghoul lantern back to the hunter's dream a consideration which might have been made in case this fight was too hard but i'm happy it's here regardless for one it grants the spark hunters bats early on in case the player is interested in a build which utilizes both the papers like i am or the tinnitus another reason i like this boss's placement is because i feel this part of the game is sort of lacking in really meaty boss fights and parle i think is among the best in the game its crowd's body makes its head very accessible and the head always takes more damage than any other body part the saw spear has great range so i'm able to do a lot of consecutive damage on carl's head which means it's super armor goes down faster super armor is a function of enemies by which they momentarily get stunned once you've dealt enough damage to them my setup drains parl very quickly but parl can be a very difficult boss if you don't know what you're doing it's very nimble and able to dominate the fight arena with ease design wise paul is some of my favorite hitboxes in the game because it's so massive it has to crouch while fighting and its limbs and spine are very well located for challenging the player it's not as easy to hit this thing as you might want but patience is key paul's unorthodox physiology harkens back to the crouched giant skeletons in dark souls tomb of the giants and its attacks aren't all that dissimilar to those guys either except they're more refined paul was also pretty dynamic because its bolt damage could be turned off if you spend too long underneath it paul will ground itself and charge up an electric blast this is a fight or flight moment for players with some serious on-the-fly decision making to be done if you're confident in your speed and stamina reserves you might want to hit paul to break its charts and shut its bolt buff off but if you screw that up get prepared to be absorbed in its blast the later half of the fight has parallel obtaining ranged attacks as a moving wall of electricity is spawned where it strikes so it even manages to impart on the player serious considerations for their environment we've now opened up the door to old yharnam to talk to jira he's been de-akrot so we're able to obtain the powder keg's hunter batch without killing him jura's placement at the top of this tower actually makes it very easy to kill him since you can just shoot him until the knockback kicks him off the tower you'd need to reload the area for his drops to appear but there you go if fought properly jura is actually quite a tough enemy and he has the on paper strongest weapon in the game the stake driver fully charged the stake driver is able to deal more damage in a single blow than any other trick weapon the real challenge in fighting jira however is the blunderbuss e wheels the fight arena is fairly small so it's easy for him to stun you and hard for you to safely heal but since this is a pacifist run haha we confront jorah with our words not weapons though i assure you i would win if we bought jira is a powder kick the powder cacts were a faction of hunters who specialized in things which went boom their bats reads batch crafted by the powder cakes the heretics of the workshop the powder cac's adoration of complex design and big booms culminated in weapon designs that contrast with those traditionally of the workshop the late powder cacts bless themselves had a motto if a weapon ain't got kick it just ain't worth it i've made my bias towards big numbers apparent already so it should come as no surprise that i quite like these guys and the weapons which are associated with them there's no way to actually join them as a faction bloodborne sadly does not have as many joinable factions as it has factions in the world but the presence of factions still adds some flavor to the game take the executioners on our way from yharnam to the forbidden woods will stumble upon alfred who if prompted is all too eager to give us an admittedly biased lecture on the vileblots of cainhurst there will be time later to delve deeper into them but i want to address a complaint which i imagine some of you might have about this video thus far and that is my liberal talk of cut content the issue i imagine some of you might have is that talking about cut content is ignoring the continuity presented in the game that canon only refers to what is actually again in the game and i respect that view up to a certain point bloodborne went through many iterations and it's very clear that the team changed their minds as to what sort of game this was supposed to be as they were making it additionally in data mining often it is very difficult to know where one build ends and another one begins and much of what the bloodborne data mining community has discovered is stuff which was cut because fromsoft decided to go a different direction i've tried my hardest to separate what was cut for creative reasons from technological and time-restrained reasons thus far and will continue doing so going forwards but going forwards i am going to ask that those who don't already accept that the cut content still has significance um not only as novelty things to know about the game but also genuine significance in narrative canon the problem with dismissing all of it on the grounds that only what made it into the game is canon is that one if you care about the game on its own merit you should probably care about what the creative vision was if you ignore narrative significant content simply because it was cut you will be making it unnecessarily harder for yourself to connect the game's story and you'll be forced to fill in blanks which have very clear and concise answers and two what made it to retail wasn't the most important stuff but rather the easiest to assemble stuff now post dlc many of the threats which the calling process left bare have been fixed more or less but in the interest of a deep dive on this game cut content is still on the table if only because it warrants knowing about i will continue making a distinction from what i believe was cut for creative reasons and what i believe was cut for technological reasons and if you don't like what this does to the canon you don't need to accept all of it as fact i do for much of it and understand that that might make this video harder to digest but i don't see why i should ignore miyasaki's very blatant and obvious answers just because sce could not extend the team another two months of development time to iron out the kinks in certain areas the forbidden woods is the first deviation from the cityscape levels we've gotten so far on a hull bloodborne is way more urban than it may seem demon's souls warped the player to levels which were spread out all across an entire country dark souls managed to cram in an incredibly large array of biomes which helped the cramped world layout feel incredibly expansive and dark souls 2 tried to mix both approaches and simulate an entire continent bloodborne's is the most localized setting of the bunch and areas like the forbidden woods helped to break up what might otherwise have been an overload of gothic architecture i've always seen the paths out of yharnam as quiet time relative to the early game and late game we go from fighting for our lives in the city to being dropped into a nightmarish waking version of it so it's good that the middle game gives us access to the forbidden woods bergenworth hemwick cainhurst and the nightmare frontier that the game slows down somewhat to let us breathe interestingly though hemwick cainhurst and the nightmare frontier are completely optional areas and two of them are accessed in the forbidden woods to get to the nightmare frontier early on we need to acquire the tonsil stone from patches right here and to get to cainhurst we first need to access the inside of yosefka's clinic to fetch the cainhurst summons patches is interesting in this area because he will come to inhabit the first house we visit almost as a means of ensuring that players talk to him structure-wise the cainhurst summons have the effect of making the forbidden woods a bit clunky since we need to redo a portion of the level when we decide to go for bergenworth and we also need to finish hemwick first for cainhurst if this were a mandatory portion of the game i imagine there'd be more complaints about this setup but since it's optional it's fine and if we're considering the setup to optional content in other fromsoft games it's downright brilliant i don't think i need to remind people of the needlessly long chain of events needed to access dark souls 1's dlc if you compare gaining access to that dlc to getting access to cainhurst it's night and day and k-nurse comes across as so much more bearable in playing because you can actually map access in cainhurst to the natural progression of the game the underground area leading back to yharnam is a good example of how the core gameplay changes the expressive capabilities of the level designers level design is always informed by the gameplay so assessing quality on this front requires considering gameplay first a good level in one game might be disastrous if imported over to another and the underground area here is interesting to analyze considering the studio legacy predating this game this entire area is drenched in poison afflicting water with small islands where players are safe wandering through this area are giant sumerians which the healing church repurposed for the church giant enemies on the surface which means safety comes at the price of combat there are items strewn around the area to entice players to wander from the safe path and caves leading to dead ends should the player be reckless enough to wander into one of these caves the entrance will be sealed by an army of maggots who will hit stun the player and kill them this is not a new type of fromsoft area status ailment swamps or a miyazaki trademark but it's remarkably understated in the great scheme of things bloodborne does not use status ailments to direct the player's navigation as much as other fromsoft games even though it had multiple opportunities to do that the sewer in the beginning of the game could have been one such area as could the fishing hamlet without a lot of changes i noted already that traps on a hole lean more on combat than in previous games but actually when levels in this game have setups to shake up the gameplay on a whole they are more about combat than nebulous status ailments we're advancing the yosefka questline right now by meeting imposter yosefka i think she's a member of the choir come to perform experiments to master the art of ascendancy before the menses ritual is finished commencing so any npc players will have sent to this place up until now will unfortunately not be making it not that the npc they sent to odin chapel will have the best go of it either i went over this earlier but there seems to be a bit of a disconnect with the kinds of npc storylines we get in bloodborne compared to the means by which the world is laid out on a blind playthrough most players will never meet imposter yosefka let alone the real one and this has to do with the player constantly making progress through the world and the npcs largely being stationary dark souls npcs comparatively could show up in levels if you had triggered their quests earlier and that helped that game's world feel a bit more alive and demon souls as npcs they were stationary in the nexus but the nexus was an area you constantly came back to i'm not exactly sure why fromsoft opted to make most of the npcs stationary in bloodborne considering it really doesn't congeal with the way this game's mechanics tell its story but i can understand how they might have been constrained by the story that is being told when mad men and beast roam the streets the variety of persons who can realistically survive in the open is diminished but the same can be said for dark souls and i don't think anyone would really be upset if bloodborne had more hunters we could talk to as dark souls 1 had adventurers the lore change to blood echoes from being literal blood to being the sensation of blood drunkenness meant roaming npc vendors were not workable so it might be that the game having fewer roaming npcs generally was a byproduct of less of a need for them but i think the real culprit is the hunter's dream dark souls world was major league propped up by the independence it offered the player from any real hub firelink shrine is clearly the main one in that game but the the player is not locked to it like they are to the hunter's dream here and in dark souls 1 every mechanic from demon souls was redesigned to make the player a more independent agent estes replaced moongrass since it freed the designer from having healing items be farmable in every level in demon souls you could buy those but since it's possible to be penniless in that game the developers made it so that it can be farmed off of enemies in fact every hearthstone in demon's souls had a specific resource be farmable of its enemies but because the player can't just warp back to the castle where the enemies drop healing items in dark souls 1 healing items needed to either be updated to not be dependent on farming or every area needed to include enemies which could be farmed for healing that's where the esta system came from and controversially that's where i argue it should have stayed i have never seen it as the out-and-out upgrade to moongrass like many people but i could see the reasoning for keeping it if dark souls 2 and 3 and sakura were to also lock warping from the player which they don't and this is why bloodborne veering away from estes is very interesting to me it's almost like an acknowledgement that the healing system should be designed around the game rather than the other way around and because the player can buy vials in the hunter's dream and because healing is now attached to the combat going back to depletable resources for healing makes a lot of sense to me i understand if you don't like it but if we had estes here then players would not be forced to desperately lean on rallying for health like they are now and the ramifications of that mechanic might have been somewhat diminished the point of the combat in this game according to miyazaki was to give the player the feeling of fighting for their lives and the rally mechanic is how that feeling is produced and if producing that feeling is the goal then anything which detracts from it might be rightly cut and going back to nbc's because we have no incentive outside of runes batches and early game items to engage with any of the npcs we just aren't going to engage with them as much and it's going to seem like bloodborne is lacking in this department even though it has about 25 npcs not counting the blood minister from the beginning the npcs who stay indoors or any summons now dark souls had an excess of 40 and demon souls around 30. so yes there is just a numeric deficiency in how many characters we can talk to but more interactions more incentives to talk to the ones we have here might have gone a long way to make that up considering how many npcs in the previous games were one and done affairs i wonder if us being able to actually meet the arnomites to stay indoors would make the world feel a bit livelier and i also think that in general it would have been nice to have had some more passive npcs or just some minor quests like an npc who gives you some fire paper if you clear out some enemies in an area so that they can go back home or something from software's worlds are celebrated for the sense of desolation they can impart onto the player and since they all take place around some central law of the world getting twisted there's always a really deep sense of societal collapse and the horrors which ensue after that that being said environmental storytelling i think only goes so far and what we saw in dark souls with wandering npcs i think was a winning formula which i would have liked to see somewhat expanded on here rather than reduced and it's not even the raw numbers that i'm talking about sure dark souls had more npcs on the overworld to meet than bloodborne does but i don't think it was the number of npcs which make people like them in dark souls rather i think it was the way they breathed life into the world and for bloodborne to not capitalize on this by scripting out more engaging stories through the world is very disappointing what i'm about to say will date this video but if there are two things i would really like to see from elden ring it would be for healing to be a means of propping up the experience rather than saving the appetite of the fans who don't like anything but estes and for it to lean more on character interactions as a way of propping up the experience rather than combat and it's not like this would be some radical new step for fromsoft they've been hovering around this since dark souls 1 released and introduced us to covenants covenants are one of those things the fromsoft community seems to overwhelmingly agree on to have never been fully realized these games are fairly unrestricted on the players actions minute to minute yes you are going down pre-designed gauntlets but i mean in the sense that prior to sakiro the core gameplay is never altered for the sake of the story there's no point where the player's walking speed is reduced to hammer home that the scene in front of them is important and that their desire to get to the end of it is secondary to miyazaki's desire that they breathe it all in moment to moment the player is in the driver's seat once they get their hands on the controller it's a straight shot from one end of the map to the other bar some short cut scenes and loading screens here and there i've talked a lot about how fromm uses level design area specific challenges to vary up the experience and to direct the player a bit but in terms of npc interactions and utilizing them to breathe life into the world covenants are miyazaki's red-headed stepchild in that he puts them in his game but they are relegated solely to the online experience and to deacrowing those npcs in the forest in dark souls in the offline game covenants on paper enable more guided experiences without placing arbitrary limits on the player's ability to engage with the world joining one gives players a certain obligation and fulfilling those comes with certain rewards as it relates to multiplayer this mostly translates to killing other players or aiding them and the reason covenants always have a sort of number cap is because too many would fragment the online community and make it harder for players to meet if you imagine that every single faction with bloodborne features was a joinable covenant with an online element attached to it pretty quickly players start to ditch the ones with the least action it would be cool if joining the powder cacks obligated the player to defend old yharnam from intruders but if you imagine that there was another task for these spark hunters and another for the choir and ludwig successors you can quickly see that things start to get a bit lonely without a vibrant and dedicated enough player base people would flock to the factions with the action and the work done on the abandoned ones is sort of wasted as it relates to the single player however i think there's a lot of room yet to be explored if we lived in the alternate dimension where bloodborne's maps still checked the game states and adapted themselves accordingly you can quickly imagine how these could have ramifications maybe powder cacs can access secret tunnels in all jarnam to prey on invaders which in single player translates to less dangerous paths to the boss certain npcs might be more or less prone to aid certain factions the game has traces of this as we saw when i dressed up as a member of the church to talk to a developer covenants could be a way for the game to liberate the player to perform certain additional tasks in their playthrough while also punishing them for performing certain other ones to have a system hovering around the player which subtly guided their playthroughs and allowed each one to feel somewhat distinct in that while the player would do more or less the same thing they would do them for different reasons the changes made to the main story might be as little as enemies having an added chance of dropping blood vials or the player having access to covenant exclusive runes and it might extend to our significant things as covenant story exclusive areas and bosses and in the middle of those two areas might open up and be playable from different directions so rather than going from yharnam to the witch of hemwick a covenant might lead the player to being captured at some point in the story waking up in hemwick and having to make their way back to yharnam reversing maps isn't even that radical an idea as i noted before fighting gas coin at one point in development hamwick was the beginning area of the game the character creation took place right here in the staples and the player would make their way to the dead hunter which now drops the rune workshop tool to get to the hunter's dream additionally dark souls's undead asylum was reused and reversed in that game with the revisit giving players access to the stray demon the peculiar doll and hollow oscar and in this game the nightmare frontier has been completely reversed from dana mining it seems like the player was originally supposed to enter it where we now fight the amygdala and make their way to the cave which is now the entrance except it wouldn't have ended in a cave rather the cave would have linked to the cave where we now enter the nightmare of mensis i've made the analogy that a game's core gameplay loop can be thought of as an invisible game director which orbits the player and that level specific challenges limit and expand that director's ability to guide the player's expression and if we expand on that analogy then the covenants have the potential to impose a micro director on that director completely decoupled from the level design or enemy placements now it's one thing for me to say these things and another entirely to actually map this stuff out so that it works i'm not saying this is something from software is at fault for not having done before and i'm also not really saying that this is what i want it's entirely possible that these grand announcements of mine would actually make this game play much worse but and again i might be dating this video here as fromsoft continues to make games it seems like more of their core is being stripped out to hone in on the combat experience and i like that experience but i also like the less hectic more thoughtful moments in these games moments which are created when the game asks me to make a decision other than timing my button presses and when my interactions with the characters makes me appreciate or despise them those moments don't come easy especially in a medium as clumsy with emotion as ours is and i would really appreciate if this was the area fromsoft decided to dedicate their efforts to the combat and level design are fun but i can get that elsewhere what i don't get elsewhere is a knight whom i freed killing my fire keeper or an npc who has always kicked me down some chasm who i always want to believe won't do it this time those are the moments i relish in these games and i'd like for them to be what sticks around as the studio continues making games more so than anything else i can stomach this covenant idea of mine not being the best way to produce some of these unique moments but it's harder for me to stomach that fewer moments like the ones i described is where we're headed it's hard to gauge what goes on behind the scenes because fromsoft's games always seem to have very hectic productions but i do fear that the over focus on difficulty has done damage to this studio if all the feedback which developers get is good level design good combat good bosses then it should come as no surprise that the more subtle implementations which propped those up get called over time to hone in on what people loved the loudest what i'm trying to say is that feedback is a double-edged sword and we should probably take care to pay tribute to the little things i like these games because of the unique experiences they provide and i don't think more combat is the way to get more of them the witch of hemwick boss is probably the weakest one in the entire game but hamwick itself is an interesting area if you look at it from the perspective of the game's lore it connects back to that theme of everything which is happening in this world has happened before and you can actually meet the witch of hemwick in the ritual chalice dungeons where they will spawn mad ones on every level the idea there is that the witch is an archetype which humans slash thummerians revert to and hemwick itself is an expression of the same tendencies which produced the chalice dungeons it's matriarchal and much like the chalice dungeons hemwick is basically a giant graveyard i will not be doing any online in this video but i still want to talk a bit about pvp and i thought i'd use the hunters which gatekeeped the access to the nightmare frontier to go over some stuff these sorts of enemies were an interesting change from dark souls where hostile npcs would invade you to attack rather than be stationary awaiting your arrival the hostile npc's here don't have to navigate the online system to get to you but since builds are more standardized compared to dark souls the compact between two hunters is less about building a certain strategy and more about on-the-fly improvisation now a skilled hunter will understand there's really no shame in using the best gear in the game just because lutwix holy blade is kind of a black hole to the game's build varieties and because it's a bit overplayed it doesn't diminish its legitimacy because really it's just about getting the job done that's all that matters a skilled hunter will also understand that there's really no shame in utilizing the enemy's dumb ai to get a free backstab in this isn't cheap so much as it exemplifies my superior tactics to the ais and frankly accusations of cowardice are nothing more than cope from those who don't have the raw skill set to get the job done oh no you're serious not though first encounters in bloodborne can be difficult to gauge because simple observation does not feed the player enough info for them to know what they're in for magics are not attached to equipped weapons so an insta-kill arcane blast of some sort is always a looming danger but there's also to consider how each weapon setup changes what an optimal strategy is the transformed version of my weapon is relatively slow so i'm open to parries when i use it that being said a single hit is often enough to finish the fight because of the recovery frame locks so timing my heavy attacks to coincide with the enemy's swing is a good gamble that i'm going to walk away victorious in talking about pvp i just casually threw the phrase build variety your way and my saying that lutvik's holy blade is a black hole for build varieties is in reference to how one's accessed looked vic's holy blade can easily turn the game into one where you two-hand version of this weapon your way through the entire game bloodborne has been accused by some of having limited build variety compared to its predecessors and that's a point which has some legitimacy but it's not like more build variety is better in the abstract a tighter range of expression can be more immersive to interact with if only because the removal of say item weight means that there's no incentive for players to walk around naked anymore bloodborne's online is not as silly as dark souls is and if that's important to you then you might have to thank the limitations placed on build varieties for that of course that it suffers from limited build varieties is an argument which has sort of lost steam over the years in bloodborne's early days i remember there being some genuine animus towards this but as the game's intricacies have been figured out and as players have pushed high level play to further heights i think it's apparent that many of the initial complaints were unfounded as it turns out bloodborne does not have limited build variety it just has fewer avenues of player expression compared to its predecessors a single trick weapon can shake up a build more than many cumulative features in dark souls would but it's still just a single choice compared to however many smaller choices were present in that game so it's less a question of limited variety of builds and more a question of less decision making to facilitate those builds and nitpicky as this sounds there is a difference theoretically if both games have 10 builds then those builds have hazier parameters in dark souls since each individual stat could be dialed around a bit to make certain fringe deviations possible like which pyramids do use or whether a sorcerer dumps a level into dexterity to have a surprise katana attack up their sleeve or something it's it's the little nuanced decisions like that the reason i'm specifically making a distinction on these grounds rather than just paying the difference is that in its current state for bloodborne to have more builds it need more weapons and the parameters under which the weapons are designed around have very few avenues left to be explored but for bloodborne to have more choices within a build all that is needed is more ways to fine tune things stuff like carol runes and blood gems already go a long way here but the ability to say make a weapon righteous by using it a lot against cainhurst enemies or have our blood tinge be buffable by injecting ourselves with some sort of special blood at the cost of our enemy rallying much more and having their beast pallid meters fill faster would also facilitate this things like taking extra damage from righteous weapons and online if you're a vile blood and letting players play more with the hands-off stats like frenzy could also add a bit of added decision making specifically to online not that bloodborne as is is lacking for choice when it comes to combat sure it has fewer weapons than dark souls but most weapons in dark souls are trash anyways which no one uses so even though there's technically speaking fewer builds in bloodborne it's a trade-off of variety in favor of quality every weapon in bloodborne is viable and interesting to experiment with if you're creative enough every weapon in dark souls not so much what seems to be at the core of this conversation is the sequence in which builds open up to the players in this game in dark souls every build was opened from the get-go and the player's journey was largely about optimizing it finding better spells for sorcerers unlocking pyromancies for pyromancers you get the idea and since that game's beginning was so incredibly flexible the player could be 80 percent of the way done with their build before even going into sen's fortress demon's souls is still the reigning champion in this regard if you ask me since it quite literally has 5 things for the player to do at any time in the early game and the built variety on offer which that setup enabled is hard to match bloodborne being a more linear package might be where this issue is rooted because the builds are so based on the weapons used and when a weapon unlocks near the end it requires the player to replay the entire game for them to experience that build as a burial blade and bloodletter fan i i know this pain all too well of course a bit of online searching will reveal which chalice dungeons make the player's desired weapons available but considering you can't do the searchable chalices until you've finished the first one it's not as if builds are accessible from the get-go and the searchable chalices are also locked behind sony's online subscription so it sort of feels like there's a running tax on playing the game your own way had bloodborne been more sequent shiftable that is had players been able to construct their own path through the world more this likely would not be as sore of an issue as it is a hypothetical sequel would hopefully have the good sense not to lock so many of the builds behind bosses you can't access until there's nothing left of the game if player expression is made heavily dependent on their chosen weapon then players are going to feel a real lack of choice when the best stuff is kept away from them for a long time a potential solution might be to make every weapon choosable in the beginning on the condition that the player had already beat the game once already that way they'd have the experience which miyasaki intended their first time through and for their second build when they actually know what they are doing they can be a bit more expressive without having to pay for sony's online subscription in other words the game can be somewhat improved by sony not making as much money so it's probably not going to happen i thought that that guy had fallen off the bridge luckily he didn't kick me down the nightmare frontier is one of the best areas to reach on any playthrough because it's got a lot of wandering nightmares which drop relatively good upgrade materials that can set you well up for the areas to come we also have crawlers here who drop cold blood and there are also winter lanterns the frenzy inducing enemies which like to drop some pretty good blood gems that being said story wise i think this is the least important area in the entire game i mean sure in medicines it's where we get tricked by patches which you know that's an important part of from soft games but relating solely to bloodborne this might be the least important area this or hemwick that being said i go here much more often than i do say cainhurst which might just go to show how going through games is often more about systemic progression in this case getting good resources than it is story progression in the case of cainhurst uncovering the story of the executioners and the vile bloods the nightmare frontier is almost devoid of story which relates to the main narrative cainhurst is almost devoid of resources which you'll be using in your playthrough whichever you visit more might have to do with which of these are more important to you i was floored the first time i went to canehurst but after learning about it its umph oomph isn't that big of a draw for me anymore i'll be running through a lot of the areas to come because they like to deal status ailment damage to me and some of them have enemies who like to throw giant boulders with unpredictable hitboxes at me note in the case of the boulder throwing enemies that the area trap is attached to enemies so that players are able to rally in case they get hit since there's not a lot of action for the next few minutes i think this is a good place to talk about lore we were brought into the nightmare frontier by the amygdala because we had the tonsil stone we got from patches in our inventory so it makes sense to talk a bit about those guys first there seems to be a cut subplot in the game relating to spiders this is one of those pieces of cut content which was seemingly cut for creative reasons rather than technological ones so consider the following conversation to be spurned by novelty other than need for lore the idea with the spiders seems to be that they were a sort of bridge between humans and the great ones this is still somewhat represented in game with the human-headed spiders and rom but the extent to which this was cut is really remarkable first of all amygdalas all have eight regular limbs and one seemingly magical hand