RE: ELDEN RING Directed By: Hidetaka Miyazaki
A Game that I Just Finished
From: Travis
April 15, 2022
Here at RTFB, we've never once been accused of being on the cutting edge of review cycles, of being the ones on the forefront of the SEO of all the newest film adaptations, or the hip new thing that everyone is talking about. I think Dune and Dr Sleep are the only cases where we covered movies that were even still in the theater (if you don't count the Hallmark movies, which you shouldn't). So, it is in keeping with that grand tradition that I sit down now to write about a video game (an RTFB first!) that came out almost two months ago; Elden Ring.
Plus, whenever I try to talk to Danielle about Elden Ring her eyes get all glassy and I can see her doing the 'how quickly can I change the subject without risking our marriage?' math in her head, so this is really the only place I can go on about it at length, which I certainly will.
But, to keep even truer to tradition, before I talk about this game, I want to talk about Souls games in general.
I came to the series very, very late. The Demon Souls remake for PS5 was my first one, and even that was like a year old before I picked it up. All I really knew going in was that the general consensus was that Demon/Dark Souls games are, like, ridiculously hard - the whole 'You Died' meme, partnered with the general advice that the only alternative to death is to 'Get Good' - that they were populated with extremely difficult bosses, punishing game mechanics, and lots and lots of frustration. So, when I first booted up Demon Souls, unsure if I'd even be able to finish, I was ready to be really angry.
And yeah, I died right away to the first "boss" (which you are supposed to do, you know - otherwise, you wouldn't get trapped in the Nexus, being reincarnated each time you die and the game wouldn't even happen) ... and then died again, I think before getting up the first staircase in Boletaria. So, just as promised, here was a game that was very unforgiving of non-attentive play. Really any enemy in the game could kill you if you take them on in a dumb way (for instance, hitting the attack button while not facing them, or hitting the dodge button when you are backed up to a ledge and falling into oblivion). But the obvious thing that I hadn't realized beforehand was that these games are action RPGs (really hard ones, but RPGs none the less). I guess I had thought these were more like Ghosts N' Goblins? Just really hard games where you had to work with what you had at the start, with maybe an armor or weapon upgrade here or there. But, no, not so.
The main mechanic, for those who've never played: you are some guy/lady (an adventurer, or an undead, or a tarnished depending on the specific game) dropped into a random dark fantasy world. You run around, you kill a bunch of monsters, and you get experience points (in the form of souls) that you can cash in at save points to level up. If you die --- Strike that, WHEN you die -- you drop all your souls and leave a little marker more or less where you had been on the map and you respawn. If you can make it back to that point, great, you get your souls back. If you die again before you get to that point, that old marker is gone now, and so are how ever many souls you'd had there (and that's when you swear a lot and do the thing where you mourn the hours that you had spent earning those souls that are now just fucking gone).
So, that's the first wrinkle to what I expected the games to be; yes there was dying. Lots and lots of dying. BUT! If you kept trying, kept at least getting back to where you had been, well, you might've tripled your souls total from when you first got clapped by a skeleton who'd been hiding behind a blind corner. With those souls in hand, you could level up the specific stat that you needed to 'Get Good'.
The next wrinkle, each time you died (or saved), most of the monsters reset back to their starting points and you can run through it again, trying a slightly different strategy: going for the magic caster first instead of tanking the zombie mobs, taking a left in the tunnel instead of a right, changing to your cross bow to pick off weaker monsters before engaging the area. It almost turns the game into a machine learning program, wherein you play the part of the algorithm, incrementally changing plans until you figure out what works. And here's the thing, that part fucking sucks. That's the part where you will spend hours saying how broken the game is, how much you hate it, and how poorly designed it is... and then, whether through good planning or sheer dumb luck, you make it through. You get the next checkpoint, you level up... and strangely, that area is never quite that hard ever again. Your gameplan has become better, or else your stats have, and guys that used to take 3 or 4 stamina-draining hits to kill, now only take 2. And then 1, and you have a lot more stamina left over to deal with even more monsters; the game seems to unbreak itself. It lends the games a real sense of progression, of your character getting stronger... but, again, it fucking sucks while you're going through those growing pains.
The thing that I think really hooked me is the online aspect (another thing I hadn't known about going in). First of all, one of the things all the games let you do is leave messages on the ground. Things like "Be Wary of Right" or "Hidden Path Ahead" or "Try Piercing Weapons"; you know, little hints that you would've liked to know when you first went through the area. These messages show up in the same spot for other players whenever they pass by, and of course, you can read a bunch of messages that have been left by other players, which serve as a kind of living, in-game walk through.
