Bloodborne / Tropes J to Z

This page covers tropes found in Bloodborne.

Tropes A to I | Tropes J To Z |

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Tropes J-L

• Jar of the Bizarre: Since Yharnam's local Mad Science focuses on transplanting blood and eyes, nearly every building the player character enters has entire shelves of these, plus plenty more containing unknown fluids and preserved samples that aren't for the faint of heart; standouts include mutated organs, mold collected from corpses, eldritch-infused invertebrates, and stillborn fetuses. You can even collect some of these harrowing ingredients yourself, as they are required to access the Chalice Dungeons.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: In grand Souls tradition. While the overarching plot is relatively easy to identify (Byrgenwerth tried to find out Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, screwed up, now everything's werewolves and you have to clean up after them), many of its specifics are deliberately left vague, and various plot elements remain open to interpretation. Anybody who claims to have a full understanding of what's going on in the game is missing the point entirely.
• Karmic Transformation: According to the Sword Hunter Badge, the clerics of the Healing Church, the Corrupt Church responsible for both the outbreak of the Scourge of Beasts and a heavy-handed way of dealing with them, tended to turn into the most hideous beasts of all.
• Kill It with Fire: Beasts are particularly vulnerable against fire.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: Choosing to consume three pieces of Umbilical Cord will cut off the chance for one ending, and then another choice lies in accepting or refusing Gehrman's request.
• Lean and Mean: The beast plague elongates the limbs of those afflicted while remaining the same width, causing nearly all the beast-type enemies in the game to appear extremely thin and emaciated.
• Left the Background Music On: Yahar'Gul stands out as the only non-boss area in the game that has any background music playing, which comes in the form of some very unsettling Ominous Latin Chanting. However, speaking to Sister Adella will confirm that the chanting is happening in-universe, as she can hear it too. And when you approach the gate to the heart of the Unseen Village, it gets louder.
• Lethal Joke Weapon:
  • The wooden shield, which, despite being a shield, barely blocks any damage and requires you to give up your gun for it. ...but it does block gunfire quite well, making it situationally useful in areas with a lot of gun-toting enemies. The Loch shield, on the other hand, doesn't block physical attacks very well, but it does block spells, meaning it's incredibly useful against arcane builds focused on spellcasting and some of the worst Demonic Spiders in the game.
  • The Pebble, while it doesn't do any huge damage, since there's no such thing as poise, you can lob a pebble and knock enemies into a Bottomless Pit if you timed it well. And if you think it cannot kill? Wrong. You can deliver a One-Hit Kill to Yamamura and Brador with pebbles. Cherry Tapping to the finest.
  • The Kos Parasite. Equipping it, you may note, does nothing but make you swing your arm around like an idiot. Equipping it while transformed into a Lumenwood, however, gives you the weapon's true power, turning it into a massively long-reaching arcane whip with some fantastic stats. This is, of course, having to contend with the Lumen's... erm.. uneasy movement abilities, so only very skilled players will be able to use it effectively. Even if you equip it without transforming, it does increase unarmed damage, and you can further raise its potentials with flat-damage Blood Gems and investing in Arcane scaling, making unarmed combat viable.
  • The Amygdalan Arm seems initially like a slow, weird club you have to go through hell to get (fighting past the Gatling Hunter and a Blood-Starved Beast). But then you realize that it can stagger most enemies in its normal form (which you normally need to be using a two-handed weapon to do), and its basic moves strike down, making it good for killing enemies low to the ground (such as Spiders or Worms), plus it scales incredibly well with strength and as a blunt weapon has huge rally potential. And then you realize that its transformed version is a scythe with a huge range, and you might start using it regularly.
• Light Is Not Good: Unlike the rest of the game, the Hunter's Nightmare takes place during the daytime. Not only is this disturbing as it contrast the rest of the game, the Nightmare is also far more difficult than the vanilla game.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The initial release was criticized for this; while transitioning between areas was seamless, the game still had annoyingly long load times when dying or traveling to and from the Hunter's Dream. While the devs eventually found a way to shorten the load times (and also changed the loading screen to display random item descriptions to make the loading times more bearable), the fact that you have to travel to the Hunter's Dream to level up remains a bit of a hassle.
• Lost in Imitation: In-Universe, the Reiterpallasch's design was mimicked by the Powder Kegs in the form of the Rifle Spear.
• Lost in Translation: Quite a few things, apparently, mainly due to the original script being in Japanese, a language with a lexicon ranging from "multiple words for the same thing" to "specific concepts that are difficult-to-impossible to translate". Although in a vicious cycle, the Western lore hunters look to the Japanese script for answers, while the Japanese lore hunters do the same with the English script.
  • One of the very first notes you get in the game, apparently written by your character to himself, is the "handwritten scrawl" note in Iosefka's Clinic. It says "Seek paleblood to transcend the Hunt." It can be more accurately translated as "Seek "light bluish blood" to complete the Hunt." This drastically changes the meaning in two ways. First, it makes it clear that your character doesn't know what "pale bluish blood" is, and was told to seek it by someone else. Second, it says that finding whatever that is will finish the Hunt, not "transcend" it. In context this transforms the note from a cryptic breadcrumb into a relatively straightforward goal for your character. Miyazaki confirmed in an interview that the "pale bluish blood" referred to the color of the sky after killing Rom, brought about by the Mensis Ritual and Mergo, and that you were supposed to put together the connection as "stopping this ritual will stop the scourge." Not only that, but the Japanese version specifically calls the note an autograph, making it clearer that you wrote it to yourself.
  • The game revolves around an extreme version of the Japanese concept of kegare — spiritual filth/corruption/uncleanliness brought about by natural things such as menstruation, spilled blood, death, and childbirth — which brings certain things and events into a whole new light.
    • The Japanese script never refers to the Vilebloods as such; they are just called the Cainhurst ketsuzoku (blood relatives or kin) — joining the Vilebloods basically means that you are joining the Cainhurst family. The term "Vileblood" comes from the fact that the Cainhurst bloodline is steeped in kegare, due to them using spiritually unclean blood in their blood ministration. This brings the modus operandi of Logarius' Executioners to a new light: they slaughtered the Cainhurst nobility not because they were a physical threat to the Healing Church, but because their blood was so spiritually unclean that it was considered a source of spiritual uncleanliness.
    • The creation of the Healing Church was Laurence's way of spiritually purifying the Old Blood so that it could be used to gain Enlightenment/Insight.
    • The reason that the "Vermin" that the League seeks to destroy look like centipedes is due to them being the most common animal associated with kegare.
  • The Japanese description of the Old Hunter's Bone doesn't specify whether it came from a man or a woman — gendered pronouns really only show up in Japanese if you're deliberately trying to point out gender — it just states that they were an apprentice to Gehrman. The English translation uses male pronouns and therefore closes itself to possible interpretations. However, further context in the game very strongly suggests it is none other than Lady Maria's bone.
  • The Tomb Prospector Set can be more directly translated as Grave Robber, a more apt description of the Byrgenwerth archaeologists. Likewise, the Harrowed Set is blatantly called a Disguise Set, with the description outright saying that the Disguised ones were pretty much sanctioned to find out the secrets of the Yharnam citizens under the pretense of beast hunting. Which explains not only their fear of the Church, but their immense hatred for Hunters.
  • Rom's Japanese title is a fairly vulgar term for "Stupid", somewhat akin to "retarded", carrying a significantly greater pejorative context than the English translation "Vacuous".
  • The connotations of Laurence and Willem's talk has a different tone in the Japanese script. The English script has Willem outright accusing Laurence of betraying him, while the Japanese script has him say "You also think to betray me?", putting their talk after one of the Byrgenwerth scholars betrayed their work to the Cainhurst nobility. Also, the "fear the old blood" adage has a different tone. The English version is "We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by the blood"; while the Japanese version is "We are made human (by the blood), we surpass humanity (by the blood), we lose our humanity again (by the blood)". The notion of using blood to surpass humanity is missing from the English script, and the Japanese version of the last verse is "We urge you to fear the blood as you proceed". Interestingly, the game's Story Trailer uses a different translation^note "The blood makes us human, makes us more than human, makes us human no more" that is closer to the original, so it's unknown why a different version was used in-game.
  • The Japanese version's words for Insight and Frenzy are Enlightenment and Insanity, making it a little more on-the-nose, though it loses the 'eyes on the inside' pun of the English version.
• Lord British Postulate:
  • The first Scourge Beast you encounter in the clinic is supposed to be a Hopeless Boss Fight since you don't have any weapons, killing you and sending you to the Hunter's Dream where you can claim your start gear. However, if you can get behind it, hit it with a fully charged R2 attack and perform a visceral attack, you can kill it quite easily due to the fact that visceral attacks depend almost entirely on your Skill stat and don't use any weapon scaling or damage properties.
  • Applied to the player, of all things! Normally, it's impossible to die in the Hunter's Dream except at the hands of the Optional Boss, but many players have found ways to do so anyway, such as by using Cast from Hit Points weapons.
• Lovecraft Lite: Ultimately, while the Great Ones exert greater control over, and have far more understanding of, the universe, humans are more than capable of comprehending and utilizing their abilities. The player will also likely end his or her game having slain a half-dozen of them — some of which in the very dreams they dominate over.
  • The Great Ones themselves aren't really even evil in the traditional sense, with the Moon Caryll Rune's description stating that, "The Great Ones that inhabit the nightmare are sympathetic in spirit, and often answer when called upon." It's a notion that is furthered by Great Ones like Ebrietas aiding The Choir in the search for the eldritch truth, and doing so with no ill will towards them, the Moon Presence creating the cycle of the Hunt to give humanity a fighting chance against the beasts, and so on.
  • It's interesting to note that the human factions have been terrorizing the Great Ones just as much, if not more so than vice versa, having robbed the Orphan from Kos' corpse, enslaved the Brain of Mensis and kept it around like a tortured lab animal, and peddled the blood of the Great Ones as an all-cure to unsuspecting Yharnamites. Ebrietas, Rom and the Orphan of Kos don't attack the player unless they attack first, and even the Moon Presence doesn't attempt to battle you unless you show hostility, at which point it is clearly startled. They may not necessarily be "good" so much as just very alien, but they're arguably victims moreso than they are predators, and what harm they cause to humans is primarily due to them being dangerous to humans' sanity just by existing.
• Low-Level Advantage: If your character is below level 30, Chime Maidens will not spawn automatically in Nightmare Frontier and Nightmare of Mensis unless you use a Sinister Resonant Bell to summon them or have a Co-Operator present. Without the presence of Chime Maidens, the other players cannot invade your world. Also, since your weapon level and upgrades do not affect the summoning range, a purposefully under-leveled character with late-game weapons and upgrades can obliterate new players without them.
• Lunacy: Lore notes throughout Yahar'gul state that madmen — aka the Healing Church and its followers — toil to beckon the moon, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg. When night falls and the moon comes out, most everyone in the city begins to experience Sanity Slippage. Killing Rom turns the moon crimson and dyes the sky purple with Paleblood, unleashing all sorts of freaky monstrosities and driving people even crazier than they were before. The True Final Boss is an eldritch creature called the Moon Presence.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: No parrying aside, the Wooden Shield can sometimes block bullets and other small projectiles, leaving you unscathed. This makes the Wooden Shield somewhat useful.
  • The Old Hunters DLC introduced the Loch Shield that is useful against arcane attacks, making two shields in total.

Tropes M-N

• MacGuffin: Paleblood. It's never made clear what exactly it is, just that it's somehow motivating the Player Character. Various notes you come across in your journey also keep cryptically referencing the word. One interpretation is that the Moon Presence is the mysterious Paleblood, while cut lines in the game files from the Blood Minister in the opening and Gehrman suggest that your Player Character is afflicted with a disease or curse known as Paleblood that somehow makes you key to realizing a plan to "transcend the Hunt" by stopping the Mensis ritual and maybe defeating the Moon Presence.
• Madness Mantra: Wouldn't be a Cosmic Horror Story without some!
  • From a random townsperson: "Bless us with blood, bless us with blood..."
  • From the Research Hall patients: "Plip, plop, splish, splosh..."
