Bloodborne / Tropes A to I

This page covers tropes found in Bloodborne.

Tropes A To I | Tropes J to Z |

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Tropes A

• Abandoned Hospital: Iosefka's Clinic in Central Yharnam and the Research Hall in the Hunter's Nightmare.
• Abnormal Ammo: Regular bullets are useless against beasts, so Hunters have to use specially made ones. "Specially made" meaning the bizarre combination of blood and quicksilver/mercury.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap is an absurd 544, but it's much lower than the caps in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls trilogy. As for what level the game is finished at, the guide recommends you to be between levels 70-80 for the final story bosses, level 90 for the last area of the DLC, with the hardest Chalice Dungeons requiring being level 140+ and be playing in online co-op due to how hard they are supposed to be. The PvP Meta level hovers anywhere from 75 to 120.
• Academy of Evil: The Byrgenwerth College, which gave rise to the Healing Church of Yharnam, and the School of Mensis, which is a heretical offshoot.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Consumable items like Blood Vials, Quicksilver Bullets and Molotov Cocktails become more expensive the farther into the game you get. Luckily, the farther you get into the game, the more Blood Echoes you also get from defeated enemies.
• After the End: The city of Yharnam is already ruined beyond repair by the time the protagonist reaches it at the start of the game, with most of the responsible parties being either dead or worse. And somehow, it only goes downhill from there.
• Aggressive Play Incentive: The game was designed to counter the Soulsborne genre's tendency to rely heavily on defenses while you wait for an opening to strike back. It achieves this by removing shields and most armor altogether, and replacing them with the Rally mechanic, which heals most of the damage the Player Character takes, as long as they inflict enough damage themselves in a short time window after taking a hit.
• Alien Blood:
  • The Rotted Corpses found in the Yharnam aqueduct and elsewhere are filled with green bile instead of blood.
  • More to the point, Kin-type enemies bleed a deep grey, and perhaps most alarmingly, the Plain Doll bleeds pure white.
  • The most extreme and disturbing case, though, is the Old Blood itself, the foundation of Yharnam's blood-oriented culture and the cause of the city's downfall. It itself is an actual alien — the Great One Formless Oedon.
• All Just a Dream: It's repeatedly implied that the events of the game are occurring within a dream world created by the Great Ones, and numerous lore bits indicate that what you are experiencing may not be completely real. Some of the item descriptions and two of the endings, however, indicate that the nightmare is very real.
  • You are told at the beginning, "Whatever happens, you may think it all a bad dream.", before getting your blood transfusion.
  • When killed, Micolash exclaims that he doesn't want to wake up and forget everything he's learned.
  • The description for the Lead Elixir consumable item, which states that the recipe for it is unknown to anyone, but some postulate that it materializes only within the most desperate nightmares.
  • The "Yharnam Sunrise" ending has you die in the Hunter's Dream, only to awake alive back in Yharnam as the sun rises, just like the other Hunters who "no longer dream".
  • This game draws heavily from H.P. Lovecraft, who proposed a number of times in his works that dreams and nightmares were absolutely real. They just take place in alternate dimensions.
• All There in the Manual: All three ending cutscenes are rather esoteric. Their PSN trophy descriptions clear things up a bit, however.
• Always Night: The game begins at dusk and soon enough shifts to nighttime, and remains that way until the end. This is a plot point; the night simply will not end until the Scourge of the Beast or rather, the infant Great One responsible for creating the Nightmare, has been destroyed.
• Ambiguous Syntax: Once you find out what the name of the queen of the fallen Pthumerian civilization is, it potentially changes what a lot of people and notes are talking about all throughout the game. "Yharnam" could refer to either the city or to the person, and it's seldom confirmed which it is whenever the term is brought up.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Due to the nature of the plagues in Yharnam, this can (and in most cases, will) happen to pretty much anyone. It's noted that most of those who are hunting beasts are infected with the sickness themselves. Most of the angry Afflicted Villagers are torch-and-pitchfork mobs who treat you as the monster despite already being pretty monstrous themselves, on top of working together with their more far-gone fellows.
  • It is also a special case of Ironic Death, as most Hunters and members of the Healing Church who fight beasts will usually turn into the most dangerous beasts themselves once they give in to their bloodthirsty urges (see Father Gascoigne and the Cleric Beast).
  • The second ending, Honoring Wishes, has the player kill Gehrman, only to be absorbed by the Moon Presence and turned into the next Watcher of the Hunter's Dream.
  • The third ending, Childhood's Beginning, in which the player kills the Moon Presence and replaces it as a new Great One, to guide humanity into its future.
• Animalistic Abomination:
  • Pretty much all beasts are this by definition, particularly since they are created from the blood of an actual Eldritch Abomination within humans. The Blood-Starved Beasts, Silverbeasts, and the Darkbeasts like Paarl especially stand out because of how absolutely mangled, deformed and/or otherworldly they are.
  • The Nightmare is home to giant snakes that can be directly summoned at will by the Shadows of Yharnam or by anyone carrying the Madaras Whistle Hunter Tool. They're also presumably responsible for the many snake balls found within the Forbidden Forest.
• Animal Motifs: All of the more bestial enemies you fight in the game loosely resemble some kind of actual animal, with werewolves being the standard end result of the Healing Church's use of the Old Blood. Cainhurst's blood, in contrast, produces more vampire-like beasts (ranging from the Nosferatu-style bloodsuckers in the grounds, to the Renfield-esque floor scrubbers, to the fencer knights who resemble Dracula at his most noble), while Byrgenwerth's Insight experiments produces multi-eyed, insectile creatures or blobby lumps resembling brains.
• Animesque: Inverted; much like the Dark Souls games, Bloodborne looks and feels a lot like a Western made game due to the realistic art style, and you might not be able to tell it was a Japanese game without reading the credits.
• Another Dimension:
  • The Nightmare of Mensis and Nightmare Frontier areas exist in separate dream realms.
  • It's implied that most of the game takes place within a dream-world created by the Great Ones. How much of it is a dream and how much of it is reality being sucked into an Eldritch Location is up to interpretation.
  • The Old Hunters DLC introduces the Hunter's Nightmare, Yharnam's mirror world where the perhaps-ghosts of the titular Old Hunters are trapped inside, now drunk on the blood they used to sustain their hunts and are eternally consigned to the twisted, malformed landscape of the Hunter's Nightmare — that also happens to be an incomplete and utterly bloody memory of the Cathedral Ward.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Picking up more items after you've reached their inventory limit sends those extra items to your storage chest in the Hunter's Dream, assuming the items you've picked up haven't reached their storage chest limit yet.
  • If you have spare Blood Vials and Quicksilver Bullets in your storage, then after dying (or transporting to the Hunter's Dream), you'll automatically replenish your on-hand supply of vials and bullets in your inventory as long as you have such extra items in your storage.
  • If you have just lost a huge chunk of your health, using Blood Vials will restore a lot more of it than usual.
  • All of your equipment now scales to your stats. Attires/Armors have a percentage-based defense instead of a flat static rating, while attack items like Throwing Knives and Molotov Cocktails now have stat scaling to make them viable throughout the game.
  • The 1.07 patch added a new Additional Rite for Chalice Dungeons called "Shared Fixed Dungeon". Said Rite has no material requirements and locks the Chalice Dungeon to a single fixed glyph code for easier co-op and invasions.
  • Before the first boss of the DLC is a desiccated skeleton banging its head against a gate; this skeleton always drops five Blood Vials and respawns. Add to that there's only three enemies between the lamp and him (an Eye Collector hag who's easily killable, and two Carrion Crows you can just run past) and it makes it likely that you'll only ever have a net gain of vials.
    • Additionally, there are two Nightmare Executioners in the same area that separately drop 10 Quicksilver Bullets and 6 Blood Vials, but you need to do Visceral Attacks to them from behind for a stable source of vials and bullets.
  • Bloodstone Chunks and Blood Rocks were added to the Insight Messenger Bath inventory with the 1.09 patch, making it relatively easier to earn materials for weapon upgrades. They just cost a load of Insight to buy them.
  • Using Blood Bullets - the extra five Quicksilver Bullets you get from sacrificing your HP which also happens to last until they're used or when you go through a loading screen - can never actually kill you. If you try to do it with too little HP to do it and live, the animation that plays when you try to heal with no vials will play instead.
• Arc Symbol: The 'Hunter' Caryll rune (and Caryll's runes in general), lumenflowers, bells, and the red moon.
• Arc Words: "Farewell, Good Hunter. May you find your worth in the waking world."
  • Paleblood.
  • Eyes on the inside.
  • The Old Hunters adds more:
    • Secrets.
    • "Curse the fiends, their children too, and their children, forever, true." - the opening narration of the trailer and the first time you visit the Hunter's Nightmare, later echoed in the Fishing Hamlet. This is the curse that the Fishing Hamlet's inhabitants laid upon Byrgenwerth and the Hunters in retaliation for the latter massacring them.
    • "A bottomless curse, a bottomless sea." - said twice by the Fishing Hamlet priest; once when he gives you the Accursed Brew tool and once in the ending narration.
• Arm Cannon: The Cannon and the Church Cannon. They’re literal portable cannons (though, understandably, they require a lot of Strength to wield). A variant of the Undead Giant boss also uses a cannon strapped on its forearm against you in the Chalice Dungeons.
• Armor Is Useless: In-Universe, it's said that the Beasts are so strong and fast that conventional armor offers no meaningful protection from their strikes. Instead, Hunters dropped armor for lightweight, durable clothing and designed their fighting styles to rely on speed and aggressive strikes to better match their inhuman adversaries. This is reflected in gameplay well: the earliest proper chest piece gives you 110 Physical Defense, while the most expensive set only gives you 120. Instead, clothes are more easily selected based upon characteristics such as their resistance bonuses or simply their aesthetic appeal.
• Ascended Meme: "FashionSouls" gets a vague reference in the Attire section of the official guide, and it even gets discussed with Miyazaki during the interview with Future Press. As an actual trend in of itself, "FashionSouls" got its start in Demon's Souls, where the static defenses for armor essentially became less helpful once you hit a high enough level. It continued into Dark Souls and Dark Souls II, despite the implementation of an admittedly imbalanced armor upgrade system.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: One possible interpretation of the goals of Yharnam's scholars as well as the events of the "Childhood's Beginning" ending. Master Willem suggests that humanity is living on "the basest of planes" and requires "eyes on the inside" to truly awaken, thus presumably becoming extradimensional deity-like beings similar to the Great Ones. Micolash likewise mentions that Rom was "given eyes" by Kos, suggesting that she was originally a human before "evolving" into her current form. Both of them were seeking the Umbilical Cords which are said to grant these "eyes on the inside", but both had failed ^note  Willem and the Byrgenwerth College were performing strange experiments to literally "fill people with eyes" which only turned them into deformed monstrities, whereas Micolash and the School of Mensis did obtain a Cord and were granted audience with Mergo, but they "had their brains stillborn" for their troubles. . Only the protagonist manages to "successfully" transform into a Great One, and the description of the trophy you get implies that the rest of humanity will soon follow...
