Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero has the biggest roster in the 3D arena-fighting franchise’s history, but some players still want more. Specifically, more costumes, accessories, and other ways to customize their iconic DBZ fighters’ looks, including with shirts and jackets that pull from deep cuts within the long-running anime’s history.
The Most Sought After Elden Ring Sword Has A Storied History
One of the most requested outfits is Goku’s pre-Cell Games track jacket that he wears in his off time leading up to the tournament. Another is Piccolo’s yellow “Postboy” shirt he wears in the Trunks Saga filler episode in which he and Goku try to get their driver’s licenses. The streetwear fits aren’t just fan favorites, they also showcase more casual sides of the characters and express a range of personality outside the standard battle outfits.
The Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero subreddit has had fans frequently scratching their heads at why a game that’s bursting with fan service in other areas is missing these key costumes. Some are worried that it simply means Bandai Namco is planning to dole out each new style over months and years through a relentless drip-feed of microtransaction add-ons as it’s done with Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. SparkingZero seems destined to be the ultimate DBZ sim, but no DBZ sim is complete without more robust dress-up options.
Enter modders who are at least bringing some of these costume changes to the PC version of the game. A Piccolo Postboy outfit was added to the GameBanana mod repository yesterday. There’s also a mod for Vegeta’s pink “Badman” button-up at NexusMods. Of course, there are plenty of other outfits still missing, like Goku and Vegeta’s “SAB” winter jackets from the Dragon Ball Super: Broly movie and Gohan’s Kai outfit from the Buu Saga.
I can forgive some of these missing from the game at launch, but too many of the best alternate costumes seem MIA at the moment. I’m not above paying for them all if they get rolled out later. It would have felt more satisfying if they were all late-game unlockables, though.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtreelaunched some weeks ago, meaning players have hopefully managed to surmount its immensely difficult fights (the last one in particular) and roll credits on the expansion. However, a contingent of players have found themselves underwhelmed by the conclusion, and the expansion’s narrative content as a whole, since Shadow of the Erdtree is Elden Ring’s only DLC and bears the weight of sending off one of the biggest games of our time.
The Most Sought After Elden Ring Sword Has A Storied History
Some have expressed frustration with the ramifications, or lack thereof, of Shadow of the Erdtree. Many expected characters from the base game to return in some way, react to the events of the expansion, or simply play a bigger role in it, especially ones who have close ties to Miquella, the DLC’s central character. The lack of consequence, and the absence of new dialogue that’d further the player’s understanding of the story, have been a sore point for folks who are starved for morsels of Elden Ring’s massive, sometimes inscrutable narrative.
There’s a contingent of folks who are especially disappointed in the final cutscene of the DLC, feeling that it does very little to pay off the experience that preceded it. That sentiment is likely bred from the fact that Shadow of the Erdtree ends in a massive fight. I’m talking, like, a huge pain in the ass that is even rigged against the player thanks to insane hitboxes, seemingly unavoidable attacks, and the kinds of long combos that Elden Ring has become infamous for doubling down on. Once you have beaten that absolute unit of a final boss, there’s a cutscene that can be triggered, and many fans of the game are none too pleased with its brevity and lack of oomph, for lack of a better word.
Spoilers for Shadow of the Erdtree’s ending follow.
For many, this ending to Elden Ring’s saga seems like a whimper rather than a triumphant bang. The scene is straightforward enough (or as clean-cut as FromSoftware’s esoterica can be) and that appears to be the source of the tension. Miquella, the quintessential character of the entire expansion, appears for the first time and effectively doubles down on his goal, or at least restates it. There is no pomp to the affair. Miquella is kneeling throughout the scene, which takes place in a void save for the nearby throne of the Elden Lord, and it is over before you know it. It betrays no significant new insight.
I won’t lie: this does kind of suck ass. I actually get the contingent who were maybe expecting more from the end of this DLC. Elden Ring is an epic, and if this is the end of it, yeah, it’s not exactly what I would’ve expected. But while some are fixated on the short nature of the ending, others are pissed because of how little it appears to add to the story, or at the least their understanding of it all.
