When Demon’s Souls released in 2009, I was going through a pretty hard crisis of faith regarding videogames. I had grown old enough to finally see their limits, the industry-imposed repetition and condescention in their design, the corners that have to be cut and padded. I blindly took the advice from a few raving cynics I aligned myself with and imported Demon’s Souls from America as a last shot before I defiantly moved on from the medium like the little drama queen I was. DeS was exactly the game I needed, I had never played anything else like it, I had my mind shattered by the way the bosses in the title weren’t so much battles as they were puzzle boxes - imposing small situations to solve, being asked to find the lone small thread that will make the beast unravel. It felt like a NeverEnding Story adventure or something, I loved it, I still do.

With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.

There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.

Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.

Nearly a year removed from its launch, free of recency bias, no longer swarmed by the theses of those more eloquent than I, I'm content in saying I don't like Elden Ring. I've beaten it a couple times, played solo and online, used a variety of builds, gone completionist and not, tackled its world in intended and unintended order, had fun and glazed my eyes over in boredom, been in awe of and readily mocked it through and through. I like so very much of it, but I don't like Elden Ring.

I don't like this GRRM-gilded world. There's a prevailing sense of deliberate obfuscation that apes the peculiarities of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls but it's a mere mimick. It is an inverse Rowling-style approach to worldbuilding -- she fills her holes and says they were always filled, Dark Souls had holes and never noticed them, Elden Ring creates holes to taunt the VaatiVidya watcher with the tar with which to fill them.

I don't like this ocean of content. Even if wondrous tsunamis are few and far between, the impetus to purposefully seek them renders them decreasingly effective. The novelty of Walking Mausoleums, Erdtree Avatars, winding tombs, subterranean cities all turn quickly to routine. I can only laugh so many times at a man getting hit in the groin by a football.

I don't like the perpetual breadcrumbs. Scattered like millet for fowl lay treasures for the taking. Of what use is a thousandth herb, a hundredth spirit, a tenth greatsword? None, so say I, if it caters only to that which I am not: the theorycrafter, the PvPer, the challenge runner. And for these redundant fragments to be handed to me after a repetitious romp through yet another imp infested tileset with a singular twist? I am left wondering why I put in the effort.

I don't like the ramp. Other FromSoftware titles, deliberately or not, have tremendous peaks and valleys in their presentations of power and the scope of encounters. From the terror of Ornstein and Smough to the odd simplicity of Sif to the potential headache of Four Kings to the humour of Pinwheel to the fear of Nito to the melancholic ease of Gwyn. Here, outside of minibosses, I proceed uphill eternal as Sisyphus. On paper it is an ideal, in reality it is a fatigue. Does it seek to frustrate? Does it matter? There is no reprieve on the intended path.

I don't like that this is designed for me to like it. Polished to a mirror sheen, every aspect is intended to appeal to me. A personality in flux to receive my adoration, never showing me that true, imperfect self. I long for the idiosyncrasies of a chance encounter.

I had so much fun with you, and I came away with the understanding it was all a falsehood. The dopamine was real. The sentimentality, a fiction.

✅Open world
✅Abyssmal collect-a-thon of plants and animal stuff
✅Shitty crafting system completely tacked on
✅"Stealth" mechanics revolving around hiding in bushes and takedowns
✅Enemy campaments with useless rewards
✅ Annoying npcs

Far Cry haters are awfully quiet today

FromSoft's first open world game and they absolutely nailed it. I was initially worried that the move meant they would have to compromise on level design, but that wasn’t really the case here. Despite its vast and seamless world, the majority of it still has the same level of varied intricacy as the rest of their games. Like sprawling castles with detailed interiors and immense verticality, random caves you may stumble across that lead to massive underground systems, and of course plenty of unique bosses to fight.

That’s its biggest strength for me, the exploration. What sets it apart from many others is the complete lack of endless map markers or quests to focus on, rather just letting you get lost in a world with so much to see on the horizon that you can’t help but want to explore. And it rewards this curiosity by always having something worthwhile to find, whether it be useful items, boss encounters, or even paths to entire new areas. This also makes approaching difficult bosses a bit more manageable, as you can always just go somewhere else if you’re stuck and try again when you’re stronger.

And as a setting I loved The Lands Between. I’m not sure how much influence GRRM had over the world-building, but its mysterious lore is ever present all over and it’s wonderfully realized. It’s still as somber as From games have always been, but it also felt more grand given how open it is in comparison.

The only real gripe I had was the smaller catacombs you can find felt a bit too repetitive. Most of them look the same and some bosses are reused for them, basically serving as ER’s version of chalice dungeons which is eh. But I still enjoyed going through them so didn’t mind too much. Performance also seems… not great on most platforms, but I played the BC version on PS5 so was pretty much locked 60 for me. Hopefully they can iron its issues out for everything else.

But overall it’s yet another masterful game by From and now among my favorites. I’m excited to see where they go from here, cause it really did feel like a culmination of all their work up to now.

Elden Ring gets caught into the trap of the open-world design: bigger always means better.

There is a sense of discovery in the first 20 hours or so, where you slowly uncover the elements that form the world (characters, enemies, levels, systems...). Many of them are well-known by now, as everyone has pointed out, given their iterative nature. But it's in how is iterated that I think lies the magic of those first 20 hours. The caves, dungeons and mines are my favourite part, having to keep your lantern with you at all times, not knowing where those little assholes will come you from. Little passages, some secrets, a nice boss battle at the end and out. A little adventure in the midst of all that grandiosity.

Sadly, those 20 hours of discoveries and secrets comes to an end rather abruptly, when the iterative becomes repetitive. The same locations, the same enemies, the same bosses, the same items, the same strategy, the same vistas. A boring mosaic. All the magic got swept away for the sake of squeezing all those hours that become junk.

There is much more than just small dungeons, of course. The rest is an extension of dark souls 3, not dark souls 1, with very big and intricate castles, and at the end a stupidly giant mega boss awaiting to be slayed and make a fucking super epic moment, which in many cases read as very similar encounters. I would lie if I'd say that i didn't enjoy (very much enjoy) some of those battles, mainly Radahn and Rennala. They offered something more varied and interesting than just battle, and very refreshing.

Dark souls games have been compered to Berserk ad nauseam, pointing at all the homages and references to Miura's biggest work. It is considered that Dark Souls 3, even this one, kept some of the spirit of the manga faithfully. Recently, I was once again listening to Susumu Hirasawa's ost for the anime while re-reading the manga, and when this song started https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZa0Yh6e7dw, I realised that we view Berserk through different lenses, because there is no moment in all Elden Ring that even resembles this.

If that wasn't enough, I've also been replaying Dark Souls 1 at the same time, and it's really jarring the comparison. People destroyed Dark Souls 2 for not capturing the essence of the first one, but I now think they only meant the world wasn't fully interconnected, because Elden Ring is nothing like the first one in the worst ways! DS1 gets much better the spirit of Berserk, the melancholy of a dark and twisted world, full of violence but with traces of hope to continue. Some of the characters you meet along the journey are too cynical to keep going, some of them still hold the will to go forward, many will fall into despair, madness and death, but every single one of them are bound to the strength needed to dream a different future. The idea that the world is not going to die this time. Some still believe it, some stopped believing a long time ago. You yourself keep persevering in a world that has died so many times that it doesn't make sense anymore. Buildings are not going down, but the concept of architecture itself is fading. Ugliness can be felt in the colors of the walls, in the faraway trees and landmasses. Elden Ring is too concrete and clean to show that ugliness, and is too convoluted with power plays to make character interactions tragic or memorable (also, maybe having much more characters doesn't help). The only exception is the woman's hug in The Round Table, something that could perfectly have been in DS1.

I read someone explaining the game as "imagine the moment in DS3 when you saw Irithyll for the first time. That's Elden Ring all the time", implying that it was something great. For me, it's not. I got saturated of so much "beauty", so much brightness, so much clarity, so many perfect compositions that it didn't strike me anymore. Since you are going to be traversing a world for a long time, they decided to make STUNNING VISTAS all the time, every time. An attempt to naturalistic open-worlds. In Spanish, there is a word that perfectly describes my sensations: relamido.

Yes, the gameplay is obviously good. Its the previous games with more weapons, which translates in fun ways to approach fights. But I find pretty underwhelming that the thing this game has going for is what people criticise constantly: polish. A bigger and uniform forest with polished trees.

Maybe I'm being more harsh with this game than with any other, but seeing the comparisons with previous games and Berserk, and spending maybe 70 hours with no moving or alienating experiences unlike the previous ones, has made me more bitter towards this spouting of thoughts. Beware games, don't make me play for that long.

The fallen leaves tell the story of an arborescent world order decaying from the inside out. The Land Between is slowly cracking away at the seams as its twilight draws ever closer.

This is the world that FromSoftware shows the player, a world in which we are left to pick up fragments of a bygone past piece by piece as we fight against the forces that seek to uphold the ways of old.

This world we are shown is a not-so-subtle metaphor for our own world, a world that so desperately clings onto the ideas of old (capitalism) in the hopes their old world order won’t buckle to the pressure of history and the forces of progress itself, that force being you, the Tarnished.

Elden Ring is a game of stagnation, a game that challenges the very essence of the series it originates from, a game that seeks to take the Soulsborne formula to its logical end point and burn it all down in order to start anew. In some ways it succeeds at doing this, in other ways it doesn’t, and I think the ways it succeeds at this overshadow even its most glaring failures.

The gameplay here is refined to the best it can be; it feels as though every weapon was meticulously crafted to allow for some of the most varied and unique build variety I’ve seen in a Souls game. The open-world especially lends well to enhancing the variety of Elden Ring due to its non-linear nature, which allows for some of the most freedom in exploration and gameplay I’ve seen in a modern AAA title. I sometimes feel that the gameplay, however, was so streamlined and improved to such a degree it can sometimes feel sterile in a sense. I miss the roughness and edge to the older Souls games which I feel isn't present in From's newer games. There’s times, however, where this freedom can become overwhelming and lead to parts of the world feeling either bloated with meaningless content (excess copy-and-paste bosses and dungeons) or completely barren, a problem that could have been easily remedied if the map itself was slightly reworked to be a tad bit smaller. I feel as though a rework of the map that makes it more compact and tight would have greatly benefited Elden Ring and led to the game feeling less unbalanced in the way it presented its content. Even in spite of all that, there’s a genuine understated beauty to the world of Elden Ring that I cannot deny. This world is beautiful at times, and even in its rotting and decaying state, there are still shreds of beauty left that are worth holding on to.

