I had the worst first impression of this game
>First playthrough
>Game is flowing smoothly until I beat Vicar Amelia
>Where the fuck do I go now? This place just ends in a dead end.
>Go right of the cathedral
>Dead end, until you get some more insight
>Go left, fight Witch of Hemwick, it's just the prison shank lady with mold on her back x2, with adds
>Think the game is starting to flow well again, but it just ends in another dead end
>Head back to cathedral ward, trying to figure out what I'm missing
>Go up the path to the right that leads to the elevator that takes you to that spire place
>Dead end until you get some sort of item
>Go back, talk to Plague Doctor dude, head up the stairs and through the town square
>Find the prostitute and bring her back to the ward, route loops me back to town square
>Find my way to Blood Starved Beast, dead end
>Back to the ward, get blood treatment from whore, try to see if I missed anything in town square
>Killed by bag man with fuck ton of health
>Taken to prison, think I'm on the right track again
>Go left when I'm out in the street
>Dead end
>Go right
>Dead end
>Find way to Darkbeast Paarl
>Loops back to Blood Starved Beast area
>Can't figure out if I'm even on the right track anymore of if this is just optional shit
>Eventually figure everything out after running into dead end after dead end
>Enemy attacks still clip through solid geometry because FROM can't into giving enemies recoil animations like the player has in DaS
>Gave so little of a shit about recoil animations that not even the player has them anymore
>Enemies break recovery animations to start more combos (there was this incredibly shit instance where I was fighting the tonitrus wielding hunter right of the cathedral, where he went from bent over after launching a strong attack, to standing up with straight posture, already beginning his next combo, in a single frame)
>Can no longer use bonlamps to repopulate map without going to Hunter's Dream, sitting through a loading screen, going back to the area, sitting through another loading screen
>Hunter's Dream is supposedly the game's hub, but the NPC's rendezvous at the ward, have to go to two separate places and sit through two loading screens to level up and talk to NPC's
>PvP wasn't even functional at the time
>Beat the game
>Figure out I missed half the content because I couldn't figure out where the fuck to go
<Read the item descriptions, dumbfuck, you'll have an easier time
>Read them, just end up more confused than I was before
>Missed Moon Presence, Gherman, Daughter of the Cosmos, Orphan of Kos, Lady Maria, Amygdala, Martyr Logarius, Celestial Emissary, Ludwig, Laurence, Living Failures
Nothing clicked with me in this game, except for the combat. The map layout didn't click, the constant dead ends of "you can't go here until you get some sort of item" didn't, the lore didn't click, the weapon customization didn't, lack of respec didn't, most of the weapons didn't, and certainly not the way lamps work. Maybe I'm just fucking retarded, but despite my problems with the Souls games, I never had any of these issues with them. Everything felt less disjointed and walled off. Even if you took a turn down the wrong area, you could either find another route to take or go through the area under-leveled, but I don't recall that many areas just being straight up dead ends until you got X item or farmed X stat. I'm on my third playthrough and I don't feel like I know the map any better than I did my first time around. Bully me for being a fucking moron, but Bloodborne has the one map out of this series of games that I just don't fucking like. The layout is atrocious.