Souls Inheritors: Bloodborne vs. Sekiro vs. Elden Ring [Spoilers]

[Music] [Music] excuse me the ending of dark souls 3 is extremely definitive all kingdoms collide at the end of time as the cosmic cycle of its universe grinds to a wheezing halt and from that ending some new painting to fill some new canvas in the wake of dark souls from software has released a tree of games that are unique experiences from one another mechanically distinct aesthetically contrasting and widely varying in scope these games are also all connected on almost every other level they are each one variations on a theme and that theme is dark souls bloodborne sakiro elden ring they all form a loose trilogy of their own because despite their differences each of them finds its unique voice by adding or subtracting significant elements of gameplay that the dark souls trilogy had tested and honed bloodborne was the laboratory for fast combat operating outside of the cosmology of dark souls but using the same organizational structure to create a kind of parallel experience a new version of dark souls 1 where speed is more important than precision shakiro kept that same tight structure and then tightened it even further hardening its combat eliminating all of its slack demanding more from the player than it ever had before or likely will again and then eldon ring which is mechanically a direct successor to dark souls right down to the contents of its spell book however it instead finds its difference by breaking the structure of dark souls open from interconnected linear dungeons into a true open world eldon rayne sold 12 million copies in its first month an almost impossible degree of success for a technically new ip whose entire pitch was about how it did not conform to modern design trends however that success didn't happen overnight and it wasn't a fluke from software has spent the better part of the past two decades making variations of the same game so what right so has infinity ward or rockstar or any number of big name studios and if this were a criticism so what would be warranted but the truly strange thing about the secondary trilogy of bloodborne securo and elden ring is that these variations have produced significantly different games than you'd get with just another ubisoft open world i spent a lot of the pandemic playing open world titles and there was a similarity to them that was disappointing in aggregate grand theft auto would do something and then a dozen other games would seek to replicate the experience with tonal or aesthetic variations it was many ideas all reflecting back on one core emotional experience this is not the way it is with the from software titles and sequels the opposite in fact they all begin with one concept the dark souls proprietary combat loop and then explore extremely different emotional and interactive experiences by pushing that core idea to contrasting and extreme conclusions by mutating it in truly unexpected ways i was so grateful to have played the dark souls games before attempting any of the ones in this loose trilogy and their own ways each of these games is more unforgiving at the beginning of their experience than dark souls ever was this is balanced by the fact that each game is very aware of both their difficulties and their differences compared to what came before these games tutorialized more than the dark souls titles did they offer more concrete and tight narrative experiences generally and they also generally improve on the base formula with each and every experimental variation the dark souls trilogy is maybe more consistent more linear they all build off of what came before and iterate on the same ideas this secondary trilogy oddly enough ruminates on many of the exact same themes and imagery as the primary trilogy of dark souls does but it does so diagonally with such major differences in tone and approach that the cumulative experience of playing the games is even more excitingly dynamic everything i loved about the way dark souls 2 for example as a sequel related back to the first game so obliquely is present here too these games all relate back to the core trilogy of dark souls in strange and oblique ways in more resonant and subtle ways as each of the three games take these same cycles of struggle on death and decay and push them towards artistically distinct statements each of these games on their own is beautiful each one exceptional in its style and execution but seen cumulatively the game shine even brighter elden rings smash popularity is no fluke no isolated success in the universe of from software the flame of creation burns in cycles the fuel of previous games providing a pyre on which elden ring could flare so brightly into the public consciousness years before i managed to get really into dark souls i had tried playing bloodborne and i bounced off it incredibly hard it seemed to me like it was both unfair and impossible i spent four hours trying to find my way to the next checkpoint and i failed to make any progress at all coming back to it now after having made it through all three of the dark souls games i figured things would be different that i wouldn't find it so difficult and intimidating i was wrong about that bloodborne is now one of my absolute favorites among the whole from software catalog but it has by far the most aggressive and cruel first few hours out of all of them dunks you into the deep end from the start the very first major street of the game escalates from one enemy to two to four to 24 in the space of less than a block any three hits from these enemies will absolutely wreck your [ __ ] i got past the first street a lot quicker than i did the first time around but then immediately discovered another problem i wasn't expecting there is no next checkpoint until you beat a boss you can't even spend your souls now called blood echoes until you discover one of these fights win or die and then come back to the hub area called the hunter's dream of course if you die you just lost all of those points so there's little conundrum for you oh and one more thing you can't block anymore by design in fact this subtraction is one of the most important aspects of this particular variation on the dark souls theme bloodborne is a game about speed and aggression much more than it is about player freedom and versatility there are still substantial build options and weapon styles but there's been a thorough process by which almost every element of dark souls combat and exploration has been stripped down to its most essential spartan characteristics in some ways this makes for a tighter game there is a narrower set of options but these options exist in more obvious balance and harmony with one another in other ways it makes for a much more immediately difficult experience gone was my magic my fancy rings my upgradeable armor and my shield my precious precious shield it's not entirely gone there is one called the wooden shield whose description reads hunters do not normally employ shields ineffectual against the strength of the beasts as they tend to be shields are nice but not if they engender passivity end quote by the time i found the shield i had fallen out of the habit of even using it forced to adapt by the demands of the game hours ago now it's extremely important to note bloodborne came out before dark souls 3 did prior to bloodborne souls combat was done with almost a very casually turn-based rhythm i do a thing the enemy does a thing it's a string of choices and deliberate reactions bloodborne is by contrast wickedly fast it's centered around completely different design priorities ones where patience is de-emphasized in favor of aggression which is the whole theme of bloodborne yharnam the city of blood administration it's under attack from a plague of beasts and you as a newcomer are pressed into service as a hunter of those beasts but the blood has a will of its own an ancient echo of hunger and fear you're not a hero separate from these beasts you are one of them among them and if you are not even more cravenly violent than they are well you don't remotely stand a chance tonight is the night of the hunter's moon and you aren't invited to join in the revelry if you're going to spend the whole party cowering behind a steel platter i ended up spending a whole four hours on the central yharnam checkpoint again but with a key difference i had some semblance of an idea of what i was doing and what i was working towards i needed to kill the cleric beast and to do that i needed to be a whole lot less fragile these first four hours were really fascinating to me because of how much more immediately hostile the design of bloodborne is compared to dark souls how much more casually punishing it is towards pensive or conservative playstyles i had to relearn all the systems that i had learned in dark souls almost i had to unlearn the old way and adapt to the new and that's even including dark souls 3 which is more closely related in speed and aggression to bloodborne than it is to dark souls 1 and 2. it is shocking how little translated from dark souls 3 to bloodborne for me or perhaps not since my favorite playstyle is the one that bloodborne seems most intent on disrupting which is not unfair dark souls 1 and 2 played with a shield and one-handed weapon like i mostly did is extremely methodical and pretty slow lots of clanking and clanging and rolling backwards what ho have at you so forth bloodborne's genius is that it doesn't simply take the shield away but provides a baseline bedrock mechanic that encourages players to take the exact opposite approach the rallying mechanic when you take damage this is represented by an orange bar that disappears in a second or two if you damage enemies in return during this extremely brief orange bar window