Moving on from the gameplay, I feel that Elden Ring truly shines narratively and thematically the most. One may be quick to write Elden Ring off as a rehash of Souls, which to an extent is a take that isn’t without its merit. I, however, believe that it’s continuity with and rupture away from Soulsborne narrative similarities that this game truly gets interesting; it feels like a meta-self-examination and final nail in the coffin for these ideas. Elden Ring has many similarities to Dark Souls; often times, the main narrative similarity people point to is the concept of a dying world held in stasis that we are forced to decide the fate of, but what Elden Ring does with this concept is far more brilliant than people give it credit for.

Elden Ring is not just taking Souls narrative and gameplay concepts to their logical end points; it’s also burning them down. Elden Ring is Miyazaki’s pivotal turning point, where he realises that this formula is not going to be sustainable forever and that it’s necessary to accelerate these ideas to their end points and then burn it all down (symbolically done through the burning of the Erdtree).

To further understand the significance of the Erdtree, I must draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

In their follow-up book to Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatarri describe two forms of organisation: rhizomatic (non-hierarchical) and arborescent (hierarchical). These two forms of organisation are obviously references to plants, with arborescence referring to trees with a central root system and trunk and rhizomes referring to potatoes and their decentralised, free-flowing root system, to put it simply. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze uses these plant metaphors as a way to explain and illuminate the flaws of certain organisational structures and forms, with arborescent structures having one key flaw: their dependency on each other. If one part of the structure dies, rots, breaks, etc., the rest will follow suit, as they are dependent on each other.

Now, with this understanding of arborescence, we can tie it to the Erdtree and its functionality within the narrative of Elden Ring. In Elden Ring, the Erdtree serves as a monument that represents and upholds the old world; it maintains order and allows the world to continue as it is, but if this order is threatened or destroyed, the very same old world order it once upheld will crumble soon thereafter. It is through the actions of The Tarnished that we are able to light this arborescent structure ablaze and accelerate history forward (I would use this as a jumping-off point to explain Mark Fisher’s idea of accelerationism (not to be confused with Landian accelerationism)and how it ties into the story of Elden Ring, but this review is already too long as is).

Elden Ring is a story of stagnation and rebirth.

I ultimately see Elden Ring and, more specifically, its Frenzied Flame ending as a rejection and rupture away from the ideas of the old and an embrace of more radical new forms and ideas, while also staying in continuity with the general style of Soulsborne. For all of its flaws, of which this game has many, I firmly believe it’s a bold new step in the right direction. I believe that Elden Ring is not only the end of an era, but a new beginning and continuation into a new, radical, and free era of expression and creativity from Miyazaki and his team.

A challenge can be anything that’s difficult to achieve, but to be challenged, in the sense of being called to action, carries a much more complicated set of implications. The most distinct is a sense of inescapability, that there are no alternatives but to rise and give your best within a certain set of limitations. The difference between the two is core to what I found lacking in Elden Ring, but it’s also what I think lies at the center of the game’s unprecedented appeal. In a game like Dark Souls, you could find yourself at the bottom of Blighttown with no way to easily boost your weapons, no way to upgrade your flask, no way to try a different weapon, nothing, you had to either press onwards, or do what no player wants to do, climb back out and redo the whole thing when more prepared. For lack of a better term, it was a challenge in both the intransitive and transitive senses; it was difficult, and it also confronted players with that sense of inescapability. Elden Ring’s wide open world with unimpeded access to weapon upgrades, weapon arts, summons, physick flasks, alternative progression paths, and so much more means that the only time the game presents an active challenge is an hour from the end, in the final couple bosses. The rest of the game is a wide open space where you can always go where you’re prepared, and snowball without pressure. The Souls games always let players do this to some extent, but the ease with which this can be achieved in Elden Ring is its unique selling point, and thus why I think it’s so appealing to newcomers. An open space dotted with intransitive challenges allows players of all skill levels to enjoy themselves in the way they want to, and never hit any brick walls. For me though, the most memorable parts of the series were the times like Blighttown and the drop into Anor Londo, when I knew that my only real choice was to press onwards against all odds. Elden Ring is clearly an artistically ambitious game, and I can applaud and respect it for that, but now that I’ve finished it, I’m left without any similar moments to remember. I’ll certainly recall playing it, but that's a lot different from an experience hoping “to be remembered”.

Hey there! I’ll be honest, I don’t have a great deal of interest in talking about Elden Ring in any formal capacity. If someone wants to pay me to do it, I might, but no-one likely does. :/

Anyway, instead of a write-up, I’m just gonna list my 10 favorite proper nouns in the game.

-

10. Vulgar Militiamen (keepsies on this one for my future hardcore punk band)
9. Shabriri Grape
8. Ancient Death Rancor
7. Morgott, The Omen King
6. Flame, Fall Upon Them (the choice to make spell names full sentences is always sick, regardless of property)
5. Fingercreeper
4. Land Squirt
3. Albinauric Bloodclot (I would ride around on Torrent just mouthing “albinauric bloodclot” a lot)
2. [Bastard’s Stars](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Bastard's+Stars)
and finally, 1. Godskin Stitcher

Alright, bye!!

A lonely journey through ruins punctuated by dense trials in honeycombed dungeons. What (obviously) distinguishes this for me from previous Souls entries is the ability to stray from the Light of Grace and just wander through the vast overworld and navigate the winding geography in an almost frictionless manner, then return to the dungeons when I have recovered my courage (usually with the added warmth of a friend guiding or being guided through the labyrinths).

It isn’t really the bosses or combat that draws me to this series, but the perpetual sense of a larger world, of meaning and history, just beyond your grasp - a sense of mystery evocative of Gene Wolfe’s New Sun or Harrison’s Viriconium. This isn’t a living world in a Skyrim sense - there are few areas that evoke a bustling town or real city, and like Souls games before, this feels like playing through a myth, with unusual characters guiding you, withholding information from you, tricking you.

If you are fatigued by From's work, this may not be the one to bring you back. Occasional repetition of bosses can at times reveal a game outreaching its ambition, of assets stretched too far, but so many encounters constantly wake you up and undermine your sense of how the world works. The map grows, above and below ground, and never offers a complete image of the world and its secrets.

One of my favourite traits of Fromsoft's work on their assorted Souls games is their ability to make worlds feel larger than they actually are. The way these games will have you be able to visually see in the distance places you will reach over ten hours in the future, or looking back and seeing where you journeyed from and feeling so small compared to this world around you. How the very existence of illusory walls makes it feel like there could be a secret hiding basically anywhere. Huge chunks of content being hidden in compelling, obtuse or even outright bizarre ways, with no concern for the notion of players missing out on literal entire regions or multiple major boss fights as a result, leading both to excitement and surprise when you manage to stumble upon these secrets or figure them out on your own, and to those amazing moments where you get to share discoveries with others or learn from them, the game repeatedly opening up to be even bigger and more mysterious somehow. I typically don't love the npc quests in these games but even those, with their habit of careening off-course as if some player's unfortunate choices unknowingly ruined their dungeon master's plans, make the world feel somehow larger than you and beyond your strict control.

This is also why I think lore videos for these games have ended up coming awfully close to just being their own miniature industry. You're always playing as someone showing up long after the main event has already concluded, with the history of these worlds and characters being something spoken of in riddles and hidden in item descriptions of the relics you find, etched into the environment around you. You have to piece together what happened to get the world to this state from incomplete information, often with the gaps leaving things up to player interpretation. Yet again this all leads to you feeling very small, and the world around you feeling incomprehensibly large with a history so rich that someone as inconsequential as some random undead/hunter/unkindled can't possibly hope to fully grasp all it.

A lot of this would be considered by many to go against a lot of principles of Industry Standard Good Game Design™, but the sum total of it is game worlds that become just endlessly fascinating and evocative to the people they connect with; it turns out designing games is a lot more than just fulfilling a bunch of heuristics on how games and narratives should look, and FromSoft's holistic approach to how the design and lore of these worlds interact with their mechanics is such a great example of this.

This is the environment into which Elden Ring is born. On the one hand an open world game feels almost inevitable in some sense; FromSoft has spent so much time designing game worlds that have their first priority set as making you feel miniscule contrasted with your environment, the player often feeling like a footnote in a long and storied history, and so going ahead and making these feelings come a bit less from smoke and mirrors and a bit more from something literal feels like, at the very least, something they must have been curious to experiment with ever since the original Dark Souls' deeply interlinked, almost Metroidvania-esque map design. On the other hand, isn't it a bit redundant? If they're already instilling these emotions in people what is there to gain from actual, physical vastness, and wildly excessive runtimes, and aren't there just too many costs involved in pushing your game to be this large? This forms the central conflict at the heart of Elden Ring's existence, and whilst I do largely have a lot of fondness for this game, laying out the conflict in this manner makes it very easy both to see why some people are so besotted with Elden Ring, and also to see why others feel like FromSoft jumped the shark here compared to their previous work. Towering, spectacular, intoxicating ambition meets the awkward reality of trying to make that sense of scale be something rendered so literally in a world where realising that takes unfathomable hours of labour.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 30 hours into my playthrough I would have said it felt like one of the best games I'd ever played, and that I was anticipating the possible reality where it ends up becoming my favourite FromSoft game. This opening act for me was frankly magical, and really shows what FromSoft can bring to open world games as they apply many of the principles that they approached their previous Souls games with but on a grander scale. I'm going to avoid explicit spoilers here and make oblique references instead, but the manner in which I first discovered Caelid and Leyndell, how you are shown Siofra, and interacting with The Four Belfries for the first time, all rank as some of my favourite moments in gaming as multiple different tricks are taken advantage of, that follow through on FromSoft's usual strategies but writ unthinkably large, to impart a sense of scale, wonder, curiosity and awe on the player. Combine these tricks with how rich these environments are to explore, the handcrafted element that even the various catacombs or caves had to them, and the ways in which, in stark contrast with other open world games, ticking off lists and markers is heavily de-emphasised in favour of advocating for intrinsic motivation and player agency being much greater focal points of your journey, and I found exploring the Lands Between simply enchanting.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 60 hours into my playthrough I would have said it was a really great game, but one that is not without sizable flaws. This is the point at which the cracks start to show as the sad reality of trying to make any open world game is you're going to need to re-use a lot of content to make that achievable. The Erdtree Avatar fight that I'd really enjoyed several hours into my playthrough had been repeated to the point where it had become mundane, the wriggly Tree Spirit I'd found in Stormveil Castle that really wasn't very fun to fight but was still interesting because it was a fairly unique encounter was, apparently, nowhere even close to being a unique encounter, and almost any boss that I found in a catacomb or cave would end up being dredged up again, sometimes multiple times, sometimes even as a normal mob enemy. Even some of the wonderful early-game surprises become diluted a bit as they're repeated, the recurrence of the walking mausoleum being the saddest example to me. The crafting system, that I touched only a handful of times in my entire playthrough, is very much a symptom of the open world format too; you need something you can scatter around the world for players to pick up, some reason for them to jump to that hard to reach ledge, but you can only put so many runes and swords and hats in the game so crafting materials start to seem like a necessity and yet it's hard to say that they really add anything to the game except more menus and a slight pang of disappointment when you finally fight your way to that shiny purple item and it turns out it's just another Arteria Leaf.