with spidery hair follicles and clinging to buildings like they do they give the impression of spiders that's what people initially thought they were when they were seen in trailers and in the open beta the wet nurse boss fight seems to also be a vestigial element from that story it has eight arms and probably used to be located in a cut area from yosefica's clinic and its name was the demon of darkness and death we have another cut piece of content in a character model of an old hag in clothing reminiscent of the wetness so it seems like yosefka's clinic was a place where experiments were being done to elevate humans to great ones i mean that's still kind of what josephus clinic is but in the case of the cut story the experiments had to do with spiders bridging the gap specifically though i theorized that the human-headed spiders were originally supposed to be attempts at creating amygdalas but later got repurposed as development went on as is they don't really make any concrete sense in the world but the amygdalas themselves kinda do in japanese their name is amendos which is supposed to be read as almonds and the name amygdala comes from the latin translation of almond and although it is localization that name might give us a better explanation to its purpose the name almond simply refers to the shape of its head but the amygdala is a part of the limbic system which is thought to be responsible for learning and organizing fear responses that is it seems like it is connected to our ability to form memories which relate to fear the amygdalas and bloodborne seem to be some kinds of cosmic vagabonds who are drawn to elder rich happenings and they have the power to open gates between dreams and reality if the player has an appropriate key to the dream in question so for the nightmare frontier this is the tonsil stone we got from patches fun fact tonsils seems to translate to amygdala in some languages and for the hunter's nightmare later on this will be the eye of a blood drunk hunter what the tonsil stone is and how it relates to the nightmare frontier is anyone's guess but considering that the yharnam stone seems to be the fossilized remains of queen yarnham's stillborn son mergo likely the tonsil stone is something depressing also don't go image searching for tonsil stones those things are disgusting to understand the nightmare frontier we first need to understand the chalice dungeons and what i've talked a bit about with the cycle of the old blood that is what is happening in yharnam right now has happened before in this universe the east route chalice reads root chalice that breaks multiple labyrinth seals root chalices used in rituals to break old labyrinth seals are said to change the labyrinth's form each time according to the choir the land of ease lies in contact with the cosmos which allowed the great ones to function on transcendental planes of thought and the ailing laura antalis reads a chalice that breaks a labyrinth seal loren is a tragic land that was devoured by the sands the tragedy that struck this ailing land of loren is said to have its root in the scourge of the beast some have made the dreaded extrapolation that yharnam will be next yharnam is either going to destroy itself or it will manage to transcend like east did and managed to give birth to a new great one great ones and although this game isn't very in your face about it these games thrive on subdued and subtle storytelling the idea is that the nightmare of mensis which is the same as the nightmare frontier is lauren just like how the hunter's nightmare is yharnam it's a dream memory of a place and probably was born from a great one much like how the hunter's nightmare was born when coss placed a curse on the hunters if we imagine that this area was still the entrance to the nightmare of menses it would even explain why mikalash is beckoning cause in the nightmare considering koss was probably born in lauren the crawlers the white aquatic looking giant slug monsters in this area are eerily similar to kaz's corpse which we'll find on the beach of the fishing hamlet in a few hours what with their wide aquatic exterior and the crawler's bellies are also littered with messengers like how cause was pregnant and there's also to consider that the dreamlands in bloodborne all seem to be born of a great one the hunter's dream was made by the moon presence the hunter's nightmare was born of the curse of cause and the nightmare frontier's origin what caused it to be made it's not really elaborated on but considering that lauren is said to have fallen and have been filled with beasts and that this area is littered to the brim and more with tombstones the mind does not need to linger far for possible answers moving away from the canon of this game the nightmare frontier is pretty much just the dreamland in lovecraft's the dreamquest of unknown kadath what with its multitudes of basalt columns and beasts with sideways mouths i'm no bloodborne expert but i take pride in my performance against the amygdala here on my test prior to recording i was 20 levels higher than i am in the recording now and my weapon was more upgraded in that run as well the amygdala fight might be the best embodiment of what the alterations bloodborne made to the combat can do for the boss battles if i had to note the main difference between boss battles in souls and boss battles in bloodborne it's that bloodborne enables players to actively strike at the boss's weak points rather than just having players wait for the boss to exhaust their animations there are of course weapons more suited for each boss ludwig's holy blade and the burial blade are pretty much cheating when it comes to the amygdala but each weapon excels at its own niche and there's probably a boss for every weapon another massive shakeup is that because the player is not locked down by stamina regeneration concerns as it relates to armor weight bosses can now be optimized without concerns for slow players needing to be able to defeat them and because players now have a higher threshold for their ability to maneuver through the arena bosses can be designed to take advantage of a larger more complex range since players can respond to that here that's seen in the amygdala's multiple arms being able to attack from different points of origins without the player ever really being unable to pay attention the only place they won't see the strikes coming from is from underneath the thing and when players get there the amygdala likes to jump on top of the play once you get the timing right the amygdala's jump is really good for recovering a bit from the hectic fight but for first timers this is almost certainly an insta-death trap pushing them to engage the boss from further away not that the player has some major advantage from close-up the damage this boss takes from strikes near its crotch is negligible there's a small window which can deal decent damage but even so the player is supposed to attack the hands and the head and my now famous overhead vertical swing is just a tool for the job that and as i already said the burial blade with just a few precise strikes i'm able to open the amygdala up to visceral attacks and i try to capitalize on those as much as i can not so much because of the damage those deal but rather because the time it takes for the amygdala to get back into the fight is time i'm getting free stamina and some heels in if i need them the best bosses in these games have a sort of app and flow it's rare for a boss which is a total pushover to be a favorite and i think it's equally rare for an endlessly aggressive maniac to crack top 10 lists made in australia and ludwig proved that it can happen but i think it's rarer than people maybe think it is the amygdala was one of this game's best and i think many of people's favorite bosses in this game all have in common that they lean on the strengths of this combat system rather than being carryovers design wise from dark souls because bloodborne has more direct controls over the kinds of attacks which the player throws out than dark souls did it's able to do more with bosses than dark souls could let me put it this way bar that game's exclusive status ailment vomiters think curses every dark souls boss and i'd say this applies to general enemies as well feels like they could be imported into bloodborne without any real trouble if you have hang-ups about this idea because bloodborne does not have shields remember that every dark souls boss was designed to be beatable by a player using no shields in the first place if we reverse this boss import idea however the same can really only be said of a handful of bloodborne's bosses into dark souls and very few of those bosses tend to rank in people's top tens these are your witch of hemwicks your man-eater boars your beast-possessed souls you're undead giants etc it's usually not enough for a video games experience to be impressive in a vacuum for it to resonate often it's the way the experience is conveyed with the mechanics on hand that makes it stand out and for combat i think the amygdala boss fight was a really good example of just this i think it's a real shame that we don't get to see more of the world outside of yharnam the forbidden woods is strangely enough a woods that are forbidden and not an urban gothic monstrosity like yharnam city is this makes for a different sort of geometry one less concerned with straight angles and i think the game might have benefited from more of these the ram shackle houses here often include breakable walls leading to secret areas and the trademarked from software level design is able to stretch a bit here since it has different constraints on it bloodborne did not upgrade to the jumping from souls and has no you know real climbing mechanics to speak of i don't know if you want to count climbing up a ladder so it's surprising how engaging it can be to maneuver through the levels here everything is mapped out like the old dungeon crawlers used to be where tunnels have optional paths and the entire area is littered with loot to entice players to get a bit lost bloodborne is kingsfield in its dna and not just in the chalice dungeons the souls games are very iterative on much of from software's older stuff with the main difference being the third person camera kingsfield and shadow tower both played from the first person perspective i theorize that this perspective change might have had something to do with the most impactful game on miyasaki's career being fumito waiter's eco and surprisingly it took until sakiro for from soft to match the level design to this perspective shift before fromsoft went all in on the third person demon souls was planned to be playable in both perspectives miyazaki suggested in an interview that this had to do with sony wanting to have an exclusive to compete with bethesda's oblivion but that obviously got changed a bit and the third person perspective stuck even so demon's soul still functions if you swap the camera perspectives nothing in the map layout there is too difficult for kingsfield 4 alumni to handle and much the same could be said of dark souls dark souls maps were built from the ground up to be played in third person and so were bloodbornes but if you cut all of the combat out of those games the areas themselves could still be navigated in first person because the integration of the player's spatial awareness as it relates to navigating levels didn't really become a big feature until sakiro included a jump and a grappling hook bloodborne's combat is way too fast to be playable in first person but the levels might survive such a transition fairly well which just goes to show how mechanics impact design for all of the talk these games get about their interconnected and vertical level design it's not often noted that they achieved it without making the player climb and jump everywhere and careful attention to level design made sure that players unmasked never asked why can't i just climb up this dark souls 2 being the outlier of course earlier in this video i was talking about how the game's animations prioritized feeling good overlooking good in regards to us being able to run at a wall i made the point there that players only have their expectations of realism betrayed when the game established that they should have those and i think the level design picks up on this philosophy as well when you can't climb every surface players don't feel betrayed when they aren't allowed to climb a specific gate unless we have a really poorly designed level again certain areas in dark souls 2. alternatively if the experience does not manage to get the player invested the game will not be able to easily shield itself from those sorts of questions either a work that puts in the effort to prioritize internal consistency can usually get away with departures from reality provided they are consistent in the game all throughout another exception players will make is for the sake of gameplay bloodborne allows us to pick up items but it doesn't have extensive animations of the hunter bending down and picking the things up overextended animations are very rarely appreciated because games are dynamic once the player prompts the game to pick something up there's no involved part of the action left so the game can just skip the realism and let our guy have the item that's not to say that there couldn't be more decisions in the interim between prompting a pickup and the actual pickup but since bloodborne does not have any it's probably better that it keeps things moving at a tolerable pace a quick note on pickups an interesting quirk of psychology is that unpredictable rewards are more addicting than predictable ones are in a vacuum a 10 drop rate hooks players more than guaranteed drops every 10th enemy killed i say in a vacuum because in case the player has some priority to the interaction say they are speed running they might not take as kindly to r and g in addition to some recurring themes miyazaki also has certain characters he likes to remix and reuse and the afflicted beggar is this game's version of demon souls yurt or la track from dark souls i noted earlier that alfred's design documents have a note saying he should be like solaire and the other returning faces include the level lady demon souls is maiden in black and dark souls is anastasia of astora being the doll you could also argue that imposter yosefka is an adaptation of demon souls's mephistopheles and there's of course patches who is pretty unchanged discounting that he's a spider-man now the afflicted beggar is here to punish altruistic players if you send him to urden chapel he will work his way through the npcs there until he's been killed we could send him to imposter yosefka where i'll get a taste of his own medicine but i want to fight him in his beast mode and i also want to kill the skeptical man to punish his rudeness towards me so i'm actually gonna invite this guy over story wise this is probably my favorite interpretation of this character but gameplay-wise i rarely bother meeting him bloodborne's npcs are simply not of as much value to the player as the npc's insults are so this story is massively undercut i bet there are even players out there who on their first run might have rescued this guy and never figured out that he kills npcs because there's no point to ever going back to urton chapel i've set my piece on the alterations to hops made in the game and some of the positive and negative ramifications of this change so i won't dwell on this much longer obviously though this is a story which suffers from the player being so independent of their non-hunter's dream hubs and off the npcs much like how it took sakura's jumping to finally have fromsoft reassess their approach to level design to incorporate the player's ability to quickly observe the area i would have liked it if bloodborne's development had had the team wake up a bit to how they approached their npc stories had had them decide to make the stories fit the world as the player navigated rather than once again dropping the best of miyasaki in the game hoping they still get the love this isn't a point of criticism i particularly want to linger on firstly because demons and dark souls had this pretty down path and because we know that maps used to be more dynamic and it's entirely possible that these characters are holdovers from an earlier build where the player might have interacted with them more organically than they do now i'm just bringing this up in case this isn't ever corrected dark souls 2 and 3 were the victims of mid development overhauls and sekiro's story was much more conventionally told i make this point often but certain games do certain things better or worse and it is very rarely a good idea to structure an experience in a game on top of something that game does poorly it can work really well if there is something being communicated with the juxtaposition or if the absence of gameplay challenge convergence produces interesting results like i talked about earlier with souls platforming silent hill open exteriors cramped spaces in bloodborne etc but usually games do better when they do what they do well rather than when they try to overload the bar with weight they can't quite lift bloodborne does a lot of things very well sending the player back to urton chapel so that they can see the npc stories play out around them over time is not one of those things it works and you can watch those stories if you want but it's an effort which it didn't used to be walter over here is one of the covenant leaders specifically he directs the league which he formed after a trio he was involved with got killed by a beast they had chased to yharnam after killing and devouring the whole beast walter obtained the impurity rune and formed the league whose mission is hunting down vermin which are centipede like beings which live in filth and are said to be the source of man's impurity these things can only be seen by the confederates of the league because only they have the impurity rune which is also the old throne of the covenant it's basically a jolly cooperation covenant except instead of collecting sun metals we collect vermin and vermin in this game are basically the opposite of phantasms the phantasms are the slugs which are associated with arcane and can be seen in much of the arcane artwork vermin are connected to beasts the impurity rune is called stagnation in japanese which has to do with the theme of flow which miyazaki goes to in his games very often in japan still waters are sometimes seen as bad and flowing waters are seen as good still waters are stagnant and so they are where parasites hats their larvae knowing they won't be swept away by the flow vermin show up in stagnant blood as it is a breeding ground for parasites just like how stagnant water is parasitic and bad as you saw in the water underneath josephus clinic with stealth poison and had maggot enemies in it and stuff like dirty blood gems as well as the water in the nightmare frontier was also dealt poison if we collect and crush enough vermin valtter will eventually abandon his post as the master of the league and will be able to pick up his helmet usually its item description reads an iron helm resembling an upside down bucket a single hole allows one to peek out with a single eye which is probably all that its original owner had but if players complete his quest line it won't be called one-eyed ironhelm it'll be called masters ironhelm and its description will also feature the line the ironhelm is passed down among masters of the league walter had in fact lost the ability to see vermin long ago and i think the implication of him leaving the helmet is that he is giving the leadership of the league over to the player after seeing their conviction at destroying vermin their item description reads a centipede-like creature discovered on successful hunts by league hunters vermin found hidden in filth are only seen by league confederates and are the root of man's impurity the league has assumed the task of finding and crushing all vermin perhaps there is some mercy in the madness those who wish to see vermin can and those who choose to are provided with boundless purpose the forbidden woods area is very focused all throughout to showcase vermin we see villagers whose heads explode from a snake infestation we see ticks on the gigantic snakes and we might also be seeing the color out of space way back when i talked about the lovecraft stories which seemingly inspired this game i noted the color out of space but i didn't really explain how it connects to the game go to this timestamp if you want to read that story for yourself okay so the color out of space has a meteorite land on a farmland and slowly begin to corrupt it it's vegetation and its inhabitants and in the forbidden woods we had patches gift us the tonsil stone if we surmise that the tonsil stone actually fell down from the nightmare frontier the stone is theorized to be a meteorite then it's possible that it carried the rot of the nightmare frontier with it lauren subcame to beasts so assumably it is a treasure trove of vermin the forbidden woods has giant mushrooms which resemble the heads of the amygdalas it has humans who live in filthy water it has snake parasites it has ticks on the giant snakes and much like the nightmare frontier itself this area is littered with tombstones so i think the idea might be that the nightmare is reproducing itself here in the miyazaki flow theme very often flow and stagnation are represented with elevation where flow comes from above it is rain it is waterfalls it is sunlight all those forces which give life and stagnation is at the bottom where the rain sinks into the ground where the river ends and pools and sinks etc and another component of this theme is that it seemingly has a higher standing in his works when it comes to adjudicating the morality of his worlds it's not good and evil it's vitality and stagnation demon souls showcased stagnation in the valley of defilement as well as in true king alant who was located in the lowest elevation in that entire game dark souls has this with the great lords each one is situated after a descent they sit in stagnant depths and the golden city of anor londo was just a front and gwyn was really located like a land in the lowest elevation in the game because he was the source of that world stag nation here menses and the choir occupy the lowest and highest elevation in yharnam respectively changing topic real quick from games are fairly diegetic considering their genre the player direction is mostly done by the world and it's rare that the game decides to go for a cutscene to let the player know what to do next players expect every gauntlet in the game to end in a boss and if they're curious enough they'll just go through each gauntlet whether or not they know what the story is expecting of them and they go kill the boss bloodborne is scripted to be a mystery so this setup works fairly well first time through the hunter and the player are both in the dark about what is to come but the game does just fine getting the player from beginning to end in terms of visual information the game is pretty understated as well the hud lock on point and health bars don't actually exist in the world but any less information in the game would be almost unplayable the non-intrusive narrative of the game makes for a very player driven experience that said there are some tricks here and there to get the most out of the players some intentional some maybe not so much among the most impressive is how bloodborne directs combat like how scoring systems do in character action games yep compared to the action in the bayonettas of the world bloodborne is incredibly primitive but the idea of using visual information to push the player to a certain feel of playstyle is still on full display in devil may cry the constant stream of visual information from combat both rewarded players who played with style and communicated to them that that is what they were doing in god of war the style system rewarded and communicated brutality here combat is about fighting for one's life and the two mechanics which manage to simulate a style meter are the rally mechanic and blood vials the blood vials which we use for healing cap out at 20. everyone picked up after that goes into the player's storage where they sit until the player dies with less than 20 vials when respawning the difference is made up by subtracting vials from that storage games tend to pivot to optimal play because players like to show off to themselves and optimal play in bloodborne on quick glance seems to be clean not losing health that is but upon a bit of introspection it becomes apparent that there is an even higher level of play available because damage can be recovered with the rally mechanic the player can actually take blows but still come out of an engagement unharmed with 20 blood vials this requires some knowledge about enemy hit damage and the intricacies of the rally mechanic but you can go through the game faster by letting some hits go through and so the highest level of play does not actually have a player be unharmed it has them at full health at the end of every encounter and so the encounter is not about careful dodging it's about taking the most optimal number of hits get this gang raw optimization makes bloodborne a game where losing health is not necessarily a telltale sign of sub-par play you are being directed to slug it out here but let's not go too far a bloodborne does not have extensive mechanics to handle enemies like juggling and devil may cry or anything quite so fancy it's just able to jerry rig up a phantom style meter to get the message of its combat across and compared to those games bloodborne's flow of information is so subdued and the display is incredibly clean of course bloodborne does not have the depth to convey nor the fine-tuning of those games so a comparison is not really fair i'm not saying bloodborne is a sneaky character action game but rather that it directs the theme of its combat using some of the same tricks and because it has no actual score at the end players aren't funneled to a specific playstyle once developers attach numbers to actions there comes the perception of there being objective ways of playing better but developers can get numbers wrong and when they do more skilled players might get a lower score than someone who is just chasing numbers now one can argue over whether getting numbers is the mark of skill as that is the bar which the developers set or whether the arbitrary values assigned to actions by developers should be regarded as sacred if one is to argue that however they can kindly do that in another video's comment section i'm more interested in what happens when a game's action is directed to congeal to a theme without any score to distract the player bloodborne puts in the effort to make players fight for their lives but so long as their health is good and vials plentiful there's nothing telling the player that their approach is invalid or subpar there are gradients to the quality of every build and they vary in their individual capacities to deal with problems but within the parameters of surviving the encounter bloodborne isn't fussy about how you get the job done if you fought for your life using carol runes to recover quicksilver bullets good job if you fought for your life by hurling molotov cocktails at a boss out of nowhere good job if you fought for your life by having a flexible arsenal and you cycled through each weapon as it became the optimal one good job every approach gets zero points so all are equally valid success is all that matters your reward isn't some trophy but rather it's the sense of accomplishment which follows the desperate fight it is often useful to alter the paradigm you're using to analyze a game because it shows just how universal the language of good game direction really is and it also forces you to ruminate on just how guided an experience can be with just the inclusion of a single mechanic during development of the call of cthulhu role-playing game sandy petersen its creator decided that a key component of lovecraft's stories were their cinematic nature in that so many of the stories are cemented by specific moments like cthulhu waking up or the deep ones coming from the ocean or the shootout in the whisperer in darkness and lovecraft is not about how people overcome those moments but rather how they succumb to them and how they are tormented by them onwards this was where the sanity mechanic came from and it allowed for older pcs to return in later modules as villains after incorporating a sanity system into call of cthulhu peterson had a moment in play testing where players were conducting a ritual and half of them decided for their pc to close their eyes to not see the ritual take place the sanity system therefore managed to make players simulate being afraid because averting danger was a better survival strategy than combat and so peterson stumbled onto a mechanic which managed to produce lovecraft characters who automatically engage with the settings brand of roleplaying my favorite moments in video games are usually produced by interacting with some system and discovering that it manages to tell a story like the moon in majora's mask like yorda in eco and like the inventory in silent hill 2. and this is probably why i make such a big deal about how little developer interference there is in these games bloodborne's gameplay naturally tells the story of fighting for one's life and the setting oozes the elderage so that's the story which the game tells and it doesn't need any elaborate cutscenes or scripted events to deliver on this better i still would have liked to see the version of bloodborne where dynamic maps responded to insight but even without it the game does a good job of getting the player to tell its story i'm using the shaman's bone blade i got from the brainsucker to turn the fluorescent flower to our side momentarily birgenworth is where the main game really introduces the player to kin enemies and the descent into the lake will be the moment where bloodborne finally tips over into making the cosmicism the focus rather than being blurry environmental hints aside from yuri the last scholar every enemy in this area is kin so i've talked about serrated and righteous weapons but there's another way the game handles damage enemies can be grouped into the categories of beast kin and non-affiliated beasts are pretty self-explanatory but kin are best categorized by looking at their skin if the enemy in front of you looks more like an alien than a dog it's probably kin and certain weapons have specific qualities that grant extra damage to these enemies blood gems can also be inserted to deal with them better and a good heuristic for assessing your foe is if it has fur fire if it has watery skin bolt and before you ask no the damage modifier for beasts here is not the same as the serrated damage modifier why have 3 distinct damage classes when you can have 2 sets of 2 and double up on beasts yuri over here is a member of the choir and she's seemingly positioned here to keep hunters from attacking rom the choir is on to menses ritual so lore wise this is the best reasoning i can gather in this area we can summon menses scholar damien to help us kill rom and i'll actually bring him into the fight against yuri because he's kinda kicking my ass right now after reviewing this footage i i can tell there's obviously some input delay here you you can't see it but my timing on the gun is much better than the game is registering on a serious note though i think this fight will be a good showcase of why i'm not the biggest fan of the online in these games conceptually i like it but aside from the horrendous lack it doesn't seem to be balanced around good play me and damian are juggling yuri and she's completely locked out of responding one-on-ones in these games can be very good but it is very rare that two-on-ones are anything other than frustrating because there aren't any mechanics designed to balance it out for the outnumbered player there could be a bravery stat which is temporarily granted to players who are outnumbered in online which makes it impossible for them to be caught in recovery animation loops or something like that whether online should be completely fair is another question entirely however i don't think invaders for example really deserve for the invaded player to be capped from summoning help so if this was ever going to be changed i think it'd be best if it were done on a case-by-case basis the menses choir war is i think a great example of utilizing different mechanics to tell the story as we just saw with damien and yuri and when it comes to storytelling and bloodborne in general if there's anything that feels like a crutch it might be the game's reliance on item descriptions fromsoft has experimented with different ways of feeding the player information about the world but the subdued and optional nature of their experiments makes those unreliable since players might very easily miss them bloodborne has notes scattered around which give cryptic hints to events which might play out later but item descriptions are where most of the story takes place the novelty of this kind of storytelling hasn't been completely exhausted if you ask me but if the npcs in the world could be incorporated into the game better they could do some of the heavy lifting of telling the story and i also think in general interacting with npcs is just always going to feel more impactful than reading the item descriptions i remember my first meeting with solaire i don't remember when i first read what any of his items were about and my favorite moments in these games usually have to do with interacting with the npcs that's not to say that i want item descriptions to go away i'm just curious what a game like this would look like if it had more interactions with the people in its world funnily enough from unused dialogue we can assume there was a fetch quest in birgenworth where willem had the player collect eyes in the institute back then the lecture hall which i entered to get to the nightmare frontier was still the ground level of birkenworth so there was some actual meat to this place considering lawrence got some play in the dlc willem is probably the most underwhelming character we meet in the game considering how significant he is to the happenings around us you'd think something interesting could be done with him so it's a bit of a shame that he's just a brain dead plant man at this point i suppose it highlights how his pursuit for inside has fried his brain so his inclusion here is on theme but i wonder what a character like him could have brought to the story if he had been more active his quest was seemingly repurposed for adeline in the dlc and considering that there are mushrooms growing on willem's back in retrospect it really seems like birgenworth should have been where the player acquired the milkweed rune and where the arcane builds finally opened up the dlc runes have not been found to have existed in any pre-dlc builds of the game that might change with time though i don't think it will so hindsight is 20 20. the milkweed rune is another example of what i talked about earlier with the game having a poor handling of dealing out builds currently and seemingly in earlier builds willem drops the iron when killed fitting considering he had the player collect eyes for him and also fitting because like arcane levels the iron boosts item discovery the fetch quest might have gotten caught because