Elden Ring, like most of FromSoftware’s oeuvre, is fascinating to digest and think about. I love people who sniff out bits of lore and propose theories about the motivations of characters and the larger schemings of the world. I too have fallen asleep to many Vaatividya videos piercing together scraps of item descriptions into a cogent and deeply tragic narrative. However, these practices have also borne a kind of fan that demands “truth” from these games. People who expect answers for their sleuthing and investment. In my humble opinion, those folks are playing these games—and engaging with art—in a reductive manner, and only getting in the way of their own enjoyment.
The absolute truth of these games is supposed to elide you, you dingbats. Whatever absolute meaning you are trying to wring from them flies in the face of the entire point of FromSoft’s preferred method of storytelling. If Miyazaki wanted players to know everything about the game, he and his team could’ve simply written it out for you in a game rich with endless dialogue, exposition, and scenes pontificating on every minute detail. The fact that these games have never fit that mold should have clued you all into an obvious fact: there is no truth waiting for you at the center of Elden Ring or its expansion.
Disgruntled players who can’t believe that Shadow of the Erdtree would end in such an abrupt and curt manner are outright hoping that there’s a secret ending to be uncovered. Though Elden Ring didn’t have a secret one, it did feature multiple endings depending on what quests you completed and what force/faction you ultimately aligned with. Shadow of the Erdtree lacks a similar framework, and Miyazaki has outright stated that the DLC wouldn’t impact the endings already baked into the game, but that hasn’t stopped a select few from praying that those claims were little more than a red herring.
I find how little I understand Elden Ring to be a fucking joy, y’all. When I do come back to it, I love trying to click the puzzle pieces together. Some of them fit, and others don’t. Some of them may never click and that’s okay. I can master the game’s mechanics and dog-walk half of these bosses in my sleep, but there’s something about the fact that I may never really understand all of its mysteries, including Miquella’s motivations for abandoning the Lands Between and seeking godhood, or whatever people are bent out of shape about. I’ll never really stop exploring the larger-than-life cast of Elden Ring and that keeps the thrill of it alive. I don’t need to know everything about Elden Ring to know that I love it and love being engaged by it. Believe it or not, that’s enough.
For years now, Bloodbornefans have wanted the popular PS4-exclusive RPGported to PC, hopefully with performance improvements and graphical options. And while FromSoftware’s president Hidetaka Miyazaki didn’t confirm that such a port is happening, he did say he’s not opposed to it and suggested that many people at the studio want a PC port to happen.
The Most Sought After Elden Ring Sword Has A Storied History
Released nearly a decade ago in 2017 exclusively for PlayStation 4, Bloodborne is one of FromSoftware’s (Dark Souls, Elden Ring) most popular and beloved games. Like many of its other games, Bloodborne is a tough-as-nails action RPG featuring intense boss battles and many secrets. However, unlike many of FromSoftware’s RPGs, Bloodborne has never been ported to other platforms. It remains stuck on PS4. That’s led to people asking over and over again for the Sony-owned Bloodborne to get a PC port. And it sounds like, while Miyazaki doesn’t have anything to announce, he seems into the idea of this fan-favorite RPG finally being playable on something other than a PS4.
In an interview with Miyazaki, PC Gamer asked the president if he would personally like to see Bloodborneported to PC one day.
“I know for a fact these guys want a Bloodborne PC port,” said Miyazaki in reference to FromSoftware staff sitting with him during the interview. However, he quickly added that if he says he wants a port he’ll “get in trouble” but that he’s not “opposed” to a PC version.
“Obviously, as one of the creators of Bloodborne, my personal, pure honest opinion is I’d love more players to be able to enjoy it,” said Miyazaki. “Especially as a game that is now coming of age, one of those games of the past that gets lost on older hardware—I think any game like that, it’d be nice to have an opportunity for more players to be able to experience that and relive this relic of the past. So as far as I’m concerned, that’s definitely not something I’d be opposed to.”