  • From Yamamura: "Shrouded by night but with steady stride. Colored by blood, but always clear of mind. Proud Hunter of the Church. Beasts are a curse and a curse is a shackle. Only ye are the true blades of the Church."
  • From Vicar Amelia: "But beware the frailty of men; their wills are weak, minds young..."
  • From Micolash: "Ah Kos, or some say Kosm... do you hear our prayers? As you once did for the vacuous Rom, grant us eyes, grant us eyes!"
• Magic Missile Storm: The "A Call Beyond" weapon, which is cast by squeezing a tiny Eldritch Abomination to make it gob "small exploding stars" that track enemies. Certain monsters can also cast it, at a greater proficiency than the player (they get three salvos to your one and can cast it at-will, whereas it costs the Hunter seven bullets).
• Magic Music: The Choir Bell uses Quicksilver bullets to heal you and kills Eileen when she's wounded.
• Magical Species Transformation: The city of Yharnam is afflicted by the "Scourge of the Beast", an ailment that slowly transforms the residents into lycanthropic monsters the more they're exposed to the Old Blood. The change is seemingly irreversible and erases the victim's identity, replacing it with beastial hunger and violence. Other inhuman species exist too, like the Vilebloods, the game's most overt take on vampires, and the aquatic monstrosities of the Fishing Hamlet, who are all an homage to The Shadow over Innsmouth.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Arcane-focused builds have amazing offensive potential... too bad you'll be almost halfway through the game before you can get any really good gear for them, and have to go through the entire DLC to get the truly dedicated Arcane weapon. Once you do, though...
  • Similarly, Skill builds, particularly Skill/Tinge, can feel like this. Most early, pre-Amelia weapons favor Strength over Skill, and the Skill weapons have less stagger and can feel less intuitive and "powerful" than early Strength weapons like the Hunter Axe; there's a total of three Skill-favoring weapons in the early game (and putting the Saw Spear there can be pushing it, in some definitions). The DLC is similar, with the first Skill weapon being a fair way into the first area, one other requiring seeing a quest through to the final area or attacking an NPC, and one being locked behind the hardest non-boss fight in the game. However, once you get to said DLC and/or go to Cainhurst, you can begin to get a wider variety of Skill weapons, in particular the Cainhurst ones (one of which also grows powerful off of Bloodtinge), the Saif, and the Bowblade, which you get if you do that quest or kill the NPC. You'll also begin to gain some of that Skill, which means your viscerals will start hitting really hard... and guess which weapons have the fastest backstab attacks or built-in, special guns? Once you have the Bowblade, a good 30+ Skill and Tinge, a Clawmark rune, and another Skill weapon of your choice, you'll have all the tools and power you need to completely break the game in half, even compared to Strength or Arcane builds.
• Mars Needs Women: The core purpose of the Great Ones manipulating Yharnam and the Phthumerians is to use humanity to bear its children.
• Matchstick Weapon: The basic Torch and Hunter's Torch can be used as melee weapons that deal physical and fire damage (though only the latter is viable against all but the weakest foes), provide light in darker levels, and make the beasts of the Old Yharnam area cower in fear whenever they see it.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Amygdala, which are named after a part in the brain of the same name that deals with emotions (in particular the flight-or-fight response, i.e. fear and aggression).
  • Chikage (千景) translates from Japanese to "Thousands Views", which can be interpreted as Death of a Thousand Cuts. However, it's also a bit of Japanese wordplay, as "血影" which literally means "Blood Shadow", can also be read as "Chi Kage"; alluding to its transformed mode. Likewise, Rakuyo (落葉) translates from Japanese to "Deciduous Leaf" or "Falling Leaf" in reference to the allegorical legend surrounding the two swordsmiths. The differing names may be a vague reference to the legends of the swordsmiths Muramasa and Masamune: the Chikage being a stand-in for Muramasa's bloodthirsty blades and the Rakuyo for Masamune's divine blades.
  • Reiterpallasch roughly translates from German to Cavalry Sword.
  • Tonitrus translates from Latin to Thunder.
  • It turns out that Yharnham itself shares its name with The Pthumerian Queen and may well have been named after them, suggesting from the beginning the settlement has been tied with the catacombs beneath.
• Medieval Stasis: Pointedly averted, in contrast to the Souls series. Various burials and ruins indicate that the world Yharnam inhabits has advanced as a fairly steady pace like our own. The Chalice Dungeons showing off the remnants of the Pthumerians also make this clear; when their civilization fell the Pthumerian soldiers were still wearing mail and plate and primarily using halberds, swords, and crossbows complemented by the occasional crude arquebus or blunderbuss, while Yharnam's military technology has progressed into the late 19th century (with primitive machine guns, artillery firing explosive shells, cartridge-based firearms, repeater pistols, reliable incendiary hand grenades, and so on). Ditto the architecture.
• Memory-Restoring Melody: Father Gascoigne's music box. His daughter gives it to you in an attempt to stabilize him, since she knows he is prone to losing himself and the music reminds him. If used in his first phase, he will stagger for a second as the music does its job, but it only works for a few times, and used too much it will instead speed up his second phase, at which point the box will no longer work.
• Mentally Unwell, Special Senses: In combination with Go Mad from the Revelation. Insight is a stat that represents the inhuman knowledge gain from things that shouldn't be seen. There is an item that can increase Insight called Madman's Knowledge which is a human skull who went mad after contacting a Great One. At 40 Insight, The Hunter is able to see the invisible Lesser Amygdala in certain areas.
• Metroidvania: A rare 3D example. There's an interconnected world full of shortcuts and warp points that encourages exploration, gradual progression of your character, locked doors and areas that require special items to gain entry, and a wide array of weapons, tools, and gear to experiment with for added customization. Also, the fact that all enemies excluding bosses respawn upon death or returning to the Hunter's Dream easily gives this game an old-style Castlevania feel, as if the setting and atmosphere didn't do that already.
• Mercy Kill: When Gehrman offers you "mercy", or vice versa.
  • The duty of the Hunter of Hunters is to kill their fellows before they fully succumb to the Scourge. Eileen the Crow is the leader of this covenant, and her questline involves helping her put down Henryk, an old hunter about to fully lose himself.
  • Pretty much any time you defeat a named Hunter in a Boss Fight.
    • Father Gascoigne is a very prominent example. Eileen even tells you that it had to be done when she deduces that you killed him.
    • Then there's Ludwig, who is so far gone that he's pretty much turned into a giant, mutated centaur.
  • Everyone and everything in the Hunter's Nightmare. Per Lady Maria's cut dialogue: "I know what you did to them. It's not your fault. The nightmare held them, and now they are free."
• Mind Screw: Copious amounts. Several things are flat-out never explained, such as the Hunter's Dream, the Formless One's motives, the weird blood moon that rises at certain points, the degrading nature of Yharnam, etc., the world is populated with mind-destroyingly powerful Eldritch Abominations that the Church worships and are capable of completely altering reality at their will, the game world changes completely over time, and several instances will leave you wondering if what just happened actually happened or if your character isn't just completely bonkers.
• Mini-Boss: There are several, most of whom are Hunters scattered throughout Yharnam. They make up for their lack of brute strength with their agility. They can also parry your attacks.
  • Notable ones include Henryk the Old Hunter, Eileen the Crow, Vileblood Hunter Alfred, and Retired Hunter Djura.
• Mirror Boss: Aside from the hunter mini-bosses that were all created by the developers with the same template as the Good Hunter, it's possible for the player to invoke this with the humanoid bosses. If you know where to look for, you can mimic the abilities of Gascoigne, Micolash, and, to a lesser extant, Logarius, the Shadows of Yarnham, Lady Maria, and Gehrman.
• Mix-and-Match Critters:
  • Vicar Amelia is a massive, snarling beast with features of bears, wolves, and stags, with a large mane of hair on its back, as an exaggeration of her human self's long hair.
  • Also, later on in the game, you'll encounter crows with dog heads and dogs with crow heads...
• Mix-and-Match Weapon: The game has a notable focus on "trick weapons" which possess two different forms that can be cycled through on the fly. Also featured are "off-hand weapons" which, while usually firearms, can be torches or shields as well.
  • The Standard Workshop Weapons are weapons that don't have any strong affiliation with either the Healing Church or the Vilebloods, but belong instead to the old Hunter's Workshop which now exists only in the Hunter's Dream.
    • The Saw Cleaver and the Saw Spear, both Saw Hunter Weapons, are saws with handles that fold out to make them behave like a cleaver and a spear respectively.
    • The Hunter Axe, a Saw Hunter Weapon, can transform between a one-handed axe and a two-handed axe resembling a halberd, which is another Mix-and-Match Weapon all on its own.
    • The Threaded Cane, a Saw Hunter Weapon, transforms between a cane and a metal serrated whip.
    • The Tonitrus, one of Archibald's infamous creations. It's a mace that can generate electricity.
    • The Burial Blade, Gehrman's Weapon of Choice and the original Trick Weapon. It's a scythe with a detachable blade that can act as a scimitar. Like the Blade of Mercy, the blade is made of the magnetic mineral siderite.
    • The Hunter Pistol is a standard-issue firearm ideal for dealing solid single-target damage. The Pistol's weight also makes it great for ripostes owing to its faster draw.
    • The Hunter Blunderbuss is another standard-issue firearm meant for damaging hordes of enemies on its own. The wide spread of this firearm means that there's little room for error to dodge the spray.
  • Powder Keg Weapons are known for being the most damaging, but the most difficult to use, usually requiring a large amount of Strength and some Bloodtinge to wield efficiently.
    • The Stake Driver, Djura's favorite weapon, is an arm-mounted dagger with a very powerful critical attack.
    • The Rifle Spear, a mimic of the Cainhurst Reiterspallasch, is exactly how it sounds; a spear that can transform into a rifle, or more accurately a shotgun, with an attached bayonet.
    • The Boom Hammer is a Powder Keg variant of the Tonitrus. It's a powerful hammer that houses a miniature furnace that ignites when it hits. This requires continuous priming to use the fire attack of the weapon.
    • The Whirligig Saw is the preferred weapon of choice of Valtr, Master of The League. It's a mace that connects to a head of buzzsaws.
    • The Gatling Gun, a smaller, more portable version of Djura's stationary one, was once used by one of his disciples. The Gatling Gun consumes the equivalent of one quicksilver bullet per second, yet sprays a larger amount of bullets than first thought, since it was designed to be more efficient than standard firearms.
    • The Cannon is a prototype of the more standardized Church Cannon. While it is definitely more powerful than the Church version, it's less efficient in quicksilver bullet usage, consuming a total of 12.
    • The Piercing Rifle wasn't actually created by the Powder Kegs themselves, but rather its predecessor, the Oto Workshop. The design meant that parrying would be difficult to do, but this also meant it would be the most powerful single shot firearm and the one with the most range. This design also meant that it can penetrate many enemies with ease.
  • The Hunter of Hunters is a group that kills other hunters that have been driven insane by the nature of the Hunt. This is not honorable in any way, as they know they signed up to Mercy Kill their fellow Hunters. Eileen The Crow is an aging veteran and one of the few Hunter of Hunters remaining. Their signature weapon is:
    • The Blade of Mercy. It's a lightweight short-sword that is made with a magnetic metal known as siderite that can also be split into a pair of daggers.
  • The Healing Church Weapons are known to be more strength based weapons than the others because of the strength and handling required and are meant for the larger enemies that, ironically, most of the Healing Church Hunters become. Some of the Church Hunters preferred to abandon the use of guns or used smaller weapons, which were mocked by the others.
    • The Beast Claw, made by the Irreverent Izzy, is a two-pronged claw made of the still living bones of a Darkbeast. When transformed, it turns both of your hands into beast talons, with the left hand becoming the size of the actual weapon. If equipped with the Beast's Embrace Covenant Rune, it's given a new moveset and a massive damage boost, though in order to get the rune, you need to beat the Superboss of the DLC, Laurence, The First Vicar.
    • The Kirkhammer is the most common trick weapon the modern Church Hunters use. It consists of a silver short sword and a large stone block into which the sword can be inserted to create an enormous maul.
    • Ludwig's Holy Blade, a more mundane imitation of Ludwig's Holy Moonlight Sword that was used by his successors. It's a one-handed silver longsword that can be used in tandem with its massive sheath to become a two-handed greatsword.
