Vampires are one of the most well-known monsters in the world. A being who drinks human blood and has supernatural powers and an ageless body. If they existed in reality, what kind of lives would they lead in this modern age of advanced information and technology? There’s a perfect game that lets you experience a part of that.
『Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2‘ is a first-person action RPG based on the tabletop RPG ‘Vampire: The Masquerade’. The setting is modern-day Seattle, America. The player takes on the role of an Elder vampire who has awakened from a 100-year slumber, and must fight in a nighttime city filled with intrigues such as vampire factions and murders. The compatible platform is PC (Steam/Epic Games Store/GOG.com)/PS5/Xbox Series X|S。
A number of games based on the TRPG “Vampire: The Masquerade” have appeared so far, and this work is a sequel to the cult-popular work released in 2004. However, there is no problem even if you do not know the original work or the previous work. I myself played the game without any prior knowledge, but since I could check the profound world view and technical terminology of vampire society at any time within the game, I was able to fully experience the story of this work.
The biggest appeal of this work is the “role play” as a vampire living in modern society. The vampires in this work have a clear weakness: they cannot live without drinking human blood, and they die under the sun. Humans won’t die if they suck in the right amount of blood, so they blend into human society without being discovered and live their lives little by little sipping on lifeblood. In this article, I would like to tell you about the appeal of what can be called a “vampire simulator.”
*This article was written based on playing the Steam version provided by the manufacturer using a PS5 controller.
Realistic vampire life in a miniature modern city
This work progresses in three major parts. The part where you will spend the most time is the miniature garden part, which is set in Seattle during Christmas. Since the main character is a vampire, the time period is only at night, but the beautiful cityscape with glittering neon lights and snow is recreated. The city is a so-called open world, and even the inside of the buildings are seamless. However, since it is a relatively compact city measuring less than 1km square, I will refer to it as a “miniature garden” in this article. However, the density of buildings is high, and there are collectible elements, so you can have plenty of fun exploring.
The player travels through the streets of Seattle as a legendary vampire who has awakened from a 100-year slumber. It has mobility that surpasses humans, such as high-speed sprinting that exceeds the speed of a dash, high-speed wall climbing using pipes, double jumps, and gliding. However, because they cannot live without humans, vampire society has something called the “masquerade rule.” The point is, don’t let anyone find out you’re a vampire. There are many NPCs roaming the city, and if they make suspicious movements within sight, their suspicion meter will rise. When a certain amount accumulates, the police will gather and attack you, and if the suspicion meter runs out, the game will be over.
Therefore, if you want to escape from the police or move at high speed, you will have to climb from the back alley to the roof of a building and move along the roof. This sprint between rooftops is very exhilarating. By jumping and gliding while sprinting, it can reach buildings tens of meters away, and even if it can’t reach the roof, it can use parkour to climb up to the roof if it’s a small wall, allowing it to fly freely around modern cities lined with buildings. Although there is no fast travel, probably because the city is relatively compact, I didn’t feel stressed because I felt comfortable traveling at high speed. Please note that there is no problem even if some people see you, so if you want to go to the rooftop from the ground, run to the back alley.
In addition, in this game you can talk to all the NPCs walking around the city, and surprisingly, NPCs are also fully voiced. However, it’s usually just one simple line. If you press the R3 button, the emotions of such NPCs will be visualized, and there will be NPCs whose colors are flashing. When you talk to a blinking NPC, options will be displayed and you can draw out their emotions. If they are optimistic, they will be charmed; if they are violent, they will become enraged and follow the player. If you are pessimistic, you will run away in fear. By sucking blood in that state, you can earn ability points to unlock the skill tree.
The conversation with this NPC is also affected by the main character’s costume. For example, if you want to charm, wear a seductive outfit, or if you want to scare, wear an intimidating outfit, and you’ll be presented with options that are sure to elicit emotion. On the other hand, if you wear a costume that doesn’t match your emotions, you won’t even be able to see the options and the conversation will end with just one word. As a modern-day vampire, it’s fun to act in a way that suits the NPCs and continue sucking blood in secret.
