After eighty-some hours, I’ve completed Elden Ring! I’ll happily admit that I’m heavily conflicted when it comes to FromSoftware’s games. I love the ambient world-building, the dark atmosphere, and the mythical inspiration… but the controls are just terrible and the writing is all over the place. That Elden Ring was sold as an uncommonly long and open-world souls game struck me as a terrible idea, as it seems like this format would work best with a smaller-scale game… but it’s getting so much praise that I felt it necessary to play through it myself to see what it’s all about.
There will be spoilers in this review.
To keep things organized, I’ll split my analysis into the following sections:
- Briefly, what is Elden Ring?
- What happens in Elden Ring and how is this explained in-game?
- Is Elden Ring difficult? What makes a game difficult?
- Why do quests work like this?
- What’s my verdict?
- What rad things don’t fit anywhere else?
Briefly, what is Elden Ring?
Scroll past this section if you’re already familiar with Elden Ring.
Elden Ring is the newest FromSoftware souls-like game. It’s an action role-playing game designed with controllers, not keyboards or mice, in mind. The combat punishes button mashing and encourages slower, more methodical actions. Rolling provides a brief window in which you’re invulnerable, known as “i-frames,” which heavily influence combat as you must roll through attacks to avoid taking damage. What sets souls-like games apart from other ARPGs is the dark, moody atmosphere, ambient storytelling, and frustrating combat.
The game’s overworld map is open, but with some locks to keep you from progressing too far too fast. Frequent save and fast-transport points allow you to move around the world easily and your horse, Torrent, has excellent controls. Getting around in Elden Ring feels much easier than, for example, The Witcher 3 – but the challenging monsters make it more difficult than in Breath of the Wild or Genshin Impact.
The overall atmosphere is dark fantasy, but it’s a bit higher fantasy than the previous souls games. The giant golden Erdtree, in particular, stands out as fantastically magical. The game is pretty bleak and most NPC storylines end tragically. There aren’t many cutscenes or long bits of dialog, so the world feels (intentionally) lonely.
Elden Ring is primarily single-player, but it has both cooperative and competitive multiplayer similar to other souls games, but a bit less complicated than some of the later entries. Players can intentionally leave messages on the ground to either help or mislead other players using a collection of phrases (you will see many variations of “Try Fingers. But hole” and “Offer Rump”) and unintentionally leave blood stains which show other players a phantom image of how you died. This system is fantastic, as it offers a social atmosphere to the game while still allowing the bleak world to feel lonely: you’re only seeing echoes of other players, after all. Death Stranding took this concept from the souls games and, in my opinion, improved upon it, but it’s still great in Elden Ring. You can also invite other players to join your world temporarily to help you out, but if you do this outside of a boss room then you’ll eventually get invaded by a competitive player out to kill you. You can easily ignore all of the multiplayer options if you’d like, or even take advantage of co-op for bosses without ever being invaded. Passwords allow you to group up with your friends.
The graphics and performance are pretty good. It ran just fine on my computer, which struggled to run Cyberpunk 2077 even on mid-tier settings. The music isn’t particularly interesting, but it gets the job done.
We’ll get more into the story and world later, but very briefly, the plot of Elden Ring is that reigning Queen is gone and a brutal war of succession between demigods left The Lands Beyond in ruins. The player is one of the tarnished, who were banished at some point in the past but have been called back so that they can attempt to take the throne and mend the kingdom. This story takes place on both a political and a metaphysical level: becoming the Elden Lord will both unify the country’s peoples and repair the Elden Ring itself, which governs the laws of reality for the game’s setting, The Lands Between. This story is told ambiently through scraps of dialog and item descriptions, similar to games like Destiny 2, Path of Exile, and the Diablo series. Piecing together the full story is a challenging puzzle, but following the main thread is pretty straightforward.
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get into some details.
What happens in Elden Ring and how is this explained in-game?
Let’s take this part in two sections: how the story is told and what that story actually is.
How is Elden Ring’s story told?
I’ve already claimed that Elden Ring’s story is told “ambiently,” but let me explain what I mean by that.
Most stories are told very intentionally, in a linear fashion, as a storyteller explaining the story to their audience. This is pretty much a necessity of the medium: movies, books, and oral storytelling are inherently linear processes. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to figure out, but you can be certain that you have all of the information the storyteller wanted you to have and that you received it in the order they intended.
Video games often follow this format, but they don’t have to. In a game, the narrator can break the story up and hide it throughout the world so the player needs to uncover it. Different players may uncover the story in different orders or even find different pieces of it. Not all players will find all the same information and the plot, characters, and world lore may need some real investigation and puzzle-solving to understand. This sort of storytelling can be described as ambient, as the story is woven into everything in the medium. I often see this described as merely “non-linear,” but I prefer “ambient” as this emphasizes that it’s not merely a matter of ordering the story but in where it’s received from.
Now, to be clear, ambient storytelling is by no means unique to Elden Ring or to the souls genre. It’s actually pretty common for games to at least dabble in this. Isometric ARPGs like Diablo and Path of Exile stick out as notable examples: the games’ required quests and cut-scenes are traditional, but most of the game’s narrative content is found in optional monologues from NPCs, world events, and item descriptions. Destiny 2 is another great example of this: most of the game’s story is told via a collection of lore books, which exist in-game and are written from the perspective of various characters in the game. If you merely play through the main quests and and watch the cut-scenes for Destiny 2, then you’re missing most of the story. Most MMORPGs do this with their lore, but have a more traditional main story to pull players along; see my take on The Secret World for a good example of this.
Elden Ring, and the From games in general, are notable for having relatively sparse stories with lots of intentional gaps. The games are left deliberately incomplete. If you take a look at some lore videos for Elden Ring you’ll quickly find that most of them are fan theories making claims of what they think happened. Note that this is really a difference of degree, as all games leave at least something to the imagination.
This style of telling a story ambiently and leaving gaps is pretty interesting. I think you can really look at it from two perspectives.
Antagonistically, you could say that Elden Ring is fake-deep. The small pieces of story that we get are bombastic and striking, so our natural response is to assume that there’s a depth to it all that we simply cannot grasp… even if that depth doesn’t actually exist. It feels like playing a randomly generated game like MÖRK BORG, where everything sounds cool but the construction is done by rolling dice and taking entries from tables. Plenty of stories do this, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a great example: the anime feels very clever and deep, but if you listen to some interviews with Hideaki Anno, you’ll quickly find that he was just pulling symbols from religion and psychology at random.
I get the impression that much of Elden Ring’s world was built starting with cool scenes and names and then the details, as much as they exist, were filled in as an afterthought. When designing Rykard, they wanted a big snake guy with a weird body who pulls a sword out of his mouth and lives in a volcano. I don’t think they ever stopped to consider why he’s a big snake guy with a weird body who pulls a sword out of his mouth and lives in a volcano, I think they just thought it would look cool. Pretty much every interesting character in the game is like this: their visual design is really overdone and edgy, but if you stop to consider why they are the way that they are, you’re going to be disappointed. Criticizing this is frustratingly difficult, as the developers can always just pretend that there’s a depth that we’re simply missing and fans trying to advertise their YouTube videos will insist that their convoluted interpretation makes the game make sense.
