Endless Death in the Lands Between
“Feel free to go off and die in a ditch somewhere” – White-Faced Varre
If you’re part of the video game community, even as a casual player, chances are you’ve heard of Elden Ring. The newest game from renown developer FromSoftware, famous (or infamous) for their previous successes such as Bloodborne, Demon Souls and Sekiro Shadows Die Twice, brings everything you’ve ever heard about FromSoftware games to bear and far more besides. Over the course of their publishing history, FromSoftware has garnered a highly identifiable and unique reputation among gamers.
In fact, their games have spawned an entirely new sub-genre of action RPG games, often referred to as Soulslike. Soulslike games are identified by their beautiful dark fantasy worlds, rich and atmospheric visuals, deep and immersive hidden lore and of course the hallmark of all Souls-style games: punishing and unforgiving combat. The combat is notoriously difficult, almost a sort of death loop, where you’re expected to die over and over again fighting the same boss until you finally figure out how to defeat them.
Elden Ring takes the standard FromSoftware formula and applies it to a massive open world experience. Players begin their journey through the realm, known as The Lands Between, as outcasts called Tarnished. That’s basically all the game tells you at the start (more on this later). In Elden Ring, like all Soulslike games, combat is centered around encountering numerous foes en route to a near endless stream of difficult boss encounters that begins (for many players) a repetitious cycle of death. The design of the game is, at its core, to lose and lose again until you’ve discovered and mastered the particular strategy (more on that later) that allows you to eventually achieve victory.
That’s the hook: Fight, die, rinse, repeat. The loop remains closed by the lack of any difficulty settings. In almost all other games of its ilk, there are options to either increase or decrease the challenge of the game’s combat. Most games include various modes that allow you to scale up from a casual, non-threatening gaming experience to horrifying heights of difficulty. Not Elden Ring. The game is programmed by default somewhere between the typical hard and very hard modes common in other games. Ouch.
It’s a formula that in theory shouldn’t work as well as it does in application, and therein lies one of the genre’s biggest intrigues. How does it all work so well? Quite frankly, there are many elements native to FromSoftware’s game design that I, when encountered in other games, typically abhor. Repetitive play (a la the fight/die loop), zero accessibility options, an uncompromising vision that alienates as many players as it enchants, all creates a polarizing tapestry that begs our central question: Who exactly is this for?
Initially, I said, “NOT ME”. In fact, I commented fairly often on social media how the lack of difficulty options was a nefarious and toxic form of gatekeeping. This gatekeeping is perhaps best exemplified in a phrase that has become widely known among serious and casual gamers alike, the infamous ‘Git Gud’. It basically means what you think.
If the game is too hard, don’t blame the game, the developers, the industry, etc., blame yourself. If you want to beat a difficult game, then you need to get good enough at it to beat it. The unsavory folksy undertone of the phrase make it particularly onerous (to me at least) and yet whether you like it or not, it may simply be the organizing principle for all games designed for maximum challenge.
Feeding into this type of cultural rhetoric almost always lead to toxic behavior. Most of us in the gaming community do what we can to steer clear of the trolls, leaving us to wonder if there is a way for us to avoid the unpleasantness entirely. Perhaps we hold the developers accountable? Encourage them to make games that are accessible to everyone. Maybe, the community? Ask for better from our peers who enjoy making others feel uncomfortable in places that should be safe spaces, such as gaming.
That certainly feels like the side of the angels to me. We should do those things. We need to. Gaming is for everyone, and anything less is bollocks. But maybe, when it comes to something like Elden Ring, we should also stop complaining and take a more artistic view of the medium, the way many do with books and movies. Can we fault games who stand firm on creative vision trumping other concerns? Should we just accept the simple message that if you don’t like the style of gameplay, don’t play. If it’s too hard, get better at it. If you can’t, then give up. What’s the right answer? Before I played Elden Ring, I was pretty sure I knew. But now, here’s the thing: I’m not sure anymore.
What Does That Mean Exactly?
“It is my Ordeal, you could say, to test myself, to better myself, to fell ever great foes” – Iron Fist Alexander
Well, let’s start here. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” That feels like a poignant explainer for the dissonance between what seems like fairness and what is actually fair. Elden Ring at first glance appears to be both unjustly designed and exceedingly well implemented. It’s a paradox of sorts that, for me at least, was difficult to reconcile.
