Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 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?
  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • After going through tons of his ghouls inside his mansion, it's rather surprising to discover that Alistair's already dead.
    • The first time, when you can easly jump on a safe table and shot Andrei the Tzimisce down with your trusty gun or with long-distance disciplines.
    • The Mandarin doesn't even have a health bar.
    • The endgame. Assuming you were hoping to kill the Prince in something other than a cut scene.
  • 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: a dude in a ridiculously fluffy white fur longcoat, a ridiculously tall Cat-in-the-Hat hat, and no shirt flips off Nines while Venture Tower burns in the background.
  • 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.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: LaCroix despite being a Hate Sink and one of the most hated characters in-universe has a surprisingly large number of fangirls.
  • Epileptic Trees:
    • Notable for the contributing factors. Pretty-much all in-game signs point to the cab driver being Caine, but the developers, when questioned by fans, claim that there is no right answer, and the expanded-universe novel covering Gehenna puts Caine 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, all of the Cabbie's voice-files are sitting in a file labeled Caine. As for conflicting with the novel, it's worth noting that Caine is pretty much a vampiric God - disguising his appearance and seeming as if he were in two places at once would be child's play for him. 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 Andrei and that one Conspiracy Theorist who manages to figure everything out, for the latter, she gets unusually hostile at the guy, and for the former, she says she has to "take care of something" and quickly goes to commercial after the call.
  • 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.
  • Fetish Fuel Station Attendant:
    • Seems to be what happens if you play a Female Malkavian.
    • Jeanette. Dear God.
  • 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, exclusive to the Tremere clan, is ridiculously powerful. Its starting ability, Blood Strike, is a homing projectile with a decent range that always damages, kills any non-boss in three or four hits, costs only one blood point, and - the kicker - restores two blood points to you after it damages most types of enemies. It's possible to wipe out an entire area with this ability and only end up with a net loss of one blood point. The second tier power, Blood Purge, affects almost all enemies, including several bosses. It costs only two blood points, and paralyzes enemies for several seconds by making them vomit blood. By the time they recover (assuming you haven't already killed them), the ability has long since recharged and can be used again.
    • 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. And to add icing on the cake, it erases recent memory from the target, meaning it can be used to neutralize any potential witness who threaten the Masquerade without having to kill them.
    • The Punch-Packing Pistol, the last pistol you can buy, is possibly the most accurate firearm in the game. And unlike the sniper rifle you can fire off multiple shots quickly before you need to reload.
  • 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.
    • After the Point of No Return, the player character can only go to his/her haven, Vandal's bloodbank, Trip and Mercurio shops, and the two final levels. Except leaving the haven through the airvent instead of the door allows to still access the normal areas of the game. It's fixed by the Unofficial Patch.
    • Hiding in a certain place during the final boss battle will cause Chiropteran Behemoth to glitch out and stay floating in one place, allowing you to just shoot it until it dies.
  • 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:
  • Narm:
    • Any cutscene featuring the Player Character won't look nearly as serious or cool if you're playing as a woman due to how they're rigged to the same skeleton as a male character. Their animations look incredibly wonky, and they have a notably masculine way of walking.
    • The opening cutscene is supposed to be filled with a sense of tension, but it's silly when you see that Velvet has attended what's supposed to be a formal meeting in her stripper outfit.
    • Nines' (and to a lesser extent, Damsel's) "rage face" looks pretty good... for a second or two. If they hold it longer than that (because they're waiting for you to select the next line of dialogue, for instance), or if they actually try and speak wearing it, the effect is... not what they were going for.
  • Player Punch: Heather Poe's fate, which is unavoidable, but only if you picked the less-moral option before. Thanks to the reinsertion of a dialogue option soon after she shows up. Granted, you miss out on the Body Armor, but some view it as a worthy sacrifice to save dear Heather.
  • Scrappy Level: And they can't even be blamed on Troika's Obvious Beta release...
    • Friggin' sewers... Both from a gameplay perspective and from a narrative standpoint.
    • 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.
    • The Elizabeth Dane can be this if you were really unlucky with your skillpoint allocation. It isn't so bad if you're halfway decent in Persuasion and Hacking. 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. And if you're a Nosferatu or a Malkavian, hence gifted with Obfuscate, even the sneaking portions aren't that bad.
      • 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.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: The main menu music sounds almost like an instrumental version of "Angel" by Massive Attack.
  • That One Level: The Warrens, a Marathon Level that largely serves as nothing but Padding. They're full of annoying and hard to kill monsters, tricky puzzles, and contain no interesting loot or anything importance to the plot. Thankfully, the most recent versions of the unofficial patch re-implements a Dummied Out shortcut that allows you to skip the lower three levels.
  • That One Sidequest: Defending the graveyard from a zombie horde. There are literally hundreds of zombies, they take forever to kill, and the two gates you have to defend are very far apart, and you automatically fail if even one zombie breaks through. Let's just say that many players take up Romero's offer to get him a hooker (or have sex with him, if your character is female) just to avoid the sheer pain of the graveyard level.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • The Player Character's sire. Going by estimates from lore fans based on the PC's traits and the tabletop rules, they were at the very least of below-average generation, possibly even stronger (most likely 7th). Yet they're forgotten about shortly after embracing the Player Character, with none of LA's major vamps ever mentioning knowing them. Why this individual chose the PC of all people, why a seemingly experienced vampire would (no doubt knowingly) commmit such an obvious violation of the Traditions, who they were and what their allegiance or ambitions were, none of it is ever answered. Also falls into They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, given that this is Vampire, where whole storylines could spring from trying to dissociate oneself from a sire who has fallen from grace or the power vacuum that the destruction of such a vampire would create.
    • There are two other primogens at the primogen meeting in LaCroix's office, but you never get to interact with them.
    • Grout. Seriously, the head Malkavian vampire already being dead when you find him is going to make you feel very cheated.
  • Too Cool to Live: Grout and your sire, see They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character above.
  • Ugly Cute: Of all things, most of the Nosferatu you encounter. With a hood they could easily live in LA. The male PC Nosferatu is arguably the ugliest of them.
    • Mitnick the hacker Nosferatu 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 though female Nosferatu seem to be uglier than the male ones, Imalia's just bald and a funny colour.
  • Wangst: Mocked; when switching from the Camarilla to the Anarchs, you can tell Damsel, "I hate my parents and I want a divorce."

Back to Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_–_Bloodlines/YMMV?oldid=1620188"