YMMV / BloodRayne

Franchise-wide:

• Complete Monster: See here.

The games:

• Anti-Climax Boss: Of a fashion. Shortly before entering boss battle with them, you can see them slaughtering an entire horde of Feral Vampires — who already proved themselves as deadly adversaries even when fighting solo — seemingly without breaking a sweat. This immediately sets up Krieger twins as a serious threat, but in reality, they are surprisingly easy to beat. Although there are two of them, they don't cooperate at all and most of the time, they just run around the pillars and occasionally throw shurikens at you — which will surely miss if you merely keep moving. Somewhat justified, since Krieger twins seem more interested in flirting with Rayne, rather than actually fighting her.
• Breather Boss: The Krieger twins are a relatively simply boss fight that you encounter just immediately before the big final battle with Wulf and Beliar.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Rayne is seen as a gaming sex symbol of the 2000s.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The way to beat almost all of the bosses in the first game is to build up your blood meter by hitting them, then activate blood rage and curbstomp them into bloody chunks. A couple of the bosses, namely Mauler and Wulf, are invincible against anything except blood rage. Blood Rayne 2 is almost exactly the same, except you build up the blood meter by executing minions instead of just whacking at the boss.
• Demonic Spiders: Ephemera's sword-wielding female mooks. They can electrify their swords for extra damage, which also causes attempts to harpoon them to damage you. You can't feed on them from the front because they'll block you, throw you to the ground, and smack you. Even without electrifying their swords they hit like a truck. The best way to attack them is to get behind them, but they're also fast enough to make that a tall order.
• Difficulty Spike: In the second game, the level directly after The Shroud is released, the difficulty jumps up several notches, the most common enemy is the above mentioned Demonic Spiders, meaning you can't simply circle or kick to get a drink and are extremely difficult to harpoon, and gives you miniboss after miniboss, with little breaks between to heal. Basically, just getting past the zoo section of the park is an exercise in frustration.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Butcheress from the first game is one of the most popular characters, to the point they brought her back as the antagonist in one of the comics.
  • Ferril seems to be the most popular of The Cult of Kagan, for obvious reasons.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The first game's implementation of the Blood Rage mechanic makes Rayne virtually unstoppable. Time slows down, Rayne speeds up, and she inflicts so much damage in such a short amount of time that almost any non-boss enemy will be instantly killed or maimed, and most bosses will have their health drained very quickly. The Bloodlust gauge is also refilled by any melee attack, making it easy to replenish.
  • Use your Super-Reflexes to get behind specially-uniformed officers (who otherwise resist frontal bite attempts). Then suck them dry—this can be much quicker than slashing or shooting them while healing you to boot.
  • The Final Boss's lair in the sequel contains a fountain filled with blood which can replenish both Rayne's health and blood meters when the player stands in it. Standing in the pool and using Rayne's time stopping ability makes this the easiest fight in the game.
  • Freeze Time in II is like Dilated Perception on overdrive: Rayne moves at normal speed, while every enemy on screen is virtually frozen in place. They still move, but incredibly slowly. Oh yeah, this even affects bosses, including Kagan himself.
• Good Bad Bugs: There's a cheat code in BloodRayne 2 that opens up the game's debug menu. This allows you to do things like turn off the bump mapping or screw around with the graphics engine. If you're interested in game design at all, it's actually pretty neat.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The rail-grinding sections in the 2nd game are clearly based on those from the Sonic the Hedgehog games, except for the parts where you can use guns or blades against enemies while grinding. The Sonic games wouldn't see anything like that until the following year.
  • In the first game, in the Argentina level, an Easter Egg Shout-Out to Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark is featured in a form of the Ark of the Covenant in a crate in a secret room. Spielberg himself would later return the favor by having Rayne featured subtlety as an avatar in his movie Ready Player One. As shown in this image, just as the final battle is starting and all the players are running into battle, she can be seen in the shot with Tracer, standing very close to Lara Croft on the far left side of the screen with one of her blades held in the air and shouting “First to the key” with the others. Her outfit and bright red hair could be seen for a split second.
• Jerkass Woobie: Rayne herself. She's a vicious, remorseless assassin who takes pleasure in butchering her enemies and doesn't seem to bother much with social niceties, but she had her entire family killed by Kagan in addition to having a thirst for blood she has no say in or, from any appearances, any chance in curing.
• Les Yay:
  • Rayne and Mynce.
  • Rayne's conversation with the Butcheress is pretty suggestive.
  • Rayne feeding on female minions in the second game.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Due to Surprise Difficulty in Betrayal, many complain about the game being a Nintendo Hard platformer and put it down from frustration. It also doesn't help that the third-person shooter games aren't very hard games either. The Fresh Bites re-release of Betrayal would go on to implement a new difficulty mode to address the complaints of the original game's difficulty.
• Magnificent Bitch: Rayne herself started as another child of Kagan's, barely escaping the massacre of her family at a young age. Recruited into the Brimstone Society and becoming their top field agent, Rayne made a career out of facing monsters and demons leagues above her abilities and ultimately coming out on top, often outsmarting them when beaten down. Keeping many at arms length with a snarky attitude, and showing few her vulnerabilities, when Kagan was seemingly killed, Rayne settles on killing her wicked half-siblings to destroy his legacy. With many underestimating her, Rayne uncovers a Brimstone conspiracy, outsmarts god-like beings, secretly countered their attempts to cure her, and dismantled the conspiracy from within. When Kagan returns and causes a vampire apocalypse to break out, Rayne finishes off the last of her siblings, before killing Kagan himself. Becoming a fugitive, Rayne takes Kagan's kingdom for herself, hoping to use her new power to undo what he's done and protect the people living under her, cementing her brilliance and audacity in her appearances throughout the franchise.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Bloodrayne was originally a spinoff of Nocturne (1999), a Resident Evil-style third person survival horror game for the PC.
• Narm: This scene from the first game, after Rayne witnesses a Daemite possessing a Nazi officer:
  Rayne: "Very attractive."
  Officer: "I'll wear you like lederhosen!"
  Rayne: "Whatever you are, you just said the wrong words."
• Narm Charm: The Mooks in the final act of Blood Rayne 2 (Kagan's Tower) talk like Jersey Shore rejects and have ridiculously silly dialogue, which can make them seem wildly out of place given the otherwise horror-filled setting.
• Retroactive Recognition: BloodRayne 2 was Troy Baker's second video game role. The guttural voice he uses for Kagan makes it hard to spot him, but Severin is much closer to one of his "standard" voices, bar the British accent.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Any point in 2 where you have to use the harpoon to throw enemies into a specific stage-hazard, as 90% of the time the enemies never land where you want them to (assuming they actually go flying in the first place, instead of just kinda falling 2 ft. away from where they originally where or getting caught on another part of the stage), and other enemies will constantly be attacking you, causing you to lose your hold on the one that you harpooned (and you can't use the Freeze Enemies code to prevent them from attacking you, as mooks will never be in the right position for you to throw into a hazard otherwise, and you'll eventually run out as no more will respawn). And if there's an instance where multiple hazards have to be activated at a time, then good luck trying to activate one before the enemy that's impaled on another eventually fades away.
• Squick: When Rayne defeats Slezz, she has to crawl inside her blown-open belly to rip her heart out. She's understandably disgusted.
  Rayne: I think I need a minute alone.
• That One Boss: The Final Boss battle against Wulf and Beliar is also the hardest. Beliar must be killed within a certain amount of time, or he will grow too large to defeat and instantly kill Rayne via cutscene, and is immune to melee attacks. Wulf, meanwhile, is impervious to bullets, runs at super speed, and has a flame-based attack that can heavily damage Rayne. There are also no lesser enemies in this area to feed upon, meaning that Rayne cannot heal herself during the battle.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Part of the fanbase's reaction to the BloodRayne: Betrayal gameplay trailer, due to Metroidvania design and the animesque style of it. And it's about as hard as the 2D Ninja Gaiden games.
  • Initially BloodRayne: Terminal Cut came with censorship of the Nazi imagery in the game and changed the zombie skin colors to look less human like in the Japanese version of the original game, which lead to some complains about said changes and some modders attempting to undo changes in the PC version. Thankfully these changes were reversed officially with the 1.04 patch.

