I am exhausted with Elden Ring.
Here is a game that, from announcement to release, gave every indication that FromSoft would produce as vast a game world as has ever been made, as rich with incident and care, as challenging, as weird, as colourfully indirect as a made maze in a Kandinsky; the tides rolled in on beaches docking millions set for sail expecting Carcosa, Atlantis, and El Dorado, and the wash could have lent their journeys as layaway meats for Leviathan and Davy Jones. And yet, the playership got what could charitably be called the most important game in a decade, one which culminated a discourse surging with antitheses between difficulty and invitation, open worlds and designed spaces, Western and Eastern design styles, Dark Souls-ification of auteur design and the Ubi-Soft Soylenting of AAA IPs. Elden Ring not only culminated the design ethos which had substantiated FromSoft’s output for longer than a third of it’s developer company’s lifespan but also may as well have finalised the general trending of all games to arrive since Rockstar made plays to become the medium’s premier developer with GTA3, wresting away ideas of dispassionate world design which models itself as player centric as opposed to ludically deifying. If the 2010s was a battleground for UI infection, side-quest motivational throttling, inexpressive play, and IP above all else marketing, then Elden Ring was The Battle of Beneventum capping the whole bloody affair.
Of course, given the game that Elden Ring is - overwhelming, unmanageable, gruelling, larger than life, a work so unruly that it has taken an incestuous and infighting community to unlock a half ‘s half of it - the Battle it has won now plays the same as The Battle of Beneventum: it is the, if not last then at least most definitive up until this moment, battle which shows to be Pyrrhic the campaign shape organzing AAA video game development since the 90s. Undeniably, Elden Ring has defined itself as a game which can achieve on expectations and motivations of enormous potential without riddling its successes full of caveated compromises; if that could be in doubt after the endless stream of flotsam articles articulating every single way that Elden Ring defiantly trends apart of the ‘standard conventions’ of modern game design, then the vitriol it has received from developers of other games for whom the culture decided were manufacturers of metastasized adjoiners to the growing cancer infecting anything within the budget worthy game sphere works as equally valuable contrary proof of the same. However, these advances showing off Elden Ring’s merit are exactly those which in turn dam its elevations in the space for considering games a still predominantly artistic form: its successes were squarely, unilaterally, won on the battlefield of soulless corporate design’s choosing. To put it as myopically as I see it, Elden Ring is the surrender to the industry’s perpetual play, open world games designed to elicit extrinsic motivation for ingratiating an audience, all love for which could have been elicited kept instead at a remove of novelty, completeness, or argumentation of game ‘fact’ over artistic ‘feeling’. I’ll put it harshly here because, while I enjoy the game, the merits have been praised endlessly elsewhere: it is vistas which do not delight in the construction of beauty for inhabitation towards a meaning or poetics of space but instead a world of battle arenas which disallow human expression or connection, which payout materials removed of contextual meaning, which adorn no love for simplicity in kind which connects the human spirit to mutual elements of our making, which can have no meaning as composite makeups of our choices to be better or worse than we have been, which engender no kindness or cruelty towards ourselves because of others or others because of ourselves, and which hold no lineage with the stubborn Soul furtively sputtering in the palm of a weakened and shamefully scorned mite on creation’s flank. In short, Elden Ring is the Dark Souls of removing meaning from our engagement with systems which can in concert with a human shibboleth and human community relay humanity by precluding our senses of freedom and ability: it is the Dark Souls of Pavlovian empathy.
A lot of big words signifying what? Are there many things which Elden Ring’s successes are composed of that were included in previous entries and formatted so as to mean and draw different conclusions from artistic evaluation than in Elden Ring? I would argue that the answer is emphatically yes to almost all comparisons drawn from every single game made in the modern FromSoft vein (including the similarly valuated, in my opinion, Dark Souls 3). I’ll try to make my points obvious by indicating the areas from which I draw the disparities between the trajectory’s starting points and motivations and whereupon they’ve been changed or have culminated in Elden Ring. This isn’t to say that the examples I mention specifically below are more exciting or fun to play, better designed, unique, or counter-cultural in our earlier games than in Elden Ring, merely that they are less doctored by the wrenched age they occurred in in comparison to those operators plucking at the cords and bunkers of Elden Ring’s 2022. Equally, it cannot be said that there are not forces which tremorously bombarded and indicated within those earlier FromSoft games with as much resoundingly complete ‘end of auteur’ era finality or some other overblown case to how dire things are as I or anyone else can make it sound (although those things, particularly as we back away from their containing game’s original release dates, oftentimes seem far less than threatening with hindsight allowing us into futures certain which show what did not come to pass). It’s hard to read anything that has proceeded above or which will follow below as a ‘soft’ criticism of Elden Ring. I have not meant to sound overly harsh or as if I thought the game as an abject failure; I like Elden Ring a good deal, enough to play it through twice and poke about with a third playthrough. What I think Elden Ring signifies for FromSoft and gaming criticism et al is much different than what I think of it as a singular entity, and I would like to be able to talk about Elden Ring (the game) and Elden Ring (the cultural artefact) distinctly for the sake of readership clarity as well as my own sanity. But to separate the two is to remove any possibility of using criticism as a tool for effecting our world as a response and proportionate creative tool as the art it assumes as its language - to use it in isolation is merely advertising. Most of the things that are meritorious in Elden Ring are expounded endlessly elsewhere - for my purposes, their obviousness allows them to go unspoken.