Of course, while it’s nice to hear that the president of FromSoftware wants a Bloodborne PC port, it doesn’t mean one is happening. Remember, FromSoftware doesn’t own the Bloodborne IP, Sony does. And until Sony decides to fund a port, remaster, or remake, all FromSoftware can do is vaguely go “Yeah, we want one, too!” and that’s it.
Hopefully, as we near the game’s 10th anniversary next year, Sony will realize that they have a literal goldmine on their hands and all the company has to do is post a teaser for Bloodborne on Steam and it will be flooded with pre-orders before it even shares a trailer. At the very least, we know everyone at FromSoftware is down for a port. Now we wait to see what Sony wants…
It can feel good to put the controller down at the end of Armored Core VI, comforted by the knowledge that you survived its most brutal skill check bosses and learned to configure your complex mech for whatever new hazard Rubicon threw your way. It would be a mistake not to pick it back up again though, as Armored Core VI’s new game plus mode is where a great game starts to get even better.
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After you beat the game’s final boss and the credits roll, Armored Core VI brings you back to your mech hanger and presents you with the very first mission all over again. At first it seems like you’re just repeating the entire game, only this time with all of the shotguns, missile launchers, laser swords, and new mech parts you collected during your previous run. But then little changes start to pop up—additional snippets of dialogue, unexpected new choices you can during various missions.
Armored Core VI has “good” and “bad” endings, and a few branching missions along the way, but its new game plus mode is more than just a chance to take the road less traveled. There are entirely new battles and narrative twists that add new depth to the game’s thrilling but barebones story. If you’re playing and enjoying FromSoftware’s latest mech game, do yourself a favor and don’t sleep on its new game plus.
The first wrinkle comes in chapter one’s Attack the Dan Complex sortie. You’re hired by Balamb to join its squad of “Red Gun” jarheads and destroy Rubicon Liberation Front MTs and facility generators. Only this time the rebels radio you halfway through and promise to pay you to double-cross the Red Guns and defend the dam. Adding to the drama is the fact that the fight is legitimately hard, punishingly so if you try to sleepwalk through, and still challenging even if you go in with your best late-game loadouts.
Rokumonsen is one of the many pleasures that awaits you on a new game plus playthrough. Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku
New game plus unlocks additional parts too, as well as more Arena matches to earn the chips needed to fully upgrade your OS Tuning skill tree. A lot of the missions stay exactly the same, but they’re perfect testing grounds for all of the gear you purchased but didn’t play with the first time around. Boss fights like Balteus and the Sea Spider, meanwhile, are incredibly satisfying to rip through with ease in less than 60 seconds. And some of my favorite characters in the entire game didn’t appear until subsequent playthroughs.
Armored Core VI has three endings total, the third and final of which is both the most satisfying from a narrative point of view and the most difficult to achieve, not least of all because it requires beating the game three times. I’m not usually one for toiling through the same levels over and over again with minor changes just to unlock a cutscene. The thematic resonance of “cycle of violence” stories can only take these thinly veiled attempts at padding so far. Armored Core VI’s new game plus mode, like its base game, doesn’t mess around though, and I’ve only fallen more in love with it each new time I’ve beaten it.
Lords of the Fallen was already a game, one that came out nearly 10 years ago by developer Deck13 (Atlas Fallen) and publisher CI Games. It was fine, but felt too much like a lackluster facsimile of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls formula to have much of an identity of its own. CI Games is back, though, with newly founded studio Hexworks to take another stab at Lords of the Fallen. And this time around, at least based on the previews, it sounds like a stellar Soulslike might be in the offing.