While exploring Nokron, you will climb into a completely arbitrary stone coffin in order to magically drift to the next area multiple times. I feel like they were trying to go for an effect like in Silent Hill 2, where James continues to jump down holes… but that game was more consistently and intentionally psychological. The audience is meant to wonder whether James is actually jumping down holes or just going crazy and the answer doesn’t matter to the overall plot. In Elden Ring, it just felt like a neat idea someone had but then never bothered to explain. The hope is that the audience will be too insecure – too afraid of being told that they just didn’t “get it” – to assert that it’s just stupid.
But, this antagonistic perspective takes it for granted that storytellers should have a comprehensive understanding of their story, that the author should have the full story in their head. If you followed along with my series on literary theory, then you’re already familiar with the notion that we don’t need to hold the author in such esteem. Leaving gaps and demanding that players find the story bit by bit introduces a degree of free play which encourages each player to imagine their own story and encourages fan communities to construct competing theories. Leaving some symbols undefined creates a spectrum of potential interpretations for fans to play with. If there’s no single correct version of the story, this allows for many different interpretations, as you can fill in the gaps with whatever you want to build your own world. Even if From really are just bad/lazy writers, does that matter when fans are more than willing to fill in the gaps? Maybe people are a bit tired of having every last symbol in a fictional universe exhaustively explored and defined.
Really, this form of storytelling is closer to real life than traditional narratives are. No matter how much history you read or research you perform, you can only ever narrow reality down to a smaller set of potentially valid interpretations. A healthy worldview is one that doesn’t claim to have an answer for everything, but is comfortable with simply being what it is.
What I really like about ambient storytelling is how conducive it is to daydreaming and fanfiction. Thinking back on games like Diablo II, I’m always astounded by how much character I read into the world. Most NPCs barely say anything, and even the long-winded ones only give you a dozen or so paragraphs of monologue. Yet, when I think about Diablo II, I feel as though each act’s city was vibrant and full of characters. Even characters like Flavie, who barely say or do anything at all, feel like real characters in that world. When I think back to each act, I remember the zones as being full of life, but nearly all of that “content” was only ever implied. The same is true for Elden Ring. We really barely know anything about any of the characters, but that hasn’t stopped fan artists from producing just tons of adorable comics about the cute lizard person you meet in the Volcano Manor. Ranni gets a fair bit of screen time, compared to the other characters, but every single word she says easily fits into just a dozen or so paragraphs. Yet, she’s a major fan favorite and felt, while I was playing the game, like a fully realized and interesting character.
Ultimately, both of these perspectives are valid. If you approach the game with an open mind, you’ll construct as much depth as you bring to it. If you want a story that brings its own depth, then you’re going to be disappointed. The only really frustrating part of this for me, personally, is the fan response to the game. I’m seeing a lot of reviews praising the story and world and… it just doesn’t really seem genuine to me. Maybe it’s just because I played Elden Ring while taking a short break between books in The Wheel of Time, but Elden Ring’s story really is pretty shallow: it’s just a basic war of succession where the characters have messed up bodies. I’m also seeing plenty of YouTube lore videos that are pushing head-canons as though they’re spelled out in the game. Anyone who claims to have a specific definition of an “Empyrean,” for example, is making stuff up – it’s simply not fully explained within the game. That said, it seems like everyone’s having fun throwing around theories, and Elden Ring is a great sandbox to build fan theories in.
What happens in Elden Ring?
Though Elden Ring’s lore has a lot of convoluted or partially-defined elements, the basic story is actually pretty simple if you don’t get too bogged down in details.
Before the game starts
Elden Ring takes place in The Lands Between, a kingdom that has – by the start of the game – fallen to ruin. Under normal circumstances, The Lands Between are ruled by a married couple: the Elden Lord and their Empyrean consort. The Empyrean becomes god of The Lands Between and wields the Elden Ring, which governs the metaphysical laws of the kingdom. The Elden Lord serves as the protector of the throne. Together, they rule over both the political and metaphysical aspects of The Lands Between.
Above these rulers are the Outer Gods, beings who aren’t really explained within the game. These Outer Gods interact with the world in a variety of indirect ways. Grace is a blessing from The Greater Will, which manifests as a golden light. A person who is blessed with grace will show gold in their eyes but there are also scraps of lost grace throughout the kingdom which guide any who follow them towards the path of becoming the Elden Lord. There are also giant fingers and finger prophets who provide guidance for the will of an Outer God. The Outer Gods are seen through a variety of religious perspectives with individual characters disagreeing over their benevolence or will. Regardless of their claimed divinity, all characters beneath the Outer Gods can be thought of as characters – we could call some of them gods, demigods, or just powerful people – but the Outer Gods are distant and mysterious to the extent that you shouldn’t think of them as characters: we really have no understanding of what they are or what they want.
There has only been one Empyrean consort in the provided history of this kingdom: Queen Marika. She arrived from outside the kingdom and conquered it, taking Godfrey as her husband to be the first Elden Lord. Together, they had three children: Godwyn, The Golden, and the twins Morgott, The Omen King and Mohg, Lord of Blood. After some time, Godfrey’s grace faded and he was banished. It’s a mystery whether Godfrey’s grace faded because of some personal failing or just because Marika was finished with him, but in either case he seemed to have lost his relevance.
This brings us to another major character, Radagon. Radagon courted Queen Rennala, who rules the Academy of Raya Lucaria, and the two had three children: Radahn, Ranni, and Rykard. After some time, Radagon left Rennala and married Queen Marika, and these two had two children: Malenia and Miquella.
What we don’t learn until nearly the end of the game is that Radagon and Marika are actually the same being. They seem to have different minds, and they may or may-not be able to either merge bodies or split (we know for a fact that they can transform between the two selves but we never actually see them physically separate.) This means that all of the children I mentioned here – Godwyn, Morgott, Mohg, Malenia, Miquella, Radahn, Ranni, and Rykard – are descendants of Marika/Radagon. Malenia and Miquella are unique in that they descend solely from Marika/Radagon. Of all of these characters, only Marika/Radagon, Malenia, Miquella, and Ranni are Empyreans. Empyreans aren’t really explained within the game, but we could assume that it’s somehow passed down genetically as a recessive trait, which would explain why both of Marika/Radagon’s asexually produced children are Empyreans but only one of their sexually produced children – Ranni – is an Empyrean. (If you want to make a Song of Ice and Fire joke, as Martin wrote some of Elden Ring, now would be a good time to say “the seed is strong.”)
The Elden Ring itself is a combination of Great Runes which each govern a different metaphysical law. You can see the Elden Ring as the golden symbol on the game’s main menu and in its promotional materials. At some point in the past, Marika removed the Rune of Death from the Elden Ring and placed it under the protection of her shadow servant Maliketh. Doing this removed the law of death from The Lands Between making everyone unable to die… sort of. This isn’t really conveyed well within the game, but we could assume that this is why we can be reborn when we die. Note, by the way, that we don’t really see a good spread of Great Runes, so it’s hard to get a real sense that the Elden Ring governs all aspects of reality. The cosmology here is really left to the imagination.
The Elden Ring is not natural to The Lands Between, but was sent here in the form of a golden beast by The Greater Will.
At some point in the past, for reasons we don’t know, Marika chose to shatter the Elden Ring and Radagon tried (and failed) to mend it. It’s never fully explained why they did this, but it’s implied that Marika wanted to break free from the influence of The Greater Will. As Marika was merged with the Ring, Marika and Radagon were also shattered, which is how you find them at the end of the game: as a statue broken into pieces.