• Ass Shove: Landing a backstab visceral attack on certain enemies, such as the Maneater Boar or Merciless Watchers, results in you ass-fisting them up to your elbow.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: A surprisingly viable option, if you choose the exact right moment to attack that is. Enemies and bosses can often damage you at close range, but thanks to the new "Rally" mechanic, you can regain all your recently lost health as fast as you lose it just so as long as you keep whaling on the enemy and not get hit again before you do. The old gameplay of "fall back and let your shield take most of the damage" is no longer possible, so retreating to heal is actually less survivable than getting right into an enemy's grill and Stun Locking them.
• Attract Mode: Letting the game sit on the title screen for a while will cause it to play the cinematic reveal trailer from E3.

Tropes B

• Back to Front: The Old Hunters expansion pack seems to show the backstory of the game in reverse order, with an Ironic Hell laid over it. To simplify it, you begin in a beast-infested Yharnam, with the Hunters there mercilessly executing their duty despite at least one section of the city clearly being lost. You continue to find Ludwig, the first leader of the Church Hunters, having fallen to beasthood in his failed attempts to contain the scourge. Continuing further takes you to the Astral Clocktower where the Healing Church experimented on their first victims and manufactured "Blood Saints" to synthesize the Old Blood for their own purposes — the Old Blood and its proliferation by the Church being the principal source of the scourge. At the top of the Astral Clocktower you find Lady Maria, who was sent to oversee the experiments, but committed suicide from the guilt of her actions. Going past Maria takes you to the Fishing Hamlet, where the mutated residents have already been decimated by Byrgenwerth's purge, with many having been forcefully "searched for eyes" due to their contact with a Great One. And past the hamlet, you see where the story began — at the corpse of Kos, who died during Byrgenwerth's raid, and whose child (it is heavily implied) was cut from her and taken to be experimented on before it too died as well.
• Badass Cape: Bloodborne is ripe with Attire that features them. Here are some examples:
  • The Charred Hunter Set has a long, dampened and tattered one.
  • Gehrman gains one for his battle out of nowhere in between camera shots. It looks like the one above.
  • The Old Hunter Set sports a tattered cape that is black on the outside and red on the inside.
  • The female version of the Yharnam Hunter Set has a small cape that covers the upper left side of the wearer's body.
  • The Crowfeather Set has one that's made out of crow feathers that seem to have been meticulously stitched together.
• Badass Longcoat: A number of the Attires also have either long dusters or cloaks attached to them.
• Bad Moon Rising: After you kill Rom the Vacuous Spider, the Red Moon descends, casting an eerie but almost sunset-like light on the city, and the world as you know it changes drastically. And then there's the True Final Boss... The Moon Presence, who descends upon the Hunter's Dream, seemingly from the moon itself.
• Bandaged Face: A notable number of the more human enemies have some type of covering over their eyes, whether it be wraps of gauze or some specially made type of mask. Due to all the weird stuff seen when you have high levels of Insight, they're either intentionally blocking their vision to keep themselves from seeing too much, or that they already have seen too much and don't want to see more.
• Beam Spam: The A Call Beyond Hunter Tool does this, shooting out a bunch of bright homing lights that are usually enough to kill most enemies in the game with a single use. Ebrietas has a powered-up version of it that can easily one-shot you if you don't dodge it.
• Beast with a Human Face:
  • Patches the Spider.
  • Some spider enemies from the Nightmare of Mensis (and sometimes in the Chalice Dungeons).
  • Darkbeast Paarl has what appears to be a skull for a face.
  • In the DLC, Ludwig the Accursed has distinctively human features on his head and even speaks in an incongruous soft voice.
• Beating A Dead Player: Enemies will often go on attacking your vanishing corpse, even including bosses who are delivering a Pre-Mortem One-Liner.
• Bedlam House: The Research Hall, where the Healing Church experimented on human beings to gain the knowledge of the Great Ones. It's overrun by the mutated Clocktower Patients, and you can see evidence of some pretty awful things that went on in there, such as syringe-filled corpses strapped down to beds, while those who are yet lucid and still alive are further mutated beyond all recognition and can do nothing else but beg for you to kill them.
• Beneath the Earth: The Chalice Dungeons are located deep underground, though occasionally there are cracks in the ceilings of some Chalice Dungeons that suggest they are reasonably close to the surface. Ailing Loran, in particular, appears to be built into the sides of an enormous desert canyon.
• BFG: You can get a literal Cannon as a sidearm! Although it's a case of Cool, but Inefficient, due to how many Quicksilver Bullets are used per shot. ^note  10 before Patch 1.03, 12 after Patch 1.03.
  • The Old Hunters DLC expansion adds two more: a portable version of Djura's Gatling Gun and a Healing Church variant of the Cannon.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Despite the vast array of monsters, conspiracies, and miscellaneous lunatics you have to fight that are already present in the city and beyond when you arrive, the majority of individuals of whom are TRULY responsible for the main conflict are either already dead or missing, such as Willem, Laurence, Oedon, Kos, Mergo and the Moon Presence.
  • Averted with Willem, who can be found at what remains of Byrgenwerth College, though he doesn't attack The Hunter or even fight back at all, as it's indicated that his attempts to obtain power left him effectively brain dead and handicapped, being confined to a rocking chair and unable to speak.
• Big Bad Wannabe: A rather mixed example. In the game proper, as the former leader of The School and the Host of the Nightmare of Mensis, thus the one who started everything within the game's events, Micolash serves as a major antagonist for The Hunter to fight and defeat, but by the time the game starts, let alone when you find him, he has become far, far less important and significant than he believes himself to still be — you don't even learn of his existence until his boss fight, and killing him does nothing to stop the Nightmare. In the backstory, Master Willem and Laurence fulfill this role more-so as the leaders of Byrgenwerth and the Healing Church, respectively, but in the game proper, they have fallen to the same fate that has befallen everyone else in Yharnam — Madness or Beasthood.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Iosefka, the kindly doctor you meet at the beginning of the game, is killed and replaced by an impostor from the Choir after you defeat Father Gascoigne. She proceeds to tell you to send civilians you find on the street to her, promising to take care of them, when she in actuality will instead do some experimenting on them and eventually turn them into Celestial Emissaries. You can implement Laser-Guided Karma by sending the beast to Iosefka's clinic, where the latter will experiment upon the former.
• Bittersweet Ending: All of them to various extents, though how much depends on your personal interpretation of the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot. In any case, Yharnam's still falling apart at the seams, most of the survivors probably have serious PTSD at least and the city is almost certainly doomed in the long run. But, on the bright side the Good Hunter did ensure it won't be destroyed literally that night.
  • In Yharnam Sunrise, the player is free from the dream and can resume their life and leave Yharnam's problems behind. But Gherman is still trapped by the Hunter's Dream, and the Hunt will continue until the Healing Church collapses.
  • In Honoring Wishes, the player is able to free Gherman, at the cost of having to take his place. But on the bright side, they don't have his issues with the Plain Doll and the Workshop.
  • In Childhood's Beginning. the player frees Gherman, avoids becoming a slave to the Moon Presence, and becomes a Great One- but they've lost their humanity and might have killed the Big Good.
  • If you finish the DLC, you've managed to free all hunters from an Ironic Hell... but not before your ally Simon has been killed by someone who wanted to keep Byrgenwerth's atrocities secret.
• Bizarrchitecture: The idea of Yharnam as an actual, functional city stretches the imagination — it looks like Victorian London as designed by M.C. Escher and Bloody Stupid Johnson working together. And that's before you get to the Nightmare areas.
• Blatant Lies: "I tell you, I will not forget our adage.", said Laurence to Willem before leaving Byrgenwerth to focus on his own Great One-related ambitions. The adage in question is "Fear the Old Blood", so this was Laurence's way of assuring Willem that he'll be careful with the blood of the Great Ones... before promptly founding the Healing Church and then transfusing said blood to the citizens of Yharnam en masse. Due to Hanlon's Razor, Laurence may have really been trying to use the Old Blood responsibly, and just happened to have astronomically failed in that regard.
• Bloodier and Gorier: You have read the game's title, right? Bloodborne, true to its theme, is much bloodier than the Souls games. The player character and enemies alike can become covered in blood as they fight.
• Blood Magic: Everywhere. Every magical invocation requires the use of blood as a medium, including healing sickness, traversing the ancient tombs of the Great Ones, empowering Vileblood weapons, and casting spells using the specialized Hunter Tools when Quicksilver Bullets are in short supply. Even the material used to make the Quicksilver Bullets is itself implied to have come from the blood of the Great One, Oedon.
• Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: Yharnam, the Pthumerian Queen.
• Blood-Stained Glass Windows: Lots of brutal fights occur in churches. The church that sees the most bloodshed is undoubtedly the Grand Cathedral, where you fight Vicar Amelia, the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst or Eileen if you didn't advance enough in her questline, the Celestial Emissary and Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos.
• Blood Lust: Every Yharnamite shares this; from alcohol to medical use, blood is everything for them.
• Bloody Horror: The Game. Tainted blood serves as The Corruption, the resulting monsters have a serious bloodlust, and the players themselves spends the game injecting, consuming, losing and throwing around a lot of the red stuff.
• Body Horror: There is not one character in this game who does not go through some horrifying transformation, madness-inducing revelation, or other form of turning into a beast. Special mention goes to the lower parts of the Forbidden Woods, which feature Huntsmen whose heads burst into a large cluster of snakes as you approach them.
• Body of Bodies: The One Reborn is a massive amalgamation of decaying corpses wrought together to form an abomination that's not even remotely human nor animal in appearance. The lower portion is made up of several human limbs (of which several of them twitch in a random pattern), and there's a larger skeleton acting as the "upper body", akin to a nightmarish centaur. And there's two distinct ends of the body, with each acting on their own...
  • The endgame Scourge Beasts of Yahar'gul are living amalgamations made of various body parts, even having a leg for a tail.
• Body Motifs: Eyes are a recurring element in Bloodborne. Many characters and enemies wear blindfolds, as excessive blood use causes the eyes to decay. Scholars of Byrgenwerth and the Church make cryptic references to "lining the brain with eyes," with evidence suggesting that this may be literal. Certain changes occur if the player has enough Insight, the most obvious one being several enemies having many more eyes. Even the name of the Greater-Scope Villain, Oedon, which is derived from "Oedipism", suggests that enucleation is a very common thing in Yharnam.
• Book Ends: If you choose the third ending of the game, the second and second-to-last boss fights are both with fallen Hunters that use a giant, oversized cleaving tool and a Blunderbuss ^note  Dragoon in Gascoigne's case. . Both bosses have three distinct phases, they're both very vocal during their fights and they both eulogize themselves after you put them down. Furthermore, if you fight the Moon Presence, it moves and feels very similar to a beast, much like Father Gascoigne's final moments.
