Bloodborne Retrospective | It's a Great One

when Dark Souls 1 first released back in late 2011 I wasn't a fan because it was too hard at least compared to what I was used to at the time however just as I documented in my retrospective of the game it had cast a spell on me and thus a year or so later I'd end up giving it another shot leading to the most impactful gaming experience of my life one which actually altered my taste in games and left me wanting more then two and a half years later Dark Souls 2 has come out of course sharing most of the same gameplay elements as the first game but with a rather different feel and tone and reception Dark Souls 2 Remains the most controversial of from Source modern titles and though my own opinions on that game have shifted a fair bit over the past nine years but when it first came out I loved it it was more Dark Souls call it dark souls put on a plate and I'd put it in my mouth and suck then just three months after the second game had even came out from soft's new project was announced and it wasn't Dark Souls 3 it was bloodborne thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] game many many times and I love them all well kinda being the ripe old age of 30 now it can be pretty difficult for me to get excited about any new games these days and really nobody Wonder most games suck but despite my cynicism here a new front soft release Railway fails to get me hyped and rightly so because they consistently delivered some of the highest quality gaming experiences you can have I love Dark Souls I love Elden ring I love sahiro but folks I really love bloodborne it's my favorite from sort game and probably my second favorite game of all time to be honest the only reason I haven't done a video before now on it was because I just didn't know how to record gameplay footage on the PS5 but then I actually looked up how to do it and it turns out it's the easiest thing in the world so here we are finally in a bold departure from the Dark Fantasy of Dark Souls bloodborne would enter into the darker world of horror replacing demons with beasts bows with guns knights with hunters and castles with watch where there is a castle and what Ubuntu although the trailers showed blood beasts and frenzied villagers giving off vague Echoes of Resident Evil 4 there would end up being much much more to the game's themes but the surface horror elements of werewolves and mad doctors and such masking the more comparing Cosmic and Eldritch themes found deeper within and higher above this was all back in 2014 2015 too when the warcraft themed games were actually quite rare and people still got excited about the prospect of a new one as opposed to now but every third Indie title released is Lovecraft influenced in some way not this somewhat how everyone used to get our hyped in the prospect of a new Souls like compared to Nowhere every third game is a Souls like gameplay wise compared to the relatively slow methodical pace of Dark Souls 1 than the even slower pace of Dark Souls 2 bloodborne would ramp the speed of everything way up from the attacking to the dodging to even the healing the new combat system would be fast frantic and very very bloody nonetheless Souls fans would certainly not be alienated by the new field combat with the game still holding through to the same quality and principles found in the three prior Souls games such as excellent level design difficulty tight combat mechanics and compelling lore a new term was even coined to Encompass bloodborne into the farmware from of modern titles soulsborne though the later release of sekiro complicated this a bit when some people started thrown around soulsborne Cairo before people gave up entirely with the gaming convention upon the release of Elven ring that being said I will still use the term Souls born from time to time throughout this video to refer to the whole catalog of modern from soft games I remember the day before bloodborne's release date I was living in a flat with a couple of friends at the time hyped as hell for the next day when I'd finally get to play it only for the very game to emerge from through my letterbox before falling gently onto the doormat had arrived a day early the same thing would later happen with Elden Ring 2 and speaking of Elden ring please watch my video on it I promise it doesn't suck but then I would say that wouldn't I I was excited as hell to get the game installed and get playing it and by the time I'd finished it the next week I realized that bloodborne was one of those rare special cases of being completely hyped for something only for it to come out and be even better than you could ever have hoped folks let's get into it let's talk bloodborne quick one about what to expect from the structure of this video I'll first begin with an introduction into the world and Lord of bloodborne before discussing the game's many levels and bosses throughout our Hunter's Journey bringing up interesting nuggets of lore and background where appropriate and I'll also provide analysis and critique of the game's many gameplay elements and mechanics throughout the video let me stress by the way that for as much as I love bloodborne's lore I'm really not a lore expert so please don't expect any groundbreaking theories on novel interpretations from me here because it's just not my thing and lastly if you like what you see and hear in this video I'd be real appreciative if you can give it a like and maybe even subscribe if you really like it many thanks although every other model from soft title starts out with a sequence to give the player at least some sort of introduction and explanation of the game World bloodborne kinda doesn't yes there is a cutscene where we're given a contract so as to choose a starting class followed by a blood-soaked werewolf climbing up onto our Garnier before going up in Flames followed by whatever the hell is happening here but these scenes only serve to lead the player more baffled than they were before and even though I finished a bloodborne about 20 times I still don't quite understand what's happening here but at least after the opening scenes of Dark Souls second when Eldon rang I had some sort of idea of what I was getting into this isn't intended as a critique by the way just an observation and I think it's actually really effective in quickly establishing a tone of weird inexplicable horror bloodborne is set in your name a dark Gothic City of Madness blood and beasts Janam is the home of an institution known as the healing Church a powerful and influential organization provide and control a process called broad Administration ostensibly a medical of medicine capable of curing ailments which cannot be cured through conventional means blood is the lifeblood of the city of yharnam and as well as it being used for healing even otherwise healthy yonamites are known to indulge in it in preference over alcohol due to it being more intoxicating however all this Blood Administration and intoxication is not at all without its risks because as we very quickly see yarnum is overrun with beasts and our character a foreign has arrived at the worst possible time because this is a night of the hunt and beasts now roam the streets one of the branches of the healing church is that of the hunters and the rule of hunters is to fight back against the scourge of beasts whenever an outbreak occurs it's not known how many outbreaks there have been in yalem's history or exactly how severe they tend to be but one thing is for sure this particular night is the worst it's ever been to the extent that janamites can be seen prowling the streets part way through their beastwave Transformations and there are almost no more normal humans left than even other Hunters have gone blood drunk attacking the player on site the cause of all this is blood hence the name bloodborne and the healing church is to blame for its normalization of blood Administration not to mention consumption the world itself isn't from any person or animal either but rather it was originally discovered by scores from the school of bergenworth but in the Tomb of the Gods of all yarnam and the dark Eldritch origins of the old blood within the tomb's other root of this Dreadful scourge of beasts as for our own Hunter we are a foreigner and that's about the only thing we know about our past as for why we've came to yarnam in the first place that has never covered in game but a reasonable assumption is that we are here to receive a cure for some illness hence the blood transfusion of the very beginning near the start of the game we encounter another Outsider named Gilbert who himself came to jalam for a chance at survival from some ambiguous ailment and the church's blood healing death helped buy him some time though ultimately things don't turn out so great for him due to us being an outsider we first need a contract as we'll see don't see Yana makes the test Outsiders and this is primarily because rather than the healing Church taking responsibility for the scourge of beasts they instead win it all on foreigners and Outsiders thus we have several unpleasant interactions with irate citizens shot within their houses who aren't too pleased our presence at their doorsteps and whilst in combat you'll frequently hear the beastway town folk show things like well I used to think they were saying this to us because we're a hunter no it's actually because we are an outsider and youngamites hate Outsiders but back to our contract this is where we choose our starting class now one area where bloodborne is somewhat toned down compared to Dark Souls is in build variety for example there are far less weapons in this game compared to Dark Souls there are only six starts options for ranged belts are quite limited though still viable to some degree and there's also never an option to reallocate your stats if you want to try out a different build in the middle of a playthrough or a new game plus you just can't gotta start a new game because of this a quality build with an equal emphasis on both strength and skill is never a bad idea for a playthrough making most of the game's weapons available to you and with enough scaling potential to make them viable blood tinge is quite an interesting start though because unlike the others it really doesn't have an equivalent star in Dark Souls or eldendron and instead is what determines the strength of firearms though it does also play a part in a few special weapons too I've tried a blood change belt before and while it starts off pretty weak due to the limited ability for firearms to serve its primary damage dealers it can end up being one of the most powerful builds in the game after getting your hands on the Chicago weapon as for Arcane it works just like walk from Dark Souls 3 or Arcane from Elden ring primarily determining item discovery but also coming into play for some weapons and special items like I said earlier what Bond doesn't have magic as such but there are still some interesting options for range damage which do kind of resemble magic in a way something which I found hilarious was that it took over five seconds of me getting control of the game to accidentally trigger a gesture I'm working from soft's other games gestures are motion controlled and bloodborne triggered by holding down X and moving your controller in a certain way and furthermore you cannot turn this off this is a horrible horrible idea and they shouldn't have done it why did they do this the Xbox happens to be the button used to open doors pull levels and pick up items too so it's really not that uncommon to accidentally trigger a gesture when performing one of these actions or even to die after performing a gesture In the Heat of battle due to the fact that you cannot quickly cancel out of them also it seems to get accidentally triggered more frequently with a PS5 controller than a PS4 one for whatever reason or maybe I'm just imagining that for anyone thinking I'm being overly harsh here let me clarify the gesture controls are one of the very few things I don't like about the game and they're more of a nitpick than anything so now that we've gotten that out of the way let's move on while and up walls after getting to grips with the controls of wee bit and moving onwards through the clinic where we've awoke we come face to face with our first Beast feeding on the corpse of a janamite who has himself begun the transition to beastood and this is where most people will see a swift death as it's from soft tutorial level tradition it is actually pretty easy to kill this thing even without yet having any weapons though because the unarmed charge attack happens to be the fastest in the game staggering the enemy if they're hit from behind and allowing for a high damage critical even much later on once you get a weapon it can be a really effective tactic to switch the bare hands for a fast charge attack just to take advantage of the follow-up Critical with the strength of criticals primarily being determined by your skill start and level also a nugget of useless information here is that if you take out this particular Beast it's one of the only regular enemies in the game that will never respawn after being killed regardless of whether you die here or make it to the Hunter's lump at the top of the water the outcome is the same you awake in the Hunter's dream this is bloodborne's Hub area and possible Contender for best Souls 1 Hub area so majula is also a series Contender for that position being a hub earlier this is where you'll do all your leveling up shopping weapon upgrading and more and speaking of weapons we finally get to choose a couple I've used all three starting options here extensively over different playthroughs and they're all great but they're so Cleaver in particular is considered by many to be one of the best weapons of the game and all you actually need from beginning to end hence while this is the weapon you'll see almost exclusively in the vast majority of bloodborne speedruns out there so for everyone else there are a bunch of other interesting and brutal weapons on offer particularly within the DLC which did well to address some folks complaints that the vanilla game did not have enough weapon variety I decided to Buck the salt level Trend myself and opt for the Hunter's ax another great weapon with a wonderful sweeping ability though I'd experiment a bunch with other tools of the hunt throughout my playthrough as well as a primary weapon we get to choose a firearm and the constant presence of a gun is key to making bloodborne's combat feel so thrilling and distinctive an important character we meet in the Hunter's dream is German the wheelchair-bound first Hunter now taunt Hunter's helper the Hunter's dream itself is a very mysterious Place clearly being located in some different plane of reality from The Real World as indicated by the multitude of bizarre Powers arranged in the distance a motif that appears in several other front sword games too but as we as Hunters can travel to and from the Hunter's room German is bound to this place and with him being known as the first Hunter who knows how long he's been here for in fact upon this introduction he initially struggles to recall even his own name will give the player some light advice and guidance through the first several hours of the game though to be honest he doesn't really stick around for all that long at a certain point through the game he'll just disappear entirely before you see him again at the very end which I always find a little bit off-putting what's even more off-putting though is this line of dialogue you're welcome to use whatever you find as he did see tell me I can [ __ ] the doll joking