Elden Ring by FromSoftware

God damn… I finally got to my weekend, thought I was making progress… there’s a whole other zone under the second zone too… and now the side dungeons are more complicated. I do love the enemies though. There are so, so many.

I think I am in the end game? There’s all this freaky stuff the closer you get to the big giant gold tree…. Scary madness, festering soul rot, a death curse, and stellar emissaries.

but I think I’m down to just a couple story beats left. 

The other benefit of waiting will be quest/item guides. I’m pretty sure I missed a lot, but I did make a lot of progress when I switched my weapon art from a holy laser beam that I liked to a cheesy frost aoe. I basically spam that and everything dies. I gave up trying to “play fair” because the longer it takes me to finish this the more likely I’ll spoil something and I’ve made it too far to get fully spoiled.

Volcano Manor, the lava place, is weird as hell, Lord Rykard freaked me out. But I’ve got a few main bosses left and 1.5 zones left (half a secret zone and a full final zone) and I’m like level 100 something. I think there’s 10 zones in total, but most of them are optional, if you just go for the story, it appears you only have to kill 1 demigod, get one shard of the Elden ring, and can skip huge chunks of zones. Which is honestly amazing how bravely they left tons of this game be optional or secret. If you don’t do one optional quest line for instance, entire zones are never unlocked.

I will likely get the game one day though only when it's cheap so if I find it's truly not for me then the monetary waste won't be so bad. I have a friend who streams games and I keep poking him to play it. The last time he tried one of the Dark Souls games as a bit of fun he let me and a few friends who are his main viewer base pick his appearance and combat style so that'll be amusing if he does get the game eventually. Magic does look OP in the game but some of the bosses are so aggressive it probably balances it out considering the cast times for the really strong spells are really long. I've seen a few bloodmage-esque life using- Samurai builds that also look pretty fun. I'm sure by the time I get the game it will have plenty of guides, especially as it being open world I know I'd probably end up missing a lot of stuff simply by missing an area to explore.

I took a break from video games after… that horrible experience.

My friend begged me to help him finish the game so I did end up getting the last few bosses done.

I’m not gonna put this stuff in spoilers as anyone who buys this game should kinda know what they are getting into.

Basically plot: Mareka came to this place known as the lands between, where people were worshipping Outer Gods and stars. Mareka summoned The Greater Will, an outer god associated with the color gold and corpses eating trees. The Greater Will sent the Elden Beast to the kingdom in a comet, from the beast grew the Erdtree and Queen Mareka used the Elden Ring for power but the Ring required death to work, so she funneled her people into the roots of the tree, the tree is kinda a parasite. Eventually that didn’t work, so Queen/Goddess Mareka pretended to be an invader, Radagan, and began attacking her own people, spilling tons of blood, but never her precious children or her own, cause she was afraid of death. She invaded Queen Renala’s land but fell in love with her, they ended the war, and had babies. Eventually in the peace, the Elden ring weakened, Radagan pretended to be summoned by Mareka to replace Godric, the first Elden lord, who was expelled because he became tarnished (living dead, drained dry by the tree). Mareka learned that if she impregnated herself as Radagan, she could have super special babies called Empyreans (Ranni, Malenia, Miquella). She also was having tons of babies with other folks and some of these were cursed by other Outer Gods (Mohg and Margot) and referred to as omens, and she dumped those and other omens into a sewer and sent Perfumers and Omen killers to kill them, but they lived. Also, the finger maidens who serve the two fingers started getting weird and some started serving the three fingers and the Yellow Flame. Also her Empyrean children all started getting corrupted by Outer Gods (Ranni and the Moon, Miquella and Unalloyed Gold, Malenia and the Scarlet Rot). It also seems Mareka was prejudiced against visibly impure or chimeric creatures.

Eventually, Ranni discovers that being an Empyrean kinda sucks ass. So she devises a plan to break free from the machinations of the Greater Will and return to a more free cosmic state of the world. So she kills herself by stealing the Rune of Death, which Mareka was obsessed with, and becomes a disembodied soul living in a doll (fuckin Miyazaki has a thing for real girl dolls). But after the death runs is abandoned when Ranni becomes incorporeal, a still unknown group of assassins steals the rune for themselves, finds Mareka’s favorite brat Goldwyn, and shanks the shit out of him (but he’s maybe alive but now Undead). This is because the death rune is associated with some sort of original sin Mareka did with Maliqueth lord of death in a defunct ancient city of Farum Azula (a beast land) and is now associated with Undeath.