With the Elden Ring shattered and Marika/Radagon silent, the other major powers in The Lands Between took what Great Runes they could find, built up armies, and fought a brutal war of succession. The battle between Radahn and Malenia is featured in some of the game’s promotional materials and was a particularly brutal war, ending with the lands of Caelid covered in rot and with both Malenia and Radahn incapacitated.
The fighting ended in a stalemate with no single ruler for The Lands Between, no proper Elden Lord, and no one to mend the Elden Ring.
At this point, the Tarnished – people who lost their grace and were banished from The Lands Between in the past – were granted a small blessing of grace (presumably by The Greater Will) and the guidance of grace to lead them towards the throne. This manifests as a game mechanic in the Lost Grace save points, many of which point to the next location you need to head towards to progress the plot.
Just before the start of the game, another major development occurred. Ranni the Witch stole the Great Rune of Death and ordered the Night of the Black Knives (I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated that Ranni ordered this, but it’s very, very strongly implied to the extent that I don’t think this is just a fan-theory.) On the Night of the Black Knives, both Godwyn and Ranni died, but in very different ways, as neither fully ceased to exist. Godwyn become a sort of undead, Those Who Live in Death, while Ranni’s spirit survived and attached to a doll’s body. It’s impossible to say with certainty how much of this was Ranni’s plan, but it sure seems like she had most of this planned out intentionally.
At this point, the player starts the game as yet another Tarnished with ambitions for becoming the Elden Lord.
After the game starts
The player’s journey through the game can take a number of paths and there are several optional quest-lines. I’d like to keep this fairly high-level, so I’ll just hit the main points.
Early in the game, our Tarnished encounters a mysterious girl, Melina, who has some superficial resemblance to Ranni and may be another descendant of Marika/Radagon. She notes that we are “maidenless” – a term which is never explicitly explained. It is implied that a Varre, a man you meet early in the game, is killing maidens – possibly include yours – but we don’t really know what a maiden is or see any of them, so this is kind of a mystery. Melina helpfully offers to fill some of the roles of a maiden for us, which serves the gameplay function of allowing us to consume runes to level up. She also provides our horse, Torrent, and encourages us on our journey.
At minimum, to finish the game, we need to make our way to the heart of the Erdtree, mend the Elden Ring, and claim the title of Elden Lord. There are a number of incidental steps along the way, but when we finally arrive at the Erdtree, we find that it is sealed shut to us. Melina appears again and hints that we need to go to the Giant’s Forge. After a long trek to the Giant’s Forge, Melina asks if we’re prepared to commit a cardinal sin (which is a hint that we’re about to hit a major point of no return in the game.) When we agree, she takes the fire from the Giant’s Forge, immolates herself, and uses herself as “kindling” to burn the Erdtree and the surrounding capitol. The Erdtree isn’t entirely destroyed, but it is scorched sufficiently to destroy the barrier keeping it from the throne.
We return to the Erdtree and make our way inside to find the fractured body of Marika and the shattered Elden Ring. As we approach, Marika shifts into Radagon and fights us. When we defeat Radagon, the Elden Beast itself manifests, and we need to defeat it as well. Finally, we win the chance to mend the Elden Ring.
This is where the multiple endings come into play. If we only completed the minimal content to finish the game, then our only option is to mend the Elden Ring without any additional “mending rune,” which results in “An Age of Fracture.” Given that every other ending is “The” age of whatever as opposed to “An” age, it’s implied that this is a partial ending: one in which we didn’t truly remake the Elden Ring, but simply held it together. Presumably, Marika remains god and becomes our consort, though this isn’t explicitly stated.
If we did some of the longer side-quests, then we have some additional options. Most of them are pretty similar in terms of what we actually see, and it’s left mostly to the player to imagine what it means. We could take Fia the Deathbed Companion’s Mending Rune of the Death-Prince to create The Age of the Duskborn, the vile and accursed Dung Eater’s Mending Rune of the Fell Curse to create The Blessing of Despair, or use the holy Goldmask and Corhyn’s Mending Rune of the Perfect Order to create The Age of Order.
But, there are two other options.
Ranni’s questline is fairly long and involved. In it, we discover her original corpse, give her the means to kill the Fingers of the Outer Gods that have sway over her, see her die yet again and attach her soul to an even smaller doll body, and ultimately restore her spirit to a human-sized doll body. In this state, she retains her powers as an Empyrean and demigod, but she is also free of any Outer God influence (or so she claims.) When we approach the Elden Ring, we then have the option to summon Ranni, who takes us for her fair, eternal consort, extends her hand, and takes us on a thousand year journey to the moon and stars, ushering in The Age of the Stars. This ending is also only briefly described, mostly left to the player’s imagination. This is the ending I got, and my take is that Ranni is pursuing great power and knowledge for herself, but also maintaining a more distant approach to ruling The Lands Between.
…The battle is over, I see. I do solemnly swear. To every living being, and every living soul. Now cometh the age of the stars. A thousand year voyage under the wisdom of the Moon. Here beginneth the chill night that encompasses all, reaching the great beyond. Into fear, doubt, and loneliness… As the path stretcheth into darkness. Well then. Shall we? My dear consort, eternal.
Ranni in The Age of the Stars ending
Note that there’s some fan discussion regarding the translation for this quote. The Japanese text I found for it is:
…すべて、終わったのだな
私は誓おう
すべての生命と、すべての魂に
これよりは星の世紀
月の理、千年の旅
すべてよ、冷たい夜、はるか遠くに思うがよい
恐れを、迷いを、孤独を
そして暗きに行く路を
さあ、行こうか
…永遠なる、私の王よ
That’s… pretty much the same as the English text, so I think that fans are just trying to get some free clicks by claiming that it was mistranslated. If anything, I’d say that this is an uncommonly direct translation for lines from a video game. In either language she’s speaking cryptically, so it’s left to interpretation whether she’s going to plunge The Lands Between into fear, doubt, and loneliness, or if she’s describing the voyage that the two of you will take, separate from the world. You really need to decide for yourself how benevolent Ranni is.
The last ending is also very different from the main ones. In the Lord of the Frenzied Flame ending, we become the Lord of the Frenzied Flame and immolate our own body at the forge instead of Melina. In this ending, we completely destroy the Erdtree, burn the whole world (even the sky), and rise as a being made of fire. Melina warns us that this path is a foolish one, as we wouldn’t really be a lord of all of our subjects are dead. In this path, Melina survives to the end, swearing to deliver “Destined Death” to us.
So, that’s the story. There are plenty of other twists and side-quests along the way, but much of that content is pretty convoluted and doesn’t fit easily into a single interpretation of events. As I explained above, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it does make it impossible to work all of the game’s content into a single linear story without bringing a large amount of my own personal interpretation, which is why I chose to stay as close to the “facts” as possible to give an account that everyone who played the game will agree with. I’ll touch on some of the other interesting bits more later on.
If it still seems convoluted, just remember that it’s basically just a war of succession among squabbling nobles and we play the role of a disgraced, banished commoner who rises from nothing to claim the throne and unify the land.
Is Elden Ring difficult? What makes a game difficult?
Aside from the story, the main discussion I’ve seen surrounding Elden Ring is its difficulty: is it too hard, should it have an easy mode, and is the difficulty fair? To address these questions, we first need to define what “difficulty” means.
What is difficulty?