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Out on October 13 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, Lords of the Fallen is a third-person action-RPG with an interesting conceit: With the help of the Umbral lantern, you can reveal secrets hidden in the land of the dead while still traversing the world of the living. But should you die and end up in Umbral—which will happen since this is a Soulslike—you’ll still be able to fight for your life for the chance to return to Axiom. Die here, though, and you’ll start back in the land of the living having lost your XP. Typically Soulslike stuff, but that two-realm implementation offers a new perspective for the genre, something the previews call attention to.
So, considering the game comes out in two months, here’s a roundup of what early players are saying about Lords of the Fallen and how, as many of them purport, it’s sounding like an exciting Soulslike worth paying attention to.
After playing the opening hours of 2023’s Lords of the Fallen, our journey through this nightmarish world was eerily familiar, yet filled with a current-gen polish that games like the Dark Souls trilogy and Bloodborne could only dream of. Our initial impressions were that the game felt a lot like the PS5 remake of Demon’s Souls, which is not a bad thing, but from an aesthetic point of view, Lords of the Fallen leans even more heavily into the grimdark setting.
Image: Hexworks
I’ve played a couple of hours of new Lords of the Fallen and crucially, I can tell you it’s: good. If you’ve played a Soulslike before—or as Hexworks wisely describes the genre, which extends to Nioh, The Surge, and the rest, tactical action-RPGs—it’ll be immediately familiar. You can create a character from one of several preset classes, ranging from glass cannon mages to sword-and-shield warriors, with some more lore-y archetypes in between with a little clan-based backstory behind them: a raven-like archer, a brawler with a twist of wolves.
The moment-to-moment in my Lords of the Fallen demo ticked most of the Souls boxes I have when it comes to combat, but this game distinguishes itself in its concept of dual worlds. Axiom, the land of the living, is more or less the “normal” dimension, but it exists in parallel with the Umbral realm, the land of the dead. The two realms run simultaneously as you play, which takes advantage of tech on latest-gen platforms. It’s similar to The Medium or Titanfall 2‘s Effect and Cause mission, but spread across an entire sprawling dark fantasy world.
What surprises me most, however, is Umbral. This is the realm of the dead and exists parallel to Axiom. It can be accessed at almost any time, in real-time. But, once you’re there, you must fight through its more challenging enemies to reach an access point that brings you back to Axiom. While you can select to explore Umbral on your own, Lords of the Fallen will bring you there almost every time you die. Dying gives you a second chance in Umbral, where, if you survive, you can reach the realm of Axiom once more. This eases the usual challenge of the genre—mind you, Lords of the Fallen is still extremely tough—but also opens up a unique playground for puzzles I welcome.
By tapping into two distinct worlds at once, Hexworks completely revamps how we view death in a Soulslike. Lords of the Fallen turns the most infamously iconic, eternally frustrating thing about a FromSoftware game into more than a second chance: It’s a second world, one that functions entirely differently from the place we start out in. The result is a varied combat experience in a truly untamed universe, one that pulses with unknown wonders and its fair share of chills—no matter your familiarity with the genre.
Image: Hexworks
There’s a great fluidity to Lords of the Fallen’s combat too. You can seamlessly flow from light attacks to heavy attacks, and can even change weapon stance in the middle of a combo as well. I could start with two light attacks, press the stance switch button, and do another light attack, I’d get a unique attack in which my character seamlessly goes from a dual-wielded slash, into a two-handed thrust. This is even better when you add magic to the equation, as you’re able to easily swap between melee and magic attacks even mid-combo. It opens the door for a lot of freedom of expression through combat, which is something you don’t see all too often in the Soulslike genre.
While in the Umbral world, enemies slowly become more aggressive and powerful, but the XP multiplier increases as well, amping up the risks as well as the rewards in an enticing way. Being able to respawn allowed me to progress much faster and alleviated some of the frustrations that come with the genre. The Umbral world also offers access to shortcuts and gives you wild abilities that mirror Jedi powers. Lords of the Fallen is at its strongest when it leans into the mechanics of the Umbral world.