Despite this I understand that these design decisions are largely just a necessity in a game this large, and outside of them the game was a really great time for me at this point in my playthrough. Exploring was still lots of fun and whilst the exciting moments of discovery had become a bit less frequent they were still there, often delightful, and the quieter, emptier moments found in areas like the Altus Plateau made for a sense of palpable loneliness that served the game well. Build variety felt the best it ever has to the point where I was toying with the idea of a second playthrough later this year. Ranni's and Fia's questlines were very compelling to me, emotionally, narratively and in terms of the physical journeys they involve, and are among the highlights of the game. The bosses felt like a clear step down in quality from Dark Souls 3, but there were a handful of fights that were still really enjoyable to me in different ways, and the game has a great sense of spectacle that sold even some of its overwise more uneven fights.

By far the most impressive portion of the game at this point were its legacy dungeons though. Even the weakest ones among these are still largely fantastic, and the level design in the two highlights, Stormveil Castle and Leyndell, is among the finest work FromSoft has ever done; packed with secrets to an almost ludicrous extent, constantly looping back in on themselves in really cool ways, and with great encounter design throughout. I adored these portions of the game, but I could never fully shake the notion from my head that if the very best portions of this game are the bits that are contained to a single zone then why exactly is it open world?

Sadly, this is where things start to really drop off for me. My playthrough landed at a little over 90 hours and I'm honestly a little exhausted? Leyndell was the highlight of the game for me, and after this area was complete I was very satisfied with my experience and honestly pretty ready for the game to end soon but it just kept going.

A part of the problem here is that I'm not convinced a game like this was ever meant to be this long; the various Souls design tropes that are very entertaining in a shorter game start to wear thin when you're seeing an enemy with their back to you mournfully looking at an item on the ground for the 25th time. A part of this too is that reused content was starting to rear its head to an absurd extent; a beloved enemy type that I was thrilled to see be brought back and placed in a tonally appropriate area earlier in the game would go on to reappear a few more times in areas much less fitting to it, earlier enemies in general just get brought back far too much (the hands are a great example of this; I adored their first appearance and how well suited they were to that locale, and every appearance since felt like the game was just struggling to know what to fill the environments with), Erdtree Avatars, dragons and Tree Spirits showing up yet again would just start prompting eyerolls from me, even a storyline boss from earlier in the game could be found roaming out in the wild in multiple different places. In possibly the most insulting example a secret boss from earlier in the game, that felt very important from a lore perspective and which was very visually unique and impressive, ends up reappearing as the final boss of an otherwise inconsequential cave. This is the sad reality of trying to make a game this literally vast instead of simply instilling a sense of vastness.

Despite all of this I think I would still have mostly been onboard with the late-game stretch, or would have at least been more forgiving towards it, if all the bosses after you leave Leyndell didn't just...kind of suck? There are far too many ridiculous AoE attacks with some bosses having a few different variations of these, shockwave attacks that hit on multiple different frames and so feel very janky and unintuitive to dodge, ridiculous combo attack strings that would appear a couple times per game previously become the norm now instead, every boss had multiple attacks with ridiculous wind-ups (again, a thing that was used but sparingly so in previous games) to the point that fights feel weirdly disjointed and impossible to sight read, multiple bosses are placed in the same arena without any real concern for how these are going to interact with one another, windows to get in attacks are narrowed to the bare minimum especially for anyone who wants to play the game purely melee, and there are a handful of bosses that are gigantic to the point where you can only see their feet as you slash at them oblivious to whatever is actually happening. In two different cases with these oversized bosses I felt like I spent as much time charging across the arena to reach them whenever they ran away as I did actually engaging in combat.

Many of these late-game bosses are just not fun, poorly designed, and beating them for me felt less like I learnt the fight and played it well and more like I just got lucky and rng landed correctly. Even that exciting feeling of how much build variety the game had started to slip away at this point; the late-game requires that your build be incredibly powerful and severely limits what things are viable as a result. Maybe this is just a case of FromSoft just misbalancing things or having an off-day, a bunch of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are very disappointing too so it's not like this is a first, but I think this is actually the final, and most frustrating, manifestation of the downsides of open world games. It's so hard to keep one-upping yourself over the course of a 90 hour playtime, in a game with a colossal number of boss fights, that the only way you can guarantee the bosses become even more spectacular is to start pushing them in the direction where they also start to feel unfair too, and with how big the game is leading to there being so much game to test it's easy to believe that maybe these bosses just weren't given as much playtesting as they should have as a result.

I see everyone talking about how Elden Ring refined open world games and is going to change them for years to come and whilst I do think there are a bunch of elements of Elden Ring's approach to the quasi-genre that make for a more satisfying, rewarding, and less cloying experience than what you'd find elsewhere, I think ultimately it made me feel like the best thing this game could do for open world games is convince more developers to just make tighter, more refined experiences instead.

I wouldn't blame someone for being just completely turned off of Elden Ring by these problems that crop up in this final stretch. It left a really sour taste in my mouth at points, even in between moments of still genuinely enchanting imagery and art direction. Ultimately though I really loved so much of my experience with Elden Ring in its earlier hours, and there are many moments from this game that will stick with me for a long time, so despite its fairly severe flaws I can't help but find a lot of love in my heart for it regardless. Elden Ring is a display both of the reasons I love FromSoft's approach to game development, and of why I hope they never make another open world game again.

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

The top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren - the secret name. This corresponds to the director, who directs the game of your life from conception to death. The secret name is the title of your game. When you died, that's where Ren came in.

The second soul off the sinking ship is Sekem - energy, power, and light. The director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the guardian angel, depicted as flying away across a full moon. A bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in a video game from your Xbox. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defence - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the heart - often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down like Samson by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka - the double. Most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Sands.

Number six is Khaibit, the shadow memory. Your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

𓂀

In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ‘real’ job, leaving behind the hell of zero-hour retail and office temp work to become an IT repairman at a big library. Finally, I could provide myself with food, clothing, shelter and, most importantly, video games. I loved problem-solving, working with tools and being on the computer so much already, and now had a professional outlet for all of those things that I enjoyed. It was the best job I’d ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didn’t like the cleaning and repair staff.

I’m not sure what makes librarians think that alphabetising Anne Rice novels is a more noble profession than networking 500 computers together or replacing tungsten filaments in industrial lighting systems, but nonetheless, they felt justified in keeping the workies out of every kitchen and staff lounge in the building. Mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milk, plates and microwaves were all kept in locked cupboards that only “academic” staff could access. Fresh out of retail hell, I just accepted this as a natural law of the universe (of course I was unworthy of a plastic cup for some water!), but in retrospect, it was a little fucked up. My “non-academic” colleagues responded to this in kind by hiding kettles, instant coffee and tin cups in electrical cupboards and storerooms, an essential act of survival misconstrued as spiteful by the microwave-havers. Without anywhere to store fridges in a stock cupboard, there was no milk to be had. Black tea or black coffee were our only options at break-time in the library.

This is how I learned to love black coffee. I had been a white-and-sugars type guy until this point in my personal hot-drink history, treating coffee more as a vehicle for warm milk then an experience in and about itself. Thirsty as hell from running around physically installing Microsoft Excel patches on computers still running Windows 98 in 2011, I had no choice but to forgo my preference for milk and just get used to gulping hot acidic bean water day in, day out when I needed to restore my hit-points. At first I didn’t enjoy it all, but like everything else in life, cultivating patience of habit can allow you to accept and adapt to almost any situation you find yourself in. 11 years later, I now drink nothing but black coffee. I could, probably, somehow - like those wine wankers you see in movies - even tell you the difference between different blends of the hot acid gloop that is burning my insides. Such is my passion for #coffee.

In the autumn of 2011, something else happened. A video game called Dark Souls launched on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to some degree of fanfare that is still up for debate to this day. Video game historians like to mythologise the rise of the Souls series, and often claim Dark Souls launched to very little acclaim - but from my own historical perspective, I contest this claim. My memory leads me to believe the contrary - that Dark Souls had an exciting buzz about it right out of the gate - for game-fans and game-readers, at least. I was mostly a Halo and Street Fighter IV player at the time, and even I’d felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I can’t remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I don’t remember my motivation for every video game I’ve ever bought.

Friends of mine who’d foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demon’s Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demon’s Souls was a “stupid” and “unfair” game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 instead because this one was gonna have all-new ways for 12-year-olds to militarily abuse me through the internet. I wasn’t the type of person to listen to my friends, though - I preferred to listen to anonymous message board posters and professional video game journalists. With one of my first paycheques as a fully-fledged computer janitor, I purchased a Cafe AeroPress coffee maker and a copy of Dark Souls.

... And I hated it. As my friends had prophesied, Dark Souls was relentlessly unfair. Enemies came back to life and stabbed me in the back; pathways crumbled and sent me tumbling to my doom; evil knights shrugged off my attacks and responded in kind with bigger and badder swords of their own. The infamous curse status - an affliction that permanently halves your health and prevents you from becoming human - was my final straw. I recognised the gauntlet that was being laid before me in the Undead Depths and chose to reject the challenge. I found solace in the darkness of my coffee maker and put the game away forever.

A few months later, while trying to avoid studying for the most important exams of my life, I picked the game up again. I had decided that wading around damp dark sewers as a cursed little half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit was less daunting than preparing for my final exams before my adulthood-proper. I persevered, #coffee in one hand and a Wiki in the other, learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics in far greater depth than any of the Relational Database Management Systems textbooks on my study desk. I would rather prepare to die than prepare to pass.