“Difficulty” is a vague term. In the context of Elden Ring, I think we can discuss it in terms of skill learnability, skill transferability, flow, fairness, difficulty customization, punishment for failure, and what I’ll call raw difficulty. These aspects will combine to produce a level of challenge or frustration.
Skill Learnability
Skill learnability is the degree to which you can learn to make a difficult thing feel less difficult. This is often discussed as a “learning curve.” Not all challenging tasks require learnable skills. For example, I could design a boss encounter where you simply need to roll a six-sided die ten times in a row and only roll sixes. This would be extremely difficult, but there’s no learnable skill involved – you’d simply need to try it around 60466176 times to succeed. This doesn’t have to be about chance either. I’m a great deal taller than my wife: she would find it very challenging to grab something off of a very high shelf, but I’d find it trivially easy. There’s no skill to train here, but it’s not random at all. On the other side of the spectrum we have games like Dragon’s Lair, in which the trick to each encounter is just to know when to hit the button. You cannot intentionally do it correctly on your first attempt, but it’s pretty easy to simply memorize each encounter after seeing it. Of course, most challenges lie somewhere in-between.
Learnability isn’t merely “good” or “bad,” but it is highly relevant to saying whether a game “requires skill.” If you cannot learn to become better at a game, then most people would agree that the game doesn’t take much skill. However, requiring a great deal of learnable skill means that players will need to invest time to appreciate a game, which makes it less accessible. Party games, for example, generally try not to have too much learnable skill, as that would make it frustrating for inexperienced players in a group. Mechanics like blue shells in Mario Kart serve to even things out a bit while still allowing for learnable skill.
Skill Transferability
Skill transferability is the degree to which a skill can be applied to different situations. Memorization games like Dragon’s Lair are a good example of a skill that is almost completely not transferable. Skills that are highly transferable are more general. For example, becoming good at aiming and moving in first person shooter games transfers pretty well to other FPSs: someone who’s very good at Doom is going to pick up Halo much faster than someone who isn’t experienced with any other FPSs. Musical instruments are a good example of something that’s in-between: learning to play the saxophone will make you a little better at playing piano, as you’ll know how to read music, hear notes, and understand rhythm, but it’s not going to help you actually press the right keys. An experienced sax player will definitely pick up the piano quicker than someone with no experience in any other instruments, but they’ll quickly hit a point where they need to learn how to play the piano itself as they’ll have pushed past the point where their transferable sax skills helped.
Notably, basically any challenge eventually becomes non-transferable if you get to a high enough level. A talented pianist won’t have any problems picking up a beginner’s song book and playing without practice, but even the best pianist in the world will need to practice a difficult song a couple of times before playing it live. The same is true for video games: the best Doom player in the world will definitely have an advantage in playing other FPSs, but they’ll still need to spend some time actually playing Halo if they want to play on the highest level.
Note that transferability isn’t merely “good” or “bad.” It can feel good to feel as though you’re gaining a general skill that can be applied elsewhere, but there’s also joy to be found in overcoming a unique challenge. The Touhou games are a good example of a series where most of the challenge is in figuring out each individual phase: the learning curve is very steep and that’s the entire point. Even an extremely talented Touhou player will need to invest a fair bit of time in mastering a new game in the series: they’d be disappointed if they ever found that their existing skills were sufficient for a phase they haven’t seen yet.
Flow
Flow is the state of doing something that’s just hard enough to be engaging: it’s not so easy that it’s boring and it’s not so difficult that it’s frustrating. We can think of this as a sort of pacing. For a player to lose themselves in the game and really get into the zone, they need to feel like they’re constantly being challenged without hitting any walls or feeling like they’re wasting their time. Learnability and Transferability come into play here: to achieve a good level of a flow, the game needs to grow in difficulty at the same rate that the player grows in skill. New challenges should feel unique – the skills shouldn’t be completely transferable – but they should also build upon previous challenges to some extent. When this is done well, the game feels exciting and it’s easy to lose yourself in the game. Players will feel like they’re truly mastering the content as they look back on what was difficult a few hours earlier and laugh at how easy it would be now.
The ratio of tension to significance is also important here. If insignificant obstacles are too punishing then they become distracting: the player either needs to remain hyper-vigilant at all times, which is too stressful, or they need to accept that they’ll occasionally fail simply because they didn’t notice something that didn’t feel significant. In either case, flow is disrupted.
Note that flow isn’t required for a game to be good. It’s perfectly reasonable to break flow to tell a good story or to occasionally throw something extremely challenging at the player to give them an exceptional challenge. But, if a gameplay-focused game rarely achieves any degree of flow, then players will feel that it “wasn’t fun.”
Fairness
Players have an intuitive grasp on what seems “fair” or “unfair.” If you learn how an enemy acts over the course of the game, then an enemy of that type suddenly does something unexpected, it can feel unfair. If certain gameplay mechanics aren’t explained in-game so looking up guides online makes the game significantly easier, then this can feel unfair. Making a boss more challenging by simply giving it a very large health pool so it takes longer can feel like “artificial difficulty.” Fairness is really pretty subjective and hard to define, but as a general statement, any tactics the developer uses to make the player lose in a way that feels overly tedious or arbitrary can feel unfair.
To some degree, fairness isn’t necessarily the goal in designing a game: a certain amount of cheating from a boss or character can give some extra flair and surprise. But, if it happens too often, it just becomes frustrating. When asking whether a game was difficult, fairness plays a big role, as games that are difficult but unfair don’t feel legitimately difficult.
Difficulty Customization
Difficulty customization is the degree to which players can control how difficult their experiences are and how legitimate this feels. The key here is that players generally want to feel like their customization options aren’t cheating. Having different modes – easy, medium, hard, etc. – is a good way to strike this balance. Players who want an easier experience can choose an easier mode, but this decision feels perfectly legitimate. In a social setting, it feels perfectly reasonable to say “I beat the game on normal, I didn’t want to invest the time for hard mode” or “I beat the game, but only on easy to see the story.” You still get a sense of accomplishment for having legitimately beaten the game, even if you know that you didn’t take on the highest level of difficulty.
Modes aren’t the only way to adjust difficultly though: players can also hold themselves to specific restrictions. Allowing co-op for bosses is a good example here. Players who want to experience the game but don’t want as much stress can play co-op while players who want to brag can play solo. Plenty of games offer achievements for doing one or the other. Destiny 2 does this for most challenging content: there’s an achievement for beating it, beating it without dying, for beating it solo, and for beating it solo without dying. On the extreme end of the restriction spectrum we have things like low-heart runs through Zelda games, where players deliberately avoid power-ups and items to beat the game only using a severely restricted toolset. Low-level play-throughs are another good example.
Hitting a good balance here is difficult, particularly when you’re not just dealing in modes. Where things fall apart entirely is when there are unbalanced builds or exploits that allow players to make the game trivially easy in ways that don’t require any “cheats”, but are clearly not a legitimate method of overcoming the challenge. If a game is particularly unpolished, players can feel as though every decision they make affects the legitimacy of their achievement. It’s frustrating to wonder whether you’re playing smart or just cheating.
Punishment for failure
If you fail a challenge, what happens? This is closely related to flow, as severe punishment for failure can easily break you out of flow. In games, this generally manifests as either losing progress on death or needing to run back to a boss fight. It doesn’t feel good when you need to spend a long time running back just to make another attempt on a boss or if you lose a lot of time spent gathering items or experience if you die.
