[homestar runner voice] elden ring

“what a damn video game” — me

i’ve now got almost 150 hours in elden ring, having done all remembrances and having made it most of the way through ng+, so i am officially qualified to have Opinions about it.

fittingly for such a big game, my feelings about it are all over the place. it’s undeniably a great game, but also deeply frustrating in a number of ways.

in some respects this frustration is forgivable; when a game is experimenting with so many things, it’s not going to get everything perfect. and there are certainly times when a gamble pays off beautifully. for example, the localization is excellent overall, but the english voice acting takes it to another level. the cast, surprisingly, are not primarily voice actors, but instead are mostly british tv and theater actors. the casting director’s only other major credits are the xenoblade remaster and 3, which are also notoriously british but which i can’t speak to the quality of. she absolutely killed it here, though; the performances behind ranni, roderika and hewg in particular breathe so much life into their stories. (also the opening narration goes so fucking hard? james livingstone went absolutely apeshit on that monologue.) (credit also has to go to the vo director, whose cv is literally “all the soulsbornes, plus lego marvel super heroes 2”.)

sorry, got a bit distracted. i said “stories” in the plural, because elden ring is experienced for the most part as a number of independent but interconnected stories. this is the source, imo, of both its greatest strengths and weaknesses.

spoilers for a number of plot points, major and minor, below the fold

elden ring can’t be compared 1:1 to either previous soulsborne games or to other open-world games, but it draws from both of those genres, and it’s interesting to look at how the mechanics and styles of each manifest here.

i haven’t played dark souls, but i did just come off an obsessive set of runs through bloodborne, so i couldn’t avoid drawing comparisons between the two. the one that struck me first was how the open world changes the player’s relationship to boss fights. bloodborne is very linear; there are plenty of optional and/or secret areas, but periodically you will have no choice but to fight a boss in order to continue in the game. this is rarely the case in elden ring, at least in the first half of the game. prior to morgott and the endgame sequence, if you are having a difficult time with one boss you can simply leave. you can fight one of the many other bosses, or you can simply explore the lands between (leveling up in the process) before taking another crack at it. this can help avoid frustration, but (at least in my experience) it also has the effect of discouraging the player from actually learning the fight. it’s much easier to just come back when you’re stronger and stomp whoever you were stuck on, but in the end it’s less satisfying.

(having said this, i think it might be for the best, since the bosses in elden ring are, by and large, disappointing. it’s not unreasonable to ask a player to spend hours learning how to fight gehrman, lady maria, or the orphan of kos, because those are fantasically designed fights. i can’t say the same about any major boss in elden ring; my favorite fight in the entire game was alecto, one of the evergaol prisoners. and don’t get me started on the absolute disaster that is the radagon/elden beast finale.)

this all might be part of a more general tension between traditional rpg leveling and open world mechanics. when your character can become significantly stronger over time, certain enemies are designed to be stronger than others, to reward your growth. not only can this re-introduce linearity where it might not be desired, it can also sometimes put the player in a situation where they can’t tell if they “should” be stronger before entering a certain area. (in bloodborne, by contrast, the only times i found myself grinding were in order to replenish blood vials and bullets, rather than to gain levels. the point at which i encountered a boss was almost always the point at which i could beat them.)

the only open-world game i can think of that avoids this quandary is breath of the wild (this is a big part of why it’s the best open-world game). in botw the only stats that you can improve are health and stamina. beyond that, your tools for taking on stronger enemies are better weapons (which, crucially, break after a time), better armor, and experience. this is why the game allows you to walk straight to ganon after leaving the plateau; as long as you have a decent sword, you can kill anything at any time.

a number of delightful consequences result from botw’s “flat” progression model. it enourages the player to focus less on whether they are “strong enough”, and instead on learning how to fight whatever enemies they happen to encounter. it also removes a great deal of grind. exploring becomes something you do for its own sake, rather than to gain experience or materials.

in elden ring i found myself exploring in order to gain progression items (especially bell bearings in order to upgrade weapons and ashes), but also for another reason that wasn’t simply for the joy of it: a lot of my exploration was out of the sense that i was missing important pieces of story. (elden ring also discourages casual exploration because of how likely it is that you’ll die doing it.)

this brings me back to what i was talking about at the beginning: the stories. a distinctive feature of the storytelling in elden ring and bloodborne (and, i understand, dark souls) is that is it expected, even desirable, that one doesn’t see all of the story beats, at least on their first playthrough. the player-character is not special, and does not have privileged insight into the world. they are simply one of many individuals, stumbling into something far larger and older than they are. in bloodborne this works brilliantly; as a hunter you are quite literally encountering horrors beyond human comprehension, and its themes of peace in ignorance and the danger of knowledge are strengthened by the fact that you have to make a deliberate effort to discover even basic facts about the situation you find yourself in.

this approach, in my mind, is less successful in elden ring. the linearity and smaller size of bloodborne means that even though you won’t see everything, you generally will come across enough bits and pieces of plot in order to get invested, and to want to discover more. in elden ring, the size of the world means you organically encounter significantly fewer parts of each story. in my first playthrough, before i started reading wikis and other resources to fill in the gaps, i simply had no idea what was going on. beyond the basic outline provided by the introduction, my understanding had advanced not a jot.

now, there’s a compelling argument (from @prophet-goddess) that this is exactly as it should be; that what elden ring is about is, in part, the difficulty of established a shared frame of reference from which agreed-upon truth can emerge; that it is therefore not just appropriate but necessary that different players are quite literally told different stories.

i respect this take, and as far as the side stories go i think my lingering disagreement would be that some of them are just a bit too hard to experience without a guide (millicent’s quest is a good example of this, and of how it’s made more difficult by the open world: in order to really understand what’s happening to her, you have to repeatedly revisit gowry, which i can only imagine you would do if you somehow hadn’t met any of the more convenient teachers of sorcery and incantation – he’s completely out-of-the-way, without even a convenient site of grace nearby).

but: elden ring also requires you to make significant choices that determine how the game ends, and you simply do not have the information required to have any understanding of what your decisions mean. i chose ranni over the other factions simply because i love her; even after finishing her main questline i couldn’t have begun to explain what her objectives were and how her ending might compare to the others. playing through a second time, with the assistance of guides that let me experience ranni’s story with the added context provided by rogier and fia, is an undeniably rewarding experience, but i would have liked to have something of its emotional weight the first time, and i didn’t.

(i also very nearly didn’t even do a ng+ run, because the elden beast is such a garbage boss that i seriously considered not finishing the game.)

overall, though? still a great game, and going back to encounter more side stories was absolutely worth it. sellen is so evil and so gay, and i love my snake daughter zorayas with all my heart.