Makeleek
7 reviews liked by Makeleek
Elden Ring
2022
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.
š
In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ārealā 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 Iād ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didnāt like the cleaning and repair staff.
Iām 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 āacademicā 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 ānon-academicā 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 didnāt 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 Iād felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I canāt remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I donāt remember my motivation for every video game Iāve ever bought.
Friends of mine whoād foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demonās Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demonās Souls was a āstupidā and āunfairā game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancyās 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 wasnāt 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 gameās 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.
Iām sure youāre 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 friendās 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 donāt remember. And so on. Youāve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I donāt 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 grandmotherās baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think thereās ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capitalās 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 donāt 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, itās 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 thatās come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoftās other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that canāt 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 - youāre 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 Ā£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 āNoble Onesā: those who are deemed āspiritually 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 taį¹hÄ ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirstā). 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 taį¹hÄ; 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; Buddhismās sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.
āø
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 Vās 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 doesnāt get the full meaning across, but you can feel all thatās 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:
āThis was a game of my dadās era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.ā
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.
š
The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.
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.
š
In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ārealā 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 Iād ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didnāt like the cleaning and repair staff.
Iām 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 āacademicā 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 ānon-academicā 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 didnāt 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 Iād felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I canāt remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I donāt remember my motivation for every video game Iāve ever bought.
Friends of mine whoād foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demonās Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demonās Souls was a āstupidā and āunfairā game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancyās 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 wasnāt 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 gameās 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.
Iām sure youāre 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 friendās 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 donāt remember. And so on. Youāve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I donāt 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 grandmotherās baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think thereās ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capitalās 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 donāt 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, itās 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 thatās come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoftās other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that canāt 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,
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 Ā£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 āNoble Onesā: those who are deemed āspiritually 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 taį¹hÄ ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirstā). 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 taį¹hÄ; 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; Buddhismās sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.
āø
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 Vās 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 doesnāt get the full meaning across, but you can feel all thatās 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:
āThis was a game of my dadās era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.ā
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.
š
The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.
Elden Ring
2022
When Demonās 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 Demonās 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 werenāt 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 ātypesā 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 Ringās world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, itāll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales Iāve seen in a minute; Iām particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahnās arena post-battle for a taste of what Iād personally hoped exploring Elden Ringās 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 āthis reminds me of another gameā 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.
2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.
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 ātypesā 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 Ringās world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, itāll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales Iāve seen in a minute; Iām particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahnās arena post-battle for a taste of what Iād personally hoped exploring Elden Ringās 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 āthis reminds me of another gameā 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.
2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.
Elden Ring
2022
This review contains spoilers
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
Elden Ring
2022
This review was written before the game released
She elden on my ring till i'm far fromsoft
Elden Ring
2022
Starnger Of Paradise will be better
Elden Ring
2022
Play Lego Island
Baldur's Gate 3
2023
please free my SO she's 50 hours deep still in act 1 and keeps sharing snippits of wanting to fuck the vampire I can no longer reach her