  • This also extends to The Old Hunters DLC. The first and last boss (that is, if you fight it first) is a Cleric Beast. The second one is Laurence's original beast form.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Saw Cleaver you can get at the very beginning is one of the best weapons in the game, dealing damage on par with weapons obtainable much later on if significant resources are invested into it. Its versatile moveset, low stamina cost per swing and adaptability in combat only adds to its general usefulness. Even when it may be lacking in some aspects, such as stagger capability, it still functions reasonably well as a backup weapon when needs must.
  • While the Whirligig Saw is pretty cool from a visual aspect, its most effective move is its tricked L2 attack, which holds the saw in place in order to apply continuous damage. It's not flashy, but the DPS potential, combined with the ability to move while using it, will stagger all but the beefiest enemies in the game with the only limit being the amount of stamina needed to sustain it. Many bosses will have their limbs crippled, opening them up to Visceral Attacks, and its passive bonus to Beast-type enemies (which a LARGE chunk of enemies are) makes it an even nastier combination, not to mention the extra damage you can deal to them if you also applied a Fire Paper to it and consumed a Beast Blood Pellet too.
  • The Tonitrus is regularly derided as the least exciting Trick Weapon in the game — beneath its crackling electric aura, it's a plain, simple mace with an equally plain, simple moveset. Its 'Trick' is nothing more than a short-lived damage buff. Despite this, you're still going to want one — it swings reasonably fast, has a reasonable stagger effect, consumes surprisingly little stamina per swing and hits like a truck with the buff on, letting it sustain incredibly high DPS for a remarkably long time if you remember to regularly buff it using its Trick. Most importantly though, it's the only Trick Weapon that naturally deals Bolt damage, which Kin-type enemies are cripplingly weak to, and several of the most dangerous enemies in the game happen to be Kin.
    • In other words, the Tonitrus will melt through Kin foes that would otherwise pose a deadly threat to a Hunter wielding any other weapon, making it an incredibly useful trump card, and its drawback — its lower-than-usual durability — only becomes a significant problem if you're extremely careless. Most of the time, it just means you'll have to pay a tiny amount more of Blood Echoes in repairs whenever you stop by the Hunter's Dream.
  • The Blacksky Eye Hunter Tool, which fires a simple and straightforward projectile... that happens to use only one Quicksilver Bullet per cast, has a fast attack animation, does good damage with high Arcane, and can stagger nearly every common enemy including even smaller bosses to death.
  • Running. You do want to fight enemies, for their Blood Echoes and random drops or to be able to safely explore, but never underestimate the power of just booking it. Almost every single enemy will not be able to hit you if you just keep running without stopping for too long, and you can still pick up items lying around the world if things are a bit too dangerous or when you're gunning for a specific item, and if you've cleared an area, you can get back to where you were very quickly by just running past all the enemies. But do it too much and, like any RPG, you'll screw yourself over on Blood Echoes and items, but if you know what you're doing or are simply going back over an area after you've cleared it already, then there is never any reason not to do it.
  • The humble Hunter's Torch doesn't have much variety in its moveset, but it has a simple jabbing attack that's great for staggering smaller enemies to death, including the dreaded Brainsuckers. Additionally, because it can be obtained near the beginning of the game - of which is filled almost exclusively with Beast-type enemies that are weak to Fire - and on top of having a surprising B scaling in Arcane, it's not a bad choice to help even the early game gap for Arcane builds that are struggling, besides being a reliable source of light.
  • If you plan on abusing the Parry mechanic, and don't care to do much damage with firearms, the basic Hunter's Pistol you can get at the beginning of the game will serve you just fine. Yes, it doesn't do as much damage as the likes of even the Repeating Pistol you get soon after, let alone the Gatling Gun or Cannon you can also get, but it only uses one Quicksilver Bullet per shot (as opposed to the Repeating Pistol using two per shot), and since 99% of the damage dealt from a parry comes from the Visceral Attack afterwards - which scales off your Strength or Skill - only one weak bullet per parry is all that you need to make the most out of the mechanic.
• Boss-Altering Consequence: One of the first bosses that the player faces in the game is Father Gascoigne, a former hunter who has succumbed to the beast scourge that has ravaged Yharnam. While exploring the city, the player can meet Gascoigne's daughter who will give a small music box. Using the music box during the fight will temporarily stun Gascoigne allowing the player to deal damage to him. Overuse of the music box will cause Father Gascoigne to transform into a beast much earlier in the fight then he would normally, however.
• Boss Arena Recovery: Conveniently, there just happens to be Antidotes lying around the Blood-Starved Beast's arena.
• Boss Banter: Most of the bosses you fight who are still capable of speech tend to be quite talkative, either in the fight or when transitioning through their phases.
• Boss Corridor: Quite common. Among others, Darkbeast Paarl, Mergo's Wet Nurse, Ludwig the Accursed and the Orphan of Kos all feature such examples. In addition, every single Chalice Dungeon boss has one as part of the basic level design.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The endgame's NPC Hunters, due to being created the same way as the player's Hunter, have been revealed to have maxed-out stats and weapons, with some even having Blood Gems slotted in their weapons and Runes equipped. Add in the fact that enemies have an infinite supply of Quicksilver Bullets plus items and... well, let's just say that they can be harder than most of the bosses.
• Boss Rush: The last three bosses in the game, Mergo's Wet Nurse, Gehrman and the Moon Presence, are all fought in quick succession with no additional dungeons between them. ^note  Though the only one you have to kill is Mergo's Wet Nurse, and depending on your choices, you may not even find the Moon Presence. In the DLC, there's also the Living Failures and Lady Maria, whose boss rooms are literally right next to each other.
• Bottomless Magazines: Zig-zagged like crazy. Enemies with firearms have an infinite supply of bullets, but need to reload between shots unless they can use the same mechanics and weapons as a player character would. On the other hand, you don't need to reload at all, but instead you have a limited supply of anywhere between 20 to 32 Quicksilver Bullets on your person, in addition to the ability to create 5 emergency Quicksilver Bullets drawn out of your blood whenever you want them.
• Breaking Old Trends: Bloodborne is the first of the Soulsborne game (and up to Elden Ring, only) that doesn't have an extensive expository introduction, instead preferring to throw you into the madness right away, which enhances the pervasive feel of confusion and mystery surrounding Yharnam.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Ultimately, little the player does affects the overall situation. You've only accomplished killing a few lesser Great Ones in a city that's close to finished, anyways. Entities like Oedon aren't even inconvenienced by your actions, and depending on the ending, you either blithely leave the cycle, become its next integral part, or in the ending where you actually do Punch Out the Moon Presence, replace it with yourself, transformed into an infant Great One. While the cycle is broken, there's no telling what you, in your now possibly alien mindset, have in mind for "Humanity's Next Childhood".
  • The DLC reveals that no matter what ending you get, the player has still done better for themselves and everyone around them than Byrgenwerth did. They killed and/or somehow defiled the corpse of the Great One Kos (plus massacred and experimented on her followers in the Fishing Hamlet), but in return, they and all their successors were cursed with bloodthirst and beastliness that inevitably led to the Hunter's Nightmare, where all the old figures of the Church linger as grotesque parodies of their former selves, trapped in endless savagery. Suddenly, the main game's endings look like getting off easy...
• Brown Note: Appropriately enough for a video game that is heavily inspired by Lovecraft and the Cosmic Horror Story genre, this is actually incorporated as a gameplay mechanic: Frenzy. Frenzy builds extremely fast upon viewing otherworldly horrors in the game (particularly the Winter Lanterns and Brain of Mensis), and if it fills up, you'll lose close to 90% of your health. The consumable item called Sedatives can be used to stop your Frenzy meter from filling up before it's too late.
• Brutal Bonus Level: All of the higher-level Chalice Dungeons could qualify, especially if you decide to use Fetid or Rotted Offerings to spawn additional enemies inside them. The Defiled Chalice Dungeons must receive special mention, as not only are they exquisitely difficult in their own right, but your health is cut in half the entire time.

Tropes C-D

• Call-Back: Some of the enemies and weapons reference other ones from the previous games.
  • The Vileblood Pistol, Evelyn, sounds suspiciously similar to a certain crossbow from the Dark Souls trilogy.
  • The Vileblood Katana-Sabre hybrid, Chikage, is another bloodthirsty weapon for the franchise.
  • The Cleric Beast is based on Manus, the final boss in the Artorias of the Abyss DLC of Dark Souls.
  • The Moonlight Greatsword makes a triumphant return in The Old Hunters expansion.
• Came Back Wrong: Highly implied to be how the Hunter's Nightmare was formed. If someone tried to make a replica of Cathedral Ward by memory, just memory (and possibly having consumed several illicit substances beforehand), it would look like the Nightmare.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Chikage and Logarius' Wheel both have tricked modes that make the weapon more powerful at the cost of draining your health. Ironically, the latter is a weapon of the Healing Church Executioners, who claim the moral high ground over the "depraved, blood sucking" Cainhurst Vilebloods, which used the former.
  • Made even more ironic in the DLC, where the weapon of choice of the Healing Church assassin Brador is the Bloodletter. Said weapon requires impaling yourself through your midsection to create what is essentially a two-handed morning star from crystalized blood.
• Cast Full of Crazy: Almost every character you encounter that is still capable of speech is either insane or slowly going insane. Even the protagonist may not be all there in the head; as the more Insight you gain, the more you start hearing and perceiving things that weren't there before, culminating in being haunted by the sound of a crying baby at all times (who is presumably Mergo).
• Chainsaw Good: The Whirligig Saw's two-handed tricked form is essentially a mace with an attachable set of buzzsaws for a head.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: So you used the Tiny Music Box against Father Gascoigne, but listen closely to the tune. When you get to Mergo's Wet Nurse, it will shock you.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Old Hunter Bone's description about the "art of Quickening" may seem like just another part of Bloodborne lore, but when you refuse to leave the Hunter's Dream, Gehrman will use the technique against you. In the DLC, Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower will also use the art. Unsurprising, given that that she is heavily implied to be the old hunter whose bone allows you to use the art in the first place.
  • The One Third of Umbilical Cord items initially seem to be just more powerful Insight items with some minor lore tidbits attached to them, but consuming at least three of them unlocks the True Final Boss.
• Closed Circle: Yharnam is one of these, though the confusing, interconnected city layout and the massive amounts of Gothic architecture seen throughout hides it well. Justified somewhat, as Yharnam is part of a dream.
• City of Adventure: Most of the game is set within the ancient city of Yharnam, but the player will have the ability to journey to outlying locales.
• Coat, Hat, Mask: Seems to be the standard for most of the Attires in the game. Though the mask part can vary, in that it either covers the lower face or just the eyes.