Umbral also softens the difficulty level of its chosen genre—up to a point. If you die in Axiom, you are resurrected in Umbral, then given another chance to defeat your enemy before you give up the ghost completely and need to corpse-run from the last Vestige to reclaim your Vigor (Lords of the Fallen’s souls). This doesn’t refresh your healing items, though, and the longer you spend in Umbral, the more Dread builds up, and the trickier things get. Enemies get tougher, and increasing numbers of zombielike creatures materialize in your path—they’re easy to kill, but their presence complicates the battlefield considerably.
Outside of exploration, you can use the lantern to rend a baddy’s soul from its body, then batter it for extreme damage. You can’t do this all the time, as you’ll need to power the lantern up to do it. This can be done by bursting pustules in the Umbral realm and sucking up the resultant juice, but if you can’t find a pustule, you might encounter an enemy with a blue glow—which means they’re invulnerable unless you reveal their parasitic Umbral companion floating alongside them. Hoover this critter up and not only can it power your soul attack, it will also remove their pal’s aura of invincibility.
Image: Hexworks
The game is not as obscure as its FromSoft progenitors, and that works in its favor, because when you’re being pulled in two directions and interrogating the tension between worlds, you want a sense of what’s going on, and where to go. Lords of the Fallen is all about playing as a heathen, shunned by the world for embracing a dark lantern that allows them to traverse the realms of light and dark. It’s all about being sacrilegious, defying the common knowledge and tasting the forbidden fruit. If you wanted to do away with subtext, you could say it’s what Hexworks is doing in discarding the commonly held beliefs around how death should work in this genre. How traditionally hard it must be. But the studio eschews that. And the result, at least at this early stage, is unique and compelling.
My time with the 2014 version of the game was quite frustrating. While the review is no longer live—the site I wrote it for is now defunct—I essentially said that, although the game had a compelling narrative, its cumbersome gameplay and unintuitive systems made for an ultimately forgettable experience.
The previews of the new Lords of the Fallen reboot are based on just two hours of gameplay, so a lot of questions will remain unanswered until the game drops in October. But based on everything I’ve read so far, Lords of the Fallen is sounding like it’ll be a pretty solid take on the Soulslike style of game.
Lords of the Fallen launches on October 13 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
The player known as Let Me Solo Her has become an icon in the Elden Ring community in the year since FromSoftware’s action RPG launched. It started when he used the game’s online co-op features to help a player fight Malenia, one of the game’s hardest boss battles, wearing nothing but some underwear and a pot on his head. Now, it looks like he’s attempting to play a version of Elden Ring where every enemy is replaced by Malenia, and he’s streaming it starting on, March 17, for your enjoyment.Players modding Elden Ring to replace enemies with Malenia isn’t necessarily new, as mods of that kind were circulating throughout 2022. However, given that Let Me Solo Her’s vendetta against Malenia is an Elden Ring legend, at this point, it’s just the natural next step in this saga. Will Bandai Namco send him more swords commemorating all these kills he’s racking up in nothing but some white underwear and a helmet?
Let me solo her
The stream is ongoing on Let Me Solo Her’s YouTube channel, and the mod already makes early segments of the game terrifying to watch. Where once low-level enemies wandered in the base game, Elden Ring is now entirely populated by one of the most powerful bosses in FromSoftware’s game, who just happens to be able to heal herself.
Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku
So far, he’s mostly running past Malenias that appear in the open world, and only has to face them head on when he reaches a boss fight. Hey, we’ve all done it. But that doesn’t stop each of them from making swings with their giant swords as he sprints past, and it’s easy to imagine a situation where many Malenia make it hard to simply flee. If you, like me, are too scared to take on this challenge yourself, sit back and watch Let Me Solo Her do it, instead. Personally, I’d rather try the mod that turns enemies into Pokémon. That seems less terrifying.
While seeing cool remixes of the original game is fun, most Elden Ring fans are looking for new content for the game, which Bandai Namco and FromSoftware finally announced back in February. Not much is known about the upcoming expansion, but fans are already speculating about what characters might be in it based on what little information and art we have at this point.