The films:

• Best Known for the Fanservice: The lesbian and truck sex scenes in The Third Reich are well, pretty damn memorable. Mostly because both come out of nowhere.
• Fight Scene Failure:
  • During the Final Battle, Sebastian swings his sword straight up into the air and a vampire still bothers blocking it rather than just stabbing him.
  • Kagan's "sword fighting" amounts to holding a rapier in front of him and very slowly walking forwards.
  • One vampire on horseback is seen casually twirling his sword several feet from anyone, looking like he doesn't realize the battle started several minutes ago.
  • While training with Sebastian, Rayne repeatedly stabs at him from about three feet too far away to have a chance of hitting anything but his sword.
• Ham and Cheese: Meatloaf is in this film for about 10 minutes. He gloriously hams up the entire thing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This won't be the last time Matt Davis fights vampires.
• Les Yay:
  • There's some in the first movie, between Rayne and some vampire chick she feasts upon, as well as some tension between her and the knife-thrower in the circus at the start.
  • There's also one scene in the third movie where Rayne has sex with a chick in a brothel.
• Narm: So many examples, though special mention goes to Vladimir's death scene in which he's stabbed right through the chest and, thanks to Michael Madsen's Dull Surprise, doesn't give a rat's ass.
  Linkara: My God, man, you're being stabbed! Don't you care?!
• Questionable Casting: Michael Madsen?! Michelle Rodriguez?! Billy Zane?! Meatloaf?! Ben Kingsley?! OK, Ben did it out of Awesome, Dear Boy, but still! And that's just the first film.
• Sequelitis: Not that the first movie was exactly well-received, but the sequels were considered even worse, something few would have believed possible.
• Signature Scene: The scene where Vladimir gets stabbed (and his reaction to it) is cited as a summary of the movie's quality in a nutshell.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • As the Spoony One put in, the gore effects are so bad it's barely even worth the R rating.
  • The end of the first movie treats you to a five-minute montage of butchery with the fakest-looking blood they could find.
• Video Game Movies Suck: Thanks, Uwe Boll.

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