• Combat Stilettos: The female version of the Black Church set has these.
• Companion Cube: The Doll is implied to be this if she isn't loved or appreciated. If she is, she gains sentience.
• Cool, but Inefficient: What the Powder Kegs, and their predecessors the Oto Workshop, are known for.
  • One Powder Keg firearm is the Cannon. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin; a portable cannon you can carry around. It's incredibly powerful, but not only does it require 30 Strength and 13 Skill to wield, it also consumes 12 Quicksilver Bullets per shot. In-universe, this is generally how the Powder Kegs' weaponry are perceived: powerful, but too unwieldy compared to the Trick Weapons and firearms devised by the other Hunter groups. In the Cannon's case, it's too unwieldy for even the Powder Kegs themselves.
    • The Old Hunters reveals that the Healing Church did design a variant of the Cannon for their brawnier Hunters. Unfortunately, the level of brawn required to wield them was supernatural, and anyone strong enough to lift a Church Cannon also happened to have their mind degraded too far by the Scourge of the Beast to use it, leading the Church to quietly put their Cannons into permanent storage.
  • Another Powder Keg Trick Weapon is the Stake Driver. When in its tricked form, it does massive damage with its Charged R2 attack, similar to the Cannon, but it requires a longer charge time in return, long enough for you be attacked out of the charging animation.
• Cool Old Guy: Retired Hunter Djura, assuming that the player can figure out how to make him non-hostile. If the player agrees to spare the beasts he protects, he will even give them his Powder Keg Hunter Badge and a gesture.
  • Gehrman falls under this as well. At first, he's a laid-back old dude who gives you useful hints and information. He's also not above getting a kick out of misleading comments.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: The Chalice Dungeons largely consists of this, with variations depending on which type of Chalice it is.
• Corridor Cubbyhole Run: One possible feature of the Chalice Dungeons; long corridors with giant boulders rolling through them at regular intervals, some of which have Pthumerians blocking the cubbyholes.
• Corrupt Church: The Healing Church. Their solution to the Scourge of the Beast? Initiate a massive hunt against the beasts that is tantamount to a Witch Hunt, since most of the city's citizens are already infected themselves, and see the uninfected as the real beasts to be slaughtered. And they caused the Scourge of Beasts as a side effect of their blood ministration, and covered up the connection by blaming outsiders and assassinating anyone who looked to be putting the pieces together. See, the Healing Church started as aa splinter faction of Byrgenwerth's scholars, used the Old Blood to continue their research upon the citizens of Yharnam, who the Church used as fodder for whatever hideous experiment they thought of in their attempts to elevate themselves to Great One status.
  • Laurence, the founder of the Healing Church, left Byrgenwerth when they refused to use the Old Blood in their ascension research. While it was true that the Old Blood had great healing properties, they are more Lovecraftian Superpowers than anything else. Laurence naively thought the Church could "purify" the blood, as seen in Lost in Translation below. In his zeal to spread and refine the technique to this end, he wound up popularizing Blood Ministration and fostering Yharnam's obsession with blood, turning Yharnam's citizenry into lab rats.
  • And according to one comic, the Church also created the Ashen Blood plague that destroyed Old Yharnam by dumping some strange powder into the water supply.
• Cosmetic Award: The Yharnam Stone, which you get for clearing all the Pthumeru Chalice Dungeons.
• Cosmic Horror Story: This becomes increasingly prominent as you find references to "Great Ones", and stumble upon increasingly horrifying tiers of Eldritch Abominations. Then you learn that there's something going on with the moon... and that monstrous beings are using Yharnam as a kind of nursery to turn mankind into their "surrogate children", since they can have none of their own.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: This far into the article, it should be clear to you by now that this is not actually a Gothic Horror story. In-game, this reveal happens by gaining enough Insight or by defeating Rom, which causes the moon to turn red and cause several eerie changes throughout Yharnam, such as the enemies becoming more eldritch, the surviving non-hostile NPCs behaving strangely, and the sudden appearance of the giant Cthulhu-headed spiders hanging on the sides of the buildings.
• Cozy Catastrophe: Invoked and defied. Some houses contain sounds of merriment, as the Yharnamites inside attempt to party through the night of the Hunt. Judging from the screams, insane laughter and eventual silence that will come from those houses later in the story, it does not end well for the people inside of them.
• Cramming the Coffin: The Cramped Casket enemy is this coming around, not as the result of disposing of a murder victim, but because of cheapskate tenement landlords only buying one coffin for an entire family to share after The Virus killed everyone in their house. The result is a nightmarish heap of screaming, fused-together zombies dragging around their coffin as their foot while gobbing out semi-congealed rotting blood clots as their ranged attack.
• Creepy Cathedral: Half of the buildings in Yharnam are either creepy mansions or this. The Cathedral Ward is the most notable example.
• Creepy Good: Many of the characters that help you are kind of creepy in their own right, including Eileen the Crow, the Oedon Chapel Keeper, the Messengers and even the Doll herself. Also, the Moon Presence. Maybe.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Healing Church is basically the Catholic Church, if they worshiped a bunch of Eldritch Abominations, complete with a focus on communion.
• Cue the Sun: After you kill the Orphan of Kos in The Old Hunters DLC, the constant thunderstorm in the area lifts, and for perhaps the first time in the whole game, you're able to clearly see the sun.
  • The Yharnam Sunrise ending also has this happen after Gehrman beheads you in the Hunter's Dream. You wake up in a deserted square in the seemingly abandoned Yharnam as the morning sun rises over the city.
• Culture Chop Suey: As per usual in From's Souls series, there's a lot of Japanese influence in what is otherwise a European-Gothic fantasy world:
  • The Healing Church visually takes many cues from Catholicism, as well as some Catholic practices such as the veneration of holy blood and saints, but otherwise shares a lot of beliefs with Shintoism. Jerks San Frontieres elaborates on the Shintoist belief system of the Healing Church here.
  • The Cainhurst nobility use a variety of imported "Eastern" weapons such as the Chikage and the Rakuyo in their arsenal, as well as traditional European-style longswords, rapiers and pistols.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The Orphan of Kos has 20,000 HP, which is only one part of what makes it so ridiculously hard.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The health-replenishing Blood Vials have their own dedicated button. Unfortunately, it's the same button from the Souls games that lets the player switch weapon stances (the Triangle button). The new button that changes your weapons' stance/form is the L1 button.
  • When using the Beast Claw with the Beast's Embrace Covenant Rune or the Kos Parasite with the Milkweed Covenant Rune, your dodges have changed animations that don't quite match up with the invincibility frames you get. It's not enough to be blatantly noticeable, but it's just enough to mess up your timing if you're not used to the weapons.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the other Souls games alongside Bloodier and Gorier, this game takes the whole Cosmic Horror Story element and ramps it up.
• Dark Is Not Evil: There's evidence to suggest that this may very well be the case for many of the Great Ones, with the Moon Caryll Rune even describing them as "sympathetic in spirit." Some, like the Brain of Mensis, are shown to be Non Malicious Monsters, while others, like the Moon Presence and Ebrietas, do seem to want to help humanity in their own way. However, problems arise when humans decide to abuse the knowledge and power of the Great Ones for their own ends.
• Dark World: The Hunter's Nightmare in The Old Hunters is a twisted version of Yharnam, featuring the same buildings and streets within the same kind of eldritch landscape found in the Nightmare Frontier.
• Dead All Along:
  • Once you know the password needed to enter the Forbidden Woods, you'll see that the gatekeeper who asked you for it is not only dead, but his body is also in a mummified state. How he was able to speak to you earlier is never explained, but it's possible he gained enough Insight to survive the death of his body.
  • Micolash, one of the bosses of the Nightmare of Mensis is found in Yahar'gul as a mummified corpse and is oblivious to the death of his physical body.
  • In The Old Hunters, it's revealed that Kos herself has passed away long before the Hunter arrived at the Hunter's Nightmare. The only thing left is her Orphan, the Final Boss.
• Deadly Euphemism: Subverted. 'Escaping the Hunter's Dream' initially sounds like this, once you discover the method, but no, Gehrman is being totally open and honest with you — having him ritualistically kill you in the Dream with his Burial Blade will indeed result in you waking up in the real world, safe and sound.
• Death or Glory Attack: The game is focused on dealing more damage than the opponent while risking your own life to defeat them. Basically, act like Guts.
• Degraded Boss:
  • The Shadow of Yharnam bosses appear as regular enemies in the Nightmare of Mensis.
  • The Keeper of the Old Lords Chalice Dungeon boss becomes a regular enemy in harder Chalice Dungeons.
  • The Blood-Starved Beast reappears as a mook in the Hunter's Nightmare. It's also in a small pitch-black cave, so it's nigh-impossible to see without a Torch (which fills up your ranged weapon slot). It doesn't Turn Red this time, though, making it slightly easier.
• Dem Bones: One boss, Darkbeast Paarl, is a giant electrified werewolf skeleton covered in a few remaining clumps of fur.
  • The Skeleton Puppets are disjointed skeletons that are suspended and moved about with magic in a manner resembling their names.
• Developer's Foresight: Performing gestures in front of the Plain Doll causes her to react in various ways: she applauds, bows and tilts her head curiously depending on the gesture used.
  • A minor event at the bridge near the Tomb of Oedon, which has a party of Huntsmen and a fiery boulder trap. If you approach the bridge from the Tomb, the Huntsman's Minion who pushes the boulder will do so when alerted to your presence and then turn to face you... while the aforementioned party of Huntsmen will start running away from their own boulder trap.
  • It is possible, albeit insanely difficult, to go through nearly the entire game without ever entering the Hunter's Dream by simply never dying or using a lantern, which also means you're cut off from fundamental mechanics like fast travel, leveling up, parries and visceral attacks, and farming drops. If you manage to reach and defeat Mergo's Wet Nurse with these restrictions, then the cutscene for entering the Hunter's Dream the first time will be changed to factor in the workshop burning down.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: If you use the "Make Contact" gesture in front of the Brain of Mensis after dropping it into a pit, after about a minute or so of holding the gesture, it will give you a Rune!
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: One ending has you defeating the Moon Presence, the monstrous perpetrator of the hunting cycle and the True Final Boss.
  • With the kind of enemies that show up in this game after a while, this trope is all over the place. One starts getting the feeling that if the Good Hunter was allowed to roam the actual Lovecraft-verse, the books would be a lot less bleak.
• Difficult, but Awesome: A design point.
  • Bloodtinge builds undergo serious Magikarp Power — they're almost completely useless for a very long time, but making them work turns weapons like the Repeating Pistol and the Chikage into boss-destroying badasses, along with making Visceral Attacks effectively One Hit Kills. See for yourself.
