If I were a Strength build I'd have stuck with the Saw Cleaver, Botch, definitely. The axes and hammers and stuff are too slow, and some of the weirder weapons are too weird. Saw Cleaving is definitely the way to cleave.

Reading back through this thread I think I've missed a lot. Very few NPCs, especially Hunters, remain active in the city. I never saw Eileen again after meeting her in the overcroft above the canals. Gordon or whatever his name is was okay last I saw him but he's not very helpful.

Something has changed in Yharnam, since I got through the Forbidden Woods I think. Whenever I knock on doors or windows now the only answer I get is growling or screaming. Nobody talks. I have to take a quick walk through downtown to see if anything's changed. And there's the day/night cycle too... it's so subtle that until I read Xtal's note about it I'd only vaguely suspected there was one.

Also, what's the point of Chalice Dungeons? The idea's cool but as far as I can tell, they're a great way to run down your stores of blood and quicksilver bullets for very little return.

Botch: Is-It-Soup-Yet Cave (the one with the giants) is home to a couple of great bloodstones, arc-shaped ones I think, and opens up a HUGE shortcut you'll never use since you can warp anywhere from the Hunter's Dream, plus access to a little neighborhood you haven't been able to visit. It looks worse than it is. Think of it as the Blighttown Swamp, except smaller. Put Antidote in your personal effects menu -- that was a godsend when I discovered it, all my Bells are there -- and eat those things like chips. The worst part is the Sodomy Leeches, which might not be their official name but it should be.

But you gotta get out of that windmill. I mean come on man. If I'm ahead of you there's something not right with the world.

Edit: 

The Forbidden Forest is super-huge, also. I co-opped a lot of it, which was handy for learning secret paths and routes to treasure. Even so I bet there's places I never found. Unlike Darkroot Garden which is sort of wide open, the FF is more labyrinthine. You have to look for paths. In general the place was pretty easy for me, though, and a good source of Blood Echoes. The Snakeballs are easy to kill; Snakeheads are a little tougher because timing a firearm break is difficult. 

You'll also find a few Pigopotamuses further on. Personally I've always struggled with those guys. But there are paths you can take that circle around them. They herald the boss just further on. There's a useful shortcut in a cave near the windmill. 

I did fight him, and I'm sure there's something to his story. It's very much one of those Souls-ian decision points... "What will YOU do?" 

But he guards something that might be useful to you. 

I've been back through most of Yharnam to do blood and bullet runs, and suddenly it occurs to me there's a spot not far from Vicar Amelia's that I never fully checked out. I sure hope I haven't missed Eileen because I want that Blade of Mercy. 

This is definitely a game that will benefit from a couple of playthroughs, even if structurally it's more linear than Dark Souls. 

I'm also curious how it has affected my Dark Souls play, since the way you approach things is so different in Bloodborne. 

Yes, I went down there and ran into the two hunters, and then those axe guys further on. And then for some reason I turned back and went somewhere else. So that's on my to-do list. 

As is the Unseen Village, which I'll deal with right after Byrgenwerth, which is a terrible place to go if spiders make you scream. 

Botch, why does the forum hate you so? I guess it does allow me to watch your posts for signs of villainy...

Had at him by myself a few more times last night. I've gotten Rom down to about half and I think it's just a matter of time. Clearing out the first rain of spiders was helpful -- gave me more room to maneuver wide during his later teleports.

It seems like there's a lot of luck involved. When I died, it was either because one of the little spiders got an insta-kill jump attack on me (which is pretty damned infuriating), or I stopped to deal with one of the little spiders at the wrong time and got bombarded. There was another insta-kill on my first go, when Rom belly-flopped onto the lake surface and somehow drained every atom of my health.

For the hell of it I did start a new build last night, Strength/Vitality, and I'm curious to see how that goes. It's easy to miss those red lanterns signifying there's a rude person at the door.

Yup, Eileen appeared one more time. My Rom adventure is at an end -- you would have laughed at it. GorkyParkNotTheBand and I killed him JUST AS I DIED and the game took pity on me, and having been to Y'h'Apostrophes'are'f'Posession'&Contraction'aghul already I decided to visit Yharnam again. The poor fellow in the window never did give me a flamesprayer and had already turned into a beast, so I put him down.

And Ms. The Crow is right in the Grand Cathedral, right where Amelia used to be. She's done quite a number on me with the Blade of Mercy, but I'll get her sooner or later. She stops a lot to talk about how the Hoont turns Hoonters into madmen; I just need to get a Quicksilver Bullet into her spine at the right moment.