aside this isn't what he actually means but it's just funny how to imagine it that way especially the way his voice goals are hushed as if he's saying something shameful the darling question is merely that up first an abandoned motionless doll so later on after the player gains at least one Insight the dog gains sentience and serves as the means to allow the player to level up once the player is up and ready to lead the Hunter's dream Adventure back out into the waking World though you can teleport back to yharnam Via one of these headstones and this may be with warping from location to location is one aspect of the game that I've never been all that hot on see in the other games he's set at a bonfire sculptor's Idol or Point of Grace healing you up protecting you from enemies resetting all the enemies in the area and allowing you to warp to other such safe havens but the Hunter's lamps in bloodborne don't work like that instead all you can actually do from them is walk back to the Hunter's dream and then from there warp elsewhere back to the real world adding a somewhat unnecessary state in between compared to just allowing the player to warp directly to other Hunters laps from any other Hunter's lamp this can get particularly tedious if you're out doing a bit of blood echo or blood viral farming and have to sit through multiple load screens each time just to be able to reset the enemies in the area and even more tedious when you take into account the game's rather long important times even on PS5 though anyone who got this game on release will remember that the original loading times were way worse not to mention that the loading screen used to just be a still image of the word bloodborne before they implemented a well-needed patch but finally we are free to rain Terror to the Beast Scourge stuck in this face of yarnum the game really doesn't start you off too gently either and the first section of the city can be brutal for first-time players throwing hordes of youngamites at you many of them in various stages of beastood some still being fully anthropomorphic and clothed but with thick hair sprouting from all over their bodies others with one or more grotesquely elongated arms from which they hold various crude weaponry and others still which are fully transitioned into their Beast forms with the only remnants of the former Humanity being the bloodstained tatters of clothing clinging to their filthy 4 an outstanding aspect of bloodborne which immediately hits you upon stepping out into yarlum is its distance native atmosphere of horror and Madness even the very structure of the city itself and its craft architecture and ominous Gothic spiers which stand out against this Scarlet Skyline create this unnerving overbearing feeling of Oppression especially when coupled with the brutal gangs of janamites stalking the city streets in search of Outsiders to butcher ours is the case with most of yarnam's inhabitants their minds have completely snapped and they'll shout out and call the player a beast in broken ignorance of their own monstrous Transformations bobbon has insane enemy variety especially when taking the Chavez dungeons into account but these regular jalamites are by far my favorite thanks to the Frantic wines of dialogue when attacking and upon dying so quotable too some things I'll just be sitting in the house by myself and then the words you are not Wanna Do Well pop out of my mouth before I even know what's happened perhaps I should seek help incredibly strong opening area and a perfect introduction to what the game offers and like I said it really throws you into the deep end and forces you to quickly get to grips with a faster pace of combat due to the enemy's ferocious and high damage combos not to mention the sheer bloody number of enemies here this spot where the werewolf is bombing at the stake can be brutal as the game hits you full on the face with what to expect from its combat and even with me being a Souls veteran back then this part still kicked my ass several times before I got through it it's not even that difficult and certainly not when compared to many later sections but rather it's there to get you acclimated to the nature and speed of the game's combat in one Airway focused dose what has hung in buck and playing defensively behind a shield or by simply barraging the enemy with sorcery pyromancy Miracles hexes or incantations is a totally viable and legitimate way to play the souls games and Elven drink it is most certainly not legit when it comes to bloodborne's combat the new focus is on aggression not quite to the same extent as insecuro but certainly more so than the other soulsbourne games several new gameplay aspects all encourage player aggressions such as the lack of a shield the lack of effective armor and the rally mechanic now that technically is a shield but to be honest it's [ __ ] and no one uses it I guess there's also the lock Shield way later on in the game in the DLC but from what I understand it's nearly useless for blocking physical damage as for the lack of armor there is still fashion socier and in fact the range of a parallel North or here has never been so sleek and elegant but I've always found the extent to which clothing sets actually prevent damage to be quite limited and I've never really noticed a significant difference in defensive quality from one set of clothing to the next and you certainly won't be finding any equivalent of Havel's Armor here thus I always just choose clothing that looks the coolest which happens to apply to most of what one's clothing options and even unlock more gear for purchase after defeating certain enemies like The Keeper of the old Wards followed gascoigne and Henrik as for the rally mechanic when you take damage in bloodborne the amount of Health you've just lost will remain highlighted within your health bar for several seconds after getting hit and retaliating back against that enemy or any other enemies during those several seconds will gradually replenish your lost Health with the potential to distort it all the way back to fuel and you can even throw in a couple of extra hits on a dying enemy to continue gaining Health back bloodborne is a hard [ __ ] game and you're gonna get hit a lot I don't think it's the hardest Source ball game because personally I think that Accolade belongs to either say hero or maybe even Elden Ryan [ __ ] you Marquette but in bloodborne taking damage and lots of it is just part of the game however the game also counters this in your favor with the inclusion of a rally mechanic as well as the fact that right from the very start of the game you can carry up to 20 broad files at a time or even 32 blood vials with the right Rune setup later on not to mention that healing is faster here than in any other soulsborne game thus although the speed of combat and enemy aggression has been greatly accelerated here it also provides you with a much higher capacity for health recovery encouraging the player to stay right there in the action after getting hit instead of trying to panic through our way to safety speaking of wrong it's mostly been replaced by a Swift new Dash although you can still roll when not locked onto an enemy but gone are the days of mid-rolls or fat rolls because equip load has also been done away with regardless of which set you're wearing or the size and heft of your trick weapon I haven't forgotten about Trek weapons by the way I'll talk about those later they're sick the stamina consumption of dashes compared to the laws from Dark Souls is also way less and that's a good thing too because you're going to need to do a lot of Dashing to deal with all those crazy combos thrown at you from both bosses and regular enemies extended combos would of course become commonplace in Dark Souls 3 sekiru and Elden ring but that was not so much the case with the first three Souls titles due to their slower heavier feel and bloodborne really set the wheels in motion for the acceleration of the sourceborne formula for several games to come there's a couple of directions to head for at the start and depending on where you go your first boss will be different I always go straight for the big bridge so I guess the two werewolves hanging around here can act as a prey effective deterrent making some players think oh this must be one of those situations where I should come back later and kill these things so you can make good use of molotovs or if you're really cheap attack from within the doorway where they cannot get to you at the end of the bridge though is the cleric Beast the same creature will be first held back when climbing the ladder to the first Hunter's lamp well this boss is actually completely optional it can be pretty freaking hard too and it has a lot of health so that way so do we thanks to our 20 watt vials the cleric Beast is a challenging encounter but you certainly do have tricks and tools to make it less painful one of which are molotovs the effectiveness of which can be enhanced by first throwing an oil on or you can shoot the beast's hair to stagger allowing for a critical attack those tactics will only go so far though before you simply need to get to grips with its punches slam arms and grabs the reason it's called a claddock beast is because well we've already seen all manner of beasts and Mad Men by this point it would end up being the members of the healing Church itself who would go on to transform into the largest and most grotesque of beasts Soul spawn games are generally some of the best in the industry when it comes to delivering that satisfying rewarding pop after beating a boss coupled with a big sword and maybe a boss soul but I think Bob bond has them all beat when the wads prey slaughtered appeared in bold formed by the Boss Arena literally reigning with a vlog of your anime so being the clinic Beast does not progress this story forward or unlock access to other areas it does get you the sword Hunter badge unlocking more weapons and items for purchase at the shop in the Hunter's dream and now that we have some insight the doll is alive and kicking allowing us to level up for the first time while she's sentient now though if you do come back to the Hunter's dream with a zero Insight a nice touch is that she'll be transformed back in into a regular door again until you get some more insight is both an interesting and thematically appropriate resource in this game and you get it from entering boss Arenas being bosses entering certain strange and secretive locations and also by using certain items although Insight can just be thought of as another resource it also authors certain characteristics of particular levels and enemies depending on how much Insight you have at that time there really aren't all that many aspects which can be affected by it and furthermore the game gives zero indication of how much Insight is even required to trigger certain thresholds but what do you expect it's from soft a classic example is in the optional area Henrik Channel Lane where these shadowing mod 1 creatures will only appear if you have at least 15 insight and in fact the area boss just further ahead can be truly trivialized because if you go on with zero Insight in the aforementioned mod 1 enemies that are normally spawned and there too just won't show up at all another example is outside the chapel and they age or what but having an Insight of at least 40 will make a terrifying amygdala creature fully visible whereas normally these Eldritch Oddities will be completely invisible but always present here though even if you can't see them as evidenced by this attack which seems to come out of nowhere when you first come here there are a number of other Insight effects too and a really cool aspect of them is that they never make the game easier as I mentioned this is thematically appropriate because the inside counter is supposed to represent the players level of Eldritch knowledge of the world hence why it grows every time you see or beat some new boss monstrosity or enter a forbidden area and thus as your Hunter's understanding of the world grows they gradually start to discern all its true terrifying realities and suffer for it rather than gaining strength to their insight and I think that's a beautiful implementation of a game mechanic I certainly do think it could have been handled better though I mean due to the various negative effects that insight has such as making some enemies do more damage and increasing the player's vulnerability to the frenzy mechanic in theory it would be best to maintain a fairly low number of insight and spend it on consumables and materials and the Hunter's dream before it gets too high in reality though Insight really doesn't have as much of an effect on gameplay as it could have yes there's some cool effects here and there but not many I wish they'd have done more with it the possibilities could have been endless for example the mild one enemies which appeared in hamwick that's a great idea but that's the one and only time this is done which is just a bit odd why not have additional enemies spawn in other places too also to my knowledge they didn't include a single Insight dependent aspect in the DLC showing that its implementation as anything other than an additional purchasing resource sells way about half baked a very cool and easily missable touch with the icons for the madman's insight and great ones wisdom consumables which are used to gain and cite is that they depict these luminescent slug-like creatures called phantasms within human skulls although phantasms are an easy element to overlook in general when it comes to bloodborne's law there are also a fundamentally significant part of it and they'll reappear several more times throughout the game especially in the DLC shoving the other direction from the cleric Beast will instead lead you down into yalam's sewers past more worthman as well as other varieties of monster entirely like these disgusting sewer corpses little legs Rod off not to mention the manager board at the far end of this tunnel see but when I first saw the early trailers and promotional images for bloodborne I assume the hollow themes would be somewhat conventional with people transforming into wolves and all manner of other hairy beasts and I even remember being a bit disappointed at the prospect of a new front-soft game primarily being set in a city environment but guns and stuff assuming that the more grounded levels might be less interesting than places like dark fruit Basin or the dragon Edie from the Dark Souls games but no bloodborne gets really weird and interesting really quickly and any disappointed Notions of more grounded levels are done away with after only a few minutes of playing the game you fight all sorts of weird enemies here and explore a great variety of interesting locations particularly in the various nightmare levels later on in the game and especially in the DLC I will of course cover the oath Hunters DLC extensively later on in the video but for now suffice to say that's the best DLC I have ever played at the other end of the sewer just before the next boss we emerge back up into yarnum and at the top of a wide set of steps I'm not going to be doing a play-by-play of every occurrence and action in the game by the way but I did just want to highlight this part because every time I've emerged from the top of the Wilder on any playthrough the brick throw at the top always hits the Bulldog which always damages the troll itself before rolling down and killing a bunch of enemies followed down the steps I like that this happens because as a player it helps me plus it's Mel I'm using but why does it happen anyway just followed on the