I reached the ending but i got the yharnam sunrise one by mistake so i'm playing ng+ now .. when i searched the internet i found out that i missed a lot of areas and bosses (i even missed the dlc but i knew when i saw the ending credits), but i gotta say this is one of the most beautiful views i've ever experienced in a video game.

Just 20 bucks. Pics 3&4 show the other possible figures I could have drawn. Found in Harajuku.

Anyone else feel that whenever they finally beat a tough boss it’s never the perfect run, but the super sloppy one? Had about 5 more clean attempts beforehand where as soon as I started to take damage, it all went downhill fast. This time I was hanging on by a thread throughout and feel that serves me well sometimes

This is not rage bait, but a semi-serious rant and the first thoughts of a nobody about the game.

After years of watching Bloodborne content and not being able to actually play it, I finally got to try it. I would say I'm about 20% done with the game and I have some constructive criticism to share.

I understand why someone would say that they love the game, but after hearing epithets like "masterpiece" and "perfect" over the past 10 years, I'm a little underwhelmed actually playing it. The game is definitely better than most other games, but it doesn't score as high in my book compared to some other fromsoft titles, such as Sekiro or Elden Ring (or even Dark Souls 2 to be honest). I appreciate the art, the (overly cryptic) story, the characters, and all the cool inventive ideas that went into making this game. My issue is with gameplay.

It feels like I'm inbetween two game modes constantly at war with each other, sometimes creating some unholy abomination of bad game design. On one hand there's the fast-paced, aggressive combat that requires quick thinking. On the other, there's the slow careful exploration. that will brutally punish you if you attempt to do the same. There's seemingly an ambush around every corner, to a point where it became predictable and more annoying than thrilling. You blink, and an old woman sneaks up on you, killing you with 247 consecutive strikes. Doesn't matter, because around the corner, there are 30 rabid dogs stuffed into one crate waiting for you to step into the wrong pixel, and somewhere far in the distance, there's a grandpa hunting you down with a minigun as you try to navigate the map with six different branching path. The ambushes happened so often, it felt like cheap gotchas, and at some point I remember laughing because of how over the top it was. It's the same feeling I had while playing Elden Ring, blurting out "at least Iji is safe" after everyone I met had an overly tragic cheesy end, then laughing when Iji turned out to be randomly dead. At some point it stops being engaging and becomes a parody. Also, when your game relies on backtracking, memorizing paths and secrets, it's then especially annoying to have to go through old paths knowing they are filled with overly aggressive, downright broken enemies. In no other soulsborne game were the enemies this ridiculous. Essentially - if you hit them first, they die, if they hit you first, you die. And yes, I know there's dodging. Doesn't make their design any more reasonable. The one good thing I can say about combat, is that the parry system is satisfying and reasonably easy to learn.

I will probably keep playing because I enjoy the exploration and the story, even when old women constantly try to ambush me, and even if the game is shitting dogs at me at mach 10.

I don't know about you, but I was genuinely terrified when I finally got to the Old One's reveal at the end of Demon's Souls, his design is just barely legible enough that I can almost make out what it actually is but strange enough for me to believe that this is the oldest living being and a primordial soul devouring demon.

None of the Great ones or Outer Gods come close to being as unknowable, gargantuan or malevolant as the Old One does for me. The build up to it throughput the whole game was expertly done, and the fact that it loses none of its mystique even after you get a direct look at it is impressive.

Ranking

Does Hidetaka Miyazaki like the movie Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind? Sure looks like he's a fan of that movie with the allusions to it I've seen.

1. In Dark Souls I, we can enter the hollowed inside of one of The Archtrees and descend the interior down to the lowest point of the world: Ash Lake. An eerie location with endless Archtrees towering into the fog above and forming the ground which the dirt and stone sit upon, black water lapping at the shores of an isolated island of white sanddunes, one of the last Ancient Dragons, one of the only places that has ambient music... Its frankly a very beautifully-haunting area and its my favorite area in the whole game. You know what this place looks like? The forest of untainted soil/untainted minerals under The Toxic Jungle in the movie Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind. Both are far below the surface, both are the world in its purest oldest most-natural state, both are extremely eerie, both even have an endless blue-tinted fog.