There are vampires scattered around the city who will help you, and you can unlock skill trees by consuming the ability points you get from sucking blood. At the same time as you unlock the skill tree, you will also receive new costumes. They also have options and sub-events during the story, and it is possible for them to become lovers in the end. The rewards were so attractive that I sometimes ignored the story and continued sucking blood. In addition, in this work, you cannot use skills just by unlocking them; you need to learn them separately, but I will explain that later.
In the miniature garden part, you will be able to fully enjoy the experience of being a modern-day vampire, flying around rooftops at high speed, completing story events, and sometimes sucking blood from NPCs.
High speed battle unique to vampires
As you progress through the story in the miniature garden part, you will enter a specific building that loads a separate map. This is the so-called dungeon strategy part. Although the dungeon is basically a straight road, it has a structure that takes advantage of the vampire’s physical abilities and has height differences, so it is necessary to carefully look up and down and find your destination. The inside is also characterized by countless objects arranged in detail, providing a highly immersive exploration experience. Occasionally, a horror game-like presentation is prepared, and battles with hostile forces occur in large areas.
As for the main character’s battle actions, you can perform a normal attack combo with your bare hands by pressing R1 repeatedly, and a strong attack that destroys guards by holding down. In addition, the high-speed sprint button also functions as a step evasion with a short press, allowing you to parry by dodging forward in time with enemy attacks. Furthermore, by combining basic movements and normal attacks, you can perform a variety of techniques, such as a high kick that makes the enemy flinch when attacking while sideways dodging, and a drop kick with a jump attack while crouching and dashing. Even with just basic actions, you can enjoy high-speed battles that make full use of parries.
Also, as a basic vampire ability, you can “attract” various objects by pressing the R2 button. The object you pull becomes floating, and you can throw it with the R1 button. If you draw a firearm, just press the R1 button once and it will automatically fire all the bullets, causing massive damage. Furthermore, attraction also acts on humans. It can only pull humans a few meters away, but depending on your ideas, you can use it to fight in a variety of ways, such as pulling them in to make them lose their balance, or pulling in high-altitude enemies so that they fall to their death. The pleasure I felt when I realized an improvised strategy using attraction was exceptional.
By making full use of these battle actions, you will be able to suck blood by whittling down the enemy’s physical strength, and sucking blood will restore your HP and the blood sucking gauge (described below). You can also throw things at walls to get their attention, and if you sneak up from behind without being seen, you can suck their blood without having to fight. Sucking blood from an enemy is the act of taking their life, and various finishing motions such as decapitation are also available, which is super exhilarating. By the way, you can also pull back the head that you snapped off, and if you hit it against the enemy, it will cause great damage.
In the early stages and one-on-one, you can enjoy high-speed battles that take advantage of your physical abilities, but from the second half onwards, a large number of enemies with firearms will appear, and situations such as snipers stationed in high places will increase. There are few recovery items in this game, so if you are surrounded, you will quickly run out of power. However, the main character of this work is a legendary vampire. We have powerful abilities to overcome such situations.
Irregular battles that utilize supernatural skills
In this game, you can set four powerful skills unique to vampires. In addition to offensive and defensive skills such as area attacks that blow away the surrounding area and fully automatic defense, there are also various skills such as becoming invisible and warping to a designated point. There are even abilities that you won’t find in other games, such as possessing enemies and actually moving them so they can attack each other, and even ordering all enemies within sight to commit suicide.
Each of these skills has a separate blood-sucking gauge, and can be activated when the gauge is full. Once you use it, the gauge will be empty, so you need to use other skills or suck blood to fill up the gauge. Powerful skills can’t be fully charged by sucking blood once, so you can’t use them repeatedly. However, there are a lot of items that restore the blood-sucking gauge, so the difficulty level requires you to fight while making full use of these skills. However, you can change the difficulty level at any time.
Learning these skills also involves role-playing as a vampire. Vampires in this work have multiple bloodlines, some good at violence, some good at charm, and some good at illusion, and the protagonist chooses one of the six bloodlines. As you accumulate experience points, you earn skill points, and you spend skill points to learn the abilities of your chosen bloodline. However, the main character is a legendary vampire. By asking the vampires mentioned earlier to cooperate, the abilities of blood relatives that were not selected will also be unlocked. However, the learning cost is likely to be high. Although I unlocked all the skills by the time I cleared the game, I was only able to learn about half of them. Acquired skills cannot be easily reset, so it may be better to check their usability by loading from checkpoints.