proper boss of central yarnum awaits father gascoigne with his legendary intro cutscene you'll be one of them sooner or later such great voice acting if there was dialogue once he loses about 30 of his HP is even better oh what's that smell the Sweet Blood oh it seems to me foreign although the classic Beast is certainly a challenge it is rather conventional in a sense essentially being a big monster with well-tailed raft moves and combos gas coin is very different though being a hunter just like us and even using our same weapon the hunter rocks as such he poses a different sort of Challenge and while you can simply awareness attacks and Dodge timings this is a great time to really get to grips with one of what Bone's most enjoyable combat mechanics the Stagger see we picked up a firearm at the start of the game and there are in fact a bunch of different Firearms later from Modest pistols all the way to Roaring cannons and Gatling guns however whilst guns can be used to deal some damage but the damage potential increasing depending on your blood turns start it's really not an optimal way to play the game for multiple reasons one a significant investment into the blood tinge stat is required to start doing remotely decent damage 2. fighting your gun requires Quicksilver bullets of which a starting marks of just 20 can be about it at the one time though this can be upgraded with runes or by sacrificing a chunk of Health for five temperate bullets however with weapons like cannons consuming 12 bullets at a time this can be of limited usefulness and three developing a build around attacking enemies from a distance with guns isn't even close to being an optimal way to play the game you have to force it the true rule of firearms in combat is the stargo bloodborne's answer to partying when an anime is at the tail end of an attack animation hitting them with your gun will stagger them leaving them completely vulnerable to dash in for a critical hit this works in the vast majority of enemies for the vast majority of their attacks and even works on several bosses whilst I say to stagger is bloodborne's answer to partying it's actually much safer because for partying to watch in Dark Souls you need to be close enough for the enemy's attack to actually connect otherwise the enemy attack will mess and of course the party but in bloodborne as long as an enemy is within range of of your bullets you can start out the attack as long as your timing is right even if they're out of range of you the timing part can be easier said than done through and it can take a certain amount of experimentation and dying before you figure out the staggered window but really the same can be said of dodging with some enemy attacks you need to wait a second and a half after the startup animation even begins before firing whereas other anime attacks might come out just a bit faster than you can even fire because bear in mind that firing your gun is not instantaneous and has its own startup animation compared to your Dodge which is comparatively quicker to perform to me the Hunter's pistol always seemed the obvious option to choose at the start over the blunder boss due to its faster firing speed but then I learned that the firing speed of both Firearms is actually the same and the wander boss even has the benefit of a greater shot spread much like a shotgun though the recovery speed is lower then again if I ever find myself spam fighting my gun in combat it's because I was playing badly just like span rolling you you never actually have to make use of this tiger at all if you don't want to and there are even offhand choices that don't even have the ability to stagger at all like the flame sprayer or the rosemaryness but then you're making the game substantially more difficult if you choose to ignore this mechanic not to mention Less Fun staggering is especially useful for some of the hardest bosses both in the base game and the DLC to the extent they can sometimes feel a bit cheap the difficulty of bosses like lady Maria Garmin and often of course can be lowered significantly if you make effective use of staggers though even with this weakness they're still very challenging fights staggers come in particularly handy for the father gascoigne fight because he's just so aggressive and quick but then again more anime aggression also means more opportunity for staggers even though we only hear a handful of direwolf and gas going within this one boss fight fronso still managed to make him a really compelling character because you can interact with this whole family both literally and morbidly before the fight you can speak with his daughter who asked after her mother Viola and even give you a music box which his family would play to calm him down when he started to lose his mind suggesting that gas going butchered his own wife and threw her through this fence because she did not have the music box which would make him remember himself if fromsoft had included this music box solely as some sort of key item to provide extra context for the boss it'd still be an incredible touch but the fact that you can also use it as a tool to help in battle is a beautiful Fusion of Boss design and storytelling especially the way Beast gascon holds his hands to his head and torment as he remembers that he's just killed his own wife the tragedy doesn't even end there either because if you bring Viola's brooch back to her daughter she'll lament over the death of her mom and then run off to find her corpse only to be eaten by the manitobore and the sewer who yields her red ribbon upon death and then you can have the exact same thing happen to her sister it's an incredibly cruel and depressing questline with no real rewards and I love it from my own experiences the NPC Quest finds in bloodborne have always been very easy to miss in fact I didn't even discover gascoigne's daughter at all until several playthroughs in and as for the Odin chapel questline and Cathedral Ward without exaggeration I think it was years until I realized that you can actually send all these people here for anyone not familiar the creepiest dude on Earth Here requests that you direct any sane yondamites over to this Chapel but they will be safe from the beasts although his demeanor makes it seem like you definitely should not do this and that you probably want to sliver over them like some creepy slimy slug you actually should do it because he turns out to be the nicest character in the whole game there is an alternative place to send people through that being isfk is Clinic where we start out the game but you should definitely not send anyone here unless you want to subject them to a crew on unusual fate though maybe you do want that the voice acting of the Imposter at the clinic here is masterfully done it's just that subtle strangeness in our speech and the odd breathiness to her voice as if she's not quite all there mentally the hunt I presume then if you find any survivors tell them to seek yusefka's Clinic upon my Hippocratic Oath if they are yet human I will look after them perhaps even cure them there are a bunch of great characters you can send over to the chapel with brilliant dialogue and great personalities which gradually deteriorate as major events transpire in the game's story but I somehow missed all the [ __ ] before and only realized you can even populate the Chapel to this extent after seeing some video on it on YouTube and thinking oh [ __ ] I didn't know you can do that that said the method for getting suspicious man to the chapel is both hilarious and ridiculous he's something of a xenophobe and so whichever supported Safe Haven you tell him about he'll go to the other one and thus I chose clinic so that I can interact with him back at the chapel I did this with the aid of a Wiki but I can't help but laugh at the idea of players who actually did want to send him to isfk's clinic or to see his grumpy ass show up in the chapel anyway because he's a [ __ ] here too hope nothing happens to him the cathedral Ward level after father gascoigne is a great deal bigger than Central Yana and a bit harder to navigate in my experience there's a lot of areas in the game that I know the way of by heart having played through them so many times but the exception of the Forbidden Woods which I will never not get lost in but there's something about Cathedral wards that makes me unable to commit its layout to memory there's just a ton of different paths and alleys to take and every time I play through this level at some point it guaranteed to hear me say how the [ __ ] do you get to Forbidden Woods again with his Central yarlum was primarily home to beasts boars and trolls on the hunt for Outsiders the inhabitants of Cathedral World tend to be more strange than beastly like these were tesk Chapel Giants and the creepy pale Church servants armed with Kane Lantern and crucifix this joint and particular down here armed with the ball and chain is the only one of its kind in the whole game as far as I know same with this one with the Flaming fists and the Upper Floor of the lecture hall and where we're shouting out unique enemies how about this [ __ ] boy with a massive heart although the main POI of interest of interest is of course the grand Cathedral at the top of the ward this area has one of my favorite sections of the whole game it's really just a small alley but some residences to interact with but this crooked Smoky corner of yharnam is one of the places that always sticks in my mind when thinking of wadbone the conversations you can have with the on-edged terrified janamites from behind their doors as they nervously praise the church and the hunters clearly indicating that criticism of the human church was not something which was tolerated in young and culture factor a good chunk of dialogue in this game is with people you can't actually see really adds to the horror because you can never be quite sure who or what you're talking to from behind that door the only indication that a door can even be approached is the glowing red incense Lantern outside said to be effective at wadding off beasts most of the folk you interact with in this manner are just plain hostile so others are clearly batshit insane as the game progresses through you start getting nervous about initiating dialogue at these doors at all because all of a sudden you start getting back very different responses than you did before [Music] thus despite the various indoor youngamites who think they're safe from the Beast Scourge thanks to their incense the beastly Fates were always sealed due to the yarn and blood in their veins at the top of Cathedral walls past the chapel Giants and church servants stands the grand Cathedral within which awaits vikr Emilia hunched over chanting hushed prayers before transforming into the biggest beasts we've seen yet very artistically done to the way you only see the transformation via Shadow sometimes it's more effective horror to lead the grizzly or details to the imagination though if you want to partially ruin the horror for yourself and see what actually happens off screen here check out Omega fantasies video on the matter white gascoigne Emilia can be very tough for people because she has a lot of Health a massive array of wild attacks and on white gas going she cannot be staggered with a well-timed gunshot she is weak to fire through and can be staggered by heavy strikes to her limbs although bodbon doesn't quite have the invisible stagger meter that Elden ring does larger enemies can still be staggered by targeting a limb or head and this is key to making those massive health bars far more manageable for bosses like Amelia dark Beast apparel and especially the wonderborn a cool ability that Amelia has which she only sometimes pulls out is that she can heal I've always found the animation here to be rather sad and touching the way she adopts this very human and feminine pose of prayer not unlike solvent based on the bridge into erathal in Dark Souls 3. although further gascoigne is the first mandatory boss in the game allowing access into the cathedral World he's not quite a major boss in the same way that Amelia is and that beating him doesn't really progress the world but beating Victor Emilia does progress the game advancing the world to night time causing some enemies to fall asleep and also making some items in the shop more expensive the same way Spirit emblems became more costly throughout sakuru as such it's a good idea to stock up on as many blood vials and perhaps Quicksilver bullets as possible as early as possible ideally before even entering Cathedral world and what vials are just 180 bucks compared to later on in the game where they literally quadruple in price the decision to move from automatically replenishing healing items to proper consumables which need to be purchased or found was a bit of an odd design choice of course Demon Souls had the same system though it was a bit Messier there with the six different varieties of grass but then fromsoft found a much better alternative but Estes flasks such a great system that almost every Source like went on to shamelessly copier along with the bloodstain mechanic that's why the blood vial move was a bit of a head scratcher like I said if you're conscious about stocking up on blood vials Elway on you can easily go through the whole game and never get close to rolling out but then again I'm saying that as someone who's finished the game countless times and who doesn't tend to die too much to bosses although Ludwig sure ended up humbling the [ __ ] out of me if you're more of an inexperienced player having to take time away from being able to organically race through the game and appeal where attempt bosses really can be a bummer although it's not quite the same thing it reminds me of the horrendous Boss run box from Dark Souls 2. if I die against the boss I don't want to have to Fan it around before my next attempt I want to get right back in there and beat it exactly like this making me run at Great distances back to the boss or making me walk back to the Hunter's dream and then walk over somewhere else to find broad vials before walking back to the Hunter's dream again and then back to where the bosses can get quite tedious but as they'd already figured all this out with dark souls perhaps the reason they did this relates to the sheer number of blood vials available to you right from the start because 28 is a hell of a lot for the game to just replenish for free every time you die but then again you could theoretically get 20 Estes in Dark Souls 1 within the first hour of the game via the right of kindling and a few Humanity if you really wanted to another location accessible from Cathedral Ward is old yarnon a very interesting location which is surprisingly completely optional as are many of bloodborne's other levels like Henrik Channel Lane the lecture hall upper Cathedral Ward The Nightmare Frontier and cainhurst old yarnum was with the very first Beast outbreak took place before the yarn and we start off and was even built the beasts here are a somewhat different variety to the ones we see elsewhere too being smaller with many Dion poison buildup on attack as a result of the outbreak all the yarn was bumped To The Ground by the powder cake Hunters with her crude explosive weaponry and the ruined City we see is the result this event was even depicted in the first issue of the bloodborne Comics released a few years ago of which I actually bought the first four although there are a ton of beasts here yet another X1 and thematically after gameplay Edition as if they feel fire and will shy away from it hence the prior bonding of the city by the hunters there's