After Goldwyn died, Queen Mareka shatters the Elden ring in grief, only for her alter ego, Radagan to sort of repair it, after. The Elden Beast seals the tree off, and Mareka/Radagan martyr themselves to keep the Ring sort of solid.

All Mareka’s children and Rennala have parts of the ring called runes, and with the Ring fractured, these runes start becoming corrupted and then outer gods start feeding these shard bearers megalomania. They all start a war that never ends until Malenia fights Radahn but the battle causes Malenia to bloom, unleashing the scarlet rot, basically ending the war in a nuclear blast and so no one has any strength. Miquella, who had powers to circumvent the influence of outer gods and end the rot, is abducted by Mohg who serves the Outer God the Formless Mother. So that fucks everything up and is also super gross and I hate it (also all of Mogh’s servants are queer coded and you can’t have the classic well at least we’ll be fun villains because Mohg is a fuckin pedophile!) And it’s even worse because the themes of these Bloody Fingers is that they believe in a new type of all embracing love, different than Mareka’s but guess what?! They’re working for a pedo! Kinda implying all these queer coded guys talking about fashion, love, and with effete accents are just like pedo Mohg! It’s also gross cause to PvP you join the Mohg cult! So your like consenting to this crap to PvP! I hate this so much. 

So the Greater Will is like… I guess I’ll summon all the Tarnushed who Mareka kicked out because they couldn’t fix her problems for her, cause she is trash, and so all the Tarnished start seeing pretty gold lights and return. The important ones are Us, Fia the deathbed Companion, Hora Lioux, Ever Brilliant Gold Mask, Lord Gideon Hofnir the All Knowing, and The Loathesome Dung Eater (not great for lgbtq players either folks).

Essentially we are the only tarnished who does anything, and we kill Godric the Grafted (a weak little boy who takes body parts of stronger people for power and is totally being corrupted by the ghost of his undead brother Godwynn), beat Renala and reclaim the rune she has from her husband Radagan, kill Starscourge Radahn (who became a cannibal beast after the Rot from a Malenia fucked him up) and bring back the stars, kill Praetor Rykard who fused himself with the Godkilling Sepent and eats people for power, kill Morgott who became an annoying nay sayer, kill Mohg who is gross and I hate him and ruined the game for me, kill Malenia who is a rotten goddess, kill the last giants (who Mareka used for her death powered empire in the early days), burn the Erdtree to let us in, get teleported to Farum Azula to confront the lord of Death and get the rune of Death back, and then nuke the capital, break into the tree, but first get whined at by Gideon who tries to kill you cause he’s pro Mareka, kill him, but first find out Hora Loux is the first Elden lord Godric, kill him, and find out Mareka is a corpse hanging on her precious ring, she turns into Radagan, we kill him, and then fight the Elden Beast, the Herald of the Greater Will.

After that crappy fight, you have ending choices! (Not really lol)

1) you barely do much abd repeat Mareka’s shitty mistakes and have the age of Fracture

2) you do the really borrring Gold Mask quest and usher in the good ending, the Age of Order.

3) you did Ranni’s quest, which means killing everyone’s favorite wolf man Blaidd, marrying a doll, and usher in the Age of the Stars under the protection of the Moon, who is an outer god.

4) you embrace Fia one too many times and decide not to kill her and you get the age of Undeath (deathbed companions suck the life out of normies to resurrect important people, so she sucks the life out of you, kills your friends, and is resurrecting Godwynn as the new lord of Undeath))

5) you decide to become the loathsome dung eater, a necrophiliac murderer who literally eats the seed out of male victims by consuming their genitals after death. Wtf is this game and usher in an age of murder and necrophilia.

6) you do the only option imo and embrace the three fingers, become the avatar of the yellow flame of madness, and burn it all down. You get to do a fun jump down an endless pit filled with corpses playing a beautiful violin song. 

I hate how much promise their was, and cool concepts… but the queer coding of villains in the most vile way (pedophiliacs and necrophiliacs) is unforgivable also I interpret Rennala going insane and having a cursed egg to be hinted because her love was secretly a woman, and she is the gods of rebirth and changing yourself and gender, but in the game doing so kills you in the lore and makes you malformed. Feels vaguely transphobic.

also Melina, is probably part of Ranni, just the part that feels regret and simps for her crappy mom.

if I ignore the really problematic queer coding… game is good. Factoring it in, I honestly can’t recommend the game and would actually warn people/advocate for being incredibly cautious of any future stuff in this IP.

