You’re on the right track so I guess nothing more needs to be said. Consider yourself lucky and enjoy.
I finally got a friend of mine to fire this up, and he was having a very similar experience to yours, but I was there to help “coach” him a bit, and now he’s in love.
Many people have written (most notably Austin Walker) about the obtuse nature of these games, and how systems both inside and out help shed light and build a shared experience.
For better or worse, these games thrive in an environment that combines “going in blind” with the use of wikis, guides, forums, videos, and the coaching from experienced souls veterans.
The ironic thing about Bloodborne is that, while I think it is the most obtuse of all the games, it’s the one that acts as the gateway drug for most newcomers. Going back over the coverage of these games, and listening to podcasts and whatnot, sooo many people say Bloodborne is the game that allowed them to understand the appeal of souls games.
It’s a testament to the combat and setting, because boy they don’t tell you shit, and if you aren’t persistent enough, or you don’t partake of the community resources, you’re more than likely to just throw your hands up.
Appreciate the responses. I am glad things broke the way they for me because now that I am settling in to a routine of levelling, resource farming, and opening up shortcuts, I am hooked pretty hard. Currently have the second boss in my sights. Tried the fight a couple of times in order to come up with a strategy and actually came close the second time. Nothing that some more vitality and a weapon upgrade won’t fix. Time to get some more blood shards.
Not to spoil anything, but there is an item you can get that helps with that fight. Try and talk to everyone you can. There are NPCs behind certain windows and doors…
YMMV on the item “helping,” FYI. Mine sure did.
Oh that is interesting. Thanks for the tip. I am going to be a bit more diligent with the door knocking.
How deep into that fight have you gotten? I have a post somewhere upthread where I reveal the One Weird Trick that made its latter portion go from terrifying to trivial (well, much easier for me, at least).
Incidentally, this fight is what made my girlfriend look up from her Switch and say, “I could never play this game.”
I got pretty far into it and I had him down to less than a quarter of his health. I am going to check your posts upthread. I have only been skimming the posts in this thread as I wanted to go in fresh. But now that I have some context, tips and tricks are welcome:)
Quoting myself because I happened on an interview with Bloodborne’s composers and one of the first things one of them says is:
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was one of my first soundtrack purchases when I was younger, and with composer Wojciech Kilar’s recent passing in 2013 I felt that it was something I wanted to pay tribute to in my own way.
Nailed it, dude.
Martyr Logarius … is a fun, but tough, fight. My pal and I made our way to the rooftops of Cainhurst where my guy was waiting for us.
Immediately, we were like, okay, he’s Dracula.
Took us a few attempts to get him to his second phase. It’s tough going, but we have it figured out. Tracking him while he’s in the air is difficult, but that move is so cool (and hilarious). Feels like a Castlevania fight.
Hope to get him down tonight, and then do it all over again in my game.
My friend wanted to level up a bit more before we took another crack at Logarius, so we did some backtracking, and killed the One Reborn (twice).
So, if I’m tracking this correctly, aside from Logarius, we have the Nightmare Frontier, The Lecture Building, and whatever comes after. Plus the DLC.
Going to savor every minute of it. This game may just overtake Dark Souls as my favorite.
So, my reading here is that the Vilebloods are all the nobles associated with Cainhurst and Queen Annalise. Cainhurst nobles drink the blood of Annalise (the first vileblood, perhaps because she drank the blood found by the scholars at Byrgenwerth), thereby becoming Vilebloods. So, basically they’re vampires. Or rather, Annalise is a vampire (or a very close approximation), since she’s immortal, drinks blood, and imparts her immortal blood to the nobles around her.
The drinking of the blood seems to be quite different from blood ministration (which appears to be an injection/transfusion), and the name vileblood was probably imparted upon the followers of Annalise from the Healing Church, as a distinction between what they were doing with blood (“healing”) and what Annalise was doing with her blood.
In this vein (ha), Logarius and the executioners were pretty much straight up vampire hunters sent by the church (probably precursors of the healing church hunters) to wipe out Annalise and the Vilebloods, so they could have total control of the old blood.
This one is a bit trickier….child of blood is probably a reference to the Queen of Yharnam…or Queen Annalise…trying to give birth to a Great One. Apparent failures, both.
Read some pretty cool shit about the component parts of blood, and how they are represented in Bloodborne–
Red Blood Cells = the old blood which results in the scourge of the Beasts.
Plasma = serum, or the blood of the halfway ascended, The Kin of the Cosmos.
White Blood Cells = antibodies, The Doll and The Messengers.
Yes, but it all seems very much to be a vestigial appendage compared to the rest of the story. It’s a cool area and a good boss, but it doesn’t really have much of a purpose beyond that.
I tend to think of it like the Painted World from DS1.
Nice snowy diversion (change of pace) from the main game.
Plus, they had to get vampires in there somehow ; )
Yes, I was just coming back to say, “I mean given the gothic horror angle they were obligated to work vampires in,” but from a lore perspective the Vilebloods don’t do anything. They’re totally unnecessary to the game, which is too bad, since in retrospect the Logarius fight (annoying as I found it at the time) was amazing from a “spectacle” standpoint. That music is so good.
I’m already thinking about replaying this.
Yeah, I guess if the main story of BB is about Willem, Laurence, Micolash, and Gehrman, the inclusion of an offshoot of the old blood (the vilebloods), doesn’t really fit.
It’s a cool example of other alternate paths the old blood can take, but doesn’t really do much (other than provide a basis for the eventual church hunters) to further the overall narrative.
That’s sort of my issue with Kos, too. I like Kos a lot more than I like the Pthumerian labyrinth, but since they established in the main game (likely to justify the half-baked Chalice Dungeon mechanic) that the latter was the source of the Healing Church’s blood, it makes the former sort of superfluous to the story. Like, the labyrinth could still be there, could have come first, given Byrgenwerth some clues about weird things and whatnot, but since the labyrinth is the source of All The Trouble, Kos is a little bit of a flapping story appendage, which is really too bad, since she and the fishing hamlet could have easily been ground zero.
Not at the DLC yet, so I have no idea what this is all about, but I’ll keep an eye out for flapping lore!
Shit, sorry. I thought you had banged this whole game out long before me.
Thanks for this post. How did you figure all of this out? Is this all deduced from flavor text in item descriptions?
And can you give me the same treatment to the main story, since I don’t know what that is either?