Like many rookie Dark Souls players, parrying was my Everest - though perhaps over-emphasised by the playerbase as an essential skill for completing the game, it was certainly a far more important mechanic back then than that it is today. I spent many hours in the Undead Parish practicing my defence; learning the intricacies and timings of the mechanic and its follow-ups with my undead knight partners until the synapses solidified and I could pull a parry out of my reflexes without much mental effort. It was the key I needed to unlock my progress through the game, and I proudly rode my parrying prowess to the Kiln of the First Flame, linking the fire in ignorance of an unintended side-effect this new reflex had developed in me in the new ages to come.

Years later, I got the chance to play the now-infamous Dark Souls 2 demo at a video game expo and felt compelled to put my parry skills to the test once more. Despite the fact a coked-out Bandai Namco Games employee was offering free t-shirts to anyone who could beat the Mirror Knight in their allotted 15-minute slot, I persevered in the starting area until I could get my timings down once more. After a few whiffs and some off-colour comments from our jaw-clicking host, I finally managed to bat back a shadowy blade. It was at that moment that I discovered that Dark Souls 2 had a brand new feature - the parries smelt and tasted of black coffee. Despite all the gamer sweat and farts and poorly-ventilated electronics in my environment, I could sense coffee inside my brain. Hours of parry practice while sipping black coffee in my bedroom had built a permanent association between parrying and coffee in my mind. A soul memory.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of soul memory, even if you know it by another name (Mikhail Bakhtin calls it the chronotope, for instance). The taste of spaghetti bolognese reminds you of a good day at your friend’s house in 2002. The fresh scent of factory plastic that emanates from a new video game takes you back to the summer holiday when your mum finally bought you Timesplitters 2 despite it being rated a 15+. Perhaps a particularly bad hangover from a night of drinking rum and coke has forever ruined the taste of Pepsi for you. Petrol makes you think about the forest, for some reason you don’t remember. And so on. You’ve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I don’t need to labour at this point.

Soul memory is the currency of the sequel and the franchise, and in our current era, soul memory is undergoing hyperinflation - Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Spider-Man: No Way Home; Ghostbusters: Afterlife - filmmakers are eagerly trying to collect soul memories so they can take them to the bureau de change and cash out in dollars. You might baulk at this suggestion that the scent of your grandmother’s baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capital’s claws.

Video games are perhaps the most egregious traders of soul memory. Video games, even the best ones, are standing tall on the shoulders upon shoulders of prior moments in space-time - real and imagined - all the way back down to Donkey Kong. Re-releases and remakes and remasters and retro collections are nostalgia-primers for experiences you might not even have been alive for - we all love Pac-Man, even though we may not have met him in an 80s arcade hall; you and I replicated those experiences instead with a movie) or a PlayStation 3 Arcade Archive or a Pac-Man music video on MTV; phenomena best exemplified by the teenagers I saw on Twitter who are collecting Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles promotional Happy Meal toys from 1993 to bring their souls closer to their blue-haired messiah. By letting you collect and play your figurative Rainbow Roads again and again and again in generation after generation after generation of product, video games explore the loss of a childhood place, and our attempts to recreate it.

And so what if the place that we are in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? What if the things we yearn for are located elsewhere, in another place or a falsely-remembered past, and all we now carry within us is an image of this place. We may remember only elements or impressions of it: there may be certain objects, sounds, a level, a character, special moves, cutscenes, or online battles; all of which come out in a manner that we cannot control or understand. Yet any of these elements or impressions make us feel at home in a way that we cannot find in the physical space where we are now stuck. Being displaced and yet capable of remembering the particularity of place: it is the state of being dislocated yet able to discern what it is that locates us. We have a great yearning, but we often cannot fulfil it with anything but memories from our soul.

In my review of Halo Infinite at the end of last year, I suggested the possibility that game developers are attempting to harness soul memory in new and exciting ways, the limits between your imagination and theirs almost fully removed in this gilded age of RTX and NGX and Speed Tree and shader-caching and other computer stuff I don’t understand; the world expanding ever-wider as we slot in more and more chips, spreading the channels between CPU and memory (both silicon and cerebellum) ever-wider. The end-state, no doubt, is a game that never ends, expanding outwards like our universe, all contained in the heart of an eternally-burning electric star on the platter of your hard drive. But how do you fuel a world-game of such approaching-infinite size? With the dependable financial and artistic mainstays of gaming, of course - the memory of/reverie in/nostalgia for/ known experiences, known systems, known self. Which makes Halo - a DirectX-based comfort food of the 18-35 crowd - an ideal candidate for colonisation via constant computer creation.

With Halo Infinite, it’s hard to gauge the intentionality of the author (and the multi-billion dollar corporation employing the author). By all accounts, Infinite was a scrap-piece, a million shattered pieces of contractor work and discarded concepts fused into a Holiday Product - something that, at least initially, presents itself as a never-ending ring-world: Zeta Halo could not be more apt as a setting for the beyond-open world template that’s come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoft’s other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that can’t sustain itself beyond a financial quarter (never mind an eternal age!)? Fields upon fields of the same retrofuturistic alien base and knowing remarks about crunch and copy-pasted environments from your maiden, Cortana Weapon, imply that Halo Infinite was an illusion produced by profit - a defective ring-world, nothing more; but there are, at the very least, implications that game developers know what they create. In this new Halo instalment, Master Chief, regretting his transition out of cryostasis, is the only character in the game who opposes the rebuilding of the Halo installations. Too bad, John - you’re going for another last-minute warthog ride to the sounds of early-2000s progressive hard rock.

Does Halo Infinite sound familiar? Well, you might have played Dark Souls 3 and its downloadable follow-up: The Ringed City. Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series homecoming may have been hailed as a "return to form" for the franchise after the polarising reception to Dark Souls 2, but this oft-quoted games-journalist soundbite has a double-edge to it - namely, that it quite literally returned Dark Souls to its original form, repurposing locations, bosses, and emotional beats from the games that came before it. Lothric isn't a million lightyears away from Zeta Halo - it forges a similarly flimsy ring of questionable geography and architecture, a Dark Souls Disneyland built from item and character references that no longer mean anything beyond commercialised self-sabotage, names and item descriptions appearing only for the purposes of cynical, cyclical continuity with its predecessors. The game knew what it was creating with itself in its Bandai-Namco-hued orange-yellow wasteland - an idea perhaps best exemplified in the Abyss Watchers, a gang of frenzied Artorias fanboys from the Firelink Shrine who serve no literary purpose beyond infighting among themselves about the ways Artorias of the Abyss was like, really, really cool. (For some reason, I am now recalling the fact my PlayStation 4 copy of Dark Souls 3 came with a mail-order slip for a £344.99 statue of Artorias from the Bandai-Namco Official European Store...) These references without continuity, these connections without purpose... all they do is ring a Pavlovian spirit bell of soul memory in your brain for a fleeting moment. Nothing more. And Dark Souls 3 didn't just know this - it made it a central tenet of its thematics, even building its last-ever DLC around the concept of painting a forever-world made of the Dark Soul itself. Known experiences, known systems, known self, known forever. Consuming the Gods without question, like Gael, until the coming Age of Dark.

[[LAUNCH DEADLINE REACHED - BACKLOGGD SHAREHOLDERS ARE DEMANDING A Q2 LAUNCH OF THIS REVIEW ]]
// TODO: placeholder for another 9 paragraphs discussing the cyclical ages of fire depicted in the Dark Souls trilogy here and how the idea can be metatextually applied to the development cycles of each Souls game and their growing commercial impact vs. receding artistic impact. This part will be included in a post-launch patch to this review at an undetermined date. Hopefully never.

In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the truths of the “Noble Ones”: those who are deemed “spiritually worthy". These truths are:

- Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara, the world-cycle of death and rebirth we all live through. Existence is pain, to some degree.

- Samudaya (origin, arising, combination; 'cause'): together with dukkha arises taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst”). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it; a suffering often understood to be a combination of a consumptive desire for fleeting things, destructive hatefulness, and ignorance of the world as it truly is.

- Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement) dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha; the end of suffering. We are finite flawed creatures with only two ways out: either cyclical death, or transcendence through enlightenment.

- Magga (the path, the Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha. The next path in the teachings; Buddhism’s sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.

☸

Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on February 25, 2022.

Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat featuring several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, summons, and crafting. Elden Ring received critical acclaim, with praise for its open-world gameplay, fantasy setting, and evolution of the Souls formula. The game sold 12 million copies within three weeks of its release.

Elden Ring is From Software's first game of a new decade that follows an Age of Dark.

The exciting thing about a long voyage like Elden Ring is that it can inhabit so many spaces and times within your life, entwining its soul memories with your own in so many more ways than just an association between coffee and parrying. Due to its epic scale, brutal difficulty and my desire to travel through it as un-aided as possible, it took me four months to beat the game. Looking back from the now, the distance from February until May feels, as it often does in modern times, like a lifetime and a moment. Nothing and everything happened within the standard cycles of my life. I got up and went to work every day, playing through Elden Ring in spare moments and evenings. A war broke out while I was playing Elden Ring. I finished all six seasons of The Sopranos and four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the time period I existed within while attempting to beat Elden Ring for the first time, and I noted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleed for the PlayStation 2 plays surprisingly similarly to Elden Ring. I went abroad for the first time in over two years, often thinking about Elden Ring while looking at the cathedrals and sweeping vistas of Barcelona. I saw a bunch of my friends in person for the first time in years while playing Elden Ring, and we discussed what builds were cool and which characters were cool. When I started Elden Ring, social distancing and facemasks were still mandatory in many places; when I finished Elden Ring, they were not.

So how do these new memories of mine intermingle with those presented in Elden Ring? Does Hoarfrost Stomp taste like marzipan? Is the Altus Plateau a portal to the golden fields of childhood freedom? Have I come to understand Godfrey as a Tony Soprano-like patriarchal figure in relation to Godrick's AJ? Perhaps nothing as crass or immediately interdependent as that. Has playing Elden Ring while existing in 2022 caused me to draw personal and societal parallels between my different lives? I'm tempted to say yes. I'm tempted to take apart Elden Ring's Elden Ring piece-by-piece and point at its golden roots and talk about the scarlet rot and the human ashes that drown the golden skyscrapers of Leyendell and all the ways in which this tale of souls and swords can be applied to someone who travels in the world of our present. But I'd be here even longer than I already am, hanging onto the dying embers of a rambling essay that has gone on too long. In a sense, choosing what aspect of Elden Ring to unpack and explore is exactly how the game makes you feel when you're contemplating which path to take at a crossroads in the Lands Between - whether to explore a cave, a castle, a peninsula, a continent, a realm, a galaxy, an age, a concept of the afterlife turned into a video game level. Naturally, you have to let go of possibility and walk down a single path in order to move forward.

