Finished my Nosferatu run, I don't have anything substantial to add to the excellent and eloquent write ups provided in this thread, just a few random observations without any particular order:
While there's no doubt that Santa Monica and Downtown are the best parts of Bloodlines, the decline in quality in the second half of the game isn't nearly as steep as I remembered it or as it is often made out to be. I thought both Hollywood and Chinatown had an interesting cast of characters and and several good quests that can be tackled in different ways - although all this is true to a bigger extent for Hollywood than for Chinatown. Thanks to Wesp's shortcut the sewers have effectively become a non-issue and do no longer taint the experience as they did before. The second half of the game has also a lot of treats in store in terms of missions - the Giovanni mansion, the Society of Leopold, and the Werewolf encounter were among my personal highlights. I think where Bloodlines really drops the ball is the endgame with the Hoolbrook hotel, Ming-Xiaos temple and the Ventrue tower - it's just on big, long combat slog that seems to go on forever without anything to do in between. I even enjoyed Hoolbrook for a while because I could finally go batshit crazy with my combat skills, but it dragged on for too long. The Kuej-in temple was also too long with too much repetitive combat, and the Ventrue tower was just glitchy and confusing as hell.
I'm really surprised by how easy this game is. When I played it for the first time a decade ago it was on a shitty computer that turned every boss encounter into a lag fest, which made me remember the game to be much harder than it actually is. This time I played a melee focused character with a few points in firearms (but never used them for most of the time) and there wasn't a single fight or mission that gave me any trouble (edit: except the graveyard zombie mission). When my Nosferatu wasn't busy stealth killing anything that moved he wrought some serious melee havoc with Potence and Bloodbuff on.
I really liked how powerful Obfuscate was, especially when maxed-out which allows you remain invisible even when interacting with the environment. Some RPGs will give you a cool spell or power, but then they'll say "oh yeah, but you can't use that here really", ''you can't infiltrate the castle using invisibility because you have to drag you party along to every loading screen', 'all but the weakest enemies are immune to this'. I'm mainly thinking about the Bioware/Infinity Engine variety and its spiritual successor(s) here, with their static non-interactive setpieces and limited gamist approach. Of course Bloodlines has it's own share of limitations - Obfuscate doesn't work on most vampires and bosses, but seeing how the majority of enemies are humans it is still a very powerful and useful tool, allowing for fun stealth gameplay most of the time.
I went into the game determined to see a different ending than in my first playthrough, but ended up choosing the Anarch ending again. The Anarch/independent endings seem the most satisfying ones, joining LaCroix and being blown-up like a sucker or making common cause with the Kuej-Jin only to be backstabbed and taken captive by some weak goons seems like the equivalent of Fallout's "tell the master where you Vault is and watch its inhabitants getting slaughtered" 'ending'. I didn't know about the Camarilla sans LaCroix ending and will definitely try it out next time, seems nice as well. When I first played through game I thought the ending was rather anticlimatic with the sarcophagus turning out to be an elaborate prank by Jack and all, but I see the beauty of it now, truly one if the finer endings in video games.