also another NPC interaction here that I did not know was possible for several years allowing you to make the hunter firing down upon you from the tower non-hostile opening up extra dialogue when you enter the area jira there warns you at first not to kill the beasts and to go no further into the city before firing what I've always done here is simply get closer and then climb up the tower and fight him to claim his powder cake Hunter's barge however if you defeat a later boss called Dark Beast puddle accessible from yahargul and then make your way directly to jira through a couple of shortcuts without killing any of his precious beasts along the way he will suddenly be friendly to you how the [ __ ] you're supposed to know all this I will never know this is actually my first time even hearing this dialogue and I only managed it via instructions from the wiki I've no interest in matters further up but you must not disturb this place the beasts do not Venture above and mean no harm to anyone if you still insist on Hunting them then I will hunt you first by the way same voice actor who played marvelous Chester from Dark Souls 1 King Vendrick from Dark Souls 2 and king osiros from Dark Souls 3. the what style beast at the end of old yarnum is one of my favorite bosses in the game and I came so damn close to being home without getting hurt but then I did get her unpoisoned the best one I can use to describe the world starve Beast of design is rancid it doesn't even bleed blood upon being hurt but some ambiguous foul fluid flying from its winds instead and further on in the fight it starts spraying potent toxin in all directions inflicting you with poison just by standing near it just like with vicar Emilia though it is weak against fire being a beast and like many irregular Beast enemies it can be totally distracted for 10 seconds to the use of a pungent blood cocktail item this boss has one of the most fiendish grab attacks I've ever seen in a from soft game too being nearly guaranteed to catch you out at fast due to the fact this startup animation is well adjusted staying still for a second and half before quickly lunging and every time I've ever been caught out by this grab it has killed me it keeps you on edge too because it can be hard to tell if the boss is winding up for an attack or just not doing anything being a boy star Beast does reward you with your first challenge as well as unlocking this specific door in Oden Chapel for some reason I guess now's as good a time as any to talk about the Charles dungeons perhaps one of bloodborne's least enjoyed features though many others like them a lot personally my opinion on them is pretty mixed so before this most recent playthrough I was definitely followed on the dislike side of the spectrum of Charles dungeon opinion after getting the sumeru showers dropped from the board staff Beast you can place it in one of the headstones to the west side of the Hunter's dreams and after conducting the Charles ritual the twiring just a wee bit of water Echoes and a couple of Richard Woods you'll likely have already picked up and you'll die on them you can enter into your first showers dungeon now there's a certain deal of confusion about these back when the game first came out because a lot of people thought these dungeons were randomized but that's not the case only the dungeons are accessed by root chalices have randomized layouts while all other dungeons are fixed a dungeon can have anywhere from three to four layers and each wear will always have the same goal activate the weather to allow access into the boss room the then beat the boss this is certainly easier said than done though because the dungeons are crawling with monsters and traps and they can be very tricky to navigate the yellow ones with a depth of just one will tend not to be too complex but even once you start getting onto depth two almost to the max difficulty of five [ __ ] can be absolutely labyrinthine and this is exacerbated by the fact that many rooms and Halls look the same if not identical between different layers and even different dungeons that said it is a really fun feeling when you find some new feature enemy or room that you've never seen before in the dungeons though after even a few hours of playing around in them this will become increasingly rare you can easily play through the game and never set foot in a child's dungeon and while they absolutely serve as an excellent source of wad Echoes blood gems and blood shards they're not at all necessarily for making your character strong enough to take on the late game or even the DLC in fact the last I'd even played through all them was about seven years ago until I dabbled in them again here just can have a competent discussion on them for this retrospective the reason I hadn't touched them in so long was because they'd previously left a rather bad taste in my mouth back then I played through all the hardest dungeons before coming up against the end boss of the dungeon that being queen young and by the end of that whole Saga I was sick of them it's important to stress a lot of the stuff you find in the more advanced child's dungeons is significantly more difficult than anything you encounter in the main game to the point but after a certain point the reason you continue grinding the dungeons is largely to get strong enough to handle even harder Dungeons and trust me some of them will give you nightmares just ask anyone who's taken on the Watchdog of the old Wards or amigdawa in the defiled showers I did and I'll never do that again that said the best thing about the Chalice dungeons are the animation bosses because rather than from soft just recycling enemies and bosses from the main game there are tons of unique ones here that you won't find in the main game at all don't get me wrong there are certainly a lot of recycled bosses too but when they do appear they tend to be much harder like this nightmare of a fight against Rome the enemies and bosses unique to the dungeons really aren't lazy tacked on things either by the way these are incredible high quality enemies with amazing designs and animations like the Sumerian descendant the blood white and Beast and the undead giant there are even several variations of the undead giant one of which happened to be perhaps the most difficult fight of this entire playthrough seriously [ __ ] this boss I love its visual design but [ __ ] it although I was expecting to not have a great time with the Charles dungeons once again here I actually ended up having a lot of fun on them and I especially enjoyed collecting the different ritual materials necessary for the more challenging dungeons there are tons of different types of ritual materials too and some of which are really rare sometimes requiring about hunting and farming and this was an aspect of the game I did really enjoy it's all quite addictive that said the fun does wear off and while the intense and even unfair difficulty of some of the later dungeons can be somewhat off-putting for me the greatest weakness of every child's dungeon is how damned repetitive they are like I said earlier regardless of the difficulty of the dungeon you're in your objective is always the same find the lever then beat the boss and this gets old fast and this is made even worse due to the layered structure of each dungeon because regardless of whether it has three layers or four they're all the same aspects between them will change sure but you're still essentially just finding a lever and beating a boss until you make it to the bottom layer there's something about knowing exactly what to expect with the structure of each dungeon that gets really really boring for me I don't mean structure is in the actual layout but just the endless [ __ ] levels bonus rooms and bosses the bosses themselves are probably the best part of this formula but even with those you're going to be seeing a lot of repeats and there's several hours I spent doing a bunch of dungeons here I saw the Watchdog of the old Wards the Keeper of the awards and the money or more three times each and a few million descendant twice and as cool as a unique dungeon enemies are you also start to get a bit sick of seeing the same snatchers fumerian guards and merciless Watchers thoughts are really nice surprise when you see something a bit unusual like this odd slog this roaming on their Giant and The Keeper of the old Awards just patrolling the area with a couple of fire breathing dogs all in all I have a better opinion of the Charles dungeons now than I did before but the repetitive nature can sadly cause the fun and Novelty to wear off quicker than would be ideal although we learned the passwords to gain access to the Forbidden Woods from the cutscene after the vicar Amelia fight there is an optional level to travel to first which then leads on to a later optional level though the path to hamwick channel Lane is guarded by a multitude of armed men as well as the aforementioned mad one enemies that come out to play if we have 15 Insight or more the actual area just ahead is populated nearly exclusively by women with the auditral one executioner this area some of the best ambience in the entire game and when we're talking about a game like bloodborne that ain't nothing God damn I just want to take it all in and immerse myself in this thick delicious atmosphere of smoke bone dust and death coupled with the auditory horror of the hysterical screams and maniacal wafts of the torch settle in cleaver-wielding women foreign it's insane that this game came out back in 2015 just a year after Dark Souls 2 so that was also the year of the Witcher 3. a [ __ ] detail I discovered just in this playthrough was that these enemies have unique dialogue if you kill them with fire I only discovered this by accident after one of them killed themselves by standing on a fire oh yeah for our next main destination is the Forbidden Woods which as far as I can tell is the largest level in the game this place is a [ __ ] twisted Maze and very easy to get lost in my favorite part of it is this stop but [ __ ] is still kind of recognizable and there's even a quint Charming village where some old familiar beasts and yolomites but in the second half the place totally goes off the rails and in place of beasts you have asked dragon verminhos and Tangled snake balls both large and small I'll never figure out the [ __ ] layout of this place well usually if I can make it to this swamp I'm golden it's like the 1-1 Mark I can actually match to memorize here there are some very cool [ __ ] in the woods though for one the game's best NPC is to be found here voltor who wasn't actually added into the game until patch 1.09 seven months after the game's release night brims with defiled scum and is permeated by their rotten stench just think now you're all set to hunt and kill to your heart's content hunt in cooperation with your fellows your league Confederates Now That's What I Call voice acting Walter has one of the sickest pieces of Lord related to him too because if you pick up the Constable set from the DLC it tells a story about a group of foreign constables who were nearly all wiped out by a yarn and Beast save One Survivor who ate the Beast hole the item description doesn't mention voter by name but if you follow his questline by giving him five them and then he'll give you his eccentric helmet and can be summoned as falter Beast eater for a couple of DLC bosses we also meet patches in the Forbidden Woods so he's very easy to miss but he gives us a key item needed to gain access to yet another optional area the nightmare Frontier before we carry on to bergenworth there's one last noteworthy character found in the woods and he's a Shifty one a suspicious beggar who seems to be feasting on a few corpses before interrupt his business now you can't just attack him here and put an end to it not that that's necessarily straightforward but you can also send him off to the chapel if you really think that's a good idea as well as the fact that this is clearly a [ __ ] psychopath the chapel dweller does indicate to you earlier on that you've succeeded already in sending all the friends who are NPCs there and your work there is done also that I'd like to be your friend uh sorry I'm busy however if you do send the bigger to the chapel he will progressively start killing off its inhabitants as you make your way follow through the game and kill more bosses before I'd even had a chance to fight another boss though he'd already brutalize this skeptical man and so before he had a chance to lay a hand on my precious fake grandmother I took him out except he's actually a terrifying lightning Beast that never appears anywhere else in the base game with the exception of the Charles dungeons this is such a cool surprise Because unless you've heard about this beforehand you'll probably just assumed you'll die in a couple hits or it'll play out like a hunter fight not this it also has some very interesting ramifications for the whole concept of beastood because it even whilst transformed it still maintains intelligent speech a far cry from the animos like frenzy of nearly every other beast in the game at the end of The Forbidden Woods Gathering the way to bergenworth are the three shadows of yarnum back on my original playthrough this was the first boss I struggled like hair one to the extent I just had to leave the area to level up my character and weapons Elsewhere for a while before coming back that said the difficulty of this boss really is affected by how you choose to go about the fight and whether you prioritize picking one Shadow off at a time or try to spread out the damage due to the fact there's one shocking groups of homing Fireballs at you through the whole fight it seems obvious that you should pick that one off first and that's what I used to do but conversely it actually makes the fight harder because the other two merely focused ones are much harder to deal with and this second phase once they get access to the long-range snake attacks if you [ __ ] around for too long here without killing any of them then this boss gets really hard to manage hence why you want to have taken one of them out by the time phase two comes around now if you've left the fireball one till last well good news his AI is garbage and you can just do this though a snake summon can be surprisingly difficult to dodge if you're badly positioned apparently there was originally going to be a massive snakeball boss here as documented by Lance McDonald but despite technically being a Gunk boss I think the shadows of yarnam are great you do encounter them again later on as regular enemies and the nightmare of Menses except without all this snake Tom Fury just ahead of the Shadows is the beautiful but bafflingly shot bergenworth where it all started bergenwell scores were the ones who originally discovered the old wad down in the tombs of the Gods which I think means the Chalice dungeons the head of bergenworth Master Willem quickly grew to understand the dangers of the old Wadlow instead emphasizing the need for great Insight before man could come closer to the Eldritch truth and Ascend higher as a species but one of willam's students at the school of bergenworth Lawrence was of a different mind wanting to progress The Human Condition through the use of the old blood causing him to split off from Bergen birth just as we saw in the cutscene in the grand Cathedral from here Lawrence founded the healing Church of which he became its first vicar hence his skull being venerated at the altar in the grand Cathedral bergenworth itself seems to have been largely forgotten about though and no small part thanks to being hidden