it feels deliberate to me. it’s late game, optional, extremely difficult content. makes sense that it should be even harder to find than those. I mean siofra/ainsel are both kind of hard to miss, even if fully exploring their reaches is varying degrees of more esoteric.
and I appreciate that the deeproot area is accessible from two different entry points, and they both require a lot of careful exploration and questing to even come across. it owns. I’d have it no other way.
Oh that’s what Tower of Return does. I was too good at anticipating traps and didn’t get teleported. I was like “that’s it? why’s it called Tower of Return”?
yeah this stuff is excellent, I think “more entry points” is a consensus point here
There’s another way to access Mohg’s area, and I’m pretty sure you can get there from the start of the game, or at least post Godrick.
Talk with Varre outside the Church of Roses in Liurnia. I won’t detail the following steps but they’re all doable right then.
Thinking right now that a low-key major theme running through every Fromsoft game is having a healthy relationship with shame. It’s okay if you can’t beat the boss. It’s okay if you’re a creepy perv who lives in a poison swamp. It’s okay if maybe the game you released is kinda bad.
No matter which one of those you are, Fia will give you a comforting, motherly hug. (this hug will also debuff your health)
this is why I’m still a virgin
Yeah I haven’t even gotten there any other way.
Today’s anime sickos ep covers Elden Ring and Tom has only good opinions about it, imo. A week after finishing my playthrough I think my last-third analysis still really rings true for me, which is this is just everything FromSoft does, good and bad, but way way more of it, which makes the good stuff (cool environments! weird freaks! impossible clinch fights won at the very last second!) extra good and the bad stuff (unusable UI that makes half the cool things about the game basically impossible in execution! obtuse non-story events that only pop up to let you know you missed them, somewhere, by doing the wrong thing, which you won’t know unless you wiki! weird gimmick encounters you just don’t know how to do and probably won’t figure out without looking it up!) extra bad.
I think at some point after there’s a layer of patina over my experience I might go through and do the hallowed second playthrough—sword and board the entire thing to tackle all the bosses I ruthlessly cheesed, look up all the story stuff I missed so I actually get to see what the game was about, etc. For now, for me, it remains FromSoft’s best and worst game
Wait what qualifies as a weird gimmick encounter. To me that mean something like Bed of Chaos or the Dragon God or Altar of Storms. Do you mean Rykard or Radahn or…?
Also what is the stuff that is impossible to execute, I’m sure this has been covered previously but I am just…confused by what makes the UI unusable.
at the risk of sounding like a psychopath I love the UI in elden ring. it’s a bit annoying to filter through all your items but they give you enough sorting options to make it manageable enough. I love the new assignable shortcut buttons. I’ve been double clawing my dual shock in ways I didn’t think possible thanks to that. it’s neat.
I also less apologetically love the gimmick fights. they’d annoy me in any other game, but they’re nice breathers from the brutal raw skill-based encounters. even the four monkeys boss in sekiro, as annoying as it was, was still memorable and interestingly executed.
my favorite “gimmick” event in elden ring is the sequence in ordina liturgical town required to access the haligtree. it felt like a kojima setpiece dropped into a fromsoft game… it was so good.
I don’t think I’ve disliked a single “gimmick” in any fromsoft games but I’m still strongly on the side of “the second half of elden ring has severe thematic/pacing issues unless you apply the same cheerful goblin mindset to the wiki as you do to the game itself, which people seem to fundamentally object to, and on top of that it’s just too long for my tastes” so, y’know, criticism is a many-faceted beast
When does this second half begin? Post-capital? Prior?
plateau onward imo. that’s when NPCs start to get lost after the strongest and most intuitive narrative throughline (ranni’s), and the “main” story around radagon and miquella and so on starts to just rear up and flop around periodically. also, the spectacular geography starts to take a back seat.
I played like five or six hours a day up to that point and fewer than that in a week after that. I don’t think that was just fatigue on my part, but even the fatigue still reflects on it imo.
I found that Ordina bit infuriating at first, then decided to say fuck it, no magic torch, no fighting these goons and I just Benny Hill’d them all around town until their AI pathing was all screwed up and I could rush up and across the rooves to kill the archer that stood in my way and it ended up being a fun thing to cheese that way, Souls style.
re: UI gripes, nothing major for me but plenty of minor things that add up, mostly in a pinch like when I’m fighting some hateful hordes and need to cycle through my left/right dpad gear but happen to be standing on top of a message or blood stain and end up toggling my UI/action options so that any necessary split second combat strategy is thwarted and I die.
Or that time I used a stone sword key on a statue and an enemy leapt out during that animation and I ate it because the message prompt telling me what I had just done cancelled any actions that weren’t “go away prompt!” with Y button. Little things like that kinda suck but not enough to shake my overall FROM love (also I encountered my first player message that prevented me from activating a Site of Grace (Loretta at the Haligtree) which was quite a deflating thing post-boss triumph. I had to quit, go offline, activate, quit, go online, resume. They oughta just disable messages that are too close to Sites of Grace, seems obvious! It all rides this very fine line of “Ah, FROM you loveable jankmeisters unbeholden to AAA polished pabulum” and “c’mon get it together, this is kinda obviously bad”.