I dislike the ‘git gud’ mentality. I don’t believe it’s a compromise of artistic vision to make the game more accessible to people that lack the requisite skills to overcome the steep difficulty. I think that the rigid approach that these games simply are what they are, take it or leave it, is a form of gatekeeping. Yet, Elden Ring may be the best game of this generation. Now when I say ‘best’, I mean my ‘favorite’, but also objectively a game of the highest quality. Yeah, see, that’s the thing. Elden Ring, is an absolute masterpiece, certainly deserving of a spot in the pantheon of great games from any generation. Elden Ring is just so good, no matter how you view it, and that makes my head hurt when weighed against the criticisms I levied at it in my mind.
Though I’m not a particularly skilled gamer (you won’t see me on the Fortnite or the EA Sports circuit anytime soon) I still have a pretty solid gaming pedigree. I’ve been playing games for almost 4 decades now and have reverence for both the experience and the culture. Elden Ring is not the first difficult game I’ve played, and it certainly won’t be the last. I’ve played probably a thousand games spread over 20+ consoles since I was given an Atari 2600 as a small child in 1984.
Does that experience make me an expert on Elden Ring’s legacy? No, I mean, it’s video gaming. The whole experience is largely subjective, and that also extends to our takes on the quality of games. All opinions are valid, full stop. I’ve played countless games in the action RPG genre, the gaming vertical I perhaps enjoy the most. I get what Elden Ring could have been versus what it actually is. All I’m saying is that as a longtime fan of action RPGs I understand games like Elden Ring even if there’s never exactly been a game like it before.
So, how is it that Elden Ring may be the best game ever and simultaneously a cautionary tale of an industry that, despite its best efforts, fails time and again to include all players at the table? Well, let’s begin by taking a look at what makes it so good. Most people you could ask would tell you that the Soulslike games are remarkable because they offer some of the best boss fights in all of video games, and let me tell you, they really do. A lot of attention is paid to the ‘challenge’ of the boss battles, but I think what makes the fights so interesting is the near mythic proportions certain bosses take on in the gaming culture itself.
If you were speaking to the millions of people that have played the game and name-dropped, for instance, Malenia Blade of Miquella or Starscourage Rahdan or Praetor Rykard, most of them would know immediately who you mean. They would remember their many defeats, and hopefully, their ultimate triumph. Battles in Elden Ring are legendary, both in the narrative of the game and the mind of the players, curating an epic vibe that hard to find just about anywhere else.
The War of Attrition
“I am Malenia, the Blade of Miquella, and I have never known defeat” – Malenia
Malenia the severed, the Blade of Miquella, is considered one of the toughest bosses ever created by FromSoftware and with good reason. She’s a stone-colds killer, with several insta-death moves that for some sadistic reason heal her as she deals damage. I mean, what the actual hell! It personally took me about 4-5 hours of gaming to get to her resting place in Elphael, Brace of the Haligtree (a secret location you have to go out of your way, far out of your way, to find). Then another 2 hours of trial and error trying to actually defeat her. I did eventually. I defeated her, and when I did, I jumped up out of my seat and started cheering.
It was similar to what I did when David Tyree made The Catch on his helmet during a do-or-die 4th down Eli Manning pass during the Giants Super Bowl XLII win. That is to say, it was an epic moment, one I’ll always remember. How did I defeat her? Simple, I looked up a cheese tactic that allowed me the best chance of success. 1That’s right, I used a blade with high bleed and I staggered her the way I saw in a video on YouTube made by a content creator who figured out the trick. Still took me 30-35 times to pull it off right, but it made it possible. I knew after the first few tries that I could do it. Thereafter, it was just a matter of patience and a non-trivial amount of luck, then…finally….victory!
That leads us to the next point: There is always a way. Victory in Elden Ring is a war of attrition if there ever was one. The whole system revolves around small, incremental gains designed to give modest boosts that can help bring victory within reach. Every boss, even the most insane and unfair (I’m looking at you Elden Beast) has a character build or tactic, like Malenia did, that makes it possible with enough effort to defeat them. 2 There’s literally some trick, trap, glitch, build, weapon, spell, tactic, or combination of all of these that you can find (or look up) that will position you for eventual victory. Cheese tactics are fairly rampant in these games. If you spend enough time getting your cage rattled by Outer Gods, you can find something in a dark corner of the internet that allows you to find a path to victory.