This painful push and pull between potential possibility and your (perhaps pre-determined) path is what makes Elden Ring so compelling. Of course games like Breath of the Wild have already explored this concept of 'go-anywhere', but not in an artistic sense that exists beyond the controller and the things that are happening literally on the screen. In Breath of the Wild, going up a hill will get you into a fight with a bird and you will do a puzzle and you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun - but experiences begin to entwine and overlap, memories becoming overwritten and jumbled in endless plains of rolling green and goblin. Memories require delineation if they are to be stored within containers of consciousness, and in Elden Ring, going up a hill can turn into a 20-hour odyssey through the ashes of time to explore an all-out conquest that was once fought over the very nature of Godhood, where you will meet and contemplate primordial, psychological and philosophical concepts in the form of a dude with a wolf head who reads Berserk. Or maybe you will explore the entirety of a lost kingdom on the edge of the afterlife's cosmos and wonder why it exists or even existed at all, all while the ghost of a forgotten world-serpent caves your skull in. And you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun and those unique, memorable moments will bond with a greater space and time in your head.

Exploration of space beyond the time is a fundamental element of Elden Ring and the Elden Ring. From Software understand that space-time extends with video games, through video games, in video games - that old cliche of a gamer living a thousand lives. In much the same way that it can be confusing to refer to Elden Ring as both a video game product and a concept within the world of Elden Ring itself (it is amusing to note how difficult it is to get the wiki page for the Elden Ring on the Elden Ring Wiki), so too can it be confusing to separate memory and space-time as they exist within and outwith ourselves, our Golden Orders of subjective fact and fiction; moments and how we place ourselves inside them, the near-infinite subjectivity of experience that so often causes people to argue with each other over matters that are ultimately our inner order of perception and recollection. Was Radahn right? Was Malenia right? Sound off in the comments below.

For a long time, one of my most-visited YouTube videos was this performance of Dragon Quest V’s music by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The music is a fantastic soundtrack to a comments section full of positive nostalgia in a foreign language. Google Translate doesn’t get the full meaning across, but you can feel all that’s being said despite the barriers between people on opposite sides of the internet's round table. This is the comment that always stands out to me when I scroll down:

“This was a game of my dad’s era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.”

I only beat Dragon Quest V in 2019, but I feel this same nostalgia, these same memories, this same realisation of a video game world as a portal through soul memory. I beat the iOS port of the DS port of the original Super Famicom version while sitting on the toilet at work, but my shared DQV reality with that kid, and his father before him, who played the game on different hardware in a different space in a different time, allows me to understand them. We saved the world and that adventure will stay with us all for a lifetime. Bur this feeling isn't anything unique - throw a dart at the board of YouTube's video game soundtracks and you'll find this phenomenon replicated for pretty much every video game ever made. Queen Rennala stands in a Grand Library and offers you endless rebirth.

The beauty of Elden Ring's length, scale and scope is that it's also capable of playing with this concept of chronotope from within. Whereas Dark Souls 3 relied on imagery and ideology from previous entries to invoke soul memory with (intentionally) cheap referentiality, Elden Ring instead chooses to loop over itself many times over in order to play new games with your mind. There are many ways in which the game achieves this, and if you've ever griped about "reused content", you probably know the kind of thing I mean - fortresses reappearing in different states of decay and ruin; enemies returning again and again as if pursuing you through the Lands Between; the souls of wolves and trees and tree-avatars haunt the earth; the same dungeons and dragons in different locations, sometimes appearing as battlefields of the present, sometimes appearing as sites of historical importance - Great War memorials on a school field trip. The game even deigns to reference the wider From Software cosmology (I am using every word in my vocabulary to avoid typing the term "Soulsborne"), but interestingly chooses to place a lot of these capricious callbacks in dank, dirty, decaying swamps - they are deemed to be hollow, undead references. In a sense, it's a game so vast that it's able to create nostalgia for itself.

For me, the most interesting way the game exemplifies soul memory is in its boss battles. In our realm, the bosses of Elden Ring are something of a contentious topic - out of some 150+ battles that put grand old names above life-bars, only five in the whole game are wholly unique. "How could the developers be so lazy as to do this?!" is the rallying cry of the passionate masses who are seemingly unwilling to afford From Software any artistic agency or intentionality of design. In a series/franchise/whateverthisis like the Souls games, isn't the whole point that you're prepared to die, over and over again, in the same battles, just like the demigods that you seek to surpass? You're in battle against spiritual and physical elements of the universe itself! The Fallingstar Beast appears twice in the game, but you didn't fight him twice, did you? I'm willing to wager you fought him five times, ten times, twenty times, maybe many times more. Why delineate by encounters in space when you can just as easily use time? Was each death and rebirth just "reused content", or was it an intentional part of an experience that the game's developers wanted you to live through? The game's named after a big old circle, for crying out loud!

This isn't an attempt by me to reframe the reuse of content as a purely artistic choice - of course it was done to gild the game's vast size and ensure every crevice of the world map had some experience of some form for the player, but practical compromises made within the constraints of development can be moulded, with appropriate care, into art. We can challenge From's tendency to rework frameworks, but aren't they trapped in their own never-ending cycle by capital, working to the drumbeat of 100 million sales? You may rankle when yet another boss pulls off the iconic Scarlet Aeonia (itself a reference/homage/repetition of a Magic the Gathering card ), but it's all in aid of your personal character development and the development of the game's characters and their relationships in the Lands Between. While I certainly wouldn't call any of my many, many, many battles with Malenia and her acolytes art in and of themselves, my memories of these multi-faceted repetitions tie back to an essential theme of the Souls series - overcoming the greatest boss of all: yourself.

It would be trite of me to spend a ton of time telling everyone about a universal human experience and how it applies to a series of video games that have sold enough copies to make them almost universal gamer experiences, so instead I'll just share a soul memory of Elden Ring that I think embodies this value of repetition and self-mastery. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds (the names in this game rock lol) is essentially the final dungeon of the game, a terrible theme park of sewer content that long-time fans of these games will immediately recognise - pipes, poison, basilisks, curses, rats, little fucked up gargoyle dudes. It's essentially all the most annoying things about playing a Souls game in a single package, ramped up to 11 by twisted virtue of the fact this is the final area in a 100-hour game that stands at the end of a path of six other 100-hour games with similarly wicked ideas. 11 years after giving up on Dark Souls, I was once again a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit. Indeed, it is a punishingly difficult experience to be a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit - even with a high-defense build, certain enemies can take you out in a hit or two. And if they aren't capable of taking you out in a hit or two, they have almost certainly been carefully positioned next to a giant pit that can take you out in a single hit. It's an infuriating area, yet entirely optional. You don't have to do it to yourself, but at this point, it just feels right that you should pursue whatever nebulous reward that the Shunning-Grounds harbour. And what is the final test at the end of this dungeon? A dragon? An army of the undead? Another cosmic deity? No! It's a jumping puzzle in a tomb of skeletons and corpses piled to the ceiling - an incredibly tricky test of wits that combines your physical dexterity with an eye for problem-solving. It took me dozens of tries to master, and memories of the hallways leading from the bonfire to the puzzle chamber have now been seared into my mind. A video game challenge that made me scream out in pain for the first time in years... Fuck that bullshit!!! And at the end of it all, what is your reward for completing this task? No runes or swords or armor. Just a spell called Inescapable Frenzy, an incantation that sends the minds of humans towards madness. Let it never be said that From Software do not have a sense of humour! No wonder some players choose to enter into a covenant with Chaos a few moments later...

"try jumping" is a message you see a lot in Elden Ring. One of the oldest pranks in the Souls fan playbook, it's a nasty little trick that encourages the freshly chosen undead to leap from high places with promise of some unknowable reward. Inevitably, it always leads to one thing - a painful, costly death. Why do players take the time to encourage people they'll never meet to commit suicide, and why do so many people mark these messages as helpful to others? Probably for the same unknowable reason that people tell each other to kill themselves via other mediums of the internet. Ugly as "try jumping" may be, it has always fit comfortably with the artistic notions of Dark Souls as an analog for the neverending battle against depression and misery, the difficulty that comes with suppressing one's urge to die, to give up, to leave it all behind. One of Elden Ring's first concessions to new players is to finally explain this meta-mechanic - if you fall for the very first "try jumping" message that the game places before you, you end up in a tutorial area. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake twice now. From Software know that the Internet-at-large is one of the most lethal enemies their games have to offer, and I fought against that wicked foe by making a point of putting down some "no jumping ahead" messages while on my journey.

The online component of these games has always existed, but has never really been explicitly acknowledged within the game-world beyond a few experimental instances like The Ringed City's Spear of the Church. As the ostensible herald of a new age Elden Ring takes the first steps toward acknowledging ours, supplementing a mechanism with a metaphor. To avoid beating around the bush - I think the Roundtable Hold is the Internet. A realm inaccessible by horse nor foot, where the people of the world meet up to sell shit, trade stories, gossip and fuck around, all under an oath of no physical contact. Per Varre's comment, the Roundtable is "a place for has-beens trying to look important but unable or unwilling to actually take any action". Sound familiar? There is a place in Leyndell Royal Capital that looks exactly like the Roundtable Hold, but no one is there - the Hold is, in effect, a virtual, imagined space; a simulation in parallel existence to reality. It's a trick that From has pulled before, but characters and their occupation of parallel space-times with differing persona spells out that this is, in some classic weird-ass cosmic FromSoft way, a digiverse within a digiverse.