I’m having a real good time putting off the final boss rush and exploring Haligtree to advance Millicent’s storyline though, lovely twisty vertically viney place to plod and pump through.
OK, that makes sense to me. I think the game clearly signals “you can wrap it up now if you like” post-capital and to me that was a great relief. I still did almost all that side shit but I’m not sure I would have been as eager if I wasn’t so certain the end was easily within reach.
I just figured out why Elden Ring’s map felt familiar
i think this is an important observation in regards to a lot of the criticisms of the game i’ve seen. something that hasn’t really been fully appreciated i think is how straight of a line through the game you can take if you want, and how clearly communicated it is at every step; you more or less just walk north and there is, i’m pretty sure, at least one npc and often more than one that just straight up tell you what to do next the whole way through. you can totally play the game like any other open world game, and i think most people have and i think to a certain significant extent the game encourages you to play it that way, but if at any point you decide you’re over it you can pretty much just walk to the end as if it were a more linear game and only take detours when you feel like you need to level up or whatever — i was basically aware that the path to the end was there for me as early as beating rennala. i don’t think the “too much cake” analogy is entirely without merit but i do think it’s more wrong than it is right when you don’t have to eat very much of the cake at all to finish the game, and that’s true of a lot of open world games probably but i think the way in which it is so direct in this aspect and so willing to let you miss so much of the game is not
i’m unconvinced that missing parts of the story or the lore or the world is an issue, even if it’s a big part, even if the game suffers for it somehow. i don’t think that being confused or mistaken are necessarily negative outcomes — i love being confused, i consider it a precious, delicate, magical thing and really that’s what i appreciated about elden ring the most, that it was so successful at confusing me. i think the way so many of the names are so similar is good because it so strongly heightened the sense of being in a dream, where sounds and syllables dissolve in my mouth and comingle and lose their meaning before i’m able to speak. i think the way it’s so easy to miss a meeting with an npc or an incidental piece of text or dialogue or like, an entire area that all could grant so much more clarity to my understanding of things is good because having that understanding being thwarted or withheld contributed so much to the sense of being in a dream, where the world around me shifts and vibrates and contradicts itself at its own whim. even if i liked being confused less, even if i really resented the game for being as obtuse it sometimes is, i don’t think i could really fault it for that because the way in which it is obtuse or just like, resistant to my ~consumption~ of it worked towards a theme, or a sensation, or an aesthetic, whatever, that like, is pretty undeniable to me. it seems so strange imo to assume something so carefully cultivated to be like, a mistake, or solely the product of time and budget constraints and not just like, something that’s supposed to be there and maybe important somehow
really i just can’t think of another recent aaa game that’s anywhere near as confident in itself. i wish more games with this kind of budget were as willing to let me fumble with it or just plain not get it, i appreciate being given that kind of trust/indifference
I’m changing my position and I think the lore actually isn’t missable enough. The problem is there are fifteen steps in the lore and I see three, five and seven which basically only exist to tell me that there’s stuff I didn’t see which is now inaccessible because everyone involved died mysteriously after completing unrelated objectives I couldn’t possibly know about. Actually all of it should be basically unfindable so I don’t need to have frustrating debates with people. I don’t even want to know there is any lore anymore. You can keep it
There’s things I liked about Rykard and Radhan (I wouldn’t mind honestly checking the Radahn encounter again now that it’s been fixed up a lot) but also they’re all kind of wonky in their own ways. Like I died to Rykard like ten times trying to fight him and then I thought “this is silly but what if I just spam the sword over and over without really moving or doing anything” and I did it damageless the next try. At the end of the day, like with a lot of things, I’d rather game developers try for something great and fall short, winding up with something that has both good and bad aspects, than just copy another successful approach but make it so smooth there’s absolutely nothing notable about it, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend it doesn’t have problems—these fights are very cool the first time and very annoying the 34th time and they just kind of feel like they lack substance.
The UI stuff is just an ongoing problem since Demon’s Souls. The FromSoft UI method backgrounds a lot of stuff that should be front and centre and makes a lot of things weirdly a chore or just extra cognitive load you can’t afford while perfect dodging an eight attack combo. Paying a cost for weapon switching whether or not you use it and then struggling to get weapons out (sometimes your input just gets dropped and they’ve literally never improved this!) is annoying, but spells, especially faith spells… I mean there’s so much opportunity there to have incredible versatility but the reality of switching out a big roster of spells is that it’s just not practical because of how tightly tuned the game is and how poorly designed the spell UI is.
I mean at the end of the day the weird thing about this game is that I’d much rather talk about the things I liked about it (of which there are many!) than the three things I didn’t, but every time you bring up something bad about a Souls game you wind up having to defend the audacity of not liking like two or three things forever and can never talk about anything else again