far beyond the Twisted Paths of the Forbidden Woods of which Entre is only permitted to those who knew the password there's ruin not much exploring to be done in Bergen birth and other than the short outdoor area outside the main building populated by this Garden of eyes enemies this is a remarkably small area being more of an extension of the Forbidden Woods than its own proper level the eye theme of the anime Seer is extremely prevalent in bloodborne and it ties back to the idea of insight if you read the description of the iron it reveals that Master Willem himself sought to line his very brain with eyes to elevate his thoughts indeed you actually see Willam himself setting on the lunarium clad in Long robes as well as a blindfold again going back to that thing of higher level Vision in lieu of regular Vision we see other characters with various kinds of blindfolds onto such as the docker in the opening cutscene father gascoigne the suspicious beggar and every member of the choir another group associated with a healing Church who Don blindfold caps over their eyes and tribute to master willon speaking of quiet members one of the most obnoxious Hunter enemies in the bloody game is to be found on the Upper Floor of bergenberg presumably there to protect the secrets of bergenberth and stand guard for master Warren who cannot even speak at this point or have no fear I'd never lay a hand on this feeble old man as well as being generally Swift tricky and tanky this is the first time where the player will see one of the most obnoxious [ __ ] attacks in the game a call Beyond it's just so hard to dodge and does way too much damage to the point where if it hits you you have a very high chance of just dying furthermore there's not an effective enough counter to enemies who use this if you're extremely fast you can shoot a gun at them to cancel the attack but if you're even slightly too slow the attack will still just go off anyway and you'll probably die I guess the one upside to this is that you can't actually get a hold of this attack yourself except it has an Arcane requirement of 40 which you probably won't have unlike you've specifically went for an Arcane build Hunter enemies in general tend to be very challenging in this game because they have all the same tricks and attacks as you except unlike you they often have significantly more health and do much more damage seriously even regular Hunter encounters out in the world can be a decent bit more difficult than some bosses and these encounters can be very frustrating one-on-one fights are bad enough like the one in bergenworth or even the fight against Henrik where we have the help of Eileen but later on in Yahoo girl the game throws three against you at once one of whom has a [ __ ] Cannon and another with a tiny ton of dress either of which can easily one shot you the one consolation with Hunter enemies is that they don't respawn after death but even so for as much as I can appreciate the difficulty of this game it can get a bit excessive and frustrating with the hunter fights the number one most difficult such fight though is of course the bloody Crow of cainhurst who you face at the Grand Cathedral of the end of Eileen's Crestline holy [ __ ] this fight sucks it has so much health does insane damage even with its repeating pistol file on and just when you think you're doing well it pops a broad vile I took on this Hunter pretty early on and struggled but although it took me over four minutes straight it looked like I was actually going to win but then it killed me with a random pistol shot right at the [ __ ] end absolutely devastating that said I did turn back here much later and had a surprisingly easy Time by simply poking it for high damage with my holy Moonlight sword courtesy of Ludwig out on the onearium the path forward is profoundly unconventional but as indicated by William's feeble gestures we have to step off the balcony and done into the moonside lake below the water or the baffling form of Ron the vacuous spider becomes visible off in the distance very unusual boss design both a visually and mechanically especially with how it won't even attack you until the second cycle when it teleports away you can easily end up being overrun by spiders here especially if you can't be asked clearing the old ones out after each cycle though this is way more of an issue if you see Rome out in the Charles dungeons which I did cool trick that speedrunners use for ROM is to hit it with a Charged attack right at the point where it's going to teleport away making it stick around for a while longer if you're really strong and make use of a beast Squad power and wallpaper it's possible to take the boss out before they can teleport away at all just as vicar Amelia caused the game Barrel to shift forward in time altering the Skybox and causing other small changes killing Rome precipitates an even more dramatic transformation following the moon red and bringing it terrifyingly close to yharnam to the point where it seems to hang below the sky rather than existing as some distant Celestial body furthermore from this point on the sky itself completely changes to a visceral Cosmic purple coloring the rolling clouds beneath after the boss the game warps us to yahar ghoul unseen Village an area which can be accessed via the cathedral Ward but which was up until now inaccessible unless you allowed yourself to get manhandled by a snatcher earlier on as well as this Transportation into this nightmarish location Rome's death is also the Catalyst for other events occurring throughout the world for one if you travel back to Odin Chapel everyone is not all right at all with what remains of people's minds have a now completely snapped the coming of the red moon and the same is largely true of isfka's imposter although as with many things in this game it's easy to miss there's a cave just by The Village in the Forbidden Woods which actually leads all the way down back to yarnum after passing through a quicksilver swamp populated by discarded Giants and giant reaches and from the other end we enter isfka's clinic for real but as before you couldn't access the upper level as easily missable and optional thought maybe it's for sure a good idea to come here after being wrong because one you can pick up the cainhurst summons allowing access to a whole new level and two isfka's imposter us here being in a state of distress although you can come here before killing Rome I never do this because the Imposter will be hostile here you'll miss out on one of the game's third umbilical chords but if you come after she seems to be pregnant in some way and in great Agony twitching and giggling as if she's lost her mind and as if it needed saying Again by me amazing voice acting see things I knew it I'm different I'm no Beast I God is awful but it proves that I'm chosen don't you see How They Ride Ride inside my head rather Rapture user killing her here does get you the thought umbilical cord though or the one thought of umbilical cord as it's apparently called in the U.S even though there are actually four of them available so you only need three to gain the right to fight the true final boss at this point before discussing any further areas I think it's about Bloody time I talked about one of bloodborne's coolest features trick weapons otherwise this Topic's placement so late in the video is a bit odd but I want to space out my discussions on game mechanics in between discussions of levels and bosses which is another way of saying I'm not very good at essay structure although bot Bond doesn't have anywhere near close to the number of weapons found in the souls games or Elden ring the weapons it does have are significantly more interesting because they can transform the Dark Souls you've eaten one-handed light attack and heavy attack you get two-handed light attack and heavy attack as well as your running and jump attacks and maybe even a weapon art or Ash of war in the case of Dark Souls 3 or Elden ring the main reason for switching to two-handing is for about extra damage output at the expense of a shield or maybe because you prefer the two-handed move set more than the one-handed moveset no one weapon really provides a particularly high level of complexity but the strength of the combat mechanics as well as the sheer number of weapons meaning that the complexity simply isn't needed in bloodborne the complexity of move set still isn't really that high but it certainly is higher because each weapon has two different forms the extent to which the second form of a given weapon differs from the first really does vary from weapon to weapon but in most cases the difference in moveset between the two forms is substantial and thus instead of just switching to two hand for a bit more damage like you do in Dark Souls you're effectively switching to a new weapon for example the cut Karma transforms from a swift blade for slashing to an enormous Hammer the threaded cane transforms from a well Kane to a segmented Whip and the Hunter's ax transforms from a small ax into a bigger arcs the most interesting weapons definitely are the ones with the more dramatic Transformations whereas to me the least interesting ones and the ones I almost never use are those with the second form is just a firearm like the rifle spear or the writer plush the reason for this is simply that I already have a firearm in my offhand and so rather than a weapon that just transforms into another gun I prefer the Beast cutter please or better yet the Wally jigsaw the game also cheats a wee bit with some trick weapons by making their second form do some sort of Elemental damage as opposed to change engine into a whole new thing like the torn address or the boom Hammer before all you'd boom Hammer Fanatics go reaching for that dislike button please stop because I'm something of a boomer myself it's just I prefer the weapons with proper Transformations one of the coolest aspects of Trek weapons is how fluid it feels to transform back and forth between their forms in the midst of battle because instead of punishing the player for trying to switch to one or the other in a fight there's some long animation Where You're vulnerable for a second or two there are designated transform attacks which can be thrown into the middle of a combo and you can even do back to back transform attacks if you've got the stamina for it furthermore these tend to be really strong and are key to building up this meal if you've popped a Beast plot power you don't even need to throw them into the middle of a combo either because transform attacks can even be performed just after a dash I remember making use of this extensively back when fighting German on my blood level 4 run of the game last year because the extra damage from transform attacks as great as the trick weapon are they'll really want a huge number of them in the base game in fact there were just 14 and not all of them were that great or interesting like the rifle spear or stake driver however the DLC added an additional 12 weapons and this was both much needed and very welcome because these are some of the sickest weapons in the game by far the far more crude and brutal too as the old Hunter DLC of course features older versions of weapons thus instead of the somewhat elegant thread it came you have a far more brutal Beast cutter which completely foregoes any illusions of subtlety or dignity then you have the Wally gigsaw literally designed to rip Beast to shreds with a spinning serrated teeth as far as upgrading goes it's all done in the Hunter's dream and it's the same standard from soft fare when it comes to upgrade materials with Bloodstone being a material of choice in this game back in the day though unless you were born to delve very far into the Charles dungeons it was only possible to get one Broad Rock per play through which was pretty to be honest but when the DLC arrived they made it possible to get another one there as well as giving you the option to buy a bloodrock with 60 Insight now that's a lot of insight that if you've been hauling your madman's knowledge and great one's Insight since the start of the game it's not that difficult to afford though apparently you can farm for insight in the Chalice dungeons too but things get a bit more interesting though is with broad gems these can be slaughtered into your weapons to gain various damage bonuses and while the early gems you find might only exist your damage output by a few percent the later ones can give you a massive boost to damage you'll find great blood gems and later levels of the game particularly in the nightmare of Menses but by far the best gems are to be found in the Chalice dungeons though again you need to delve very deep into them if you're after the really good ones and be prepared to fight some brutally difficult bosses there too if you're a fan of min max and Thor or you're one of those folk who enjoys spending hours and hours trying to craft the optimal build and games like new or two in the hunt for ever more powerful blood gems can be great fun but again you really don't need all that power for the base game all the DLC for that matter although if you plan on taking on the hardest bosses of the Chalice dungeons now I guess every extra little bit of damage output does help the main criticism I have with broad gems is that the only ones that actually seem worth bothering with are those which provide flat percentage increases to Raw damage out poo because I just never saw the utility of the ones that added poison buildup or Elemental damage to your weapon all the ones that specifically both thrust or want damage I would have liked to try these out but the difference in damage output always seemed worse than going for Pure physical so why would I ever bother with it but now let's get back to Old Johnny please after beating Ron the Warped to yahar Guru and this is where the game shows its true face sure you've seen plenty of weird [ __ ] up until now and plenty of formidable bosses both wild and weird but yahargul is where it goes off the [ __ ] rails for the start there are enormous amigdawas hanging from buildings for who knows what purpose and they don't just politely mind their own business either they will try and [ __ ] you up with portals and lasers it's terrifying once you see these things up close so you can even fight one of them in the nightmare Frontier area where it rips its own arms off to attack Uber sick speaking of our McDonald's although you can get an early look at the one back and Cathedral award if you have 40 Insight it'll become fully visible regardless of your Insight after the broad moon phase is initiated another indication that yarnam is currently going through an extremely significant and terrifying transition as the line separating reality from Nightmare becomes increasingly blood it's a cathedral World amygdala that's responsible for transporting you to the Hunter's nightmare of the DLC whereas the one located just above the doorway leading to yahar girl will whisk you away to the whiter theater followed by the nightmare Frontier the nightmare Realms and the concept of nightmares are very interesting in bloodborne being layered on top of each other so the Hunter's nightmare is located at the very bottom which makes sense with it being the first nightmare containing the old Hunters then above that you have the fishing Hamlet hence the shell lady who falls down from above is same kind to be later encounter in the hamlet and then at the very top you have the nightmare Frontier read notes at the top because one it's called The Nightmare Frontier and two you can see shipmasts down below and there are numerous ship masks visible