    • The Holy Moonlight Sword, Ludwig's personal weapon; the Bloodborne iteration of one of Fromsoft's Recurring Elements: the Sword of Moonlight. This version of the arcane blade has the base form of a silver claymore, and a transformed mode with the weapon's typical glowing blue blade. The transformed mode even has the Sword Beam attack from the Dark Souls versions, but it uses Quicksilver Bullets rather than a chunk of weapon durability.
    • The Church Pick is one of the oldest Church weapons known to exist. Thought to be a myth by the current Healing Church members, it's essentially a large sword that transforms into a long war pick. Its design is both eerily similar to a wooden stake and reminiscent of the Hunter Axe.
    • Simon's Bowblade is wielded by its namesake. Simon himself hated guns with a passion and preferred to use his signature Bowblade, which others mocked him for due to the impracticality of bows when compared to firearms. The standard form is a twisted scimitar, while the bow form uses Quicksilver Bullets as its arrows and is one of the stronger ranged weapons.
    • The Repeating Pistol is a gun with a somewhat misleading name. Though the name implies it is capable of rapid-fire, it instead simply fires two bullets at once. While it does consume an additional bullet, it's also the most powerful pistol in the game, albeit very inefficient to use.
    • Ludwig's Rifle is the firearm of Ludwig and his followers. While it has poorer scaling, the weapon has a longer range and a more narrow spread than the Hunter Blunderbuss.
    • The Church Cannon is the Healing Church's version of the Powder Keg Cannon. Intended to be used by large brutes, this cannon was unfortunately too complex for them to utilize fully. Unlike the prototype, The Church Cannon fires in an arc.
  • The Executioners were a fanatical group of Hunters that pledged their lives to battling the Cainhurst Vilebloods. Formerly led by Martyr Logarius, nearly all the original Executioners are long gone by the time The Foreign Hunter meets Executioner Alfred, Logarius's last surviving disciple. While they're still members of the Healing Church, they have a preferred weapon in the form of:
    • Logarius' Wheel. This trick weapon resembles a Heavy Torturer's Wheel. Transformed, however, it opens up to unleash a mystical blood vapor, which augments it with arcane damage that amplifies the more it revs, but saps the wielder's health in increasing amounts as well.
  • The Cainhurst Vilebloods were a decadent noble family shunned by the church for their use of unclean blood, until they were all but wiped out by the executioners. Cainhurst weapons require a more bloodtinged wielder to be effectively used.
    • The Chikage, a strange katana-sabre hybrid used by the Queen's Royal Guards. Its transformation is actually a powerful blood rite that slowly saps the wielder's health away but gains bloodtinge scaling and a rapid poison effect.
    • The Reiterpallasch is the standard Vileblood weapon. It's a rapier that has a pistol attachment. This mechanism was mimicked by the Powder Kegs in the form of the Rifle Spear.
    • The Rakuyo hails from the same eastern country as the Cainhurst Chikage, but lacks the connection to blood magic. Instead it's reliant on pure skill, being a twinblade that can be split into a katana and offhand dagger. It was once wielded by Lady Maria of The Astral Clocktower, a distant relative of the queen and the person the Doll was based on who hated the blood-thirstiness of the Chikage.
    • The Evelyn is a powerful single-shot pistol that relies even more on bloodtinge than the Hunter Pistol.
  • The Old Hunter Weapons are actually more bizarre than the current Trick Weapons in design, where some of the hunters dislike and tend to forego firearms. These weapons draw out a more significant amount of blood than the current Trick Weapons in comparison. Unfortunately, this lack of restraint was one of the reasons why The Old Hunters were driven mad in the first place.
    • The Fist of Gratia, while not a trick weapon itself, is very useful with the Bowblade, Rifle Spear, and the Reiterpallasch. Essentially a chunk of iron with finger holes in it that functions like a set of brass knuckles. This improvised slab of iron was used by the hulking huntress Gratia, who was hopeless with firearms.
    • The Beast Cutter is the predecessor to the lighter Threaded Cane and the cleaner Saw Cleaver. It's a massive blade that can separate into a whip sword.
    • The Beasthunter's Saif, the basis of the Saw Cleaver, is a trick weapon that has a secondary blade on the inside. The untransformed mode is essentially a large saif, hence the name, while the transformed mode is similar to the Saw Cleaver and Saw Spear, only it's noticeably quicker and can cover more ground with each swing, something that's essential in all Souls games.
    • The Bloodletter is a unique weapon wielded by Brador. This weapon is similar to Sir Alonne's Bewitched Blade, mechanically speaking. Initially a mace, its real power is revealed when the wielder's blood is given to it, transforming it into a Living Weapon and also the only one that can inflict frenzy.
    • The Kos Parasite is the Kin version of the Beast Claw. Earned from defeating the Orphan of Kos (or some say Kosm), to utilise it fully, one must discover the Milkweed Covenant Rune, the Kin equivalent to the Beast's Embrace Covenant Rune.
    • The Amygdalan Arm is a trick weapon severed from a small Amygdala. Usually used only by madmen, the weapon's untransformed mode is a large club, while the transformed mode works like a sentient chain sickle, which implies that, like the Beast Claw, the Arm is still alive. On a side note, in a sense, this is Bloodborne's version of the Dragon Tooth.
  • The League is a new covenant that all players can join even if you don't have the DLC. This is a covenant that encourages players to help others, sound familiar yet?, and have an online ranking with it. Basically, Bloodborne's Warriors of Sunlight. However, unlike other join-able factions, it doesn't have an associated weapon. The "League Cane" is just the covenant register, with the scroll listing all the members hidden within the handle. The closest thing they have to an affiliated weapon is the whirligig saw wielded by their leader.
• Molotov Cocktail: A potent weapon against crowds and beasts.
• Mook Maker: Chime Maidens. In addition to appearing whenever the player calls for help via a beckoning bell, attempting to summon adversaries by ringing their own bell, they can also be found in later levels summoning mooks until killed. They're especially dangerous in the Chalice Dungeons, where they often appear in groups, and start to summon spiders as the player gets into the deeper dungeons. Lots of spiders. Who can spot the player from several rooms away.
• Money Is Experience Points: In addition to buying items, Blood Echoes can be used to level up your character.
• Monster Is a Mommy: Or rather, the Eldritch Abomination Wants To Be A Mommy. The Great Ones keep impregnating humans. The resulting offspring die, but it doesn't occur to them to stop trying.
  • As revealed in the Old Hunters DLC, the now-dead Great One Kos is revealed to have been pregnant. In fact, her offspring, The Orphan of Kos, is the final boss of the aforementioned DLC.
• Mordor: The Nightmare of Mensis, an alternate dream world created by the villainous School of Mensis. It is a twisted expanse of black mountains made of fused-together, screaming faces rising impossibly high over an endless sea of fog, where the only building in sight is an enormous cathedral that serves as a prison for one Eldritch Abomination and an incubator for another. It helps that it's The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of the game.
• Motif: Sound and Water. The currency of Bloodborne is Blood Echoes. Bells are spiritually significant tools used by enemies for summoning. Players use bells to summon allies. Father Gargiscone can hear blood "singing" to him. The voices of the Great Ones, especially Oedon, is heard like ripples in a lake or sea. And in The Old Hunters, the deformed patients of Maria's clock tower constantly hear the sound of water flowing. The DLC ends in the beach where Kos lies dead.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
  • Amygdala is a gargantuan humanoid with several elongated limbs mimicking a Giant Spider, and makes use of most of them during her boss battle. You can hack them to debilitate her.
  • Mergo's Wet Nurse is a six-armed wraith that wields a sickle-like blade on each hand, and mainly tries to dice you up in a flurry of slashes.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Character creation has you choosing your origin/upbringing before your journey to Yharnam in order to generate your stats, replacing the "class" system from the Souls games.
• Multiple Endings: With potentially all the endings coming to pass, on different nights, in different dreams, eventually.
  • Yharnam Sunrise: With the night coming to an end and a number of the other Great Ones' vanquished, Gehrman offers to release you from the Hunter's Dream and forget all you have seen. Agreeing has him behead you with his scythe. You awake the next morning back in the Cathedral Ward's graveyard. The Doll is then seen in the Hunter's Dream, kneeling at a gravestone and wishing you farewell.
  • Honoring Wishes: You reject Gehrman's offer and have to fight him instead. Upon defeating Gehrman, his Eldritch master, the "Moon Presence", descends to make you its next emissary. Some time later, the Doll is seen pushing you in Gehrman's wheelchair back towards the mansion in the Hunter's Dream. The Hunt begins again, with you as the next Keeper of the Hunters.
  • Childhood's Beginning: The Hunter consumes at least three of the four pieces of Eldritch Abomination umbilical cord hidden across Yharnam to "ascend to the level of a Great One" and face the Moon Presence instead. However, after you defeat the Moon Presence, you end up turning into an infant abomination yourself. You are eventually found by the Doll as a small slug/squid creature, seemingly to be raised into the next of the Great Ones.
• Mutual Kill: A collective example; the Executioners' assault on Castle Cainhurst appears to have all but wiped out both sides of the conflict, leaving only Alfred^*Who wasn't present, Annalise^*Complete Immortality, sealed away at the end of the battle and so effectively a casualty anyway, and possibly the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst as the survivors of their respective factions.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Enemy Hunters use many of the same maneuvers, weapons, and techniques that the player is capable of. However, they deal a lot more damage with their attacks (including their guns), have Bottomless Magazines, and have much more health at their disposal. But on the other hand, they can't replenish health via the Regain system, and none seem to carry as many blood vials as the player does.
  • NPC Hunters can use their firearms while wielding their trick weapons in two-handed mode, which you can't. But on the other hand, the player character is the only person that can perform Visceral Attacks, even though you are just as susceptible to staggering as any enemy in the game. Though there are four exceptions to that rule: Djura, the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst, Gehrman, and Lady Maria.
• Mystery Cult: The Choir, the inner circle of the Healing Church. The Healing Church itself is not a mystery cult and is happy to explain its doctrine, but what only the Choir knows is that the Healing Church is actually their front, ensuring them political power and a steady supply of test subjects. The Choir does share some of the Healing Church's basic beliefs, such as the Old Blood being the key to Enlightenment, but unlike the Church, they deal directly with the Great Ones and seek to ascend to their level, and Old Blood is just one of the tools they use for that purpose.
• Mystical Pregnancy: Arianna ends up impregnated by a Great One in the game's later half.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Yharnam borrows artistic direction and mood of the Tower of Latria from Demon's Souls.
  • The Cleric Beast draws from Manus's design.
  • In the alpha, Gascoigne would say "sick creature... may you rest in peace... Umbasa" when he kills you. This line is cut in the final game.
  • The armor, stance, appearance, and occupation for the Executioner enemies hearkens back to Executioner Smough.
  • You once again have to run across a bridge while a huge monster fires ranged attacks at you. In Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, these were dragons breathing fire at you. Here, it's a Lesser Amygdala firing lasers at you in Yahar'gul, Unseen Village.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The "Face Your Fears" trailer ends with the Hunter walking through a pitch-black Grand Cathedral and examining Laurence's skull on the altar, before a Cleric Beast appears behind him. In the actual game, that room of the Cathedral is always well-lit, and the sequence of events is backwards; you have to defeat Vicar Amelia (who isn't the Cleric Beast- he's a Central Yharnam boss- but is a Cleric Beast and shares the same theme music) before touching Laurence's skull.
• New Game Plus: Returning from the Souls series is the feature to replay the game's story, while keeping your equipment and ramping up the difficulty. Miyazaki and his team even claim to have trouble beating it!
• The Night That Never Ends: Yharnam is a land without sunlight, lit only by the moon. This is justified, however, as the Hunter is trapped inside a dream. And the Moon exists as a presence. Should they free themselves from the dream, the morning sun would be seen again. However, if the Hunter chooses to free Gehrman by killing him or become a Great One by defeating Moon Presence, the Hunter will never see the sun again.
• Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: The Beastly Scourge in the game manages to combine four different monsters into one lifecycle. The Scourge is triggered by consumption of the Old Blood (vampire) — which originates from otherworldly Great Ones (Eldritch Abomination) — and first turns the afflicted into mindless, deformed husks (zombie), before finally transforming them into lycanthropes (werewolf).