that health is refunded usually it's not enough time to fully replenish your health bar but with high enough dps or enough courage to attack multiple enemies at once it is completely possible to zero out the impact of incoming attacks so you can take hits and be damage neutral much like using stamina to tank damage instead of health when using a shield in dark souls but only if you go against the impulse to back off and reassess the situation only if you go completely bloodthirsty bat [ __ ] and beat the health back out of him many regular and especially boss enemies track backwards roles and punish them rolling into enemies closing the distance getting behind them staying close staying aggressive these are the higher virtues in bloodborne's combat variant a hunter in bloodborne is not a tragic figure like the chosen undead of dark souls a hunter is a sinister figure time and again the hardest boss fights are against fellow hunters as much as they are against beasts the first two boss fights of the game are meant to give robust impressions of each category of fight of the respective mechanical and thematic dangers of hunters and their deadly prey the cleric beast is technically optional but it's also the first boss most people find so it doesn't really work out that way as an optional boss it does have an absurdly high health bar for an early game encounter let alone boss number one if you're clever and swift you can just grind him down but i'm neither of those things and for players like me the boss does serve a tutorializing purpose a seemingly impossible health bar can be quickly broken down by elemental damage bonuses instead of reusable magic as part of your build however it's all about the items in bloodborne at least in the early game oil flasks increase fire vulnerability beasts are weak to fire already so doubling down means thousands of points in bonus damage when you hit them with a molotov most boss encounters in bloodborne have these hard elemental counters and elemental damage items that you can use completely independent of an investment in the arcane stat those items are available for purchase with insight insight is a new version of humanity from dark souls that is both used to enable online co-op and as a secondary currency the main similarity it has with humanity is in value and rarity it's not an item you can just throw around it's meant to be used judiciously the cleric beast is also weak to a new damage modifier unique to bloodborne serration anything the saw teeth counts as serrated including one of the weapons available for free at the start those advantages still weren't enough for me to prevail though i chose a starting class with high combat damage but middling starting health and i felt unacceptably fragile going up against the cleric beast like i didn't have enough of a margin for error so i ground my way up to level 20 which wasn't even too much of a trudge because i was learning so much of the time and also because yharnam is incredibly dense denser than many of the maps in dark souls 3 featuring the kind of recursive shortcut driven level design that made dark souls 1 so absolutely unique by the time i felt like i had finished exploring this central urnum checkpoint i was already at level 19 just once more around the circuit and i had enough points to come back swinging that is a confidence that a player has to back up more here in bloodborne than dark souls would have demanded because of another variant on a traditional comfort the estus flask in dark souls they automatically refill in the first game you could increase the amount refilled from 10 up to 20 and then the second and third games have you finding one estus flask shard at a time to make a cumulative upgrade for the reusable flask bloodborne takes a simpler but much more severe approach healing flasks are now disposable consumable items if you run out you need to buy more which is tricky to do when you've just died or you can farm more by killing more things which probably means returning to the central yharnam checkpoint and running the circuit over and over and over long after the xp has stopped being useful and the boredom of it sets in skilled players can probably maintain a surplus just going along and by the time i was a new game plus i was just buying them outright but for most of my experience with the game the flask scarcity issue only got worse as i went along by the time i was trying the dlc bosses and chalice dungeons i was spending 20 to 30 percent of my play time farming for either flasks themselves or souls to buy the flasks which became prohibitively expensive in the late game i struggled with this problem less in the new game plus cycles because the early game allows a player to get a head start before the game actually becomes difficult again but new game plus is also where depth 4 and depth 5 chalice dungeons are played and those are an incredible step up in adversity and a major drain on your resources farming for flasks added hours to my time with the game unpleasant repetitive boring hours death costs in bloodborne more than any other from software title in more frustrating ways than hollowing in dark souls 2 or the reduction penalties in demon souls getting stuck can put a player behind their goals even further you can get even more stuck in a way that i had not experienced in dark souls and with longer runs to the boss arenas than the dark souls trilogy the first mandatory boss is father gassion a fellow hunter who you can actually summon for help as an npc against the cleric beast if you like he is also kind of a tutorial boss but a stricter one than i'd seen in a from software game before you see in a lot of ways he's you he's got a similar melee weapon he's got a similar ranged weapon he dodges in a similar way to you he represents kind of a mirror figure the game is saying look at this guy do this be like this but faster better and a meaner do what he does and then surpass him only then will your journey actually begin idex gundyr in dark souls 3 was never like this even from melee builds edx was a simple boss a learning boss a genuine tutorial father gascion and especially the almost five goddamn minutes it takes to run over and reset the fight is a much more punishing encounter a stern tap on the knuckles with a ruler shouting not like that do it again which is only compelling to me up to a point i managed to beat him on my own since i was trying to hoard the insight but it wasn't hard at all to get summoned into the world of someone else who is having a harder time bloodborne has continued to emphasize and include cooperative multiplayer like from software had done so well in dark souls a hunter is never alone as a phrase seen all over the game a comforting reminder that so long as you have the insight to summon there is summoning to be had from the absolute foundation on up bloodborne seeks to challenge a player in different ways than it had with the dark souls trilogy it tries to encourage players to try to be something new to play in a new way but it's not as fundamentally prescriptive about it as it appears at first glance like dark souls it still fundamentally wants its players to thrive and to succeed and to that end it gives players the power to help each other through the cruelest parts of its world and the most severe parts of its design a more interesting and impressive example of something that seems at first prescriptive but is in practice much more free than that is the reduction of weapon choice from nearly 100 options down to just a couple dozen especially at the beginning you don't have much more than six weapons to choose from including those found in the environment isn't that limiting well yes if each weapon was just one weapon it would certainly be limiting instead every choice available in bloodborne besides your secondary weapon is a trick weapon that transforms from one mode of damage delivery to another at the touch of a button myself i chose exactly what the guy on the cover was using because that guy sure looks like he knew what the score was and i loved it the stock cleaver does serrated damage quickly enough when folded down at short engagement range and then you can flip the cleaver out like a straight razor and it'll deal slower damage at a much longer range giving you an option between the safety of a speedy offense and the safety of keeping enemies further at bay plus that handy handy serration bonus against beasts the secondary suggested weapon is the hunter's pistol which requires a stat investment to be viable in terms of damage but even if you never put a single point into your range damage stat the pistol can still be used to pull enemies off of larger groups and stagger enemies in the middle of attacks allowing a dramatic and spectacular critical hit with your melee weapon it is just a fantastic combination the other weapons i favored were the kirkhammer and the holy blade both of which are light heavy combination weapons each has a simple sword of two slightly varying speeds which can stagger smaller enemies well and are especially powerful versus other hunters keeping them in stunlock loops larger enemies just shrug off the little slashes so for them you have the heavy two-handed mode either a giant hammer or a dark soul-style greatsword these are well capable of staggering large foes but all enemies move so fast and often in such large groups that making heavy weapon attacks is always a tactical gamble by making it so easy and to so stylish to switch between the two modes of damage it becomes quite easy to juggle your own disadvantages and vulnerabilities to change your mind and change your approach in seconds even in the middle of a fight speed and ruthlessness are the things that the game wants a player to prioritize and it does