  • The Chikage has a lot against it — its tricked form drains HP at a steady rate, which can really screw over a weak Hunter, and its over-reliance on Bloodtinge for damage makes it initially weaker than most Skill weapons. Then you get it all upgraded, kitted out with the right Blood Gems and properly built your Hunter to wield it, and then all of a sudden its doing unbelievable amounts of damage and out-ranging most weapons that other NPC Hunters or invaders have that deal comparable damage.
  • The Bloodletter relies heavily on taking a huge chunk of your own health for its powerful tricked form, which is very dangerous and chews through vials if you can't make Rally the damage back in time. While its untrick form is mediocre, its tricked form is highly dangerous in both PVP and PVE: the tricked L2 causes an AOE attack that applies Frenzy to everyone it touches, including yourself, making it even more likely that you'll kill yourself with it. However, skilled Bloodletter users can cause some insane amounts damage with this if they have low Insight and are smart about their timing, causing a Hunter to go from full health to dead in a Frenzy application plus one or two R1's.
  • The Stake Driver doesn't have that much of an impressive moveset, and its tricked form makes its already rather lackluster range even worse and turns attacking more than one enemy at a time a chore. However, if you practice on the timing of its tricked and Charged R2 attack, it can potentially deal out more damage in one hit than just about any weapon in the game, and its tricked mode (including the aforementioned charge attack) deals exclusively Thrust damage, which will make it tear through late-game enemies that have weak resistance to that damage type.
  • Builds that dump Endurance have less of a safety net, and have to focus more on stamina management, but it allows you to put those points elsewhere, like maxing out Strength and Skill for the Saw Cleaver, or maxing Strength and Arcane for the Moonlight Hunter's Greatsword.
• Disc-One Nuke: There's a specific Chalice Dungeon accessed by a specific.....rather suggestive glyph, cummmfpk, that, after only a few runs (run to the next room, let the unseen enemy kill itself, use a Hunter's Mark to warp back to the lantern to respawn the mob, repeat), can get you enough Blood Echoes to soft cap several stats at once. That being said, the earliest you can access it is after killing the Blood-Starved Beast, and beating the first two bosses of the chalice you get from it.
• Disability Superpower: While Gehrman lost half of his right leg, he is able to Flash Step, which is far more effective than dodging/side-stepping.
• Disconnected Side Area: A couple. Notably, the Nightmare areas are floating off in their own space, disconnected from the rest of Yharnam.
  • The Astral Clocktower is perhaps the most prominent building in the Cathedral Ward, but is unreachable in the base game, which is odd in a series where if you can see a place, you can normally go there. You actually have to traverse the DLC to reach it in the Hunter's Nightmare, and it's where you find Lady Maria.
  • Byrgenwerth is an in-story example. When you finally reach it after braving the Forbidden Woods, it's a single building, seemingly too small to be the great seat of learning you've heard much about to this point. You later find the other parts of it, notably the Lecture Hall and the Research Hall, as part of the Nightmare areas.
• Does Not Like Guns: Some of the weapons revealed in The Old Hunters specifically mention early Hunters who hated firearms, such as Simon, who Simon's Bowblade is named for, and Simple Gratia, the Hunter who instead opted to punch beasts with a giant hunk of iron rather than use the firearms she was completely hopeless with.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The Foreign Set is oddly similar to some of Nikola Tesla's clothing.
  • The game itself feels like a Victorian Era Berserk game, with all the blood and monsters along with a BFS that's incredibly popular to players because of its good scaling.
• Door to Before: EVERYWHERE. The level design uses fewer checkpoints and many more shortcuts back to earlier areas than previous Souls games. It's often possible to have a shortcut leading straight to the boss of an area right next to the save point for the beginning of that area.
• Dream Emergency Exit: The "Yharnam Sunrise" ending has you die only to awake alive back in Yharnam as the sun rises, implying that the entire game is nothing more than a dream.
• Dream Land: Many of the settings in Bloodborne (possibly even the entire GAME) take place in various dream and nightmare realms evocative of H.P. Lovecraft's Dream-Cycle.
  • The Hunter's Dream is a fantastical replica of the Abandoned Workshop, kept in pristine condition away from the rotting touch of time and created by the Moon Presence. This is the only safe place in the entire game before you have to fight Gehrman and acts as the player's hub for the game.
  • The Nightmare Frontier is a vast, canyon-like nightmare filled with various Silverbeasts and yeti-like monsters that is theorized by fans to be what remains of the lost civilization of Loran, which was pulled into the Nightmare by the Great Ones in the same vein as Yharnam is during the game.
  • The Nightmare of Mensis is a nightmare realm created when the School of Mensis and their leader, Micolash, contacted the Great Ones and had their minds pulled into the Nightmare. Their mummified corpses are found by the Hunter earlier in the game.
  • The Hunter's Nightmare is a Hellish-realm created by the now-dead Kos/Kosm to punish the Old Hunters of Byrgenwerth. Those who become drunk on blood are trapped in the lower levels of the Nightmare, a canyon-like mockery of Yharnam with a river of blood that leads to the monstrous Ludwig the Accursed. Found in a secret gateway in the Astral Clocktower, guarded by the Hunter Maria, is the Fishing Hamlet preserved in time where the dead Kos and her orphaned child dwell.
• Dream Within a Dream: If the events of the game are All Just a Dream, then the Hunter's Dream and the Nightmare Frontier/Nightmare of Mensis are a Dream Within a Dream.
  • At a certain point in the game, you can find Gehrman asleep in the back garden of the Hunter's Dream having a nightmare.
• Dreams vs. Nightmares: The game is a Lovecraftian take on this trope: You play a Hunter of Monsters based in the Pocket Dimension of the Hunter's Dream, who invades the pocket dimensions created by the nightmares of undead Eldritch Abominations (one in the main game, and a different one in the DLC), ostensibly, to stop the curse they put over Yharnam. However, while the Hunter's Dream looks, at first glance, like the Good Counterpart to Mergo's and Kos' nightmare worlds, it is eventually revealed that it is likewise the domain of a Great One, the Moon Presence (or the Doll, depending on your interpretation of the game), who just happens to favor peace and quiet unlike the other two, but is otherwise just as removed from human morals as them.
• Driven to Madness: Happens to nearly everyone who is still alive in Yharnam once the moon turns red.
  • And it's implied that it happens to your Hunter by the end of the game if you refuse Gehrman's offer to release you from the Hunter's Dream. It doesn't help that every time you experience something horrifying or otherworldly, your Insight grows.
• Carry a Big Stick:
  • The Kirkhammer definitely qualifies, since it has a head the size of the player character's torso, and it features a detachable hilt with a silver longsword in it.
  • The Boom Hammer acts as one, but with a built-in miniature furnace, allowing for flaming explosions.
• Dual Boss: The Witch of Hemwick is this, though the second Witch doesn't appear until the first is at around half health. They each spawn nightmarish creatures that do most of the fighting for them. They also cloak themselves and teleport around whenever they aren't summoning Mooks. If one dies and the other isn't killed fast enough, the first will get back up with some more HP.
  • To be more specific, the second Witch is present for the whole fight, but her health bar doesn't show up, making it likely that you won't even be aware that you've hit her. Additionally, she doesn't make obvious signs of her presence such as bright red lights until the first Witch has been killed once. As such, running into her is entirely by luck until she makes her presence known.
• Duel Boss: Father Gascoigne, who is a Hunter himself and even uses the Hunter Axe and the Pistol (which functions more like the Blunderbuss — aka a Dragoon — for some reason), both of which are potentially your starting weapons.
  • Gehrman, The First Hunter, is also one, though the player can choose not to fight him.
  • Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower in the Old Hunters DLC is another one.
  • The Orphan of Kos is a very twisted variant.
• Dump Stat: Of all the six stats, Endurance. This is because Stamina is really efficient here, and a number of weapons are best when you have high stats in two different stats.

Tropes E-F

• Early Game Hell: Bloodborne is popularly considered to have the hardest first area out of all the Souls franchise. Enemies roam around in groups and most can use speedy combos that can kill you in a few hits. On the other hand, you receive some of the better starting weaponry in the franchise, once you visit the Hunter’s Dream for the first time.
  • What really makes it hurt is that you can't level up until you acquire Insight, because the Doll doesn't come to life until you have at least one point. This means either finding a Madman's Knowledge or running into a boss before you can improve your stats (though you don't have to defeat the boss in question). There are two possibilities for running into a boss at the start of the game. One boss is on a bridge behind a pair of werewolves, who move faster and hit much harder than anything you face up to that point, and given the narrow confines, you will draw aggro on them. That's the easy option. The other is Father Gascoigne.
• Eldritch Abomination: There are a number of cryptic references to eldritch entities called Great Ones, several of which can be fought as bosses. Consuming three of the One Third of Umbilical Cords will allow you to fight the Moon Presence, the creature responsible for controlling the nightly hunts.
• Eldritch Location: The Nightmare Frontier, and the other Nightmares traversed throughout the game. The Old Hunters DLC is notable in that it takes place entirely within a Nightmare that starts off as a hellish reflection of Yharnam and eventually leads into a fishing hamlet that is in fact situated in the sky above the Yharnam reflection.
  • The Lecture Building has somehow been made adrift somewhere in the Nightmare, presumably as a result of eldritch experimentation.
  • The Chalice Dungeons. There's some implication that time isn't flowing linearly in them or that it's necessarily aligned with the timeline of the rest of the world, what with you encountering people and creatures that honestly should be long gone but are still very much alive and kicking. To say nothing about how some of them even change shape (to justify the procedural generation of the Root Chalice dungeons).
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: The ocean is one of the Great Ones' preferred homebases, particularly of the one known as Mother Kos. In The Old Hunters DLC, you actually get to visit the Innsmouth-like Fishing Hamlet where Kos washed ashore in the backstory and even find her Not Quite Dead corpse.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Largely averted; while there are other weapons to get in the later areas of the game, the starter weapons are more than enough to get a player through to the endgame. Other weapons are basically just there for the players' personal playstyles and their choice of aesthetics.
• Equipment Upgrade: The real crux of Bloodborne’s progression are the upgrades through Bloodstones and Blood Gems; any weapon can be upgraded to their endgame levels if given enough Bloodstones and Blood Echoes.
• Every Proper Lady Should Curtsy: One of the gestures, which you get after rescuing Arianna.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: Forsaken Castle Cainhurst is close enough to Yharnam that it can be seen from Hemwick Charnel Lane, but the ground there is covered in snow and your character's breath fogs as they walk around it.
• Evil Is Visceral: The School of Mensis has the most gruesome motifs, and being as its modus operandi is kidnapping people as fodder for their rituals, it's by far the most malevolent faction in the game. Their headquarters in the Hidden Village of Yahar'gul is home to Body of Bodies creatures, most notably The One Reborn, and the walls of Mergo's Loft are lined with eyes and guarded by a giant, rotten disembodied brain that's also lined with eyes.