the boss arena being locked behind the fetch quest played poorly and the absence of purpose to the lecture hall in the current setup might be why they were repurposed as the entrance to the nightmares alternatively the lecture hall was cut out and made the entrance to the nightmare and there wasn't time to give willem anything else to do much like willem himself i find birgenworth in its current form to be somewhat of a disappointment considering its significance in the story but the fight between damien and yuri and the fight against ram go a long way to redeem this place rahm was a student of birgenworth who was able to partially ascend bergenworth had the third umbilical cord from the fishing hamlet and used it to transform rom into a brain dead great one or at least an incomplete great one a note in the lecture hall says to hunt the great ones and another note says three third chords so eventually these guys were able to piece together that rom was imperfect because they needed more third umbilical cords i'll be fetching the bergenworth court near the end of this video and i'll go more into what exactly these things are but short story they are the bond between the great ones and their stillborn infants the menses scholars are currently conducting a ritual to back in the moon presence which will reveal the red moon once it descends yharnam will be drowned in madness and ram is the only thing that is currently holding the red moon from descending rom is said to be vacuous which i think simply means it has the mental faculties of a human being rather than that of a great one which might explain how it's able to know what it's doing and drama might actually be located near the altar of despair so what we are fighting right now might possibly be a mental projection of rom which exists in the dreamlands there are many such cases going forward since this is the point where bloodborne nose dives into a wonderful insanity rom might be more aware than she lets on and might have learned about the menses ritual from the choir or maybe there is some natural instinct which is guiding it but regardless we're gonna genocide yharnam in a bit because we really want to fight more bosses sorry not sorry much like the amygdala rom is a boss which encapsulates the changed design sensibilities of bosses from souls every hit here eats well into the player's health and if you don't take care of them quickly the small spider enemies can quickly overwhelm you with sheer numbers this isn't as big a drain on resources as it would be in souls because the rally mechanic should be the first healing option the player considers but the damage mixed with the sheer magnitude of enemies makes dashing through the fight the best strategy this is an example of a boss which really leans in the bloodborne's unique quirks ram is miyazaki's favorite boss though when he said that he stipulated if you ignore the gameplay itself he finds rom's model and animations to be cute apparently and he enjoys the atmosphere here and that's a really interesting word atmosphere universally i think people's favorite bosses tend to always over represent those who had a specific sort of atmosphere rather than those who were fun to fight goes back to what i said earlier about how the best parts of the from soft games experiences tend to be outside of the combat with the descent of the red moon we see queen jarnam weep for her lost child mergo the red moon will allow for menses to call out to the great ones and queen jarnam's presence here seems to suggest that this area is located in the dreamlands though you can warp to the lantern here through the frontier headstone so it seems like the game doesn't register it as such bloodborne has sort of cemented its legacy as a lovecraftian game but it was marketed and sold as a gothic action affair it's sort of been forgotten in the dialogue that the cosmism was a plot twist if you didn't find the nightmare frontier yet statistically likely to miss in a first playthrough it wouldn't be until rom where the cosmic theme really got going what i'm trying to say is yahar ghoul might not be anyone's favorite level though i have a certain fondness for it but it was almost certainly the level where the mask slipped for most players it might not be your number one but it was almost certainly one of the most impactful areas on your first run i think this level maybe more than any other suffers from the changes made to the dynamisms in the levels and i'll talk more about how after we've done some cleanup i'm gonna go to the hunter's stream to level up and make some purchases and then i'm gonna conclude some npc stories one consequence of dedicated builds is that items in the world can quickly become more hassle than their worth if you imagined a bloodborne where we could not sell our items you'd be imagining a bloodborne where experienced players would not take the time to explore each area thoroughly because most items can be sold most items even though you can't use them offer some tangible benefit to you and in a weird way picking up loot is the best insurance policy in the game because held items don't drop with your blood echoes when you die i made a note earlier that a single mechanic can be enough to make wild changes to the experience and simply being able to sell items a mechanic i imagine most people never think twice about is an example of just that in this video so far i might have come across as negative about the hunter's dream so it might actually surprise you to hear that i actually really like this place it might not beef up the npc interactions but if i'm to be locked to a single hub to access my upgrades and vendors i can imagine many places that would be worse than this one if only because it's so small being able to compare and contrast the cost of items sold by the blood echo's messengers and the inside messengers in such a short time is a godsend lagos is the ability to do my upgrades and buying and selling without having to flip through a bunch of text crawls the messengers themselves went through many iterations during development so their exact nature cannot be ascertained by looking into the game because the game has hints to more than one of the proposed origins for these guys still present it is said that all great ones lose their young and yearn for surrogates and this idea of children who failed to live might at one point have been embodied by the messengers they are childlike but they also have some physical deformities like cleft pellets uneven eyes or cracked faces just to name a few they can also be seen in the crawler models from the nightmare frontier and knowing that those guys are hearkening to cause that they are infested with messengers who are deformed children might at one point have been a nod to how cars cars's child was still born with the emergence of the red moon gilbertson came to beasthood and although i'm not playing every npc story out since he was so friendly in the beginning i thought it'd be right to put him out of his misery that fight consisted of a single visceral attack whereas the upcoming fight against the afflicted beggar will be a bit more we sent the afflicted beggar to earthen chapel so that he could kill the rude skeptical man this area is littered with incense a mechanic of the world which we sadly do not get to interact with at any point incense pushes beasts away as they don't like it which is why the beggar is positioned outside whether that positioning was a lore decision or whether the incense lore was written to make sense of his placement and that beasts don't come into a chapel a decision which was driven by the player needing the freedom to swing their weapons against enemies without killing other npcs i don't know but i still think incense has some potential that isn't fully utilized i don't know if i'd ever use an item which specifically makes me not have to fight enemies in a game about fighting enemies but it doesn't take much imagination for good applications of this to start appearing dark souls 3's grand archive area has the player dunk their head in wax to make themselves impervious to the curse attacks of the magical hands in that area and i imagine that if yharnam at the end would have been overrun by beasts and i mean like beasts clamoring on beasts like cockroaches it might have made sense for some optional questlines to have the player be given the choice to addrence themselves in incense so that they can run through the city to finish the quest in one piece it might be more hassle than it's worth to create such a mechanic since it would need to shut an enemy's acrostate from triggering and would have to be allotted into the right enemies and finally be made interactable so i understand on a technical level why we can't use incense but since this exists in the world logically one should expect that the hunter would want to get their hands on it it might just have been a throwaway line to explain why enemies don't come to earthen chapel but i actually think no explanation would have played much better incense has the player asked questions no answer just means that the player makes up their own like maybe the passive spirit of urden repels enemies this isn't a big deal or anything but it's a [ __ ] in the armor so i suppose it warrant it disgusting bloodborne for the most part is incredibly good at interweaving the world we play in and the game we play into one cohesive package we're about to finish up eileen's quest line and fun fact the bloody crow of cainhurst tied ludwig as the enemy who killed me the most in the entire game with a total of six deaths i decided i'd try a different tactic for each encounter which i'll show off as i go against him but first eileen eileen is a rare npc in that her questline does not end with her explicitly dying she's an old hunter from a far away land and she was once connected to the dream like we are now what exactly becomes of her after she hands the duty of hunting hunters to us is not known but it might be something as simple as her just hanging up the mask and going on with the rest of her life that mask has incense inside of it to mask the scent of blood and plague doctors in the real world wore those sorts of beak masks for the same reason the scent of death is disgusting but in the lore of bloodborne it might also be that eileen did this because the scent of blood might be a trigger towards blood drunkenness and masking it along with shielding exposure to all of her body parts made her that extra bit safe before the dlc the assumption some players had was that the bloody crow of cainhurst was the apprentice of german rather than you know maria which it is now the idea was that since the crow uses the art of quickening a lot by activating the old hunter's bone there was a link between them and the grave near the abandoned old workshop additionally since the doll sometimes tends that grave the idea was that the apprentice was the one who built the doll and since the doll is wearing kane hursty in a tire she was drawn to this guy who wears kane hersty and armor and the idea was that he built her rather than garmin and he did so in the likeness of queen annelise of course that doesn't quite work because as you can plainly see this guy is alive and not buried outside the abandoned old workshop for me to have looted a bone of his corpse what makes this fight hard is that the punishment for failure is very steep as the crow of cainhurst nbc can take me down in two or so hits and since he has such a high blood tinch he does really good with his pistol without even having to use bone marrow ash blood tinge is the stat which governs firearm scaling but it also has atonement with certain weapons two of whom connect with cainhurst the rider palash and the chikake the idea with blood tinge weapons is that they either have a secondary firearm function like simon's bow blade the saw rifle and the writer palace or that they cast blood to use like the chicago and the blood ladder the crow of cainhurst uses the chicago and the idea with it is that once transformed it gains the ability to poison the enemy but also passively drains some of its wielder's health every second to counter this the bloody crow of cainhurst has the ability to use blood vials i've only ever seen him use one per fight but apparently he has been seen using two and to put pressure on the player to not try to have the crow die off his own health train this guy has the good sense to deactivate his weapons from time to time he can also throw numbing mist which is an item from cainhurst which prevents healing and finally he's very good at interrupting your attacks and since he's as strong as he is his visceral attacks are usually game over for this fight i tried using poisoned knives to kill him i tried using blue elixirs to sneak my way towards him and i tried to use my own quickening to match his aggression but ultimately the only tactic which worked for me was to go back to basics and interrupt as many of his attacks as i could for some of that sweet visceral attack damage now that he's dead i can relieve eileen of her post as the hunter of hunters and get what i consider to be the best oath rune in the hunter's room this thing increases the speed at which stamina regenerates by six percent that might not seem like much but it it really is the old thrones in the base game are impurity which we got from walter which gives a two percent health increase during co-op corruption which i'll get from annelise later which gives a continuous heal effect of plus one near death radiance which we get at the end of alfred's questline which increases the amount of health each individual vial will heal us by and hunter which is the one i'll be going with for the time being out of these four only radians and hunter are actually good and considering stamina is regenerated passively and serves a function for healing via the rally mechanic i consider hunter to be better than radiance there are very few times where i would have really wanted to have had more health but very often do i find myself wanting to have that little bit extra stamina there are many times where i'm just about to finish an encounter but find myself getting fatigued and unable to get the job done times where i know that if i just lasted a bit longer if i had just been able to gather up some extra amounts of energy i would have performed much better but there are also times playing bloodborne where i want faster stamina regeneration a few minutes ago i said that yahar ghoul might not be everyone's favorite area and i want to return to that point a bit if you map it out this is among the most impressive levels in the game in terms of sheer size enemy placement integrated environmental challenge and visual design though that is subjective but there's a catch attached to this place which is that it has arguably the worst enemy design once you consider the core gameplay now i'm going to refute that argument a bit because i think it's needlessly harsh but first i'll just go over it early enemies here respawn if you don't kill the bell maidens so in each encounter the player's optimal strategy is to ignore enemies and go for the bell maidens first the issue there is that once the enemies have been skipped to fight them usually means you need to run backwards and if you don't want to do that at that point anyways maybe you can also stomach not going for the bell maiden in the first place so instead of doing the challenge as you're supposed to you just wind up running through the area additionally since there's no convenient shortcut to the boss once you've gotten to the level's end once you're probably just gonna rush it if you die and finally on the streets leading to the one reborn we have enemies who can attack from a distance who deal massive damage and who like to attack in groups the worst solution to a souls area lacking difficulty is to crank up the damage values and increase the threshold for enemies being stunned that much i can get behind but that isn't what is actually being done here i disagree with so much of the assessment of yahar ghoul being a poorly designed area because i think although it is cranking up the values and incentivizing the player to run through this place still has craft to its warrants noting for one attaching the numeric value increases of the enemies to the bell maidens i think is a brilliant touch it forces players to assess combat a bit differently and leans into bloodborne's ability to have placement be more proactive than in souls in souls once you got fighting an enemy you needed to be the one on the move to optimize your footing if a large enemy were to do a big attack you would want to roll out of its way rather than block to conserve some stamina but before counter-attacking it would have been fruitful insoles to first make sure that your new position provided you with enough options in case you needed to roll again shortly in this sense enemies very much set the rules of combat since you would figure out your optimal placement by observing their behaviors and estimating your best options from there in bloodborne you have so much added mobility that you can for the most part reposition yourself anywhere on the map when fighting an enemy so when you decide on an engagement the enemy is following you rather than the other way around and the bell maidens capitalize on this this area with the choir member corpse holding the key to upper cathedral ward is a good example if you're really greedy you can fight the buffed huntsman's minions but the bell maiden was positioned upstairs where i needed to roll off a cliff to meet her at this point in the level players should be familiar enough with the respawning enemy gimmick that they know brute forcing their way through here isn't the optimal strategy and since the room with the upper cathedral ward key is in the center of the area and since the loot glowing from the key on the corpse highlights it players are asked to think a bit before venturing on as for the more open areas the bell maidens are a pretty clever inclusion as well the arnamites are not fast enough to pursue you if you both to the bell maidens so their placement ahead of them isn't really meant to be a combat encounter but rather an obstacle course which tests your timing and precision going backwards to kill them after making them weak is then just a way to collect some easy blood echoes as your reward and the respawning enemies which all urge you to play fast are doing so for a reason running makes you miss details until it's too late like how there's an amygdala which can fire a laser at you the path of the laser isn't straight and the laser's lingering trail in the ground blows up on a delay so there's a little developer resistance to ensure that the player can have a safe spot on the stairs if they're observant enough a big part of the yahar ghoul hypokian jail map was made available for players to explore after they got kidnapped by the snatcher earlier and the new enemies and scenery will make players appreciate just how drastic the happenings of the menses ritual are since when they arrive to the street leading to the advent plaza they'll have proper context for how that area was supposed to look the cell area we awoken when the snatcher kidnapped us earlier was called typogen jail g-a-o-l is an old-timey way of spelling jail and hypogen means underground so that area was literally the underground jail where the kidnapped jarnaments were held the game does not go into explicit detail on the ritual but we know some stuff it was fueled by bodies and probably necromancy and an ominous choir singing came from the advent plaza this is the area where we could teleport from yahar ghoul to the hunter's dream earlier but the lantern has been broken now assumably by the ritual hunters there are three hostile npcs in this area who assumably broke the lantern to make sure that no one could interfere with the menses ritual and while i deal with them i'm going to talk a bit about menses the school of menses is an offshoot of birkenworth controlled by mikalash and they seek to gain an audience with the great ones although they are not the main villains of the game they are the final threat we come to face and it is ultimately them who bring the admittedly decimated corpse of the city to its knees the damage done by the healing church was almost certainly unrepairable but once menses is done the city is done well you know in lore at least the latter half of the game has an iffy convergence of the game on screen and the story it's telling than the beginning hat thanks to the changes to how maps work the red moon used to work similar to how the inside mechanic used to work like demon souls is world tendency the red moon would trigger a global variable which every level would check before being built by the game and once true each level would know to change the sky box to incorporate the red moon change the lighting from the game's usual to red and would swap out every human enemy for beasts and every beast enemy for larger beasts i wonder if the false sun in dark souls is on orlando used to be a much more pronounced feature at some point which got scaled back and from was attempting with the red moon to reintegrate that idea here our old nemesis last minute change from dynamic maps the static ones is why the red moon is a bit underwhelming under the microscope but the visual splendor of getting to this place and seeing all the horrifying happenings is still a really good moment i think since we're able to see this area before the red moon came we have a frame of reference for just how insane everything is and since the game doesn't really incentivize the player to return to aldarius they probably won't figure to check whether the red moon is now omnipresent like it's supposed to be in the story which like i said earlier it isn't while we've been running around killing bosses in the background there's been a turf war brewing between the game's separated factions i noted earlier that the key to upper cathedral ward was found on the corpse of a choir member which seems to indicate that menses has some plans to assault them well had some plans to assault them before the ritual fried their brains and mummified their bodies menses controlled the unseen village and they are the ones who sent the thummerian snatchers around to kidnap yharnamites while the healing church tried to use blood transfusions to elevate humanity to the next stage of being which caused yharnam's downfall and the church to lose its power and the choir tried using their connection to a british and the lost land of east research the cosmos and instead of blood transfusions try to ascend by creating kin and where master willem seems to have gone a bit loony trying to elevate his thoughts to ascend menses his approach has been guided by their discovery of lauren and their connection to the amygdala as is evident by the statues menses built of the amygdalas in the unseen village they intend to have an audience with a great one as a means of ascension and specifically they intended to use the third umbilical cord belonging to mergo the child of the old sumerian queen yharnam as the medium to facilitate the meeting with cars who would make this happen for them later on mikalash will ask cars to line his brains with eyes he did not have the three courts needed for ascension so it seems he was unaware of that stipulation rather he seems to think rom's vacuousness occurred because ram was not enlightened enough as a human in this sense mikalash is not too far from willem but instead of meditation mikalas just reaches out to a great one and asks it to give him the insight which will let him ascend the name mensis comes from latin where it means month and it is usually used in the context of menstruation the lunar cycle is roughly a month in length and considering the heavy matriarchal themes of the game you might think there's something to the idea of menses trying to use a ret moon to gain audience there was a note left in bergenworth which went when the red moon hangs low the line between man and beast is blurred and when the great ones descend a womb will be blessed with child and this note is an example of bad translation because it should go more like when the red moon draws near the boundary for man becomes vague and the great ones appear and then we bear our children and the two things the translation got wrong here was the meaning of bearing our children and the meaning of the boundary for man becoming vague when the japanese text says bear our children it doesn't mean this is when ladies get pregnant it means this is the time we hand our children off to the great ones ariana's pregnancy coinciding with this event is probably just a coincidence as the game establishes that urton had been writhing around inside of her even before the red moon editor's note it was writing this part of the script where it finally clicked for me where the messengers we encounter come from mass child sacrifice enjoy and that part about the boundary for man becoming vague does not mean that the red moon is when birgenworth believes men become beasts but rather that it is when men's limitations are removed and they can elevate their thoughts the bergenworth adage we are born of the blood made men by the blood undone by the blood in japanese reads more like the blood is what makes us makes us human makes us human no more and the idea there seems to be that thumerians might originally have been beasts which were fed blood to transform them into thumerians to serve the great ones in the chalice dungeons old blood makes people moldable and maybe the great ones guided the transition from beast to thumerian and that using the old blood now without any celestial guidance is reverting people back to their true beastly form the reason for the mental collapse during the red moon is because it's kind of like the old blood except for the mind the old blood makes the body moldable the red moon does the same for the mind if the old blood is a formula in an injection the red moon is like a formula injected with rays the appearance of the red moon signals the arrival of the great ones this is why menses sought to bring it up out as this is when the great ones turn up for them to be communicated with knowing as much and wanting to reconnect with mikalash who has been stuck in the nightmare for some time menses conducts their ritual and upon connecting with mergo their brains are fried many of the menses corpses we will find leading up to mikalash will be shackled indicating that this ritual wasn't necessarily something everyone agreed to embark on regardless it went through and the petrified corpses of the arnomites in this area are a testament to the powers which menses unleashed a lot of my time in yahar ghoul will be spent fighting so i'm gonna talk a bit about the enemies here specifically i wanna talk about the cramped caskets these things are wonderfully designed in that in spite of their immense size and placement as late game enemies they aren't hit sponges they are very easy to stun lock but they make up for it with a large health pool which is easy to drain your stamina trying to empty they deal a respectable amount of damage and can lock the hunter up if the players are careless enough in fighting them also they take damage from the burning corpses in the area so you can always just try to abuse that if these guys are giving you too hard of a time in the early game there were a lot of coffins and caskets strewn around yharnam which had been chained shut and it's entirely possible that these things in lore terms at least emerged out of those caskets seeing as they are attached to caskets on the bottom you can find these enemies in chalice dungeons where they don't have the caskets so it's possible menses duck them up from there locked them up and distributed them throughout yharnam in case they ever needed a scorched earth approach to war in a specific region their internal name is mimik so maybe the original idea was even that the player would open chests and caskets and these things would come out of them like the mimics in dark souls the streets of the unseen city are very wide and zigzagging is enough to deal with the range attacks from the cramped caskets so they are skippable but since they drop some respectable blood gems it might be worth the blood vial investment to take these guys out although the balancing and math under the hood are a bit complex the theory underpinning player progression in these games is very simple as is the reason players tend to stay within the expected level range of a given area players have natural defenses tied to their levels as well as strengths players upgrade their levels to see those numbers go up simple enough the balancing is something fromsoft probably figures out from play testing but they are assisted in that players are more interested in progressing than they are in over leveling themselves yahar cool is a good enough source of blood echoes that theoretically i could stick around this area and grind out as many levels as i need to become vastly overpowered for the game to come if i put this into a formula i could even reason that this would be a wiser strategy than going to the next area since the added levels will go some ways to keep me safe in them grinding is a pretty smart insurance policy but players don't do it unless they are really struggling with an area because grinding is not as engaging as going through the next area would be and this little quirk of player psychology goes a long way to keep the game's challenge somewhat balanced all throughout if you're over leveled in an area you have no reason to grind so over a playthrough the game's rising difficulty will likely catch up with you if you're at the right level you'll probably retry the current area rather than go back to grind only when you are under leveled is grinding blood echoes a more appealing option than venturing forwards bloodborne does not utilize any dynamic difficulty scaling like making enemy levels rubber band near the players to ensure that the challenge is maintained all throughout this makes bloodborne a more easily digestible game in replay terms since you'll have a pretty good idea of what each build will be able to dish out in an area but there is still something to be considered here the optimal path through the game and the optimal path to a certain build are not the same thing and since the game emphasizes progressing through the game rather than through your builds unnecessary difficulty spikes are going to crop up simply because players opted in and out of the most optimal choices to reap rewards later what i'm saying is since the game front loads certain weapons and since it does not dynamically adjust itself to the players bloodborne is not as good of a game for every build demon souls and dark souls had major balancing issues for their magic classes but the players still had those classes accessible from the beginning if the restrictive early game in bloodborne was a way to rectify the need to balance builds to better match the game's difficulty spike that is overpowered strategies are not as front loaded as they were in souls then i think bloodborne hits the dragon to the wrong horse since we can directly compare souls and bloodborne i'm a much bigger fan of optimizing the game around builds than optimizing the builds to map on to the game if that means certain early game builds are going to be able to coast for some time then so be it i'd rather bloodborne gave me an overpowered arcane build against the blood starved beast way back when then an underwhelming arcane build against the bloodstart beast and yes i know that experimental enough players have found a way for every build to be somehow viable from the start but those examples actually prove my point rather than refuted if you are familiar enough with the nitty gritty of the game you can fetch yourself the right weapons items and buffs and be overpowered in no time the problem with the idea that this is a solution to compared to sol's limited early game build variety is that those strategies are reserved for players deeply familiar enough with the game and those strategies also break the game's difficulty curve without offering the average player access to more builds so if the restriction on build variety was placed to ensure a smoother difficulty curve it didn't even accomplish that note that in my example of arcane build versus blood starved beast i didn't say i wanted an overpowered arcane build rather than an underpowered one i said overpowered rather than underwhelming magic and pyromancy built in dark souls 1 were not fun because they made the player overpowered they were fun because they shook up the playstyle and asked players to see the game from a new point of view those builds delivered to the player an experience rather than a good difficulty curve and i think this approach to looking at these games goes a long way to explain what can be so magical about them i don't want this video to be too tempered in negativity but i think it's important to include in the bloodborne conversation not just what we liked about the game but also which elements we think could have been better that's a subjective conversation of course so it's going to fall on miyazaki to decide what is and what is not good feedback i'm not entirely sure many people saying the same thing means the feedback is good especially since we might not necessarily be attracted to the game for the same reasons so i'm gonna leave it up to you to decide for yourself if we like the game for the same reasons bear in mind that i don't think you liking it differently for me in any way diminishes your appreciation of it you're allowed to like the bloodborne you play just as i'm allowed to like the platform i play the boss of this area is the one reborn and surprise surprise it's one i consider to be a total knockout it borrows the boss room layout from the tower knight fight from demon souls what with projectile enemies being stationed above and the stairs to set projectile enemies being located in the far left and far right behind the bars seeing the bell maidens in the cutscene prior to the boss also pays off the preceding areas since we know these gals like to add an additional challenge to the enemies we're fighting meaning the bell maidens in the unseen village were a tutorial for the boss which is another reason to like them this boss leans into the player's improved mobility from souls has interesting hitboxes has what i consider to be a good boss arena i've laid out my standards for what i consider to be the hallmarks of a good boss fight in these games already my affinity for this guy should not be a surprise the internal id name for the one reborn is half baked devil which might give some indication to this thing's function many of the id names are carryovers from old builds so we can't reliably use them for lore but the idea of this thing being half baked indicates that it is an incomplete devil whether that means the menses ritual was trying to construct an artificial great one by maybe using the craft they honed making craft caskets or their knowledge of the bell maidens summons is unclear as is much of this boss considering menses obsession with cause it might be that this was an attempt to resurrect it so that they could have the audience they wanted but that's purely speculation in the end it might be that the one reborn is just a massive group of bodies reanimated with necromancy now that i'm able to access the final area in the game i'm going to go back to do all of the optional