When most of us experience a glitch, we can soothe our woes by simply reloading our game, or perhaps looking up a solution online. But PaschalisG16 has already tried that, and much more. No matter what this Witcher 3: Wild Hunt player does, though, their Geralt is walking around with a floating hammer stuck between his legs.
It goes everywhere Geralt goes. Cutscene? Hammer. Tearing down a monster? Hammer. And so PaschalisG16 ended up making a Reddit thread asking what the hell was going on and more importantly, could anyone lend a helping hand? You can probably guess what happened next: an endless array of dick jokes. Oh no. Perhaps the funniest thing about it is that, buried under dozens and dozens of replies like “Tis the most mighty of all the man-mallets” and “Giggity” is the OP once more, to zero effect, pleading for people to stay on topic.
“Does anyone wanna actually help? It’s not THAT funny,” PaschalisG16 wrote, if you scrolled down far enough to see it.
Speaking to Kotaku, PaschalisG16 admits that the oddly persistent hammer is not that big of a deal but that “my OCD makes me hate it a little bit,” so they want to get rid of it even though it doesn’t affect gameplay at all. In fact, PaschalisG16 has gone ahead and done things like saving Dandelion from the soldiers in Novigrad with the hammer in tow. What makes this entire ordeal so amusing is just how pervasive the damn hammer has ended up being. They’ve started a new game. They’ve reloaded a new save. The hammer won’t go away. Worse, replies reveal that other players are suffering the same fate as well.
The issue isn’t new, based on various internet threads over the years from baffled players who, much like the top picture suggests, always end up stripping Geralt naked in an effort to delete the hammer. Reading the troubleshooting is kind of hilarious: Yes, Geralt has tried meditating the hammer away. No, your suggestion isn’t going to work.
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“Unfortunately, I could not play with him when I realized that [the hammer] was with me now forever,” reads one thread from almost four years ago. “This destroyed the atmosphere of the game, constantly following me, I could not take my eyes off [the hammer] almost all the time. I could not forget this, I began to go crazy with this hammer,” they recounted, clearly traumatized by the whole thing.
While in-game meditating didn’t get rid of the pesky hammer, embodying its teachings did, in a roundabout way.
“However, the time has come, and I calmed down,” the 2019 hammer sufferer went on to say, before sharing a picture of the hammer, Geralt, and Ciri sitting around a campfire like a happy family. They’d accepted their fate and were now sharing what was the equivalent of a photo album dedicated to the hammer. “I was able to complete the game, one of the DLCS. Now this is my new bro, companion, like Roach. I realized that there was no point in paying attention to him and continuing to play as if nothing had happened. And it’s good that I was able to come to this, because the game deserves passing.”
But, uh, seriously, if anyone knows how to fix this, can you hit PaschalisG16 up?
2022 was truly the year of Elden Ring, with FromSoftware’s latest game exploding into the mainstream unlike anything it had previously created. As such, a lot of people played and finished Elden Ring. In fact, according to one set of data, Elden Ring was the most completed game of 2022. But funnily enough, the same source also pegs it as the game players were most likely to abandon before reaching the end.
If you’ve read Kotaku (or any other gaming website) in 2022, you are likely already familiar with Elden Ring, the latest game from Dark Souls creators FromSoftware. And like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Elden Ring is a tough-as-nails action-RPG with a heavy focus on mystery, world-building, and boss fights. However, this time around FromSoftware added a true open world to its popular “Soulslike” formula. The end result? One of 2022’s most acclaimed, best-selling games. The open world in particular helped sway many to try Elden Ring for the first time, letting players avoid harder areas until later and ostensibly making it easier to finish than past FromSoftware adventures. And it seems that design choice paid off.