Ensha, Dung Eater and D are the most vivid exemplars of this idea. Three masked edge, lords who spend their time in the Roundtable acting aloof and cool and above it all; their corporeal forms lashing out with hatred against women in the meatspace of the Lands Between, giving away their Inner Order to pursue violence against Malenia, Fia and - in the Loathsome Dung Eater's case - every woman and child in the known universe. (See also: Gideon/Seluvis and their relationship to the class-conscious Nepheli Loux: Gideon as a gatekeeper who encourages you to overcome your Maidenless status and venerate yourself in the eyes of the Roundtable's men ("the road of champions"); Seluvis as a PUA who tries to involve you in a date-rape scheme.) In the case of D, the game implies the existence of a "twin brother" - an alternate persona - who behaves differently depending on the space-time he inhabits. We see him in reality, unreality and Nokron's post-reality afterlife, behaving more aggressively in each plane until he loses bravado when faced with with the bare-faced truth of inescapable Death itself. The player has the option of giving him back his mask and suit of armour, which ultimately leads to a violent death for "that bitch" Fia, a woman who recognises men possessing a warmth that has nowhere to go. In the case of the Dung Eater, whose mortal form is trapped within the aforementioned ur-Souls palace of the Shunning-Grounds, the connection to our ugly internet personalities is a little more explicit, a seeming admission by From Software of all the ugliness that arises from building one's personality around a nexus of digital souls and swords. If From are shackled on some level to this medium of expression, the least they have done here is develop some self-awareness and critique. At the game's climax, the Roundtable burns out, telling us more or less everything we need to know about the developer's feelings on the Web Between Worlds that we inhabit and the paths we choose to walk in each realm of spirit. Will this Roundtable fall to the mortal ashes of Leydendell too, or is there potential for All to achieve Magga, the enlightened transcendence of Buddhist teaching?

The natural follow-on from this topic is an exploration of the golden Grace, the "maidenless" concept and its real-world implications, but I feel the paragraph above demonstrates why it's unwise to provoke red phantoms in the hold through discussion of certain topics and experiences. Elden Ring is a game where not every path should be taken, and, as I already said like three times before (lol), the same holds true of a review; I'm not sure I have the experience or incantations necessary to step into that toxic swamp, lest I provoke an invasion. Instead, I choose to focus on the light that casts this darkness: Friendship. The golden light of the summon sign is the natural enemy of the blood-red invader, and Elden Ring makes this relationship more explicit than its predecessors by mandating that human invaders can only go after parties of two or more players - the eternal war between the "git gud" and the "git help" is now more aggressive than ever before. By changing the mechanics of the franchise's online component, From Software have peppered their latest instalment with challenges to the sensibilities of try-hard players that remind me most of Sakurai's implementation of the anti-competitive tripping mechanic in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While I think the omnipotent anger and cultural overpowerment of the "git gud" crowd is perhaps overstated by the fans at large, it's an unfortunate signifier of their ever-presence that after seven of these games I still get second thoughts about asking for help when I need it.

The kindness of strangers is an enduring motif of Elden Ring, a natural tonic to the toxic anger that permeates every environment you journey across. Melina, the thematic emodiment of this kindness, turns your experience and soul memory into strength, a companion who appears to those at risk of stoking personal flames of frenzy as a guide who leads you towards the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game gets inordinately tougher to handle by yourself in the wake of her ultimate sacrifice; investments in endgame Rune Levels feel less substantial, less meaningful, than those conversions of experience made while travelling with Melina at RL100 and below. (The Ranni questline, with its literal idolation of a young girl as a peculiar doll the player can contemplate in silence by the fire, dovetails nicely with Melina's death and serves as an interesting pair of endgame decisions the player can take, further compounded by the Roundtable stuff discussed above) The final stretch of the game demands, almost explicitly, that the player look beyond themselves and extend a hand of need to those around them in much the same way one should following a deeply personal loss.

If you did not touch a summon sign or ring a spirit bell or read a fan-wiki after Leyendell, know that I know you are a liar and a punk and you will be judged far more harshly by my council than the guys who spent six hours outside Maliketh trying to bring in a sorcerer called Pigf#cker or whatever other desperate means they chose to undertake in order to realise their ambitions. Everyone needed help to finish Elden Ring; everyone needed help to stave off the Frenzied Flame that the Elden Ring's Golden Order was trying to stoke from within you on your personal path to enlightenment. Fought the Godskin Duo by yourself, did you bro? Well, the Godskin Apostle didn't. He brought in someone to help him. Are you really that stupid? The legend of Let Me Solo Her didn't develop from the tremendous feat of beating Malenia solo - was this noble pothead the first person to ever beat her by himself? Of course not. The legend developed as a veneration of kindness, a manifestation of will and memory and dreams of ambitions, a symbol of those Tarnished who offer their help to those who need it most: Let Me Solo Her is our idealised savior, a breakup bro for the maidenless, a hero who will help you fight your hardest battles and overcome your most painful soul memories. Stay isolated and lost in your past, or find your friends on the path and start living your life.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.

And yet it all seems limitless.

So what of soul memory, the idea I spent so long talking about at the start of this review? Well, that's another thing that's beautiful about Elden Ring - I'm not done playing it yet. Much in the same way I wasn't done playing Dark Souls after I'd put down the pad, Elden Ring has manifested itself in my everyday life and my relationships with the souls and space-time and coffee granules around me. It's difficult to write a conclusive conclusion for an Elden Ring review because it doesn't feel like the game is over yet. I fought the Elden Beast, I saw an ending, I saw the credits, but evidently I can't stop thinking about the game and the ideas and memories and experience it imbued me with. I'm walking on an invisible path in a consecrated snowfield of boundless white, trying to find my noble truth and inner order and greater will by constantly making sense of everything I've seen, heard and felt through, with and in my lives lived, tilting at windmills in the gardens of madness within this life and beyond. You are too. Let's face it together.

𓂀

The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.

1. imagine being a triple a videogame developer, you know what Fromsoft is capable of- the phrase "the Dark Souls of ... " rings in your heart; it is the tinnitus of your soul. But Fromsoft stays in the corner, gurning, keening, laughing at the end of sentences, this grants you a measure of peace. One day you come into work, and they're sitting at your desk. they own your fucking desk.
2. the greatest videogame adaptation of the works of Hieronymus Bosch
3. little guy in the foreground of landscape concept art simulator
4. the definitive answer to the question "would the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich be improved by letting you throw fireballs at skeletons"
5. did Hidetaka Miyazaki come up with "The Loathsome Dung Eater" or did George R R Martin, or did they simply both announce the name out loud at the same time at their first meeting, before offering so much as a "hello"
6. with Bloodborne, they came for the shield guys, with Sekiro, they came for the dodge guys, with Elden Ring, they came for the Fox Only No Items Final Destination guys
7. Elden Ring is a 100 hour game that feels like a 200 hour game that feels like a 50 hour game

I am called to revere Elden Ring out of spite. I once heard someone I no longer speak to for various reasons say, upon seeing a then new trailer, that they wish FromSoft would making something interesting like King’s Field again instead of this. Now, I was playing the King’s Field games for the first time when they said that, and I happen to love those games a lot, and I certainly want them to make another one or something like it, even though they never will because the games industry is full of cowards. But I also happened to know that this person had never played King’s Field, and were probably only saying it out of a smug sense of superiority. And this made me angry.

Yes, yes, the familiar gang is here. Yet another lowly warrior usurps the eternal cycle. The fallen order, the god-kings, corruption, the moon, the flame. Invasions, summons, messages, bloodstains. Tragic sidequests, Patches is there, and multiple endings. Magic is blue, holiness is yellow. You can parry and backstab enemies. You upgrade your weapons to scale with your stats. You dodge roll and stagger. These are familiar. They are played out, to a degree. And yes, they are not exciting in that old way. But I don’t really care, because I’m a “fan of the genre”. I am enthusiastic about the new things that come from this company, and the genre they’ve inadvertently spawned, and I’m always ready for innovation. But that doesn’t preclude me from finding joy in the familiar. Because it was never the uniqueness that mattered most.

There’s this kind of jealousy surrounding the Souls series. The fans (myself included) view them as special, unique, and precious gems. When something besmirches their name, it is a disgrace, because there is something transcendent about these games that we hold sacred. But as the series has become a prototype, a whole genre sprouting from its seedbed, the things that made a game like Dark Souls special have become no longer so special. How many games can we find that are trying to be exactly like it? Those qualities, whether it be difficulty, inscrutability, atmosphere, even specific mechanics, they’re not special anymore. How quaint does Super Metroid feel now? How cliche is The Shining now? Are The Beatles run of the mill? Is Seinfeld funny anymore? It’s like the old joke: “I don’t get the appeal of Hamlet. It’s just a bunch of famous saying strung together.”

It becomes difficult to vindicate why these games are good. So, we get jealous. We get protective. “No, you see, these games are special. How else could I love them so much if they weren’t? They are doing something different. They are beautiful in a way only I can understand.” Everyone thinks they are the sole prophet of Dark Souls liking, and that everyone else is some misguided mystic. I do, too. But I know I’m fooling myself. I know these games are mortal.

See, I’m not sure these games were ever that special to begin with. I remember, years ago, sitting on a couch playing Demon's Souls, and wondering out loud how they made this game, how they reached something so specific. And he said to me that "it had to have come from someone with a vision". As years go on, I find that statement less and less true. They were and are unique, sure. But they didn’t come from nowhere, sprouting from Miyazaki’s forehead like Athena. They were made by people in a company making a software product. Elden Ring was building off of Dark Souls, which was building off of Demon’s Souls, which was building off of King’s Field, which was probably building off of Ultima Underworld or something, and yadda yadda. Iteration is underrated. I think what ends up getting underrecognized, ironically, is that these are good video games. It’s not because they’re special. They haven’t unlocked a secret to games that no one else can know. These games don’t have to be special to be good. They can just be good. Which they are.

Anyway. I liked Elden Ring. I thought it was fun. I thought it was cool. I liked exploring its world. I liked crawling through its dungeons. I liked fighting bosses. That’s enough for me. And so you might ask, “Is Elden Ring even that special?” And I’m going to say, “Who cares?”

Hidetaka Miyazaki (or JRPG Tolkien as I call him) has probably had the word ‘masterpiece’ thrown at him more times than we’ve had ‘you died’ thrown at us. As a work of art, Dark Souls is his masterpiece. But, as a video game made for the masses but moulded from the same principles, yes, Elden Ring is probably also his masterpiece.

Elden Ring is for Dark Souls what The Lord of the Rings is for The Hobbit. It is a vast expansion of its predecessor not only in scale but in narrative complexity, character depth, innovative worldbuilding and overarching philosophies.

