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Samovar
Jun 4, 2011

I'm 😤 not a 🦸🏻‍♂️hero...🧜🏻



C'mon. Obviously Bad Cop and Badder Cop are on the hunt for bad blood.

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Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


I personally disagree that Chalice Dungeons suck, most of the non-random ones are bad, but level 5 dungeons with all the additional modifiers are great and fun. Unfortunately they do require you to play through all the non-random dungeons, which is not fun to repeat. Mainly though the level 5 dungeons with additional modifiers are probably the hardest challenge in the game and so if you like challenge they're pretty good.

Although I will say that the biggest problem with the first few Chalice Dungeons is that most people did it way later than the game intends, because you're probably supposed to do it after you beat Blood-starved Beast. Isz and Loran similarly expect you to do it after beating Ebrieatas and Amygdala, respectively.

Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Dec 13, 2016

Kobuddy
May 11, 2013

As a bit of a small update, we WERE going to record some more Chalice Dungeons but I kinda...forgot it was Christmas.

I'm still working on the retrospective though, so, that ~might~ go up sometime next week if I'm being hopeful.

Kobuddy
May 11, 2013

UPDATE:

Let's Play Bloodborne - EP36: Lovecraft, Madoka, and Blood

Final episode. In this, it's the credits and me messing around in NG+ with a post-game weapon. However, the commentary is more just podcast-like. We go over a lot of things about the game, the story elements, the design choices, etc. in a bit of a retrospective on everything.

Chalice Dungeons will continue to happen, albeit at a slower pace as my friend who's doing the videos has been very busy over the past month.

It's been a fun ride doing this, and I hope you all enjoyed.

Goggle Fox
Jul 9, 2011

Yes.

As for Oedon. Oedon does show up, technically; he's inside you the whole time. The formless one is the hunter's blood.

Genocyber
Jun 4, 2012

Be wary: long post ahead

I disagree with Dvac's opinion that the DLC is necessary for closure. In fact I feel the exact opposite, that the DLC does a good job of being largely self-contained while relating to the base game in a significant way. All of the lore stuff brought up in the DLC is either entirely new (e.g. the Fishing Hamlet stuff) or an elaboration on something in the base game that wasn't exactly requiring elaboration. Like the reveal that the reason everything turns to poo poo is because of the Fishing Hamlet's curse of blood on the hunters is cool, but you don't need an external reason for everything to have gone to poo poo. It's perfectly reasonable that everything goes bad simply because that's what happens when humanity messes around with stuff beyond its ken. And I think that's very much intentional, the thing she mentions immediately after how Fromsoft intentionally cuts out stuff in a lot of situations to leave gaps for people's imaginations to wander.

One of the things I loved about this LP was your guests and their commentary on the game and the lore. The reactions to all the crazy and nasty poo poo of course, but also seeing them puzzle their way through the lore and the plot. When you have an LP like this it's usually done solely by someone who knows what the gently caress is going on, and LPs where the person playing the game is blind tend to ignore the lore entirely. So it was fun and novel having this one here where you had someone who knows what the gently caress is going on handling the reigns, with two idiots (I mean this in an endearing fashion) along for the ride trying to puzzle out what's going on.

Speaking about the game itself, one of the little details I really like is how a lot of the cast, and a lot of the important people in the game, are women. I think one of you even brought this up at some point. That's just a rarity in games and it's nice to see. The main reason I want to bring this up is to mention a strongly Bloodborne-inspired game that I really like, called Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight. It's a rare example of a game that is strongly influenced by Souls/Bloodborne without actually trying to be it. Atmosphere-wise it's strongly influenced by Bloodborne, but gameplay-wise it's entirely its own style of 2D action platformer. I strongly recommend checking it out if that kind of thing interests you.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


I agree with Genocyber regarding the importance of the DLC, especially because I don't think the Beast Plague is the same thing as the Curse of the Fishing Hamlet. The Curse is why the Hunter's Nightmare exists, and is what drags hunters who are "descendants" (students or students of students etc) of Gehrman into it as punishment for what Gehrman and the scholars of Bygenwerth did. The curse only targets Hunters, and only those who can claim to be part of Gehrman's Hunter Lineage/Legacy. This is why there's no Vilebloods but Maria and no Executioners, neither group ever used Gehrman's teachings. The other half is the people who follow in Laurence, not Bygenwerth's, footsteps because I'm pretty sure he ordered the Hamlet massacre and then afterwards split because they didn't actually get much from doing so, hence there's no actual Byrgenwerth Scholars but there is the Research Hall, which Laurence ran. Also explains the lack of Choir/Mensis, as they're not yet taken and more importantly they moved so far from Laurence's teachings/style that they don't count for the Curse.