Yeah… on the one hand I like the aesthetics, it’s very good for the games industry, but the other the writing is sometimes very cliche and uncreative.

I see so many people raving about combining medieval fantasy and cosmic horror but… that’s what Pathfinder is, but pathfinder is better and also has sci fi twists in it.

Also I fucking hate Ranni. I liked her at first, then killing Blaidd, the only character I liked, and she was all “lol that sucks but it’s in his nature and I knew he’d always have to die” was completely against her character arc of defying destiny.

The writing was just so inconsistent and bad at times, other times way too predictable, while being really proud of plot twists that are not only obvious but the game spoils before you’re supposed to know about it. Like Radagan being Mareka is spoiled from the get go, Hora Lioux being Godfrey is spoiled from the intro slides, and Melina being Ranni was spoiled in a trailer.

anyways. Was such a let down for me. And sucked that it really all came crashing down in one obscure optional boss fight that my steam metrics say only less than 10% of players had seen. 

I do see more people waking up to the fact that huge chunks of the game appear unfinished/cut though. Basically 30% of the game is unfinished, the snow zones were terrible and empty compared to the other zones, and the endings were rushed and boring. Also I guess they just released a patch that added in a bunch of missing pieces of npc quests into the game, which appears to have definitely been released unfinished despite early reviews. 

Yeah I am of two minds. Honestly, dark souls/demon’s souls/bloodborne did not have better writing as non open worlds and had just as many contradictions. Notoriously DS3 completely contradicted/dropped every plot from previous games to tell a very specific story about brand new waifus and then unceremoniously abandon them for a completely out of left field idea that made all the actions of all characters pointless besides two characters introduced in DLC.

I kind of feel like the ideas and story of Elden ring wouldn’t be good as anything but an open world because the lore and story is very straightforward (almost like GRRM decided to write a bunch of predictable cliches for some reason).

Like if FromSoft had ever told an actually good/complete/satisfying story I’d blame the open world for sure. But they really haven’t besides bloodborne came close.

Yeah, FromSoft games are all about waifus, but DS3 semi broke the mold as none of the waifus mattered the only characters that mattered were a young dragon girl and her coded gay uncle (a tragic hero). Honestly I was suspicious Elden ring might go hard on the waifus, like DS1, demon’s souls, or Bloodborne as it seems to be a crutch in these games but I was hoping there might be more Slave Knight Gael type characters, or male characters who aren’t sociopaths or who die, but alas…. The dudebros get their doll waifu or their spirit waifu. Who are actually the same person anyway. Cause Miyazaki also like making your waifu dead, disabled or agency less. Ranni is actually weirdly independent and capable for herself, which is actually an improvement. But they throw that all away cause her big play for freedom makes her simp for a new outer god. 

But another criticism is honestly a lot of the themes, plot points, and characters are recycled from other Miyazaki works. It’s essentially the same story as Dark Souls but now more cosmic high fantasy instead of low fantasy where the cosmic horror stuff is more abstract, like the Deep/Dark waiting to eat the world of kings and fire no matter what. Now those same forces are now boring Outer Gods.

Also like the Greater Will and it’s ways of working are almost exactly like Hastur/Carcosa stuff from Pre Lovecraft, and the Lovecraft himself, horror. It’s also almost identical to Pathfinder’s ideas of Elder/Outer gods where they guide civilization, create golden kings who melt into ash, to harvest creation and guide it to be consumed.

also Ranni is kinda the whole reason for all the tradgedy in the game. So on some level she’s top tier villain, and the moon is equally as bad as the greater will to serve, it’s just that the moon appears to be more subtle in its manipulation but in the moon/stars eras past, horrible monsters rained from the sky and buried humans under illusions of freedom. 

so Ranni goes from.. okay a cringey waifu trope but I can get behind freedom, to ohhhh she’s not very smart and is dumb. The doll symbolism is literal, she is a puppet of a new, more subtle evil. 

I found this article that might help. Either way, that really sucks...and is yet another reason why I don't like MP aspects in games. v.v Humans are terrible people!