My specific game-wide cheese tactic was finding and utilizing a special summons called the Mimic Tear. It’s a summons you can use for boss fights where a copy of your character is created and fights alongside of you. It’s acquired by defeating the Mimic boss in Nokron, The Eternal City, a secret and beautiful underworld of sorts that you can’t access until you defeat the optional and insanely difficult boss Starscourage Rahdan. Afterward, you must find the location of the meteor crater he makes during his death throes to enter Nokron.
When using the Mimic tear the stats, equipment, weapons, abilities and many of the buffs you can use all translate to the Mimic when you create them. Think your character is good? Well, now there’s two of you. That was my trick. I over-leveled myself by a fair margin and made plenty of Mimics. Most players finish the game around level 150-170. I finished over level 200. We basically became a demigod crushing duo. Yet, every single battle felt like an epic typhoon struggle between life and death. Even with all that power, I never once felt confident I could win a fight. Many times I didn’t. It still took patience and an examination of each boss’ move set and abilities to win most battles. Nothing comes free or easy in The Lands Between.
Winning By Any Means Necessary
“Now we can devour the Gods together!” — Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy
Of the 100+ hours I invested traveling through The Lands Between, I spent dozens doing nothing by grinding out levels, a task incidentally I didn’t find as tedious in Elden Ring as I have in other games. There are several places in the massive world of the Lands Between where it’s optimal to farm for runes (a currency used to level your character). These levels often had associated stories of their own. One of them was in a place I was able to reach far earlier than intended because of a hidden portal (that the internet found) that warped you there.
One of them was an entirely hidden place that not only did I have to find a mystical way to, but then I had to traverse extremely dangerous terrain to find a specific spot where the glitch allowed me to snipe a bird monster off a cliff to yield a high number of runes. Let’s appreciate for a moment that someone found that location and specific glitch.
Dan Harmon once said regarding Rick and Morty spoilers that the audience is essentially a rendering farm. 20 million people all obsessed with the same thing will outthink any writers’ room imaginable. So it is with hidden secrets in games. Every secret, glitch, Easter egg, etc. ultimately will be found. You can then in turn search the internet to find them yourself, and Voilà! You may have just discovered a way to progress!
Do I feel bad about this? Absolutely not! I didn’t break the game. I didn’t cheat it by utilizing tools outside the system, such as manipulating my save file with an editor. I used the broken bits of the game as it was, the tools that were available to me, whether intended by the developers or not. And intention becomes a topic of discussion in and of itself. With so many glitches that can yield potentially crucial gains, is it possible that the glitches themselves are a design choice?
I literally used a glitch to get past Radagon of the Golden Order during my final run. I had beaten him many times before, but always ended up out of gas for the Elden Beast. What did I do? Well, I looked up a cheese tactic for the Elden Beast (basically do a Holy protection build) which required a bunch of gear and material I didn’t have. So I went on a “Beat The Game” quest of sorts where I spent several hours collecting all the items I needed for the final fight.
It was pretty spectacular in retrospect. I loved the whole idea of going on additional quests to give my builds variety, so I could be ready for any foe. After getting everything I required I cheesed Radagon then spent numerous deaths in trial and error with the final foe and a few deaths down the line I won. BOO to the YAH.
So it becomes somewhat ironic that the games “flaws”, so to speak, actually created a few hidden layers of accessibility. This seems like accidental shortcuts and maybe that’s what it is, but it’s so prevalent that in a way it becomes part of the gaming ecosystem. In a system this difficult to navigate, it can be a welcome bonus to be able to cheese a particularly tough boss to clear the way for the next link in the chain. At rough count, it’s been reported that there are 157 “boss” fights in Elden Ring, so it’s certainly not lacking in its number of challenges. If there’s a will, there’s a way, and that alone is an argument for the game being more balanced than it might have seemed by reputation alone.
Lore In The Lands Between
“The fallen leaves tell a story. Of how a Tarnished became Elden Lord” – Narrator
A lot to chew on here, but wait, there’s more. I would be remiss if I didn’t touch upon the whole reason I forced myself to play the game in the first place: the story. Yep, you read that right. It’s no secret that Elden Ring Director Hidetaka Miyazaki collaborated with Song of Ice and Fire wordsmith George R.R. Martin to develop the lore behind the game. As a serious fan of both the books and Game of Thrones TV show, I was genuinely interested in what Martin might bring to the table. It seemed odd to me at first that someone with George R.R. Martin’s profile would be interested in writing lore for a Soulslike game.