everything in its power to assist a player who is willing to meet it halfway even if halfway is still a couple miles further down the road than most games would demand the only thing that does genuinely limit a player is the scarcity of upgrade materials there's only enough in a given playthrough to fully upgrade one or maybe two weapons bringing another two or three of the weapons up to the 9 out of 10 threshold you'd have to come through again on further new game plus cycles to add more bonuses and try out new things which can be rough if you gamble on a weapon that you don't end up enjoying i wanted to like the blast hammer for instance but it isn't much of a trick weapon the second mode just kinda sparks a little flame that goes out very quickly a boring frustrating average performance weapon especially when you can just add fire damage to the more impressive kirkhammer so easily the early game is when you get to try stuff out without worrying about it too much by the time new game plus in the late game rolls around you need to be able to put some major upgrades into a weapon for it to be viable at all it's not hard to get something up to plus six but plus nine is where something has to be to really be effective and that gap where you've got something cool but useless sitting around in your inventory can really stretch on for hours it's the weapons themselves that are so fascinating and so versatile firearms are a huge part of the game scaling with the blood tinge stat but the bullets are a limited resource and i just didn't like the idea of relying on another item besides the blood flasks that i'd have to farm for arcane is a more interesting choice it governs the effectiveness of items and also allows a player to use items that function like magic spells limited in use to your bullet pool arcane however also augments elemental damage and you can use gems to convert all of your basic damage into an elemental variant i ended up spending pretty much my entire new game plus cycles adding an arcane component to my build and this made my playthrough much more dynamic and interesting the first time though i just wanted it to be simple i wanted strength if everything is scary fast and lethal then i just want to hit him the fewest amount of times to win and i was granted that wish slowly over hours once i started to get comfortable in bloodborne i discovered a world with much more personality than even dark souls 1. yharnam is the most gorgeous city in the from software catalog it's built with the same fascination that the dark souls trilogy has with european gothic architecture but it's more intricately dense by far than anything in dark souls 3. the world design has more in common with dark souls 1's lordran built vertically with every neighborhood tucked inside another building off each other and interconnecting in extremely surprising ways yharnam isn't quite as vertical as lordran was and features quite a few winding rural wilderness areas like dark souls 2 and 3 had but it has an extremely strict approach to checkpointing that prioritizes shortcuts much more heavily than bonfires called lamps in this game this can lead to some extremely frustrating situations where even with shortcuts resetting a boss fight can take actual minutes of your time and involves running past maybe a half dozen clusters of enemies it's an element of the design that is genuinely hostile to players however as much as it can be a drag in the player experience it is absolutely fascinating as a way to arrange the spaces of the world it leads to levels that are extremely large with many blocks and many wings that nevertheless all radiate out from or thread through the same spot that you entered them from this density builds and it stacks as you light the lamps defeat the bosses and progress deeper you open up shortcuts between the broader areas revealing the same connectivity at the macro level as there is with just one lamp in its surrounding area yharnam is built from swamps up to slums up to the cathedrals of the healing church's choir all of it built to the glory of the divine the facilitation of communion between this realm and the intangible hereafter of course the more work the healing church accomplishes the less intangible the hereafter becomes bloodborne isn't a universe of mythic dichotomies like fire and dark but instead a very tight and gloriously told story of cosmic horror in the vein of h.p lovecraft lovecraft is famous both for his imagination and for his racism and the latter cancels out the former and a lot of people's estimations of the man's work bloodborne is a phenomenal example of taking the core imagery especially of lovecraft's dream cycle books and decoupling it from the author through creative transformation yharnam stands on its own although if you've ever read at the mountains of madness or a dream quest of unknown cadet the imagery is like a living illustration of the most imaginatively arresting parts of those stories lovecraft's prose is often driven mostly by mood suggestion on specific imagery he sometimes punts by simply describing things as indescribable beyond the realm of human understanding and only comprehensible in the grip of absolute madness yharnam civic religion is based entirely around not only the worship of these unfathomable alien gods but on the mutual exploitation of them the church takes from them learning and blood it mixes their celestial power with human potential and in doing so creates both beasts and hunters the less human the church becomes the more they comprehend hence the game's secondary currency insight at high levels of insight like above 40 horrifying watchers called the amygdala become visible clinging to the high towers of the cathedral ward the city is infested infested beyond just beasts the whole thing is tipping into madness deeper and deeper as the magic knight of the hunter's moon goes on these beings are exploiting the entire city in ways that the church doesn't even really comprehend the density of the environment naturally leads itself to a density of detail it isn't just a gothic it's an insane and surreal hyper-gothic aesthetic where catholic affectation is mutated into the material with which the game builds its cosmic horror narratively it's much more explicit and tight than the storytelling done in dark souls which pairs so well with the incredible and intricate design of yharnam itself ascending the steps to the great cathedral tentacled figures raise their hands in worship to something unknown and sinister and terrible yet this is not the tallest tower the highest place of honor and worship in the city far above is an even more beautiful cathedral home to a british daughter of the cosmos she was the first god or goddess or whatever found long ago deep in the ancient catacombs of cities even older than yharnam that have risen and fallen on this very spot the choir exists to sing to her with her to commune with the divine and learn their forbidden secrets abritas is at the foundation of the story and lore but physically you'll find her at the apex of the world hidden in a neighborhood it takes extra optional steps to even unlock in the dark souls games the lords of the realm loomed over the kingdom manipulating its cosmos to their own ends and making it sick in bloodborne the cosmos itself shines down over yharnam with its own horrifyingly inscrutable agenda the bloodshot eye of the hunter's moon just one of the many alien gods staring coldly from their high perches until of course you come along to knock them down smashing their ancient flesh into the cobblestones and dirt bloodborne's artistic cohesion isn't limited to just how beautifully the story and the setting complement each other the monster design and rhythm of combat further unify and intensify the game's presentation bloodborne has i think the best creature design out of all of the from software games and i don't say that lightly the absolute best thing about the high difficulty in boss driven combat of any from software game is how they allow for bosses that are legitimately gorgeous to behold creepy and compelling in equal measure animated with the kind of fluidity that most games never even come close to from demon souls to elden ring the games are able to express not just challenge with their boss fights but also personality these bosses contribute to the themes to the atmosphere to the storytelling they provide dramatic climaxes for each and every area of the game where mood and music come together along with challenge to create an artistically complete experience by exercising tighter control over the amount of tools at the player's disposal the boss fights in bloodborne are also able to orient more tightly around these tools and by doing so exercise more control over the pacing and style of the boss encounters as we'll see when the video eventually lumbers along the elden ring trying to design for an extreme multitude of player approaches can lead to some uneven guesswork in encounter design the game kind of has to ignore the most obvious outliers of overpowered and underpowered approaches bloodborne and to an even greater extent securo eliminate the possibility of the player being too overpowered or too underpowered their progression has been curated through the linear elements of the design and the borders of possibility that the difficulty curve creates on average it seems like the health totals are higher for bosses in bloodborne than other related games and these bosses run an interesting mix of colossal beasts and duels versus other hunters who draw on the same list of available weapons and abilities as you do these two things combined lead to fights that require not only finesse but endurance most bosses progress through several stages where the moveset