What Elden Ring has more than any Souls game, is a certain accessible warmth. Gone are the days of waking up in a lonely jail cell and wandering into some uncertain prophecy in a hollow and deathly landscape. Instead you are thrust into a thriving world of life, both good and evil, by a range of vibrant allies - all of whom have their own story to tell, many becoming side quests. This, plus improved multiplayer elements and further abilities to summon aid, add to the comfort of its worldliness; it’s a game made for the many, not for the few.

Haha, that’s not to say it’s easy. It’s a bloody Souls game. But now, rather than hitting a brick wall of difficulty, you hit brick columns which you can shimmy around or even try elsewhere to better yourself for the challenges that be. Everybody wins: the game maintains its sadistic aura and the players have unlimited options. That said, I’m sure we all still have plenty of punch-the-seat moments (I'm looking at you, Black Blade Kindred).

As with much of FromSoft’s output, it’s hard not to be wowed by the varied world design: castles, swamps, caves, forests, underground cities and whatever the hell-fuck Caelid is meant to be, rendered with incredible graphic detail. The gruesome inhabitants of these worlds are also just next-level in terms of imagination (shat myself at those hand spider-things).

Of course, there’s always room for criticism of lesser aspects, such as an underwhelming upgrade/crafting system and a few copy-and-paste catacombs levels, but the game is just too grand for those cracks to harm the foundation.

Most important, as with Breath of the Wild or any truly open-world game, is the sense of freedom: that ability to go literally anywhere and be rewarded rather than punished. This very lack of demand from the game, and absence of clear markers or objectives, emphasise its overwhelming scale without actually overwhelming the player. All one has to do is explore; find new and different paths. Therefore, in the spirit of the high fantasy that Elden Ring masters, it is only imagination, or lack thereof, which set the boundaries.

In the distant future, gaming should, in theory, get better. But until then, I pity any game that shares its genre with Elden Ring.

[This review is sponsored in part by My Buddy Erick, who so generously gifted me my copy of Elden Ring]

FromSoft's latest dark fantasy dodge-roll extravaganza is a game I was perfectly content to let pass me by despite the insane hype built up by its memetically-long development cycle and the critical acclaim heaped onto it by its rabid fanbase. The Soulsborne series is something that I'm very aware of as an avid gaming enthusiast (it's kind of impossible to ignore the biggest action RPG craze of the past decade,) but it's a series that I, up until now, admittedly had zero interest in. I'm not one for the fantasy aesthetic or its vast amounts of masturbatory lore about the adventures of ancient knights named Big Shoe Lorentz et al, and the online circlejerk of hardcore Souls masochists who get their rocks off by being elitists online isn't my kind of scene. It wasn't until every single friend, mutual and countryman I knew seemed to be playing this damn thing that I eventually caved when I was generously offered a copy by a friend of mine who was similarly swept up by the Elden Ring cultural zeitgeist.

As my first Soulsborne experience, I was surprised by how many of the positive qualities in Elden Ring are in none of the popular conceptions perpetuated by the Soulsborne fanbase en masse. The often-lauded nightmarish difficulty isn't nearly as tough as gamerbros will lead you to believe, often being more of a test in patience and observation instead of any particularly taxing test of "Pure Gamer Skill" you'd see in a character action game (except for maybe Malenia). The story is relatively understated all things considered and the quote-unquote lore is mostly left to the player to piece together on their own instead of being forced down my throat via lengthy exposition, which is a far cry from the initial impressions I had set by the enthusiasts stripping these games down into 6 hour loredumps. It's honestly kind of refreshing! The exploration in Elden Ring is nothing short of magical in those first few hours; stepping into Limgrave, searching every nook and cranny for adventure and constantly being rewarded for doing so. I could see exactly how this series managed to get so popular, and Elden Ring certainly dug its claws deep into me with all the hours I sunk into this damn thing. The bases are loaded, which makes the surprise foul all the more disappointing.

Disappointment is often the brood of expectation, especially when you have such a rabidly devoted fanbase that would proclaim the release of Elden Ring equivalent to the Second Coming, so the shoes to fill were quite large (almost as large as the shoe of aforementioned legendary knight Big Shoe Lorentz, if you will), and for what it's worth, Elden Ring does a good job at tricking you into thinking it manages to fill them. The awe of these stunning landscapes and sprawling world do well to mask the inanity of it all, and it's a charade Elden Ring manages to keep going for an impressively long time, but once it starts to funnel you towards the finale, the jig is up. For a series hailed for its innovation in the action RPG genre, Elden Ring isn't really convincing me that FromSoft is doing anything truly innovative. It's very pretty to look at and well-executed mechanically and all that, but I struggle to see how you manage to maintain a fanbase as rabid as Souls fans with something like Elden Ring.

From the outside looking in, it feels like they've made this game at least four times now: fucked-up, decaying dark fantasy world where some Average Joe called something vaguely demeaning is beset to dodge-roll their way to the front doorstep of the setting's head honcho. It seems the well has run dry if the only difference I can gleam from Elden Ring is that our Average Joe now has a jump button and a bigger playground to explore, the triple A idea of relentless biggering being the final step FromSoft has taken into true mainstream appeal (even despite all the xenophobia peddled by western devs in their criticism towards Elden Ring's design philosophy like we're back in the 7th gen or something.) I'm not very partial to the open-world genre in general, these massive timesinks with tons of little repetitive checkmarks to fill-out a sprawling sandbox, and Elden Ring is no different in this regard, even if it manages to keep the fresh ideas coming for an admirably long time, which begs the question of what makes Elden Ring stand out from the crowd besides the big names behind it and its innate goodwill built up by a decade of prior entries. By the time I reached the Mountaintops of the Giants, I had already checked out, and very nearly dropped it when Elden Ring kept dragging its feet and setting up more hoops for me to jump through in an attempt to pad out its already ludicrous runtime.

So as my first Souls experience: It's fine. If you've already drank the Kool-Aid, you were never going to be anything but pleased with Elden Ring, but as a first-timer looking in: I'm not entirely sold on what Miyazaki is peddaling. I can only hope the other Soulsborne games do a better job at selling me on their core appeal.

As I found myself circling a zombified grunt at the tutorial area of Elden Ring in order to perform the classic Souls backstab, I subconsciously knew right then and there what game I would be playing for the next 100+ hours, and not even that first sight of the ethereal Erdtree and its expansive surrounding landscape managed to swat away that sinking feeling.

"Dark Souls but open world" is a fairly justifiable tag line that Elden Ring earns with distinction for many, but it's one I interpret in a less charitable way. Considering how cruficied Bloodborne was over its optional chalice dungeon content, it's a bit surprising now to see a map filled with it deal with such little critical scrutiny by its fanbase, having an overreliance in copy pasted settings, bosses and mysteries that ends up homogenizing the experience of discovery and reward.

These issues are par for the course when dealing with the open world genre, and they would be acceptable had the space inbetween them provided any semblance of evolution on the Souls formula to acommodate the shift in scope. Double jumping horse aside, the unaltered Dark Souls moveset doesn't really offer compelling exploration outside of the small pockets of dungeon content, and when most of the interesting and unique content is relegated to the main story dungeons of the game, it's hard not to question if Elden Ring really needed to be open world in the first place.

The obssession with Dark Souls 3 boss design places you into a strict familiar pattern where stat and weapon experimentation are heavily punished, as most bosses have at least one "fuck you" move that one hit kills you for no reason, and weapon crafting insists on being a time consuming and expensive endeavor that forces you to hold onto the same high damage boring greatsword. It's telling that in a roster of 100+ bosses, Renalla, Radahn and Rykard are the only bosses I fondly remember, as they provide a challenge that goes beyond constant I-frame dodge rolling and memorizing fake out attacks.

And make no mistake, Elden Ring is Dark Souls 4, not just in the way it plays but also in the way it tells its story. Despite taking place in a different universe with new gods and lore to learn of and decipher, it has become evidently clear by now that Miyazaki and his team really have only one story to tell. Sure, it is still a fascinating story, but when I'm once again learning about secret crystal magic, beasts and dragons preceeding humanity, golden orders that are built upon lies, or chaotic forbidden flames that threathen the status quo, through the same obtuse and obfuscated dialogue and storytelling that defines these games, I struggle to find reason to engage with it with the same enthusiasm I once had for it.

Concepts like the Scarlet Rot or Destined Death are interesting enough to have had been the sole creative well to take from, but are forced to share the spotlight with the ever increasing and convoluted list of ideas Elden Ring has to offer that unnecessarily overcomplicate its world with a vast number of uninteresting factions, outer gods and characters that dont have the space to develop and enrich the universe of the game, robbing Elden Ring of the opportunity to create a laser focused experience like Bloodborne. Is Rykard's house of horrors that much different from every other castle you end up in Elden Ring? Or can we agree that the Dark Souls 3 formula has sanitized the world design of theses games to a point that they no longer have the capability to put you inside a world in the same manner Demon's Souls once could?

It's an odd thing to be this critical of Elden Ring, considering it still manages to be one of the most compelling triple A titles of recent years, with amazing creative art direction, original storytelling and engaging challenges to overcome, maintaining the strengths of the series that makes it stand out from everything else in the market, then and now. Conveying how threathening Caelid is by the mere act of the player walking into it represents some of the best environmental storytelling you will see, and the confidence to make so much of Elden Ring's content optional and secret turns the nonchalant reveal of a whole hidden area to explore beneath the overworld map one of the highlights of the series. It contains some of the best tragedy filled NPC questlines that characterizes the franchise, with Ranni's being a standout in the way it presents the most tradicional story arc in a Souls game and Diallos' being a noted highlight that feels like it could have come straight out of a GRRM book.

But at this point in time, 10+ year of Souls games, Elden Ring ironically and unintendely further reinforces metatextually the themes of stagnation and extending the life of something that has long gone past its prime. In his pursuit to perfect the Souls formula into his idealized game, Miyazaki has instead dilluted the small quirks, nuances and idiosyncrasies that made the series so groundbreaking and revolutionary all those years ago, and has fallen into a cycle of redundancy and iteration that has quickly trapped the series into a niche of comfort food. Sadly, Elden Ring is not the game we have all been waiting for that dispels the notion that open world is an inevitable flawed genre with diminishing returns, and it is also not the promise of the evolution the franchise has been desperately in need of. Maybe it is time to extinguish this flame and usher in a new age once and for all.