• No Name Given: The old man during the intro administering you the Yharnam blood is only mentioned in the credits as "Blood Minister". The Lonely Old Woman and Bigoted Old Man you can save in Central Yharnam and the Cathedral Ward aren't named either.
• Non-Indicative Name: The OST track "Soothing Hymn" is not very soothing.
• The Nose Knows: Weirdly, everyone in town notices your smell. Somehow you smell like the moon and that marks you as a Hunter. Either there's something very wrong with you, the townspeople, or both.
• Not Using the Zed Word: The people of Yharnam are effectively vampires, and the Scourge of Beasts pretty much turns people into werewolves...but neither term is ever used.

Tropes O-R

• Obliviously Evil: It's implied that the Great Ones are this for the most part. They don't seem to mean any ill will towards humans, and some of them even tried to help mankind by sharing their knowledge, but somewhere along the way things went terribly wrong and created the apocalyptic scenario Yharnam is now experiencing.
• Old Master: All the old Hunters are fearsome opponents due to all the years spent honing their craft.
  • Retired Hunter Djura, an old man from a long-defunct sect of Hunters who will hunt you if you insist on coming into Old Yharnam. Even without his Gatling gun, he's a serious threat.
  • Gehrman, an old man in a wheelchair who was once a great Hunter. If you refuse his "mercy" at the end of the game, he will show himself to still be a master Hunter, becoming a Final Boss, and arguably one of the toughest bosses in the game.
  • Eileen the Crow, an old woman who still serves as a deadly Hunter.
  • Henryk the Old Hunter, Father Gascoigne's former partner, counts as well, as he can potentially kill Eileen if you don't help her kill him first.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Several examples, and "sanguine" usually appears somewhere in the lyrics. Especially in Yahar'gul if you end up there early by getting killed by a Snatcher (or some say Kidnapper). Listen. What makes it scarier is that this chant is diegetic - the closer you get to the One Reborn's boss room, the louder it gets.
• Once per Episode: The game reuses themes and plot points featured in both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
  • A mighty kingdom is left in ruins after a Zombie Apocalypse. (Werewolf apocalypse in this case.)
  • Adventurers making a pilgrimage to an ancient, forgotten land in search of a cure to a mysterious disease that afflicts them.
  • A cursed katana that damages its wielder. (Okay, Katana-Sabre Hybrid, but close enough.)
  • A huge monster blocks your path and fires a ranged attack at you.^note In Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, you have to cross a bridge while a dragon/drake breathes fire at you. In Bloodborne, you have to cross a bridge while a Lesser Amygdala fires lasers at you.
  • Miyazaki's favorite Dirty Coward, Patches, shows up. He'll also try to kick you off a cliff yet again.
  • The gods of the world are jerks who care very little for the well-being of humanity.
    • This one is actually subverted; the Moon rune states that "The Great Ones are sympathetic, and will often answer when called upon." And Kos and Ebrietas, at the very least, actively answer prayers addressed to them.
  • Downplayed compared to Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, but the cyclical nature of the conflict is still implied in one ending, and possibly two.
  • The DLC includes the Moonlight Greatsword (well, Holy Mooonlight Sword in this case), a sword made of a beam of moonlight.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Arcane is among the most incredibly useful stats to raise and to base a character build around. Most stats raise only one thing (Strength raises strength weapon adjustment, skill raises skill weapon adjustment, etc.), but Arcane raises elemental weapon damage (and all enemies have an elemental weakness), increases the attack damage of most attack items (like firebombs), grants access to the use of magical items, and raises item drop rates. Long story short, even if your build is strength or skill based, many advise raising your arcane during your second playthrough so you can make the best use of all of your items, and broaden your arsenal so that you're up for the challenge. The Old Hunters DLC introduces the Kos Parasite, a peculiar weapon that turns you into a Lumenwood Kin and it only scales with Arcane. In other words, if your primary weapon is the Kos Parasite, you don't even need to raise any other stat at all.
• Ontological Mystery: Unlike the Souls games, Bloodborne lacks an introductory cutscene that explains the setting's background. It simply begins with your character receiving an injection of mysterious blood and then waking up some time later to find the clinic abandoned and city overrun with beasts and mad Hunters, with no immediate explanation of how things got that way. You'll have to rely on the Story Breadcrumbs to find out.
• Optional Boss: A good chunk of the game's bosses are entirely optional; the only completely necessary boss fights are Father Gascoigne (to enter Odeon Chapel and change the phase to Evening), Vicar Amelia (to enter the Forbidden Woods and change the phase to Night), Shadows of Yharnam (to enter Byrgenwerth), Rom the Vacuous Spider (to change the phase to Blood Moon), The One Reborn (fought right after Rom), Micolash (to enter Mergo's Loft), and Mergo's Wet Nurse (final boss).
  • The Cleric Beast is probably going to be the first boss you find, and drops the Sword Hunter Badge, which allows you to explore Cathedral Ward. Fighting him is also one way to get the insight you need before you can level up.
  • Old Yharnam has the Blood-Starved Beast, which gives you a lantern in Old Yharnam and access to the first Chalice Dungeons.
  • The Witch of Hemwick grants you access to the Workshop Tool needed to use Caryll Runes, which give you a number of useful buffs.
  • Matyr Lorgarius blocks the way into the section of Cainhurst Castle where Queen Annalise lives. Defeating him is a godsend for Bloodtinge builds as it allows you to get the Chikage, one of the game's best Bloodtinge weapons.
  • Darkbeast Paarl drops the Spark Hunter Badge (which allows you to buy various Bolt items) and allows you to befriend Retired Hunter Djura.
  • Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos, requires breaking a window to even reach and gives access to the Isz Chalice Dungeons.
  • There are actually three bosses with a claim to being the Final Boss, but this is route-specific. You only need to fight Mergo's Wet Nurse to trigger the burning of the Hunter's Workshop and the Last-Second Ending Choice, and can get Yharnam Sunrise without any further violence, but if you want Honoring Wishes you'll also need to fight Gherman, the First Hunter, and if you want Childhood's Beginning you need to fight both of the above plus the Moon Presence.
  • The Chalice Dungeons are entirely optional and grant access to several unique bosses; Keeper of the Old Lords, Watchdog of the Old Lords, Forgotten Madman, Pthumerian Descendant, Bloodletting Beast, Pthumerian Elder, and finally Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen.
  • The DLC adds 5 new bosses, but only 4 are required to complete the DLC's story. The last is Laurence, the First Vicar, a Cleric Beast on fire who will only fight you if you find his human skull first.
• Orphaned Etymology: On several occasions. It's never explicitly made clear exactly where the game takes place, whether it is a Constructed World or an Alternate Universe, but considering how damn weird Yharnam and the other in-game locales get, it may not even matter anymore:
  • The imposter Doctor Iosefka mentions her Hippocratic Oath at one point.
  • Ludwig, in the Old Hunters DLC, calls his Church Hunters "noble Spartans".
  • The Molotov cocktail item; presumably, Vyacheslav Molotov doesn't exist in Yharnam.
  • The rapid-fire rotary gun is called the Gatling Gun. Perhaps it was invented by a Richard Gatling in the Bloodborne world as well?
  • Some of the books in Gehrman's room are dated to 1872◊, implying Yharnam somehow uses the Gregorian calendar.
  • There are Polish prayers written on some of the graves in Hemwick (which isn't Translation Convention, as it's the same in all versions of the game).
• Our Monsters Are Different: As mentioned under Fantasy Kitchen Sink, Bloodborne has takes on many, many creatures of western folklore. Examples include:
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: The Old Hunters has what's probably the closest analogue to mermaids in the Bloodborne world. They're white, woman-shaped mollusk-like creatures that frequently inhabit large ammonite shells who appear to worship Kos, and have been transformed into their state by her influence.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: The beast-disease infecting the citizens of Yharnam turns them into mixes of humans and various beasts, like wolves, spiders, crows, and so on. In general, most of these resemble werewolves of some sort; this is the most common enemy type, as opposed to the Souls series' usual penchant for undead zombie-folk. The origin behind the lycanthropes — them being hybrids between humans and a squid-like Eldritch Abomination of the full moon — is also fairly unusual. While vulnerable to conventional weapons (albeit highly resistant, to the point where late 19th century small arms are said to do nothing to them), they notably appear to possess the classic vulnerability to silver, given that Ludwig's Holy Blade is made of the stuff. Unique to Bloodborne's take, they're also particularly vulnerable to fire. Understandable as the beast-turned's hair are usually visually depicted as oily and frayed, and Yharnamites seeming to have poor eyesight due to the effects of their affliction to the point where many bandage over their eyes.
  • Our Werebeasts Are Different: A lot of the more mutated beast forms hardly even resemble werewolves, either leaning more into another animal type like a stag or goat, or going straight into Animalistic Abomination territory.
  • Our Centaurs Are Different: Ludwig, unique among the beasts, resembles a half-horse, half-man abomination, in reference to Mezu, the Japanese Buddhist guardian of hell.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: After Blood Ministration became the medical practice in Yharnam, the sheer popularity of it (healing, an alternative to alcohol, maybe even an alternative to sex) shows such blatant undertones of vampirism without it ever being mentioned. Even you, as a Hunter, heal by injecting a Blood Vial into your thigh or splattering beast blood onto your wounds. Perhaps vampires never appear because in a world where everyone commoditizes blood, it would be redundant. The Cainhurst Vilebloods, or what is left of them, embody the typical Eastern European vampire appearance-wise: tall, pale-skinned nobles dressed in central European medieval finery who live in a musty old castle. Their preferred method of gaining blood, however, is to salvage blood dregs from the corpses of the slain for their Queen.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: On top of the Beastly Scourge, the Chalice Dungeons feature more conventional zombies in the form of the various Pthumerian enemies. They resemble emaciated corpses, but retain superhuman strength and are still intelligent enough to use weapons. They come in many varieties, from basic civilian Labyrinth Watchers with knives, sickles, and cleavers, to the former soldier Labyrinth Warriors with mail armor and swords/crossbows/flails/halberds, to the Watchers, to various types of undead mages... not to mention the Kidnappers. It's implied that these zombies are somehow sustained by Great One contact.
  • Our Liches Are Different: Martyr Logarius is basically a lich, being a visibly-decayed undead sorcerer with a specific purpose, who nonetheless still maintains enough sapience to remember his mission and fight intelligently. One of his attacks also seem to use damned souls as ammunition...
  • Our Hydras Are Different: The large Snake Balls in the Forbidden Woods are land-dwelling hydras: large, multi-headed, hostile serpentine monsters with deadly poisonous breath, spit, and blood.
  • Our Gargoyles Rock: Grey gargoyle-esque creatures resembling half-men, half-bat hybrids attack you at Cainhurst Castle. They resemble stone gargoyles and will perch themselves still on walls when inactive like them, but they appear to be flesh and blood.
  • Our Giants Are Bigger: Several types of giants to be found in this game, including the Church Giants at the Cathedral and the Undead Giants in the Chalice Dungeons. They're all implied to be the result of mad science experiments.
  • All Trolls Are Different: Huntsman's Minions are technically beasts created by the plague, but they heavily resemble trolls, including having the characteristic facial features, size, physique, simple speech patterns, and hunched posture. You even fight some of them under a bridge. They usually carry concrete blocks as weapons, and like the other beasts (and mythological trolls), are particularly vulnerable to fire.
  • Our Demons Are Different: The Moon Presence is called the Moon Demon in the Japanese text. What this means, and how this distinguishes it from the other Great Ones, is never elaborated upon.
  • Our Ghosts Are Different: The Labyrinth Spectres that haunt the Chalice Dungeons are pretty standard ones, being white spirits covered in ectoplasm that can turn invisible, teleport, turn intangible, and so on. The main difference is that they can be physically killed. Ditto the Silver Ladies at Cainhurst. The Orphan of Kos as seen in the Hunter's Nightmare is also basically a ghost, a vengeful spirit who torments others because it is unable to move on due to the injustice it was dealt in life. Letting it pass ends the Nightmare.
  • Our Spirits Are Different: In addition to crossing over with the above, you can summon helpful phantoms with the Choir Bell, a la the white phantoms in Dark Souls. Spirits in general seem to exist separate of one's body in the Bloodborne universe, as indicated by the existence of the Hunter's Nightmare.
