Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines/YMMV

""The dead cannot live, but they can survive. Understand?""
 * Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Isaac a genuine friend that just wants to recover his old relationship with Ash? Or is he an obssesed vampire that embraced Ash just to force a relationship, whatever might be its nature, between them?
 * Complete Monster: Quite a few, which is unsurprising given the setting.
 * Andrei is the leader of the Sabbat, so obviously he's bad news. But its not until you reach his lair and find out what he's been up to that it truly sinks in how depraved he is.
 * This troper found that killing Andrei wasn't a job, but a PRIVILEGE. As I proceeded through his lair, I just kept getting angrier and angrier at the atrocities he's made from innocents.
 * Your first target in the bounty hunter sidequest chain, Stanley Gimble, is a psychopathic Mad Doctor who abducts and murders innocent men, women and children, then hacks their limbs up in order to fufil his deranged amputation fetish.
 * The Plaguebearers are a sect of vampires obsessed with death and disease, and plot to spread a deadly plague throughout LA through use of the city's bums and prostitutes, all For the Evulz. While the leader of the sect, Bishop Vick, arguably has a Freudian Excuse, the other two higher ups you fight have no such excuse and are spreading the plague purely for their twisted amusement.
 * Actually Brother Kanker pretty much believes in Vick's philosophy, it's just Jezebel who seems to be doing it for kicks.
 * Crazy Awesome: Malkavians. Especially the independent ending for a male Malkavian in full armor:
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome: Jack in the Anarch and Independent ending.
 * And also yourself in the independent ending.
 * Meeting as a Malkavian. You become an instant Fan Boy as you realize exactly who he is. (Or you scream and panic while trying to claw your way out of the cab. It depends on how your conversations with Rosa and Skelter go down.)
 * Crowning Moment of Funny: The entire Malkavian route.
 * Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: produces a rather sweet exchange.
 * When you talk to one of the thin bloods on the beach and give him the truth how his vampiric condition is probably permanent, he doesn't take the news too well. This is what the player can say to him.