dramatically changes the way they change can be unpredictable some tighten up and become more precise with their attacks some gain area of effect capabilities and new spells and some lean into fury with attacks that come more ferociously than before eliminating the safe attack windows of the first phase or two of fight the one thing that unifies all of these fights is that aggression increases as the fight goes on and the deeper health pools that you're fighting through are meant to make sure that a player stays in each phase for a properly dangerous amount of time when i came through on new game plus for two playthroughs going after the second and third endings i added an arcane component to my strength build to use what forms of magic there are in this game and even then magic was little more than a small bonus to damage a secondary toolset that doesn't must represent a whole different playstyle the way magic works in dark souls or eldon ring in new game plus the health pools were even deeper to the point where some of the fights are in the 5-10 minute range per attempt player damage scales over the course of a couple playthroughs and into the 100 plus level range but the bosses always seem to scale a little higher and i found a lot of the boss encounters on new game plus 2 to be much more desperate and difficult than they even were the first time around despite me being relatively close to the max damage output as far as upgrades and attribute points are concerned baked into the design on the very deepest levels are hedges and dams against the player becoming too overpowered and to maintain the balance of power between the bosses and the player this is a game about hunters in prey with you the hunter but the thrill of that is also in being the perpetual underdog in the situation the prey needs to be more powerful than the hunter for the mood to stick in new game plus cycles of dark souls and eldon ring a player can approach parody with some of the bosses especially early you can be much more dangerous than them bloodborne is a game that deliberately seeks to be a harsher more aggressive experience and it goes about this not just on the thematic level but in subtle numeric ways as well like the more hostile scaling into new game plus in dark souls the high difficulty was part of the theme but generally felt more like a puzzle something that could be reoriented and overcome systemically as much as by willpower and good gameplay with bloodborne the difficulty is integrated more deeply into the storytelling brutality cruelty hostility both to the player and from the player these are the foundations of everything the visual art and the narrative are trying to accomplish they are integrated here in bloodborne in a way that says uncommon as it is impressive sakiro takes these design approaches and intensifies them elden ring walks them back but here in bloodborne the game's inherent hostility feels the most purposeful and the most balanced of all three of these titles it is trying to create an atmosphere where when the boss dies and a reign of blood pours down on you you just want to open your mouth wide drink of it and scream father gacion is a fine early example of difficulty theme and narrative being integrated and the way he acts as a kind of instructor on how to play your own character and as a warning of what you're destined to become once you've heeded those instructions but he is only one of many let's now visit the inhabitants of the cathedral district to its highest heights and lowest lows down is the direction the game takes you first from the middle position of the odin chapel the chapel kind of mirrors the firelink shrine in dark souls 1. the hunter's dream is the player's hub area yes but the original firelink shrine in the original dark souls wasn't like the modern hubs you didn't need to return to it to level up or to upgrade anything its purpose was navigational and thematic a central anchor between up and down ignorance and knowledge the beginning of the game and the end the cathedral ward central checkpoint serves the same navigational role branching paths out to not only the required areas but most of the optional areas in the dlc besides playing bloodborne after playing the other games was really strange because as different from dark souls 1 as the gameplay can be it does feel like a more direct and true follow-up in the level design boss design and narrative design than either of the official dark souls sequels or even elden ring itself it is so gorgeously dense and compact in almost every aspect of its design it makes it rather unlike its sibling games i missed that sense of a colossally vertical world from dark souls 1. from the chapel you ventured down into the burnt ruins of old yharnam here years ago the healing church ran away from the terrible damage it did in the beasts it created sealing the old neighborhood away down at the towering foundations that the church would later build on top of the suffering it created the church has two types of ministers the black garbed hunters like gascion like you're supposed to be and then the fight garbed clarets the clerics don't heal so much as they experiment in the ancient catacombs under the city where a british was discovered they communed with the old blood and have ever since kept teasing out that blood's power drawing the attention of even stranger forces from the outer cosmos that first attempt to connecting that whole early city of yharnam in the church was buried alive deliberately so at the deepest layer of the deepest city is a forgotten dilapidated chapel without even a name the humble beginnings of everything above forgotten now below in it is the blood-starved beast a fearsome and incredibly aggressive boss whose principle feature both mechanically and thematically is its ravenous hunger it wants to tear you apart and to drink you it's been so long and that comes through amazingly well in its movements intensified even more by the choice of background for the fight in this dilapidated chapel and with the accompanying music there is a lot of storytelling being done with this boss fight all of it pretty much non-verbal driven instead by a fascinating combination of context and choreography weak to serration weak to fire brittle and dry with years of caustic neglect the mechanical weaknesses of the boss go hand in hand with its narrative weaknesses as a character killing the beast opens up the tower that eventually will lead to the choir and lead to a british here at the bottom though is just the lost beast and a shortcut behind where the locked gates are in the middle district this shortcut leads to the grand cathedral of the healing church all along the massive staircase are statues of saints with amygdala heads unlike the chapel of the bloodstar of beast the grand cathedral is gleaming well cupped up by a much healthier beast vicar emilia has one of my favorite introductions in any from software game such a classic horror movie moment that it might as well be in black and white you see the shadow of her her hands as she clutches a pendant and then a great change she becomes a beast before your eyes turning around only now to grin it would have been pointless to greet you with her other face anyway this is her true self the face of bestial sadism hunger isn't amelia's motivation though it's zealotry you're an intruder a heretic you will be punished accordingly this is one of the longer fights in the game even as it is but it becomes unpredictably longer in the second phase as emilia takes breaks from attacking you to heal large chunks of her health there's items you can use to disrupt this healing but i never remember to use those items and letting the heel happen leads to such a drawn-out feeling of desperation willpower versus willpower that it really changes the character of the fight from phase one to phase two characterization and storytelling through combat once again the upper cathedral ward is a secret housing the city's orphanage just like iosefka's clinic is filled with the results of the old blood experimentations the upper ward is a combination of the healing church's past and a future these weird dopey-looking blue dudes are as closest to the gods as humans can get without becoming beasts it seems at least without going so far as you do in the game's final ending they are the future i guess a mix of the old blood with the new and they are clearly neither capable nor interested in the kind of grand works the healing church has manifested here in urnum the healing church is a dead end just as the other areas and factions like the scholars of mensis and what remains of the old hunters prove we've already talked a little about the source of the healing church's power the elder god from the center of the catacombs of british daughter of the cosmos let's take this opportunity to just look what an incredible design a british has otherworldly in every way threatening so active with so many moving parts so hard to understand with a torso that's intended to actively confuse a player about which direction it's facing while it's unfair to say that h.p lovecraft never uses concrete detail to describe his creatures a lot of his talent as a writer is in being able to sidestep those details with powerful illusions that the reader has to finish for themselves to see those old images ideas and suggestions given such gorgeous illustration is just artistically tremendous visual art has always been one of the strongest elements of the modern from software games but bloodborne's commitment to truly maximizing the presentation of the source material is something unique something special as someone huge into the horror genre bloodborne is a total revelation i didn't understand that by not paying the price of admission required