• Outside-Genre Foe: The starter monsters and bosses draw from Gothic Horror, and while they're very intimidating, they are at least understandable. Then you get halfway through the game and the enemies start becoming more and more alien and bizarre, dreams and reality merge, and the Great Ones start showing up. The giant werewolf of Vicar Amelia is downright mundane compared to the unspeakable thing hidden beneath the altar where Amelia was praying...
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • The first floor of the Lecture Building can be accessed relatively early and has a lecture theatre containing 16 Slime Scholars who will give you about 11k Blood Echoes total (without any Moon or Heir runes equipped). They also fairly commonly drop Quicksilver Bullets. It's pretty much your best bet for farming until you can access the harder Chalice Dungeons.
  • In terms of non-root Chalice Dungeons, area 2 of Ailing Lower Loran has a room with two Chime Maidens inside it. After dispatching the enemies outside the room, one can simply stand there and kill an endless stream of red spiders, which give over 1500 echoes each with the three Moon runes.
  • One infamous root Chalice Dungeon that exists (colloquially known as the Cum Dungeon due to its code, CUMMMFPK, has a loading glitch that allows players to obtain 83,000 blood echoes in a few seconds. The reason is that there's an NPC Hunter that spawns in the path of an axe trap, and though can't stagger out of the way because his model and animations are not loaded, his hitbox is. So he gets repeatedly hit until he dies, and then the game assumes that you did it and gives you the Blood Echoes.
• Pile Bunker: One weapon available in the game is the "Stake Driver", a large gauntlet-like Blade Below the Shoulder that can be extended and retracted.
• The Plague: The Scourge of Beasts infecting Yharnam turns those afflicted into mindless monsters, with the later stages of the disease turning the infected into literal beasts. Although Yharnam isn't the first place this has happened.
• Plague Doctor: One of the available attires is the plague doctor-esque Crowfeather Set, the signature of the Hunter of Hunters covenant.
• Platonic Cave: Heavily implied to be the entire setting.
• Player Headquarters: The Hunter's Dream.
• Plot Device All Along: The Umbilical Cords may seem like a rare type of Insight-obtaining item, but really, consuming at least three of the four you can find will unlock the third ending.
• Portal Pool: The Byrgenwerth Lake, which contains a portal to an eldritch realm containing Rom.
• Posthumous Character: Laurence, the chief disciple of Master Willem. As well as Kos, the Great One the School of Mensis sought after.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: There are two primary sources of Yharnam blood. The Choir found Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos in the Isz Chalice Dungeons, relocated her to the Grand Cathedral, and used her blood for its healing properties. And the Pthumerians originally used Queen Yharnam and her dead, unborn child Mergo for their blood.
• The Power of Blood: The use of blood is a central theme of the game.
  • Blood Ministration, Yharnam's unique medical practice, is based on receiving a transfusion of unique unknown blood in order to cure illnesses. Something happened to those who have received blood ministration, causing the beast outbreak that has enveloped Yharnam. Said healing blood is also implied to be what created the bridge between the human world and the Nightmare Realm that causes the game's plot to begin with, though the link between the two worlds is seemingly what the Byrgenwerth scholars had wanted in the first place, with the blood being an added bonus.
  • Blood Echoes replaces souls from the Souls games as the level-up and item-buying currency.
  • A stock of blood vials is used to recover health, replacing the Estus flask from the Dark Souls games.
  • The Rally mechanic allows you to regain health if you cut into enemies immediately after your own injuries and bathe in their blood.
  • Dying to an enemy can potentially cause them to take your Blood Echoes, which makes them stronger. The player then has to slay said enemy in order to re-obtain their Blood Echoes.
  • Bloodstones and Blood Gems are used to upgrade and augment your equipment.
  • The player can sacrifice some of their health to create five temporary blood bullets at any point.
  Yahtzee: ...something of a pattern emerging here. It’s all blood, all the time. It’s like that time of the month at the all-female gladiatorial arena.
• Power of Love: The Plain Doll implies that being loved makes her sentient.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: "Tonight...Gehrman joins the Hunt."
  • Also, "A corpse... should be left well alone."
  • "Beasts all over the shop... You'll be one of them, sooner or later."
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
  • Father Gascoigne: "Too proud to show your true face, eh? But a sporting Hunt, it was!"
  • Retired Hunter Djura: "I should think you still have dreams? Well, the next time you dream, give some thought...To the Hunt, and its meaning..." ^note The "To the Hunt, and its meaning" part gets cut off by the load screen. Alternatively, "You still dream, I should think, then come as often as you like, I'll show you another death." ^note When you double-cross or attack Djura after befriending him.
  • Eileen the Crow: "You still have dreams? ... Tell the little doll I said hello..."
  • Gehrman: "You must accept your death. Be freed from the night."
• Prepare to Die: Yes, it's not an official Souls game, but it's essentially a gothic spin on the Souls formula. As such, you'd better be prepared to die. A lot. Because Bloodborne is a hard game.
• Procedural Generation: The Root versions of the Chalice Dungeons. While the default Chalice Dungeons have a set layout, the Root versions always have a random layout. The Root versions even provide a "world seed" code, so that each particular layout can be saved and shared.
• Punny Name:
  • The School of Mensis. It's a dirty joke, since Mensis can refer to a woman's menstrual cycle as well as to the moon, and blood, the moon, and pregnant women feature heavily in Bloodborne, which in itself is a pun.
  • The Church Cannon is a pun on "church canon", which refers to the rules that the church operates under.
  • Insight, which causes eyes to grow on the brain. Sight on the inside, if you follow me.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In the Healing Thirst comic, the doctor betrays his cleric companion to get Blood Ministration for a sick loved one. The final pages show that said loved one is now succumbing to the Scourge of the Beast.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: It's not hard to sport this look. Just combine the Threaded Cane with the Hunter armor set and top hat.
• Rain of Blood: A brief, subtle one after you complete each boss fight.
• Reconstruction: Of Gothic Horror. This game revisits all of the classic hallmarks and makes them all proper scary again. Infectious werewolf bites not doing anything for you? How's about a werewolf apocalypse? Witches dancing in the light of the full moon laughable? Not when you walk in on the witches and they stop dancing to descend upon you with meat cleavers and red-hot pokers. The tragedy of Victor Frankenstein no longer resonating with you? The One Reborn is here to remind you how a botched attempt at creating life can turn out. Torches and Pitchforks are a lot less silly when they're all pointed at you, and there's so much bloodletting and blood-consumption that everyone in town is pretty much already a vampire. This is also probably why Not Using the Zed Word is in play; if it doesn't have a familiar label, then old horrors are new again. And if you thought the Cosmic Horror Story was becoming old hat, this game makes that fresh again too; all the eldritch horrors are an Outside-Genre Foe that just ramps up the horror due to how unexpected and wrong they are.
• Recurring Boss: The Chalice Dungeons have a tendency of recycling bosses between dungeons. When you've finished them, you'll have lost count of how many Undead Giants, Merciless Watchers, Keepers of the Old Lords, and Watchdogs of the Old Lords you've killed. Major bosses from the main game also show up, most notably the Blood-starved Beast, Ebrietas, and Rom.
• Recursive Precursors: The Healing Church was preceded by the Byrgenwerth College, who in turn based their teachings on the ancient relics of the Pthumerians.
• Regenerating Health: Of a sort. The Rally system focuses on regaining health, and certain weapons regain more health than others — the weapon with the most regain potential is the Hunter's Axe. Different weapon forms also have different rally values, with the transformed Burial Blade beating even the Hunter's Axe when in scythe form.
• Religion of Evil: The Healing Church is founded on the use of a substance that turns people who take it too much into werewolves, and they know this. Their excuse is that it's "frailty of men" causing the problem (which falls a little flat when you consider that the people who resist the Scourge become the worst beasts when they do turn), and to blame outsiders for Yharnam's werewolf apocalypse. The part most people don't know is that the Church worships eldritch entities called the Great Ones, and desires to ascend to their level, a goal which involves unethical experimentation on ordinary citizens and turning them into mini-abominations. It's a unique case where the religion is actually eviler than the gods it worships, since the Great Ones are alien at worst and seem to want to be helpful, while the Church subjects people to horrible fates knowing full well what they're doing.
• Remixed Level: The Hunter's Nightmare in the DLC, which is most of the areas you explore in Yharnam proper (e.g. the Cathedral Ward, Old Yharnam, etc.) with completely different level designs and enemies.
• Rivers of Blood: In the DLC The Old Hunters, there is a literal river of blood flowing through the fake-Yharnam portion of the Hunter's Nightmare. The banks of this river are completely filled with still somewhat living shriveled up corpses, and at the end lies Ludwig. Castle Cainhurt also has a somewhat dried up version of this. Interestingly these rivers have their own local fauna, as both happen to have giant blood-sucking ticks gorging on the blood, with the ones in the Hunter's Nightmare being much more engorged and dangerous due to there being more blood to feast on.
• Romance Sidequest: Defied. If the Hunter can acquire a Ring of Betrothal, then they can use it to propose marriage to Annalise. She rejects it, but she's flattered, and lets them down gently, noting that, should she accept, you'd be in danger, and you're far too important to her for her to let that happen.
  • Repeatedly asking after the first time gets her to giggle like a school girl, lets you know that the thought is enough, and pretty much suggests she wouldn't mind if not for the goals of Cainhurst. Considering the ring itself is a random reward from a chalice dungeon, it's entirely possible it's a nod to the fandom wanting to "wife" characters in other Souls games.

Tropes S-T

• Sad Battle Music: Like Dark Souls before it, the track used for the final boss of Bloodborne — Gehrman, the First Hunter — is not an epic and orchestral score, but a sad and somber piece.
• Samus Is a Girl: You probably couldn't tell that the Hunter on the cover of The Old Hunters with the Rakuyo trick weapon is Lady Maria of The Astral Clocktower until you meet her in-game. Oh, and she's the person that the Doll is based on.
• Sanity Meter: The Insight mechanic and the Frenzy meter. Insight is gained either from using certain items or from encountering and slaying bosses. The more Insight you have, the more you see of this world: more enemies show up, enemies gain new attacks, and the enemies get harder. (Plus, there's the Amgydalas just hanging onto the walls that you can see once you have enough Insight.) Most dangerously, though, is: having a great amount of Insight greatly reduces resistance to the "Frenzy" status effect, which allows certain enemies to kill you almost instantaneously. However, Insight can be spent either by summoning another Hunter online or through the Insight shop in the Hunter's Dream.
• Sanity Slippage: What you presumably experience when your Insight rises (or maybe you become more sane?).
  • Also experienced by most of the NPCs in the game. Most of the ones who won't leave their homes will start to go insane if you check in with them as the game goes on, with some going silent eventually, and of the NPCs you do save, some of them begin to crack after the Red Moon Event. The church lady is just huddled over chuckling to herself and will apparently kill the other young woman under certain conditions. The young woman begins to hunch over as a strange affliction takes her. Ironically, the old lady starts off in a terrible mood and devolving into panic much faster, only to become very calm (and mistaking you for her child). This is because she evidently went so nuts that she began taking sedatives to calm down (she'll even share).
• Scenery Gorn: Just like its predecessors. The environments are dark, dank, and filled with death, disease, and decay.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: Mainly with the bosses. Father Gasciogne, at the end of the first area, is one of the hardest bosses in the game, and one of the few you cannot summon NPC help for. After him, the next few are relatively little trouble until you meet Vicar Amelia (and even she isn't bad if you summon the NPC helper). You may also go down into Old Yharnam to fight the Blood Starved Beast, who is at least as hard as Amelia with its poison abilities.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Yharnam Sunrise ending in a nutshell. After all the crap you've seen and the horrible things you've experienced (plus realizing Yharnam's already doomed and has been so long before you got there), you decide to simply leave the Hunter's Dream (and possibly Yharnam), and be no longer bound to the Hunt.
• Self-Disposing Villain: Not the bosses (those you gotta kill yourself), but most of the people who are actually responsible for Yharnam's wretched condition have managed to destroy themselves long before you got here. The only one you actually fight is Micolash, who pulled off his evil plan only to have you kill him on your way to dealing with Mergo, the infant Great One he summoned.