Next up for me is Y'Punctuation'Village. May take a short Bloodborne hiatus, though, since I saw that Scholar of the First Sin is $24 for PS+ members right now, and I never did finish Dark Souls 2.

(this is no xtal rant but I'll do my best)

I'm beginning to get pretty frustrated with elements of Bloodborne -- specifically those ones that weren't a problem in either of the Souls games. Normally it might not be fair to compare two different franchises, but when they reuse mocap assets from one in another, it's fair game.

My chief complaint is that I have issues with the camera in Bloodborne that I never had in Souls, where the camera was far from perfect but wasn't usually an adversary either. Here the camera seems to go out of its way to position itself in the most obstructed place. It doesn't help that the only color invented in Yharnam is "browny-grey," so things are often lost in the monochromatic scenery. THERE ARE OTHER COLORS. USE THEM.

Then there's a more subjective complaint that might be limited to my suckitude, but more and more it seems like setpieces and confrontations are made challenging by dint of lazy design rather than...  well, rather than good design that's challenging. The Vacuous Spider boss at Byrgenwerth is a prime example of this, as is the entirety of the Unseen Village that follows. Positioning Bell-Ringing Women where you can't see them and using them to respawn enemies endlessly from above while firebomb throwers block your path from below and a giant freaking laser beam cuts across your limited playfield may seem like a good idea, but just a little playtesting should have revealed how monumentally frustrating that whole zone is. 

And don't get me started on the trifecta of Hunters lurking in a church near the boss of the level. Not only is it impossible to draw just one out, but they take practically no damage from any attack, and their stunlock tag-team maneuver gets old really quick. Sure, this is a technique clever cooperators should use when they're well matched, but AIs don't seem to have the Stamina limitations that human players do. It took all afternoon to get through that damned village and past the Darkbeast -- actually a pretty straightforward fight since you can summon help from an Old Hunter now -- and what was my reward? A shortcut back to Yharnam that I'll never use. 

Which leads me to my biggest complaint, which is the hub-based structure. Yeah, I know, Bloodborne is a spiritual successor to Demon's Souls, not Dark Souls, but let's be clear about one thing: the Nexus hub in Demon's Souls was a technical necessity, not a stylistic mechanism. Hubs make it possible to clear old assets and stream new ones during a loading screen, while in open worlds you have to do that on the fly. FromSoft was (rightly) concerned about its ability to manage that on the PhyreEngine of the time. The Demon's loading screens were long enough as it is.

I'll never know Yharnam (or Drangleic) the way I got to know Lordran because I don't have to; I don't have to explore it and get intimate with every nook and cranny. The lovely wraparound architecture they built into Bloodborne is pointless since players simply warp to where they want to go. That is a crucial flaw in warp-anywhere or hub-based layouts, though in Bloodborne it's made all the more annoying by the fact that you have to go back to the Hunter's Dream no matter what, so you get two load screens instead of one.

All in all I love Bloodborne for its setting and ideas, and I love the concept of the Church Hunters and their training and the way they behave. But there's really only one way to play, and while it's a cool way, it's also ultimately rather limiting. It's still a great game overall, but it could have been more were it not for some misguided design decisions I hope don't become a trend in From's work.

That is all.

I remember how I felt when I opened that little metal gate -- the one inside the aqueduct -- in Dark Souls. It was like scales had fallen off my eyes or something. The revelation of the hugeness of that shortcut, of how much the game had just rewarded me for sticking with it, was among my Dark Souls Psychological Turning Points. And of course it keeps doing it; there's always (almost) a massive shortcut once you've been through an area once.

Shortcuts aside, walking around Lordran made me feel part of it. It was a sensation that grew over time. Sparkly drops you off at Firelink and it's just so hugely overwhelming -- not to mention the fear -- but little by little Lordran becomes your home. Places that had seemed forbidding become familiar. You learn how it all fits together. It's like looking at a piece of clockwork.

Dark Souls 2 had a number of problems, in my view, but the first thing to truly put me off was my inability to become part of the world. Obviously it's an option to simply not warp, but I find that when a capability like that is available, I'm almost compelled to use it.

Bloodborne is a great game, absolutely. It might even be some people's Dark Souls, but it's not mine. I play in fits and starts with weeks or months in between. I would like to finish it, but it often feels like I'll arrive at the end and be uncertain how I got there.