by the combat's difficulty i was missing one of the best shows in the entire sub-genre that same tower that separates the middle and upper cathedral districts has a hidden corner tucked behind a door halfway down the tower with no way to reach it but just to fall just as you can find an abyssal mirror of the firelink shrine in dark souls 3 suggesting its repetition and persistence through multiple ages or multiple timelines the abandoned workshop shows that the hunter's dream was once a real place and by showing that the real one is dusty and forgotten long sealed off by the modern church it raises a lot more questions about just what the supernatural version you repeatedly return to is while the story and setting in bloodborne are certainly more concrete than before much is still pleasantly cryptic and open-ended no part more so than the nature of the hunter's dream and the supernaturally endless night of the hunt you progress through so let's pull on a few major threads real quick and try to tie some stuff together you have one directive at the beginning of the game seek pill blood to transcend the hunt no npc ever offers much better clarification than that however the doll of the hunter's dream is the only being who allows you to level up and she happens to be the only being in the game who bleeds pale she quite literally allows you to transcend the hunt she prays sometimes to a god or goddess called flora she's connected to this divine presence who watches down on you your whole journey the hunter's moon itself always there a baleful eye watching your slaughter with some unknown distant satisfaction the real ending of the game happens when you find and consume three-thirds of an umbilical cord originating from three various failures of an elder god trying to birth itself anew one is in the abandoned workshop another is at the top of the game's final tower the last fight at the last level two more can be found in grosser more uncomfortable circumstances the elder gods curse two characters with unholy pregnancies one is a mad member of the choir who replaces esefcad or clinic to run experiments on any survivors that you send there another is ariana a sex worker who's also some kind of double for queen cainhurst of the vilebloods she's like in the story in on willing heir of swords to the same legacy of cosmic rape that centers around queen yarnum the apparition you sometimes see honestly the fixation on unwanted childbirth and rape from beyond the stars is a pretty rough element of the narrative deliberately shocking deliberately gross horror is often about trying to provoke discomfort especially about the body but there's an odd abstraction and lack of sympathy in the game that makes its inclusion kind of crass here so we can talk about weird star babies and consuming mutated umbilical cords and that's all just kind of genre standard for horror but without sympathy for the characters involved it kind of reduces the idea of childbirth and pregnancy to that whole level of weird and grody things beyond understanding funny enough this is almost an inherited problem from lovecraft's writing what's so gorgeous about lovecraft's stories at their best is the way that they can articulate or more often suggest the dangerously impossible and the unknown lovecraftian monsters and storytelling erode of the sanity of its protagonists exposure to the unknown is not only dangerous but corruptive normalcy becomes no longer possible once immersed in the worlds of the cosmic unknown within the context of many of these stories that perspective can be incredibly compelling listen to this bit describing a hall of statuary in an ancient city of the old ones deep under the antarctic shelf taken from at the mountains of madness mold compressed twisted and ruptured as they were their chief common injury was total decapitation i had seen those primal sculptures too and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate old ones those whom the frightful shugaths had characteristically slain and sucked into a ghastly headlessness in the great war of re-subjugation they were infamous nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old bygone things for shoggoths in their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings the mad author of the necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none of them had been bred on this planet and that only drug dreamers had conceived them formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all true forms and organs and processes viscous agglutinations bubbling cells rubbery 15-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductal slaves of suggestion builders of cities more and more sullen more and more intelligent more and more amphibious more and more imitative great god what madness made those even more blasphemous old ones willing to use and to carve such things end quote it's the pictures that kind of prose can paint in a person's head that's the compelling thing about the lovecraftian style and about cosmic horror in general the problem is that lovecraft himself didn't limit his fear of corruption and the unknown to supernatural questions he felt that way also when someone of a different color made eye contact with him at a market he mixed his fear of the normally different with what's so much more compelling in his fear of the supernaturally different there's plenty of stories including the classic call of cthulhu that uncomfortably mix this fear of the true unknown with dehumanization of what he simply regards as immoral or irregular bloodborne isn't nearly as bad as lovecraft's work but this thread where menstruation and childbirth in bloodborne are treated as being supernaturally incomprehensible on a similar level to elder gods from beyond the stars is kind of a traditional tendency of lovecraftian stories it's hard to say if it's such a strong part of the narrative because of too close imitation of thesaurus material or if it's part of a more personal set of images and themes that are unique to from software moving towards elden ring this question of accidental or deliberate becomes cloudier a link between femininity and the moon becomes more explicit and mirrors the use of symbolism and imagery found here or even earlier within the dark souls trilogy without that same weird uncomfortable focus on unwanted pregnancies regardless of the failure of other characters to give birth to a new living god the player can fulfill that destiny themselves by proactively consuming all three-thirds of that corrupted umbilical cord granting them eyes on the inside of their brains and insight into the corrupting madness of the universe the most lovecraftian victory of all really total corruption through total deliberate exposure to the unknown to seal the deal you must confront the hunter's moon you must seek the pale blood if you don't consume the whole cord the moon presence uses you for its own purposes but if you have it rejects you as it had rejected queen cainhurst in the chosen ariana instead so it attacks and even here the boss is doing storytelling with its moveset it is the platonic ideal of the game's beasts the impulse in the blood that corrupts them into such huge and tortured shapes this is the most animalistically aggressive beast of all the beasts it seems dangerous in every way predatory fast cunning but not in a human way like the final boss gearman had been in a way that feels totally devoid of sanity or reason an actual monster and sure enough when it dies it doesn't say prey slaughtered like it usually does it says nightmare slain not just a symptom of madness but part of the cause except you didn't get to fight him because you were sane yourself did you you chose to do the thing that gives you eyes on the inside of your brain not once but three times you're transformed as a result into a princely worm a little divine slug that will in time become an elder god of the outer sphere it's hardly a satisfying ending for the player character but it is such a wonderful way to drive home and tie off the narrative arc of corruption you wanted to be the most powerful thing in the game didn't you well you get to be reborn in the cosmic slime where the true power of the universe resides the imagery and the story of bloodborne is frustratingly incomplete without becoming deeply invested in its most frustrating repetitive and hostile aspect of all the chalice dungeons like everything else the chalice dungeons are tightly integrated with the story and with the setting long before the city you see today was a civilization called the thumerians they made contact with the british as the healing church did and invited the same communion with the older gods queen yharnam was their monarch she's the one the new city is named for over and over you see echoes of queen yarnum her ghost prefaces the most major transitions of the game we see her first after defeating the game's strangest boss rom the vacuous spider there's some suggestion that rom might have once been a person who like you sought to grow eyes on the inside however they couldn't contain this transformation and now rom holds the night of the haunted stasis keeping the moon presence at bay rum takes a lot of things that are already creepy and gross about spiders and makes them worse its minions have longer creepier legs than regular spiders they leap medium distances they spit this awful corrosive vomit and they spawn in three consecutive waves ram is vacuous indeed it doesn't even fight back at first and when it does it acts in ways that are genuinely stupid wide area of effect attacks that are essentially vicious tantrums rahm is the boss of bergenworth the college of magic and cosmic studies and it is deeply ironic that this most intimate connection with the forces beyond destroyed rom's