While there are more things that could be lacquered onto the following roll, I will limit the specificities to a few different component parallels between previous FromSoft games and Elden Ring.
Motivations implicated in the player when interacting in worlds with directional/linear traversals vs those in sandbox/open worlds: The unofficial tagline for Elden Ring has been written underneath the play community placard: Open World Dark Souls. Even though the progressibility for FromSoft games, with limited choke point exceptions, has offered non-linear progression paths (Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne tend most away from this typicality out of the set but their own holding least to the open traversiality with lack of obvious directions is the ‘exception’ which proves the rule), it’s fair to say the generality of Open World Dark Souls is less implying a nodal mission quality than it is the traversability and freedom of the world that has a, more often than not, compassed horizon as opposed to a plotted one. The freedom of movement in Elden Ring, as has been pointed out rightly for the wrong reasons by journalists and fans when making criticisms about Elden Ring’s Spartan UI, is a negative freedom momentously charge when directly contrasted by the freedoms allowed within Souls-like games as we have mostly come to know them with the FromSoft catalogue, but more specifically when contrasted by the freedoms motivating play within Sekiro and Demon’s Souls.
In philosophy, a positive freedom is one which allows the discovery of self action and purpose through action - freedom of religion, freedom of marriage, freedom from descriminations - and a negative freedom is one which disallows action to purposefully, incisively, or meaningfully be chosen by presenting choice wherein there is an operator denying the substance of the choice by its presentation - freedom to ‘choose’ your grocery options, freedom to work and ‘make a living’: they are the dichotomies of free will, one indicating the abilities human cognizance can realise when probing the boundaries of themselves and their society, and the the other countenancing the limits of transgression or excursion from the state of slavery to the state of freedom. What this distinction means in FromSoft’s Souls-catalogue is this: The freedom to choose a path, a weapon, a playstyle, etc. in the games prior to Elden Ring was lent various validation mechanisms that internal to the games system implied a correlation between the possibility of the playspace and the boundary reaching play of the player. For example, let’s pull a situation from Demon’s Souls: the player is using a melee build, successfully managing to fight and defeat bosses which have been able to be encountered and retreated from without obfuscation of golden path play. They encounter Old Hero, and after banging their head against the boss for a few tries, retreat to other spokes to try and grind or practice. Returning to 1-1, they find the Thief Ring and witness its affects; if they make the mental connection between the description and what they know of the boss from its behaviours and model, they find that the Thief Ring validates their utilising the world backward and forward with the toolset and knowledge instilled into them as a player. Maybe they were turned the wrong way towards grinding, but if they picked up the Thief Ring on their first pass, it wouldn’t have even occurred to them that Old Hero would be difficult or a challenge with a key. In short, the system which allows for the blocking of progress has at its limits a contingency for overcoming the blockage. Shorter in relay, in Sekiro the various difficulties of bosses are largely contingent on, yes, systems mastery, but also on the tools crafted for specific and, keeping in spirit with Shinobi history, unequal possibility space between the greater portioned action leniency given to the player than to the bosses.