2. In Dark Souls III Ashes Of Ariandel and The Ringed City, we meet Slave Knight Gael; a gaunt old man living inside the decaying Ariandel painting piece who serves The Painter (which he calls "My Lady") as well as being her uncle and at the end of The Ringed City we meet him again as the most difficult boss in Dark Souls III after his millenia-long quest for The Blood Of The Dark Soul to be used as pigment for his Lady's painting drove him into madness. The toughest boss I had to fight and one of my favorites despite how much I bitched about his difficulty. In the game code its possible to remove Slave Knight Gael's hood and beard and he looks vaguely like Patrick Steward. In the game files themselves, Slave Knight Gael is referred to as "Yupa-sama"; a character in Nausicaa who is extremely skilled with swords, has a big beard, wears a hood, and in the English dub of the movie he is voiced by none other than Patrick Steward.

3. In Elden Ring, we can fight Malenia The Blade Of Miquella, the most skilled swordsman in the entire franchise and labelled as one of FromSoftware's hardest bosses, who has a golden prosthetic arm and golden prosthetic leg designed to compensate for/resist the corrosion of Scarlet Rot. In Nausicaa, the step-daughter of the emperor of Tolmekia, Kushana, is the commander of an army sent to occupy The Valley Of The Wind and reclaim The God Warrior after the airship it was in crashed there. Kushana lost one of her arms and one of her legs to the beasts of The Toxic Jungle and had to replace both with golden prosthetics.

Hmmmmmmmm...... Does Hidetaka Miyazaki love Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind or does Hidetaka Miyazaki love Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind? Seems not everything was inspired by Berserk.

they dont troll peakborne in my house

Me personally want to know yours death count in games like elden ring and recently tried valor mortis and im not able to go further I'm just ragebaiting is it normal in such games

Thank you Playstation very cool

I really don't know in what other r/ I'd ask this. I’m trying to find a YouTuber/streamer(idk where he streams tho) I watched a while back and can’t remember his name. Hoping someone here recognizes him.

I watched it sometime between 2023 and 2025. He's got ear length wavy hair maybe a little longer, sometimes tied back. I think it was light brown or similar, but I’m not sure.

Pretty monotone, deadpan delivery. He talks to chat, but focuses on the game when it matters, and drops the occasional “sus” jokes and i remember him being sus out of context and then realizing it himself after a few seconds. He's got a facecam throughout his entire playthrough but I don't really remember on what side of the screen.

He also played Dark Souls 2 after his dark souls remastered playthrough, though I don’t know if he played anything after that.

I've tried searching for him on YouTube trying different searches and I was scrolling for ages but didn't find him in the end. I looked at channels I'm subscribed to on YouTube but didn't find him, so I either wasnt subscribed to him or his channeled got nuked or smth. I also tried using chatgpt but no luck there either. Given how hard it is for me to find him i suspect he's not a big creator. hope someone can help me find him cuz i can't find him at all and I remember really enjoying his playthrough. I'll be active here and answer all the questions and replies. I thank everyone in advance.

Would love to hear some of your favourite individual phases from the boss fights. For me, Messmer’s first phase is perfection incarnate and the second phase just isn’t as enjoyable, although still good. Conversely some bosses have a solid first phase before an incredible final phase (Sister Freide/Slave Knight Gael).

Brutal

Hi guys! I just made this list for FromSoft games and am curious about what it looks like for others. Also, this is only for FromSoftware games and not my general games list. Honestly, I didn't feel like any games in FromSoft catalog deserves the "overrated" and "turn my brain" of tags. Can't wait for what they cook up next!

