[Playing…] Bloodborne

The classic is worthy of imitation, the classic is more than its current moment, it touches the future in its present and seen from the same future it is a past to remember, they are timeless, they innovate in their time and in later times, they have that unique flavor, whether they are tried today or tried years from now, the ambrosia flavor that the demanding cook will look for on their plate will already have an unrepeatable owner.

At E3 2014 there were rumors that From Software, Japan Studio and Sony interactive were preparing to announce the ARPG video game that Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of the Souls saga, was working on. It was going to be exclusive to PS4, squeezing out everything that this new generation console could give, the name “Project Beast”. The time has come, the lights went out, the trailer goes. Miyazaki's name appears, a drop of blood falls and is diluted in a dirty jar of apparent water, From Software, the public at the fair shouts with joy and amazement, the image changes, some Gothic buildings emerge in the background, a cello plays in E minor in a gloomy tune, the camera goes down to the street, a wheelchair, the camera goes up, an old man?, it changes, a mob goes with torches, an ax drags a corpse, A guy appears with a hat similar to the one worn by plague doctors, he is carrying an axe, he cuts up many bodies, blood everywhere, a musket is pointed at the head of a beast, the music stops... Bloodborne has been presented, it will be released on May 25, 2015.

The day arrived and the reactions were immediate, it sold 152,567 copies in Japan in its first week, positioning itself as the best-selling game in that particular week. Until April 5, it had sold a million copies in the world, the intoxicated press called it a console seller. It was the game that started a generation. It's been 3 years since that time, this March 2018 they gave it away to PlayStation Plus subscribers, at ComboGamer we are playing it, and if you haven't downloaded it, I honestly don't know what you're waiting for.

A story in perspective

Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game's main creator, considers himself an avid reader, so like a good reader he always seeks to implement a different style in his way of narrating based on what he has read. Some use Lovecraft stories to exemplify the context in which it takes place. Bloodborne, other novels by Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, among others. Such a symbolic narrative is reflected in the player. Miyazaki already warned, it was not going to be an easy story to understand the first time, much less linear, in itself it is the perspective that the player has with what he reads, listens to and sees. In my case, Yharnam reflects in me the sixth circle of hell, a city of heretics ruled by harpies and demons, the city where Bloodborne, is nothing more than the Victorian version of Dite. Dite is the city of the sixth circle of hell in Dante Alighieri's divine comedy.

The story of the game is described in the dialogues - which are few -, the fragments that you discover in book pages, and the descriptions of the items. A complex story but told with a style that reminded me of a paragraph from the legendary writer's story. Jorge Luis Borges in his book Ficciones, called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

“Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and we were delayed by a vast controversy about the execution of a novel in the first person, whose narrator omitted or disfigured the facts and incurred various contradictions, which allowed a few readers – very few readers – to guess an atrocious or banal reality.”

It is not a novel, nor is it in the first person, but the contradictions in the narrative of Bloodborne There are many, are you a hunter, a beast, a vampire, a wolf, a dream, the murderer's dream, or something else, really, what are you and where are we? Very few players will understand the story from the creator's perspective, so It can be banal, atrocious, both, or neither. Each player will have different ways of experiencing it, since it is symbolic, and this time I want you to discover it, the reader, so I will say little about it.

What is true is that at the beginning of the game we receive a blood transfusion, we wake up in a clinic and we must die -yes, we must, because it is the only way for them to give us weapons- to go to the hunter's dream, a large cemetery where we will return whenever we want to increase our level, improve weapons, or learn more about what is happening. There is a plague that is devastating the city of Yharnam, turning its inhabitants into beasts, death will be everywhere, thanks to this your enemies are very aggressive, so dying will be the rule and not the exception.