In Elden Ring, let’s imagine another situation: the player, using a dexterity/intelligence build, upon leaving Limgrave goes to the gates of Stormveil to fight Margit (as most players do on their first playthrough). They get roundly smacked by him a few times, maybe a few dozen times, before leaving to, similar to their leaving Old Hero, grind or discover. They go Northeast to Caelid and get clobbered. They go to the Weeping Peninsula, fight through it to Caste Morne, which they find challenging but slightly less so than Margit, so they die their way through it to the Leonine Misbegotten. They fight it (and get a measly 3,800 runes) and it drops the Grafted Great Sword. Having earned maybe 5 levels going so far South, they return to Margit and die 20 more times before getting lucky with the AI and continuing on. Now of course, they could have found Margit’s Shackles if they’d found Patches if they’d found Murkwater Cave (and for transparency, I didn’t on my first playthrough) but unlike the Thief Ring, it works twice on Margit and only in his first, much easier, phase. This is the difference between the playspace Elden Ring and the other, less ‘open’, variations found in earlier releases: in those games, the paths of progression were meted out to afford and ensure that players were given all the boundary reaching toolsets to express themselves within the world; in Elden Ring, those tools are either denuded in pursuit making sure challenge is equal across players regardless of what freedoms they have been sewn or placed so that the freedoms allowed are those whose presences and possibilities are more surprising than their absences.
A much shorter point that leads from the previous is this: difficulty as a meaningful indicator of theme and tone. Elden Ring is in many ways the latest in a fed, growing, insatiable fire started by the marketing and anathematic to its time play of Dark Souls. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the directorial head of all the FromSoft games in this lineage excepting the vanilla version of Dark Souls 2, has stated that his intention of difficulty was to reinforce idea-forms of mountainous overcoming in how any given player can reference themself in relation to the FromSoft catalogue. Of course, as we see mimed micro in Elden Ring, the scaling of difficulty can grow not just with entries of reinforcing playstyle but also with echoing reinforcement of the industry’s understanding of the Souls combat style in the market. FromSoft can no longer satisfy themselves making an intra difficulty, or really, if they stuck to their stated aim, a play which reinforces achievement internally to the world, but has to move to an external fort of difficulty and, more importantly, impressing difficulty amongst Jedis Fallen, Niohs, Surges, and so on. Elden Ring’s enormous spike in difficulty following Leyndell is well documented elsewhere but I want to more specifically, and briefly, comment on how the difficulty can be contextualised amongst the other various elements of play: let’s put a scenario up against DS2. In Elden Ring, when first entering into the Mountaintop of the Giants, you come across a ruin like any other. It is inhabited by three Knights of Zamor, enemies who, regardless of your build, utterly smoke the tree trunk through in a way totally upscaled beyond any consideration from Leyndell, potentially an increase in damage and health of 300% over the average knight in the previous area. This difficulty is clearly meant to indicate crossing a precipice into a different kind of hostility than was previously understood or probed - but, why here? Why these enemies? Why to such an incredible degree? The player has fought boss versions of this enemy that go down in 1/10th the amount of hits, scaling even for damage inflation. The answer is Elden Ring, like every FromSoft game before, has to earn continual monikers of huge and difficult encumbrances, only now they have to come 15 times in a game - Ornstein and Smough at all points on the compass. By contrast, in DS2 the player exits Heide’s Tower of Flame and fights a dragon from an area not past discovered, like with the Knights of Zamor, but from far down the golden path, the Dragon Aerie. It is a reasonable spike in difficulty, and probably has more lacklustre design in both its arena and moveset than the Knights of Zamor. But, once defeated, the player doesn’t continue to climb a sharp and sheer cliff of difficulty endlessly skyrocketing. Instead, they fight The Old Dragonslayer, now too impotent to do what they did just outside the front door.
The difficulty tells a story both within the hands and in the game in FromSoft’s earlier works, whereas in Elden Ring, it merely tells on the devs.
There is more to be said but I don’t want to find out if there is a character limit on GG, so I’ll end with this: Elden Ring is FromSoft’s best realised world in a fictive sense; it has characters with more agency and intrigue and genuine pathos than any game in their catalogue which came before en masse (although Sekiro tells a more compelling story in the actual course of the game, whereas Elden Ring keeps its goods locked in the prior to start screen). It is gorgeously animated, the design of the creatures and world is consistently enthralling, strange, frightening, and funny. Its soundtrack is better than those of all the other Souls games combined. It, with its success, guaranteed in a small way the inevitability of Miyazaki being able to continue creating weird little fucked up dudes; if there is any miracle in 21st games, it is probably those fucked up little dudes. But, it is for better or worse, the last Souls game. They could go back to making more linear, more thoughtful, more ebbing and flowing, more mysterious, more just for me kinds of games - but they’ll be tarnished by the knowledge that they can always again bend the knee to Rockstar, Ubisoft, and Blizzard and every cycle of perpetual gaming that keeps the art a subject of commerce.
