Can I get one of these at 7-11
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prolly gonna get this, even though Iâve barely played the series. the world is just so Vibe Racer starved that it feels like a duty
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So about 3 weeks after posting about how I finally decided I was never gonna play Elden Ring I started playing Elden Ring. I ran out of games I wanted to play that I owned already.
It is sort of annoying how much of it is store brand Dark Souls, I mean like I understand From is a highly iterative game dev and thatâs the secret to a lot of their success, but like itâs not a bonfire itâs a grace place, ok, sure, whatever.
The innovation is of course the âopen worldâ which I think is a huge success. Itâs not as pointlessly massive as I feared it may be, itâs quite dense without losing a sense of grandeur and isolation. Huge Vvardenfell vibes, which is the highest possible compliment I can give. And they were still sure to include big highly authored tricks & traps dungeons as their setpieces, so you still get to interact with that From level design, which has always been the greatest pleasure in these games.
I still miss all of Demonâs gimmick bosses and have nearly run out of patience for the Artorias model of sword guys that jump around and have 14 different 6-hit combos youâre supposed to read, but there is a still pretty respectable spread of boss types so itâs not bad. The welcome new mechanic of having little personal summons helps too, I like those a lot. I do feel like Iâve sort of seen all these bosses before, though. Very much a remix.
I like how ashes of war are the new way to attach stat scaling to weapons, so you can just generically level up weapons you like with the basic stones without being locked into this halberd is always a faith halberd forever. More generous in how it allows you to allocate your resources. Not that Iâm at a level yet where stat scaling really matters. At some point I guess Iâll probably find some kind of way to respec and be high enough level that I can start thinking about âbuildsâ or whatever, but for now Iâm just pouring stones into a halberd and levels into VIT, which is the classic start for me.
It is interesting how just having regular animals in the overworld + having a few more characters to talk to makes the game feel much more alive, almost political, relative to the post-apocalyptic feeling of Demonâs and Dark. I guess that might be George R R Martin influence?
So yeah so far itâs two thumbs up but not like a revelation like some people clearly thought it was. Iâm starting to understand that your first Souls game is almost always your favorite, theyâre all a bit too similar too each other to ever have that incredible shock of awe your first one shoots through you.
24 Likes
probably at the time the game came out you could
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but if you like the multiplayer and play them at launch thatâs a decent substitute
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Mission #2 and I am all in on The Silver Case. Its sort of a visual novel with light point and click. I think I was annoyed at the UI before but I went in knowing about it this time and I dig it the more Iâm using it. Its a perfect after work chill out game so far. You can eat dinner and play it. It begs to be played at night.
Mission #1 and someone is like âDo you know the phrase Flower Sun and Rain? (someone) has it all inside.â
So I think Im going to treat that as a big mystery to solve later.
My plan is to beat silver case then hack My Wiiu to use its DS emulator to play FS&R and Wii RE4.
Rudie posted a preview clip of D2 in discord and I forgot it was a snow game. Given the current weather outside my door Ive decided to check it out. Will report. Been watching a lot of Lynch and this all feels right.
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I honestly donât know how many people think itâs a revelation, and from themselves have been markedly cool in public on committing to another open world game with the same scope. like the consensus seems to be âit rules because they managed to at least find an excuse to make another one of these with some novel angles but it is really a bit much by the time youâre doneâ
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I personally think itâs a worse game than most of the Souls but many people (mostly not posting on this forum) absolutely did consider it a revelation.
The essential contract of all of Fromâs games is âwe offer you cool fantasy spaces to appreciate and explore, but you must first prove you deserve them by completing these challengesâ. Mountaintop views are always more sublime after a tough climb up than after riding a vehicle there.
Elden Ring substantially sweetened the deal by making the spaces much larger and making the challenges much more optional (theyâre only rigid skill-checks if you do them in a certain order and live by a self-imposed honor code). This isnât a revelation for those of us who already had been willing to agree to the original deal, but it was the trick for a 10x larger population to understand what it was all about. It paved the hiking path up the mountain and installed a viewing platform at the top, so to speak.
14 Likes
i didnât play demons, and what initially sold me on dark souls was the contiguous world w/ very few load screens. exploring was exciting because you literally didnât know what would be around the next corner â sometimes the transitions between areas were gradual and made a certain sort of sense, and sometimes they were stark and goofy, but that unpredictability was exciting.
ds2 lost me a bit with all the warping, where i could no longer keep a mental picture of how the world was laid out, and by ds3 i had some souls fatigue and the immediate forced warp to the high wall of lothric put a bad taste in my mouth (not to mention the area itself being rather annoying and constrained like a theme park ride).
for elden ring, i basically still feel the same way i did when i first posted about it:
like for me mechanical challenge or mechanical expression is the bare minimum i need to stay engaged and interested in a single player game. so from my perspective, the UNIQUE things i get from souls games vs. other games i play are all accentuated with the open world format elden ring has, and itâs still hitting that requirement i have for challenge. yes, the challenge is a necessary piece, but only to hit some minimum threshold.
not mutually exclusive! play mudrunner/snowrunner 
9 Likes
played popoposan and thought i would have ample opportunity to fetishize being followed and stalked by a giant woman, i didnât quite get what i wanted, but instead the protagonist killed everyone, so good for her
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I hadnât thought of the evaluating Fromâs games based on how they handle âwarpsâ but youâre right, Elden Ring has the least feeling of artifice of them all. For the most part it doesnât have the feeling that youâre warping at all. But when it does (teleport chests, iron maiden capture, and early Farum Azula visits) they put that in purely because the warp is cool for its own sake.