capacity for more knowledge or for understanding completely yarnam's ghost appears when rom dies to welcome down the moon presence to worship the god that killed her and her whole civilization you see queen yharnam again at the top of the nightmare of mensis the seed of another set of scholars who sought to transform themselves and commune more closely with the gods to try to bring about the birth that you do in the final ending if you consume all three of those umbilical cords they came close one of the thirds of that chord is that of mergo a failed moon child whose disembodied cries echo throughout the game if you have the insight to hear it she stares up her midriff bandaged and bloodied suggesting that this was once her fate as well mergo's wetness is an awful cosmic emptiness that guards what remains of the little baby it's not a beast or a god like the others it's pure nightmare pure emptiness the hunter's moon cannot set or arise again until the nightmare is defeated that cavity of space all emptiness and blades is genuinely frightening as far as monster design goes the wet nurse's extra phase is to create a disorienting fog and to double itself creating an even more powerful version that appears suddenly out of the merc was this nightmare the same one that destroyed all of thrumaria queen yarnham is so deliberately connected to everything that happens in the game from the cut scenes to the deep lore and yet she's never more than a ghost unless you complete almost all of the 10 basic versions of the 10 chalice dungeons you have to grind for hours to get there i'm kind of happy to have done so though because she feels just as truly climactic as any of the endgame bosses the hunter german climaxes your experience as a hunter a kind of reworking of the gacion fight into an even more aggressive intense encounter fighting against the man who invented trick weapons in the first place and whose consciousness principally keeps the hunter's dream intact the moon presence fight climaxes the elements of cosmic horror it fits you against the hidden watcher who hung all game long in the sky above the city and queen yarnam is necessary to climax the whole set of symbolism and imagery surrounding blood ministration and the creation of the healing church the city of yharnam is built on the example of yharnam the person built in her image and making her same ancient mistakes and trusting the elder gods and seeking their power no matter the expense she attacks with her poisoned blood crafting it into arrows and spears that burst from her hands and from the ground below she uses the cry of her lost child to paralyze you and get off devastating combos she creates phantom versions of herself in multiple places as you had seen her do throughout the main campaign when you kill queen yarnum you get a peculiar stone the remains of her own failed god child crystallized over the untold millennia into a kind of petrified womb leaving aside everything odd about getting this as a prize this cryptic and gruesome item is a missing piece of the puzzle leading towards the final ending queen yardham's goal was the same goal as the ending of the moon presence where you turn yourself into an elder god the goal of the scholars of menses it is the bizarre climax of a very ancient ambition seeing that circle close is more interesting if you see where the circle began and you don't get that without the extra hours you spent grinding towards queen yarnham's hidden fight with the chalice dungeons for the most part though story doesn't have much at all to do with the chalice dungeon experience which is what's so damn frustrating about excavating the path to the queen yharnam fight i had heard quite a bit about the chalice dungeons by reputation as being especially difficult but by taking reputation at its word i also misunderstood them quite a bit i want to stress that they are extremely optional completely unimportant to the broad strokes of plot and experience only really meaningful in the context of being very completionist about the whole thing the chalice dungeons are arranged one after another within four possible varieties of chalice into these ritual cups are poured rare ingredients which open a portal to lost in hidden places there's the thumerian chalices which account for fully half of the 10 base templates they range in depth which is how difficulty is measured from one to five get deep enough into the optional areas of those first couple layers and you'll find the hinter tombs chalice this was my first major disappointment with the chalice system each of the 10 basic dungeons is built in a standard way but you can perform rituals to create versions that have more modifiers or restrictions which then randomizes the dungeon's layout in a manner kind of similar to diablo where the same bosses and general components are distributed in unpredictable patterns there are tens of thousands of overall combinations but they're all made with an honestly pretty limited set of rooms hallways and atriums the variation is real in a mechanical way aesthetically they are endlessly repetitive the hindertombs have a few enemies that are unique and a pretty fun set of bosses but the actual environment doesn't feel meaningfully different than the ones that came before the chalices of ailing lorann are an intriguing idea that once there was another city like yharnam which came to obsess over the old blood and now it's being swallowed by deserts and sand a dead wasteland of beasts it uses sand and lightning storm effects to take the same old rooms and give them a new flavor which is welcome and it also features these enormous canyon areas which suggest an even greater vastness of space a city buried deep in the earth but it wasn't materially much different still so in some ways you have a pretty good amount of potential variation within the chalice dungeons but not a huge amount of true experiential variation they're also a self-justifying self-perpetuating system it takes tons of rare materials to perform the rituals for higher level dungeons materials only found by thoroughly exploring other lower level dungeons you need to explore thoroughly to grind for materials in some cases although you can buy many of the original items for insight after you've already found them once these dungeons also exist completely outside of the core game loop they do not reset during the transition from one game state to another you could beat the game twice and pick right back up where you left off on the same dungeon still saved to memory they also don't scale it all with new game plus they are always difficult in the exact same way based on their depth rating it is that part that is the most obtuse and confusing leading to some really disappointing interactions with the chalice dungeon system i knew by reputation that the chalice dungeons were extremely difficult but you get the first chalice by defeating the blood starved beast in that forgotten chapel and it's actually at that early game point around level 25 or 30 or so that depth one chalices are actually appropriate depth 2 represents a step up in difficulty but not an especially serious one and if you wait until the later game to try them like i did there's a strong chance that they just won't be very engaging at all it's kind of fun to stomp bosses in less than 30 seconds but it is not worth the hours of hunting for switches and getting inadequate experience points and under-leveled loot and reward the lack of meaningful rewards takes the fun out of the ease of completion if you come to these chalice dungeons over level if a player were to do them earlier just one or two at a time instead of trying to marathon the whole experience that would be a much smoother better integrated approach just try em when german mentions them then take a break when they're starting to frustrate you that's the way i feel they were intended to go depth 3 chalice dungeons are a significant step up in difficulty as difficult as the original campaign's climactic areas depth 4 are about as difficult as the old hunters dlc and then depth 5 is as difficult as that same in-game expansion content with the new game plus scaling it seems as if the intention is to do these dungeons sporadically in the background across multiple consecutive playthroughs delving deeper and deeper with the same extremely powerful character trying to dig up treasures that will allow a player to survive the intensified curve of playthroughs beyond new game plus which truly do feel much more difficult even at just new game plus two the biggest hiccup and hurdle to get over isn't a depth 5 dungeon it's a depth 4 with an unavoidable modifier famous for being the absolute most aggravatingly unfair stretch of content in any from software title the defiled chalice cuts your health in half for the entire dungeon putting you against massive groups of enemies in the labyrinthine portions and against bosses who can easily and quickly one hit kill a player at the maximum health they're capable of reaching on account of the boss's high elemental damage output and the 50 reduction in player health it is to borrow a dark souls phrase a hollowing experience on every level i hated it lord how i hated it it was and contest is not even close the least amount of fun i've had in the whole modern run of from software games even when i felt like i was more stuck and more frustrated in sakura at least sakiro's most difficult fights are cinematically gorgeous full of lush color and sound the defiled chalice is as creatively dull as it is mechanically difficult it exists only as the [ __ ] down in the comments section might phrase it as a filter an artificial test of patience meant to create a sense of value and scarcity in victory for those willing to push through it