After finishing Estival Versus, I had three PS4 games sitting on my shelf taunting me from their shrinkwrap.  Two of them – Nights of Azure and Deception IV: The Nightmare Princess – are JRPGs that heavily emphasize the general bustiness of their heroines, and normally those would be difficult selling points to overlook.

I thought about it a bit and realized that I’d actually reached a sort of fanservice saturation point and needed something a little less bouncy.

That left me with Bloodborne, a Souls game in everything but name, but with a reputation for being closer to an action game and for discouraging the sort of turtling-up that had gotten me through all of the other games in the series.

I will confess that I spun up the disc with a certain trepidation, and a few very early deaths had me thinking that I might well have gotten in over my head, but then I looked up “how to level in Bloodborne” and found that all I needed to do was make it through the level to find the Cleric Beast and let him kill me, at which point leveling would be unlocked and I could grind up some Don’t-Call-Them-Souls and boost my stats a bit.

So, I bought some molotov cocktails from the vendor in the Hunter’s Dream, and I used those to make it past the pair of werewolves that had been giving me trouble, and then I found myself face to face with aforementioned Cleric Beast, and I figured that I would take a couple of swings at him and try to get a feel for his patterns and then come back once I’d leveled up a bit.

…then I noticed that I’d taken a good chunk out of him with those couple of swings, and started trying to win.

Nobody could have been more surprised than me when he dropped.  I did need to use 8 Don’t-Call-Them-Estus flasks during the fight – I’m still having some trouble getting used to the way you can heal yourself after you’ve been hit by hitting back – but my philosophy in the Souls games has always been that Any Win Is A Good Win, especially when I went in expecting to die.

So, a pretty good start 🙂  I understand that the mandatory boss for getting out of Central Yharnam is actually a big step up in terms of difficulty, so I don’t think I’ll be repeating the performance on him, but it feels good to get that early W and I’m a lot more confident in my choice of games now.