Bloodborne and Mastering the Fundamentals
/The concept of “the fundamentals” is present in probably any area of life that one can get good at. You can think of them as the core skills that fall into that “easy to learn, hard to master” area, and for the most part, they are skills that just kind of come with experience. There isn’t really a ceiling to how much you can improve on “the fundamentals”, but it’s not really the same things as targeted practice (like learning an instrument, for example), so much as it is just getting a feel for things as you go, exposing yourself to as many different situations as possible, etc.
In the Souls games, “the fundamentals” are actually pretty similar to what you would see in a fighting game. You can certainly practice using a specific weapon, or parrying a specific move, and those things will definitely will help you perform better. Beyond those mechanical skills though, you also have much more intangible skills that drive your decision making process. The more you play, the more you get a sense of things like, where you should and should not stand, when it’s safe to attack, how aggressive you should be in a given moment, and so on.
Now the thing about the Souls series of games, is that they are pretty infamous by now for their difficulty, and a big part of where that difficulty comes from, is the fact that these games tend to be very cryptic. It’s very easy to get screwed over because you didn’t understand a mechanic, you didn’t know a trap was there, or you just didn’t know the “one weird trick” that makes that situation much easier to deal with. You can almost think of the game as have 2 distinct challenges, the first is a binary puzzle that has to be figured out. You either know the answer or you don’t, and once the puzzle is solved, then the “real” game starts, and you can actually start engaging the skills you have learned up until now.
Where Bloodborne differs from the rest of the series in this regard is that, it just doesn’t have this “puzzle” component at all.
See, if you’re playing Dark Souls for the first time and you get stuck on something, chances are you can go ask your friend the Souls series veteran for help, they will tell you the “one weird trick”, and then from there you can work out the rest on your own. Half of the challenge is one wherein the answer can be given to you, and the other half of the challenge is one that you have to figure out on your own, with your own skills.
In comparison, if you ask your friend how to get past a particular part in Bloodborne, the answer is probably just going to be “get good”.
The difference here is that, Bloodborne more or less does away with the whole “puzzle” part of the equation all together. The cryptic parts of Bloodborne are all saved for the game’s cast of characters and the narrative, and in exchange, all of the games mechanics are actually quite simple, and work pretty much exactly how you would expect. There are still some finer points in there for you to sleuth out if you want to get deep into the nitty gritty of the game’s systems, but in general, you are never going to make a mistake for lack of knowledge. Hell, even the game’s insight system is literally making the game easier for you the less that you know.
Your runes and blood stones can all be changed at any time. Your armor is for the most part just visual- the stats on them usually don’t matter that much at all. Your weapon upgrades are literally just “make the weapon I like be stronger”. You can’t really invest your blood echoes into the wrong things, because stat upgrades are basically the only major sink for them. You can technically choose the “wrong” stats to invest into, but a few points one way or the other makes very little difference, so you’d have to “accidentally” spend like 10+ points before it makes an appreciable difference. So on and so forth.
This stuff is all here because it’s a video game and it needs to have progression, but functionally, it all takes a massive back seat to how good you are at playing the video game. As far as the situations that the game actually puts you in, there seems to me to be a decided focus on the player’s aforementioned fundamental skills. More to the point, the skills actually being challenged typically aren’t even things that are mechanically complicated or hard.
My 2 favourite examples of this lie with 2 of the game’s main “checkpoint” bosses: Shadows of Yharnam, and Rom the Vacuous Spider.
Shadows of Yharnam is somewhat unique in that it’s a fight against 3 opponents at once, which is something you’ve not seen in a boss fight up until this point. One of your opponents fights from a distance with fireballs, one from medium range with a flamethrower, and the last will try and slice and dice from melee range. Each individual Shadow is actually pretty pathetic on its own, but with all three attacking simultaneously, it’s very easy to get immediately overwhelmed. Thus, the challenge in this fight lies entirely on the player’s ability to separate the opponents so that they can score hits without the other 2 answering back.
Now certainly someone can just give you the tip of “use the giant rock to separate them”, and it will help you out if you’re strategy to that point had been to just keep running in head first. I don’t think this is something that likely happens a lot, though. Realistically, the player has been trained by this point how to deal with large groups of enemies, as well as how to deal with ranged enemies. This is a concept that you learn within the first 10 minutes of the game, because Yharnam is crawling with both of those things. The very first significant challenge in the game is a huge procession of enemies down the street, and you learn real fast that you have to separate the enemies out to stand a chance, use narrow points so they can’t all approach you at the same time, etc.
You can always do better at the fight by learning the Shadows’ attacks and tendencie, but the reality is that they aren’t anything special. Even more than most bosses in Bloodborne, this is not a fight about memorizing patterns. The only skill you really need is knowing where to stand, which is a skill you develop against every enemy you ever fight.
Rom the Vacuous Spider is a potentially even more straightforward fight than the Shadows of Yharnam. To start with, the fight takes place in a perfectly flat arena with no walls or obstacles to speak of. The only things one really needs to know to fight Rom are that she is vulnerable on her sides, she spawns tons of spiders to prevent you from getting at her sides, and her ranged attack will end your life if you are ever caught off guard.
With all these things together, you get a fight that’s in theory very easy. The spider minions are pretty weak (aside from their lunge attack which, much like Rom herself, is deadly but easy to avoid), Rom’s ranged attacks are pretty clearly telegraphed and easy to dodge, and if you are patient, finding an opening to get in on Rom is not hard at all.
And yet, as you run circles around Rom looking for an opening, killing off the odd spider minion who leaves itself open, you may find yourself getting distracted. Especially as the fight gets on. The closer you get to the end of the fight the harder it becomes to pay attention to all the things you need to pay attention to - not because of any mechanic but simply because of our human tenancy to get impatient and/or tunnel vision when the end is near.
Rom’s attack may be easy to dodge, but it requires that you see it happen. You have to react when the attack starts, which is several seconds before the attack actually connects. If you miss the initial telegraph and try and react after the fact, you’re probably dead. What this means is that, if you ever take your eyes off Rom, you can basically die at any time. The fight’s biggest challenge is literally just keeping your eyes on Rom at all times. Every other part of the fight is trivial; the only skill you need to win is being able to nurse the right stick while also executing the fight.
When it comes to skills, pointing the camera at the bad guy is about as “fundamental” as they get.
All of this to say that, Bloodborne manages to be a standout title in a series of standout titles, despite having the lowest difficulty and mechanical requirements in the series. Everything that makes the Souls series popular is still here in spades, and despite having a reputation as a hard game, there are surprisingly few pain points in Bloodborne. I don’t think there was ever a point in my time with the game where I felt frustrated.
Of course, people have been saying for ages that, in Dark Souls, “You always know exactly why you died”. I don’t even necessarily believe that is true of the other Souls games, but I definitely think that it is of Bloodborne. Every encounter you win is a direct result of the skills that you have developed in every encounter before it - skills that you may not even necessarily realize you had. In Bloodborne, you never need to hunt for knowledge in order to win. All you need in order to be victorious, is to get good, and by the time you beat the game, you are legitimately a master of the game and its mechanics.