The curse isn't even why everything went to poo poo in Yharnam, that was flat out people messing with things they don't know, the Beast Plague in of itself is just a natural result of injecting yourself with Great One blood. It's not a Plague, the blood is in of itself trans-formative, the initial transformation is from an injured/sick human into a fully healthy one, and then it slowly turns you into other things based on who you are and what you do. Basically you take Great One Blood you are no longer human, as blood defines an Organism and your blood is not human anymore, thus from the point of view of the Cosmos you must be something else, and it slowly turns you into something else. Even those who remain relatively human, such as Logarius and the Church Servants/Giants, look more like someone's bad drawing of a human based on only an aural description.

The secret is the Caryll Runes, as we know those can define someone so much they become a Kin or a Beast. So the reason no Hunter of the Dream succumbs to Beasthood is that they literally can't, they already have a definition. The Hunter's Mark is a Caryll Rune that defines the Hunters of the Dream as exactly that, a Hunter. Other Caryll Runes modify who you are on a physical scale, hence they have a bunch of effects that can be described as literally modifying your body. Oath Runes over-write the Hunter's Mark partially, changing the nature of the Hunt. Vilebloods Hunt for Blood Dregs; Executioners Hunt for Vilebloods; Hunters of Hunters Hunt for Blood-addled Hunters; Kin Hunt for knowledge (relatively complicated side quest to unlock), Beasts Hunt for the joy of it (optional difficult boss).

Thus to become a Great One as the player does in the Childhood's beginning ending you need three things, enough blood to fuel the bodily transformation, enough Insight to know what you need to become, and to be described as a Great One due to surrounding effects. Namely you eat three third cords, which give you one full Great One Umbilical Cord and thus mark you as an unborn Great One. One final push to remove the Hunter's Mark, killing the creature that placed it upon you, and you ascend.

Jalathas
Nov 26, 2010

The Cthulhu Mythos: Just A Big Ol' Problematic Souffle

White Coke
May 29, 2015

Jalathas posted:

The Cthulhu Mythos: Just A Big Ol' Problematic Souffle

And with Lovecraft the racism is baked into his work. The inescapability of heredity degeneracy is a theme in several of his stories.

Ghost of Starman
Mar 9, 2008
Think I said it before, but this was an excellent LP. Kudos all around.

And I agree with DVac - Bloodborne kind of straddles the line between "leave lots up to the players' interpretation" and "we just didn't bother coming up with answers to these questions," and for me it comes down on the unsatisfying side of that equation. I expect that it's a highly subjective sort of thing, how much that laissez-faire approach to world-building works or fails to work for a given person, but it's good to know I'm not the only one who feels a bit put out. Like, sure you can spin out some fun and crazy theories to sort-of explain everything and tie it together, and that's enjoyable in its own right - I just get the sense that Bloodborne maybe leaned a little too hard on the "it's Great Old Ones, I ain't gotta explain poo poo." Dark Souls had a lot of unanswered questions at the end, but still leaves the player with at least a sense of the general outline of the cosmology and metaphysics they just got done interacting with; in Bloodborne... not so much.

It doesn't help that the three endings are literally either "it was all a dream!" or two variations on "no Bleaksol, now you are the demons." And of all the things that happen to protagonists in Lovecraftian horror, "lol now ur an Elder God" is such a weird, tonally-discordant shift it almost feels like a self-parody. I dunno. :shrug:


I'll echo that this was a really good way to LP a game like this, with one knowledgeable player and some blind commentators. But one thing to note for next time (and I hope you all do a "next time"): Kobuddy kind of breezed past a few moments in the game that for a player on their first playthrough would've likely stopped and gone "whoa, something's up here." Most notable was the Cathedral, right before the Vicar Amelia fight - that's the first time (I believe...) that you start seeing some truly hosed-up religious iconography, in the form of statues that look very Amygdala-like. It's kind of the first big hint of the weirdness to come (and, if you ask me, just one more drop in the "problematic questions" bucket, i.e., "just how much did/could your average Yharnamite know about the Church+Blood+Hideous Invisible Space Monster connections?")

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Kobuddy
May 11, 2013

So, due to some unforeseen circumstances, I'm gonna be shipping off this LP to Baldurk for archiving. We're still doing the chalice dungeons, but, I don't see a reason to keep the thread up while we do those; especially when it's not really a scheduled thing.

As I said in the first post, you'll be able to find the videos on either Bo's channel (which I linked) or the Bloodborne playlist I have on my channel.

It was a blast doing this LP, and I'm so glad y'all enjoyed it.

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