Hitting a good balance here is difficult, but this balance is crucial for giving players a good sense of accomplishment. If you can simply grind through every challenge, then it’s hard to take much pride in the achievement. But, if the punishment is too severe, then you’ll just rage-quit.
Raw Difficulty
The last facet of difficulty I want to consider here is just the raw difficulty: how many tries does it take to get it right? Within an individual game, I don’t think this facet is as important as the others, but it’s crucial when comparing between games. Regardless of how the difficulty feels, the easiest way to compare the difficulty of games is to just ask “how many times did you die?” I left this for last because I want to emphasize that although this is the easiest facet of difficulty to measure, it’s really only a small part of the equation.
So, how difficult is Elden Ring?
If we just consider the raw difficulty, then honestly, it’s not very hard. I beat all of the major bosses in the game as well as most of the dungeon bosses and it usually only took me one try, sometimes two. The Godskin Duo were the worst; I think that took eight tries. I had no problems getting through the first phase of both Malenia and the final boss in a single attempt and then it only took a couple more to finish them off. Mohg went down so fast I was surprised that he didn’t have a second phase.
I’m not bragging here: I’ve definitely played games that took a lot more attempts. I think the most challenging boss I’ve ever beaten is Kanrethad in World of Warcraft (I did it when it was new and I was in mostly PVP greens.) That single fight must have taken forty or fifty tries over multiple days. God of War 2018 feels pretty similar to Elden Ring in terms of controls, and I also found it much more difficult. For a more recent game, Doom Eternal was significantly more difficult: there were multiple rooms that took ten or more attempts. I just watched my wife fall off the same cliff in Death Stranding more times than it took me to kill any boss in Elden Ring, but I wouldn’t say that Death Stranding is a particularly challenging game.
Really, almost any game with difficulty options, played on the highest difficulty, has a higher raw difficulty level than Elden Ring. Dragon Age 2 isn’t remembered for its insane difficulty, but it is dramatically more difficult than Elden Ring if you play on the highest difficulty with a two-handed sword. Basically any CRPG on its highest difficulty is almost incomparably more difficult: I probably had to try Aec’Letec from Baldur’s Gate and the final encounter in Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal thirty or forty times each. Divinity: Original Sin allows for quick-saving in combat, and there are individual turns that I had to try five or more times until I figured out how to avoid blowing up my entire party.
But, this brings us into some of the other facets of difficulty: Elden Ring doesn’t have a good system for customizing difficulty. There are plenty of ways to make the game feel easier or harder, but it never really feels legitimate. For example, I used spirit ashes for most boss fights and I used the mimic summon for some of the hardest fights. I also used swarm of flies to inflict bleed on bosses that were weak to it. I didn’t do much co-op, but that would have made the game even easier. These are all perfectly legitimate tools to use, and not even the most egregious ways to make the game easier, but I often felt as though I wasn’t really playing on hard mode because I wasn’t just doing a solo, pure strength build (like I did in Demon’s Souls.)
There are also plenty of “cheese” guides on YouTube to make certain fights trivially easy. I didn’t do it myself, but there’s a way to kill the Fire Giant safely by escaping the boss room and shooting him with arrows from outside his range as he just stands there. I actually did cheese Alecto, Black Knife Ringleader by trapping her in a corner so her AI bugged out: she just kept peacefully walking in place as I slowly chopped her down. In my most shameful moment, I was so ready for the game to be over by the time I got to Commander Niall that I found a guide to killing him safely from outside the boss room by shooting poison arrows into a hole in the wall. Oh, I also abused a glitch where you can kill the dragon Greyoll using swarm of flies very quickly, then run to the nearest lost grace point before he finishes dying to collect his runes without triggering his death so he respawns and you can kill him again, which makes leveling very easy: I was at about 180 by the end of the game.
So, did I legitimately beat the game? I didn’t rely on as many crutches as some players, using co-op for every boss and using overpowered builds (if anything, my faith caster build felt a bit weak when I wasn’t spamming swarm of flies,) but I definitely wasn’t playing on hard mode. Without a more legitimate method of customizing difficulty, everyone who played Elden Ring is stuck wondering how they compare to other players. You can’t really brag that you beat a boss in one try if you were using an “OP” build, can you? FromSoftware can claim that not including difficulty options is just their style… but it really seems like they’re just too lazy to balance the game correctly.
Skill learnability is done pretty well. I definitely feel as though I could replay the game on a fresh save and complete it in less than half the time. There were definitely moments where I felt like the difficulty suddenly increased, but I never really felt like I’d hit a wall.
Skill transferability, however, is a bit of a mixed bag. Basic controls like parrying and rolling through attacks are definitely transferable both within the game and without it. I’m not the biggest souls fan, but I do love Monster Hunter, and my experiences in rolling through monster attacks and hitting guard points definitely felt applicable. However, Elden Ring enemies have a tendency to artificially delay attacks and to do sudden sweeping area-of-effect attacks immediately after lunging that don’t feel intuitive and aren’t really predictable unless you’ve fought that specific enemy before, which makes learning how to counter these moves non-transferable. Certain mechanics are completely unnecessary for certain builds for most of the game… but then become essential in endgame content. For example, I really didn’t need to do any parrying for most of the game, then found myself completely unprepared for enemies later on who I couldn’t stagger, out-maneuver, or wear down with spells. Overall, I don’t think that skill transferability in Elden Ring is terrible, but it could be better, and it was a little frustrating how many bosses had moves that felt like they came out of nowhere.
Punishment for failure is, as a whole, done fairly well in Elden Ring. When you die, you drop any runes (experience points) that you haven’t already converted into levels or items on the ground. You can go pick them up, but if you die before you do, then that pile of runes disappears. This is a great mechanic that’s shown up in various forms in plenty of games. It’s a good way to add some tension without punishing players too severely and it’s a good way to encourage players to spend their runes, rather than carrying them around forever “just in case.” You don’t even drop your items or lose any allocated levels, so this is actually less punishing them some other games. There are also plenty of fast travel points, so needing to run back to a boss room is generally not too bad: in most cases, you respawn directly outside the room. In my playthrough the only time I was really frustrated with a run back to a boss chamber was in the Godskin Duo fights, and I later learned that there was a closer fast travel point that I’d somehow missed.
With fairness, we’re starting to get into the areas where Elden Ring had some problems. Elden Ring makes heavy use of what fans are calling “input reading,” where enemies respond to actions the player takes immediately, before the player’s character actually begins the action. Certain enemies with shields, for example, will instantly and perfectly parry attacks made against them while their shield is up in a way that feels kind of broken, as they begin the parry before you even begin swinging your weapon. Some enemies will also instantly attack you when you try to drink a potion, even if they’re in the middle of an animation that should prevent them from taking a new action. Fairness is pretty subjective, so it’s impossible to say that this is an objectively bad mechanic, but it was pretty frustrating when it happened, and I think they could have come up with a better way to punish players for button-mashing that didn’t feel so janky. That said, it also encourages playing better by paying closer attention to mechanics, so I don’t think this is too bad.
I also found the health of some of the late game bosses to be excessively high, which forced many players into builds that work off of percent damage. My build for the second half of the game was a high faith and arcane caster with an occult sword. I wanted to cast dragon spells, throw fire and lightning, and occasionally jump in with my sword for some more mundane combat. For most of the game, this was entirely viable, but towards the end of the game I found that hemorrhage damage – which scales based on total health – was simply too powerful to pass up, which led to be spamming Swarm of Flies for many of the late-game encounters. The last dozen or so hours started to feel like artificial difficulty. But, again, it wasn’t all that bad: plenty of games make the last few bosses bullet sponges for some artificial difficulty, so it wouldn’t really be fair to hold Elden Ring to a higher standard.