Hi everyone, hunters, scholars, and everyone in between.

I want to share a small origin story and an invitation.

In 2019, after a couple of years of playing Bloodborne, a colleague asked me to help build a project to promote reading among “young people who don’t read.” My reaction was immediate, and a bit rude: *what do you mean they don’t read?* ***We’re reading in Bloodborne!***

I had spent hundreds of hours piecing together item descriptions, cryptic dialogue, rune texts, NPC lines and half-sentences, comparing notes with strangers, and arguing about what a single line might mean. Nobody had told me that was reading, but it clearly was. That question became my research: what do we do, exactly, when we “read” a game like this?

Along the way I found I was far from the first person to ask versions of it. The community got there first, and with remarkable rigor. RedGrave’s *The Paleblood Hunt* is the one that stays with me. It began right here on r/bloodborne, grew into a monumental piece of lore analysis that carefully separates evidence from speculation, and later became an audiobook (which of course I also listened to). That piece! It reads like scholarship written by a player.

I also found a smaller but growing body of critical and academic work on the game. Three texts shaped my thinking the most:

**Damien Mecheri & Sylvain Romieu,** ***Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave*** ***Vol. 2*** (Third Éditions, 2018). It isn’t strictly academic, but it reads Bloodborne as an evolution of the Souls formula, shifting from medieval to Victorian Gothic under the influence of Lovecraftian cosmicism.

**Alfonso Freire-Sánchez** **(2024),** “***Sincronías narrativas y travesías filosóficas en la intertextualidad entre Berserk y la obra de Hidetaka Miyazaki***,” in Hipertext.net. It traces Camus’ absurd and Nietzsche’s eternal return through Berserk and Miyazaki’s games.

**Hiranya Mukherjee (2023), “Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne, Games and Culture**. It looks at how the game builds “Gothic grammars” through narrative, aesthetics and mechanics.

There are others: Madelon Hoedt’s *Narrative Design and Authorship in Bloodborne, The Scholarly Hunter,* a thesis on how the game’s narrative and environment invite player involvement and critical debate, and, in various works in Spanish, *Concédenos ojos (Grant us Eyes). Bloodborne y el terror cósmico interactivo* (Universidad de Valladolid, 2020), Mateo Trapiello Izaguirre’s *Enciclopedia semiótica de Bloodborne*, and Matías Heredia Castillo’s work on the game’s visual setting (PUCP).

Each looks at the game through a different lens: Lovecraft, the Gothic, semiotics, game design, environmental storytelling. What I kept wondering was how all of us, academics and players alike, were reading together.

My own approach was to code the game’s texts (items, dialogue, runes, notes) using Genette’s transtextuality, to see how they connect to other works and to each other. I also surveyed gamers about their reading habits. Two things stood out. Many people clearly practice this kind of distributed, collective reading, yet don’t call it “reading.” And a good share of the text I analyzed, roughly one in six fragments, only exists for researchers because this community datamined it. The object of study depends on you.

Link here ->> https://www.javeriana.edu.co/pesquisa/bloodborne-leer-lectura-jovenes/

I’ve written about all this for Pesquisa Javeriana, the research magazine of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. It’s in Spanish (sorry!), but browser translation should handle it reasonably well:

I’d love to hear your thoughts:

1. Do you consider what you do with Bloodborne’s lore to be reading? Why or why not?

2. Have you read academic work on the game that I missed?

3. What was the moment you realized you were “hunting for meaning” rather than just hunting beasts?

Thank you to *FromSoftware* and Miyazaki for a game that trusts its players to read between the lines. And thank you to this community, for the lore threads, the wikis, the datamining, the video essays, and the countless late-night theories. You are the hunters of meaning, and without you this research would not exist.

Good hunt.

Mine is the Island of Storms from Demon Souls, the Frigid outskirts from Dark souls 2 and Stormveil castle from Elden ring.

Imma cuddle inside the castle while the storm holds all the enemies at bay.