Here is a game that, from announcement to release, gave every indication that FromSoft would produce as vast a game world as has ever been made, as rich with incident and care, as challenging, as weird, as colourfully indirect as a made maze in a Kandinsky; the tides rolled in on beaches docking millions set for sail expecting Carcosa, Atlantis, and El Dorado, and the wash could have lent their journeys as layaway meats for Leviathan and Davy Jones. And yet, the playership got what could charitably be called the most important game in a decade, one which culminated a discourse surging with antitheses between difficulty and invitation, open worlds and designed spaces, Western and Eastern design styles, Dark Souls-ification of auteur design and the Ubi-Soft Soylenting of AAA IPs. Elden Ring not only culminated the design ethos which had substantiated FromSoft’s output for longer than a third of it’s developer company’s lifespan but also may as well have finalised the general trending of all games to arrive since Rockstar made plays to become the medium’s premier developer with GTA3, wresting away ideas of dispassionate world design which models itself as player centric as opposed to ludically deifying. If the 2010s was a battleground for UI infection, side-quest motivational throttling, inexpressive play, and IP above all else marketing, then Elden Ring was The Battle of Beneventum capping the whole bloody affair.
Of course, given the game that Elden Ring is - overwhelming, unmanageable, gruelling, larger than life, a work so unruly that it has taken an incestuous and infighting community to unlock a half ‘s half of it - the Battle it has won now plays the same as The Battle of Beneventum: it is the, if not last then at least most definitive up until this moment, battle which shows to be Pyrrhic the campaign shape organzing AAA video game development since the 90s. Undeniably, Elden Ring has defined itself as a game which can achieve on expectations and motivations of enormous potential without riddling its successes full of caveated compromises; if that could be in doubt after the endless stream of flotsam articles articulating every single way that Elden Ring defiantly trends apart of the ‘standard conventions’ of modern game design, then the vitriol it has received from developers of other games for whom the culture decided were manufacturers of metastasized adjoiners to the growing cancer infecting anything within the budget worthy game sphere works as equally valuable contrary proof of the same. However, these advances showing off Elden Ring’s merit are exactly those which in turn dam its elevations in the space for considering games a still predominantly artistic form: its successes were squarely, unilaterally, won on the battlefield of soulless corporate design’s choosing. To put it as myopically as I see it, Elden Ring is the surrender to the industry’s perpetual play, open world games designed to elicit extrinsic motivation for ingratiating an audience, all love for which could have been elicited kept instead at a remove of novelty, completeness, or argumentation of game ‘fact’ over artistic ‘feeling’. I’ll put it harshly here because, while I enjoy the game, the merits have been praised endlessly elsewhere: it is vistas which do not delight in the construction of beauty for inhabitation towards a meaning or poetics of space but instead a world of battle arenas which disallow human expression or connection, which payout materials removed of contextual meaning, which adorn no love for simplicity in kind which connects the human spirit to mutual elements of our making, which can have no meaning as composite makeups of our choices to be better or worse than we have been, which engender no kindness or cruelty towards ourselves because of others or others because of ourselves, and which hold no lineage with the stubborn Soul furtively sputtering in the palm of a weakened and shamefully scorned mite on creation’s flank. In short, Elden Ring is the Dark Souls of removing meaning from our engagement with systems which can in concert with a human shibboleth and human community relay humanity by precluding our senses of freedom and ability: it is the Dark Souls of Pavlovian empathy.
A lot of big words signifying what? Are there many things which Elden Ring’s successes are composed of that were included in previous entries and formatted so as to mean and draw different conclusions from artistic evaluation than in Elden Ring? I would argue that the answer is emphatically yes to almost all comparisons drawn from every single game made in the modern FromSoft vein (including the similarly valuated, in my opinion, Dark Souls 3). I’ll try to make my points obvious by indicating the areas from which I draw the disparities between the trajectory’s starting points and motivations and whereupon they’ve been changed or have culminated in Elden Ring. This isn’t to say that the examples I mention specifically below are more exciting or fun to play, better designed, unique, or counter-cultural in our earlier games than in Elden Ring, merely that they are less doctored by the wrenched age they occurred in in comparison to those operators plucking at the cords and bunkers of Elden Ring’s 2022. Equally, it cannot be said that there are not forces which tremorously bombarded and indicated within those earlier FromSoft games with as much resoundingly complete ‘end of auteur’ era finality or some other overblown case to how dire things are as I or anyone else can make it sound (although those things, particularly as we back away from their containing game’s original release dates, oftentimes seem far less than threatening with hindsight allowing us into futures certain which show what did not come to pass). It’s hard to read anything that has proceeded above or which will follow below as a ‘soft’ criticism of Elden Ring. I have not meant to sound overly harsh or as if I thought the game as an abject failure; I like Elden Ring a good deal, enough to play it through twice and poke about with a third playthrough. What I think Elden Ring signifies for FromSoft and gaming criticism et al is much different than what I think of it as a singular entity, and I would like to be able to talk about Elden Ring (the game) and Elden Ring (the cultural artefact) distinctly for the sake of readership clarity as well as my own sanity. But to separate the two is to remove any possibility of using criticism as a tool for effecting our world as a response and proportionate creative tool as the art it assumes as its language - to use it in isolation is merely advertising. Most of the things that are meritorious in Elden Ring are expounded endlessly elsewhere - for my purposes, their obviousness allows them to go unspoken.