I had assumed the importance of the story would be catalogued as a distant second to the highly vaunted combat. That ended up not being true, at all. Soulsborne games will foremost be remembered for everything we’ve already covered, but there is something else they do, another approach if you will, that as far as I can tell is wholly unique to them. In every single RPG I’ve ever played, the narrative of the game is disclosed in “lore dumps”.
These long narrative expositions, usually in extended cinematic scenes, explain the parts of the story you need to understand at that juncture. The cut scenes tend to act as a bridge between whatever in-game events you were doing and the next milestone for progressing the story. Not Elden Ring. Not any of the FromSoftware games for that matter.
Instead of feeding you the story as every other game essentially does, the Soulsborne games leave the story for you to find. Rarely is there some cut scene that spells out the narrative. Instead, you have to find hidden places, secret locations, meet NPCs, go on quests and all the rest of it to unearth the narrative through all the various fragments you find.
Mind you, you’re doing all of this without the typical in-game journal that most games use to keep track of important quests. Elden Ring takes a minimalist approach when it comes to reminding you of a quest line you’ve been engaged in. In a very meta move, the game forces you the player to remember what was significant. You have to pay attention to every clue, every comment, every encounter if you want to take advantage of all the secrets the game has to offer.
Consequently, you could, in theory, finish Elden Ring and still know very little about the overarching story. In fact, you could beat the game and still not entirely understand what the titular Elden Ring itself is. Yet, for the initiated, Elden Ring has one of the densest and complex story narratives of any game I’ve come across. The story is a rich tapestry that draws obvious inspiration from other revered media like Lord of the Rings, The Witcher, and Martin’s own Song of Ice and Fire mythology. I mean, even the name The Lands Between feels like something ripped out of the pages of Tolkien.
Who are the Tarnished? What was War of the Shattering? Why did the Goddess Marika destroyed the Elden Ring? What role did all the Demi gods like Ranni, Rahdan, Malenia, Morgott and others play? It’s all as mysterious as it is fascinating. Even the land itself looks like Midde-earth and Westeros gave birth to a dangerous, dilapidated ruin of a world where danger and intrigue lurk around every corner. It’s a land riddled with secrets, many of them as material to the overall story as they are hard to find.
For instance, doing Ranni the Witch’s quest line (which is a massive and difficult undertaking) can materially change the ending of the game. It also fills in tons of missing information about what is really going on in The Lands Between. Overall, I found the story, and maybe more to the point the pursuit of the story, as interesting as anything else I did during my 100 or so hours. You know, back when I was a lowly Tarnished wandering The Lands Between with big Elden Lord dreams.
In Summary…
“Well then, shall we? My dear consort eternal” – Ranni the Witch
And that’s why it’s so good. It’s not just the fighting. Or the challenge. Or the rich atmosphere. Or the fact that it’s perhaps the truest open world (outside of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) ever created. Or the fact that it has a riveting narrative that you have to uncover for yourself. It’s not just the way they interplay seamlessly to craft something that’s not quite like anything else you’ve ever seen before. It’s not just the rage-quitting mixed with the cheese tactics. It’s all of it.
It’s the fact that Mogh for some reason tried to enslave Miquella and resurrect him in a creepy egg cocoon (I still have no idea why). Likewise, it’s the fact that Malenia created the Scarlet Rot wastes of Caelid during her epic duel with Rahdan. It’s the pain and the pleasure of discovering secrets while trying to advance against impossible foes. For all the things I wonder should be different, for all the gripes, I’ve rarely been obsessed with a game like this before.
All of this meandering rumination is meant to explain myself when I said in the beginning that I don’t know anymore if the approach this game took, exclusionary as it may be to some, is wrong. Who was this game for? Well, obvious it was for me. Me and 20 million others, give or take. Yet in an industry of a one billion participants, it’s a small portion of the community. Maybe that makes it both right and wrong. I have no idea anymore.
So here’s my conclusion: Elden Ring is so good, I’m uncertain if it ultimately matters any more whether it’s a game for you or not. It’s a game that is meant to polarize as much as it’s meant to be revered. It’s certainly for some people, and for those people it’s probably their new favorite game. For the rest, well, it offers everyone at least a chance and with everything else about it being so good, I suppose that’s good enough.
REVIEW SCORE: 10/10 – Masterpiece