• Evil vs. Evil: While they were once united, the Byrgenwerth College and the Healing Church went their separate ways long before the start of the game. The upper echelons of the Healing Church itself, the School of Mensis, and the Choir, have also split by the time of the game and each pursue their own, different means of ascension. They don't like each other much. When you travel to the Unseen Village post-Blood Moon, you'll find the ground littered with the corpses of Church Hunters, suggesting that the Choir tried and failed to stop Mensis' ritual.
• Expy: The Pthumerians are a long-dead civilization of tall humanoid people who wielded the now-forgotten art of fire magic, both as a weapon and as a means of gaining immortality, which in turn has rendered them into a shambling horde of mindless undead beings. Sounds an awful lot like the gods of Lordran from Dark Souls.
• Extranormal Institute: Byrgenwerth College, where the nightmare began.
• Expansion Pack: The Old Hunters, which was originally supposed to be two separate DLC packs.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The descriptions of the Eye Caryll Rune, Great One's Wisdom, the One Third of Umbilical Cords, and the rantings of Micolash and the fake Iosefka imply that gaining Insight causes eyes to grow on a person's brain. Whether this is literal or metaphorical is never clarified (though considering the Brain of Mensis, it might actually be the former), but it's undoubtedly true that the more Insight you have, the more one can see through the illusion that the Great Ones have cast upon the world.
  • Certain enemies also have many, many eyes, either by default or when they start appearing once you gain enough Insight.
  • The massive building in the Nightmare of Mensis has eyes coming out of the floor, the walls and the ceiling. There's even eyeball spiders that are pinned to the floor/wall/whatever.
• Eye Scream: Many of the Healing Church-associated characters wear bandages over their eyes, with indications that they've possibly enucleated themselves or outright carved their eyes out to attain inner sight. The enucleation angle is supported by the spinning eyeball of a Huntsman in the cinematic trailer,^note meaning that while the eye is intact, it's disconnected from the muscles and optic nerve while the outright removal of eyes is supported by the inhabitants of Hemwick Charnel Lane, the Eye Collector enemies as well as the jars of eyeballs found scattered about in certain levels.
  • The item needed to enter the Hunter's Nightmare is the "Eye of a Blood-drunk Hunter", which has a collapsed pupil.
  • The Orphan of Kos wields what appears to be a PLACENTA covered with a cluster of them.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Everything that's happened in Yharnam is due to the Great Ones' attempts to create more of their kind through the use of humans. You fight two of these victims; Rom, the Vacuous Spider, and Mergo's Wet Nurse. The Celestial Children and the stillborn fetuses that compose the Red Jelly Chalice Dungeon item are also the products of Great Ones mating with humans, a practice that evidently dates back to the Pthumerians. Both the Childhood's Beginning and Honoring Wishes endings make this happen to you, but just what happens to you changes.
• Failed State: Yharnam has all but collapsed before the events of the game, with most of its inhabitants having either hidden or been transformed into beasts due to the blood plague. Much of the city is governed only by mobs of citizens who chase down outsiders and plague infectees, burning many at the stake.
• Fantastic Vermin: "Vermin" refers to tiny parasitic creatures that infect the bloodstream. They're invisible except to a certain magical vision, but are theorized to manifest themselves in the "slow poison" status effect within gameplay. The League has discovered the vermin and hunts down infected humans and creatures, collecting and destroying the vermin in their blood.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Pretty much every single monster from Gothic Horror exists in Bloodborne's setting, including countless varieties of werebeasts, werewolves, gargoyles, witches, sorcerers, vampires, revenants, ghosts, Frankenstein-esque humanoids, ghouls, and demons, all intermixed with Bloodborne's take on the more human antagonists ubiquitous to Gothic settings like evil corrupt clergy, mad scientists, hostile townspeople with Torches and Pitchforks (plus rifles, swords, axes, flamethrowers...), and violent blade-wielding cultists. Then there are the Great Ones (the source of many of the aforementioned monsters), Cthulhu-esque aliens straight out of a Cosmic Horror Story. Then there are other creatures (most, but not all, also linked in-universe to the Great Ones) dumped in from other genres seemingly at random, like trolls, mermaids, hydras, centaurs, liches, giants, yetis, The Fly-esque half-insect half-human abominations, giant spiders and scorpions, The Grays, flesh golems, conventional zombies, and so on.
• Final Boss: The main game has three of them; Mergo's Wet Nurse is the last plot-mandated boss you have to face if you choose to "Submit Your Life" in the Hunter's Dream, but choosing to "Refuse" results in Gehrman acting as the last boss. But if you consumed at least three of the One Third of Umbilical Cord items before choosing "Refuse" and defeat Gehrman, you will then face the True Final Boss, The Moon Presence.
• Find the Cure!: People journey to Yharnam in search of a medical remedy that once made the city famous: a Panacea said to cure any illness. The protagonist is one of those foreigners, seeking a cure for their own disease. Unfortunately, it seems Yharnam itself is in dire need of a few panaceas already, as most of the folk have been mutated into beasts by the plague.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: One of the firearms is the Flamesprayer, a compact one-handed flamethrower.
• Flash Step: Using the Old Hunter Bone Hunter Tool boosts your rolling and quickstep speed significantly, changing the animation to make it look like you're teleporting. The description of said Tool also mentions a technique used by the first Hunters called the Art of Quickening, which Gehrman uses during the boss fight against him.
• Foreshadowing:
  • A subtle and easy-to-look example occurs when the player first encounters Iosefka (if they do so early on in the game), she cautions that she cannot open the door to her clinic for the player as she cannot risk infecting her patients. Later on, after defeating Father Gascoigne, she instead asks the player to send any survivors they find to her clinic. This sudden change of tone is coupled with a different voice actress as one of the subtle signs that Iosefka has been replaced by an imposter, who is later revealed to be experimenting on any survivors who have been sent to her.
  • An Interface Spoiler example; the game itself starts off as a Gothic Horror game with beasts and such in a Victorian setting, but a consumable item called Madman's Knowledge mentions Insight, or inhuman knowledge. And this is before meeting a seemingly out-of-place Cthulhumanoid Mook in an area filled mostly with deranged villagers and werebeasts.
  • If you pay close attention to the entrance hall of the Grand Cathedral (the area at the end of the Cathedral Ward where Vicar Amelia is fought), you might notice that the stone statues at either side of the hall aren't statues of people, they're statues of Amygdalas—grotesque multi-armed Great Ones with tentacled faces who bear a strong resemblance to Cthulhu. This is an early hint that Bloodborne has actually been a Cosmic Horror story (not just a Gothic Horror story) all along.
  • In The Old Hunters, upon finding the Whirligig Saw, a strange, pale mollusk-like creature will suddenly fall from the sky. Looking down into the sea from the Fishing Hamlet reveals that the Hamlet is actually above The Hunter's Nightmare, trapped behind a barrier. This reveal itself is also foreshadowed in some of the Rune descriptions, specifically those that ask the user to look above their heads, up to the cosmos.
  • Upon inspecting the apparent corpse of Lady Maria, she tells you that "A corpse... should be left well alone." Sure enough, the DLC ends with you finding the corpse of Kos (or some say Kosm), and having to face off against her orphaned child. Maybe you really should've taken her advice...
  • Early on in Central Yharnam, just past the Huntsman's Minion banging away at the gate, one can hear the music box that the Young Girl is playing, albeit very faintly. Just as this comes within earshot, the player character walks up a staircase, and at the top of it is a baby carriage. This is a bit of subtle foreshadowing for Mergo, as the music box is playing a fragmented version of the "Lullaby for Mergo" song from the soundtrack.
  • An out of the way room in the second floor of the Lecture Hall has two notes cryptically saying "The nameless moon presence that was beckoned by Byrgenwerth" and "Three third cords". These refer, respectively, to the True Final Boss and the items needed to access it.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: Mysterious witches called Bell-Ringing Women appear throughout the Unseen Village (they also appear if you're ringing a bell for assistance from another player, or sometimes in Chalice Dungeons, but the Unseen Village is their main playground). Their bell-ringing summons up and strengthens enemies, and for the final area of the Unseen Village, they combine their powers to summon up The One Reborn.
• Full Health Bonus: There's a class of blood gems (that can be kneaded into weapons) that boost your damage output while you are at maximum health. However, given that this is a soulslike and you lose health at the drop of a hat, this bonus only matters for the opening attack of an encounter, or if you are really, really good at dodging and parrying.
• Functional Magic: While the game itself doesn't call them magical outright, the Hunter Tools are basically Bloodborne's version of Device Magic that allows for the use of various supernatural powers through the use of these items. The Caryll Runes could also be considered a form of Rule Magic as they are the language of the Great Ones that grants strength to Hunters that etch the Runes into their minds. Blood Gems, Bloodstone Shards/Chunks, Blood Rocks and Blood Echoes could be considered a form of Blood Magic and/or Green Rocks that the Hunters use to enhance their weaponry and themselves.
  • The Accursed Brew: Allows you to throw a concoction of curses at foes.
  • The Beast Roar: Allows you to unleash a loud roar that repels nearby foes and objects, particularly projectiles.
  • The Blacksky Eye: Allows you to fire small meteor-shaped arcane blasts.
  • The Empty Phantasm Shell: Allows you to enchant Arcane damage to your weapon for a time, if applicable.
  • The Executioner's Gloves: Allows you to summon three wrathful spirits that lock onto a target.
  • The Old Hunter Bone: Allows you to briefly utilize the Art of Quickening; it drastically speeds up your rolls and quicksteps. Basically, it grants its user the ability to Flash Step.
  • The Tiny Tonitrus: Allows you to unleash blue lightning strikes that go forwards in front of you.
  • The Choir Bell: Allows you to heal and remove various status afflictions within the area of effect. Also affects allies.
  • The Augur of Ebrietas: Allows you to summon multiple tentacles from your hand in order to knock back a foe or otherwise open them up for a Visceral Attack.
  • The Madaras Whistle: Allows you to summon a giant and very hungry snake to take a big bite out the spot you've used it. Get out of Dodge before you get hurt.
  • The Messenger's Gift: Allows you to transform yourself into a Messenger. Perfect for fooling Adversaries into thinking you aren't there, therefore letting you get the drop on them.
  • A Call Beyond: Allows you to summon a small, but gloriously bright nova with multiple homing Arcane projectiles.
  • The Caryll Runes: Typically these Runes just enhance the Hunters' abilities, but two of the Runes allow their users to transform into a either a Beast (via Beast's Embrace) or a Lumenwood (via Milkweed).
  • Blood Gems, Bloodstone Shards/Chunks, Blood Rocks and Blood Echoes: Blood Gems are typically used by the Hunters to enhance their weapons with a variety of effects, such as inflicting Slow or Rapid Poison build-up per strike, empowering what blunt force trauma they can inflict, or by improving certain key gameplay elements — such as better Rally, dealing extra damage to Beasts or Kin, or costing less stamina for anything — although let it be known that some of these Blood Gems may come with "Cursed" effects, which may negatively influence a Hunter's or their weapons' capabilities in return for their added power. Bloodstone Shards/Chucks, Blood Rocks and Blood Echoes are typically used to upgrade or repair the Hunters' weapons as well as create Blood Gem Imprints onto the weapon to allow for the kneading of said Blood Gems.