from the Hamlet all very cool but the term nightmare itself is initially slightly misleading because rather than us falling asleep and visiting the game's various nightmare environments there it's more accurate to think of them as nightmares conjured up by some vessel or group of people which then become alternate planes of reality to be visited and explored by us I'm hesitant to offer too much in the way of explanation about the deeper aspects of this game's World though because I'm far more a student than a score when it comes to bloodborne although I think this game's Lord is absolutely fascinating I also think it's the most confusing of All Souls born games I just find it really difficult to follow and maintain an understanding of it in my mind for any proper period of time before it starts to slop away much like a dream or nightmare although yahargo itself is not a nightmare realm it's sure as hell a [ __ ] nightmare and an incredible level to behold not least of all because of the blood moon and purple sky you can visit this location much earlier on after being vicar Amelia but it's night time then and also so I ended up screwing myself over because after getting transported there I dropped down and fought dark Beast spiral which is all great to know that if you do this without touching the Hunter's lamp back in the hypogee in jail you cannot come back here until after you beat Ron this place is absolutely crawling with cramped caskets which is one of the sickest names for an enemy ever by the way these things can kill you way too easy though I mean look at this [ __ ] really after fighting swarms of these things and dodging their absolutely long-range blood projectiles we come to one of the coolest boss intro cutscenes and one of the most disgusting Boss Designs of all time the one reborn geez this thing is absolutely rancid by the way I somehow lost my footage of fighting this boss and so I'm using footage from boss fight database here there's one disclaiming this is not me playing although the one reborn itself functions very differently to it this boss is something of an homage to the tower knight from Demon Souls with the six Bell maidens doing ranged attacks from above only this boss is a lot more or juicy and a small lens in my experience the laundry Bond can either be pathetically easy or a complete [ __ ] nightmare if you go into it with a baseball and a fire or bolt paper a managed to stagger it with a few heavy attacks you can do massive damage really quickly especially if you're making use of transform attacks to build Beast me out and throwing in a nice big crackle to cap it all off now if you don't quite have the damage or confidence to go that route then this boss can be absolutely miserable but box when I did my blood level full run of the game there were really only two bosses which gave me trouble from the base game and those were the one reborn and German hallway [ __ ] this thing sucks if your health and damage is not out of scratch because the damage it does is no joke and it can be very difficult to even get close enough to attack that being in real danger of being kept from one of its gross lives or some other ambiguous appendage upon this disgusting boss's death we can progress to the end of yahar Guru and into a chamber filled with a long dead members of the school of Menses yet another branch of the healing Church it will acquire its consent with commune with the cosmos the school of Menses occupied itself with far darker rituals involving kidnapping contact with the Army towers and the creation of The Nightmare of Menses which we enter by laying our hand on the mummified corpse of the host of The Nightmare mikelwash at least after first traversing through the lecture theater and confronting patches for [ __ ] us over with his tonsil Stone nonsense I always choose the obvious option here and select of course I think I love you but this time I went with the second option and I realized I'd never had this dialogue before and once again this voice acting is just about enough to make me come close to jumping for joy because I cannot even believe how good this voice acting is indeed I should think not I shared with you a thing most secret now you witness to a miracle and all the stronger for it you should appreciate it if you have a grain of gratitude in you [ __ ] a lot of everyone in the game seems unhinged even the folk who are friendly to us everyone's Afflicted with that peculiar yarn and Madness and after you kill ROM people really go screwy the nightmare of Menses is the single most challenging area in the base game and it's pretty much the last main area before the final boss if you explode the optional levels being a nightmare it is pretty [ __ ] nightmarish containing a bunch of weird new monsters and beasts the loran silver beasts in particular are absolutely wild and enemies like this make me wish so badly the bloodborne had some sort of model viewer so we can get a closer look at these insane detailed designs an interesting aspect of this anime is that even though they carry torches a pretty strange thing for a beast to do if you want the finishing blue with a Fire based attack they'll die completely and that'll be that but it's kill them in any other way and they'll let out several maggot leech things which I think are one of the harder enemies in the game somehow seriously while these things such a pain in the ass I'd rather go up against 10 of these things than 10 of these in a day and initially baffling aspect to the outdoor section of this level is that constant frenzy buildup and damage and out from cover as that distant elevated chamber glows a bright maddening red though it can also affect enemies here too as you can see frenzy is a very Troublesome status effect and I would certainly not as [ __ ] and punishing as secular's Terror it's a decent bit worse than Eldon Ring's Madness what makes it so challenging is that the enemies who use it most the winter lanterns can cause frenzy build up just by looking at you as well as some damage and also even after you kill one the meter just keeps on building up anyway for a few seconds further and so when up against them you need to focus on more things at once compared to in regular combat you have to be looking at your friends in beer to determine how long you've got until 75 of your marked self disappears you need to know when to pop a sedative to cancel out the meter or decide if you should just tank it with blood vials instead you need to do all this while also paying attention to the monster itself who will assault you with high damage grab attacks which themselves cause even more frenzy if you get hit wondering great trick so if you can manage it is to initiate a critical Attack Just when your frenzy is about to pop because you actually have complete invincibility during this animation and will take no damage as much as frenzy sucks the main reason for its reputation really is the winter ones in particular there are other enemies who make use of it like the garden of eyes and the crucifix wielding Church servants but none Inspire as much Terror as these nightmare dwelling creatures constantly singing that unsettling song oh no the garden that mysterious source of frenzy at the beginning of this nightmare its origin is actually a terrible and rotten great one discovered by the school of Menses and we can even interact with it and kill it later on in the level so the path to it is pretty damn easy to miss and fraught with frenzy if you do manage to reach this level to drop the brain of Menses from its chamber then you can freely a roam around the outside area without having to seek cover but I've never quite understood how we can then just walk up to it here without having any effect on us also [ __ ] knows how anyone figured this out but if you perform the make contact gesture and hold that for about 50 seconds you will be rewarded with the level 3 Moon Rune and killing this thing is also the only way to get the living string ritual material for the Chalice dungeons though you can also buy more with Insight once you get this done the boss of this level or at least the first one is a bit of a controversial one because fromsoft managed to make him both excellent and [ __ ] at the same time somehow the Boss Arena is very unusual for a Soul's born game you can even call it unique yes you've got examples of massive boss Arenas in Dark Souls 3 and Elden ring but those are very open whereas Mikko washes arena is a damned Labyrinth which opens up even further in the second phase back when I first played this game I got super frustrated here because I didn't understand the gimmick requiring you to lure him into specific rooms and so I remember just chasing Mika watch around for about 10 minutes like a fool getting progressively more irate and not being able to figure out what the [ __ ] I was supposed to do yeah I'm not very bright it's not always so bad though once you've figured out the layout a bit more and when which points to drop down from until recently I thought it was totally impossible to kill him in phase one before he disappears but turns out nope you can actually take him out through a here speedrunners never fail to impress me although this boss has an incredible atmosphere soundtrack an interesting Arena it's mikowash himself who is a light down because he's [ __ ] it plays out like a regular Hunter fight except he doesn't even have a weapon instead relying on the occasional punch in between spamming the auger of a British attack and so he's actually extremely easy well at least up until we effortlessly one shot you with a core Beyond in phase two great let's take a pass week boss not even bother to give him a unique moveset but then give him one of the most obnoxious attacks in the game bit of a perplexing design decision there because if there's one thing bloodborne is not lacking it's interesting enemies and bosses and so I would have liked Michael wash himself to be a more interesting anime Beyond Mika wash climbing higher and higher up the nightmare we see the tall pale form of yarnum the Sumerian Queen the same lady we saw after defeating Rome triggering a Blood Moon Janam is of course the figure who this city itself was named after though bear in mind that she was not the queen of yarnon yarnon was just her name she is the mother of the infant great one Margo a child who we never actually see but who's crying we faintly here all around the island after the blood moon begins to hang low and also upon approaching this seemingly empty cradle in the arena beyond the elevator triggering the appearance of Margo's wagnars just as mergo seems to walk from a very cool detail of the whiteners is that there's also nothing under its robes it's just a load of clothing and Blades this is a boss I've always thought was super easy well actually because it tends to spam this attack but it floats around while slashing with its many blades at either side allowing you to just squeeze up behind it and attack while only taking the occasional Hit The Boss also has another phase with the arena goes black and it duplicates and attacks you from the darkness but I manage to beat it before this could even happen after beating the boss we get a very interesting message pop-up because instead of the usual prey slaughtered we get a nightmare slain and indeed you never hear melgos cries again after this presumably indicate getting that we've put an end to mergo at least in some way if you travel back out the arena after beating the boss yarnum even boasts to you before disappearing and so this was clearly something she wanted to happen there was sold all are vague one very important item we do get for beating the boss though is a third umbilical cord of course we got one after killing the isfk Imposter and there's also another one within the abandoned Workshop in the cathedral world where we can also find a pretty dolls outfit that I definitely did not try on the umbilical chords are very important to consume though because although each one will grant you three additional Insight they're also the key to unlocking the true final boss and secret ending at this point you can literally end the game if you like the Hunter's dream is a flame and thanks to our actions and the nightmare the Menses ritual has been stopped meaning that our work as a hunter is complete bloodborne does a very interesting thing and lets you skip not only the true final boss but also the first final boss and if you respond to German who awaits at the foot of the tree with submit your life he will chop off your head with his burial blade you will wake under the morning sun ending the game dialogue from Jura and Eileen also strongly implies that they've been through the same sort of process as they will reference the hunter stream themselves though what they may have thought through and which great ones they may have Swain not to mention how long ago who knows however we are not going to do that [ __ ] [ __ ] because of course we want to fight German otherwise how do I hear his sweet sweet boss soundtrack ah but not yet though because there is also a couple of optional areas to cover as well as the tremendous DLC the old Hunters let's talk about upper Cathedral water first and then cainhurst but as we've been to the cathedral world where the healing shot is based then bargainworth where it all begun and even yahargu which was Menses territory situated right at the top of Cathedral Ward is where the choir is based the branch of the church most concerned with the Stars and Cosmos while his Menses sought contact with great ones through ritual and Nightmare the choir have devised other ways of contact and communication with these Eldritch beings one of which they have in their goddamn basement who left this here I love how you can see the areas of Cathedral Ward that you have previously visited down below like here where we fought the chapel Giants a very creative and rather unnerving touch of the celestial larvae creatures moving and facing towards the grand Cathedral and I like these things because although you can't kill them if you really want they're more of a moving living declaration than a proper threatening enemy to worry about all the other enemies here are ones you've already seen elsewhere through Upper Cathedral World death definitely has the highest concentration of brain suckers in the whole game and spying them roaming around in the darkness coupled with the eerie music makes this a genuinely unnerving level to play through there's a really cool trick you can do here too but you hit this brain sucker through the wall with the wet form of the threaded cane until it dies getting you the orphanage key and allowing you to bypass some other level I tried it using the whip version of the Beast cutter instead and kind of [ __ ] it off oh well the presence of an orphanage in this messed up Place conjures up some very disturbing implications about what happened to all the children with a number of celestial larvae here likely tells us all we need to know about that but other than all the celestial emissaries just ahead these alien looking things are also to be found in the Forbidden Woods and iosafka's clinic but you fight a whole gang of them here fun reboss but not only much to say about it you can be in about 20 seconds now that I think about it I don't think there's a single bad boss in the base game the quality of bosses in the Ciao's done certainly do vary but as far as the mandatory and optional bosses school they're all pretty great The Witches of hamwick is a bit weak but they're certainly not bad and while Miko wash was let down by his uninspired moveset everything else about that