stuff starting with the chalice dungeons i know for myself that i've spent many hours in the chalice dungeons but these are among those elements of the game which really suffered as the development went on their original pitch had them be tombs underneath the arnhem city itself which players could prospect and upon doing that would uncover the truth that humans and thumerians are the same that is still their function but i think locating their entrance in the hunter's dream causes a bit of a disconnect the chalice dungeons are a sort of dream memory which is how we are able to fight enemies which are long since dead that reasoning makes it smart to have these things in the hunter's dream since these aren't actual tangible places anymore but functionally it separates the dungeons from yharnam geographically and makes it a bit harder than it should be for people to connect what the narrative ramifications of these things are they are completely optional so it's not as if you couldn't skip them anyway but much like the hunter's nightmare dlc i find these things to be very important to interact with to understand what's going on in this story as is players mostly go through the dungeons to get early access to some weapons and to farm bloodjams the dungeon we're currently in first became accessible right after i killed the blood starved beast but since it's optional i decided to hold back from doing it up until now throughout my time playing bloodborne i have spent an inordinate amount of time in the chalice dungeons there was a time shortly after the game released where my life basically revolved around going to school and then coming back to knock some of these out and having played them for such a long time i've come to think that the chalice dungeons embody the best and worst aspects of bloodborne in many ways the best is obviously seen in the strength of the core gameplay earlier i said that the basic map for progression in this game was to navigate an area and fight its eventual boss that's the layout in the dungeons as well but it's much blunter than it is in any level in the game the dungeons are impressive on a technical level as the game has the know-how of how to rearrange and assemble the dungeons many chunks to manufacture new ones but compared to what we see in the rest of the game the level design is pretty pathetic it might impress on an initial visit but once you've gone through the areas a few times you'll see just how much the dungeons are recycling themselves computers are not quite at the level where they can compete with artisan level designers but even then i still think the chalice dungeons feel good to play which goes back to what i said about them showcasing the strength of the core combat i can't go through more than one of these at a time anymore since i'm very burnt out on having played them as much as i have but that i've spent as much time with them as i have says something about the strength of the core gameplay that it can take detours into relatively comparatively unimpressive levels without killing the experience outright another component of the game we can put under the microscope by looking at its implementation in the chalice dungeons is the game's approach to storytelling the dungeons thrive on environmental storytelling more so than anything else but considering their structure this might be seen as a missed opportunity the fixed dungeons the ones which are actually telling a story relevant to the main game are called fixed because there is never any change when we connect to them every enemy is located the same in every area and every item is as well the missed opportunity i'm talking about is that the dungeons don't have any notes spread around they could have been left by npcs talking npcs are also a non-feature in the chalice dungeons just saying these could have been left by npcs to give the players some lore to these areas i think that something as simple as that or having the dungeons be entered in yharnam city could have gone a long way to help players connect the dungeons mentally to the happenings in the main game something i will note about the chalice dungeons is that bloodborne's usual hesitancy on attaching traps to the enemies so that players can rally goes completely out the window here since the areas are randomizable that means pitfalls arrow shooters rolling boulders and guillotines are all standard practice here more so than being a creative decision or a decision made to have the dungeons congealed with the core the setup gameplay because it's easier to have a chunk of level which has a trap in it be accessed and located by the game than it would be for the game to be able to generate ambushes and the like i said earlier that players don't like grinding as much as they do progressing so if an area is giving them trouble they'll probably retry it rather than retry an old one to beef themselves up for future encounters that being said the chalice dungeons are a great way for the player to take a break from the main game and just grind out some levels alternatively if dungeon crawling is in your forte ritual material sells for pretty respectable raids and a single playthrough of the game usually has a few level ups available in the random ritual material you find strewn around if you've never interacted much with the chalice dungeons you might be surprised that there's still a thriving online community around them players have mapped them out pretty extensively so if you want to ever experiment with bloodborne builds learning about the best glyph or items gems and blood echoes is pretty accessible now in a sense the online fan base has sort of created a tomb prospector covenant outside of the game now in retrospect i'm sure that if from software had had all the time and money in the world they would have found a way for tomb prospecting to be an actual covenant in the game but as is fans have really stepped up and i think the online ecosystem surrounding the chalice dungeons is actually the most engaging bloodborne covenant to interact with even more so than the actual in-game ones this success story really goes to show how much players can bring to a game the chalice dungeons are also i think the best places for co-op in the entire game once you get a few layers deep these things can actually become quite extensive and difficult to navigate and having to work together with a friend introduces a new kind of challenge to the dungeons which goes a long way to keep it engaging in spite of the repetitive areas you'll excuse me if i'm repeating myself but i think all it takes for an old area to become interesting again is the introduction of a new challenge one which is interesting enough for players to actually have to reassess what the area is i talked a bit about this in terms of what covenants can do for the single player since they could theoretically introduce global challenges which have players reassess their path through the world a bit and in the chalice dungeons there's a lot of little shake-ups and optional challenges which i think helps my argument that covenants could be one way of varying up the game i noted already that bloodborne decided to not include any of hp lovecraft's monsters and instead went for their own pantheon but actually that's true for every other horror enemy as well the vileblots are inspired by vampires but they have a lot of unique quirks to them and don't really engage like you might imagine vampires doing there's no garlic no bats or smoke no luring or perversion of the innocent same thing with the beasts in yharnam they might evoke the imagery of werewolf movies but they aren't functioning on werewolf logic sure they are a representation of man's struggle against this inner beast like the werewolf used to be but functionally they don't show any weakness to silver and transformations aren't connected to the lunar cycle well until the red moon hits but that's a whole can of worms on its own and i'd actually argue that the red moon is very much its own concept similarly the eye collecting hacks aren't quite witches the giant boars seem to come out of nowhere the huntman's minions aren't quite mr hyde you get the idea if bloodborne were to ditch the gothic aesthetic but maintain the entire story i doubt people would even make the connection between say bioblots and vampires because their functions are so drastically different going back to our talk on vermin these things are said to be the root of man's impurity in this game and they are juxtaposed internally against the phantasms i said earlier that phantasms are connected to arcane but more specifically we might even say that the phantasms are to vermin what great ones are to humans because the phantasms seem to just be the vermin of the great ones an eye full of vermin is the eye of a blood drunk hunter an eye full of phantasms is the black sky eye in the forbidden woods we saw humans who were being piloted by the mass of vermin within them and enemies like the brain suckers are the exact same phenomena but they are piloted by the giant slug phantasm in their heads in the old hunter's dlc we saw two new build paths introduced with the milkweed rune and the beast's embrace rune and those specifically are arcane and beast builds in the chalice dungeons this divide is shown in the juxtaposition of ailing lauren and ease one is a sand devoured hellscape full of beasts the other is a transcended almost ethereal plane full of kin the vermin phantasm divide is an expression of a very big theme in the game which is stagnation versus transcendence willem and lawrence both wanted to evolve but willem stagnates trying to elevate his thoughts and lawrence evolves into a beast so in a sense he devolves the earliest bosses in the main game are all beasts but the final ones have an affiliation with the great ones or are great ones stagnation originates in deep filth like i noted earlier with the theme of flow it's poisoned water which houses maggots and that becomes stagnant blood which houses vermin in contrast phantasms and the great ones come from the cosmos from the dreamlands if the sky and the cosmos are one then the great ones literally come from above like rain like a waterfall like sunlight like all of those good forces which are the source of vitality i could go on listing examples but the point is the divide between stagnation and transcendence permeates almost every facet of the game but the twist is that there doesn't really seem to be a quality difference being made about the vermin and the phantasms brainsuckers and snake-infested humans both suck they are both human corpses which are piloted by something else i'm jumping ahead into the dlc to talk about this but the guidance rune might specifically be making the point that beasts and kin are kinda the same thing i'll go more in depth on this later but guidance was the rune which ludwig acquired from the holy moonlight sword it is constructed from threats of light and it gave him calm in the middle of hunts represented in game with it increasing rallying potential but the guidance rune might actually just be an incomplete or alternative version of the beast room check it out so maybe ludwig just got half of a glimpse of beasthood and it deluded him or maybe beasthood and celestial guidance are motivated by the same forces what ludwig saw might have been the image of celestial guidance as the rune gives the impression of someone stargazing but this divide between looking at the sky and becoming a beast is awfully familiar right willem and lawrence the choir and menses phantasms and vermin ascension as birkenworth understood it might have been a dead end all along and it seems like lawrence understood as much before the end but i'll talk about this some more when we pick up the third chords the next optional area of business will be upper cathedral ward upper cathedral ward is my favorite area in the game largely because of the environmental design and the way it marries yharnam's gothic visuals with the lovecraftian technical stuff and since this is a from software game i suppose a talk on fairness is in order and this is as good a time as any two-plated to lay the groundwork i'm going to establish that there's a difference between a game being fair and a game feeling fair and that for the most part the miyasaki era fromsoft games have done a really respectable job of being fair but their often obtuse nature and unconventional design ethos can make them feel unfair to players not familiar with them everyone listening probably knows the feeling of getting mad at a remote when it doesn't do what you're telling it to and that sort of anger is often produced by these games as well it is infuriating when a tool doesn't do what it's meant to but as anyone in tech support would tell you all too often it is just that the people operating the tool are using the incorrect mental software for the task and when the tool doesn't do what they want they get mad at the tool rather than rethink their approach if your idea of an action game is one wherein button mashing is enough to get by then bloodborne is going to feel unfair because you are operating on the wrong assumptions likewise if you've been conditioned to not worry about death because checkpoints happen every minute or so again dying in bloodborne might feel unfair because you are operating on the wrong mental software the term get good is often used as a mostly fun-spirited insult to players who refuse to engage with these games on their own merit but mocking or not it does contain at least this much truth most of the time the screw-ups are the player's fault and not the games now that's not to say that the games are never unfair i don't think any game can be play tested enough for random unfairness to be completely erased but as long as you engage with these games on their terms they are immensely beatable that said there are some carryover motifs which players have been complaining about for a long time which i have varying degrees of sympathy towards for one bloodborne is all or nothing you don't get to cancel an attack once you've started it so if in the last frame before an attack starts a new piece of visual information presents itself players will just watch as the hunter screws themselves additionally outside of locking mobs out of paws arenas there's no real attempt made to leash enemies to make them act fair it would be possible for the game to check how many enemies are akroed on the player and then only allow say the three closest to them to actually attack and make the other enemies circle around the player waiting for their opportunity that way the game would give the player more of a fighting chance but from software it does not seem to be interested in doing that this hard dedication bloodborne asks of the player's inputs is also emphasized by the copious amounts of auto saving it does once you die the game can not register it fast enough so if you try to shut down the game and reload your last save point you're almost certainly just going to load right into the you died message now i understand not liking this approach to game design but to argue that bloodborne being more dedicated and more punishing than conventional games is a mark against it to me seems completely ridiculous since these games largely got big because they offered players exactly what the triple a's didn't challenge like it or not challenge is core to the identity of fromsoft's games and as someone who's played dark souls with mods can attest to removing it makes the games almost fall apart if you have access to dark souls on a pc i genuinely recommend installing some easy mods just to see how much the heavy penalties are doing to prop these experiences up i'm not going to host a talk about the validity of adding difficulty modes in these games since that's a needlessly toxic conversation for some reason but i'd like people who are interested in that talk to consider how much of the perceived difficulty is because of the damage values which can be scaled and how much is because the player isn't engaging on the game's terms and then consider that without fundamentally altering these games identities to conform to convention the latter cannot be modified without adding a lot of dev time to each release a similar [ __ ] to the dedicated heavy penalty combat is the heavy penalty which is often attached to exploration it is possible in these games to get yourself into a dead end with an army of enemies in tow and what often happens there is that one of the combat systems shortcomings is revealed that bar some lucky placements it's unable to handle many mobs well in tight spaces under no conventional circumstances can the player utilize the invincibility frames they gain from rolling to clip through an enemy and so the player will often be destroyed by an army of weak foes simply because enough of them grouped together attacking the player out of sync will lock the player in recovery frames and offer them no chance to begin their own attack again this sort of frustration seems to come with the territory of being a game players need to dedicate their decisions in it might feel unfair to be locked out of fighting but if you had been more tactical had had the foresight to not go running into tight spaces without knowing where they led those sorts of deaths are almost entirely avoidable once the player adapts to the game's terms most challenges they face will not fall into the category of feeling unfair but it's interesting to think about how much the role of agency affects the player's sense of fairness if i died because i hit the wrong button that's on me if i died because the enemy locked me out of movement that's unfair such seems to go the conventional argument at least another culprit people often point to in the fairness conversation is the unreliable lock-on especially as it relates to bosses many bosses are able to escape the lock-on by zipping around the area fast enough the player's axis of movement is locked to the angle the camera points to and i think that if players actually got to test what it'd be like to have an enemy jump across the arena without the lock on braking they would lower the temperature on this argument a bit imagine rolling into a certain direction only for the entire angle of action to swap mid button press and you might get a good idea of why the lock-on brakes are done i agree that they aren't the most elegant solution but i think they are better than the alternative i just described a better point in regards to lock-on is that boss fights should always lock on to the boss once the lock on is triggered pressing the right analog stick is how you trigger the lock on but if there is no enemy for it to gravitate towards then it simply centers the camera behind the player that is a tactic no one has ever intended to use in the middle of a fight and furthermore when the player is trying to get a lock on during an encounter boss or mob if the game fails to register it and just centers the camera it can be a death sentence centering the camera is a mechanic which i think these games would be wholly better off ditching it's never useful and often lethal puritans might argue that this makes locking on more skill intensive but considering some of the quality of life improvements we've gotten from from software over the years that argument seems like a non-starter to me i don't think there's any good reason for this mechanic to be maintained going back to my point about separating unfairness and the feeling of unfairness it seems like players intuitively expect the game to read the intent behind their actions and that when it doesn't players get upset that's the feeling of unfairness genuine unfairness however is when you roll away from an attack but still get hit because the hitboxes were acting weird or dying to poisoning mid-heel healing is not instant in these games so even after you've triggered it poison might still drain your health to zero before you get the benefits what stings especially hard about this is that even though you don't get the heal the blood vials still often count as being used so there's a disconnect which always comes out at the player's expense but when it comes to fairness players often neglect just how much the game is trying to benefit them anyone who thinks these games are unfair should consider what they would look like if they really intended on unfairness being the protocol i'm currently fighting the celestial emissary and once i'm done with him the book on the choir is pretty much closed after killing the emissary we can sneak our way through a window and orlando style to get underneath the altar of the grand cathedral down there we get to the altar of despair and meet ebriatus the choir managed to obtain the east chalice which allowed them to communicate with the creatives and by studying the kin which littered ease the choir were able to dedicate their experiments menses does not have access to a chalice and so they cannot have audience with a great one so easily the whole idea of fear the old blood our eyes are yet to open was that using the old blood was dangerous because humans had not elevated their thoughts enough the choir seemed to have understood that and they agreed with willem about this but lawrence thought he was ready and we know what happened next menses more so follows in the footsteps of lawrence except they seemingly don't even bother with the experimentations they just go straight to the great ones and demand to be evolved if we consider that the willem lawrence ideological split is recurring in the choir and menses then it should be no surprise that menses are making things horrible while the choir are basically becoming ineffective nothings which rot their brains trying to meditate too much where willem watched the moon and search for enlightenment the choir make contact with the sky and hope to be granted enlightenment the make contact gesture we got a few minutes ago can be used to get exactly one rune or a madman's knowledge if we already have the rune and nothing else in the game which i think is a bit of a missed opportunity i wouldn't want any playthrough to require me to have to constantly stand stationary for as long as it takes in me to perform the action but i can also see that attaching more interactions to this gesture could have made for an easy way to deliver lore outside of item descriptions i already said that i like it when unconventional mechanics or clever uses of mechanics are used to handle narrative and this meeting with ebrietus was one such opportunity menses not only did not have access to a third court mercos is in the nightmare and they couldn't get there but they also showed no regard whatsoever to willem's warning mikalas assumes that rom's vacuousness was due to her ignorance as a human meaning he would have been aware that ascension had taken place therefore it's easy to connect that he knows you need a cord for it but instead of luring the great ones with the offering of children menses conducted a mass sacrifice to bring on the red moon and the rest of this story you already know in closing out on the optional stuff in base game bloodborne our next heading will be kanehurst castle purely in terms of fan love per mileage this area might be the best from software has ever done what made it into the game is around half or so of what cainhurst was meant to be and it's possible that at some point in some build cainhurst was actually meant to be a mandatory part of the game the visual design of bloodborne was influenced a lot by movies the most important ones i figure being francis ford coppola's bram stoker's dracula the brotherhood of the wolf and g goku from g goku we get some of the visual design of the fishing hamlet from brotherhood of the wolf we get clothing some areas and maybe the idea of an outsider coming into a place where a beast is a problem and from dracula we get the fashionable and flowing clothes we get the menses cage helmets and we also get the thumerian character design funnily enough cainhurst which is inspired by dracula's castle down to you getting an invitation by letter like jonathan harker in that story and likewise being pulled to the castle by a carriage might actually have more in common with the 2004 hugh jackman vehicle van helsing ever since it released i've had a soft spot for it and if you want to see the idea of a transcode wearing monster hunter using trick weapons to confront werewolves vampires and other assorted gothic supernatural phenomena in movie form then i'd recommend checking it out it's not a masterpiece or anything but it's a personal favorite without going into spoilers the confrontation with martyr logarius is very reminiscent of the third act of that movie where the main trio uncover a secret passage in a castle leading to the wintry final showdown i consider canehurst to be the ultimate culmination of the bloodborne we were promised in the beginning the game sets up aspirations of a gothic action rpg and going off of that players might naturally expect the final level to look something like what we get here while i really like that bloodborne takes the alderitz twist i am happy that we also get a payoff to the setup from all the way back while the layout of the castle isn't the most involved the game has on offer i like it all the same because i think it's a good narrative set piece instead of vampires cainhurst was occupied by vile bloods who much like the arnamites are actually just like old aristocratic thumerians whose blood is less deluded as they've assumably been inbreeding or something going by some of the visual designs we see in the chalice dungeons there was seemingly a point where the sumerians ward amongst each other and the losing factions was driven to the surface that faction would found cainhurst as is evident by the corpses of the dead to marians wearing the fluted armor set which we also see in the portraits hearing cainhurst the cultures we visit in bloodborne are all very matriarchal and it probably has to do with the interactions people have with the great ones thumerian women are able to carry the children of the great ones the children are all stillborn but this is seminal enough of an encounter that it organizes the entire civilizations around the women who can carry these children so although the cainhurst sect and the would-become yharnam's act diverged both wind up being matriarchal because that's the mold which best congeals with the reality they find themselves in they pick for themselves queens who will carry the offspring of great ones i repeat that point because it'll be relevant again soon the contemporary story of knurst almost reads like a copy of the story in yharnam when lawrence was experimenting with old blood he ditched his fellows in bergenworth and came to cainhurst the vileblots all appear much closer to the thumerians than the yarnamats did and that's because lawrence reintroducing them to the old blood reawoke the latent sumerian traits in them again we can see portraits of a man who has eerily circumstantial apparel linking him to lawrence on the wall so his association with the cainhurst nobles by all accounts seems to have been in good spirits he liked them they liked him or more specifically they liked the blood he brought them and when cainhurst had their own version of the plague of the beasts well they just sent their knights to work dealing with them as for lawrence the blood kept flying that is until things started falling apart back in yharnam and lawrence realized he needed help from a great one lest yharnam be destroyed by the beasts lawrence spread the word that the blood in cainhurst was forbidden and that it threatened the purity of the yharnam blood then lawrence got the executioners to siege cainhurst and slaughter everyone there they could some vileblots escaped by hiding in yharnam but as is made evident by the number of corpses and ghosts in cainhurst this was a bloodbath and from queen annelise lawrence got a dead infant great one which he used to lure the moon presence you know this story miyazaki likes to cannibalize his work a lot so old ideas which he couldn't get working in one game or in one build tend to show up in subsequent ones dark souls 3 seems to have originally been the story of the end of the world and how fire's numerous resurrections had destroyed it if alden ring turns out to be the story of people turning to ash because the law of the world had been broken if it includes a woman who upgrades your levels phenomena in the sky which fundamentally alter the world state at some point and if it includes strange marriages or contracts between god like beings and humans and if there's an area where stagnant water houses some sort of filthy creature don't call me a prophet call me a man who sees trends i theorized that the sun in anor londo was supposed to be much bigger of a feature in that game and that it was originally supposed to be reintroduced here with the red moon but the impact of the red moon was so massively reduced in this game that dark souls 3 tried to reintroduce it by having an eclipse happen at one point which was supposed to be when the age of fire canonically ended prior to that game getting re-written sakiro's entire plot seems to have been cobbled together from bloodborne's leftovers down to the whole story being propelled by a mysterious disease having corpses animated by insects imposter yosefka being remixed for dojoon and the sculptor having been amputated which seems to be a carryover idea from bloodborne where german is missing a leg the sculptor was amputated to stop shura from awakening within him german was amputated because beasthood travels up the right leg i'm not saying miyazaki lacks creativity though quite the opposite he often has too many ideas and because these games are iterated on as they are designed to the extent that they are they are not as internally consistent under the microscope as they might otherwise have been and they also tend to each include iterations on themes which the last game didn't fully deliver on i'm not making any predictions on elden ring here i'm just noting how these games are made and it's not exclusive to cut content i've already noted how many of the npcs in bloodborne are brought over fairly unchanged from dark souls which brought them over fairly unchains from demon salts but cainhurst itself might be fromsoft's heist of the century the ghosts in this area are pretty much carbon copies of the ones from dark souls new londo right down to their behaviors some come at the player with knives some scream in the player's presence and lure the other ones to them also new londo in dark souls connected to the valley of the drakes so if miyazaki was playing through that area when he was getting ideas for this place i imagine that the lost children of antiquity the gargoyle enemies here might have been pilfered from the drakes in dark souls valley all this area would need to click into place would be an enemy reminiscent of new londo's dark wraiths but it seems like the better angels of miyazaki's nature got to him in time jokes aside though i really like it when this sort of remixing is done right and i think it really works for what k nurse is going for ghosts might not be the most original solution to how to fill an area which is supposedly empty with challenging enemy encounters but they get the job done the ghosts here are docile until you start to loot their stuff so anything they deal out to me on my go through here i well and truly deserve the reason i'm pillaging this place knowing i'm just making it harder for myself is because the k nurse loot cells for a good amount of blood echoes and i wanted to hatch for the boss ahead if logarius proved to be too difficult i wanted to have something to sell to get a couple of levels considering i was about 20 levels lower in this run than in the test run i did when i mapped this whole video out luckily for me the level design is helping to make my robbery go smoother knurst is a very interior heavy area so it's one of the best examples of the restraints which the combat placed on the level designers to make the game tolerable to play areas are much wider than they were in souls and the camera is better at not getting snagged on the general clutter in levels additionally the camera feels like it's better at giving you the angle you want because i repeat myself it's not as bad as the dark souls and demon souls cameras were getting snagged on stuff what makes miyazaki's devotion to every now and then include weird platforming challenges in his games interesting is not only that the movement in his games at this point was incredibly primitive with no real mechanics devoted to interacting with the environment such as mid-air jumps or let's grabs but also that the presentation format is going against him i've had this theory for a while that the industry-wide shift from platformers towards action games as the de facto model for what a video game should be didn't just occur because players got older and wanted more quote-unquote mature games and because consoles got powerful enough to render some enemies but also that it happened because the display standards were changed the worldwide adoption of the more cinematic white screen over the formerly standardized and more intimate 4x3 aspect ratio meant that the camera in video games was better at showing the player their immediate environment than it was at presenting elevation 4x3 was the initial format because film stock is naturally in the 4x3 aspect ratio widescreen came about when cinema attendants began dropping in the advent of home televisions as hollywood wanted to differentiate movies from tv shows games may have had their first life in the arcades but console games were designed around the display parameters of television not cinema which meant 4x3 which i theorized to have given platformers the edge over action games combat usually happens on flatter terrain than platformers do and the display shake up from 4x3 to widescreen might have artificially capped platformers ability to fully utilize the camera just like how the original 4x3 aspect ratio capped action game's ability to fully utilize the camera it's possible of course to place artificial bars on each side of the screen to simulate older aspect ratios but that's not intuitive and because the widescreen format gives unnecessary attention to the player's sides that's where the player's eye for environmental awareness will be drawn rather than to higher elevations if you're a designer play testing a game you're making in widescreen you might get drawn to the site and might begin to wonder how to make use of that space rather than block it out to better service the platforming assuming you're making a platformer in the first place if i'm right and that's the natural impulse game developers might have just accidentally felt they needed to have something of significance for the side view to impart to the player and so might have been enticed to add some enemies around to get an idea of what i'm saying imagine if bloodborne's horizontal display area was capped and you had to design a game out of this does this look like a game where you have the player maneuver elegantly through open areas to fight hordes of enemies or does this more intimate presentation maybe make you expect a game that is more claustrophobic in nature does this bloodborne still look like an action rpg or does it maybe look more like a survival horror game i know how it makes me feel but i'm genuinely interested in hearing people's thoughts on this theory of mine it's interesting to think about how much the