While there are more things that could be lacquered onto the following roll, I will limit the specificities to a few different component parallels between previous FromSoft games and Elden Ring.
Motivations implicated in the player when interacting in worlds with directional/linear traversals vs those in sandbox/open worlds: The unofficial tagline for Elden Ring has been written underneath the play community placard: Open World Dark Souls. Even though the progressibility for FromSoft games, with limited choke point exceptions, has offered non-linear progression paths (Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne tend most away from this typicality out of the set but their own holding least to the open traversiality with lack of obvious directions is the ‘exception’ which proves the rule), it’s fair to say the generality of Open World Dark Souls is less implying a nodal mission quality than it is the traversability and freedom of the world that has a, more often than not, compassed horizon as opposed to a plotted one. The freedom of movement in Elden Ring, as has been pointed out rightly for the wrong reasons by journalists and fans when making criticisms about Elden Ring’s Spartan UI, is a negative freedom momentously charge when directly contrasted by the freedoms allowed within Souls-like games as we have mostly come to know them with the FromSoft catalogue, but more specifically when contrasted by the freedoms motivating play within Sekiro and Demon’s Souls.
In philosophy, a positive freedom is one which allows the discovery of self action and purpose through action - freedom of religion, freedom of marriage, freedom from descriminations - and a negative freedom is one which disallows action to purposefully, incisively, or meaningfully be chosen by presenting choice wherein there is an operator denying the substance of the choice by its presentation - freedom to ‘choose’ your grocery options, freedom to work and ‘make a living’: they are the dichotomies of free will, one indicating the abilities human cognizance can realise when probing the boundaries of themselves and their society, and the the other countenancing the limits of transgression or excursion from the state of slavery to the state of freedom. What this distinction means in FromSoft’s Souls-catalogue is this: The freedom to choose a path, a weapon, a playstyle, etc. in the games prior to Elden Ring was lent various validation mechanisms that internal to the games system implied a correlation between the possibility of the playspace and the boundary reaching play of the player. For example, let’s pull a situation from Demon’s Souls: the player is using a melee build, successfully managing to fight and defeat bosses which have been able to be encountered and retreated from without obfuscation of golden path play. They encounter Old Hero, and after banging their head against the boss for a few tries, retreat to other spokes to try and grind or practice. Returning to 1-1, they find the Thief Ring and witness its affects; if they make the mental connection between the description and what they know of the boss from its behaviours and model, they find that the Thief Ring validates their utilising the world backward and forward with the toolset and knowledge instilled into them as a player. Maybe they were turned the wrong way towards grinding, but if they picked up the Thief Ring on their first pass, it wouldn’t have even occurred to them that Old Hero would be difficult or a challenge with a key. In short, the system which allows for the blocking of progress has at its limits a contingency for overcoming the blockage. Shorter in relay, in Sekiro the various difficulties of bosses are largely contingent on, yes, systems mastery, but also on the tools crafted for specific and, keeping in spirit with Shinobi history, unequal possibility space between the greater portioned action leniency given to the player than to the bosses.