In Dark Souls you had to choose a shield from the beginning, in Bloodborne Your secondary weapon is a firearm… You're a hunter, man! Being a hunter you must act as a hunter, the enemies will attack you without quarter, so you must learn to manipulate your player as the game wants and when you do maybe you can add your style. Even so, you must know that you are not here to flee, you are there to attack. And it is that in Bloodborne If you receive a blow that lowers your health, when you deal one to your enemy you recover part of it, which makes blood the primary fluid of the game. The bloody, abrupt and grotesque battles the canvas, the blood the paint, the tension, the nerves, and the reflections the varnish.

All enemies can be final bosses

After a cinematic where the Father Glascoigne tells you that you will perish from the disease that plagues the city of Yharnam, the combat begins. He takes out his axes that shine in the moonlight, attacking you with a jump with the ax over his shoulder, at that moment by reflex, you jump to the side turning on your back and deliver a lateral blow from left to right, you turn your wrist and deliver another from right to left, the swing of the saber follows, you think you have him trapped, but he stops you with a musket shot that sends you backwards, he approaches you and hits you with an ax blow from the ground, to the sky, he doesn't fail you, you must counterattack with your saber to see if you can recover the lost blood. You look at the bottom scoreboard on the screen and realize that you had only made a small scratch on it, the battle won't be as short as you thought.

In the following bars of this frenetic dance, when he sees that you are going at him with the saber in the air, he shoots you with a musket that hits you directly in the chest, the force of the explosion sends you flying towards the tombstones at the east end of the cemetery, you decide not to trust yourself and learn more about your enemy. You learn the movements of his dance and after a while of dodging, receiving and taking frantic blows, you think he is finished, but in a turn of events he transforms into a giant creature that comes at you with his brute strength to drag you to the bottom of the tombstones, Now the dance has become faster, the attack times are short and the dodge times are long, but in the end and with what remains of your strength, that last blow that you needed, the beast falls, the anguish falls, satisfaction arrives, a new path opens, and everything begins again, since he is barely the second boss of a large number of beasts that are within this damned city.

This is the frenetic combat of Bloodborne Even the inferior beasts will be great challenges for you, a horde of small beasts can kill you in seconds, you must learn to dodge, parry, and even so, if you trust yourself you will die, in turn it prepares you for what comes next. Unlike its predecessor, it is very unlikely that you will play with the shield, since the firearm you will use will be your counterattack weapon. It makes sense, you are looking to get out of this metaphysical prison - the dream - and to do so you must fight, Fighting is not defending yourself, it is attacking, it is going to your enemy, it is finishing him off.

One of the big problems of the game is that, although it has a great variety of weapons - 15 main weapons, 11 firearms and 9 magic weapons - there will only be 2 basic attacks, R1 weak attack, R2 strong attack, and if you press L1 between a weak attack the weapon transforms into another, delivering a new attack thanks to the transformation - these weapons are called trick weapons. At least in my case R1, circle, and triangle have seriously marked the prints of my fingers. 3 years have passed since its release and it was difficult for me to pass the first boss, not because of skill, but because the camera danced and I lost my character, this big bug that causes the frustration not to fall on the boss but against the bad design of the camera of the game itself, honestly it happened to me many times in my game, they had a lot of time to fix this mistake, they didn't do it.

Frustration as a mobile game

One of the characteristics of the Souls and Bloodborne es su alta dificultad, no excesiva, es un reto. El jugador debe aprender a morir, aceptar la muerte como camino a la experiencia. La frustración no cabe aquí, pero está en cada momento que jugamos, haber recolectado una gran cantidad de ecos para morir por un esbirro, el juego te da la posibilidad de ir a rescatar todo ese tiempo usado para farmear, pero… mueres nuevamente y pierdes todo, la reacción primaria es la frustración. Apagar la consola, cambiar el juego u otra reacción de huida es normal, pero no, estos juegos te invitan a superar, a tolerar el tiempo perdido, a tolerar que un jefe final esta a una tajada de morir, te sale con un combo de la nada, mueres tú. Por esa misma razón los juegos de Miyazaki, no son para todos los gustos, son para jugadores capaces de aprender de sus errores, de tolerar el perder.