presentation can impact design but since i'm fighting martyr logarius i'm going to stop this widescreen talk because i need all of the visual information i can get the martyr logarius boss is a controversial one because he employs so many of the tricks which players are sick of i noted some earlier when we discussed unfairness versus the feeling of unfairness but the whole breakdown of logarius goes he's able to break your lock on he can get to elevations to do plunge attacks at you faster than you can track him in the air manually his attacks try to trigger the player's reaction too fast by lying with their anticipation frames here and there he has ways of reaching the player at every distance so there's never any down time and finally he's so aggressive that the player kinda needs to swap over to their faster weapon variant all of this cumulative attack he employs makes him come across as immensely unfair but individually i don't think any of this is too much for a boss to have if i have an issue with the way logarius is designed it's that the cumulative effects of all of his moves makes him break the player's expectations of the core combat that is to say bloodborne is a game where you position yourself and the enemies and logarius is the only encounter where that is not the case he seemingly alone has more mobility than you do and so the framework you should bring into this fight that is to be responsive is not the same as you have going in any other part of the game so while logarius is actually not that difficult i do consider the game not prepping the player to have to change up their approach to movement to be poor game design it's one thing for a boss to be executionally difficult it's another thing entirely for a boss to be conceptually difficult all throughout you've been playing one sort of game and just like my example of people asking a tool to do something it's not designed to players get mad when the game is changed and they aren't told they might be fighting well under the metal framework employed in the rest of the game but since it's not applicable here and since players aren't told this much they get upset pretty quickly you can argue whether or not that's just how fromsoft makes logarius a more satisfying boss to defeat but you cannot pretend as if people's animus to this boss does not reflect poorly on the way it is set up all that would really have been needed was for there to be a note or npc outside the boss arena which said something like logarius was known for his mobility even the greatest fighters were forced to follow his lead if they wanted to last in the ring with him then immediately i think players would have appreciated the shakeup to mobility he brought just goes to show that communication is often the difference between fairness and the feeling of unfairness another example of bad communication in this boss is that as you can see in phase two bullets bounce off of logarius but because your eye is so focused on him you might not see the little bounce effects which they do if you ever felt like you should have gotten a parian but didn't now you know why that might be the crown we get after killing logarius is likely a holdover item from when he was the king of cainhurst rather than its destroy lore wise cainhurst is probably the messiest area in the game because it's where so many lore problems are stapled together i already talked about how the executioners are on arm of the church the misconception that they were foreign mercenaries came from the item description of the executioner's gauntlets but there are things here which go much deeper than being misunderstandings in lore there are things here which are genuinely baffling logarius for example is clearly a thumerian his visual design says as much as does his weapon of choice in the chalice dungeons we can fight the elder thumerians who utilize similar weapons as legarius does and how it came to be that he was the leader of the church's executioners is a bit of a head scratcher and analyses a whole bag of worms on her own for starters there is unused dialogue in the game for her where she is voiced by evata muradasilova who voices the doll if you consider that this might have been a mandatory part of the game and that analysis helmet is there to hide something that was meant to be a big reveal that she was the real inspiration for the doll makes a lot of sense the doll is taller than the player because she's based on a thumerian woman this would also explain the doll's attire as it is very cainhurst-based and this would also be how the crow of cainhurst nbc would have connected to german's old disciple since it's clearly a hunter with a connection to cainhurst in addition to recycling his old ideas miyasaki likes to use the same idea more than once in the same game if you've ever wondered why lawrence and mikalash have the same background as old students of willem the same trajectory as defectors who created their own organizations and have the same goal it's because they were originally the same character the model for lawrence in the cutscene where he talks to willem about the birgenworth adage that model is actually mikolaj keep this in mind because it's a topic i'll be returning to later the vile blood covenant obligates players to search for blood tracks whose item description reads the vile bloods of cainhurst bloodlusting hunters see these frightful things in cold blood they often appear in the blood of accophenes that is to say the blood of hunters queen anneliese partakes in these blood drax offerings so that she may one day bear the child of blood the next vile blood heir the idea that drex appear in the blood of those who hunt might be that those who are tipped closer to blood drunkenness are going to have these things writhing inside of them which might make their blood more potent the japanese name of the blood tracks is more like corrupted blood and corruption is a big theme in the vile blood covenant the image of the blood drugs evokes sperm cells and the idea of these things impregnating annelise with a child of blood might connect somewhat to vermin that much like how vermin can form inside of a person organically the madness of blood can give birth to a new life form which anneliese is particularly suitable to carry maybe because of the transformations she endured from consuming the old blood if annelise herself was born that way it might be that this is how her peculiar type of immortality came to be now that i have access to anneliese's throne room and the altar of despair i'm going to finish out alfred's questline i like that this quest asks players to go to different places in the world i know that things here just sort of fizzle out but considering the competition this is a pretty good bloodborne quest all things considered the hunter's dream being the choke point of all warps means we have to contend with some loading screens so i'll be editing this portion of the video to be a bit more palatable and as much as i like having a hub like the hunter's dream i'd be lying if i said that there weren't times where lantern independent warping would be preferable the reason this stuff is all attached to the hunter's dream is because you are supposed to grow a mechanical dependency on and appreciation for it that might be fine on paper but in play it has some unfortunate knock backs aside from the prolonged loading screens because of the hunter's dream the world map is broken up with every level up and the extent to which it's mostly a seamless affair is not emphasized as much as the respectable job done here might merit if players were as independent in bloodborne as the bonfires in dark souls 1 made them in that game i imagine that bloodborne would have gotten more praise for its world design i've talked about how i don't think it necessarily gels as well with the way bloodborne tells stories as the world design and demon souls and dark souls 1 did but it's still mostly a respectable piece of tight level design all throughout something alfred's quest showcases is the difference between what a quest can be and what a quest maybe should be i'll talk more about this when we go into the dlc but what i'm saying is advancing alfred's quest asks the player to change their approach to the game rather than the quest itself being conveniently mapped to how the player goes through the areas already there is certainly some value in a quest like this since it is a way for the game to get the player to revisit old areas meaning some extra value can be squeezed from existing levels but i wonder if those sorts of quests would maybe be better if they followed the model set by eileen's where the finale takes place in and out of the grand cathedral with a player not having to warp around everywhere to complete it alfred used the summons i gave him to reach anneliese and he's destroyed her i'm currently taking her flesh to the altar of despair where she can be resurrected so i should talk a bit about a breitus ebrietus is incorrectly labeled as daughter of the cosmos the great ones cannot have children so the insinuation that the cosmos bore her which people in and out of this game like to connect with cause is incorrect the japanese name for her is ebriotes musume which can be translated as daughter or as maiden which is why the rasmarines description the rasmarinus being the signature weapon of the choir who founded breitas why its description reads a special weapon used by the choir high-ranking members of the healing church sprays a cloud of sacred mist created by using blood imbued quicksilver bullets as a special media aryas are heard wherever sacred mist is seen proving the mist is a heavenly blessing o fair maiden why is it that you weep that fair maiden part is a reference to visually ebriata's might have been based on the description hp lovecraft gives to cthulhu in the call of cthulhu lovecraft describes it as a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers a scaly rubbery body prodigious claws on hind and forefeet and long narrow wings behind alternatively she has some similarities to the pisacas from dark souls as it relates to combat visual design wise abrid is his greatest strength is that her numerous tentacles makes it a bit hard to read her animations and because she is so big it can be hard to dodge away from her when she starts her attacks because most of the time you'll just zoom into another part of her body and get hit by the full brunt of what she throws out at you if you're not careful i'm able to get some good hits on a breitus's head with my vertical overhead swing but even that much isn't enough to drag me over the finish line in my first attempt of the fight so i summoned an old friend my defenses aren't high enough that i can afford to eat the blows from her as much as i do so i'm wasting a lot of her attack recovery frames healing with vials rather than go in for the rally recovery i also got hit by a breitz's charge attack a big threat in this arena considering there's no pillar or rupple for the player to hide behind and because apreitis can perform heavy hitting arcane attacks which if you aren't situated quite properly in the start of the attack it can be really hard to dodge i noted the app and flow of boss bosses way back and breitas is a boss i think is well designed for the correct levels if i approached her less greedily i would have ended up saving time on the run since i wouldn't have died like an idiot but because i knew i could brute force my way through this i did just that it's interesting to think about but if this boss would have been harder or if the path towards her would have been i probably would have had a much smoother go of it because i would not be making as many unnecessarily risky moves i know that sounds like i'm coping from the obviously bad display on screen but oftentimes finesse is a question of patience more than anything else you ultimately do need to decide when is a good time to deal damage you can't just dodge the bosses and hope to make it through silent hill style but because i'm not really having that hard of a time and because it's not that difficult to get back here taking every strike i'm offered is not as dumb as a strategy as it seems on paper at least it didn't feel so dumb in the moment if i were under leveled for this encounter i would have played it much safer but because i knew i could eat the hits i decided to just try and get it over with as fast as i could rather than prolong it any further than i had to plus i already made martin logarius lugisi by eating so many hits to display that bullet's bounce off of him so i'm not too fussed about people thinking i'm bad at the game when from software gets to making dlcs it seems like they hone in on what the base game did best and double down on that to the emission of seemingly everything else what made dark souls 1's oola seal expansion interesting progression was is that it was locked behind that game's lord vessel you need a dependent from the crystal golem in the duke's archive to get to it and the reason for that was that it was incorporating elements from the base game which players needed to have a grip on like the darkness from the tomb of the giants but also because the player needed to be able to warp in and out of it that was that the dlc's biggest issue and it's something which bloodborne doesn't do once the player has the eye of a blood drunk hunter they can get to earthen's chapel and go into the dlc when it comes to considering the changes to the game's mechanics i'm not really a purist in any way i recognize that some mechanics do some things better in some situations i've set my piece on how warping fractured the experience somewhat but this is a case of it opening the experience up the beginning of this area very much is in keeping with what we saw in the beginning of the oolacile expansion an area from the base game has been remodeled to be in keeping with an older version of itself and serves as the entrance into the experience oolacile actually had a boss prior to that section in the sanctuary guardian bad details details what artorias did better from the get-go was the placement of elizabeth she was a mushroom npc placed early into the dlc and she filled the player in on the details and gave players their heading we will get such a character in simon and boy does he elevate the entire bloodborne experience but it's not right away like it could have been so we're going to be a bit aimless until we open up the shortcut from the little bridge area back to the lantern artorias also had new enemies which built on the pre-existing lore to fill out the map with some even being the ancestors of the ones in the base game and that approach returns here we have the beast patience from old yharnam which immediately tells players that the healing church is up to no good but we also have the old hunters way back when i talked about how because bloodborne does not force the player to ever upgrade a single stat it's in the spirit of things that the difficulty threshold of the late game be balanced to allow unleveled characters to win challenge is core to these games so they play better when the player can take that challenge to its extreme but what that means is that the difficulty scaling cannot break the fundamentals which unleveled characters have going for themselves the old hunter's dlc has the strongest enemies in the game power some chalice dungeons but every enemy here must be clearable by the weakest version of the player for the game's sense of fairness to be maintained the entire combat system is predicated on the stamina bar so to balance out this area fromsoft would have needed to prove it is beatable by a character with the base stamina regeneration speed and stamina size that means there is probably some universal minimum safe frames coded into every enemy for the player to be able to deal damage without getting hit themselves if that's so then the universal minimum save frames for enemies can never be shortened every enemy here must have them but in absolute terms this is also the only component of the enemies which cannot be tuned around their damage values can go up their defenses and health pool the same and actually when i say the minimum safe ramps can't be dialed with i mean dialed down it is totally acceptable to use the anticipation period of an enemy's attack windup animation to bait the player into dodging or trying to get a parry in early and we can see that approach used a lot in the old hunters we made meet their attacks seem to be a bit delayed from their wind-ups and they also have bigger health bars tighter defenses and they just hit harder i've never come into the dlc without these guys providing a good challenge at the minimum so i think it's safe to say that this area was designed to be the last one the player went through before closing out the game in the hunter's dream the artorias dlc remixed the best of the main game's levels to provide the tightest dungeon crawling experience in that game seriously the olaseal run plays almost like the demon souls level it did have some optional paths here and there usually leading to dead ends but for the most part ula seal was very tightly directed it didn't lean on complex level design as much as interesting environmental design to stand out this is one area in which i consider bloodborne's dlc to be a step up mapped out artorias was two somewhat open areas the royal woods and the chasm of the abyss connected with a mostly linear tunnel in oolacile township the old hunters opens on a linear level which is arguably as complex as anything in artorias though and it opens to two back-to-back interconnected areas and there's a lot of smart applications of miyasaki staples when it comes to contextualizing progress miyazaki really likes to merge space and time into one in his games and that's how this dlc is laid out every area is a bit further back in time and the context we are provided with to make us advance is that there is something in the history which caused the curse the curse being embodied by the tainted moon in the sky the astral clock tower was a big focal point of the base game's level layout so it makes sense that reaching it is the objective here the moon is the most prominent feature of the skybox wow the moon and the clock tower shows up everywhere and since you're aware of this game's legacy of having a thing in the sky change to trigger a change in the world it should not be a surprise to see this moon theme reused in the dlc the curse of the hunters originates from this nightmare and is embodied by the tainted moon if the player manages to kill the orphan of cost then the curse shall be lifted and the hunters will all feel a weight lifted from them i consider the contextualization of progress in this dlc to be the most interesting miyasaki has yet thrown our way but more than that it's interesting specifically compared to artorias because the happenings here are actually neat to know information i like the artorias dlc a lot but it does not tell a story which the game falls apart not telling the old hunters however answers so many questions left by the base game questions like who was german's apprentice where did the doll come from where did birgenworth get the court to ascend rome what did the healing church's experiments look like whatever happened to lutwig and furthermore whatever happened to lawrence you know the main villain of the entire story bloodborne is incomplete without this dlc in a way dark souls just wasn't without it and it was likely because fromsoft knew they were going to do an expansion they were actually going to do two expansions but they merged them together into this that they felt confident saving up some of the main story to be used here so much of what we're seeing here is not so much a new story rather it's the missing piece to the puzzle it has a lot of retcons in it but even those mostly fit right into place with the rest of the game speaking of the rest of the game the returning areas mostly are changed up a bit to play on the players familiarity with them players should know how cathedral ward is laid out so from software was able to drop those muscle-like rock formations on it assuming players have the wherewithal to open the shortcut back to the starting lantern likewise in the darkened house near the cleric beast where we killed the wheelchair-bound jarnamite near the beginning of the game there are now explosives to punish players who think they're clever attacking the wheelchair man unprompted there are also fights with enemies who throw delayed molotov cocktails which play on the familiarity with them from the base game so the player needs to rethink how they approach a fight where these are employed suffice it to say fromsoft put a lot of work into making this dlc challenging without making difficulty the point much of the hardship here is brought about simply by the players once again being asked to go to the fundamentals and play cautiously if i had to pick a single point to celebrate about the design of this dlc it's that it wisely raises the stakes by varying the kinds of encounters rather than the difficulty of the encounters it would have been very easy to just litter the area with hard enemies but taken on its own nothing here is really that big of a step up from the base game the encounters aren't that much harder rather the framework around each of them veer into unknown territory so players have to swallow their late game pride and go back to basics the giant executioner's axes get after effects once they buff themselves and that's an unknown element the gatling gun hunter likes to retreat to his dark cave and not knowing the layout of that interior makes it an unknown the beast hunter outside of gilbert's home has jump attacks which makes you be cautious because what else might he have there are many more such cases but i think this point is made the dlc also manages to almost solve the problem of the limited early game built variety the introduction of the beast's embrace and milkweed runes open up what you can do with your character and since the dlc is accessible right after the game's first chokepoint boss has been defeated you almost have a clear sailing to make your character branch far off right away i say almost because the difficulty here is scaled to the late game and because the runes are locked behind some of the game's strongest bosses ludwig closes out both but on an extreme you'd need to actually complete the entire dlc if you want to get really into arcane with the parasite of course the beast's embrace rune is a bit more accessible but a bit more accessible than the parasite of cos is still not my idea of accessible i talked about how the entire dlc would have been balanced around the smallest stamina bar and slowest stamina regeneration speed but i haven't really talked all that much about stamina as a mechanic so rallying and blood vials function as a means of guiding the combat experience to be desperate similar to how style meters in action games set the tone of the conflict in them i've said this much already well the stamina is in complete opposition to conventional character action games those often have bars fill up when the player performs successful hits which the player can empty in exchange for some poon a stronger form or something like that bloodborne technically speaking has that in the form of the beast blood pellets which are admittedly consumables but the draining stamina means players are not even given an option for endless combos you need to do get out every fight has to be a slugfest regardless of how good you are at the game in souls the action was mostly directed by the stamina bar your ability to defend yourself and attack enemies in those games was predicated on your ability to make smart tactical decisions on which was the right option at what point here the stamina's role is massively reduced but it still serves some important functions it puts a cap on our ability to stun lock enemies since each hit drains a bit of our overall stamina and it also asks us to be a bit economic with our dashes i wonder how much play testing went into proving enemies for low stamina players movement wise and i also wonder if that is the reason we have so much more mobility than every enemy but logarius rather than that having been a creative decision in its own right it might seem like from software actually always intended for the player to be as ridiculously mobile as they are here compared to the preceding games but game design is very often just a decision between two compromises and if you've never programmed a game you might be surprised by just how much of what makes it in is actually just a close aggregate of what was intended i'm opening up the shortcut to the lantern now so it's time to talk about simon simon i noted serves a similar purpose in this dlc to what elizabeth did in dark souls's i also noted that i think elizabeth's placement was better because she gave the player their heading right away and i maintain that that is true i actually think simon being tucked away like he is is sort of a cool hook since it makes him appear more mysterious but regardless having him at the start would probably be a better way to direct this experience i've used eileen as an example of what i consider good quest design considering how bloodborne plays and i really like her but when it comes to pure craftsmanship i think simon kinda blows everyone else out of the water and i'm not sure it's even close i know i'm comparing apples to oranges here but seeing an npc which is so well integrated with the natural progression of the game is a really pleasant sign simon will teleport to meet us on our journey so encountering him is organic not tied to going through two loading screens to meet him and two loading screens to get back to where we are in the game like it is for the dwellers in urden chapel simon tells us that there is a secret which the church wants kept and that if we choose to advance we might discover just what it is the dlc and the main game are these sorts of eldritch mystery stories but only the dlc had the good sense to actually frame its narrative as such from the get-go and continually hammer home that that is the point if the main game had had an npc to continually drive home that the player is supposed to be uncovering the mystery of the menses ritual i imagine it would have played much clearer and i know that it used to work like that because dana miners have found that mikalash used to fill that role in an earlier build he would tell the players to go to bergenworth and at some point he would go crazy and summon the red moon after that we would eventually chase him in hemwick remember how i said hemwick was once where you built your character where he would jump into the ocean which was illuminated by the red moon and he would become the boss of the nightmare of menses there was also a build where the narrative was propelled by the players searching for their friend lawrence no relation to the lorenz of the healing church as is to quote channel friend and bloodborne master richard pilbeam the narrative propels because doors unlock and instead of having a consistent npc who anchors our experience to a specific thematic vision we go from one npc to another in hopes of figuring out what is going on simon is not any more complex design wise than a character like eileen but i like him more because he does that thing we talked about earlier his story is adjusted to the way in which the game plays rather than being a story which asks the player to conform to it to go out of their way to uncovering it in terms of the material rewards which you get for completing it simon's quest is not nearly as valuable as alfred's or eileen's but because he is so much more convenient i'd wager that players see his story through more often i repeat myself but some games excel at some things and not other things and it is very rarely a good idea to lean on a game's weakness to prop it up unless you really like dialogue bloodborne is bad at making the player invest the time the loading screens take to warp them to the cathedral ward lantern to access the chapel dwellers eileen and alfred what bloodborne is really good at though is keeping the player tunneling deeper into its levels so it makes more sense for npcs to travel with the player rather than ask the player to backtrack to meet them might not be as realistic but it plays better and playing well usually matters more than realism usually not always my apologies to anyone watching if the darkness makes it hard to keep track of the action if i want to maximize my damage output i can't be holding the torch and since i didn't buy the little lantern from the messengers in the dream you'll just have to tolerate this for a little while longer it's sort of been the holy grail of from soft games since dark souls 2 reneked on this promise to have areas with such immense darkness that it forces players to actually have to select between using shields or torches bloodborne's darkness is not as deep as dark souls once could be at dimes so this isn't as big a gameplay mechanic in this game either i think the problem with promising these sorts of areas and always pulling back on them is that the idea of trading this ability for defense or in the case of bloodborne offense feels incredibly grating as a localized challenge it's not really in the spirit of the way fromsoft does things to make sure players have the choice since picking up light sources is always optional but i think this idea is tenable not necessarily in an area of a game but rather if it was a central mechanic to a game much like how the pistols are here if the entire game was built on the idea that the players would be periodically trading visibility for safety then it would probably come out better in play testing than i imagine little areas like the one here do dark souls 1 flew closest to the sun when it came to delivering on this and as time goes on i've noticed more and more people have come around to the idea that the tomb of the giants is actually one of that game's better levels so i think we might get more experimentations with this in the future either from from software or someone else but as is we make do with what we get in general it seems like environmental challenges flow better when players are responding to them in the moment rather than when they need to fundamentally alter their approach i like both but stuff like responding to jira targeting us with a gatling gun and all jarnam goes uneasier for most players than being challenged to rethink how to play another one of those challenges which we get a lot of in these games are areas which deal status ailments bleeds and poisons have on occasion been incorporated into environments to redirect the player's approach to be something more cautious but for most of their presence they serve as little more than an inconvenience almost like they are trying to justify the creation of antidotes rather than making antidotes because the player needed a difficulty release valve once confronted with poison bloodborne like many crpgs often leans on stat management as a means of containing the experience so many of its mechanics seem brought over because of convention rather than because they made sense often the experience is guided by putting the stats under the hood but since bloodborne's most significant mechanics are presented visually many of the hidden mechanics like serrated vs righteous damage go missed by many players as it relates to status ailments the purpose of poisonous areas and fromsoft games seems to be to make players map out a path through the islands of safety in the poisoned liquids in practice areas which inflict status ailments work best when you make yourself pretend like they are a problem because the poison is never serious enough that you can't just take the damage if they were they would feel very unfair because the player might not immediately understand the solution to their problem and dark areas can feel very similar if you don't know the solution those sorts of areas can feel more like meat grinders than challenging levels and dying here feels unfair because you didn't feel like you made a mistake if jura killed you in old yharnam that was fair game you had all the time in the world to test out his line of sight and make decisions on advancing but status ailments are just a clock ticking down to your death and darkness is just a way for the designers to rob you off the visual information you need to make good decisions both kinds of areas might make an excellent hook if they were more central to the experience of the game but as detours they often come across as slogs to get through i sympathize with people who dislike these sorts of areas but as i've noted before i'm kind of a fan of when games willingly grind against their cores to deliver something a bit different so i always kind of like these dark areas now that i'm in the dlc i'm going to be shifting up my build gradually by replacing my serrated weapon with the whirligig saw which will also have great strength scaling and my current strength weapon ludwig's holy blade is gonna get traded for the real thing because of its arcane properties the area right after also gives me the black sky eye and the milkweed ruin and although i won't be using those a lot i'm going to fetch them because i've more or less exhausted what i can say about my current setup what's funny about arcane and this always felt like an afterthought to me is that it's a magic system which draws on quicksilver bullets just like the pistols do it makes a certain amount of sense if you consider that a shared energy source means players will likely devote themselves more to one utility and therefore this makes arcane builds somewhat distinct but early builds of bloodborne had an mp bar so this didn't always used to be the case i've noted miyasaki's love of fumito ueta's eco and the reason we know about this is because he has cited that game as the reason he quit being an account manager for oracle and took a pay cut to enter the game business and the philosophy which fumito ueda is best known for is minimalism ueda has described the construction of his games like the pruning of trees where non-essential elements get cut in order to prop up the significance of every other element we don't know if the decision to remove the mana bar was made to align the game with the philosophy of miyazaki's favorite game designer but consciously inspired by ueda or not this line of reasoning might still have been what made the cut happen that a bar should not be in place unless it is going to be used by more than one build so that there isn't any unnecessary clutter on screen if you've ever played dark souls 3 you might remember that the mana bar there was also used to fuel the weapon arts which were available for every build it's also possible that the mana bar was removed because it just didn't play well or because it was never intended to be used and the one data miners found was just a placeholder until the quicksilver bullets were implemented in any case i like the setup as is conceptually but find it to be a bit hit or miss when playing balancing magic has always been a bit problematic for these games since magic just seems to not want to be integrated into the core combat which you know fair enough but as janky as it is here i gotta say when the arcane build starts rolling it's a really fun build with a ton of great options not much to say right now about what's coming but note that the snail woman falls from above throughout this dlc we've been