CMOT70: Personally I thought the Chalice Dungeons were a great addition. I'm not sure why people complain about optional content...oh wait yes I do, they want to get the Platinum trophy without much work. I completed all the Chalices right to the final boss and enjoyed the optional meta game layer they provide- not to mention more story closure, well as much closure as you'll ever get in a From Soft game anyway.
One one the best games of all time, to me though just not quite as good as Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3- simply because of less diverse character building options.
I am enjoying the Chalice Dungeons quite a bit, though I think that’s helped somewhat by sprinkling them throughout the main game. My intention is also to get to the final boss. Hopefully I’ll get some nice blood gems along the way.
As for my unnecessarily long Bloodborne update: I explored what I could of the Lecture Hall before moving on to Nightmare Frontier. I must say, of all the areas so far, Nightmare Frontier has proven the most difficult and the most annoying. The obligatory poison/poison swamp areas in From Software games usually don’t bother me much, but this one got to me. I died to normal enemies in this area more than several other areas combined. I suspect part of the reason for my dislike for this area has to do with the fact that the slowed movement in the poisonous water is even more of a hindrance in Bloodborne. After all, mobility is a much larger aspect of the gameplay here. Plus, this area introduces the awful Winter Lanterns.*
At least the boss wasn’t too bad. Amygdala is not a puzzle box, exactly, but it does require some experimentation to figure out the most efficient way to kill her. The most easily accessible parts to attack are the legs and—butt? Tail? Back end thingy?—but you’ll quickly discover that she takes very little damage here. Her arms take a little more damage, but since she mostly uses these to flail around to attack you, getting close to them is dangerous. Her head takes the most damage, but accessing it is the hard part. Amygdala is a large boss, and her head hovers just out of reach. I suppose an overhead attack with a weapon with a long reach might be able to hit her while she’s in her normal posture, but the most effective means of dealing damage to her head is waiting for particular attacks. Some of her attacks cause her to pause for a moment with her head on the ground, and provided you avoided taking damage, it’s usually possible to get two or three hits in before she returns to her full height. This is complicated in her second and third phases because the attacks that put her in this position gain small AOE explosions and then extended reach, but I found it wasn’t significantly harder to avoid damage here. It just required better spacing and well-timed dodges. I also found that waiting for these attacks wasn’t as tedious as I first feared. As long as I remained within her melee range, I found that she wouldn’t perform more than two or three attacks before performing one that exposed her head. Plus, 5 to 6 hits to her head with my saw spear +6 opened her up for a visceral attack. It wasn’t my favorite boss fight so far, but I still enjoyed it. It kept me on my toes and felt satisfying to beat, which is all I ask from a boss in these games.
I’ve been using the saw spear for quite a while now, and while it is an effective weapon, I wanted to change things up a little. Unfortunately, I didn’t know of many skill weapons that could be found early-ish in the game, so I did a little research. In doing so, I learned of the beasthunter saif, a weapon that can be found relatively easily in the Hunter’s Nightmare. I ignored the enemies and ran straight through a decent chunk of the DLC’s first area (I even accidentally opened a shortcut) to get it, then returned to the Hunter’s Dream.
It was a beautiful acquisition. The weapons forms are comparable to those of the saw cleaver and saw spear, the main differences being that the saif’s default form is extended and it isn’t serrated. The move set is, in my opinion, where this weapon really shines. The extended form uses a lot of horizontal attacks that have a medium length wind up but a short recovery. The reach is pretty impressive, too, and that’s one of the reasons I love the overhead slamming charged heavy attack. That attack, when timed properly, can smash enemies down just before they are within their own attack range.
The retracted form is more similar to the retracted forms of the saw cleaver and saw spear, but not exactly the same. For one thing, the initial light attack is accompanied by a quick step forward. I didn’t like this particular move when testing out the weapons move set, but when actually using it against enemies? I love it. The attack’s deceptive range allows for you to jump in an get a first attack before the enemy is close enough to perform an attack of their own, and once in their face, continuing the combo is like using the cleaver or spear—a series of quick attacks that deal decent damage.
All in all, I’m loving the saif, and I decided to try it out in the Central Pthumeru Chalice Dungeon. I cleared through the first two layers in about 40 minutes. The boss for the first layer was the Beast Possessed Soul, which, from what I can tell, is essentially a more powerful version of the beast found at the bottom of the Cathedral Ward. It wasn’t a difficult fight, though I learned rather quickly that it was a bad idea to try to just tank its fire attacks and hope for the best, at least with the clothes I was wearing. Its attacks hit hard.
The boss of the second layer was much more interesting and proved a greater challenge: the Keeper of the Old Lords. This boss felt like a big Dark Souls deference, what with her clothes, use of pyromancy, and the way she applied the fire buff to her sword in the second phase. I died three times to this boss, and each time it was because of a fire attack. Again, her attacks decimated my health, and I had to remember to treat her like any other hunter NPC in the game—get in close, keep up the pressure, and quick step through attacks or toward the attacker. I adopted this strategy on my fourth attempt, and, with a little help from some bolt paper, managed to kill her.
Next time I can okay, I’ll probably clear the third layer of this dungeon and then continue on with the main game a bit. I don’t know if I’ll tackle the Forbidden Woods or Cainhurst Castle first. I might wait a bit on Cainhurst to improve my chances against Martyr Logharius, but I might just give it a go anyway.
*I know, I know. I ramble a lot in these posts. But hey, I don’t have anyone to talk to about this game in this amount of detail, so I dump it all here. Anyway, for those who don’t know what the Winter Lanterns are, they are awful, horrible enemies in Bloodborne that have huge brain heads and long, nasty arms. Once they see you, they begin inflicting the status effect Frenzy, and the only way to stop the buildup is to get far enough away from the thing AND break line of sight; kill it; or use the consumable item Sedative. Even when using the first two methods, though, Frenzy continues to build for a few seconds, meaning you are likely to receive the effect anyway unless you have high Frenzy resistance. Why is this bad? Well, because once the Frenzy meter is full, you receive Frenzy, which has a lore reason for working the way it does, but, practically speaking, it means you take damage equal to 70% - 80% of your max health. If you’ve taken almost any kind of damage prior to being inflicted with Frenzy and haven’t healed, it’s almost guaranteed death. Oh, and the Lanterns’ primary attack is a grab (with a pretty wide hit box) that holds you in place, does a small amount of damage, and continues to build Frenzy—basically a one-hit kill.
So basically, these enemies are horrible. Thankfully, there aren’t many of them throughout the game, but any encounter with them is a terrifying and not-really-fun experience. The two here are especially bothersome. One can only be approached from a distance and without any means of breaking line of sight, so the best way to deal with it is sprint toward and hope you can get to it quickly and kill it quickly. The other can be sneaked up on, but it’s found within a cave flooded with poisonous water, meaning you have to fight the thing with reduced mobility AND with the slow poison status effect, or at least the threat of it. And because of the close proximity, once you engage it and/or once it sees you, you have to kill it to stop Frenzy buildup because there’s no way to get far enough away from it quickly enough to stop Frenzy buildup.