  • Byrgenwerth started it all with what they did to the Fishing Hamlet, but the building is empty now except for Willem, Yurie, and some monsters. It seems that some of their members were pulled into the Nightmare Frontier with the Lecture Hall and the rest either died or split off into the Healing Church and the School of Mensis.
  • The Healing Church took over Yharnam and turned it into a lab for Old Blood experiments, but, as Willem warned their founder Laurence, they became too fascinated with it and started to ignore the inherent danger. When the Beast Plague came to Yharnam as a result of their actions, the Church wound up turning into the worst beasts of all because the ones who resist beasthood the most are the ones who become the biggest monsters when they do give in, as exemplified by Vicar Amelia. Their fate as of the game is never explicitly stated, but we don't meet many sane churchmen(and only two Choir members), their base in Upper Cathedral Ward is overrun by monsters, and the Choir member Yurie is titled 'the Last Scholar', so we can make a few educated guesses.
  • The School of Mensis destroyed themselves attempting to contact Mergo. The ritual itself went off well, but contact with the stillborn Great One resulted in something charmingly described as "stillbirth of their brains." In the real world, they're all dead by the time you meet them and their minions are slaughtered by the horrible things that have moved in after the Blood Moon. Micolash survived in the Nightmare of Mensis, but see above as to his fate.
• Self-Harm–Induced Superpower: In the Old Hunters one of the bosses the player faces is Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower. When a third of her health is gone, Maria will stab her sword Rakuyo into her chest coating the blade with her blood allowing her to increase the range with which she can attack and also allowing her to use a few AOE attacks as well.
• Sequence Breaking: The initial Scourge Beast inside Yosefka's Clinic at the very beginning of the game can go outside the Clinic itself if you keep it alive, and due to an oversight, if you let it grab you at just the right angle you will clip through the locked gate that opened through the secret path in the Forbidden Woods, allowing you to get to the Forbidden Woods and Byrgenwerth right away, essentially skipping over half of the game's main content. Of course, this completely borks up questlines (in particular Iosefka's, who will be completely broken should you access the inside of the clinic) but it's still doable.
• Shock and Awe: The Bolt Paper and the Tonitrus Trick Weapon, a mace that can spark itself for seven seconds.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The Hunter's Blunderbuss, Ludwig's Rifle, and any other spread-shot firearms count.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Yharnam Hunter outfit is inspired by the Iconic Outfit from Brotherhood of the Wolf. Also borrowing from that movie, the Beast Cutter is almost identical to the weapon the primary antagonist uses in the climax of the film.
  • To Berserk:
    • The Hunter's Mark has been compared to the Brand of Sacrifice, although the Heir rune fits the motif better.
    • A more specific Berserk Shout-Out, but this time it's one to the darkest moments in the series: should Arianna be in the Oedon Chapel when the Red Moon Event happens, she disappears into the Tomb of Oedon sewer. Upon finding her, she's sitting in another chair with a Kin baby at her feet. Arianna's Surprise Pregnancy and subsequent labor/childbirth mirror Griffith/Femto's rape of Casca and the early childbirth of her and Guts' demonically corrupted child.
    • Another specific Berserk Shout-Out. Logarius' Wheel, the signature weapon of the Executioners covenant, is highly reminiscent of the torture wheel used by Mozgus' musclebound disciple.
    • Some find Annalise's helmet design to bear more than a passing resemblance to Griffith's iconic birdlike headwear.
    • Much like Guts, the Orphan of Kos was born from its mother's dead body.
  • The Beast Cutter weapon from The Old Hunters is very similar to Zabimaru, Renji Abarai's zanpakuto in Bleach, from the shape to its trick mode being a whip-sword.
  • The Gold Ardeo helmet bears a heavy resemblance to the iconic helm of Pyramid Head, although it is shaped like a conical pyramid rather than a rectangular pyramid. Fittingly, the Gold Ardeo forms the helmet portion of the Executioner Set.
  • The snail women from The Old Hunters resemble the snail people from Uzumaki.
  • Armored Core
    • The Reiterpallasch is a reference to Wynne D. Fanchon from Armored Core: For Answer; she piloted an AC named Reiterpallasch.
    • The Stake Driver, being a Pile Bunker, resembles the Parrying Blade which can be attached onto various AC as melee weapons.
    • The Whirligig Saw is a reference to the Grind Blade, an Overed Weapon consists of six chainsaws attached onto an oversized drill arm.
  • Dark Souls
    • The Evelyn pistol is a reference to the repeating crossbow Avelyn from the Dark Souls trilogy.
    • Alfred, The Executioner, who openly asks you to co-operate with him is a reference to Solaire of Astora. The two even have the same voice actor. When you give him the Unopened Summons, he says "Praise the Good Blood", which is a reference to "Praise the Sun" message seen all over the place.
    • Valtr also takes on a part of Solaire's character; in his case, being the leader of a co-op covenant.
    • Patches the Spider is a recurring character who kicks people into various pits by tricking them with treasures below. Should they survive, Patches will beg for forgiveness and become a merchant.
    • One of the patients in the Research Hall who has become nothing but a head asks if she can curl up and turn into an egg. Curling up in a giant bird's nest and pretending to be an egg is how you return to the Undead Asylum in Dark Souls 1.
  • King's Field
    • The Recurring Element, Moonlight Sword, the Infinity +1 Sword crafted by Guyra and reappeared throughout games created by FromSoftware, appears as Ludwig's signature weapon.
    • There are two small islands on either side of the broken stone bridge to Cainhurst. One of them resembles a scale version of the Island of Melanat from King's Field II.
  • The entire plot plays out like one giant Lovecraft novel, with similar themes and entities to boot. Specifically, it's an homage to his Dream Cycle stories, which feature an alternate dimension that can be accessed via sleep and intersects with our world at points. It is also the home of some of Lovecraft's eldritch abominations, most notably Nyarlathotep.
    • A great deal of the story can be attributed to Lovecraft's works: Yharnam is, essentially, Innsmouth, but with beastmen instead of fishmen; Byrgenwyrth College is Miskatonic University, but without the voice of reason; the Amygdala enemies are entities similar to the invisible spawn of Yog-Sothoth from The Dunwich Horror; and the Pthumerians, the race that came before mankind, are like The Great Race of Yith, minus the bizarre non-human anatomy. Oh, and The One Reborn? That could easily have come out of Reanimator.
    • The Fishing Hamlet in the Old Hunters DLC is a shout-out to The Shadow Over Innsmouth, complete with malformed Deep One-like fish monsters. At least for the first third up to the lighthouse, as fans have attributed the last two-thirds to have being influenced by the works of Junji Ito: from the lighthouse to the beach appears to have been influenced by Uzumaki, with the beach containing Kos being influenced by The Thing That Drifted Ashore.
  • The lantern-bearing groundskeepers in the Cathedral Ward cemetery are near-identical in design to the gravediggers from the Castlevania series — in both hooded and hatted varieties. Additionally, the eyes that cover their lanterns beginning with 15 insight are a reference to the "Lantern of Insight" card from Magic: The Gathering — which Hidetaka Miyazaki is a fan of.
    • Speaking of which, the entire Cainhurst Castle area is an obvious homage to the series too: a huge, isolated castle in the middle of a lake in a mountainous region, haunted by all manner of classic horror creatures, from ghosts to sentient gargoyles to zombified servitude, culminating in a very tough boss fight against a skeleton wielding a scythe and his perpetually spawning flurry of pointy weapons which must be carefully dodged. Further, Cainhurst contains almost every enemy weak to the unmentioned righteous damage type. The first available weapon with righteous damage? The Threaded Cane, which transforms into a whip.
  • The final fight with Gehrman is very similar to the final boss fight with The Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (such as the fight being in a field of white flowers, fighting your tragic mentor in a final duel to the death).
  • The entire game is extremely similar in theme, tone, and visuals (down to the environment, the monster design, and the sword-and-pistol-wielding masked hero in a tricorn and longcoat) to Guy Davis' graphic novel The Marquis, published 15 years earlier◊.
  • The shape of the Whirligig Saw's mace head in normal mode has been likened to Bramd from Demon's Souls.
  • Kos and Oden are the names of two gods from Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories.
  • The visual design was arguably influenced by Angel's Egg, including the underwater Yharnam as seen from the fishing hamlet.
  • The currency being called “echoes” might be one to Fallen London, which is also a Lovecraftian story set in a gothic fantasy version of Victorian London. The Caryll Runes also bear many similarities to The Correspondence.
• Shown Their Work: Ever wonder why the moon is so ridiculously big? It's a reference to an old Italian saying, "La Luna del Cacciatore", which translates to "The Hunter's Moon".
• Schrödinger's Butterfly: The vague nature of the narrative combined with dreams being alternate dimensions and the general presence of madness, liars, hallucinations and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know at every corner means it's difficult to take anything you see in the game at face value.
• Silver Bullet: Or rather, quicksilver (i.e. mercury) bullets infused with blood are a staple in a Hunter's arsenal.
• Silver Has Mystic Powers: Many of the Healing Church's weapons are forged from silver and deal Arcane damage. Many of them also have a hidden "Righteous" damage-type modifier that deal bonus damage against the enemies of the Healing Church, primarily the enemy-types found in Cainhurst Castle.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Hunter's Blunderbuss is one of the two options for your starter firearm, and even if you never upgrade it, it remains a reliable standby for the whole game. The other option, the Hunter's Pistol, has a slightly quicker draw and does more damage per shot, as do most other firearms you can find, but unless you're going for a very specific build you're not using your gun for its damage output anyway. The Blunderbuss's wide spread makes it ideal for parrying enemies that might dodge a single-shot weapon and opening them up for a visceral attack.
• Sinister Scythe:
  • Martyr Logarius wields a staff adorned with a sickle blade that glows red. He mainly uses it to conjure dark magic, but is not above trying to slash you with it, in addition to wielding a sword in his left hand.
  • Gehrman, the First Hunter, carries a large scythe on his back, and uses it in conjunction with both a blunderbuss and a pistol during the Final Boss battle.
• Sins of Our Fathers: The central theme of the Old Hunters dlc. The Byrgenwerth scholars once found a fishing hamlet where the villagers worshipped the Great One Kos (though some say Kosm). To sate their thirst for knowledge, the scholars murdered and violated the villagers, and may even have killed Kos and her unborn child, though it's just as likely that she was already dead. The villagers implored Kos to give them revenge, and Kos obliged, cursing the scholars and their metaphorical descendants, the Hunters, with a blood thirst that would eventually trap them in the Hunter's Nightmare, an afterlife where they would be lost in their bloodlust forever.
• Small, Secluded World: The Hunter's Dream, a cozy little cottage located in a separate dream world that serves as your Player Headquarters.
• Snakes Are Sinister: The deeper parts of the Forbidden Woods are plagued with venomous snake monsters. Most of them show up as swarms of multi-headed serpents that appear to be tangled up in a ball, but they also have the ability to parasitically infect others, as demonstrated by the hunter mobs they burst out and take control of. As well as to the Shadows of Yharnam, who summon bigger snakes out of the ground.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Notably averted. Although there are many different weapons and armors to collect, they are not necessarily upgrades, instead providing different trade-offs^note Although there are some intentionally bad "joke" armor pieces. It's fully viable to play through the entire game with the weapons and armor found at the beginning.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Some boss leitmotifs fall under this. "Lullaby for Mergo" is a childish, soothing jingle that happens to play when fighting one of the darkest and most unnerving bosses in the game. It's not helped by the boss' disturbing introduction, much less the accompanying baby wails.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • For Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Like those two titles, Bloodborne is an Action RPG with horror elements. Similarly, the game is directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, who also directed Demon's Souls and the first Dark Souls.
  • More than a few fans have also noted how the game's Victorian Era-like setting reminds them of Nightmare Creatures.
  • Some fans consider the game a 3D Castlevania game done right when compared to Konami's own varying track record of 3D Castlevania titles.
    • This comparison is further cemented when players reach Forsaken Cainhurst Castle, which is a dead-ringer for Dracula's Castle.
• Star Power: How "A Call Beyond" works. It creates small exploding stars as a Projectile Spell.