following a river of blood it started out as comparatively understated but at this point it's become the central visual of the environmental design the upcoming fight against ludwig is based on the buddhist hell as is much of this expansion a central tenet of buddhism is the idea that life is suffering and that in the cycle of resurrection all creatures are made to suffer forever except if they obtain enlightenment incidentally bloodborne's story is literally a cycle unless you're able to ascend to the next stage of evolution and leave behind everything that made you you the buddhist hell is where those wicked in life are sent to be tortured by demons and the blood river flowing through the nightmare is here to give the image of a hellscape because it originates from ludwig's boss arena a strong theory is that ludwig himself is based on meizu a horse-faced demon whose role it is to punish the wicked in hell as well as to guard it from within so if someone were to make their way to the entrance to hell and try to escape mezu and his ox-headed friend gosu would be the ones to send that prisoner right back into hell a role which ludwig feels ludologically since he's the big stumbling block to anyone attempting to reach the core of the nightmare the way hell works in buddhism is that in life you accumulate karma and your stay in hell will reflect this karma with each realm getting progressively more horrifying and you having to stay progressively longer in each your karma weighs you down and the path you take in hell is determined by that weight on the sun tzu river there are three paths to cross and your path is determined by your karma threshold and unlike christianity there's no priest to alleviate you of sin or last minute confession buddhism goes all in truly it's the dark souls of afterlives the fight against ludwig is one of the toughest in the game so the corpse banging on the gate outside will drop five blood vials every time he's killed just so the economics of retrying this fight aren't as steep as they are for many other bosses i've made my metric of a quality bloodborne boss known already and i've also made it apparent that i'm a normie so surprise surprise this is my favorite fight in the entire game it does a lot of things right considering what i like about bosses in bloodborne but more than that it ties the gameplay and narrative together in very interesting ways i already noted how he's lootologically what blocks the inhabitants of hell from escaping but there are lore related happenings under the hood here which make the fight all that more interesting like serrated weapons only deal extra damage in the first half of the fight because ludwig awakens from the beast hood in the second half when we first see ludwig his horse head seems to be almost paralyzed and lame and the arcane mouth i had to the side seems to be the active head the intent with this fight is that ludwig is torn between beasthood and his humanity and that seeing his sword is what awakens him to his senses the fight is one of the fiercest in the game and it really capitalizes on lutvik's insane physiology without ever coming across as unfair if you get behind him he'll do a back kick which makes sense because he's a horse his charge attacks are easy to dodge if you can see them coming and his jump attack is also quite manageable once you've seen him do it a couple of times the optimal strategy in the first half is to fight him like you would any other beast so fire and serrated if serrated is an option which it isn't for me because my holy blade is much higher upgraded but the second half of the fight i find more interesting because his visual design becomes the biggest hurdle if you think of him as a giant horse monster you can trick yourself into reading his attacks wrong the point of the mid-fight transformation is that he's no longer a beast so you should look at him as you do any other giant swordsman ignore his back kicking legs they aren't active in this phase don't worry about his charges or jump attacks those are gone as is his arcane spewing second head and the paralyzed horse head now has a determination on its face i noted a line from miyazaki a while back which went the urge to transform into a beast is in conflict with the basic sense of humanity we all have that humanity serves as a kind of shackle keeping the transformation in its place the stronger the shackle keeping that urge to transform in place is the larger the recoil once that shackle is finally broken the results cause you to transform into a larger creature or a more twisted one the struggle between these two urges is one concept here you see that pretty clearly with the beast characters designed early on especially the cleric beast which serves as their icon of swords that connects with the idea that the cleric is really the most fearsome beast of them all the cleric beasts are just beasts who kept a lid on their beast hood for a while longer and that because they held on the eventual transformation was all the more horrifying for it this is why bosses like vicar amelia are as horrifyingly large as they are following that line of thinking ludwig must have held on longer than anyone else in the game because man is he not just the most horrifying design in the entire game in the amelia fight i talked about how characters at certain points are shown to be able to push back the encroaching beast to it gilbert has a cut line from a cut quest where he rejoices that he's been cured amelia clutched the pendant gascoigne heard the music and ludwig is reawakened once he sees his guiding moonlight after he's been defeated ludwig will talk about seeing threats of light which is the guidance rune whose description reads a carol rune discovered by the old hunter ludwig along with the holy moonlight sword boost's amount of life recovered by rallying when ludwig closed his eyes he saw darkness or perhaps nothingness and that is where he discovered the tiny beings of light ludwig was certain that these playful dancing sprites offered guidance they could empty ludwig of his fears at least in the midst of a hunt this fight almost made the point that beast hood could be conquered from within but unfortunately because it's set in a nightmare we don't know if ludwig actually is a beast which manages to wake up or if this form is just the punishment which the wrath of cause doles out to him he was a man who slaughtered beasts so now he shall become a beast with slaughter's men and without the guidance offered by his sword lutvik shall be absorbed by the blood drunkenness and evolve into a monster i think ludwig's last minute recovery is one reason he is so beloved in the community but i'm not going to pretend that the moonlight sword isn't a factor down these stairs we have our first encounter with braedor whom i'll talk about later but since i've talked the big game about how the simon encounters were all well constructed i should note that i'm not a fan of how inconsistent the quest advancing triggers are in the dlc simon appears near ludwig's head if you warp to the hunter's dream and back which i don't think is bad design since most players would probably do that anyways to cash in their echoes but he didn't actually appear for me so after three failed warps i decided to cut my losses and move on this also happened with adeline's quest and i had to cut out six minutes of myself just warping in and out of the area hoping to have the game register that her quest should advance people celebrated dark souls for how npcs wouldn't always be at firelink's rhine and that it made them feel like independent agents in the world rather than utilities for the player but seeing this here i wonder if the engine is just bad at telling npcs to load where they're supposed to load rather than this having been a creative decision funnily enough simon appeared on the very next load of the area so i will be talking to him near ludwig's grave later but i want to make note now that the encounter happens organically for most players i've talked about how this nightmare is a linear walk back in time and it goes missed by some that this battle arena is the interior of the grand cathedral i know it didn't click for me in my first go-through that what we're seeing here is an earlier version of it from the one we met lauren's in earlier i'll be able to ascend this area right after dealing with these two npcs i could actually skip them but that's not really in the spirit of things the implication with the bets is that the healing church was once overburdened by the amount of patience it got and that facilities like the altar of the grand cathedral were hastily made into chambers to keep these patients i could separate the two npcs by going back down the stairs into the cell area but that is not really in the spirit of things either because the black clad lady is using ludwig's holy blade i'm going to illustrate how the elemental buffs were erroneously coded into the game whenever i've applied fire paper to one of my weapons i've been giving it a flat 80 point damage increase enemy defenses or susceptibilities have then done their jobs of either lowering or increasing that damage in its transformed mode the best thing about my current weapon is that i can lock enemies in recovery frames this mods have already said but the slow swing speed means that if i had a faster weapon the buff would actually compound some more because it's a flat 80 point increase regardless of weapon mode and that damage is not adjusted for each weapon's swing speed faster weapons get more buffs why does this warrant mentioning observe each individual hit the white clad lady takes from the whirly gigsaw has a damage buff applied to it because of the fire paper and the damaging increase is hardly adjusted for the attack speed the whirly kick saw can perform way more attacks per second than any other weapon i've used thus far and each one of those little shreds is getting the fire paper buff this is such a stupid weapon but it's so good and if it was upgraded as much as lutvik's holy blade is right now this would have been way more impressive the statue on the elevator is of lawrence who has clearly styled his get-up on willem bloodborne uses environmental storytelling more liberally than its souls predecessors likely because the ability to render more detailed environments just naturally made the developers do that like with our talk earlier on widescreen and action games but even so its story is more difficult to piece together one big reason for that is that the game actually expects you to link the fact that things like the hunter's rune being found in the chalice dungeons is significant rather than just texture reuse after raising the elevator underneath it the altar is revealed where we can find lawrence's human skull which isn't actually his real skull but seems to rather be the manifestation of his lost humanity which is kept away from him in the dream and its location on the altar connects to how his actual beast skull is in the same place in the waking world i'm going to devote quite a bit of time to lawrence before this video is over so trust me that this is important to keep in mind for now however we need to talk to simon in the underground corpse pile to advance his quest and then get to the research hall i've already talked at some length about miyazaki's recurring theme of flow but water in and of itself is notable here because it seems to be a barrier between humanity and the great ones in some capacity it seems like it's an important step to ascension and so we saw willem meditating by the lake and in the research hall we come to see patients whose heads have been surrounded by water in an attempt to make them have insights into the cosmos another place water is seen is in the lock shield which can be looted from this area and the lake carol ruins lock is just an old timey way of saying lake and it's a great way to defend yourself against arcane attacks and the lake runes all give some sort of damage reduction as well the great lake runes description reads a secret symbol left by carol runesmith of birgenworth this transcription of the great one's inhuman voices ripples like a watery reflection this rune means lake and those branded by it enjoy augmented defense great volumes of water serve as a bulwark guarding sleep and an auger of the elder rich truth overcome this hindrance and seek what is yours and it should also be noted that after defeating ram the moonside lake at bergenworth teleported us to yahar ghoul and that in yahar ghul we could find giant water carrying urns which we could use to teleport water is the barrier between worlds in this game which explains why you get an animating water texture when you're summoning and the idea with the patients in the research hall is that they are submerged in it constantly to allow them to have audience with the great ones the research hall itself is probably the most intricate interior area in the entire game its design seems to be iterating on demon souls valley of defilement what with enemy corpses falling from above into the little pool near the base of the pillar connecting and supporting the stairs as well as dark souls's duke's archives with movable steps reorganizing the entire level layout another example of miyazaki cannibalizing himself to great effect the enemies spawning in the pool isn't as dynamic as the leechmongers boss arena since the enemy corpses aren't once we kick down but rather are spawned in the very moment the stairs erased but it's still reminiscent of that area's gimmick and i like that it was revisited here as for the duke's archives that level always felt kinda half faked to me so i'm really happy to see that concept delivered on as well as i think it is here these stairs in the beginning of this level direct the player for what the rest of it will consist of that is going up and the sprawling nature of progression makes the level a bit difficult to wrap your head around i think the generous shortcuts in changing map layout go a long way to make this a level players want to visit but the enemy design i also like and that's actually true of the entire dlc i think the enemy layouts are really strong here if we isolate the enemy talk to the game's mandatory portions then there's a lot of overlap maybe more than you realize on an initial playthrough most of the enemies introduced in central yharnam in the beginning are mainstays throughout the entire game like the huntsman's minion the carrying crows dogs yharnamites and skirts beasts each new area has at least one new enemy type introduced but since the old ones tend to show up again there's a really strong sense of cohesion the exception in the main game is the nightmare of menses but since that's a nightmare it doesn't really matter and here the same logic applies it's really commendable i think that the enemies are as cohesively located wheelchair bound yarnamide in the tower to upper cathedral where the site but i really do like that once the loss of reality around us gets shifted the developers allow themselves to get a bit more expressive in what enemies we're fighting as it relates to the main game the cohesion links back to what i said about bloodborne being the most localized miyazaki game that is the enemy variety has to justify its existence in vicinity to the rest of the enemies but even in the optional areas it's more than just the same enemy models appearing often there seem to be archetypes which get repeated as well much like yharnam in the beginning the fishing hamlet will have dogs and giants and villagers and many chalice dungeon enemies seem like reskins of the enemies from the beginning as well think how the merciless watcher looks an awful lot like the huntsman's minions in lore this is because the introduction of the old blood is reawakening yarnamides to these same archetypes as it did to the sumerians so yes the huntsman's minion is literally a callback to the merciless watcher but ignoring cannon for a moment this might have been a design consideration incorporated into lore rather than lore which was economic to realize in enemy designs probably these sorts of enemies just congealed the best with the core combat which explains why they were largely brought back in different forms when it came time to do the dlc admittedly it might be that the dogs and villagers we encountered in the fishing hamlet are actually built on top of the standard villager and dog enemy object and that the similarities arise from there the team already had a script for villagers patrolling the town with a dock so re-skinning those villagers and dog to have fish-like features and reconfiguring the patrol script for a new map layout might have been easier than assessing the parameters of the combat and building a new enemy from the ground up a common complaint about the enemies in bloodborne is that they can be a bit generous with the player's time bloodborne is faster than souls and because of that expectation when enemies waste your time it feels more grating than i think it really is i'm of course talking about unescapable grab attacks and our extensive recovery animations and it's not just that the player wants to be fast the game's rally mechanic is constantly directing them to be fast once you learn to rely on the rally mechanic it can be pretty infuriating when enemy attacks stun you since it eats into your window for recovery but in the grand scheme of things those irksome moments i think are to the game's benefit it may not be fun to be knocked down in a game so dedicated to speed but having to change up your approach even into something objectively less optimal gameplay-wise can do a lot to keep the player on their toes repetitiveness kills engagement so it's been standard practice in this industry to have the player be constantly stimulated by something different to break things up in the moment players may not like having to wait out an opponent's attack animation but the alternative would quickly drain the player's focus something is inconsequential as a no risk jump puzzle in the middle of a path is enough to keep the player from going on autopilot and having to prioritize dodging a time-wasting grab attack rather than just going in and attacking can shake up the player's mindset just the same going back to the nugget of information i talked about earlier which incidentally comes from our sister industry gambling human beings become more addicted to unpredictable rewards than they do predictable ones seemingly this is because the anticipation period automates itself when you know what you're getting and why to be fully immersed takes a degree of uncertainty which can be simulated somewhat by randomness changing things up and betraying the players expectation every now and then can do a lot to keep players playing can do a lot to keep them from losing interest and we see as much in the enemies here not every patient in this area is hostile so fromsoft manages to pack in some storytelling i said earlier in this video that more passive npcs would have been appreciated so it's only proper for me to point out that now i'm getting exactly what i wanted i noted back in that talk that bloodborne had about 25 npcs and i excluded these guys in that tally because they're barely even here but in hindsight maybe i should have included these guys considering i think many of them do much more to prop up the story being told here than many of the npcs in the main game do of propping up that story adeline over here willingly gave herself to the healing church against lady maria's vicious and she's quite possibly the only sane person left in this entire establishment she asks the player to acquire for her brain fluid whose item description reads grace amoeba-shaped brain fluid wobbles and bounces extract it from a patient whose head expanded until that was all that they were in the early days of the healing church the great ones were linked to the ocean and so the cerebral patients would imbibe water and listen for the howl of the sea brain fluid writhed inside the head the initial makings of internal eyes each time we gift adeline brain fluids she in turn gives us progressively better items starting with single-use healing vials then giving us the balcony key which gives us access to the nightmares version of the lumen flower garden and then finally at the end of her questline she gifts the milkweed rune brain fluid is simply ice on the inside before they fully materialize as eyes and fun fact it takes three of these for adeline to see the image of the milkweed rune which is one way humanity can transform to kin just like it takes three umbilical cords for us to ascend to a great one the lumen flowers have an affinity with the moon hence the name and they bloom at night something i really appreciate is that when we enter the lumenflower garden the patients are at peace tending to the flowers so we get to see the effects they have on the patients in real time those sorts of moments the little tranquil scenes we walk into from time to time are something these games really excel at we are most of the times running with an elevated stress meter so when the game sees itself fit to give us something more peaceful it's all the more appealing for it of course the patients in the lumenflower garden are vicious and can easily take down the player so that last part might not apply here regardless i still think this little area is a welcome inclusion and fun fact it was in discovering this area and the window back to the grand cathedral where i first figured out that the room with the beds was the grand cathedral in the first place i think the reason i ultimately missed it the first time is that it had so many beds in it and because the function of the room was very different there being an elevator rather than a boss made me apply different mental schemas to it which obfuscated to me that it was obviously a room i'd been in before usually twice before in a given playthrough the objective in this area is to raise the entire staircase to make it connect to the boss arena i suppose if the ground level is from lichmonger's boss arena and the stairs and floors are from the duke's archives then the rafters in the top are borrowed from anor londo and i think the enemy placement in the rafters is very interesting it would have been possible to have the patience man the beams but i think they went with carrying crows and rats because players would know exactly what to expect from them the challenge here isn't in the fighting it's that a single misstep means death so it makes sense in terms of the game feeling fair that the enemy be something simple something players are so intimately familiar with that they can line the enemy up with the layout of the map rather than having to be extra careful because they haven't fully memorized the attack patterns of the enemies which got introduced just a few minutes ago but that's not to say that the research hall patients are a bad enemy their degraded mental state is well captured by the setting and their sounds and animations and the variety in which they come makes them a real standout even though they have as little screen time as they do we're going to be mopping up the first boss of this area which are the living failures the living failures capitalize on bloodborne's more mobile combat system by having you fight many of them at the same time some of them deal arcane magic attacks and others pursue you into head-on combat so there's a bit of tactical decision making embedded into this fight a bit of target prioritization i've heard people complain about this boss that it is a repeat of the celestial emissary fight from the base game but that's a criticism which i've never gotten on board with for one the setup to the boss arena and what this fight is asking of the player is completely different and second these guys aren't re-skins of the celestial emissary their movement is borrowed from the research hold patients in that sense they serve as a sort of payoff to the previous area it was in fighting these guys for the first time that i realized that the research hall patients are what the process of making celestial emissaries looks like so even if there are workarounds to complain in terms of the gameplay lore wise i think these guys more than earn their keep as they tell a much sadder story than most bosses in the game periodically they like to summon arcane meteors like rom did but whereas rom's meteors spawned over her head and you had to dodge them by running towards her here the meteors come from a fixed area on the map due to the number of mobs in the rum fight rahm herself is not always in frame during that fight so when the meteors came sometimes they were able to completely blindside us here there's a specific animation which all of the enemies go into and there's a dark cloud with spawns in the area so there's no ambiguity when the meteors are coming and even though you might not be looking at any particular enemy since the meteors have a fixed spawn point you can just run right behind the giant lumen flower in the middle of the area and use it for cover now i'm not saying that this is some groundbreaking fight for a souls game or anything but considering the way these guys sometimes get hated on i feel they warranted a bit of defending all things considered i don't think bloodborne has a single bad boss the previous fromsoft souls games had bosses like the kaeper demon dragon god bed of chaos ancient dragon and the royal rat authority the worst bosses in bloodborne are usually considered bad because they don't have enough going on to distinguish them rather than because they were difficult for the sake of being difficult and i don't think the living failures should be locked up with the lesser bosses of luthborn like they sometimes are if they happen to kinda sorta look like a previous boss which played completely different that's not a problem for me the second boss of the research hall area is mary i'm not your mary is lady maria but before going in to kill her i'd like to note that we are given motivation for the fight by simon at the lantern near the access to the research hall miyazaki's previous games were very upfront about your motives but even so you could have reasoned that since those worlds were full of monsters killing them was probably a good idea bloodborne having human enemies who aren't insane or anything like that makes it so that such simplistic reasoning doesn't work all of the time so if you want something deeper you can reason that killing her is okay because simon sayso maria like every other character in the dlc is one of the most beloved characters in bloodborne like lutvik from earlier she seems to be split in the nightmare with one half of her being able to put the fishing hamlet massacre behind her and another half being kept in a permanently manifested version of the maria she didn't want to be in the research hall the patients who talked about maria talked about her as being a very caring and nurturing individual the balcony key we got from adeline even notes that maria gave it to her in hopes that the smell of the lumen flowers would bring adeline some comfort sidenote i like the little response our character has to being grabbed by maria and how the hands are a visual focus of this scene it always plays to me like our character has an epiphany there about the doll's origin the research hall gives the sense that maria was someone the patients held on to as they were losing their minds and you really get the sense that she cared for them that their suffering troubled her somewhat and that she went out of her way to bring them comfort the maria they describe is a lot more like the doll than it is this maria this maria is like a manifestation of everything maria despised about herself she fights with a rakuyo whose description reads hunter weapon wielded by lady maria of the astral clock tower a trick sword originated in the same country as the cainhurst chicago only this sword feeds not off blood but instead demands great dexterity lady maria was fond of this aspect of the rakio as she frowned upon blood blades despite being a distant relative of the queen one day she abandoned her beloved rakuyo casting it into a dark well when she could stomach it no longer not only did maria canonically already abandon this weapon but as you can see as this fight goes on her dislike of the traditionally blood-tinged weapons of cainhurst gets neglected she's shooting massive blood attacks in the latter half and you get the sense that just like how ludwig was a beast hunter transformed by the nightmare into a beast as penance maria maybe was a more gentle character after the fishing hamlet massacre who was forced to exist as those aspects of herself which she disliked with her own kindness being extracted from her and placed into the doll i think maria really embodies the strength of the core combat system because she can be a really exhilarating fight even though she's just a modified npc if you pick your timing you can pretty much lock her out of the fight by shooting her at the right times but otherwise you can just dazz around the area like you would against most nbc's and fight her like you do them i think the people who i have not yet convinced to like the living failures should consider that maria is literally a retread of a fight we've had many times in this game already she's super amped up sure but she has more in common with the bloody crow of cainhurst than the living failures did with the celestial emissary maria's placement at the end of the research hall is quite well considered since she acts as a final threshold to cross before having the church's secrets be unveiled but even more than that i think it's good that the dlc decided to go for a boss like her i consider ludwig to be the best boss in the game but i would really rather not have had the dlc be too repetitive and thankfully maria is a very niche boss even in the entire game if we consider that if we strike out every npc fight and look solely on the bosses then aside from gascoigne mikalash and german there is no boss quite like this and of those three gascoigne and my collage both have some hook gascoigne turning into a beast and mikolas being a chase so even among those bosses maria is quite a standout in the game it's very fitting that she and german alone seem to fill this niche of being very satisfying npc bosses considering their relationship and it is also fitting that they both fight you without manolis they both seem to genuinely display some care for you and put up arms because they think it is best for you that you do not go where you think you want to go the celestial dial we have to interact with before moving on from this area is a nice way to remind the player that they are currently very high up which is something they might have forgotten if they died a lot to the living failures or to maria i've talked a lot about how the warping and how the loading screens can break up the world and segment it a bit so giving us this item i think is a really good way of bringing us back into the geography of the area we inhabit the reason us remembering that we're high up is important and this is why the healing church and the choir ultimately made the astral clock tower and upper cathedral ward their basis of operation is because someone in their ranks once had the revelation that the cosmos might be closer to them than they realized that is that the sky and the cosmos are one and also that the cosmos might be very near to us only just above our heads this is what the choir believed and they went up looking for the great ones consider for a moment that the only skype on phenomena we observe in game is the moon some clouds stuff like that keep that in mind as we discuss the following the entire world of bloodborne is stacked on top of itself yharnam is built on top of the chalice dungeons the snail woman who fell to us earlier literally fell from the fishing hamlet which was literally above us in the nightmare you couldn't see the fishing hamlet from below but you can see yharnam under the water in the fishing hamlet that suggests that there may be yet another layer on top of it and what do you know in the nightmare frontier we could see the sunken sails from the fight arena against the orphan the nightmare frontier is the frontier of the niger of menses which is on top of that area and its final area is the tower where we fight the wetness the idea that the sky and the cosmos are one might be hinting that the great ones live in an elevated world one which we cannot fathom from below going back a bit do you remember when i picked up the make contact rune if you consider that the fishing hamlet and the nightmare of menses are above the dreamlands version of the astral clock tower then the placement of the make contact gesture makes a lot of sense doesn't it we're in the fishing hamlet now so i've decided to become a vegetable and i'll be swapping out my holy blade for the moonlight sword even though it's much weaker before going forward i'm going to quickly summarize the lore of this area for those not in the know long ago bergenworth realized that they needed third courts to ascend and become great ones this was after the beasts began to roam yharnam and this was before lawrence and german constructed the hunter's dream in these times german was the leader of the hunters and in bergenworth's search for great ones the fishing hamlet appeared the people of the fishing hamlet looked the way they do because they had a long-standing audience with cars this area famously takes after hp lovecraft's shadow over insmith where spoiler alerts skip to this timestamp if you want to read the story for yourself shadow over intimate where the townspeople of innsmouth had for a long time been having talks with the sea dwelling deep ones and had made a pact with them long ago where the deep ones would gift them gold and keep the town's economy alive and in exchange the deep ones and the humans would interbreed and create immortal offspring the deep ones versus daegon an eldritch creature from the deep and fun fact most fishing hamlet enemy ai scripts refer to the fishmen as deep ones followed by a description of who they are so deep ones a deep ones be deep ones big no weapon deep dark that sort of stuff and just like in the story it's based on the villagers here aren't fussed about their appearance however whereas in lovecraft's writings the horror is in discovering that these things existed birgenworth was ecstatic to find these people and not only did they not feel any sense of disgust from seeing them but rather they believed these fish people were to be studied because they were kind to the great ones the way this happens seems to be because of the parasites of cause so in japanese culture there is the idea of a whale savior where a whale would be beached near a starving village and the villagers would eat it and store its bones for worship as repayment for it having delivered itself to save the town that seems to be where the idea of cars being beached comes from that these villagers beckoned the cause maybe to revive their fishing industry like in shadow over in smith and if so judging by the amount of fish we see here it worked but additionally cars carried parasites with it which are phantasms remember when we talked about vermin vs phantasms that's what birkenworth likely saw in the hamlet instead of beasts people were becoming something greater the villagers might have been ingesting the parasites or maybe just contact with the parasite transformed them and as you might imagine birgenworth wanted