boss fight is superb the DLC boss is in particular though are incredible and very very difficult woodwork though you can be forgiven for thanking the celestial Emma said it marks the end of the upper Cathedral Ward level that is actually more to this earlier accessible by Smashing the window here putting us right above the grand Cathedral will be aware for Wacker Amelia you can see the altar where we touched Wallace's skull and everything just as the school of Menses had its dark secrets so too does the choir having a great one named abritus living beneath the cathedral in the presence of the celestial emissaries in the area just before implies they've been using these strange creatures to communicate with the britus my experience of this boss has always been a bit see I love its gross design and how there's nothing in any way familiar about its appearance but this ambiguous organs tentacles and tubes but mechanically it's just never felt all that tight to me in the way the bosses like the white nurse and vicar Amelia do to be honest it might just be my own approach that sucks because I usually do try and just run in and frantically head to head to make it stagger and allow for way more forward damage especially with a beast blood power its second phase is super cool though I'd somehow never noticed before that it generates a subtle spherical Aura around itself that you take gradual damage from over time whilst inside abritus has one attack which people absolutely hate though for charge attack and it's so detested because as well as doing massive damage it's extremely difficult to dodge probably excessively difficult to dodge to be honest though I have seen what there's a very strange altar at the back of the Arena showing something that looks an awful lot like ROM except with proper spider legs instead of the malformed things the actual run scuttles around on there's only nothing to do at this place yet but does come into play later on in relation to a certain kanehorst Queen cainhurst is the most unique area in all of bloodborne and what is yarnum and its surrounding areas are largely Lovecraft inspired especially yahargu and the nightmare levels cainhurst is far more inspired by Brahm Stoker's Dracula even our method of getting to the castle is either way similar to that book's main character's journey by college to Dracula's mountain castle in Transylvania Kane hust looks [ __ ] beautiful if you're part of my Romanian and it has such interesting character both outside and in with one of its main recurring features being the Eerie statues dotted all over the place I like this one in particular they'd go on to repeat this Motif and Elden Rank 2 of course in the Shaded Castle I hope no one's too fatigued by my many references and comparisons to other from soft games by the way I just find it interesting to see how different ideas and mechanics get expanded on from game to game there are so many great creepy touches in this place like even though you ride a horse-drawn College to the castle when the cutscene ends and you turn around the horses look to have been dead for months if not years and even the bridge leading here is completely destroyed then the port callus leading into the courtyard opens up on its own coupled with a huge door leading inside the castle itself slowly creaking a jar and let's not forget the constant gaze of the statues in the Castle's halls and Chambers my favorite moment by far here is when you first enter the Fourier and are greeted by all this absolute Splendor coupled with his servant literally in the process of waxing the floors to keep them shiny I have expect such a lawn to jump out of me here all that said for the coolest King Hostess it's not my favorite area and that's because I feel that it's messing some other cool anime type yes you do have the parade of crying women who attach you with knives some without your [ __ ] heads on but these enemies do more to add to the dark arrogant Ambience of the level rather than being mechanically enjoyable to fight but other gargoyles but these things are kind of lame and way too easy to beat although the little Rapier wielding dudes are pretty cool not that there's many of them I think Cain house could have used an extra bigger meteor anime something like the tomb guardians from The Chalice dungeons or even a variant of the executionals that said I am being played down nitpicky because they could have just recycled enemies from other areas but they didn't also side note here but doesn't Cain house remind you a lot of the castle from Resident Evil Village which came out six years later maybe not the interior quite so much but certainly the general look of the castle and the rooftops I don't think Capcom actually copied one by the way it's the pointless observation Martha logarius is the boss of the area so the rombach is a bit shitty due to there only been a single Hunter's Lap In the Hall of cainhurst though there is an elevator and a shortcut back here at least pretty damn tough freaking boss and he can be very fast and aggressive but due to him being relatively human shaped and not an enormous Ferocious Beast it is very possible to stagger him with a gunshot now if you get halfway decent at the timing you really can trivialize the boss his downward swam after flying up into the air is particularly right for a stagger who I kept screwing up and missing my chance by the way doesn't the salty plunges into the ground in his second phase kinda resembles Soul Grant from Demon Souls of the Drake Sword from Dark Souls 1. although you can't beat logalius then peso home to yarnum again he drops the same Crown he was wearing on the ground at the other end of the arena and equipping it triggers a cutscene shattering and illusion obscuring the audience chamber to Annelise Queen of the Wildwoods after this cutscene is done though always best to sell the crime itself does not have any other special properties and you get 35 000 for it although the introduction with annalize is largely in Aid of a PVP Covenant something which I have no interest in it does also lead to one of my favorite scenes in the game we've encountered a character named Alfred a couple of times before this within the cathedral Ward and he's as sweet as pie to us a friendly chap eager to exchange information and gift us with the finest gifts Alfred is however a member of a group known as the executioners the sworn enemy of the vilebots the last of which is Queen annalisia and Martin logelius who we thought earlier was actually the leader of the executioners at least until he took it upon himself to guard the way to annalize before we went and [ __ ] that up and so if you give Alfred a summons to cainhurst he gets the ability to travel there the same way we do triggering this scene I've done it I've done it I smashed appended and run into fleshy think about there you filthy monstrosity what goods your immortality now try stirring up trouble in this sorry State all mangled and twisted with every inside on the outside for all the world to see [Laughter] jeez what the [ __ ] dude this is mental what are you doing Alfred the game's feels really dark and brutal stuff including as we saw children being eaten by pegs but this is so hardcore he turns into a psychopath out of nowhere for finishing off its Quest he gives you the wheel hotter badge and walking for purchase his wheel of logarius weapon and the gold ordeal heart despite often completely [ __ ] up annalize beyond all recognition though she is in fact Immortal much like a vampire and so if you collect her flesh here and take it to the altar of Despair and the same Arena will be killed at greatest you can bring her back to life I guess they did this because you need Annelise to be alive to continue to progress with a vilebud covenant PVP stuff though I think it's a real shame how even if you do bring her back to life analis doesn't reference having been mangled by Alfred at all her dialogue doesn't change in the slightest even though he just plays the right to talk kinda lion and now we can dig into the DLC the old Hunters accessible anytime after defeating vehicle Amelia by picking up the eye of a blood drunk hunter from the Hunter's dream and letting yourself be picked up and crushed by the Army dawa outside Cathedral Ward I really like that they made it accessible so early because although you're likely to get destroyed if you try and take it on straight after beating Amelia it does provide you the opportunity to run straight through the Hunter's dream to grab a few weapons before continuing on with the main game that's a slight issue with a few of the coolest base game weapons you'll likely only unlock them very late into your playthrough like the Chicago will guard his wheel and Blades of Mercy although I guess you could just kill Alfred and Irene earlier on instead of doing their quest lines so this is easier said than done if you try and take them on at what level with unupgraded gear remember what I said about some of the hunter fights being incredibly difficult while that applies to the NPCs too if you decide to attack them and the DLC through you can grab the Beast guard beast hunter say just a few minutes from the spawn point the concert for the DLC is that it's another nightmare one which Hunters go to after becoming broad drunk just as we see the effects of the Beast Scourge on the general yarn and populace as well as the clergy hunters will eventually lose their minds and turn more drunk after slaughtering enough beasts perhaps this is one of the reasons why the later iterations of Hunter weapons aren't quite as crude and brutal as the alloy ones though let's be honest the sock Cleaver is still pretty damn brittle as the item description for the eye of the blood drunk Hunter says a hunter who goes drunk with blood is said to be taken by the nightmare destined to wander forever engage in an endless hunt it is a fate that no Hunter can escape well this is dark nightmare a warped incomplete and chaotic version of the cathedral World fused with Central yarnum except populated by the airway Hunters wearing their old-fashioned Garb and armed with beast cars and Beast Hunter safes these enemies are way [ __ ] bare and the boring old Hunters we see in the base game being significantly larger more intimidating and more enjoyable to fight playing more like well-designed enemies who resemble Hunters rather than NPCs with the same moves and abilities as us I'll take these fellas over the cainhurst crew any day of the week there are also beasts to be found here but instead of the larger ones we see throughout Central yarlum they have a small variety of old yarnum which makes sense because these were how the beasts looked during the first outbreaks in their frenzied State though the old Hunters here do a good enough job on their own of taking care of the beasts not to mention the big boulder on top followed by the emergence of the second most terrifying anime in the DLC I wonder if you who the first most terrifying enemy is yet but it sounds like this everyone who's played this DLC will be painfully aware of that sound I'm sure heading into this nightmare version of the grand Cathedral reveals the bonding form of Lawrence laying upon the Altar and although he's not the first boss of the DLC that you fight he is the first one that you see here to everyone's initial surprise I'm sure he's completely non-hostile here only coming into action if you come back later on with his skull found just before the research Hall all rather confusing because we saw Wallace's skull back in the real version of Cathedral world and it looks like the skull of a beast and indeed you see Lawrence here as a beast but then you pick up his skull later on in the Nightmare and it's a human skull throw me a [ __ ] bone here from soft please there are War Hunters who actually think the blood-lighting Beast found in the Chalice dungeons is Lawrence The Headless virgin in particular though I've never been too convinced of this it's a cool idea but a bit too far-fetched for my liking even for fromsoft I've had a lot of people talk about Lawrence being a [ __ ] boss not they hate him not least of all because he's kind of a reskin of the cleric beast but me myself personally I've always loved this boss but then I'm also a big fan of the blue smell or demon although Lawrence must have taken me about 40 to 50 bloody attempts back on my first playthrough of the DLC made more frustrating by the slightly shitty rombach I'm pretty damn sword down now and managed to nail him first try here it's definitely not just a blatant reuse of the cleric Beast either because launch does have a unique second form with the lower half of his body explodes so let's give one some credit here also he is totally optional but the actual first boss of the DLC is most certainly not optional it's Beethoven I'm in Ludwig God damn this boss is tough the DLC in general is very difficult way harder than the base game and that goes for both the bosses and the levels but the level leading up to Ludwig is somewhat manageable even if you come here at a lower level it's very tough and you might need to run past some stuff especially these guys but but you're likely to hit your first brick [ __ ] wall is this fella this was one of those bosses that I felt really cocky about here for some reason because there are certain really difficult bosses throughout from soft games I've Gotten Good at over the years and can be in one or two attempts like Lawrence fume Knight and Gail and I thought woodwick was also one of those until he kills me 10 times it got to the point where I had to just switch the game off for an hour and try again later I was getting too salty but all the salt in the world can't detract from one of from soft's greatest Creations because Ludwig is a top-tier Boss No Doubt although we only see Ludwig for the first time here in the Hunter's nightmare we hear mention of him in item descriptions in the base game too and even a couple of weapons are named after him would makes holy blade and His holy rifle just as Lawrence was the first Vicar of the healing Church Ludwig was his first Hunter training up many other Hunters to combat the Beast Scourge in the name of the church until he became blood drunk like all the others ending up in the Hunter's Nightmare and transforming into what is arguably the most hideous and ferocious beast in the game yet another very cool detail about this boss is that the whole river of blood stretching from here to the other side of the level was created by the blood of Ludwig's victims hence the Stacked piles of corpses of the sides of this bloody Arena before the DLC came out people assumed that bloodborne's version of the Moonlight blade was Ludwig's hallway blade of course the three previous Souls games feature this glowing blue sword and then Dark Souls 3 and Elden ring would have their own iterations of it though not circular however the transition cutscene into Ludwig's second phase is where we finally see bloodborne's Archer Moonlight sword [Applause] ah you were at my side all along to my night [Music] honestly back when I first saw this cutscene I straight up got shivers and then I realized I just left my window open so I got up and shot it and continued to play the game seriously thought this boss was already one of the best even before phase two but it's way difficult yes but incredible but the way Ludwig tons from a wild beast biting and bucking to changing his stance up completely and using a sword with Grace and dexterity is so [ __ ] sick I'm sure the worst thing anyone expects here is for the boss to start speaking in a refined English accent you can even have a productive chart with