• Start X to Stop X:
  • Laurence, the Byrgenwerth Heretic, may have undertaken one of the most ill-advised examples of this trope in history. Scattered bits of lore and notes from the Lecture Hall suggest that, as Yharnam fell apart under the blood curse and the Great Ones' presence, he attempted to purge the Great Ones and exterminate the beasts by summoning another Great One — namely, the Moon Presence, which created the Hunt and the Dream to give humans a fighting chance against the beasts, but also sealed Yharnam in an endless nightmare realm until the job was done. Yet, it actually does seem to work. If the player decides to submit their life at the end of the game, then the Dream burns, the nightmare breaks, the Scourge is stopped, and all the corporeal Great Ones and their acolytes are slain by the Hunter, allowing them to leave the city peacefully.
  • This is pretty much what the first three quarters of the game consist of you doing. In order to stop Mensis' Ritual once and for all and reach the infant Great One that's responsible for the horrors in Yharnam, you have to venture into Byrgenwerth and eliminate the one thing preventing the ritual from seeing completion, Rom the Vacuous Spider, and allow the Nightmare to fully take hold of the city.
• Stealth Pun: The Old Hunters added two new dog types. One of these are German Shepherds covered in blood. They're bloodhounds!
• Story Breadcrumbs: In grand Souls tradition, there is a story, but you will need to hunt high and low for its bits and pieces... or go read a wiki.
• Summon Magic: The Executioner's Gloves summon ghosts to attack the enemy as a Projectile Spell. And the Augur of Ebrietas is used to (partially) summon a Great One to kill your enemies.
• Superhuman Transfusion: All Hunters first receive a blood transfusion, which gives them access to the Hunter's Dream, visceral attacks, and the ability boost their attributes with Blood Echoes, as well as generally superhuman strength, toughness, and speed... and though there's a risk of the Hunter losing themselves to madness and turning into a beast, at least two Hunters (Eileen the Crow and Djura) have been able to leave the Hunter's Dream behind and remain sane despite being fairly old.
• Survival Horror: Has some elements. You gain powerful melee attacks very quickly, and you can and will slaughter hordes of enemies throughout most levels, but it’s just as easy to end up on the wrong end and get killed or burn through your limited (though renewable) healing items in the process. It’s sometimes wiser to sprint past crowds of opponents than to engage them.
• Swipe Your Blade Off: When the Chikage is transformed, the blade becomes coated in thick blood. The animation for transforming it back has the Hunter do this (it can even be comboed into an attack!), instantly cleaning the blade.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: The more complex Trick Weapons switch between two completely different armaments, such as a cane that loosens its inner mechanisms to unleash a serrated whip, a sword that props a large block of stone onto the blade to become a greathammer, or a curved sword that somehow turns into a bow.
• Sword and Gun: The mixture of melee combat and gunplay is to make the gameplay much more aggressive. The character is even featured in the cover using a Saw Cleaver in one hand and a blunderbuss in the other.
• Take That, Audience!:
  • The description of the shield subtly bashes players who were expecting to rely on them the same way they used to in From Software's previous games.
  "Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity."
  • In the choice of the Villagers who hide behind wooden shields, the shields can be staggered through in a single hit, leaving them wide open to attack, and even if they shield bash you, it does almost no damage.
  • The game takes the piss out of people who spam-abused dodge-rolling in previous titles by way of the Merciless Watchers; grossly overweight mace wielding ogres in the Chalice Dungeon, naked except for boots that somersault across the floor to get in swinging range of you. This variant has quickly become a laughingstock of a mob; if you pop in an old Souls game and PvP one of the overwhelmingly common heavy armor builds that curls up like an armadillo to backpedal out of a whiffed attack, so will they.
• The Theocracy: Yharnam appears to be completely under the control of the Healing Church.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Gaining too much Insight can cause some weird things to happen. The whole game is possibly an even deeper extension of this, with the world acting as a mass shared lucid dream that the player traverses through.
• Throwing the Distraction: The player is given two different items to distract their enemies, the Pebble and the Pungent Blood Cocktail. The Pungent Blood Cocktail is even able to distract a few bosses, specifically the Blood-starved Beast and the two different Darkbeasts.
• Thunderbolt Iron: A less supernatural and more cosmic/natural example in stories; the Blade of Mercy and the Burial Blade are forged from siderite, a meteoric iron alloy which becomes magnetized after it has been heated. For the Blade of Mercy, the magnetic field is what keeps the twin blades together, as the wielder must force the blades apart in order to use the transformed state. For the Burial Blade, the magnetic field helps keep the scimitar-like blade attached to the folding scythe snath. Keeping with the mythical "magic" properties associated with thunderbolt iron, both weapons cause both regular physical damage and arcane damage.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Implied to be what's going on in the lower Chalice Dungeons by way of Alternate Universe (similar to the alternate worlds in Dark Souls), due to Great One interference. Supposedly the Chalice Dungeons are just sealed ruins of civilizations from thousands of years ago placed firmly in our world; that sort of works for the upper ones, assuming the zombified Pthumerians simply don't require food, but it looks less likely the deeper you go. Firearms still work long after they would have broken down from lack of maintenance; early-stage Beast Patients show up rather than being entirely replaced with Scourge Beasts, which should have happened over thousands of years; Celestial Children in their larval forms remained ungrown. This is made more or less explicit by the final two dungeons, Isz Gravestone and Great Pthumeru Ihyll. The former has Ebrietas as the end boss despite you having already killed her present self in the main game, while the latter ends with a fight against Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen, fully in the flesh rather than as a wraith (the state you find her in the main game). She's visibly pregnant with Mergo, who can also be dead in the main game at this point and was supposed to have been stillborn long before the game began; heavily implying you've traveled to an Alternate Universe of the past, soon after Odeon impregnated the queen.
• Title Drop:
  "We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open... Fear the old blood."

  — Master Willem
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: If you've consumed at least three Umbilical Cords, whatever power they bestow upon you forces the Moon Presence to back off after attempting to embrace you. This also initiates the True Final Boss fight.
• Torches and Pitchforks: The chosen weapons of many enemy types, who also seem to be prone of shambling around in large mobs until they notice the player.
• Tortured Monster: All Beasts, given that they're just ordinary humans who were afflicted with a horrific condition that they very much never asked for. Particularly notable are Gascoigne and Ludwig, since you can catch a glimse of their lost humanity. The Afflicted Beggar lashes out at the player and Hunters in general for essentially being murderers of the ill, but whether or not his condition excuses his particularly heinous actions is up for debate.
• Touched By Great Ones: Most of the powers in the game are the result of contacting the Great Ones and asking them to pretty please make you stronger. They're generally nice enough to do so, though you might not like the side effects.
  • Blood Ministration itself is derived somehow from Formless Odeon, and may be literally his blood.
  • The Augur of Ebrietas works by opening a small portal in front of the Great One in question, allowing her to reach through and whack your opponent with her tentacles.
  • According to Micolash, Rom became a Great One by being Touched by Kos.
  • The Hunter's Dream and everything associated with it (your Resurrective Immortality, the Messengers' help, the Doll leveling you up, fast travel, weapon upgrades, et cetera) is the result of a contract with the Great One known as the Moon Presence.
  • When Gherman fights you, his second phase involves calling on the Moon Presence to allow him to teleport.
  • The inhabitants of the Fishing Village owe their magical powers and fishlike forms to Kos, who they worshipped.
• Transformation Discretion Shot: When the player locates Vicar Amelia one of the game's bosses, she is shown kneeling in front of an alter praying while clutching a medallion in her hands. The camera then cuts to her shadow as Amelia transforms into a wolf-like beast with deer antlers, spraying blood onto a nearby statue as she does so.
• Transformation Is a Free Action: Zig-Zagged Trope, as numerous bosses and enemies have different AI routines based on how much damage they've taken, often having them perform some action to initiate that change. In some cases, such as the Snatchers or Logarius, cannot be stopped from buffing but are entirely vulnerable through the process. Others still, such as Maria end their buffing with devastating AOE attacks to punish greedy players, while Ludwig gets an actual cutscene played out.
• True Final Boss: After consuming at least three Umbilical Cords and defeating Gehrman in the "Refuse" route, the player is treated with an additional fight against the Moon Presence, as well as a third possible ending upon defeating it.
• Twisted Eucharist: The Healing Church was created with the intent of using the Old Blood found in the Pthumerian ruins, be it to help the general populace, seek to evolve mankind or gain power. The religion revolves around consuming and exchanging blood, so communion is brought up a lot.

Tropes U-Z

• Unishment: It's actually worth getting killed by Kidnappers when they first appear. True, you lose your Echoes, but you get dropped off at the Hypogian Gaol. While most of the city is inaccessible at that point in the game, there's still plenty to gain: a useful Caryl Rune, a fancy new Tonitrus, a set of armor with some of the highest defense in the game, and a boss fight against Darkbeast Paarl. Even escaping the Gaol is laughably easy: there's a lantern at the top of some stairs that can be accessed without fighting a single enemy if you take the right path. As for the Blood Echoes you lost, the enemies of the Gaol are high-leveled, yet slow and easy to parry if you get the timing down, meaning you'll get the Echoes back and then some. To make matters better, there are three of them a stone's throw away from the aforementioned lantern, all-in-all making it a fantastic place to farm early-game.
• Universal Ammunition: Quicksilver Bullets are used for all of your firearms. At first it can be justified in that the bullets are made of liquid metal and can change shape to fit the gun, until you see they also can be used with a flamethrower, a cannon that shoots explosive cannonballs, or magical tools that very much aren't guns.
• The Unreveal: You're never told how you received the summons from Cainhurst, who gave it to you, or why it was sent to you in the first place. Investigating the castle turns up nothing, and even Queen Annalise doesn't seem like she was expecting you either.
• Vampiric Werewolf: Paleblood, AKA "The Beastly Scourge" is an illness that mimics both vampirism (people with the disease can drink blood to get high and heal themselves) and lycanthropy (infectees slowly mutate into dog/human hybrids). It's neither one nor the other, but the method by which the Old Ones are attempting to reproduce, using humans to gestate their child. Eldritch features, such as blood the color of moonlight (hence the name), decay into a malformed skeleton without actually dying at any point in the process, Involuntary Shapeshifting when blood-starved, gigantism, and even stranger mutations appear once the illness progresses to its later stages.
• Vagina Dentata: Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos. Her head looks like a massive vagina with writhing tentacle-like teeth. Also, when she hovers, her lower body begins to resemble something else...
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Nightmare of Mensis, a twisted dream world built by the School of Mensis to serve as an incubator for the newborn Great One Mergo. It's the last area you pass through in the main story of the game and contains some of the toughest enemies and setpieces the game can throw at you, but once you're done with it the actual final confrontation occurs in the Hunter's Dream, your Player Headquarters.
• Vice City: As you explore Yharnam, it becomes ever more clear that the Healing Church isn't so much a religion as a drug cartel in fancy clothes, with the Old Blood as their drug of choice. They're willing to do pretty much anything to keep Yharnam dependent on the Blood Ministration they produce, including blaming outsiders for the Beast Plague that's caused by Old Blood abuse. The Healing Thirst comic also reveals that they caused the Ashen Blood plague in Old Yharnam to get more people to take Blood Ministration. These efforts have succeeded so well that the Healing Church is in complete control of Yharnam, and blood is delivered to houses like milk.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • If he is made non-hostile, Retired Hunter Djura tells the player that he has been watching over the beasts in the burnt-out district of Old Yharnam, and asks the player to leave them be. If the player agrees, he gives them his badge and teaches them a gesture out of gratitude. However, this process is extremely easy to miss, as it requires approaching him from behind and never being seen until you speak to him. This is only doable by going through the Graveyard of the Darkbeast - either via Yahar'Gul or being defeated by a Snatcher and making your way through the high-level Hypogean Gaol - then taking the one-way route into Old Yharnam, instead of the traditional path in from the Cathedral Ward.
  • The Doll is given life by being loved and cared about. If you go into a certain optional area, you can obtain an item to give her as a gift. If you do so, she cries with joy, despite that being physically impossible. The stone itself is an item that gives a persistent Regenerating Health effect.
  • You have the option to play the music box to make Mergo laugh instead of crying.