In Elden Ring, let’s imagine another situation: the player, using a dexterity/intelligence build, upon leaving Limgrave goes to the gates of Stormveil to fight Margit (as most players do on their first playthrough). They get roundly smacked by him a few times, maybe a few dozen times, before leaving to, similar to their leaving Old Hero, grind or discover. They go Northeast to Caelid and get clobbered. They go to the Weeping Peninsula, fight through it to Caste Morne, which they find challenging but slightly less so than Margit, so they die their way through it to the Leonine Misbegotten. They fight it (and get a measly 3,800 runes) and it drops the Grafted Great Sword. Having earned maybe 5 levels going so far South, they return to Margit and die 20 more times before getting lucky with the AI and continuing on. Now of course, they could have found Margit’s Shackles if they’d found Patches if they’d found Murkwater Cave (and for transparency, I didn’t on my first playthrough) but unlike the Thief Ring, it works twice on Margit and only in his first, much easier, phase. This is the difference between the playspace Elden Ring and the other, less ‘open’, variations found in earlier releases: in those games, the paths of progression were meted out to afford and ensure that players were given all the boundary reaching toolsets to express themselves within the world; in Elden Ring, those tools are either denuded in pursuit making sure challenge is equal across players regardless of what freedoms they have been sewn or placed so that the freedoms allowed are those whose presences and possibilities are more surprising than their absences.
A much shorter point that leads from the previous is this: difficulty as a meaningful indicator of theme and tone. Elden Ring is in many ways the latest in a fed, growing, insatiable fire started by the marketing and anathematic to its time play of Dark Souls. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the directorial head of all the FromSoft games in this lineage excepting the vanilla version of Dark Souls 2, has stated that his intention of difficulty was to reinforce idea-forms of mountainous overcoming in how any given player can reference themself in relation to the FromSoft catalogue. Of course, as we see mimed micro in Elden Ring, the scaling of difficulty can grow not just with entries of reinforcing playstyle but also with echoing reinforcement of the industry’s understanding of the Souls combat style in the market. FromSoft can no longer satisfy themselves making an intra difficulty, or really, if they stuck to their stated aim, a play which reinforces achievement internally to the world, but has to move to an external fort of difficulty and, more importantly, impressing difficulty amongst Jedis Fallen, Niohs, Surges, and so on. Elden Ring’s enormous spike in difficulty following Leyndell is well documented elsewhere but I want to more specifically, and briefly, comment on how the difficulty can be contextualised amongst the other various elements of play: let’s put a scenario up against DS2. In Elden Ring, when first entering into the Mountaintop of the Giants, you come across a ruin like any other. It is inhabited by three Knights of Zamor, enemies who, regardless of your build, utterly smoke the tree trunk through in a way totally upscaled beyond any consideration from Leyndell, potentially an increase in damage and health of 300% over the average knight in the previous area. This difficulty is clearly meant to indicate crossing a precipice into a different kind of hostility than was previously understood or probed - but, why here? Why these enemies? Why to such an incredible degree? The player has fought boss versions of this enemy that go down in 1/10th the amount of hits, scaling even for damage inflation. The answer is Elden Ring, like every FromSoft game before, has to earn continual monikers of huge and difficult encumbrances, only now they have to come 15 times in a game - Ornstein and Smough at all points on the compass. By contrast, in DS2 the player exits Heide’s Tower of Flame and fights a dragon from an area not past discovered, like with the Knights of Zamor, but from far down the golden path, the Dragon Aerie. It is a reasonable spike in difficulty, and probably has more lacklustre design in both its arena and moveset than the Knights of Zamor. But, once defeated, the player doesn’t continue to climb a sharp and sheer cliff of difficulty endlessly skyrocketing. Instead, they fight The Old Dragonslayer, now too impotent to do what they did just outside the front door.
The difficulty tells a story both within the hands and in the game in FromSoft’s earlier works, whereas in Elden Ring, it merely tells on the devs.
There is more to be said but I don’t want to find out if there is a character limit on GG, so I’ll end with this: Elden Ring is FromSoft’s best realised world in a fictive sense; it has characters with more agency and intrigue and genuine pathos than any game in their catalogue which came before en masse (although Sekiro tells a more compelling story in the actual course of the game, whereas Elden Ring keeps its goods locked in the prior to start screen). It is gorgeously animated, the design of the creatures and world is consistently enthralling, strange, frightening, and funny. Its soundtrack is better than those of all the other Souls games combined. It, with its success, guaranteed in a small way the inevitability of Miyazaki being able to continue creating weird little fucked up dudes; if there is any miracle in 21st games, it is probably those fucked up little dudes. But, it is for better or worse, the last Souls game. They could go back to making more linear, more thoughtful, more ebbing and flowing, more mysterious, more just for me kinds of games - but they’ll be tarnished by the knowledge that they can always again bend the knee to Rockstar, Ubisoft, and Blizzard and every cycle of perpetual gaming that keeps the art a subject of commerce.
2 Comments
That's better than me, I'm working with about a 10% understanding of what I'm saying
LordDarias
1 year ago