Tropes G-I

• Gainax Ending: All three endings have varying degrees of Mind Screw, depending on how much of the game's lore you've gleaned.
  • Yharnam Sunrise: How was Gehrman able to release you from the nightmare by killing you? Was it all just a dream?
  • Honoring Wishes: What the hell came down from the moon? Why has it turned you into the next Watcher of the Hunter's Dream? What is the Hunter's Dream, really?
  • Childhood's Beginning: Why did the Moon Presence make a pact with humans to hunt the other Great Ones? Are you the next of the Great Ones? Is this the eventual fate of all of humanity? What will happen to the Eldritch Realm now?
• Gale-Force Sound: The Beast Roar Hunter Tool, which unleashes a sound wave powerful enough to deflect bullets and other projectiles.
• Game-Breaking Bug: It wouldn't be a From game without them.
  • Before the 1.02 hotfix patch, using either the Small Resonating Bell (for co-op) or the Sinister Resonating Bell (for invading) while in the Forbidden Woods would make the Lunarium Key not spawn in Byrgenwerth College, locking you out of the boss fight against Rom.
  • Some of the elevators can glitch out and become unusable, most notably the one at the Altar of Despair. The elevator will stay at the bottom of the shaft and the return lever up top will either be non-operational or you can use it but the elevator won't move. Most elevators are shortcuts, meaning that if they break, it's highly annoying, but not impassible; the Altar of Despair's elevator, however, is the only way to reach it's boss, so when it breaks, you can never fight that boss again on your own. They finally fixed it in the 1.03 patch.
  • The Isz Root Chalice Dungeons table can be easily glitched into only generating 32 of the 200 layout variants on the table. The specifics behind it is unknown, but it thought to be tied to how much loot you collect in all the Isz-type Chalice Dungeons.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Like the previous Souls games, all player deaths and subsequent checkpoint revivals are canon, and there is an in-story explanation for the mechanic. Here, it's because the contract you signed at the beginning binds you as a Hunter, and so no matter how many times you die, the Messengers will resurrect you at the nearest lamp until the Hunt is finished.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Despite the above however, certain enemies are, storywise, fully capable of severing the connection between the Hunter and the Hunter's Dream, which should disable their Resurrective Immortality. Namely, Gehrman and the Moon Presence. Yet even when the player dies to these enemies, they can still resurrect and retry again.
• Gangsta Style: All Hunters fire the Evelyn this way.
• Gaslamp Fantasy: Due to the merging of Dark Fantasy with the Gothic Horror and Victorian aesthetics of Yharnam. Later turns out to be a Cosmic Horror Story as well.
• Gatling Good: Not if you're on the receiving end of the barrels. As soon as you step foot in Old Yharnam, the Retired Hunter Djura will call out to you to stay back, or he will be forced to stop you. Should you ignore his warnings (after all, what could that old guy at the top of that tower possibly throw at you?), he'll promptly start to mow you down with hot lead from atop the old clocktower, and in stark contrast to the rest of the game's firearms, his mounted Gatling gun will kill and/or stunlock you fast, turning the rest of the area into a running-from-cover-to-cover hunt. The entire encounter can be resolved peacefully should you approach the area through another level's shortcut later in the game and walk up to Djura unseen.
  • The Old Hunters DLC adds a portable, if rather heavy, version of the Gatling gun similar to the one Djura was seen using.
• Gendered Outfit: Mostly averted (both male and female characters can run around in a frilly dress), except for the Black and White Church sets (coats for males, robes for females), the Knight's set (vest and coat for males, dress-like vest and skirt for females), and the Yharnam Hunter set (Badass Longcoat with an open front for males, closed trenchcoat/apron-like garment with a upper-body cape for females).
• Genre Shift: A story example. The game starts out as a Gothic Horror story, but about halfway through it shifts to a Cosmic Horror Story.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Micolash. Justified, since he isn't armed or mutated like most of the other bosses you fight, not to mention he really doesn't want to leave the Nightmare, and it's knowledge, behind. He only attacks you directly (with Arcane attacks) at the end of the fight, and will spend a good chunk of it making you chase him down hallways before then.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Whoever's in charge of the prison in Yahar'gul doesn't seem to take many measure to escapes. They let prisoners keep all their gear, and don't even bother locking the cells they put them into.
• Giant Spider:
  • The Amygdala, a 30-foot tall spider-beast with a squid-like head and 20 eyes, was seen hanging off the side of a building in the distance during the Alpha build, and is fought on foot.
  • Rom, the Vacuous Spider, is a bloated insect closer to a queen larva coated in mist and fires Arcane icicles at you, though she is accompanied by several human-sized spiders.
  • There are also literal giant spiders as enemies, and a giant spider miniboss bigger than the regular giant spiders serving as an early opponent in the Nightmare of Mensis.
• Gigantic Moon: The moon seems way too big to begin with, and over the course of the game, it seems to get even closer/bigger. This is eventually revealed to be an effect of an Eldritch Abomination known as the "Moon Presence" taking a keen interest in the town of Yharnam, only being kept at bay by another Great One for a time.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: The Abandoned Workshop is the spitting image of the Hunter's Dream, just with fewer gravestones. You can even find a chest with a copy of the Doll's set of clothes in it, and the lifeless Doll herself lying inside... tapping her finger.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Insight represents the player character's otherworldly and eldritch knowledge. It is gained by seeing and slaying bosses, collecting the skulls of those who had said knowledge, or from seeing certain places. Having too much of it causes strange effects and makes certain enemies stronger. Related to this is the Frenzy effect, which builds up as your character witnesses things that are so horrifying and unknowable, it literally makes their heads burst from madness. And the more Insight you have, the weaker your Frenzy resistance.
• Good Versus Good: One possible interpretation for the battle against the Final Boss. Gehrman is fighting the Hunter not out of malice, but simply to free them from the Dream, and because he has no wish to let another person suffer his fate. Meanwhile, the Hunter could be opting to fight Gehrman for the express purpose of freeing him from the Dream he so desperately wishes to escape from. On that note, the final battle of the game is a case of two people fighting each other for each other's sake.
• Go Out with a Smile: After you kill Mergo's Wet Nurse, the baby Eldritch Abomination it was guarding screams and cries as it dies. However, if you play the tiny music box, the baby will laugh instead.
• Gothic Punk: The game has a very Gothic-Victorian Era feel likened to the Jack the Ripper era of Victorian London.
• Government Conspiracy: The Choir, a shadowy organization who control the Healing Church and thus Yharnam itself. They want to use the blood of the Great Ones to gain higher knowledge of the cosmos and transcend their human bodies, and pursue this goal with inhuman enthusiasm by performing ghastly experiments on other human beings, including children, which turn them into deformed monstrosities.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Formless Oedon is implied to be responsible for the Nightmare, but he never even appears in the game, having long ago transcended beyond the need for a physical body.
• Grey Rain of Depression: The Fishing Hamlet is shrouded by a constant downpour, fitting for one of the bleakest, most difficult areas in the whole game.
• Guide Dang It!: It is a Souls Spiritual Successor, after all.
  • Getting all the Hunter Badges is no easy feat, but each Badge unlocks more items for the player to use.
    • The Saw Hunter Badge is found in Central Yharnam.
    • The Sword Hunter Badge is received by killing the Cleric Beast.
    • The Powder Keg Hunter Badge is in Old Yharnam on Retired Hunter Djura.
    • The Crow Hunter Badge is received by finishing Eileen's questline or by killing her.
    • The Radiant Sword Hunter Badge is found in the Healing Church Workshop.
    • The Spark Hunter Badge is received by killing Darkbeast Paarl.
    • The Cainhurst Badge is received by joining the Cainhurst Vilebloods Covenant.
    • The Wheel Hunter Badge is received by finishing Alfred's questline or by killing him.
    • The Cosmic Eye Watcher Badge is found in the Upper Cathedral Ward.
    • The Old Hunter Badge is received by killing Gehrman.
  • Certain weapons have hidden damage bonuses:
    • Serrated Weapons, all of which have a flat 20% damage bonus against Beast-type enemies. The weapons in question being the normal mode of the Saw Cleaver, both modes of the Saw Spear and the tricked mode of the Threaded Cane. The Old Hunters also adds the Beast Cutter and the Whirligig Saw, with both of them retaining the damage bonus in both of their modes.
    • Righteous Weapons, which have a varying damage bonus against Unrighteous-type enemies^note namely, four enemy types found in Forsaken Castle Cainhurst, three of which can be found elsewhere in the Chalice Dungeons. The normal mode of the Threaded Cane has a 20% bonus, both forms of Logarius' Wheel have a 30% bonus, and the normal mode of the Kirkhammer and both forms of Ludwig's Holy Blade have a 50% bonus. The Old Hunters also adds the Holy Moonlight Sword, with both of its forms having a 50% damage bonus.
    • The Church Pick is a special case as it has a built in effect to its Thrusting attacks (which is every attack in its transformed mode) that does 20% more damage to enemies vulnerable to Beast Hunter damage (normally only available via Beast Hunter blood gems, this includes enemies that vulnerable to Serrated damage plus many more) and/ or Righteous damage. This set it apart from the more typical Serrated and Righteous weapons because unlike them the bonus only applies to certain attacks, while all other Serrated and Righteous weapons have the bonus to all attacks in one or both of their forms.
  • The Graveguard set is found by jumping the cliff with the Celestial Children underneath on the other side within the Forbidden Woods.
• Guns Are Worthless: Zigzagged. The firearms found in the game are on par with Victorian Era firearms technology, but ammunition is limited, and they are deliberately weaker than the Trick Weapons, being used to make riposte openings instead: Miyazaki wanted to make sure the players wouldn't just use guns the entire game. However, while they lack the damage of melee weapons, they do have enough stopping power to make even bosses stagger. However again, there are the odd few firearms that actually do deal a good chunk of damage, and anything used by enemies will be painful, since they either focus on firearms or don't plan for ripostes and compensate by doing far more damage with them than your firearms will ever do.
  • To be specific, shotguns like the Hunter Blunderbuss, Rifle Spear and Ludwig's Rifle have low individual bullet damage, but their wider spread makes up for it. Pistols, on the other hand, like the Hunter Pistol, Repeater Pistol, the Reiterpallasch and the Evelyn, trade this spread for more damage and a quicker draw. The stranger ones like the Flamesprayer and the Rosmarinus have a DPS kind of damage output and thus require a steady stream of ammo. The two Cannons, while powerful, consume the most ammo out of the entire arsenal per shot, Hunter Tools and all. And the Gatling Gun, though its rapid fire and decent damage are very effective, is absolutely ravenous with the bullets.