I chose a blood relative who specializes in charm, and I liked the ability to “kiss and become an ally for a certain period of time” that you can acquire early on. In the second half, I enjoyed stealth play in which I manipulated enemies to attack each other while hiding, but there are situations such as boss battles where you are forced to be surrounded. At times like these, just by having one person on your side, you can stabilize your situation. It was an ability that helped him until the end, but in the final boss battle, it turned out that he could turn even the boss into an ally. In other words, other abilities will also be effective against bosses, so you will be able to fight in a variety of ways depending on your chosen bloodline.
A story that changes depending on your choices as the present and past intersect.
Once the dungeon boss is defeated and the event is over, the game shifts to the detective part, where you basically investigate modern-day Seattle. It doesn’t make much sense to say that it’s a detective part all of a sudden, so let’s first explain the flow of the story of this work.
In the world of this work, in order for vampires to live smoothly, vampires have infiltrated the top ranks of organizations such as politics and police. However, a series of murders targeting vampires occur, and vampire society is thrown into turmoil. It seems that some forces are breaking the rules and plotting to destroy the city. The main character, a legendary vampire, wakes up in such a town for the first time in 100 years. However, a mysterious mark is engraved on his body, making him unable to use his original powers. Moreover, it is difficult to understand why he has the personality of an amnesiac detective in his head. In order to solve these mysteries, he will cooperate with Seattle’s powerful vampires and work to restore stability to the city. Additionally, you can choose to be a male or female protagonist and have a light character development.
The appeal of this work is that the story changes depending on the choices you make during conversations with the characters. A variety of choices will appear that require difficult decisions, and those choices will affect future scenes. In the end, even the lives and deaths of the characters and the fate of the town change. In detail, depending on your likability and costume, your attitude and name change with full voice. The dungeons and final bosses were well-developed, so perhaps the main story remains the same, but when I completed the game, I felt like I had created my own story. Each player will have a completely different story experience.
The story shifts to the detective part where the detective traces his memories at key points. The detective is also a vampire, and he remembers investigating a serial murder case just before the protagonist woke up. Detectives are blood relatives who specialize in illusions, and in the detective part they use their abilities to gather evidence and testimony. Once the investigation in his memory comes to a halt, the detective goes back even further to his memories from 100 years ago. It turns out that a murder case with the same method as modern serial murders occurred 100 years ago. Moreover, the memories revealed are closely tied to the events in the miniature garden part and the dungeon part. As the past and present intersect, the story gradually reveals itself, with some surprising twists and turns, and especially in the second half, it was difficult to decide when to interrupt the story.
However, in contrast to the legendary protagonist, the detective is, so to speak, an ordinary vampire. The detective part’s investigation takes place in the same miniature garden in modern-day Seattle as the protagonist, but unlike the protagonist, you can’t fly around on rooftops or suck blood from passing NPCs, and there’s no battle action. Although there is a function to fast forward instead of dashing, I felt that the tempo was slower than the main character. In addition, this game allows you to have a different experience each time you play it, and a feature that will allow you to skip the detective part on your second playthrough is being considered in a future update.
The miniature garden part, dungeon part, and detective part up to this point are all in one set, and this work repeats this flow as the story is woven. In this work, he basically acts alone, but the detective in his head has a lighthearted personality, and conversations often take place during battles and explorations. This dialogue is also one of its charms, so please listen carefully and enjoy it.
This is a work where you can enjoy intense role-play as a vampire living in modern society. The high-speed battles unique to vampires are exhilarating, and irregular battles are also possible by making full use of various abilities. The multi-layered story changes depending on your choices, and you’ll feel like you’re creating your own story. This work gave a new reality to the existence of vampires.
『Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2” is a PC (Steam/Epic Games Store/GOG.com)/PS5/Xbox Series X|SIt is currently being distributed to The game supports Japanese display.