This brings us to the aspect of difficulty that I think Elden Ring could have done better: flow. Most major bosses have a respawn point right outside the boss chamber, so you can always fight them fully stocked, but dungeon bosses and world bosses are generally a fair walk away from the nearest lost grace. Even fairly inconsequential enemies can do a lot of damage, so if you want to reach a dungeon’s boss fully stocked, you need to be extremely focused throughout the entire dungeon… which makes it hard to enjoy exploration. Needing to be fully alert for low-stakes situations completely breaks flow. What’s worse, the actual bosses were often easier than the monsters I encountered along the way. It doesn’t feel good to get killed by a random pack of dogs three times in a row, then completely destroy their boss in a few seconds. I really don’t think that this was an intentional design choice, I think that FromSoftware is just really lazy when it comes to testing their encounters. It really shouldn’t be possible for someone to kill Mohg in less than a minute without even needing to dodge any attacks, but get so fed up with insignificant knights walking around Leyndell that they learn to always run away from them.
Overall, I don’t think that Elden Ring was a particularly difficult game, but it did feel frustrating due to the poor sense of flow, perception of unfairness, lack of legitimate-feeling difficulty customization options, and relatively poor skill transferability. Its reputation online as an extremely hard game feels like an ad campaign to me: FromSoftware is hoping to make sales to gamers who want to prove their skill by taking on the year’s most difficult game. It’s a great marketing strategy, I suppose, as gamers who beat the game will do this marketing for free. It’s also a great way to encourage streamers to play the game, as they’ll want to show off how 1337 they are. FromSoftware’s statement that they don’t want to add different difficulty modes as a sort of philosophical statement feels like a lie: they just want to avoid time balancing the game while benefiting from young gamers finding a sense of pride in beating a game that’s, frankly, not all that hard.
The only reason Elden Ring feels particularly difficult is because it’s frustrating and there’s no easy option for casual players. It’s not particularly challenging compared to most games with a hard mode.
Why do quests work like this?
Another popular talking point for Elden Ring is the quest structure. There’s no quest guide, no direction indicator, and no hand-holding. There are clues as to where you need to go next, but you need to pay attention figure things out in this game.
On its surface, this is awesome. It’s not always bad, but quest logs and direction indicators definitely ruin the atmosphere for some games. It’s become so common that I’ve learned not to mind it too much, but playing Elden Ring reminded me of how immersive games feel when they don’t hold your hand too much.
…which would be great, if the quests didn’t feel so arbitrary and easy to break or miss entirely.
Just take a look at some of the quest guides on Fextralife. How often do you need to reload an area to see the next line of dialog? There generally isn’t any reason to expect that the NPC has more to say, so it’s really just a matter of either luck or tedious double-checking to ensure that you never miss an extra line of dialog by failing to release the area and talk to every NPC again just in case they have something new to say. Sometimes you need to travel to completely arbitrary locations to find the next step for a quest. Even when there are clues, they’re very easy to miss even for a diligent player.
Several times throughout the game you will encounter a person you’ve never met before and they’ll immediately ask you to swear loyalty to them. If you say no, they simply have nothing else to say to you. Every time this happens, you’ll worry that you might be locking yourself out of other quests, even though this is only actually possible for one quest line. Why do this? There are other quests where your agreement is simply assumed, so it doesn’t even feel consistent.
Reaching certain areas in the game occasionally updates the game state so certain characters will progress in their personal stories. If done well, this could have given a greater sense of life to the world… but it really doesn’t make sense in an open-world exploration-based game like this. I’m not even talking solely about killing bosses, this can happen simply because you entered a new region. If you’re not using a guide, you’re probably going to miss out on a lot of content. The only real way to avoid missing content without using a guide is to rigorously record everything every NPC says and ensure that all NPCs are in a stable state (dialog repeats and they’re not doing anything) before killing any bosses or entering any new zones.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the game had more quests, but there really aren’t all that many. In an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game, I don’t really mind missing a few sidequests because there are just tons of them. Elden Ring doesn’t have enough content to get away with this.
I really can’t accept the idea that this is somehow an intentional philosophical choice by FromSoftware. It’s blatantly obvious that they simply didn’t spend much time polishing their quest system and they knew that their fans would quickly create guides that everyone would use. I was a software engineer for a long time, so I get the argument that a bug should be marked as low-priority because there’s a workaround, but this is really pretty shameful. For this reason alone, I really can’t understand giving this game a perfect score.
What’s my verdict?
There’s definitely some awesome stuff in Elden Ring, and I’ll get to some specific examples in the last section of this post, but before I get into unabashed praise, I want to give my honest verdict on the game. It’s receiving some very high praise: does it deserve it?
Elden Ring is a good game, but it’s not notably good. How do I most precisely explain this? I’d be equally surprised by Elden Ring being someone’s game of the year as I would by it not making it into their top ten. It takes more chances than an average big-budget game but not as many chances as a smaller game. It has some really cool moments but it lacks polish. Overall, I don’t regret buying the game, but I do wish that it’d been shorter. I also definitely felt that the game was better in the first half than in the second. Up through the Radahn fight, I was actually really impressed with the game. This might explain some of the confusingly high reviews: I’m curious how many reviewers bothered to actually beat the game before posting.
If you’re a hard-core souls fan, then I think you’ll probably love the game. But if you’re looking for a game with an excellent story, good music, good controls, interesting characters, an extreme challenge, or really anything unique, you could do better. If you play as many games as I do, then definitely add it to your list, but if you don’t have one hundred hours to blow on a game that’s just good, then skip Elden Ring.
I love the ambient storytelling, but the actual story, world, and characters just weren’t very gripping. There are very few instances of character growth throughout the game: the only character that stood out as having a real arc was Diallos, and even his story was simple and clichéd. The overall plot is, as I explained above, basically just a war of succession, and not a particularly interesting one. The bits and pieces of mystical lore certainly give the impression of depth, but after a couple of days digging through every scrap of lore I could find, I really wasn’t all that impressed.
I actually originally planned to do a more thorough lore breakdown in this post, but after performing about a dozen hours of research after beating the game, I just couldn’t find anything interesting enough to go into. It felt… fine while playing, but despite spending almost one hundred hours playing the game and researching its lore, I doubt that I’ll remember much of anything about the game in just a year or two.
You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about the music at all so far: that’s because it’s entirely forgettable. I really don’t have anything else to say about it: the best you can say about Elden Ring’s music is that it’s cinematic and appropriate to the scenes, but it’s not memorable at all.
The graphics are decent, the performance was pretty good, and I only suffered a few crashes, so that’s not bad. The visual designs for some of the bosses was pretty striking and some of the cutscenes were pretty awesome, but there weren’t really enough examples of this to stand out compared to other games of a similar length. The hand theme is neat, but… I’ve already got several Kingdom Death (NSFW) figures in my office, so it’s hard to be too impressed.
What rad things don’t fit anywhere else?
So, that’s pretty much my response, but there are a couple of neat things that I couldn’t really work into any of the other sections.