Quien entra con pensamientos de grandeza muere a la primera, esta misma razón le da un respeto a tu enemigo que está a la par de tu personaje y al juego en general. Se hace difícil, pero con la práctica, aquél enemigo que te hizo la vida de cuadros ahora en el tiempo es solo otro más. Si no tienes la mente preparada para la frustración, no lo intentes, y a su vez es de preocuparse pues ese reflejo que se da en perder en el juego, batir el mando, apagar la consola, debe estar manifestándose en la vida real.

Blood as paint

Bloodorne tiene una paleta de colores obscura, tétrica, gótica. Sus edificaciones y detalles están marcadas, pero no de una manera común, sus detalles son excesivamente marcados, como cuando alguien descarga su ira contra el papel y queda el negro carbón con roturas de la hoja, remarcado a tal punto que la imagen se ve en la siguiente página. Los juegos de Miyazaki tienen inspiraciones en las cárceles de Piranesi. Piranesi en sus aguafuertes reflejaba la luz y la oscuridad tan bien que sus detalles estaban terroríficamente plasmados. Este juego es de detalles y también de sangre.

La sangre estará por doquier, al matar un enemigo, al recuperar vida, en el suelo, en la ropa, llueve sangre. Aun así, no se siente repetitiva y es un elemento que le da vida al juego, le da estética y le da esa personalidad destacándose por encima de los Souls, la sangre es Bloodborne, naces en la sangre. Este fluido marcará la historia, nos dará experiencia, nos hará crecer. Es por eso que Bloodborne está hecho con sangre.

The dream as a representation of the unconscious

Según Sigmund Freud el sueño es la representación sin reglas físicas de la realidad. Esto hace que el trauma se repita una y otra vez, y no necesariamente de una forma real, es más bien simbólica. Si en la realidad el trauma es severo para nuestra moral se oculta en el inconsciente y a su vez manipula la toma de decisiones consciente, este proceso se llama psicodinámica, el movimiento que hace el super yo o reglas morales para que el trauma se mantenga en el inconsciente. En Bloodborne estamos dentro de una pesadilla, donde los únicos que desaparecen son los jefes finales, o los cazadores. En los Souls desaparecían los enemigos con respecto a las veces que morían, en Bloodborne el enemigo siempre aparecerá, como en una pesadilla recurrente. Huxley llamó a esto prisiones metafísicas, son más allá de las prisiones reales, están en la mente, y se manifiestan en los sueños.

Ahora bien, la ira es el común denominador del juego, todos los enemigos, los y la mayoría de los NPC (personaje no jugable) actúan con ira en su interior. Esto me hace pensar que la persona que sueña en Bloodborne, no es un cazador, además reprime la ira, lo que hace que pase al inconsciente, pero su sed de sangre está allí en todo Bloodborne, por lo que el soñador puede ser alguien pacífico, pero con un oscuro secreto. Antes de matar al Padre Glascoigne si hablamos con la ventana correcta, esta nos dará una cajita de música, esa cajita de música afecta al boss, pero no solo eso, el NPC, una niña, nos cuenta que su madre fue con su padre a la cacería, al matar al Glascoigne, caminando conseguimos el cuerpo de una mujer, y su collar, al volver a la niña llora desconsolada, a lo que me pregunto ¿estaremos reviviendo un trauma de la niñez?

La narrativa de Bloodborne es inconsciente y posee significado, pero sin significante, es simbólica. Sus escenarios son únicos, en fin es un todo, definirlo es limitarlo, a mi parecer es mucho mejor que cualquier Souls que salió y hasta ahora 3 años después no hay un juego que se le parezca. Si has llegado hasta aquí te felicito querido lector pues como en Bloodborne solo algunos podrán llegar al final, ver uno de sus finales, y pocos, todos… no hay solo uno.