the depth five chalice beyond it the one with queen yharnam at the end and the official climax of the chalice dungeons is like half as hard as the defiled chalice the defiled one doesn't challenge in a dynamic or compelling way it simply punishes any errant mistake so severely that a player often has to start again from the top when people talked about the souls games and soul's adjacent games as being unusually difficult and only for the extreme hardcore gamer crowd this is exactly the approach i assumed that it would take a reductively cruel one i ended up becoming so enthralled and invested in these games instead because broadly they are so much more in-depth creative and free than just that the defiled chalice is none of those things it is the soul's structure and combat loop divorced entirely from the things that make it genuinely enjoyable the chalice dungeons element of bloodborne fascinates me so much because bloodborne is such a beautifully compact and thoughtful game but it still chose to include everything that had shaved off to achieve that streamlining by way of this largely optional game mode it's like getting a haircut that makes you look stunning and then choosing to have all of your trimmings made into a toupee exactly resembling your previous unkempt hairstyle it is strange and strangely compelling because over the years i've been making these videos i've become especially fond of content that hardly anyone explores like the bad blood dlc for watch dogs 1 where the achievement completion rates are well under 10 was it good content god no it was repetitive and grindy and pointless but there is an odd thrill in treading ground so few others are bothering to venture video games are so interesting to talk about partly because of the way people experience them in parallel everyone is given the same basic experience but then instantly diverge in a million ways when it comes to mechanical approach narrative investment time commitment levels of attention a constellation of connected differences from software games are special in the ways that they encourage those differences their inherent flexibility when it comes to build style plot interpretation and player motivation the way they vary from player to player feels unusually intensely individual to any given person the optional areas within the games are part of that but nowhere so strongly is bloodborne where a very small proportion of players again less than 10 percent are playing a game with literally twice as many boss encounters more even if you count chalice ritual variations even just by sticking to the basic 10 chalices there are so many interesting boss encounters that wouldn't have otherwise fit into the main game or are balanced less carefully and than the main game it's not just a b side of the record it is a whole disc two of outtakes and live versions and it's not always as difficult as it's made out to be probably my most impressive accomplishment in bloodborne was in the defiled chalice facing off against a boss that's a repeat of one in the very first chalice watchdog of the old lords it is a monstrous undead fire dog and since you take elemental damage at the normal rate even though you have half health it has the capacity to one shot most players with most of its attacks however there's nothing saying you can't stack all sorts of fire protections even though the best rooms are still locked away in the next depth 5 dungeon you can still stack a plus 4 reduction across all damage types another plus 7 of pure fire resistance and a bonus plus 3 physical damage reduction plus anti-fire armor sets available for purchase after defeating some earlier chalice bosses it's not at all a one-shot boss if you're using all of the tools at your disposal stacking everything the game is willing to give you i managed to get the watchdog done on my first try by going into the fight with such a strong numerical defense versus fire this goes for really any boss in the game but the chalice dungeons are especially demanding that way because they seem to assume that you are on the new game plus cycle most of the time by the time you're at depths four and five they expect you to have everything and to use everything and in this way the challenge is more experimental and more deliberately unfair you don't have to simply accept the disadvantages the game settles you with however you can push backwards and with your equipment even out the encounter towards a less aggressive less frustrating experience the chalice amygdala is an exception to this but generally my experience with from software games so far is that getting one shot is rarely the intended level of difficulty there is typically always a way to stack and synergize your player character's points and inventory that negates or mitigates a one-shot kind of situation this is true in all three of these games in different ways even sakiro here in bloodborne there are few ways to min max your character and fewer situations that really even call for it in the main campaign especially on the first run through the balance is already dialed tightly to a ratio that feels self-evidently fair the way your tributes all have such low soft and hard caps comparative to dark souls and elden ring contributes to this there's a point at which you just kind of max out an attribute and improvement after that threshold is very uselessly incremental to keep you within those boundaries of a maximum durability and damage the runes and armors you get don't generally make a huge difference unless things are pushed to an experimental distorted difficulty beyond that of the main game in which case stacking small improvements can lead to dramatic results securo is based more on tools to prevent one-shot situations there are explicit hard counters to almost every boss within your prosthetic tool set elden ring by contrast has huge soft gaps and hard caps on the attributes it assumes that a player will decide that they don't enjoy getting one shot and just invest in vigor to avoid it then the kind of armor and rune stacking of bloodborne can be applied on top or even instead of vigor investment there's a lot of discussion about the way late game areas of elden ring ratchet up the difficulty but to me it's not surprising at all the halligtry requires all of the tools of the game to survive and if you use them all it's not nearly as frustrating as it first appears these games are very difficult yes but almost never in a way that's genuinely unfair especially not in the mandatory levels and content only at the most extreme margins does unfairness occur which is vitally impressive to me i am god damn terrible at these games just ask the comments section i don't like doing things over and over for no good reason so the fact that i had to get eight hours deep into a hidden portion of the game world to experience anything that i really considered genuinely unbalanced it's kind of a feat in keeping with from software tradition the dlc is considerable step up and difficulty for this already difficult game this gives bloodborne an opportunity to experiment in a different way than the chalice dungeons did rather than pushing the boundaries of how much they can ask of the player it expands already-established patterns and themes to very calculated conclusions the old hunters takes place in the hunter's nightmare a decayed and degraded version of yharnam where the old neighborhoods have melted into each other it's like we saw earlier workshop in the hunter's dream was once an actual place but is now a supernatural one in between life and death eventually a true death frees hunters from the dream you made a number of hunters in the game world who once dreamed but no longer care the hunter's nightmare is like a layer of dream below that a place out of step with time where the old blood eventually carries a consciousness a kind of sewer existence into which the old blood drains the old hunters works with a creative palette that is closer to dark souls than any other part of bloodborne the rest of the game isn't at all focused on stagnancy and decay or at least not as much the old hunters however were revels in rot at first i was slightly disappointed that the environment wasn't completely new to begin with but as it got deeper into the dlc the thematic weight of it was more compelling to me than a simple thirst for novelty this corrupted yarnum which is already itself very corrupted is a mashup of the middle and upper cathedral ward central yharnam plus all new areas within and behind what's familiar and the joy of this is recontextualization like how opening up shortcuts leads to new understandings of how the environment reflects back on itself stringing pieces of the city together in abbreviated corrupted patterns shows even better how the whole actual city of yharnam is composed the fun-house mirror distortions actually allow a player to see more of yharnam at once better conceive of yharnam as a singular location and not just a network of levels the way it differs from the regular city is also thematically resonant this is a memory a dying memory like the hunter's dream a fragment of something real except here it is supernaturally old beyond its time time distends no one can die there is only endless constant degradation the way the city decays is a symptom of collective forgetting hunters and beasts kill each other in endless cycles but the hunters always win the beasts cower from you they're exhausted and afraid it's the other hunters who are the real threat and these hunters eventually forget themselves they become beasts pray for the new hunters who continue to fall into the nightmare at the bottom of the heap are these fleshy skeletons barely conscious the last dregs of a decayed soul it's here at the blood-soaked bottom