According to data on HowLongToBeat.com, Elden Ring is 2022’s most completed game, with nearly 6,000 users of the site reporting they have played and finished the massive open-world RPG. That’s an impressive number when you look at the runner-up games on the list. Stray, that adorable futuristic cat game, was completed by nearly 4,000 users. Meanwhile, in third with 2,500 completions, was Game Freak and Nintendo’s Switch hit, Pokemon Legends: Arceus. To see such a big and difficult game top the list is both a sign that Elden Ring is very good and also a hint at the kind of audience that is primarily using HowLongToBeat.com.
Screenshot: Howlongtobeat.com / Kotaku
But perhaps more interesting is that Elden Ring is also the most “retired” game. When users “retire” from a game on Howlongtobeat.com it means they have given up on it, either permanently or temporarily. Now, even though only 261 players officially retired from Elden Ring on the site, that’s still more than double any other game in 2022. Even if the dataset is a bit small and weird (how many people are logging into this site to admit defeat?) it’s still an interesting data point.
This all makes sense to me. Elden Ring was the most talked-about game of 2022, and with that many people playing, it makes sense that a good chunk of them might give up on it. Other data seems to suggest around half the people playing Elden Ring never reached the end. So I buy that Elden Ring could be the most completed game of 2022 while also being the game more people gave up on than anything else.
Some other interesting 2022 data from the site: Turns out Elden Ring is also on the most backlogs, has the most reviews, and is the longest game of 2022. However, Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part 1 is the most positively reviewed game, and Diablo Immortal is the worst-reviewed.
After over a decade of FromSoftware games holding court as the quintessential ‘git gud’ franchise, locking those of us without a masochist bent out of the discourse, Elden Ring’s open world opened up the gates for an entirely new player base. As such, it catapulted the work of Hidetaka Miyezaki to entirely new heights: Elden Ring is by far the best-selling FromSoftware title, it’s snatching up GOTY awards like Rowa Fruit, and it’s still generating passionate conversations 10 months after its release.
By subtly divesting from the tried and true FromSoftware formula and giving us a game unshackled by a single, punishing, linear path, EldenRing offered up the Lands Between on a beautifully ornate (but slightly Tarnished) silver platter. And we gobbled that shit up.
Feeding The Difficulty Discourse Machine
These guys are called Abductor Virgins, and they suck. Image: FromSoftware
The Souls game discourse has almost solely revolved around difficulty. Before Elden Ring was released, FromSoftware’s Yasuhiro Kitao told Eurogamer that the game was “made for all sorts of players,” not just “hardened veterans.” This sent the fanboys into a tailspin, but it piqued the interest of those who have never been able to enjoy the punishing gameplay of FromSoft’s oeuvre.
I wrote about Kitao’s quotes back when I was at GamesRadar, suggesting that what would make Elden Ring great would be its approachability, and that that approachability was made possible by its open world. It’s a helluva lot easier to avoid difficult areas if you can run around them on horseback, but previous Souls games forced you to choose between the difficult path and the bang-your-head-against-the-wall-because-it’s-impossible path. The promise of ample choice made me think that maybe, just maybe, Elden Ring could be a game I’d enjoy.
Image: FromSoftware / Kotaku
Conversely, Forbes published a response to my piece, one that hoped Elden Ring’s open world wouldn’t ruin the FromSoftware vibes by focusing too much on “making these games approachable rather than tough and gritty.” This was months before the release date, but the discourse machine turned and turned and turned, smoke spewing from every inch, its cogs grinding and grating with each new take chucked into its gaping maw.
Until February came, and brought with it the Lands Between, wide open for exploration like a darker, deadlier Breath of the Wild. Players quickly learned that most of them were accidentally skipping the combat tutorial, and a bit more slowly learned that the first boss (that fucking Tree Sentinel) was avoidable. Many of us who could never latch onto a FromSoft game willingly clung to Elden Ring’s teat, as we learned we could, in fact, get on a horse and fuck off away from some horrifying eldritch beast.
As we collectively made our way through Elden Ring, we were given the gift that comes only with truly open-world games: seemingly endless discoveries by ourselves, our friends, and other players on the internet.