One thing you quickly notice is that the Souls game community LOVES to put "Try Jumping" messages at the edge of EVERY ledge, regardless of whether doing so will send you plummeting into nothingness -- no ESPECIALLY when doing so will send you plummeting into nothingness. Same for every single wall in the game; "Try Attacking". Some times (very, very rarely, but some times), attacking will make the wall disappear and reveal a hidden area. But I've got to think it's like 99.9% of the time just going to bounce off and dull your weapon. So, yeah, buyer beware I guess.
Second of all, you are able to be summoned by other players to join their game, and that, for me, was where things really became fun. You get comfortable with a boss, you put down your sign, and if someone comes across it, you can be connected to them and now you get to help someone who is probably in the middle of their machine learning algorithm take out some asshole, broken boss fight. I read something recently that Hidetaka Miyazaki was inspired to put this in after a time when his car was stuck in the snow going up a mountain and a stranger came along, pulled up to the back bumper and pushed the stranded cars up the path... and even if that's an apocryphal story, it is still a very apt comparison. For me, going back to the Tower Knight and helping someone beat them for the first time, showing them how to take out the archers before hacking away at the giant enemy's ankles, exchanging thanks with each other via emote, was more fun and more rewarding than when I first beat the game.
By the end of Demon Souls, though it was maybe just as painful as I expected, I felt like it had been a rewarding experience overall, so I went on to Dark Souls: Remastered. And, yeah, the basic game play is very, very similar... but now the world felt more connected, your path forward felt freer. True, in Demon Souls, you are able to pick which 'worlds' you visit and jump between them as needed... but each world is pretty much a straight path from the start to the two bosses in the middle and the main boss at the end. In Dark Souls, they said, you know what, we're all adults here, you figure it out. For instance, if you pick the Master Key as your starting item, you can take a left turn at the first 'real' bonfire and end up in the Valley of the Drakes, and then Blight Town, followed by the Salt Lake, all of which I would consider End Of Game Areas (or at least, Don't Go Here First areas). Want to go to thru the graveyard into the Giants Tomb and fight the literal lord of Death at level 2? Be our guest.
It also had a lot more NPC interaction. Just like in Demon Souls, you can 'rescue' people while you explore the world and they teleport back to your hub to give you advice and sell you stuff later on. Or, apparently, sometimes they get fed up with you and your dumb quest and decide to leave and fight you later or, you know, fucking kill other NPCs when you aren't there and fuck up your save point, fucking Lautrec -- I'll NEVER forgive you.
To sum that game up insufficiently; the bosses where numerous, their designs were unique, they were still freaking brutal, but never truly felt unfair. The world was vast, and although you really still only had the single path through each area, they were all interconnected in such a way that it still felt open; reminded me very strongly of a Metroid game.
Ok, so, anyway -- the game we actually came here to talk about, Elden Ring.
First thing to know: this game is enormous. Like, really, seriously, way too big.
It felt to me like an MMO - something that you would usually check into over several weeks or months, breaking off small pieces at a time. Which is cool, but difficult for a person like me to manage; I just could not leave a single random cave alone. I knew I was going into a side quest, that the item at the end was probably not even worth it, that I was about to trade an hour or two for maybe one soul level and a talisman at best, but I just couldn't walk away. So my first play through clocked in just under 120 hours (hence, why I am writing this two months after it launched).
At it's base level, it's just like Dark Souls but with a lot of quality of life type improvements (that may have already been in the series, but were new to me) such as:
- A goddamn jump button.
I can't tell you how many times I had to do a platforming section in the older games, but didn't double tap circle just right and fell to my death instead of making a very small jump (freaking Bed of Chaos).
- Letting you fall way farther without dying.
That was a bit of PTSD that took some doing to get over, but if they had the same fall damage in here that they had in Dark Souls, you could probably have bumped my clear time up to like 150 hours
- Having way more weapons that are worth using.
Again, in older games, there are a bunch of weapons to pick to suit your play style... and an easy way to hot swap through a handful at a time... but I basically just played with a standard sword the whole time, with a Big Sword (TM) as a backup when I needed to do heavy damage. I used that strategy for a long while in Elden Ring too... but was also able to spend time using medium weight swords, spears, katana, bows and still feel like I was dealing good damage.
- Not using up your stamina if you aren't in a fight.
Which was always a pain in other games, running through an open area but having to walk briefly every 15 seconds. Similarly:
- Letting you warp to different save spots right away.
I just can't even imagine if you literally had to walk to everything in this game. Seriously. and, to that end:
- Giving you a horse to ride.
It did take me a while to remember I even had the option, but summoning your horse/antelope buddy, Torrent, opens up not only much faster travel, but also: a double jump to help climb rock walls and cliffs; more combat options so you can save stamina while cutting through enemy mobs, or over-equip yourself with armor for a boss fight since you don't have to dodge roll when you are on horseback.
