First Impressions With Elden Ring
Elden Rig is out. It’s been out for the better part of three weeks and I’ve spent 2 of those three weeks playing it whenever I could. This is a game that while I’m still mostly forming my opinions on as a separate game, as a furthering of the designs and tides brought up throughout the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne, it’s interesting.
The story, from what little I’ve managed to glean from it, is that there’s this God Empress by the name of Queen Marika the Eternal and her gaggle of demigod offspring, who are messed the heck up and decided to make their issues everyone else’s problem by engaging in a gigantic succession crisis over the shattered pieces of the titular Elden Ring, which is the source of the Erdtree aka Basically Yggdrasil, getting corrupted by these pieces in the process, all while vying for Marika’s crown following her sudden disappearance and the Greater Will (basically the God of this setting) abandoning the Lands Between in Disgust. You are one of the Tarnished, disgraced exiles drawn back to these lands under the promise of great power, guided by grace, must now find your way to these Lords, take their greater rune fragments, and become the new Elden Lord.
While the setting is more overt with what’s going down, in no small part thanks to the involvement of Geroge R. R. Martin (yep, that one), it still maintains the cryptic and mysterious Dark Fantasy tones that I’ve come to expect from these games and while the Succession Crisis stuff is a bit too Game of Thrones for my liking currently, I do like that it gives me a good idea of the jerks I need to kill to take power for myself. But ultimately I’m here for the characters involved in the smaller-scale side stories and while I haven't encountered too many in the starting area, I’m super excited to see where some of these characters are gonna go; like Iron Fist Alexander, the game’s stand-in for Siegmeyer/Siegward of Catarina from Dark Souls as the big, boisterous, good boy and the Witch Renna, who compared to the rest of the cast looks like she was lifted directly from Berserk, which considering how influenced by Berserk From Software’s later works are, that’s saying something. I also feel like when I see that fucker Patches, I’m going to scream at him because it’s not a Souls game experience if I’m not shouting “PATCHES, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” At least once.
The biggest difference between Elden Ring and the other games that From Software has been making since Demon's Souls way back in the day is that this is a fully-realized open-world game. From the beginning of the game, after getting through the Tutorial (or skip it if you’re me and didn’t notice it like a clown), you see the sites of grace, this game’s equivalent of bonfires and from there, you can just pick a direction and just start walking and see where you are going, but if you want to the critical path it, you can follow the golden trails between each site of grace. After getting to Gatefront, I was met with the Maiden Melina, who serves as the main NPC for levelling up and guide for letting you know where to go to get the fragments of the Elden Ring. She also gives you a Spectral Steed Whistle connected to your horse for the rest of the game, Torrent.
Torrent takes the game’s world and busts it wide open in a great way because he allows for much greater exploration of the world and while you mostly only have access to Limgrave at the beginning in terms of the map to fill out, you can reasonably go to areas that you have no dang business being in because you just want to see what the have to offer, my favourite example of this is when I went to Caelid, which is characterized by its red skies, creeping rot and decay and enemies so gross looking that you would not be blamed in thinking this was the stealth release of Bloodborne 2. And I found that after finding a half-submerged village controlled by a Necromancer and his undead minions. The exploration tickles my brain in the same way that Breath of the Wild did when I played that a few years ago…but the main caveat is that this is still a Souls adjacent game, so it still has the combat of those games and you don't need to worry about your weapons breaking every five fucking minutes and no, I will not be salty about that because it means that I forced myself to avoid combat unless I absolutely needed t- sorry, I got carried away. Thinking about combat in Breath of the Wild gets me heated.
AS I WAS SAYING, even if you take out the open world and it's super freeing exploration and stitched all of the main Dungeons together in a sequence, you could really get a Decent Dark Souls 4 out of it, but they didn’t do that and it was rad. The main attraction is the legacy dungeons that you have to make your way towards and clear out because those are where the Demigods with the greater rune fragments are. The first of these I’ve encountered (and only one so far), is Stormveil Castle, home to Godrick the Grafted. There’s only one problem with this: You have to deal with Margit the Fell Omen. Margit is basically the game’s first real beef gate, the game’s way of telling you that while you can come to Stormveil Castle, you are going to get your shit rocked hard. He’s like Father Gascoigne in Bloodborne in that he’s a powerful early-game boss that’s necessary for progress, but you are too weak to go and do that just yet. Unlike Father Gascoigne, the game doesn’t have you progress to a different, weaker boss, instead of encouraging you to go off the beaten path and do some exploring and see what you can find to make yourself stronger and I love that because it’s the same basic idea that I mentioned earlier, but it’s handled completely different. Even then, it still wasn’t enough because even though I had levelled up, I was a primarily Strength-based character with shields and good rolls because my preferred method of getting through these games is to headbutt the walls they put up until the walls are reduced to a fine powder. And when I finally got past Margit, I was so fucking happy because it’s the thrill I come to these games for because I’m the kind of guy that plays them and keeps his mouth shut for the most part.
After that, I proceeded to make a new character that focused on Dexterity and Intelligence just to see if the difference in playstyle would be any different. I focused on using a Katana I had found in a catacomb and some spells I had gathered up, with NPC summoning and calling in spirits from the Summoning Bell (these are some of the ways the game gives you to make the experience easier on yourself). I almost killed Margit on my first attempt, usually dying because of my own hubris. This means this game can be cracked wide open if you really want to do that. Speedrunning is gonna be fun for this game.
All of this and me making some progress in Stormveil Castle on my Strength character was in my first 20 or so hours with the game. I’m definitely sticking with it because a) It’s a new From Software game, I’m into this nonsense and b) I just really like how the changes to the Souls formula to accommodate an open world still make it an enjoyable experience. I’m looking forward to playing this in between bouts of Destiny 2 at the moment (still new expansion release period) and whatever else I get to.