  • In The Old Hunters, you have the option to talk to Ludwig after the fight if you're dressed in Church garb. He'll ask you if his Church hunters became the honorable spartans he trained them to be. You can choose to tell him that they did become noble warriors defending Yharnam, allowing Ludwig to rest with a sigh of relief that his efforts and sacrifices weren't in vain. Telling him the truth will instead make him lose what little sanity he has left and die miserable and Laughing Mad.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • The player can also choose to simply kill Djura and the beasts he protects, up to and including setting fire to them from the rafters.
  • After you've discovered the imposter Iosefka and what she's done, if you stay, you'll trigger a fight. However... if you leave, she won't attack and you can continue to send more people to her clinic.
  • The player can also attack and kill several friendly NPCs that have done them absolutely no wrong, such as the Oedon Chapel Dweller, for the sake of Item Farming. Even worse, it's possible to attack and kill the Doll, despite all that she's done for the player, and unlike the Chapel Dweller you don't even have the excuse of getting an item out of it. You Bastard!. (Luckily, it isn't permanent.)
  • You can put Eileen out of her misery at the end of her quest line before you take on the warrior who nearly killed her. Alternatively, you can simply take up her mantle and allow her to retire in relative peace.
  • When Gilbert turns into a Beast, he fears the Torch just like the rest of the Old Yharnam Beast Patients; you can bring out the Torch, torture him with fear, and burn him to death with torch fire.
  • Talking to the young girl in Yharnam will reward you with the music box to help stop her father. If you tell her the truth by handing her the brooch, she will eventually wander into the sewers and be killed by a Maneater Boar (you can find the Red Messenger Ribbon on the corpse of the beast, implying it ate her). You can also either admit you never found it or lie if you did and just pretend you didn't. You can then try to send her to the Chapel, which will have the same result. You can then run into her sister later in the game (who is in the same home), and she will ask for help finding her young sister. You can give the Older Sister the ribbon, and the older sister will eventually commit suicide by jumping (you can find the White Messenger Ribbon on her corpse, which is implied to be the bloodied ribbon cleaned up). You can also send the younger girl to Iosefka's Clinic, where she will be mutated into a Celestial Emissary, and can be killed for a unique rune. Depending on whether you know the truth of Iosefka's Clinic or not, you can either send her there out of ignorance or deliberate malice/greed. You also need to have her die to the Boar twice if you want both the Red Messenger and White Messenger ribbons (you lose the red from your inventory to get the white), meaning you may get her killed by accident the first time, but you have to do it purposefully the second time.
  • In the Old Hunters DLC, there are several enemies that won't attack you at all in the starting area. They'll keep backing away, blocking their heads with their arms. You can kill them effortlessly for a small amount of runes.
• Video Game Demake: There's a PS1 Demake that, appropriate to the comparisons, looks quite a bit like Nightmare Creatures.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind:
  • Since the NPC Hunters like Djura, the Bloody Crow, and Yurie are created the same way as the PC Hunter, complete with actual stats, they don't get any noticeably (if any) stronger on subsequent runs of the game.
  • The Chalice Dungeons don't scale either, surprisingly enough. It's not surprising to one-hit-kill the bosses of the earlier ones if you're near the end of the game.
• The Voice: Besides a handful of people that you can send to a safe haven, most of the characters you speak to will remain behind closed windows and locked doors.
• Voluntary Shapeshifter: The Old Hunters DLC introduces two Covenant Runes that actually allow the Hunter to change their appearance when equipped, mostly limited to their head and hands.
  • Beast's Embrace gives the player furry Beast Man qualities, which enhances their mobility and gives them a new moveset for the Beast Claw weapon.
  • Milkweed turns the player into a Celestial Kin form that looks like a blue luminescent Mushroom Man. The Kos Parasite moveset becomes much more powerful in this form, allowing the player to use Combat Tentacles.
• Waiting Skeleton: The entrance to the Forbidden Woods is guarded by an apprentice of Provost Wilhelm, who is waiting for someone who knows the password to let them through. When you finally obtain the password, and the doors open, you find the apprentice's skeletal remains behind them — apparently, he died while waiting to fulfill Provost Wilhelm's last orders, and you have been (apparently) talking to his ghost.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Father Gascoigne, the first mandatory boss, is one of the game's most infamous difficulty spikes. Until this point you've mostly been fighting slow and relatively weak Huntsmen, but Gascoigne combines the damage output of Scourge Beasts with speed and agility similar to your own. Even worse, the fight takes place in a graveyard, meaning it's full of obstacles that can cause you to accidentally corner yourself. His third phase transforms him into a hyperaggressive Lightning Bruiser that can easily kill you in one combo. It's possible to find a music box that will cause him to stand still for a bit, but playing it also forces you to stand still. The fight forces the player to learn how to act quickly, use terrain to their advantage, and parry.
• Was Once a Man: Nearly all the monsters in Yharnam were once human, until they started transforming into beasts.
  • The player themselves, in the Childhood's Beginning ending, as they become a new Great One.
• Weak, but Skilled: The Hunter of Hunters are known for this. Their special covenant rune does jack diddly squat for damage boosts or defense, but it improves their stamina regeneration in a game where stamina is crucial for survival. A Hunter using this rune can attack and dodge more often, and that's where skill matters more.
  • The Blade of Mercy is incredibly ineffective against large hordes of enemies because of it was meant to Hunt blood-addled Hunters one on one. However, it is still capable of doing so, albeit very difficultly.
• Weird Moon: The moon is never obscured by the clouds; in fact, the moon is always in front of the clouds. By the end of the game, it becomes apparent that the "moon" (or at least the moon in Yharnam) is merely the physical representation of the thusly named Moon Presence throughout most of Yharnam's dream, up until the end (depending on the player's choice) where it will appear in its "real" form.
• Wham Episode: Byrgenwerth College. This is where you begin to realize that something more otherworldly and sinister than just a simple plague is at work here. And once Rom the Vacuous Spider is slain, the moon turns red and everything goes From Bad to Worse as the Cosmic Horror Story goes full tilt.
• Wham Shot: Rom the Vacuous Spider. Before this point, all of the creatures and locations are at least somewhat in the vein of gothic horror: witches, werewolves, zombies, and other such things. But then you drop into the Moonside Lake and see this... thing. From there, the situation only gets worse: once you beat her, descend into the newly opened Yahar'gul, and from there see dozens of Amygdalas crawling over the city like maggots on a rotted corpse. This is when you realize that what you have been playing in is in fact a Cosmic Horror Story.
  • Taking the back door into Iosefka's Clinic and then seeing Celestial Emissaries lingering about, including a dead one strapped to an operating table, followed by Iosefka telling you to leave at once and possibly attempting to kill you. It hits doubly hard if you've been sending all the civilians you find there, as you realize you're partially responsible for what's happened here.
  • Another Wham Shot can occur much earlier (especially once night has fallen) if the player takes a moment to really examine their surroundings. Have you noticed how the moon is always bright and clear, even in the cloudier areas? That's because the moon is IN FRONT of the clouds.
  • And another as the player is traversing the Forbidden Woods. While at first it's been sort of like a backwoods horror scenario, starting with violent mobs and ending with snake parasites hiding inside people's bodies, eventually players can come across Celestial Emissaries, which are completely out of place and out of left field with everything you've seen in the game so far, an indication that this isn't your average Gothic horror story.
  • If you take a certain path in the Cathedral Ward, you'll come across a distinctive hill blooming with white flowers, which should seem strangely familiar: it's identical to the Hunter's Dream. If you investigate further, you'll find an old abandoned workshop that's identical to the one where Gehrman is found—and there's a life-sized China doll sitting on a table who looks exactly like the Plain Doll. While it's never explicitly explained why this is, it's strongly implied that this is the Workshop where Gehrman used to work before he became the first Hunter, and that the appearance of the Hunter's Dream is modeled on it.
  • In The Old Hunters DLC, you catch an ominous sight from the lighthouse lantern: the corpse of a massive oceanic creature splayed out on the beach. Approaching it at the end of the area reveals that it is the corpse of Kos, the fishing hamlet's patron deity. The Final Boss, Orphan of Kos, emerges from her body shortly after, revealing that unlike any other Great One, she actually successfully conceived a child. And though it's easy to miss, further examination of her body reveals that, unlike the other Great Ones, she was achingly beautiful. Story Breadcrumbs confirm that the Nightmare was formed from the left-behind grudges of Kos, her child, and their followers, after the Byrgenwerth scholars dissected every last one of them. Suddenly, the Nightmare seems significantly more justified, even if it went on to ruin many other innocent lives.
• Where It All Began: Both the final boss and true final boss are fought in the flower field in the Hunter's Dream.
• Where the Hell Is Yharnam?: The game's setting is a mishmash of various European locales and eras, with Romania, Victorian England and pre-industrial Prague being particularly prominent sources of inspiration for Yharnam's architechture and technology. It cannot truly be pinned down to a single real world location, and more extremely, the Alien Sky and Weird Moon makes it hard to say with certainty that it takes places on our Earth at all.
• Wight in a Wedding Dress: Yharnam, the Pthumerian Queen wears a white wedding dress, complete with veil. It doesn't stay white for very long, though...
• Wolfpack Boss: The Shadows of Yharnam are three ringwraith-like creatures who get progressively more difficult for each one of them killed.
• Worst Aid: The primary way you heal is with the Triangle button, in which you quickly jab a giant syringe of Yharnam Blood into your right thigh.
• Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": In the backstory, the inhabitants of Castle Cainhurst were exterminated by the Executioners, an army of Healing Church fanatics led by Martyr Logarius. What makes it this trope is that the Vilebloods are consistently demonized by the last surviving Executioner as evil and corrupt heretics deserving of their fate. Who conveniently doesn't seem to realize or care about the many sins of the Healing Church.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Although there is debate amongst others in regard to this situation, The Hunter is nevertheless forced to contend with the Wet Nurse of the child of a Great One (both the Wet Nurse and Child are implied to be connected to one another) in order to end the Hunt. Although if it helps, it's unclear if the child, named Mergo is truly alive or if the source of the Nightmare is something else that USED to be Mergo.
  • The Healing Church egregiously experimented on innocent orphans in the Upper Cathedral Ward, turning them into grotesque, slug-like beings in their attempts to gain the power of the Great Ones.
• Wretched Hive: Yharnam. Forget the werewolves everywhere, there's also the citizenry who attack all Outsiders (i.e. anyone still sane), the Healing Church encouraging the spread of the Beast Plague through Blood Ministration so they can use the populace as guinea pigs, the School of Mensis kidnapping people and presumably turning them into monstrosities like The One Reborn, and to top it all off the city is apparently cursed for the actions of the Healing Church's founders against the Fishing Hamlet.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Some of the most powerful Great Ones (like Oedon and Kos, or some say Kosm) transcended physical form and merely exist as concepts. In Oedon's case, it's "Blood and Voice".
  • It's averted in the case of Kos. You find her corpse washed up on a beach in the Old Hunters DLC, and she resembles a nudibranch with human arms and a human face.
• You Kill It, You Bought It:
  • Choosing Refuse at the end forces you to fight and kill Gehrman, at which point the Moon Presence appears and makes you take Gehrman's place as the keeper, sitting on his wheelchair waiting for the Hunt to begin again.
  • The third ending, which requires more work, has you killing the Moon Presence, with your character being reborn as a Great One and leading the Dream Realm to its next childhood.
• Your Head Asplode: Effectively what the Frenzy status ailment does to you; if the frenzy bar is filled completely, you lose a huge chunk of your health along with a huge burst of blood from your face. Unlike poison, its meter continues to rise a bit even after you're away from what's causing it, and the higher your Insight, the more vulnerable you are. The Nightmare of Mensis has something even nastier in a chamber that drives you mad and damages you just from seeing it thousands of meters away.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The dreams and nightmares of the Great Ones are "just" that, but as they are dreamt by beings that are physical and meta-physical gods, these areas and their inhabitants are as tangible as anything else.
• Zerg Rush:
  • The Celestial Emissary fight consists of several alien-like monsters bum-rushing you, with none of them lasting longer than two or three hits. Only one of them is the actual boss, and when you've depleted half of its health, it will supersize and become a force of its own.
  • The go-to strategy of the Hunter Mob enemy and those horrible, horrible dogs.