- Letting you respec your character.
You do have to unlock this by beating a decently hard boss, and you can't just do it for free, but right about the time you are getting through that section, you might be rethinking the points you put into strength instead of, say, dexterity or intelligence. I am 100% sure that I wouldn't have gotten past Melania (Blade of Miquella, Goddess of Rot) if I hadn't had an option to reallocate my stats (there was no way I could've gained 20 levels without serious grinding).
Aside from game mechanics, Elden Ring really leans hard into its cast of characters and game lore - the marketing certainly wants everyone to know that George RR Martin consulted to help come up with the back story... though to what level, I'm not sure; I've heard different things from different sources. Whatever his involvement, the story here is pretty meaty if you care to dig into it. To do a very poor job of summarizing: The Lands Between (where you are) are still recoiling from a war between the demigods (the Shattering) and now nations and powerful households are vying to sit on the Iron Throne/become the Elden Lord. A Tarnished of No renown (you) is called upon by (I think) a demigod maiden to take up the effort to become Lord (either to serve the will of the Two Fingers or in defiance of the Greater Order, depending on how you play). As you journey you meet a rich cast of NPC characters, all with decently fleshed out backstories, many with intricate quest lines that will have you doing everything from reuniting spirit jellyfish with their sister to taking on assassination contracts against other Tarnished to exposing war crimes and taking back control of forts for displaced lords to finding cures and prosthesis for those afflicted by Scarlet Rot to making marriage proposals or simply buying a really good steamed prawn. And I'm sure I'm both forgetting a bunch of quests that I did and completely ignorant of a lot more that I just missed. This amount of backstory and quest lines aren't really new to the series, but whereas in Dark Souls a lot of this text would've been revealed in item descriptions and left to you to piece together, it is much more surface level here, spoken directly to you at you start a boss fight for instance (though you will probably need to consult a wiki or two to really solidify everything, especially the differences between Mohg, Margitt, Morgott, Melina, Malenia, Miquella, and Queen Marika, to name only a few Ms).
The main thing that really makes Elden Ring stand out in the series, and the first thing most reviewers are hitting on, is the open world design; that you can do whatever you want right away, complete the game in any order. The easy comparison is to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and the game even seems to have specific nods to Zelda in general). This 'Do Whatever You Want' idea is certainly there, but as noted earlier, not exactly new.
To me, it wasn't so much that the world was so open and big (it is impressively vast), but that your potential approaches to completing the game were so open. For example, attempting to break into a castle and take on your first major boss (if you chose to following in the in-game hints of how to progress), you can either:
- Sneak in the side and slowly work through room after room, quietly eliminating just the enemies directly in your way, jumping down rooftops until you can slip into the boss area
- OR You can have an NPC just open the main gates and fight through the waiting army and knock directly on the boss's door (maybe wait until new game+ to try that)
- OR Just run through like a crazy person, grabbing whatever items are laying out in the open while dodging sniper fire and guys with big axes and birds with knives attached to their legs and trolls until you can tag the save spot right outside the boss area and be 'on base'.
Similarly, when you fight that boss, you can:
- Go in guns blazing and trying to fight him one on one, using the traditional Dark Souls block / roll / poke in back method
- OR Stand back and chip away at him with arrows or poison darts or magic spells
- OR You can summon your spirit jellyfish to draw his attention with jets of acid spray so that you can sneak up behind and attack.
- OR Small Spoiler: once that guy gets into his second phase, you can even just run away from him, as his attacks actually slowly drain his HP.
Those last two might not be the most noble ways to get things done, but this is my point -- ANY way you can win in this game is the right way to go. In a series that was already known for challenging boss fights, Elden Ring has some of the most difficult, most over the top, most unfair boss fights I can think of. So, please, don't feel any shame if your solution is to call on another player from the summoning pool, AND use your spirit ashes, AND do the whole fight on horseback (if you are allowed). In this game, we are all that car stuck driving up a snowy slope, and goal is to slip slide up to that summit any way we can.
One last thought as a way of wrapping up -- I really, really enjoyed this game (and will probably break down and go through it for a third time soon enough), but I recognize it might not be for everyone. To that end, if you are on the fence on whether you should try it out, go seek out some YouTube Lets Plays; there are only about a thousand of them to chose from. In particular, I really enjoyed Dunky's overview (https://youtu.be/D1H4o4FW-wA) (if you just want to get a visual flavor on everything I said above) and RTGame's series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLliBvQE3gg9cQ1T6AdBWsGbCfX7w7RthQ) (if you want to see a Dark Souls veteran taking on the game in a very backwards fashion, or if you want to see most of the game without having to play yourself).
And if you do try it out and get stuck on anyone in particular, let me know and we'll try to work out a way I can join your summoning pool and you can watch me die instead!