Diallos and Jarberg
I really liked Diallos’s character arc. When you first meet him, he’s looking for a servant of his, Lanya. Unfortunately, she’s killed before he can find her, so he swears to get revenge. “The tale of House Hoslow is told in blood.” You run into Diallos a couple of times both at the Roundtable Hold (the main hub for Tarnished) and at the Volcano Manor. Over time, he comes to see that vengeance isn’t productive and moves to Jarberg, a little town fully of happy jar people peacefully dancing and tending flowers. There, he becomes a simple servant. He doesn’t mind being seen as a coward, as he finally feels like he’s doing something productive.
Jarberg, by the way, is really just a neat little place. It’s small and only really comes up in a couple of minor questlines, but I liked having a little peaceful place. The first jar person you find is Alexander Iron Fist, who you come across stuck in a hole that he needs help getting out of. Over the course of the game, he strives to becomes a great warrior. Of course, being a FromSoftware game, you eventually learn that the jar people are full of corpses, and part of Alexander’s journey to become a warrior involves scavenging for the bodies of courageous people. Still, it doesn’t seem like he’s murdering those people: just scavenging. Alexander left Jarberg when he set out to become a warrior.
The only talkative member of Jarberg is Jar Bairn (Jar Kid.) He wants to be a warrior like “uncle” Alexander some day. Jar Bairn is likeable enough, but he definitely doesn’t think too much of Diallos. “I don’t know. I’m a little disappointed actually. Even though good sir Diallos has a wonderful suit of armour… He says he isn’t a warrior. And since he’s a coward he won’t be fighting anymore. His smooth and silky hands feel nice when he pats us. But I wish we had a potentate big and strong like you.”
Some time after Diallos moves to Jarberg, the little village is attacked by poachers. They kill many of the jar people, but Diallos defends what he can. Sadly, he dies saving Jarberg. “…Ah, you… Are the jars… they alright? Did I defend them? Then all is well… This fool proved his worth, in the end.” When you talk to Jar Bairn again, they say: “O-oh! Coz! I’m glad you came. But we’re fine now. Diallos fought the poacher. Though quite a lot of us got broken… I won’t cry though… I’m a warrior jar. A warrior. “The tale of House Hoslow is told in blood.” That’s the kind of warrior I want to be one day, coz. Even if I’m scared, I’ll still fight to protect everyone.”
It’s simple and clichéd, but I still liked this bit.
Rya
Rya is cute. That’s basically what I wanted to add here.
You first come across Rya as a frail-looking woman worrying over a stolen necklace. You get it back from her and she invites you to her home, the Volcano Manor. If you check in on her enough, you eventually learn her secret…
She’s a snake-person, disguised as a human.
Brave Tarnished, what is your business here? I’m afraid this is not a guest room.
What’s that peculiar look upon your face?
Goodness, am I still a serpent? Oh, how dreadful… How dreadful indeed…
Forgive my distress. I ought to be thanking you got treating me as usual, despite this appearance.
Brave Tarnished. This is my true form. My real name is Zorayas.
Please forgive the deception. Do understand. The duplicity is my own doing.
Lady Tanith speaks no falsehoods, and the Volcano Manor is just as it seems.
Lady Tanith is my mother. I am told I was born by the grace of a glorious king.
That my mother cherishes this form I inhabit. I am proud of what I am.
But people are cruel. If they saw my true form, the wouldn’t speak to me.
And so I assume a guise when seeking new recruits.
But you are not like the rest.
Sadly, Rya and the player eventually uncover the secrets of the Volcano Manor. The manor is ruled over by Rykard, who has become a hideous snake monster, and Rya was the result of a hideous ritual. Speaking with Tanith, you learn that Tanith really does cherish Rya and think of her as a sweet and good child, but Rya can’t accept herself. Rya asks to be put out of her misery. The only good ending to her quest that I could find was to give her a potion of forgetfulness, which causes her to once-again believe that she was born by the grace of a glorious king.
Miriel, Pastor of Vows
So, there’s a big tortoise wearing a miter. I just think he’s neat. Check out my friend, DocFirebird’s, video here to see more of him.
Millicent and Malenia
Malenia is best known for being one of the hardest bosses in the game and for having a neat design, but I also really liked Millicent.
Millicent’s actual quest was kind of boring, but I just thought she was neat. She’s tough: when you first meet her she’s dying of Rot, but rather than begging for help she immediately warns you to stay away. Despite being on the verge of death, she holds on to a sense of dignity, asking you to turn away while she administers the cure you bring to her. Her regret is merely that, with only one arm, she cannot wield a sword to help you, and when you find her a prosthetic limb she repays you by assisting with a boss fight.
She has a connection to Malenia, but she doesn’t know how close it is. I sure looks like she literally is Malenia when you fight her, but killing Malenia doesn’t kill Millicent. They’re both one-armed red-headed women with a connection to the Rot and immense skill with a sword.
The ambiguous similarity of Millicent and Malenia, added with Malenia’s armor and the “Valkyrie’s Prosthesis,” makes it clear that Malenia and Millicent are a reference to Valkyries from European mythology.
Okay, so, that probably seems obvious, but this isn’t just a superficial reference. It is a specific trope in stories of Valkyries that they can be reborn and it’s sometimes a bit ambiguous whether a fierce woman merely takes after a Valkyrie or literally carries the same thoughts and memories. The most notable example of this is Sváfa, who is reborn as Sigrún, then again as Kára with a story that continues through all three incarnations. I see a similar theme with Malenia and Millicent: they aren’t quite the same person, but they share some core themes and are aware that they have a connection between them.
Interestingly, I think I liked Millicent’s personality more than Malenia’s. Malenia claims to have never known defeat… but we all saw her get defeated by Radahn and then just flip the table by spreading Rot everywhere. Millicent comes off as more heroic to me. Yet, both possess confidence, strength, and a sense of duty.
I am a bit biased in liking these characters though, as I just enjoy seeing cool characters with red hair in media, particularly if they’re not overly sexualized. Malenia’s second phase definitely shows a lot of skin, but it didn’t really seem like they were going for “sexy” so much as “rad.”
The Elden Beast looks cool
The fight was just okay, but the visual design is fantastic. Reminds me of the forest god from Princess Mononoke.
Mythical Inspiration
So, I originally intended to have a large section just in the inspiration for the various symbols in Elden Ring, but for the most part – as I explained above – I really think that they were mostly just picking symbols superficially.
That said, there was definitely an attempt to do something kind of neat in how most of the demigods are in pairs.
This is actually a common structure in mythology, particularly for fertility gods. What’s really tricky – but interesting! – about this is that it can often be difficult in old stories to determine just how many gods are present. As a rule of thumb, it’s often safe to assume that gods that seem very similar are likely the same god just interpreted differently in different tellings. But for fertility gods, it’s more confusing.
The complexity comes in by the need to represent the different essential roles in a family. You have a man and a woman, so that’s two, but to represent the full picture of fertility, you also need children. So, you can have either a single deity representing multiple roles, two deities representing man and women, or four deities representing mother, father, son, and daughter.
The version of this that I’m the most familiar with is from Norse mythology. Now, this is interepreted differently in different stories and there’s some academic disagreement about what all this means, but at maximum you can consider Njörðr to be the father, Nerthus to be the mother (the identity of Nerthus here is particularly contentious), Freyr to be the son, and Freyja to be the daughter.
The ambiguous duality of Marika and Radagon seems like a deliberate invocation of this idea. Most of their children are also in pairings with some concept of opposition in their natures.
