<Snipped quote by Kill Bones>
Interesting. I don't own a PS4, and I've only seen a little gameplay. I'm kinda meh about it because I don't particularly like the idea of the gun gimmick.
And now time for a text wall
Yeah, I get that. I mean, the guns are about as optional as parries are in the other souls games and you can totally manage to do a playthrough without using guns at all, and I imagine it'd only be a bit more difficult. There are a couple of straight up damage focused guns that aren't for parries, and there's other shit you can have in lieu of guns like the torch and a couple of other things that I won't spoil. There's even weapons that are forced two-handers in one of their modes, making it so you can't use guns when in that mode. All of that aside, though, I would definitely say that this game won't have much in the way of combat for people who only ever liked slow sword and board builds and tanking shit. I've mostly played the other games shieldless anyway, so it wasn't much of a change for me.
But my love for this game goes beyond the combat. There's just so many little things that were improved upon from the previous games and implemented so well, like combining DeS' hub with Das' open world. One of the many things DaS2 got wrong in my eyes was the lack of good shortcuts, and the shortcuts in Bloodborne are back to being fucking amazing. Where DaS2 did that thing of putting a bonfire every three feet to make up for having no good shortcuts, Bloodborne has you going huge stretches without ever seeing a bonfire, only to open a gate and realize you had just looped back around and opened an amazing shortcut to an older bonfire. It just feels nicer than lighting a new bonfire all the time, not to mention it being more clever from a design standpoint. So, the gist of all this is that the level design is top notch. And not even just from a gameplay standpoint. Areas feel real, like this city had actually been a functioning city and not just an arena for you to kill things in like how areas in DaS2 and parts of the other games had felt. And there are so many different feeling areas that still manage to be believably placed, unlike DaS2's lava castle on top of a windmill.
Mentioning DaS2 as much as I am, I kind of feel that part of the reason I appreciate Bloodborne so much is because of how it contrasts with things I really disliked in DaS2. DaS2 spent a lot of time being very same-y and trying to emulate DaS, to the point where things just felt rehashed and predictable. Everything in Bloodborne feels fresh and inspired. It has that Miyazaki charm that DaS2 lacked. Without spoiling anything, I'll use the bosses as an example. A lot of bosses in DaS2 were big dudes in armor, and almost all of the bosses in DaS2 were most easily defeated by circle strafing. At the end of the day, a lot of the bosses felt similar to each other. In Bloodborne, almost all of the bosses have this distinct feel that separates them from each other. There are some that are big things that have slow windups, some that are man to man duels, some that even change how the boss works halfway through the fight, and much more. And they all have different methods of getting critical attacks on them. One of the things I always thought in the earlier souls games was how lame it was that most bosses couldn't be critical attacked like how Gwyn could be parried or the Asylum Demon could be jump attacked. Every boss in Bloodborne that I've fought thus far has had some way of staggering and critical attacking them that is associated with the boss' theme and design. It just feels so nice to pull those attacks off when you figure out a boss' weakness or weak point or an attack that leaves them vulnerable.
So uh
What I'm saying is
I think I might like this game