very much to study these things so they sent their hunters here to eradicate the town the heads of the inhabitants were drilled into to search for eyes on the inside which is where the accursed brew item comes from and at some point whether they knew of cause before coming or only learned about it after they eventually found cause killed it and ripped its stillborn child out of her to study from that child's corpse they obtained the first umbilical cord the one used to ascend rom back in canehurst i made a point of reiterating the lore from that area even though i didn't really go anywhere with it the reason for that was that i wanted to have some evidence to stand on when i say i think the church genocide to fetch an infant great one story was repurposed for the fishing hamlet that it may have been a big plot point but as kanehurst became less and less relevant for the main game assuming it was once mandatory it got stripped out along with most of cainhurst and eventually made its way here alternatively the reason it's so seemingly underdeveloped in knurst might be because miyazaki realized that he was striking real gold with it and he felt it deserved a better showcase so he saved it for the dlc now this story is technically in kaner still but things like the choir being transformed into executioners just a few weeks before the game released things like much of kaner's being a bit gutted content-wise and things like queen annelise being the original model for the doll all point me to think that yeah miyasaki wanted to do this idea of a church-led genocide and murder of great one justice in a bit grander scope like he thought this should be its own story rather than be a side track in this bigger one so they might have stripped out as much as they needed to or might have just left it intentionally underdeveloped so that they could make it the central point of the dlc this is the last time we'll be talking to simon and it's fitting that in his death he introduces us to another npc who functions not dissimilarly from himself except that he's hostile introduces is not the right word though because we've actually been introduced to braitor we met him in the cells connected to the underground corpse pile but simon is how the game introduces us to braedor proper simon is a likable character who did a lot to direct the dlc and imbue it with intrigue so players will likely have grown to like him at this point and braetor killing him off like this should be enough to get players against him but just for good measure he's going to invade us over and over again and try to kill us to prevent us from uncovering the church's secrets now i am aware that i keep introducing new standards to evaluate npcs on just so that i can place the next one on a very specific sort of pedestal but braydor is my favorite npc in the game full stop not my favorite design wise that's still simon i like braedor's role in the world but simon's placement and role in telling the story are just such good craft that even braydor takes the backseat from me but rather brador is just my favorite npc hands down i think he embodies the best of everything npcs can bring to the experience and i think his character goes a long way to hammer home the point of the dlc as well as to tidy up a bit of lore inconsistencies from the base game see in the base game when we will come to fight german he will seemingly become a young man again for that fight but what actually happens is just that his face is getting stretched over the face of another character breydor shows us that this is actually in keeping with the lore because in the dreams people aren't as tethered to their age as they are in the waking world the breydor who invades us is much younger than the bredor in the cell anyways things i like about braydor he provides another side to the mission with simon set up and explores the idea of someone who does not believe that the hunters deserve peace to that end he hunts down anyone who seeks to end the nightmare he's not the hardest enemy in the game or anything but he can be very difficult so you get the sense that he's serious about stopping you going back to our talk about the buddhist hell the villagers here have many attacks which the hell scrolls explicitly state to be tortures which held's inhabitants must face of node is the cleaver wielding enemy whose grab attack hasn't continually smashed his cleaver into our face the spearmen who skewer the player the rakemen who scrape at the player the molotov throwers who burn the players and the witches who summoned vengeful spirits to attack the players i might be a bit generous with my reading here and i'll note that many of these attacks are present in other souls games which seem to not draw on the hull scrolls but i thought i should note this anyway and while i was at it i also thought that i should note this hell scroll i found depicting patches poking the messengers with a stick jerk on a serious note though the piled up stones are what i wanted to know the environmental design of the fishing hamlet draws somewhat on the end of g goku a movie about sinners who enter hell in the third act where the main character is running between the hells searching for his child and gets to witness the multitudes of tortures of hell in that movie they note that the piled up stones piled up shells in the fishing hamlet are laid for someone left behind so assumably these rocks were piled up here by the fishmen to mourn those they could not bury that movie also has a limb over children who die which is visualized as a beach bathed in blue light and yes the protagonist of that movie is also led through his adventure at the end by listening to the cries of an infant the visual design of the fishing hamlet seems to draw into goku what with the blue but the dlc draws on the hell scrolls for many of its individual set pieces the first thing you encounter in hell is a mirror which reveals all of your wrong doings in life and i think this might be what the amygdalas are ultimately supposed to be they're like judges who decide whether or not an individual is sinful and the way they see that is by observing the player's inventory that we had a tonsil stone meant that we carried some sort of sin which meant penance in the nightmare frontier and that we carried the eye of a blood drunk hunter met the amygdala saws as deserving of penance in the hunter's nightmare another notable set piece was the river of filth and blood in the health scrolls it is explained that those who shed blood on the ground are performing a type of ritual pollution and in hell would be drowned over and over again in a massive pool of blood and filth the idea with the blood is that it disrupts the flow so imagine if you wash blood stained clothes in a river that river is now tainted and anyone who makes say a cup of tea from it which they will drink while celebrating the buddha are tainting their celebration i note here that a central image of the nightmare frontier were the crawlers dragging themselves through a lake of filth so even there the connection seems to hold images of beasts being pummeled into the ground by blood drunk hunters in the beginning of the dlc are reminiscent of many of the crushing punishments doled out in hell and breydor's testament brings up the idea of flogging the hell scrolls seem to be where much of the dlc spawned from not everything is one to one i'll note that ludwig is both torturer and being tortured but that seems more like ideas are being squished together to me of the human bosses in this dlc all of them have their minds somewhat fractured ludwig is torn between man and beast maria is split between the vengeful woman in the astral clock tower and the doll and lawrence had his mind taken away from him we know from the accursed brew that the hunters went inside to the heads of the fishmen to look for eyes on the inside so it's possible that the punishment is meant to fit the crime bergenworth invaded the thoughts of the fishmen so the nightmare uses the minds of the bergenworthers to assault them braydors invasions are triggered by the player entering certain areas so he incentivizes careful play and because he respawns endlessly that is killing him in one area and the fishing hamlet will not prevent him from respawning to fight you in that area again if you die because he responds endlessly he does what so many other npcs tried and i think failed to he incentivizes for us to go back to a previous area if we kill brador in the cells connected to the underground corpse pile his phantom stops invading us alfred and eileen's quest both have material rewards at the end which you can argue are worth the loading screens it takes to get to advance their quests but i think brader's quest is a nuts above theirs in that the material reward is connected to the area which gives breitor a sort of presence i feel is absent in most of the npcs in the main game and finally if all of this wasn't enough to tip him over the ads for you consider that he has the craziest weapon in the game in the blood ladder not the best one not even close though it can squeak out some online victories but arguably the most interesting weapon design wise because it constantly drains health costs a lot of health to transform so you need to dedicate yourself to each transformation somewhat and it can cause an aoe explosion which frenzies you i consider simon to be better threaded into the game since he's more integral to the storytelling of the dlc and has a more important role than braetor's that said i do consider brador to be the pinnacle of bloodborne's and pc design his placements like simon's can deal exactly with how the game is played actually a bit better in the sense that i've never seen the game fail to load him the difference is that he's not here for chit chat he's here to kill final note on breidor while he empties out his dialogue i think he is supposed to be gozu i noted earlier that ludwig is seemingly based on the character meizu who guards the entrance to hell as well as serving as one of its chief torturers gozu is his partner in those tasks meizu is a man with the head of a horse so ludwig gozu is a man with the head of an ox braydor's outfit is the foreigners set we began the game with except it's drenched in the blood of the skinned cleric beast he wears on his head apparently that cleric beast and him were friends prior to the friend turning and i think the horns on the headset are supposed to evoke the image of an ox i know that it looks a bit more like an elk or maybe deer but considering how close breidor is placed next to ludwig how both of them are essentially placed near the entrance to hell considering that his role given to him by the church is to prevent snooping eyes from uncovering their secret and considering that he's literally a man with the head of an animal not the exact one gosu had but still i think it sort of fits that he and ludwig are kozu and mezu alternatively the health scrolls also talk about figures known as the wu-chang ghosts two characters one dressed in white the other dressed in black the white one is a fortune deity who rewards people for their good deeds and whose chinese name can be interpreted as those who make amends will always be at peace and the black one is a malevolent deity who punishes those who commit evil and whose name can be interpreted to mean those who commit crime will have no salvation if braedor is this black wu chang ghost if he is fon vuju pronunciation then it's possible that simon is meant to be the white wucheng ghost she at least the interpretations of their names would seem to align perfectly with their individual motivations i think we are making our way to the final boss of this area this is of course the orphan of cars and i just want to note that i really like the placement of the snail women here they seem to be in prayer so to me it comes across as they are trying to soothe the orphan's wrath or our mourning cause in any case the boss arena comes across as a sort of sacred area so it makes sense that the orphan is born once we enter we sully the sacredness with our hunter selves and so the full wrath of the nightmare's origin comes to us personally the orphan cries once it looks at the sky and the crying is the same audio as garmin's cry which can be heard when he sleeps except the orphans is pitched down a bit but that is not the extent to which the orphan borrows from gurman both of them have a sort of flowing cape dealie going on made of what looks like torn fabric they are about as tall in the fights the first half of the orphans fight at least and they wield similar blades i think the idea here is that german killed caught and ripped out its child and that the wrath of cause is manifested as a twisted version of german the orphan is easily the hardest boss in the game but once you get the hang of things there are some fairly straightforward fundamentals which will do most of the heavy lifting of carrying you through this fight for one dash to his left second don't get greedy the orphan can be stunned but so can you and he can roll over you in just a couple of hits it's also prudent to fight him in the ocean rather than on the beach it's a completely flat surface so you don't need to worry about any elevation based shenanigans doing you in and there's no clutter there like the walls on the beach so there's nothing to get snacked on additionally the orphan likes to fly around the map and if you're in the ocean he'll fly further away from you because he isn't blocked by the walls it's also further away from cause's corpse which is relevant because during the fight the orphan of course transforms and can summon lightning waves which originate from cause's corpse the transformation is triggered once the boss's health bar reaches a certain threshold and the way this works under the hood is a good example of how game design is more about being economic than anything else because the alternate form of the orphan is already loaded into the map it's probably just locked underneath the surface or something and the orphan itself gets swapped out when the transformation happens with a swap being masked by the large explosion of smoke this same animation trick applies to weapon transformations as well with weapons seemingly having a small window where they actually get stretched a bit before the new weapon is spawned in its place likewise we saw this technique used for gas coin and the beggar the reason this is done rather than the boss just having one model which transforms is because it's just easier and once you start to dig under the hood of games you'll find a lot of cases where this sort of stuff is done we look at the characters bosses and areas in these games as the individuals which they are but as i already explained with the way this game transforms levels by literally warping them out for the same level differently lit and decorated the magic is in the illusion you believe that the transformed orphan is the same entity and so the illusion is maintained if i made the surface transparent and let you see the other model well you fought this guy assuming that the other model is located right underneath the surface that illusion would be broken games are not reality simulators so they can get away with breaking the rules like this and considering how much duct tape and glue there is behind the scenes of games it'd be a ridiculous ask for the game to prioritize realism what we see in game is very rarely close to being how the game gets about displaying it you might think that warping between areas would just take the player from one area to the next but under the hood the game needs to freeze all of your inputs in the middle of the teleportation animation so that you don't do something stupid while it happens it needs to dump everything in the level out of memory which makes me think that the changes which are carried over between warps like bosses and npc stories are actually not checked by localized objects but rather global ones since npcs carry over between the maps being swapped around anyways the game needs to dump the held map out of the memory find the map you teleported to build that map drop your player at the designated coordinates play the arrival animation and then give you control of the character again i'm assuming that the game never actually dumps the player character out of memory since i don't think it needs to but if that's the case then the game must also turn on invincibility frames during the teleportation in case an enemy snags in a hit right before being dumped out of the memory alternatively the game freezes itself once the loading screen comes up so that enemies don't hit you or kill your npcs and the game must then also make the player character invisible only to become seeable again after the teleportation this isn't even going into the animations which the game needs to call on for effects this assumes that the game isn't rebuilding the player character at every load and it also assumes that npcs are stored as global variables which every room can use rather than as local ones where different rooms which are used as the same area at different times have the same room objects as their alternate versions on top of that this is also assuming that the game has rooms rather than just building everything from some massive data pool i'm guessing it has rooms or something approximating that because it seems like the more intuitive way to construct a game like this but i haven't gone under the hood so i might be wrong all of this just to go from one lantern to another and yes kiddos this is what game design looks like considering the tiny little details pertaining to how every interaction works with every other one is like half of the job the other half is watching frasier or something while you doodle some pixel out the beach area is an interesting can of worms on its own because back when this was theoretically a continuation of demon souls a beach area would not have been a dumb place for that game to end we would go through the chalice dungeons assumably discover baliteria or the nexus or something and then we have an area in the game which is just a beach which would assumably be the one from the ending of demon souls we don't know exactly when bloodborne stopped being a continuation of demon souls world miyazaki claims it never was but we found way too many suspect pieces of geometry and item description to take that account as credible although it's possible that in the context of saying this wasn't a continuation from demon souls miyasaki might have been asked if this was demon souls 2. which it wasn't as by all accounts it was just a continuation from demon souls as in it just took place in the same universe demon souls is not a game which needs a sequel and it also seems to me like baluteria being a twist reveal just doesn't do the game before that justice like playing this gothic cosmic lovecraftian horror action game and then discovering that whoa it's an extension of the first one the one you all liked so much like that that doesn't do it for me that doesn't feel like that would be rewarding for the players but that it was a continuation of demon souls in some capacity is almost certain considering some of the data mined content that has been found also dark souls 3 made a big deal about players returning to anor londo so considering miyasaki likes to cannibalize himself maybe a literal return to the beats from demon souls wouldn't be that ridiculous proposition regardless i'm happy that bloodborne is its own title i know people out there like to have their theories about how the worlds are all actually linked and i don't mind that but it always seems to me like it makes each work a little less impressive because the world around it becomes so small once i've lifted the curse the doll will note that german sleeps sounder knowing his role in all of this you can debate with yourself whether you think he actually deserves sound rest but it's interesting here that if you decide to not soothe german and the other hunters for their crimes you can still fight the orphan of course boss the nightmare's lane message does not appear until you destroy the little shadow effigy it leaves behind so you're not locked out of fighting all the bosses in the game just because you might not want to save the old hunters which i think is a nice touch as you can see i decided to go ahead with lifting the curse because not my child he killed not my gruds to hold ah sweet child of course turns to the ocean the bottomless curse a bottomless sea accepting of all that there is and can be with the dlc out of the way we can now go to the nightmare of menses and prepare to close down this experience i'm back at the menses ritual site where i was when i killed the one reborn earlier and i'll be entering the nightmare of menses through the lecture hall building just like i did when i went to the nightmare frontier which means we get to meet with our friend patches again he does the usual patches stick you know sorry sorry didn't mean to kill you don't kill me i'll be your friend etc now patsyus can appear in the chalice dungeons so technically speaking he is the only npc merchant in the entire game but i won't be going to see him there so i have no reason whatsoever not to take this guy out he doesn't actually pose any more threat to me so i might deal with the scenario differently but i find there's a sort of a reward to closing the quest line out by killing him regardless of the consequences and regardless of the material rewards that might be because this quest offers some actual meat to it in the early access to the nightmare frontier and the anti-clockwise metamorphosis room and the reason resolving his quest doesn't grate on me like the urden chapel dwellers ones mostly do is because i'm not going out of my way to meet patches he's a single ladder from the main path through the game anyway you know my opinion on npc locations in this game so you know by now that i like this i wonder though if patches had gone back to the forbidden woods if i'd even bother meeting him again i imagine i would have been this playthrough since i went to the forbidden woods proper after the nightmare frontier but something tells me that i wouldn't bother with him if that wasn't the case even though he gifts us a really good rune this all being said i'm not killing patches i have nothing to say about the rest of the lecture building it's just a wide area with rooms containing loot and lore lore which i've already dived into so i'm going to be jumping straight into the nightmare of menses now mikalash is still a little ways away so while i carefully dodge the frenzy beam of the brain of menses and make my way towards him i'm going to go over some of the mechanics which i didn't touch on in the video already before i do i want you to consider the praise i've showered the game with already and i hope you agree with me that you can like a video game without thinking everything about it is great i do consider bloodborne to be one of the bright lights of the eighth generation of consoles but i also think every game has its shortcomings and that those are just as important to explore as what the game did well you may disagree with me on some of what i'm about to say in fact i'm sure some of you will but there's just no way of framing this talk otherwise than just hashing it out bloodborne is a transitionary piece and so host certain translation misfires for example the storage mechanic is back from demon souls but instead of impacting the experience it's just sort of there in demon souls there was a cap to your carrying capacity and you might genuinely have had to think about dumping some levels to increase that because it limited the amount of resources you brought with you to an area and since everything was an item back then storage meant something and resource management meant something as well it got progressively less important on subsequent runs once you already knew what you were doing but it served a function greater than just being where things are heads up to the arachnophobes watching you may want to close your eyes i like having the storage mechanic in so far as it means blood valves i pick up aren't lost in the world if my inventory is full but that's actually another issue i have with it our vials and bullets refill on every warp but not every other item does so if the refilling was implemented out of convenience it certainly didn't go far enough another carryover design decision relates back to what i said about inventory being capped by your levels and that is that this is a game where you upgrade levels but aside from arcane and even then those levels are mostly relevant for combat the souls games never had really deep character interactions or integration of exploration to the levels or anything like that but there were at least some considerations baked into the levels to incorporate them as such here aside from arcane and even then the only reason to level up is for the combat now i get that the game originally had more systems to juggle the world with so this might have played really well in some earlier build but after those got ripped out the combat and leveling are sort of left propping up more of the experience than i think they are ultimately able to without straining this might be an observation which can only exist in hindsight since i've seen sakiro branch out further from souls and put some unique spin on things some i liked some i didn't but i actually remember coming from dark souls being a bit underwhelmed by the exploration in this game when it first came out even though i realized that the level layouts were some of the most impressive fromsoft had ever assembled arachnophobes can open their eyes again by the way the issue i had then was that the levels were not really places to explore anymore rather they were places where you fought enemies the early game kind of locks you on a certain build path so even going out of your way to collect items is not as incentivized as in souls if you disagree with that consider that in the spider fight i used the shaman bone blade which i picked up in that room it's one of the most entertaining items to use as it turns enemies to friends but that room was the only area in the game where this item can be found with the exception of being a drop from brain suckers like we saw in birgenworth how on earth it was decided to keep this item from the players until the last level of the game and then only make the item purchasable after the player acquires a certain chalice dungeon boggles my mind and i think it goes to what i'm saying about how the idea of rewarding exploration with new tactics or fringe items is diminished from previous games and because the game isn't designed around backtracking like dark souls was you're not really getting to meet npcs over and over again so they fade into the background and don't serve as a big reason to explore either this is admittedly subjective and i imagine that there are viewers who really enjoyed the exploration in bloodborne not that i hate it or anything but considering where it's coming from i'd be lying if i said i was all that impressed i suppose this is the curse of following two of the best games of the generation which preceded it bloodborne is just going to be scrutinized more than most games because it comes from better stock than most games do after all going back to our talk on storage items have been less and less the focus of these games as we drift further away from demon souls as i noted way back when i talked about healing demon souls had five areas and all had a central resource that was boletarious grass for healing stone things or for reinforcing weapons latrius spice to fuel magic shrine of storms souls for levels and the valley of defilement's flowers to deal with status ailments that wasn't the explicit point of any of the levels but it made the experience more scriptable if players knew what they wanted i've already talked about how dark souls detached the healing from the inventory with estes and i think overall that was a worthwhile experiment because it enabled fromsoft to make the experience a lot more independent and a lot less broken up the reliance on items to guide the experience did slip though or was still necessary for reinforcements but there is no ore area in dark souls so players likely will just buy them from the vendors or use the ones they find passively while they go through the game the only other items to really guide the experience were the moss blossoms mostly for convenience the transient curses in one area and the partying stones dark souls made that trade-off to deliver on the lost in the world mood and ultimately i think it really pays off in that game in comparison to these two bloodborne feels to me a bit confused in this regard aside from arcane builds bloodborne rarely uses the items to direct the experience in any meaningful way but it doesn't have a world for us to get lost in like dark souls did either it's not broken up so that items can guide the experience like in demon souls but it's also not interconnected and warp blocked to make you get lost like it was in dark souls so it's stuck in the middle and items don't really manage to make all that big an impact now not every mechanic needs to be the highlight of the core gameplay loop to warrant its inclusion and it's not like i'd want the items we do have to be removed so don't take this as items in bloodborne bad but it's another showcase of how the world design is more than just how the levels are laid out if players can always retreat to a central hub they will navigate the world differently than if they actually had to walk around everywhere and they will resort to valuing the mechanics on hand differently as they are more and less integral to a satisfying experience something i think bloodborne did better than both demon souls and dark souls however was its new game plus not only can you start to finally experiment with the weapons you had but you also get to revisit the game in proper context dark souls had a massive scam running throughout it with france's whole link the fire nonsense but bloodborne is a completely different world once you've been through it once already going back to yosefka's clinic and fighting beasts in the streets of yharnam develops a sort of quaintness since you know that just beyond your sight there are elder rich horrors beyond human imaginings and madmen who are plotting to evolve speak of the devil mikalaj's fight is one of those anti-boss fights which fromsoft likes to do every now and then he's been stuck in the nightmare long enough for his body in the waking world to mummify and he already believed that madness was the key to ascension so it makes sense that his fight is a bit unorthodox considering it's a bit of characterization just like willem mikulash believes that the limitations of human thought is what keeps them from ascending to great ones and like willem he sees the accusation of inhuman knowledge as the way forwards the point of the red moon was to make the boundaries of human thoughts vague i.e make everyone go insane and that's because mikalas thinks that's how you evolve and he's not exactly wrong we ascend in the end because we inherit the madness of the third quartz but mikalas still needs those courts if he is to ascend he beckons cause in this nightmare to plant ice on the inside of his brains and he is using merco as bait just like how lawrence and german used anneliese's child to lure the moon presents cause is dead in the waking world but probably still alive in the dreamlands there's a passage from lovecraft's the nameless city which reads that is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange eons even death may die and i think it goes some ways towards explaining this cause is not explicitly a being of the waking world so it makes sense that it wouldn't be bound by its rules sure you can kill cause but death needs not be permanent for something like it if cause is a creature out of time for example then it's possible that where it's from death doesn't exist anymore or maybe its body is just an avatar for its spirit alternatively it manages to survive in the dreamlands just like mikalash maria and lawrence whose bodies in the waking world are long since dead mikalash used to be the guide nbc of the game and him running away from us might have been an extension of the chase where he would run into the ocean in hemwick which is why he talks about hunters being hunters even in a dream here like he knows anything about us from soft stories always seem to take place after things have truly collapsed and you rarely interact with anyone at their prime usually the enemies are just whoever survived a great cataclysm and staggered to continue fighting see the old monk true king alet the bat of chaos old ishin gwyn the twin princess the old demon king for examples with that in mind the player's sense of smallness in the world is always maintained since even though they killed someone of such high stature there's an understanding that if the player had come earlier they might have had their ass handed to them demon souls and dark souls are much grander in scope than bloodborne is so the fall from greatness their areas showcase is seemingly much bigger but bloodborne doesn't really show the fall in the same way anyways so it's not necessarily a one-to-one comparison people don't just fizzle out in bloodborne they go mad and you get the sense that yeah this person might have been formidable at some point but they are simply too far gone to be a threat to me anymore and bosses like mikalash benefit a lot from this i can imagine in dark souls this guy would have just been a powerful wizard with sunken eyes or something but i think that he isn't that he is just an npc who's crazy is very bloodborne he's sandwiched in between the one reborn and the wet nurse so if players want more conventional bosses to close out the game they'll get that but i always kinda like when fromsoft makes bosses which don't adhere to expectations and i think mikalas is really well implemented all things considered it's interesting that these games managed to contextualize the enemy's antagonisms to the players as well as they do bosses and mobs in demon souls everyone was pretty much just mad a monster or a demon in dark souls this opened up some with hollows monsters and demons but also ghosts and illusions placed to guard places guardians of paintings and things of that nature you can assume that some of the enemies might still have had their wits about them and that their antagonism made sense because they were performing a duty bloodborne has xenophobic yarnamides bloodthirsty monsters faction-aligned npcs madmen ancient races mad ghosts insane patients spiteful villagers and unexplainable cosmic aliens just to name a few and each one's reasoning for being hostile to you makes sense even more so than in the previous souls games and i don't think there's any area which really comes up short in this regard for comparison's sake in dark souls gwyndolin was making anor londo appear to be lively so that you'd fulfill the prophecy of linking the fire but even after the player agreed to do that gwyndolin didn't deacro any of the enemies for gameplay reasons i understand why that wasn't done and this is in no way something i have deep feelings about but seeing it improved on in bloodborne is still nice as much as the story in bloodborne's world is about madness and the limitations of thought it's interesting that it doesn't lean on it nearly as much as it predecessors when