 * Reuniting E and Lily is frigging adorable.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Pretty much the whole soundtrack.
 * Cult Classic: The bugginess of the game as it was originally released put a dent in its popularity, but a dedicated fanbase has grown over the years, especially in light of recent patches.
 * Disappointing Last Level: The game is a very complex, ambitious and non-linear action/RPG with an intriguing, atmospheric story and multiple ways to solve the majority of the quests... until its last act, in which it drops the RPG part and becomes a somewhat hack-fest against waves and waves of enemies and obnoxious boss battles. In fact, while it is perfectly possible to complete most of the game with a non combat oriented character who focuses on - say - stealth or diplomacy but isn't particularly good with guns and swords, in the last chapters such character will probably get his/her ass kicked.
 * Epileptic Trees: Notable for the contributing factors. Pretty-much all in-game signs point to  but the developers, when questioned by fans, claim that there is no right answer, and the expanded-universe novel covering Gehenna puts   elsewhere. However, it's entirely possible he put himself there so Beckett would find him in a circumstance that would make him appear trustworthy, or...yeah, you can justify either point of view.
 * If you check out the folders associated with the game on your computer, . As for conflicting with the novel, it's worth noting that  . If anything, it's possible that almost crossing paths with Beckett in LA is what prompted their later interaction in the novel...
 * He's the single most powerful vampire on the planet, besides the travelling issue, he could also very easily possess someone from halfways across the world and maintain it for long periods of time.
 * Some fans have suggested that Deb, from the radio show, is Kindred. This would explain a lot, since she'd probably be how the Camarilla (or the Anarchs) kept tabs on the various crazies--note her reactions to and that one Conspiracy Theorist who manages to figure everything out.
 * Fan Dumb: Ever since the game was released, there has been a terrible Flame War that used to rage on PlanetVampire.com between the creators of two competing lines of patches: the Unofficial Patch by Wesp and the True Patch by Tessera. They both acted like melodramatic brats and ended up ruining the game for everyone else.
 * The story behind the flaming is that Tessera claims that the Unofficial Patch is actually a mod that needlessly changes many aspects of the game and that Wesp is lying by calling it a patch. Furthermore, Tessera believes that the VTMB community's obsession with "modding" the game comes from an unfulfilled subconscious desire for a sequel to the game that will never come, and has stated that he hates the PlanetVampire community and hopes they will choke on Wesp's patch.
 * On the other side of the fence, Wesp claims that Tessera stole some of the code for his patches even though this isn't true: the initial design for the True Patch stipulated it could be applied on top of Wesp's patch, but this was later discarded. Wesp also claimed that Tessera also "stole" bugfixes from him, but that claim is unprovable, as most of the bugs in the game were first discovered by other parties unrelated to either of them.
 * There are two major unofficial patches, and they serve different purposes. They generated some heated debate about their various merits and originality. These patches provoked a lot of Fan Dumb, including flame wars, a war on The Other Wiki, and some people taking their balls and going home.
 * Fridge Brilliance: According to the tabletop Guide to the Anarchs sourcebook, published a couple years before Bloodlines, "Nines" is the name of a popular Anarch game that resembles paintball + tag + live ammunition.
 * Fridge Logic: Wouldn't the Sheriff turning into an enormous bat and flying around the tower constitute an equally enormous breach of the Masquerade?
 * Game Breaker:
 * Celerity and Potence allow you to go into a Bullet Time massacre which, at high levels, gives you Nigh Invulnerability simply because you'll have one hit killed everything before it can even reach you.
 * At higher levels, Fortitude makes you near invincible, especially if you have the body armor. With it, you can shrug off entire clips of Steyr Aug ammo and even normally hard-hitting bosses like Andrei's War Form and The Sheriff will barely hurt you.
 * The Flamethrower deals ridiculous damage with no firearms skill needed, and it stops non-monstrous bosses from attacking or using their defensive skills as long as they burn. Its only weakness is its lack of ammunition and the high cost of the fuel.
 * The Thaumaturgy Discipline "Blood Purge" from the Tremere affect almost all enemies, including most bosses. It costs only two points of blood to use and leaves them puking blood while you can wail on them with your melee weapon or firearms. And, once they recover, you can just activate it again and leave them puking again to repeat the process.
 * The similarly functional (and Tremere and Ventrue exclusive) Trance skill, which only costs one blood, leaves your opponent completely defenseless for a good while, works on almost every boss, and will still daze them even if it fails! Not only can it be used to unload magazines of pain on bosses, it is also VERY useful for stealthy players. The Tremere themselves seem to be game breakers, class wise.
 * The Punch-Packing Pistol
 * Good Bad Bugs: You can get duplicates of skill books by selling them to a vendor and buying them back. Most books can raise your skills two levels, but only one at a time.
 * Hiding in a certain place during the final boss battle
 * Grandma, What Massive Hotness You Have!: Beckett and Strauss sometimes get this treatment by the fandom.
 * Harsher in Hindsight: If you look on Simon Milligan's computer when you come to deal with him for Pisha, you discover that they were planning on shooting the next episode in the zombie-filled graveyard in Hollywood.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: You can tell E after  "Vampires in love, you two make a great airport paperback"
 * One radio commercial is for a "Frankenstein" game parodying VtM: Bloodlines (down to being created by Troika themselves!). One of the gamelines in the New World of Darkness is Promethean: The Created, which is, at its most basic, exactly such a thing.
 * Nightmare Fuel:
 * Think you can breeze through the haunted hotel level because you're a big, scary vampire? You're wrong.
 * Near the end of the game, you essentially have to run through hostile territory to get to the cab driver you've been relying on to drive you around through the whole game, so he can take you to safety.
 * Player Punch:, which is unavoidable, but only if you picked the less-moral option before.
 * Thanks to the reinsertion of a dialogue option soon after shows up. Granted, you miss out on the, but some view it as a worthy sacrifice to save dear
 * Scrappy Level: Friggin' sewers...
 * The museum level as well. It's starts off rather simple until you get to the lower levels. Now you've got cameras that sound alarms if you get caught in their paths. You can disable the cameras by using the computer in the security booth, but there's a guard inside. If you don't have any Disciplines to incapacitate him without killing him, you're going to have a hell of a time trying to manuever around the cameras and the guards patrolling the area.
 * Also the Elizabeth Dane if you're not a Nosferatu or a Malkavian (hence gifted with Obfuscate). Sure, you can still massacre anyone, but you get penalized.
 * The Dane is not so bad if you are halfway decent in Persuasion and Hacking (which you should be anyway). You can persuade the first guard to give you the police report and call away another guard, then you just need to sneak into the cabin, hack the doors and the cameras, take the ledger and off you go. Without even coming close to another guard.
 * Even without Obfuscate if you managed to persuade the first guard but screw up (i.e. take too long and the guard is back at his post) you can just run right by him, pistols aren't going to drop you that fast and you can still avoid killing anyone.
 * Tear Jerker: Quite a few. One section of the Fun With Pestilence quest in particular:
 * Too Dumb to Live: None of the factions can really match the utter foolishness of the Society of Leopold. Not only do their 'field agents' dress like your typical cliche oWoD character ( Literally a trenchcoat and a katana), making them stand out like sore thumbs, their base is littered with ammocrates not seen in any other base (not even the sabbat) ripe for anyone to shoot everybody to hogh heaven. The actions of the hunters are also so stupid, it gets lampshaded. But the best example of their foolishness has to be their laser trip-wires, while one might expect the lasers to simply warn the hunters, instead, they are explosive rigged. And why would people fighting against vampires allow their own laser tripwires to be easily toggled between being triggered by vampires (room temperature) and humans (body temperature)? Of course, it could just be Law of Conservation of Detail and the player character actually does something more complicated to change the settings than pick one in a menu.
 * Ugly Cute: Of all things, Mitnick the hacker Nosferatu. Unlike the other members of the clan, he looks like a perfectly normal 20-something aside from pointed ears and baldness. Some dialogue implies that Mitnick somehow became more attractive after becoming a Nosferatu.
 * Which raises the question of how ugly he must have been before he was turned.
 * Even the other male Nosferatu don't look horrible, with a hood they could easily live in LA. The male PC Nosferatu is arguably the ugliest of them. However, the FEMALE Nosferatu (PC or NPC) are utterly horrific.
 * Wangst: Mocked; when switching from the Camarilla to the Anarchs, you can tell Damsel, "I hate my parents and I want a divorce."

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