Braving Brutal Battles For A Glimpse Of Beauty
Need a hand?Image: FromSoftware
The beauty of Elden Ring lies in its world that teems, bubbles, and spews with both friendly and deadly life, that tantalizes and terrifies with its landscapes, that beckons and shuns you in a single breath. I find this beauty in so many moments during my time with the game, like when I accidentally descend down to the Siofra River, not too long into my playthrough.
In Limgrave, I step on a platform and am whisked down, down, down, until I emerge into an astounding space: a fully realized night sky in a variety of bruise colors, littered with pinholes of light. Crumbling classical architecture obfuscates my view of this impossible galaxy and tombstones line the path leading away from the platform, which glowed a bizarre green during my descent but now lies dormant.
I am, as the kids say, gagged, and stumble aimlessly away from the platform, paying little attention to what enemies may lie in my path for the first time since booting up Elden Ring. This is a mistake I quickly pay for, as I walk directly into a horde of Claymen. They move slowly, but they hurt, and I am severely underleveled for this area. One of the weaponless magic conjurers takes me out in seconds with his weird bubbles, sending me back to the Site of Grace right next to the platform that brought me here. When I go back to fetch my several hundred runes, the same guy takes me out again.
“Fuck that,” I mumble before stepping on the stone circle at the center of the lift. “I’ll come back later.”
And I do, just much, much later. After I’ve discovered I’m a battle mage with an affinity for gravity magic and summons, and long after I fell the Tree Sentinel with a single Rock Sling, I return to the Siofra River from a completely different direction, and lay waste to its inhabitants. Then, after I’ve collected every last item dropped by a fallen NPC and picked all the Ghost Glovewort my eyes can see, I allow myself a second to breathe. I glance up at that still-impossible night sky, and exhale. I earned this. Elden Ring, unlike other FromSoftware games, gave me ample chances to amass the tools and experience I’d need to earn a brief respite.
Elden Ring Eternal
I’m an Aries.Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku
But Elden Ring isn’t just somber and serious, it’s not just hours of grueling gameplay with brief, meditative breaks. It’s goofy as hell, like all FromSoftware games inherently are. There are stupid, dirty messages littered all over the ground, dozens upon dozens of ways to die that will make you chuckle in disbelief, and the ever-popular but always somewhat broken online play that encourages players to fuck with one another.
It’s this combination of punishing play, engaging story (thanks, George R.R. Martin), and asinine antics that make FromSoftware games, especially this one, so special. Elden Ring gives you enemies like Starscourge Radahn, who will in one moment beat the brakes off of you with gigantic meteors flung from a blood-red sky and in another send you into a fit of hysterics when you realize that he is, in fact, sitting on top of a very tiny horse. Elden Ring plays with you, offering up prophecies and moral quandaries that will have you scratching your head, but undercutting it with both accidental and purposeful absurdism.
Screenshot: FromSoftware
Elden Ring gives you a gigantic turtle wearing a pope hat. It gives you strange, unsettling storylines about grapes that are actually eyeballs. It tucks a giant bat grandma away amongst a rocky outcropping and gives her a haunting song to sing ad infinitum—or until you slash at her leathery, gray skin. It deflates your hope in humankind at one juncture just to build it back up again at the next.
It lets you explore this incredibly fucked-up world for hours upon hours, fall in love with some of its characters and revile the rest, taxing you physically and mentally with enemies plucked from the deepest depths of game design hell, and at the end, it presents you with a few options that don’t really fucking matter. It does all of this while making itself playable for us FromSoft plebeians, which therefore (brilliantly) means more of us will be talking about it than any game that came before.
When we inevitably look back at Elden Ring a decade from now, it will be difficult for us to remember exactly how much it defined the zeitgeist, just how far it permeated popular culture outside of gaming, and just how much we couldn’t stop talking about it. But now, ten months after its release, it’s hard to imagine we ever existed in a world without it.