DkS1 and Bloodborne are also notably thoughtful given the constraints they were working with. They particularly like to have creatures embody warp zones (crow, imp, Frampt in DkS1, and skeleton chariot & kidnapper in Bloodborne).
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In a way, the only difference between the universally delightful âwalk into a magic painting into a land of snowâ in DkS1, and the divisive poison swamp â lava castle transition in DkS2 is that the former treated the atmospheric mismatch as an opportunity for some extra playfulness and wonder.
The reason DkS1 is my favorite is not based, fundamentally, on this kind of dry formal question of how much artifice and suspension of disbelief does it involve. Itâs because it gives me the feeling the developers had so much fun making this game. But these are actually connected
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Something like a third of the way through Professional in Gran Turismo 3, but all of the 5+ race series are untouched. Still, chipping away at it.
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I played one of my pledge games: Blaster Master Blasting Again. I only got completely through two dungeons before realizing how much of it I had played before. The third dungeon, PLANT, is very hard. It turns the BMBA sicko knob up and is looking back at the player giving a thumbs up.
The combat was finnicky but forgivable in the first two. Here it is really expecting some proper pro-Dark Souls stuff with your janky controls. It also wants you to jump out of Sophia and do a suicide run on foot across the dungeon.
The enemies spawn every time you enter a room and there is a lot of little load screens. It is a neat little curiosity of a game. Maybe my standards are rock bottom since Below, but it is nice to have a game about going into a cave and something happens. And a running theme this year, it ainât no Kingâs Field 2j. Maybe I can watch a speedrun and go âlolâ. As is I got destroyed by 3 Scopedogs twice for daring to enter their room. Thank god for save states meaning I could cut out a ton of loading screens. I think BMBA as the slowest save screen of any PS1 game.
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Continuing the Hifi Rush replay. Iâm finding it a good comfort food game for me. I just want to see and do things synced to a beat and my soul is soothed.
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the substance of what they actually want you to do in this game moment to moment is like dragon age inquisition level bad
itâs a shame because I think all the story moments and the towns are handled well enough and the combat basically feels good and I donât remember the first remake being quite that off in this regard, but I am apparently four hours in and aghast at how those have gone
6 Likes
Shiki increasingly regretting asking Ciel to explain the lore behind her iconic âBlack Keyâ holy-magic throwing knives
"So you see, the corrupted soul can no longer respond to the word of the Lord. The flesh still can, and alone returns to humanity. Like a key thrust into the void vampires call âimmortalityâ "
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Blade Chimera:
- You play as a dude and the girl on his back
- The girl provides an array of offensive, defensive, and platforming abilities
- Some abilities can only be used at specifically marked spots
- You collect puzzle pieces to open doors
CONCLUSION: Blade Chimera is a Banjo-Kazooie-like.
Anyhow, I finished it. I had a lot of fun.
Despite being a search-action game, progression is entirely narrative-based.* Youâre a cop, and you get told to go to this place or that place to trigger story events. To maintain player agency, however, the supposed âsearch action formulaâ is flipped on its head: upgrades that would be âmajor itemsâ in any other metroidvania, such as air dashing, double jumping, or attacks that would change your playstyle, are (a) unlocked via a skill tree and (b) entirely optional (!?!). The (in)famous warp-anywhere fast travel option is on this skill tree. I waited until I had about 80% of the map explored before unlocking this option (for ideological reasons (and the other options seemed more interesting)).
The game is a real treat to look at, but a weirdly common complaint Iâve heard (that did not line up with my experience) was that the gameworld âslips away from your mindâ or whatever. I suspect this is a result of overreliance on the warp function. Consider your so-called âquality of lifeâ carefully. (For me, my biggest gripes regarding the identity of the gameworld are that all the environments use solid-colored infill, and there are no title cards when entering a new areas.)
The action gameplay is the main draw here. In the grand scheme of things itâs pretty easy, but the boss fights are very busy and dynamic in ways that I enjoy. I found that my approach varied considerably during the course of the game. Early on in the game I had the strategy of using distance to build tension with the planted sword to deal several hundred damage at once. Later in the game I got weapons with high enough DPS to render that strategy inefficient, but in turn I had enough MP by that point that I could get away with using some magic skills that had truly grotesque damage output.
Most of my deaths came from ignoring the main objective markers and just deciding to explore areas that I was underleveled for instead. While the game does sometimes use keycards and other such nonsense to gate access to areas, sometimes you can just waltz in and do what you want (the story triggers wonât be there, but I suppose that when the time comes you could just warp directly there later).
There are a couple situations where your swordgirl can die instead of you. Apparently this counts as a game over (itâs very funny).
VERDICT: Winner of the 2025 âLeast Subtle Twist Villainâ Award
* I have not watched a speedrun to see if there are any sequence breaks.
14 Likes
BOOOOOOOOO
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