• Halfway Plot Switch: The first third of the game is about hunting down beasts strewn about Yharnam in search of something called "Paleblood", with strong Gothic Horror elements. The second third is about branching away from Yharnam and out into the wilderness surrounding the city, where the game takes on a more Folk Horror, Torches and Pitchforks approach. The final third of the game is about tracking down the Paleblood's location, trapped within the dream dimensions of Eldritch Abominations and firmly lands in the realm of cosmic horror. Interestingly, the Old Hunters DLC acts as a microcosm of this plot progression, beginning in the Hunter's Nightmare (a twisted version of Yharnam), continuing into the Research Hall (styled after the labs of Victor Frankenstein), and ending in the Fishing Hamlet.
• Hand Cannon: What some of the most powerful pistols arguably are, especially with high Bloodtinge: the Evelyn, the Repeating Pistol, and Gascoigne's Dragoon, not to mention Gehrman's Modified Blunderbuss.
• Handicapped Badass: Some of the NPC Hunters, like Father Gascoigne and Retired Hunter Djura, bandage or possibly remove their eyes, likely due to gathering too much Insight for them to handle.
  • Gehrman may have lost his right foot, but he can still kick your ass six ways from Sunday if you refuse to leave the Hunter's Dream when given the choice.
• Haunted Castle: Forsaken Cainhurst Castle.
• Healing Boss: Vicar Amelia can pause in the middle of her battle to pray to a medallion in her hand, healing herself through that whole duration. The flipside to this is that she leaves herself open ti attack that whole time, meaning the player can wail on her to negate any of the health she's restoring.
• Healing Potion: What the Blood Vials are used for. You will be using them a lot.
• Heal It with Blood: Hunters heal themselves with blood vials, which contain special blood that heal the player by 40% of their max health. Considering how brutally difficult this game is, you better stock up on these vials (after all, this game is made by the same minds behind Dark Souls).
• Hell: As hellish as Yharnam and the dream realms are, the Hunter's Nightmare is the closest to an actual Hell. Various monsters and enemies found there were either taken to or ended up wandering into it after becoming blood-drunk as punishment for the Old Hunters' misdeeds at the Fishing Hamlet by the Great One Kos. Many of the characters found there are those who have been presumed missing or dead during the main Bloodborne storyline, and the blood river that leads to Ludwig the Accursed even possesses allusions to the blood river found in Naraka, the Hindu/Buddhist Hell.
• Hell Is War: Replace "war" with "the Hunt" (which is probably worse) and then you have the Hunter's Nightmare.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Two Healing Church Trick Weapons have a silver longsword that also works as a handle connecting them to their tricked forms; they are what makes the previously mentioned Kirkhammer and Ludwig's Holy Blade whole.
  • The Old Hunters adds the Church Pick and the Holy Moonlight Sword to their arsenal — with the latter more so than the former.
• Hidden Villain: The Moon Presence, whose existence is only vaguely alluded to in the description of a single item that's very difficult to find, before it shows up in the ending to either make you its servant or fight you to the death. That being said, whether it's a villain, well-intentioned, or heroic (or a mix of all three), is up to interpretation.
• High-Class Glass: True to the Victorian setting, it's possible to give your character a monocle during creation.
• History Repeats: Yharnam was not the first and will probably not be the last to suffer the Scourge of Beasts and inevitable tampering with the Great Ones. Before it came Loran, now buried by sand storms and overrun by powerful beasts, and before them came ancient Pthumeru.
• Homage: The overall design of Hemwick Charnel Lane seems to be heavily influenced by the opening village level of Resident Evil 4.
• Hourglass Plot: This is one possible interpretation. Once you've made the Cosmic Horror Reveal, the Great Ones become these alien, unknowable things that barely even seem to register the fact that they're literally crawling on top of the city of Yharnam. Even the occasional one that pays you enough attention to try to pick you up seem to regard you with roughly the same significance as you would a bug. As you progress, however, you learn that the Great Ones are generally sympathetic in spirit: Rom tries to protect mankind from Things Man Was Not Meant to Know that would make them Go Mad from the Revelation; Ebrietas tries to teach mankind about the secrets of the cosmos in a way that won't ruin them; the Wet Nurse attempts to help humanity transcend and become godlike in their own right, which would also fulfill the Great Ones' desire to sire descendants, and the Brain of Mensis just wants to be left alone. Mankind, in return, kill Rom precisely because they wish to discover what secrets she's been keeping from them, they become Mad Scientists who abuse Ebrietas' gifts in order to reject their humanity, they launch a hunt to kill the Wet Nurse's protégé, and capture, experiment upon, enslave and finally butcher the Brain of Mensis. The real turning point in the story is arguably when Amygdala, who tries to play her traditional role completely straight, ends up with a lethal case of Cthulhu Breaking Her Arms Punching Out A Human, and it culminates with the Moon Presence, who's possibly trying to free humanity of the Great Ones' influence by exterminating its own kind, finding itself on the receiving end of the extermination once a human has discovered a way to usurp the Great Ones by becoming Great Ones themselves. That's right, in this story, humans can end up being, quite literally, Cthulhu to Cthulhu; putting aside the few case of Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu described earlier in this page, humans are a race which can exploit, betray and exterminate a race of Lovecraftian aliens for no greater or knowable reason than simply because we can.
• Hufflepuff House: The Cainhurst Vilebloods. They're an old enemy to the Healing Church and have similar goals as to what it and its branches in the Choir and School of Mensis are trying to accomplish. However, they were effectively wiped out by the Healing Church's Executioners some time before the game begins, and exploring their Castle is completely optional.
• Humans Are Cthulhu:
  • The Doll claims that the Messengers help the player because they love and worship Hunters. Given the idea of Gods in the game, the trope stays in-context.
  • As far as the Great Ones themselves, there's room for interpretation that they have trouble discerning what we want from them, as much as we have trouble discerning their eldritch knowledge. It's also worth noting that, for all the creatures the Moon Presence could empower to combat the Great Ones, it chooses humans to do so.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: For all the monsters in the game, it's the humans who are responsible for most of Yharnam's problems, via misusing power they were given in pursuit of ascension. The Great Ones may be dangerous and alien, but they are "sympathetic in spirit", and it's the Byrgenwerth College and its derivatives that massacred the Fishing Hamlet, performed horrible experiments on Yharnam's citizens, and caused the scourge of beasts and the Blood Moon, all in order to make themselves Kin of the Great Ones. And all of this was entirely their own idea.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: The Hunter of Hunters Covenant consists of Hunters who hunt down other Hunters when they become intoxicated by their bloodlust, or in other words, 'blood-addled'.
• Hypocrite: Yharnamites disdain outsiders and the description of the Constable's Set ( Valtr's clothing) states that they enjoy stories of pompous and ignorant foreigners getting into trouble because of it; and yet, Yharnam is currently barely holding together because of a plague brought on by the Yharnamites' ignorant misuse of the Old Blood.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate:
  • Gehrman wants to die so he can finally leave the Hunter's Dream, but refuses to kill himself because that would mean someone else would have to take his place.
  • Some of the Patients in the Research Hall are so deformed and in such pain that they're unable to kill themselves, capable only of pleading for someone else to do it for them.
• I Choose to Stay: In the Honoring Wishes and Childhood's Beginning endings, the Hunter refuses to leave the Hunter's Dream, either to pledge themselves (or possibly being gang-pressed into service) to the Moon Presence or attempt to slay it.
• Iconic Outfit: The Workshop version of the Hunter's Set. While most of the promotional footage uses the version without the short cape, the very first CGI trailer released for the game used the version with it.
• Iconic Starter Equipment: The player character is commonly shown wielding the Saw Cleaver and wearing the Hunter Set, the former being one of the choices of starter weapon, and the latter becoming available very early in the game.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: The transformed heavy attack of the katana-esque Chikage has the Hunter sheath the blade and redraw it. A unique quirk of the weapon also encourages the player to do this manually: normally, the tricked heavy attack drains a large amount of the Hunter's health, but combo-ing said heavy attack out of the transformation animation (which is sheathing and then redrawing the blade) is both faster and less taxing on health drain than normal.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: The Great Ones are unable to have children and thus yearn for surrogates among humanity.
• Improbable Weapon User: Logarius' Wheel, the weapon of choice for the martyr Executioners Covenant. It's basically a torture method turned into a way of fighting. It works all the same.
• In Medias Res: The game doesn't tell you how you came to be in Yharnam or why. The opening is just a creepy doctor mentioning something about "Paleblood" and that you need an infusion of Yharnam blood to begin exploring the city's mysteries.
• Intra-Scholastic Rivalry: Much of the (human-level) conflict is rooted in the rivalries of various scholarly institutions researching humanity's Ascension To A Higher Plane Of Existence. The first, and most momentous, rivalry took place at the Byrgenwerth College, between Provost Willem's group and a splinter faction of his students led by Laurence: the former sought to ascend through Insight into the eldritch truths, while the latter believed ascension would come through imbibing the Old Blood of Eldritch Abominations. Laurence's group eventually left Byrgenwerth and founded the Healing Church.
• Invisible to Normals: With high enough Insight or the blood of a Great One like Rom, you'll be able to see the giant Amygdalas clinging to the Cathedral Ward's spires.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Event/plot-induced time advancement format. There are four time stages that permanently affect the world, and some quests, events and secrets are restricted to a specific stage. At the start of the game, it's sunset. Entering the Odeon Chapel triggers the Evening phase (lighting is slightly altered, Iosefka is replaced by her impostor, several questlines begin). Approaching the beast skull on the Cathedral altar triggers Night (the Forbidden Woods and beyond can be accessed). Approaching the apparition of Queen Yharnam triggers the Blood Moon (everything goes crazy), which will stay up until the ending (which takes place in the Hunter's Dream).
• Ironic Hell: Hunters who become consumed by the Hunt and their own thirst for blood are sent to the Hunter's Nightmare, a distorted version of Yharnam where they'll be trapped in an unending Hunt that not even death can offer them any reprieve from.
  • The Hunter's Dream is Gehrman's Ironic Hell; a quiet and peaceful version of his own Workshop where he'll be able to teach new Hunters the ropes, and where his only other company is a doll in the spitting image of his pupil Maria... but This Isn't Heaven. The Doll isn't Maria, it lacks her spark, and its likeness only serves as a reminder of Gehrman's past sins and failures, and even if the Workshop was his haven in the past and teaching the young ones was his greatest joy in life, this is where he'll be and what he'll do for the rest of eternity.... By the time the game starts, it's heavily implied that Gehrman has already gone through hundreds of iterations of the Hunt, and he's grown to despise both the Workshop and The Doll... but if he were to ever give up his role as the Watcher of the Hunter's Dream, a new Hunter would have to take his place and become bound to it, so he must kill all new Hunters that stumble into his Workshop in order to save them from the same hell he has suffered for so long.