…that said, I don’t think it really goes any deeper than that. You can find fan theories on YouTube talking about how the various pairings have opposed Great Runes, but I feel like this is a stretch. Nonetheless, I wanted to call out that there was at least a half-hearted attempt to utilize a neat mythical concept.
Well, given that I posted the images of Marika and Radagon, I suppose I could mention the Christian reference with Marika hanging from the Elden Ring with a spear in her side, but that’s so overdone in media that it hardly seems worth mentioning.
Oh, and yeah, I got that Sir Gideon Ofnir the All-Knowing is Odin. There isn’t really much more to this character, and the similarities were pretty superficial, but hey, I do like Odin.
Ragnarök
Update: I can’t believe I forgot to mention the most obvious mythical scene in the game! The big point of no return in the game comes when you take fire from the Fire Giant and use it to burn the Erdtree. This is an obvious reference to Surtr burning the world (in various tellings specifically Yggdrasil.) This isn’t necessarily the key moment of Ragnarök, but it’s one of the most striking.
This ties in with the whole Götterdämmerung theme of the game: this is the twilight of the gods. Note that this motif is mostly an invention of Wagner, taking Norse and German myths as inspiration to build up his opera, Der Ring des Nibelungen, but The Ring was so popular that much of modern Norse myth is taken more from Wagner than from older sources (and even our oldest sources are hardly contemporary to the myths themselves.) I’ll likely do a full post on just The Ring at some point, but it’s definitely a theme that comes up in Elden Ring. Even the superficial symbol of the ring as a MacGuffin of mysterious power to pull the plot along is taken from The Ring (though I’m sure FromSoftware was aware that this would feel more like a reference to The Lord of the Rings than to The Ring.)
Cynically, I have to wonder whether rooting the game’s symbolism slightly more in The Ring as opposed to The Lord of the Rings was an attempt at making it feel deep, despite The Ring really not being all that old (it’s still performed reasonably often, despite being very long.) Or, perhaps they were simply going for Norse mythology and The Ring is definitely part of that now.
In any case, there’s actually just a bit more inspiration here. After the Twilight of the Gods, there’s a renewal of the world. In The Ring, the gold of the ring is returned to the Rhine and the gods are burned. In Völuspá, the world is reborn with Baldr and Höðr living again, yet Nidhogg still looms. In both Vafþrúðnismál and Gylfaginning two human survivors – Líf and Lífþrasir – survive the burning to repopulate the world.
The renewal and survivors rebuilding the world in abundance certainly feels like at least vague inspiration for some of Elden Ring’s endings. Of course, Elden Ring needs to make things more obscure than that, but the basic premise that the gods will fade, the world will burn, but a new age will begin is met in all but one of the endings.
As an extra note here, I’m actually not sure how much of this ending for the Norse stories was in the original myths as opposed to Christian additions to bind the Norse myths with the new Christian age. I mean, I’m literally not sure, and last time I checked it was still debated academically. I don’t think that’s relevant here though.
Once again, I have to mention that although I think this is neat and I love seeing mythical inspiration for modern media… this still feels like a pretty shallow reference to me. Elden Ring doesn’t really do anything with this material other than to superficially reference it via symbols taken almost directly from the source material. If there’s a deeper theme or a subversive twist to the material, then I didn’t catch it. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this: it’s not as though it’s “stolen,” it’s just inspiration. My point is just that, although I think the reference is neat, it doesn’t really add anything to the myth. If you’re really interested in this material, just find “The Ring Cycle” online, there are plenty of opera streaming services that provide it and some of them offer a free trial. It’s a very long opera, but it’s still much shorter than Elden Ring.
Mohg and Miquella
Okay, I was actually a bit surprised that Mohg being in-love with Miquella wasn’t played up for more attention. I’ve come to expect that the cost of diversity in video games is that companies will grossly virtue signal in just shamefully blatant ways, worried that you might not realize how good they’re being or reward them for their generosity. It was kind of refreshing to just have a character – even a bizarre, inhuman character like Mohg – just be gay without anyone making a big fuss over it.
Now, this is somewhat complicated by Miquella having been cursed to be a child forever… but Mohg is specifically trying to break this curse. Mohg also doesn’t seem to care much about what Miquella thinks about this relationship, as Mohg seems to have basically kidnapped Miquella, who is in a sort of comatose state… so, maybe this is actually just another example of homosexuality being used to indicate deviancy.
Given that most characters in Elden Ring are at least a little bit monstrous, my impression here is that Mohg being gay is an incidental aspect of his personality, rather than his single defining characteristic, which is – on the whole – progressive.
But, there’s a larger potential discussion we’re brushing up against here.
Is Elden Ring progressive?
This is already a massively long post, so I don’t want to spend too much time on this – it could probably be its own post – but I’d like to at least mention it.
Elden Ring’s portrayal of gender is a bit… complicated. When creating a character, you select a body “type” rather than “male” or “female”. …but, the “type” selection is really kind of silly, given that characters in the game will just use explicitly masculine and feminine pronouns. I suppose you could take this as a realistic portrayal of how a person is treated – that others will assume your pronouns – but… I think they just didn’t think it all the way through. My guess is that the “Type A or Type B” decision was made as an afterthought.
As for the various NPCs, there’s a pretty clear trend that most female characters are passive and pretty while most male characters are aggressive and monstrous. It reminds me a lot of this Oglaf comic (NSFW). Given the vaguely medieval setting, this could just be a decision for realism… but this is a fairly high-fantasy world, so it wouldn’t have been weird at all to have some more monstrous female characters: there’s no need to be limited by average upper body strength when you can graft monster parts on to your body. Marika is just a broken statue and has to transform into Radagon to fight you. Rennala is very powerful, but uses this power to… mostly just be a sad mother figure. Melina’s role is to be your helper until she needs to sacrifice herself for you. Ranni is definitely active and violent, but even so she mostly accomplishes her goals indirectly, via male servants.
Bear in mind that FromSoftware has a bit of a history with bizarre portrayals of gender. Demon’s Souls had a gender slider, which sounds progressive… until you actually use it and find that masculinity is black and femininity is pale. This does reflect tropes in ancient artwork (which were probably based on the idea that men should be outside a lot and pretty women should stay inside) but it feels pretty tone-deaf in a modern video game.
Overall, I don’t think that Elden Ring really does any worse than the average video game here. To some degree, I respect that FromSoftware has an artistic vision that they’re not willing to pollute by treating topical social issues as an opportunity for advertising. I’m glad that Elden Ring doesn’t have any obnoxious, poorly researched, token characters, like Mass Effect Andromeda’s Hainly Abrams. And, as I mentioned before, I like Malenia and I thought it was neat that Mohg’s sexuality wasn’t treated as a defining characteristic. Still, I can’t help but continue to compare Elden Ring to God of War, which managed to have mythically appropriate hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine characters, but also managed to work in some monstrous female characters and some pretty male characters. I don’t think that Elden Ring is a particularly regressive game, but it certainly isn’t notably progressive either.
Ranni’s design is neat
Alright, I’m just about out of things to say, but I need to call out that Ranni’s design is really cool.
…and with that, I believe that I’ve said everything worth saying about Elden Ring. If you’re confused as to why I didn’t bring up the Dung Eater, it’s because I thought he was really boring.
Let me know in the comments whether you think I beat the game.