UMA OBRA-PRIMA ATEMPORAL.
Joguei Elden Ring usando um Reshade chamado Filmic Pass, e o que posso dizer é o seguinte: FENOMENAL.
Os visuais do jogo, que já eram belíssimos, ficam fantásticos com uma ambientação ainda mais sombria com a adição de um pequeno filtro. Como todo jogo da FromSoftware, Elden Ring é uma máquina destruidora de novatos, possuindo uma experiência de gameplay extremamente difícil. Às vezes, a mecânica do jogo acaba sendo um inimigo pior que os bosses, fazendo com que tenha que morrer 82328732837 vezes para se adaptar. Os inimigos básicos que andam por aí pelo mapa são tão perigosos quanto qualquer boss, e, por mais que seja divertido enfrentar um ou outro, com o tempo vale mais a pena passar correndo por eles e ir direto até o objetivo. Apesar de ter um mundo vasto para explorar, muitos dos inimigos são repetidos ou recolors de outros inimigos, o que tira um pouco da graça, mas tudo é compensado pelos cenários estonteantes para se vislumbrar. A história do jogo não é daquelas que é mastigada e dada na boquinha dos players; você vai descobrir os fragmentos da história conforme vai jogando e explorando.
O fator replay é um ponto negativo do jogo, pois é cansativo ter que ficar indo pra lá e pra cá, porém, o jogo é tão belo e gostoso de jogar que acaba compensando.
Os bosses desse jogo são algumas das criaturas mais únicas e incríveis que já vi em qualquer obra, uma verdadeira fonte de inspiração futura para outros jogos.
Tempo de jogo: 105 horas

I applaud FromSoft for trying something kind of different when it comes to their reiterative games but I don't think an open world design -or maybe just the huge scale of it- is the best fit for these types of games, it's very detrimental to a lot of aspects but especially: level design, difficulty, uniqueness and atmosphere.

With that being said, my review is mostly going to focus on the negative things I have to said about the game as there are plenty of positive reviews for it. It took me 102 hours to finish it (blind playthrough of every boss and exploring everything) and I was level 166 by the time I reached the ending.

As mentioned before, the level design suffers a big hit: while some of the legacy dungeons, isolated areas and castles you can find in the world of Elden Ring are well-designed exploring the open-world can be very exhausting and boring at times.

You will find the open-world to be generously populated with things to do -most of them being recycled which can happen a lot in open-world games- but it feels like a far cry from the sense of magic that games such as Demon's Souls brought to the table which hit you with unique enemies, level layouts and atmosphere very often.

This is especially bad when it comes to secondary bosses, you will eventually get bored of fighting these as you will fight them in many different forms: as a single boss, as recurrent normal enemies, in another boss fight but with a little more armor, in another boss fight but this time they are two instead of one -even going up to three-.

Speaking of recycled content going from area to area, while some of the legacy dungeons can be very nicely designed and some are memorable, they are vastly undermined by the repetitiveness of their enemy design and atmosphere; I honestly think Legacy Dungeons especially would have greatly benefitted from a unique set of assets (atmosphere and enemies) as they can get very repetitive even if this meant there were less of them and the World was smaller.

The Souls franchise has never been the video game franchise with the tightest combat around -this can be seen since as early as in Demon's Souls with how overpowered magic builds are or something such as Dark Souls 2's rapier which make the combat redundant- but in those games it's more of you going out of your way to make the combat redundant or just being lucky/unlucky -depending on how you see it- with the build you choose.

I'm not sure if I got 'unlucky' with my build in Elden Ring -something I consider rather unlikely with how many options there are-, I just went for two dual colossal swords because I think they are cool and went with a focus on jumping attacks because some of the items/medallions I had plus the fact that you can break posture easier while jumping and found the combat to be way too easy for more than half of the game or 50+ hours; I never really went out of my way to break the game or make the combat redundant.

While I don't mind easy games, this made a big impact on how much I enjoyed the game since some boss fights that seemed kind of cool ended comically fast and I could not even enjoy their soundtrack or even see the full extent of the enemy move set. This might also be a by-product of Elden Ring being an open-world game in which difficulty can greatly vary depending on the order you stumble upon things or decide to do them, especially in the early-mid game.

Most of the boss fights are the least memorable out of every Souls game when considering how long this game is, if only rushing through the story it might be okay but I have never been that type of person. There are some interesting boss fights in it -about 10 in total maybe if I’m being generous-, I just don't think they are enough for how long this game is.

On another note, this game while it has its own identity feels that it references a lot of the other souls games maybe a bit too much for things such as enemy design, some of the most glaring examples are: hoplites from Demon's Souls and basilisks from Dark Souls. It sometimes goes out of its way to just reference enemy appearances such as the beast patients found in Old Yharnam (Bloodborne). This is not necessarily a bad thing but it’s something I'm not very fond of personally.

One aspect I think they nailed is the horse combat: it maintains the simple controls of being on-foot so it feels like a natural extension of the rest of the gameplay and it's fairly punishing if you get knocked out of your horse. The only problem is it makes some boss fights a little bit too easy but nothing too serious, other than that I think it was well-implemented.

Other positive point -or negative depending on how you see it- is how addictive this game is, this might be accentuated by me and all my friends playing this at the same time and discussing about the game but I have to mention it.

I have other minor nitpicks with Elden Ring such as armor being largely irrelevant but I think I have ranted for long enough.

Most of my problems with the game would have been solved by downsizing the huge scale of the world/map in benefit of more unique situation/events/dungeons/bosses/enemies in the different areas it has and maybe having a look at the combat balance.

Seeing how many people love Elden Ring, it might be more of a situation of the game just not being for me rather than it being a bad game I guess.

I doubted From Software. I will be the first to admit that, after the proverbial dreg heap that was Sekiro and the reminder of how stunningly mediocre Souls games can be with the Demon’s Souls remake, I came at Elden Ring with a healthy amount of caution. The irony is that I have a deep love for From Software when they’re firing on all cylinders. While I have always been weary of the fantasy genre and the often maligned “dark fantasy” label, the world of Dark Souls speaks to me. Although I have very little appreciation for the lore present in the series, I respect the uncompromising vision that the lore follows. As a vehicle for unforgettable visuals is where the lore shines, though. I doubt anyone who has played the Dark Souls series will forget things like Sen’s Fortress, flanked by a lush forest and standing ominously as a roadblock to a city bathed in light. The Dark Souls series is filled with displays of From Software flexing their visual design muscles, proving time and again that there is no other studio who can bring such horrifically beautiful creatures and worlds to life at such high frequency. Irithyll, Anor Londo, Duke’s Archives, Yharnam, Lothric, The Fishing Hamlet and I could name at least ten more locations from these games that all came out within the same decade that are among the most breathtaking areas in any game that I’ve played. The only lore that I need is that someone built these places, and that they are no place for the speck in this world that I’m playing as. Their size frequently dwarfs your player character, reinforcing the fact that this place is hostile to you, that despite any level of undeniable beauty that still remains, that you are not welcome here.

There is comfort to this fear of the great unknown though. I was recently introduced to the works of Thomas Moran during an art history class that I’ve been taking. Moran’s career was defined by his paintings of the Grand Canyon, and his experiences there were clearly a combination of awe and unease. See, Moran was in the company of an expedition that was mapping out the American west for an industry raring to exploit it for everything it is worth. It soon became evident to these explorers that this land was too important to be tilled by big business. This importance was not due to the mineral housed within the Grand Canyon’s fertile ground, but the sheer wonder that it inspired in them. Take a look at any of his paintings, and one can see exactly why they wanted to protect this land. It feels otherworldly, like a place that is too perfect and awe-inspiring to be a physical place on earth. That feeling would be founded in the truth, because the places Moran painted are not real. Moran painted composites of the Grand Canyon area. The places he painstakingly captured cannot be visited and looked upon with the same wonder you may have imagined he did. In a way, Moran’s paintings were “propaganda” for the conservationist cause. They captured a feeling rather than a specific time and place. This feeling, although it basks you in the light of beauty that is beyond the description of prose, is also tinged with the same unease that Anor Londo might evoke. Moran felt that to prove the pricelessness of the Grand Canyon, it was not only imperative that its indescribable wonder be on full display, but also its titanic hostility. Beauty can be overlooked in the name of profit, but it’s more difficult when the unknowable wilderness lies beyond. Pictured in his most famous painting are tiny figures representing the expedition, standing like ants at the precipice of a sheer drop. Any great gust of wind or tectonic shift could send them plummeting off into certain death. Beyond, on the horizon is a thunderous waterfall. It is fantastical and alluring, but god help you if you get caught in its uncaring flow. I want to be there, standing next to the explorers and even going out into the painted world, but at the same time I feel my fragility pang. From Software has distilled the essence of Moran’s paintings down to a concentrated formula. The worlds they create are three dimensional recreations of this feeling strung together in a barrelling journey toward more and more danger. They are anxiety filled trips to places that are constantly out to hurt you and make you feel true, unrelenting fear. The fear that all the progress you made through this world will suddenly be halted by something insurmountable. Something that has seen a thousand people like you, and disposed of them like any of the birds or unclothed zombies that you dash past. Despite the danger and confusion and seemingly endless unfair obstacles that these games are defined by, they hold some allure with us. We keep bashing our heads against these walls because they are walls that are splendid to look at.

Elden Ring is an embarrassment of beautiful walls. It feels like a scavenger hunt where around every corner a new Moran painting lies in wait. Breath of the Wild hid shrines around the world, but everyone knew that the real reward was the intrinsic joy of finding an abandoned temple embedded with sleeping guardians. It was scaling a mountain you’ve seen in the distance for the last five hours, reaching the top, and seeing that not only do dragons exist in this world, but there’s one right in front of you. Elden Ring is like Breath of the Wild if every shrine was replaced with a dragon at the top of a mountain. At every turn there is a mine filled with stone-skinned humanoids wholly concerned with stripping away the gem laden walls, or a ravine that ends in a climb through scaffolding and jutting cliffs with a magma spewing wyrm guarding its peak, or a castle just as intricate as the best Dark Souls levels taunting you with its grandeur. Everything here taunts you. Elephant sized wolves that can murder you in one fell swoop taunt you in the same way Moran taunted everyone who looked upon his paintings. It’s a dare that no matter how dangerous they can make something, we will always edge closer to it to get a better look at its grotesque beauty. It’s the dare that, my 10,000 souls be damned, you will platform through treacherous ramparts of a castle in disrepair to see what lies at the end. Elden Ring taunts me constantly, and its rewards are greater than 10,000 or 100,000 souls or runes or whatever they’re called now. All I know is that I should have never doubted From Software’s propensity to allure me with venomous curiosity.