him afterwards and gets hallway Moonlight sword which I of course started using immediately it's a very cool weapon but it's another one with its track version only really amuse it with Arcane damage rather than transforming it entirely apparently from soft originally planned to release the oath Hunters as two separate DLCs then just decided to release it as one this was definitely the right choice because well it's a good size for a DLC and with five new bosses if they'd split it up then you would have had two pieces of content which were too small still the difference in nature between the three main levels of the DLC are massive and whereas the Twisted version of yarnum we visit at the start is filled with beasts hunters and a literal River of blood the research Hall looks and feels very different and then the fishing helmet which comes afterwards is the most unique of them all moving from one level to the next here never really feels jarring in a negative way either because bear in mind that this is a nightmare with very different rules of reale so when you later Ascend the clock tower only to exit out into the fishing Hamlet it's more of a holy [ __ ] I love this moment than a holy [ __ ] this is dumb moment the research Hall is absolutely horrific though in a compelling and enjoyable way there were already several layers to blood bonds harder before the DLC and the further you made it into the game the more they were revealed when you're rooming the Smoky streets of yarnam you probably aren't expecting scenes like the Forbidden Woods or Yahoo and certainly not the quiet Cosmic horror of the upper Cathedral world but then yet another new layer is introduced with the research Hall presenting you with medical horror for lack of a better term as Simon tells us this is the true face of the healing church we know about the horrific eventual effects of what administration but this is where we see the nature of their experiments on humans with water causing patients head to bloat up grotesquely I assumed was the end goal of creating Celestial emissaries or some other kind of kin to be used to commune with the great ones as a result you have schools of these tortured Souls roaming around every floor of the research Hall in different forms too some with guns on some naked some walking around without their heads and some which don't even have bodies this place is [ __ ] horrific the most disturbing of these creatures are the non-holesale ones you can actually speak to including Saint Adeline with her question acquiring you to find and bring her brain fluid attainable only from non-hostile disembodied heads and culminating in this my guide I see your voice clearly as it bends and bleeds my own revelation just for me thank you for everything really I used to be nothing Jesus well at least we got a cool new Rune from it let's try it on Jesus the boss of the area is the living failures a fight against the church's failed experiments and creating Celestial emissaries a process a later of course perfected it's a largely unremarkable fight against their shared Health pool but their meteor attack is stunning anything bloodborne introduces Cosmic or Celestial imagery like this I love it it really complements the other more brutal and bloody horror ailments Northern failures are merely a precursor to the true boss of the research Hall however because beyond the sunflower Garden awaits lady Maria of the astral Clock Tower honestly this was another fight I thought I was gonna absolutely smoke but again I got wrecked many times and it's mainly due to our third phase white gascoigne and Marta logarius Maria is person shaped and so she can be staggered and thank God too otherwise this would probably be the single most challenging boss in the game it'll be like fighting black flame Frida as she was immune to being staggered speaking of Frida these fights are very similar to the point but I've always thought she felt like a bloodborne boss due to her crazy speeding combos the main thing with Maria that always catches me out is her delayed attacks because the wind-ups are so damn long and it makes you panic and I can just never time it correctly and in phase three she'll leave behind Trails of Fire and Blood after every attack giving her increased range as well as an additional Hazard to watch out for even after dodging several patients in the research Hall will call out to Maria by name and she's implied in certain item descriptions to have been a somewhat empathetic figure here as well as this Maria was also one of the first Hunters originating from cainhurst and training under German and being the object of his affections clearly the reason why the doll was fashioned to resemble her appearance and share her voice and if you return to the Hunter's dream after killing Maria the door will mention that she feels liberated somehow the final area of the DLC which Falls after defeating lady Maria is the fishing helmet where the body of the great one cause first washed up on its should before being violated by bergenworth due to the enormous nature of the appearance of the helmets and habitants the scores of bergenworth killed and dissected them and their Relentless Pursuit for Norwich inspecting whether they'd grown eyes on the insides of their skulls as a result of their proximity and lapal worship of course as well as what they did to the body of course whatever that may have been the great one carried a child within it who bergenworth also violated in some way though the details around exactly what was done here at hazy what we do know is that it was evil enough to result in an endless curse upon all Hunters creating this Hunter's nightmare where they'd all be doomed to hunt endlessly amidst Wad and beasts the fishing helmet is absolutely thrown with fishmen of various kinds and of course this whole place is heavily influenced by lovecraft's a shadow over innsmith although these things individually really aren't that much of an issue there are a lot of them and coupled with their ability to Chuck cartoons at you from range even this first section of the level can be brutal to get through if you're not quite prepared and I've even been known to run straight through it to the next Hunter's lamp on occasion of course it's not these wee guys who strike fear into my heart it's these big guys the most intimidating enemy in the whole game individually that's very challenging not least of all because of the intimidation factor of its voice and appearance but I think the key to handling them well is to simply not [ __ ] yourself you see and hear one it's their crazy long windups that make them so hard because you just want to get the hell away from them whenever they start an attack of course then you go down as well and there's two of the [ __ ] things the secret here is to just use a shaman bone blade causing one to attack the other getting you the rakuyu the best skill weapon in the game and one which belongs to Maria before she threw it down the well after being overcome with shame at bergenworth's actions in the fishing Hamlet I mentioned back in my discussion on Insight that the mysterious pale swags known as phantasms would come into play again in the DLC and indeed they are everywhere here particularly in this fishery where they cover the entire ground indicating that they were important to the survival of the inhabitants of the Harmon long before bergenworth became interested in their Eldritch properties from various points throughout the Hamlet you actually get a clear view of the beach the body of course lies and indeed we reach the same Shore at the end of the Hamlet all right [Applause] the orphan of course is quite possibly the hardest boss in the game at least if you exclude some of the more outrageous [ __ ] found in the Chalice dungeons a cool detail though is that if you don't actually approach it it will just continue steering off at the Moon forever it's only once we get closer to its mother's body that the boss aggroes against us orphan is extremely aggressive has a great range and does massive damage however just as with several other very challenging bosses in the game it is fully vulnerable to staggers both from guns and charged attacks and so again if you're good enough you can end this fight surprisingly quickly regardless of this vulnerability its second phase is meant to induce pure panic you can easily go a damn a minute without doing a single bit of damage just through desperately trying not to get hit as it dashes around and Loops about again it's totally vulnerable to staggers here too they're just so difficult to time that I often opted for dodging out of the way rather than risk Messing of the short and getting hit absolutely perfect final DLC boss though it's something that makes it even more memorable is the emotional aspect to it although it looks absolutely hideous we're fighting an orphan here or at least the nightmare version of it and it's as if it's only fighting us out of Rage for its mother's death at the hands of bergenberth and the hunters and our character is a hunter themselves mind you there also seems to be some bizarre connection to German here as indicated by orphan sobs and the intro cutscene which are the same as Germans if you catch him speaking to himself in his sleep please anybody I've had enough of this dream the night blocks or sight oh somebody please German Wars one of the Hunter's present at the Fishing Harbor along with Maria when the original atrocities occurred but as for exactly what his connection to the orphan is who knows certainly not me just like when we defeat mergo's witness after beating the orphan of cause as well as the shadow emanating from its mother's body presumably meant to represent its actual self rather than the Monstrous physical manifestation we just defeated we again get the message nightmare Swain and the horrific Moon that was there before disappears completely from The Nightmare at this point we also get a weapon after the fight called the cause parasite though it does absolutely nothing unless you equip the nugby Run activating the most bizarre weapon in the entire game it's just a shame that you only get this thing at the end of the DLC though because it means you're only a real chance of making use of it is in the New Game Plus and that's the old Hunters not only do I consider this the greatest Soul spawn DLC but it's my favorite DLC from any game ever I provided more insight and background into the history of the healing church and bergenworth give the player way more track weapons to use and boost two top-tier soulsbourne bosses or even make that three if you like because I know a lot of people absolutely love the Maria fight though I think the Ludwig fight in particular was something truly special thanks in large part to that legendary face transition and the impossibly cool soundtrack the DLC also does a lot to fill out the game somewhat because bloodborne can be surprisingly short if you know exactly where you're going especially if you don't bother with the optional areas and bosses or the Chalice dungeons foreign all that's left at this point is to face Gammon who is waiting at the foot of the tree though not the air tree just a regular tree as I said earlier you can just end the game here entirely if you want without even having to fight him but short of doing this for the PlayStation achievement there's no reason to do this unless you want to miss out on one of the best fights in the game and saying that though German is certainly not a massive challenge if you've already beaten Maria and indeed he can also be staggered with gunshots and indeed thank [ __ ] or this fight would be so much harder to be honest I do think it's a bit too easy to staggerman to the point that sometimes had to resist the urge to do and end the fight too early German with absolute hell for me on my blood level 4 run though because I actually had to get good at dodging his attacks instead of just being able to get hit and heal and then hit and heal and if you're level and skill set or two one bloodborne your critical attacks do absolute dog [ __ ] damage regardless of how reinforced your weapon is beating German gets to the old Hunters badge allowing you to purchase his weapon the burial blade but just as with the coarse part of sight you get it rather late so it's only really good for New Game Plus or maybe the Chalice dungeons of course the game is not yet over because a great one known as the moon presence The Entity who had been keeping Garmin prisoner here descends down from above to embrace us so that we may replace Yemen ourselves then being trapped in this Hunter's dream and continuing on the cycle of nightmares with successive Hunters but if you've consumed at least three third umbilical cords the moon presence is repelled by you thus the true final boss begins although this is a cool boss with a great design the moon presence is much easier than German and thankfully fonsoft had not yet got into that whole thing of making the player fight the previous boss over again upon death like they did in sakuru and Eldon Reign it seems like there was possibly another phase or alternate version of the Moon presence too as indicated by Focus and fascinating Treasure Trove of cut content but the version we got has a far more refined appearance and I've always thought that it looks somewhat feminine in a strange way and once the moon presence has been defeated once again for the third and final time we get the message nightmare slain indicating something is different here and the cycle has been broken by our actions are you cold oh good Hunter and that folks is bloodborne this ending implies that as a result of consuming the three third umbilical chords and defeating the moon presence we've been reborn as a great one as for what that would entail who knows I am of the opinion that bloodborne is from soft's greatest achievement I may not have had quite the effect on the industry that Dark Souls did or sell as many copies as Elder drink but the tightness and speed of the combat mechanics the deliciously dark setting the Stellar soundtrack The Complex and layered horror elements the outstanding voice acting and all the countless other smaller elements of worldborn's Brilliance add up to one of the greatest games of all time and in my opinion the greatest of all the soulsborne games whenever I finish a playthrough I just want to get straight back in and play through the whole thing all over again to re-experience the polished level design of Central yarnum and the lurid horror of yahargo and every other incredible level boss and piece of dialogue the game has to offer I guess one of the most unfortunate aspects of the game is that it's stuck on the PS4 and despite the repeated emergencies of the rumors of a PC release or a sequel in eight and a half years on there's still no closer to that being a reality I've even heard rumors of a remake but frankly that would be ridiculous there was a case for a remake for Demon Souls but all bloodborne really needs is a remaster in 60 FPS don't waste time remaking the [ __ ] thing insane although I'd still play a remake obviously but folks I think that's as good a place as any to end this thing I sincerely hope you enjoyed the video and as always cheers for watching and cheerio

Channel: CANDLE Type 1a

Views: 43,118

Keywords: bloodborne analysis, bloodborne retrospective, bloodborne critique, bloodborne evaluation, bloodborne lore critique, bloodborne humour, bloodborne lore analysis, bloodborne dlc analysis, the old hunters analysis, the old hunters retrospective

Id: 9QlFKAS06sI

Length: 124min 6sec (7446 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023