it comes to contextualizing enemy hostilities the winter lantern enemies are probably the most hated in the game because they don't really play like any other mob enemy bloodborne has some rudimentary stealth mechanics which players will likely pick up intuitively and learn to integrate into their playstyle enemies don't acro the player all at once in a given area they need to be triggered into hostility and they have seemingly three ways of doing this for one they all have cones of vision so if they see you they'll attack you they also have a radius of hearing where they can notice you if you're running behind them the blue elixir makes the player mostly invisible but does not mask sounds so if players use it they'll still have to tippy toe around the enemies if they want to be unseen finally certain enemies also seem to be able to smell the players so hiding and walking slowly won't help much against them the winter lanterns play on our situational awareness because we will likely have intuited the way's enemies acro by the time we first encounter these things walking towards the winter lanterns will build up the frenzy meter so players need to have sedatives equipped if they want to be safe but a lot of players trip up because they don't dedicate themselves to the strike against these things the winter lanterns play on situational awareness because they cannot be snuck up on because they have a 360 degree field of vision so if you run towards one hoping to sneak attack you're going to be disappointed and if you try to back off you can easily screw yourself the best trick i've found is to just hammer them with something big enough to stun lock them and take the frenzied what these things are is pretty interesting they might be an enemy repurposed for the nightmare frontier and by extension the nightmare of menses and also placed in the fishing hamlet they are wearing these same clothes as the doll except theirs has been torn and they just have a smaller version of the brain of menses glued to their heads what that was originally supposed to mean is anyone's guess as much as they are a hassle to deal with for many builds they drop some of the best gems in the game especially the fishing hamlet ones so i always spend some time fighting them trying to get my hands on some since i've picked up the blood rock there is now only one thing left to do before meeting up with the wet nurse and that is communicating with the brain while i do that here's another theory i have i'm pretty sure that the nightmare of menses was designed to remind players of latria latria is the most beloved level from demon's souls and arguably the most beloved from software level of all time though for demon souls i have an affinity for stone thing and the fan feedback on that level might be why the final gauntlet in bloodborne is very prison based with cages wardens and such and why it has a giant strung up organ the heart of latria the brain of the nightmare strung up on chains which we can collapse to bring about a localized change in the area map also no area in the game has as many winter lanterns as the nightmare of menses does and they seem to be this game's version of the mind flayers i mean i guess the brain suckers are literally the most similar moveset wise but in terms of enemies which cause panic in the players i think the winter lanterns are more like the mind flayers than the brain suckers are even though the brain suckers share more moves with them the run-up to the final boss of the area contains some of the highest blood echo drops in the main game so in case you're having a hard time closing things out fromzot's got your back the ending of bloodborne seems to draw much more from demon soulsis than dark souls what with a final run up to a boss in a high tower which opens up the final boss in the central hub which the level lady leads it to but it's maybe a bit more chaotic than either of those games endings were there's a lot of characters appearing for the first time there's a lot of cutscenes considering this is a souls game but overall i think it still manages to close out this game really well the nightmare of menses is arguably the area in the game which is most dripping in mood and there's no question that this is the final level once you get here i'd be lying if i said i didn't prefer the more somber and understated ending in dark souls but this area is a lot more in keeping with the kind of game bloodborne is dark souls's quiet walk to the kiln was very fitting for it because that game is mostly about walking from a to b fighting some enemies along the way bloodborne reverses this that is this is a game where you fight a lot of enemies and then make your way to the next one that is compared to dark souls not it on absolute so it might have felt a bit off if all of a sudden the game got super quiet and ambient for some stretch of time i think the reason the final gauntlets have gotten relatively easy since demon souls is because fromsoft might have gotten enough feedback on the last stage of baliteria where players just put the game down satisfied enough with having completed most of the game rather than the whole thing alternatively it's possible that they decided they just didn't want the final moments being frustrating so they focused more on the experience in these games near the end rather than the challenge because however hard the final boss is it's not a fight in its own right it's a cap off to the rest of the game and so it can be whatever and still be satisfying on the back of the rest of the experience for what my opinion is worth i do think dark souls once ending is still the best crafted i think slowing down and letting the players set their own pace at the end gives a better sense of closure than having them get two tens if mergo's wet nurse was the final boss of the entire game rather than the final boss of the final gauntlet it'd be fairly underwhelming i think but as the prelude to german and the moon presence this is all right and serves as a good juxtaposition with what the actual final bosses have to offer outside of the fight arena queen yarnham stands powerless listening to her child cry in the chalice dungeons we can actually fight her while she's still pregnant with the infant and the implication there is that the queen is not the powerful one but rather that she is an avatar through which merkel was able to express its immense power or that mirko is what gave the queen that power that's why she's standing outside now helpless rather than going in and ripping the wetteners to shreds which she otherwise very much could do her fight is a lot tougher than the wet nurses without merco yharnam's immense power is gone and so it falls on our capable hands to make things right the wet nurse is some unnamed great one which has seemingly been lured here by the prospect of obtaining an infant and this can be a very hectic fight depending on how you play but i'm massively over leveled at this point so i make short work of it there's a move the boss performs where it clouds the arena in a dark mist and multiplies itself but like most other enemies the wetness can be stunned if you manage to break its health below certain thresholds stuns instantly close out the active animation in favor of the stun animation and if i were using ludwig's holy blade or something equally strong i could break the boss faster than it would take to summon the mist and so i could prevent that part of the fight from even triggering there's a japanese word used in action games which is okizeme and it describes the effect of one player leveraging their standing advantage over an enemy who is grounded this is usually used in a derogatory sense or to denote when a player is not honoring the fight so of course i do this all the time specifically on this run you've seen me on multiple locations knock an enemy down which locks them into a getting up animation and me using their getting up animation to charge up my transformed r2 attack now i don't think anyone would call foul play on me for using it since i didn't do any online but also because the enemies in the game are not that fussed about spamming attacks over your body when you're trying to get up so abiding by some honor system relating to this world would create an asymmetry which would exclusively hurt me after killing the wet nurse we end murco's crying and contrary to popular theory no merkel cannot be made to laugh by playing the music box the chord we get after finishing the job here is a clue to the player about what to do next we've untangled every secret of this world thus far and the final mystery comes to us now at the end uncover what the chords are and fetch the rest as the hunt winds down the dream begins to burn and german awaits us to set us free again before that though we need to unlock the best ending so we need to unravel the third chord mystery the third chords went through some translation issues which led some people to think they were explicitly umbilical chords which they aren't the game even notes that they are precursors to them though in the japanese text the umbilical cords predate the third chords they seem to just be an organ exclusive to the great ones it's a bit complicated so we need to take some steps back i said in the chalice dungeon that ascension as birgenworth understood it might have been a dead end and that lawrence probably came to understand this much before the end after everything he did all of the experiments and horrors he unleashed he eventually realized that the old ways were true and that evolution was as simple as the bond between mother and child and so after everything began to collapse he met up with german in the old workshop and they pleaded with the moon presence for a fighting chance against the beasts lawrence promised to come back with an infant great one and sub came to beasthood while in the chalice dungeons searching for margot the game is about child sacrifice in many ways and the third courts are ultimately the final embodiment of this theme in an interview miyazaki said in the world of bloodborne babies that are treated as special in one way or the other are offered as lures to the great ones the great ones have all lost their children because of their positions and as a result they're attracted to these special babies the babies are one way of calling them this story setup was something i came up with pretty readily in mind when it comes to living creatures the stronger or more advanced you are the fewer offspring you produce in your life even with human beings the birth rates in more advanced countries is lower right looking back i wonder if facts like that were at the root of the idea the higher up you go the fewer children your species carries so it makes sense that the great ones have this incredible hardship having offspring even they aren't beyond the evolutionary constraints of the world what the third chords ultimately represent is the connection the link between mother and child and the reason for the still birth of the infant great ones might just be because these courts aren't strong enough which is why we need three of them to ascend i already picked up the third court from the abandoned old workshop and i just got the one from impostor yosefka which is actually the court of the orphan of cass which was used to ascend rom so now i just need to kill ariana's child and hold on a minute is that a viable infant great one yeah this is a pretty gruesome scene so i'm surprised to see it in a fromsoft game because they generally lean away from showing kids so we're all set to close out the game now but before we do don't think i've forgotten about the game's main enemy we picked up lawrence's skull in the research hall's version of the grand cathedral and with this on our person we can activate the lawrence boss fight i noted with ludwig and maria that in the hunter's nightmare it seems like people's minds get fractured and more so than that it also seems like the punishment in quote-unquote hell is set to fit the crime lawrence spoiled the flow of blood and doomed everyone his sin was to ignore his master and forge ahead married as he was to his own intellect that intellect was his sin so here he is a mindless beast who will forever yearn for but never obtain his true thoughts and the extent to the torture is even deeper once you realize that his human skull which symbolizes his human mind was underneath the elevator which we activated with the key we got from lawrence he is literally laying on top of the area where his skull was in the research hall version of the grand cathedral and he's animated like he's been defeated almost like he came here in his last moments of clear thought only for this to not be the correct version of the cathedral in the hell scrolls it is said that those who turn their backs on rightness are burned and those who are obstinate get cut in half two punishments we see inflicted on lauren's ear for two sins which he did in fact commit the molotov cocktails description notes that fire is used to cleanse impurity which might connect to the idea of spreading impurity i talked about earlier when i gave the example of how cleaning bloody cloth in a river paints the river and all of the rituals which use its waters lawrence tainted the blood in yharnam so him being on fire is very fitting and his obstinance is well exemplified by his musical theme which sings in latin about how lawrence believed the church needed to forge a head with the blood and that the fear of doing so was in itself a poison it is also noted in the hell scrolls that the living can sacrifice to make amends for the dead easing their torture and helping them be reborn into heaven and i like to think that's what we're doing here as much as lauren screwjarnum i don't really like that he suffers endlessly i think this fight is the most important addition to the game the dlc ultimately made since it's an actual stated meeting with the man who ruined everything but i go back to my talk on mikalash and i wonder if maybe this confrontation would have played better if it wasn't such a conventional boss battle if it drew from made in australia maybe with a half mad half broken old lawrence sitting somewhere in the nightmare asking that the player puts an end to his suffering and letting players decide to do so or not i doubt that such an encounter was ever on the cards though because of that word i used just a few seconds ago actual stated meeting with the man who ruined everything because and this will blow the minds of the uninitiated lawrence is a boss in the base game already bloodborne's more liberal use of environmental storytelling compared to its predecessors did not make it an easier story to understand and i think it's because the immediate and long-term baxter if the world isn't ever properly delved into unlike the souls games before it bloodborne doesn't start with a creation myth or a cutscene detailing the background of the setting or its characters in the beginning of this video i noted as muds and i think this has caused a lot of people to not quite catch what is going on the previous and subsequent miyasaki games have very much been appreciated in tandem with their stories but bloodborne seems to be the one that is appreciated with some of the stories skirted around and i think it's because most people got the contextual and some of the subtextual but not the finer details like how this is the original lawrence fight cramped away in an insignificant chalice dungeon with no fanfare to hammer home what is going on in the beginning of this video i said i'd circle back to the opening menu cinematic and i am a man of my words so let's take a look at it hunter reaches out for lauren's skull while they are underground maybe in a dungeon and get assaulted by what to me looks like the cleric beast which used to be the boss of the grand cathedral all the story significant skulls in the game are lawrence's and lawrence left german in the hunter's dream and went to the chalice dungeons to find murgo murgo is unlocked by going down the thumerian chalice line which is where you first stumble upon the bloodletting beast almost like this thing might have been going down there lawrence's expedition to find murgo was cut short when he subcamed the beast turd also notice the head of the bloodletting beast compare that scar on its face with lawrence's skull in the waking world and also note that the skull in the waking world looks nothing like a cleric beast and an awful lot like it belongs to this guy consider also that this guy is probably the largest beast enemy in the game which according to miyasaki makes him someone who was capable of pushing beast to it aside for a really long time remember that funny line miyasaki had about how the cleric is the most fearsome beast of all well maybe he wasn't joking also going back to the health scrolls decapitation is the punishment for those who do not fulfill their obligations to their superiors lauren said to willem that he would fear the old blood he lied and so someone at some point decapitated lawrence and brought his head to the grand cathedral remember way back when i talked about valtter and how there were vermin little centipedes which lived in filth well we can fight the headless version of lawrence in another chalice dungeon where his body is being animated by the maggot living inside of it sakura style because miyazaki reuses ideas and speaking of reusing ideas i think the original idea was that we would decapitate lawrence in the dungeon and then his head would regain some sanity and talk to us like lutvik's head does in the dlc now there's so much more i could speculate about lawrence's original role but i'll leave that to the actual data miners who were the ones to first realize that lawrence is the bloodletting beast i mean it's even in the name bloodletting beast because he's the vicar of the healing church oh and the internal name of this enemy founder beast i talked earlier about how i often like to prioritize things outside of optimization so i never killed a doll even though she is objectively wasting my time by talking and i could get the level ups faster i leave her be because i like her as a character and here's the thing the same reasoning goes for queen yharnam killing her is the only thing i've never accomplished in the game and i don't think i'll ever want to i'm not overly emotional or anything about this but it just doesn't seem right to me to relive the dream memory of when her child was ripped out of her just because sony wants to give me a trophy for doing so all right now time to close things out i said this earlier but it warrants repeating bloodborne's ending is very similar to the ending in demon souls and not just in that we talk to the level lady and then access a new area in the hub to confront the final boss i already noted that the one reborn's boss room was a repeat of the tower knights from demon souls and both of those areas gatekeeped the final gauntlet of their respective games before we get to fighting garmin we have to inherit the madness of the chords even after considering some of the more sordid things which he did german is quite a tragic figure the lyrics to his boss theme talk about how he's stuck in the endless cycle of freeing hunters from a dream he himself will never escape and his dialogue towards us really encapsulates that he isn't a bad guy he is asking the player to be freed from the dream because he thinks the alternative is them replacing him and he does not want that fate for us i do think though that fromsoft might have missed a trick here by not resetting german after he kills us once we first reject death at his hands he will be aggro until we kill him i think the scene might have played better if once we re-entered the area german was motionless unless attacked and he'd have a dialogue option which the player could use to have him set them free that being said this isn't his first rodeo so it makes a certain amount of sense for german to shun the talk once the player has rejected him once already he just wants them to wake up and he's not interested in stretched out negotiations i would really like that answer if not for how he and the moon presence assumably are the most blatant examples of the game breaking its own rules since we keep respawning until we can beat them the idea here is that german killing us will separate the player from the dream so us waking up again seems to have been implemented purely out of an obligation to letting the player get the ending they wanted if german would deacro in between fights it might be a way for the game to recognize that yes german knows that you are tied to the dream and maybe the hunter cannot be separated from it by german unless they accept to be and then he'd simply kill the hunter to make them surrender in an interview miyazaki said it all comes down to a sense of achievement i think the essence of games lies in attaching meaning and value to the actions you take demon souls dark souls and bloodborne all have one thing in common and that's how it places that meaning and value on the sense of achievement you can earn from playing that's how the battles and exploration elements work and it applies to the world setting and story as well you defeat powerful enemies discover hidden locations and shortcuts gain an understanding of the game's structure and use the window you're given to imagine the game's world and story my intention is that every aspect of game design either creates or enhances the joy or the sense of achievement you feel as a result of these actions i said earlier that the final boss wasn't a challenge evaluated on its own but rather is seen as the top-up to the entire game and that's true but if we were to evaluate german on his own i think he's a really satisfying challenge he's not that hard though he did kill me once but he makes up for it with a strong move set and by being very threaded into the game old king alant from demon souls was a great boss in my opinion and the juxtaposition of the king alant we heard stories about and the blob monster he had become went really far to sell that moment gwyn was very similar all throughout the dark souls he is being talked up and we visited shrines to his quote unquote greatness only to eventually be met with a depleted husk a setup once again repeated in dark souls 2 with king vendrick although he wasn't the final boss there here however german is a known entity and the juxtaposition is reversing the trend a land was built up and was a pushover gwyn was built up and was a pushover german was emphasized to be frail so when he stands up and takes arms you know things are serious he may not be the hardest of the from software final bosses but i do think he more than stacks up to the competition when it comes to impact these games are as good as the experience they provide and as i've already gone over i don't think there is any correlation between difficulty and quality the sense of achievement earned from defeating garmin is not necessarily tied to his innate challenge it's because he was the first hunter it's his status which the player has in defeating him sort of conquered and it's that he bookended the entire experience and so with him gone the only thing left to do is to breathe the entirety of the game in for a minute unless you knew about the third chord in which case the moon presence notice the striking lack of an abdomen which might be a visceral signifier of the great one's inability to carry children the moon presence tries to have us replace garmin but we repel its influence and when it's time to fight the moon presence turns into a very easy boss interestingly though i don't think the moon presence being easy to defeat really undermines it being a great one it's not a creature you'd expect to usually engage in conflict its power is shown in its ability to obligate humans to its will also we don't know what the repelling of the moon presence did to it internally maybe it's a much more powerful creature and it pushed away from us because it saw that confronting us was draining it of all of its power or something the moon presence also manages to stay powerful in the mind because it has different kinds of attacks it's able to repair damaged limbs though it doesn't actually regain hp and it's also able to shoot numbinglist which locks the player out of the bloodlines and the most impressive attack in terms of spectacle not power is that it can immediately drop the player's health to one usually this is followed up by the player rallying all of their health back while dealing massive damage to the moon presence often enough to put it down these different types of attacks separated from the rest of the game also that it is such a mysterious figure like most of the great ones are we know that its name is flora we know that it has some sort of attunement with the moon we know that it can construct dreams that it can force humans into contracts and that it wants a child but that's pretty much it and i really like that the more info we get on the great ones the less impressive they would probably become as we would be able to relate them more and more to regular humans and so rather than create an artificial divide between the two by getting really in depth on how much grander these things are it's probably better to use fewer words and let the player fill in the gaps it's strange to think about but becoming a little squid monster and being taken care of by a magical dream doll is the good ending the more i look at bloodborne as a work of the east wearing traditionally western clothing the more i think that ending makes a lot of sense not only in terms of the internal mechanisms of the world of bloodborne but also thematically the hunt is a cyclical thing the cycle of the old blood as well the chalice dungeons show us that history in the world of bloodborne is on loop and if the hell scrolls are being pointed towards by the dlc then the buddhist idea of transcendence might be apt here that we are able to leave the cycle and become a greater being by leaving behind everything that made us us after all of the resurrections the hardships etc the hunter and the doll leave the yharnam nightmare behind and take their next steps together with all of the old confines which organized their lives gone no more hunt no more levels at least not for us the cycle has been broken and oh good hunter that's bloodborne thanks for watching before i say my final words on it i'm gonna let the credits roll while i go over some phenomena which i could not fit anywhere in the video if you look at the trophy ranking on the day this script was written the acquisition rate of the end trophies are inverted to their difficulty with the easiest ending being the least common and the hardest ending being the most common the great ones who are affiliated with the moon are shown to have moon-like features both rom and the moon presence have a sort of crater face whether this has any sort of lore significance is not something i'm entirely sure about i noted that i think the fishing hamlet was largely assembled by ideas which were not fully realized in cainhurst and i'd actually be willing to take this theory of mine even further i believe that data mining will eventually reveal that the bloody crow of cainhurst or some similar figure originally inhabited cainhurst and repeatedly assaulted us like braydor currently does the milkweed rune kinda looks like hp lovecraft's initials but there's even more rune shenanigans to consider many corpses we find strung up around the world are posed like the hunter's rune some runes like lake just look like the things that they are specifically a lake during what looks like sunrise or sunset others like the deep sea runes seem to be referencing in-game phenomena specifically the deep-sea rune to me looks like the image of an amygdala the urton wryth rune to me seems like the image of a horned person standing in front of an oval shape and i think the implication is that the person is a demon baby and the oval shape is the vagina it was born from since the rune has some connection with imprac nation bloodborne in spite of being the first miyazaki game to guarantee that players have access to a long range weapon does not feature a single flying mob enemy i suspect that there might be a technical reason for this because it just seems to me like oversized mosquitoes are among the most intuitive enemies for a game like this to have we see the bloodlickers which are mosquito-esque but they are grounded and humanoid the carrion crows are all incapable of flying as are the lost children of antiquity in cainhurst and the garden of eyes in byrgenwerth the guardian ape in sakura not only took the bloodletting beast's gimmick of being decapitated only to be reanimated by a giant vermin living inside of it but it also has a scar running down the same eye as the bloodletting beast has finally this video's release was supposed to coincide with the 3 year anniversary of my style until 2 commentary but some rendering issues and i missed the date by a few days earlier in this video i was talking about covenants and i made the point that from software seems to be leaning more on the combat and level design to save players appetites than unique experiences as they continue making games i also made a point in this video to talk about estes even though i know full well that ninety percent of viewers just rolled their eyes when i said what i said what i'm about to say will reveal some of my personal biases and opinions on where the video game industry should go and if any of what i've said about the game so far has managed to strike a chord with you i hope you'll hear me out even though individual arguments here and there might not have passed the smell test on your end on a whole i do not think triple a games are getting better i think they are actively getting worse i think cutscenes should become relics like text frames in silent movies did and i think the future of game design is just that game design the design of interactive systems to tell stories deliver moods and create emotions endear players to characters and facilitate character expression cutscenes i think have been relied on as a crutch for such a long time that i don't think there is a lot of institutional interest in questioning them as a reliable storytelling mechanism i also think that since games have gotten as big as they are now and since they are seemingly only getting bigger the institutional interest in experimentation with the form is not going up anytime soon i relish the indie market and the double a's which still live for filling this gap but i do think that the face of the industry is always going to be set by the big guys and that the litmus test of the form's health must always include where the triple a is at any given time this may sound a bit doom and gloom and i don't pretend to have the answers to how consumers can incite change in such large industries i think more talk of gameplay rather than visuals would be healthy and i also think if players began to look at cutscenes as a bit tired it might eventually get the ball rolling but this isn't a call to action and i'm not actually trying to start anything yet but i am trying to say something which i think is very valuable studios like from software don't come around very often so we should cherish having them while we do and we should make an effort to vocalize what it is that we like about them the fates of studios like team silent might have made people jaded to appealing to the better nature of the seemingly out-of-touch managers who run the corporations who decide who lives and dies but it really does matter when people voice their affinity for the people who give them joy sales are not representative of affinity i mean sure one million copies sold will make a studio very happy as it keeps them employed but compared to someone going out of their way to express gratitude for the work that was delivered sales are a pretty sterile metric as a creator you want to have the sales you want people playing your games or watching your video game commentaries but the human element is always going to do much more to reward the creative effort from software gets no shortage of love from gamers and i'm not actually appealing to those who already give that love with this outro as something becomes popular it is often the trend that early adopters decide they need to look for new spaces to inhabit in that transition they often become bitter and begin to overstate grievances with the club they just left the games fromsoft makes are not perfect but in an era dominated by over budgeted triple a's whose costs make it impossible for their creatives to take true risks in an era where it seems like every big release is a repackaging of a safe game formula with no interest whatsoever in exploring the expressive capabilities of the interactive medium because why have risky systems when you can have safe cutscenes and conventions in that era we are doing ourselves no favors to kick a studio like from software whatever grievance you might have developed with them over the years and i have some they are still an alternative and that's important enough for me that i can stomach whatever misfires i think they make they might not necessarily be the opposition to the creativity stagnation which you wanted but they are what we got this might sound overly dramatic but i do think it is important to celebrate those who do the job from software is doing if you value an alternative you should reward from software and if enough people do this the industry might take notice and open up the floodgates for more creative led projects which i think would be a very beautiful thing whatever issues i have with bloodborne i am so happy that it exists and even if the justification for its production on sony's side was just wanting to lock in a niche fan base for a console generation i am still thankful to them for having made it and more than that i am thankful that from software was able to deliver on this premise and i hope they'll maintain the courage to continue taking risks as we continue marching onwards into the future of making games thanks for watching i am i know i'm pitching this to you after a bit of a game design hype train so please don't think i'm being manipulative with my timing here but after more than a year of development i'm finally ready to release the first promo for my video game in the promo you'll be able to experiment with most of the mechanics and if i have the time i'm going to try to package the showcase as a self-contained story i hope you'll take a look when i put it out there because i really want to know whether the foundation is working before i start constructing the game on top of it for now i hope you've enjoyed this video i'd appreciate any interaction you could do to make the algorithm notice it more and i hope to have you aboard for whatever comes next and until then take care

Channel: AesirAesthetics

Views: 133,058

Keywords: Aesir, Aesthetics, AesirAesthetics, video game, in, depth, analysis, explained, bloodborne, lore, vaatividya, sinclairlore, jsf, pillbeam, lokey, matthewmatosis, commentary, retrospective, silvermont, illusivewall, sanadsk, miyazaki, hidetaka, elden, ring, dark, souls, demon's, sony, from, software

Id: xiAVSgtIn8Q

Length: 444min 59sec (26699 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/anteloop]

A little on the short side at seven and a half hours, no?

Seriously though love this channel.

[u/axiomvira]

How much spoilers is there for Sekiro?

[u/CertainDegree]

Looking froward to this :)