of the city that bloodborne's best boss encounter takes place almost all game i had been using ludwig's holy blade an artifact left over from the very first hunter of the healing church ludwig exists in the main campaign only as a legend like artorias in dark souls 1 but he has been trapped here in the hunter's nightmare all along his visual design as a monster is just unparalleled it is the peak of monster design for the whole franchise as far as i'm concerned ludwig's connection to older forgotten eras of knights and chivalry is reinforced by the way he's become blended with equine features he's a knight who is his own steed in the most creatively disgusting way possible plus he has this tumor of eyeball suggesting that like you he sought eyes on the inside and was unable to control or complete the transformation the corpses herald his arrival with fear ludwig is well lost to the nightmare when the fight begins but then something remarkable happens ludwig hasn't had a real fight with a real opponent an untold eons the strain shocks him back into some semblance of his former self he discovers halfway through the fight his old sword not the imitation you carry but the true moonlight blade which you may at this point find familiar from other from software titles the way ludwig is shocked to find himself already in possession of the sword is deeply melancholy much more sad than it is threatening he stops moving like a beast and starts moving like a swordsman attacking in staccato bursts and determined sweeps instead of a relentless temperamental aggression it is a difficult fight sure but the difficulty supports the themes and empowers the mood to give ludwig so many hit points ensures that the two phases of his fight are lengthy and distinct it makes sure that the player spends enough time with each of those phases to feel immersed in the intended moods of them to make ludwig so differently relentless in each phase is what gives ludwig personality his character development is done through movement and his pre-programmed choreography to make him so strong is what gives him credibility as this ancient degraded thing come up out of the muck of gore to hunt you the same as you hunt him and once he's been felled his severed head will speak to you wistfully of the fate of his beloved hunters are they still the pure souls they used to be will he lie to him and say yes allowing him to die for the last time in peace or will you instead remind him of how far not only himself but everything he believed in has fallen ludwig is a distillation of so much of bloodborne as an artistic work a concentrated pure example of how it constructs its mood how it constructs its characters and how it constructs its world from the combat loop instead of in addition to it or on top of it there is no difference in bloodborne between narrative and gameplay they are completely simultaneous and harmonious and that is something exceptionally rare in how any developer approaches making a video game it's odd how many of the most famous encounters in bloodborne are here in the old hunters dlc just about every one of its bosses appears on the many many best of from software boss's ranked list that pretty much every gaming publication eventually puts together and this with bloodborne already filled to the brim with not only tons of memorable boss encounters in the main game but a ton of strange and irregular ones in the chalice dungeons the old hunters escalates and elevates the kind of design already present in bloodborne into encounters that end up being the pinnacle of what the game can achieve with them ludwig is the most impressive but tied very closely to him in design and intention is lawrence the first vicar he's interacted with in two places through two skulls first his bistrol skull sits in true yharnam on the altar of the grand cathedral on touching it a cutscene memory plays between the dean of byrgenwerth and lawrence the dean cautions the vicar fear the old blood nothing good will come of it but lawrence founded the healing church on the old blood's mutagenic properties anyway in the nightmare his human skull still exists if you go find his bestial form now sprawled in its full glory on that same grand cathedral's altar and present him with his own human remains he will spring to life and face you lawrence was the first of the cleric beasts and so his fight is a climactic ultimate version of that first optional boss fight in the game it's also similar to the vicar amelia fight but so much longer with such a much more aggressive move set when critically injured lawrence is at his most dangerous he bleeds fire it spills across the floor wherever he drags his broken torso so if you're not anticipating the way he might move towards you you'll likely get punished with a mighty dangerous hotfoot lawrence is a climactic version of a boss format you're already familiar with and he's not the only one like it lady maria of the astral clock tower is a climactic version of the hunter's duel format that began with father gascion and ends with your final battle with german both of those hunters are brutal cruel aggressive but he can't accuse them of being elegant that's the difference with lady maria she murders you in the most effortlessly beautiful ways if you're watching this video in the position of having played elden ring but not bloodborne you might be surprised by the many similarities in her moveset to melania blade of michelob lady maria is pretty clearly the prototype for that later louder encounter in elden ring in bloodborne she makes a fitting and fantastic dual style encounter but the two bosses are not interchangeable between games elden ring provides so many more pathways to power so many more combat options for the player that melania has to be tuned way higher in her difficulty as a result dealt with the self-heal mechanic and the disease bomb mechanics as a way to better counter players who are at the end of their power curve throughout the game there are complaints that melania is too powerful but in comparing her to lady maria it's more a difference of degrees than a significant shift in design in elden ring using magic builds in general trickery it's possible to counter melania in more ways than it's possible to counter lady maria in bloodborne she can be messed with and negated using the available systems much more readily than lady maria can with bloodborne's more limited tool set when people talk about how bloodborne is tighter and more streamlined than the traditional dark souls style game which elden ring is a continuation of lady maria is perhaps the best example the three phases steadily ratchet up in difficulty never unfairly adding moves that are increasingly far-reaching and dangerous with special effects that ratchet up the visual splendor of the encounter at the same time it's a fight that accelerates not in a bisected way like the ludwig fight but in a smooth and constant progression of difficulty as the player and the boss trade damage her third phase is just intensely fierce but like a similar fight with sister frida and dark souls 3 she can be easily staggered by interrupting her at the right moments the tool set you're given is so much smaller the first playthrough i had no arcane component to my belt at all i was facing lady maria with my plain old sword and it took me quite a few tries it required getting a sense of her rhythm and when to safely counter-attack as well as when to just run the [ __ ] away on new game plus with the arcane toolset also at my disposal i got her on the first try being able to use a variety of slight magics even with the bullet restrictions significantly diminished lady maria's ability to keep me pinned down with her aggression it allowed me many more opportunities to go on the offensive than the first time around with pure melee lady maria's strength as a boss is encountering specific melee playstyles the easy stagger that makes her a fair fight to melee builds is exactly the same concession that makes her unexpectedly vulnerable to magic builds so it's not hard to see how millennia goddess of rot came to be so extremely dangerous why she was given mechanics to allow her to reclaim lost health and eat slowly away at yours because these extra offensive and defensive characteristics better protect her from the expanded tool set available to a given player in elder ring better preserves the danger of the fight from a given player's [ __ ] lady maria is a difficult boss but i didn't feel completely outclassed by her the final boss of the old hunters however is a different story the orphan of coss is famously one of the most difficult bosses in the from software catalog on account of how the orphan is a combination of the strengths of every other encounter in the dlc with none of the clear and intended weaknesses he is relentlessly aggressive like ludwig and lawrence without the massive bulk that makes it relatively easy to get behind those bosses and out of the way of their attacks he has a built-in area of effect swing that punishes a player for backing off and seeking distance a herald of things to come with sekiro's general approach to combat the only relatively safe place to be is right next to him but he's wickedly fast and unpredictable he moves actually remarkably similar to the fume knight in dark souls 2 which was the absolute worst i ever got stuck in any from software title so once i realized i was looking at being stuck for another i don't know eight hours i sought help and despite the game's age and how deep into the content this was i didn't have any trouble at all getting that help anytime you look up advice about these games invariably someone will say hey never summon it'll destroy your satisfaction it'll ruin the intended experience just keep going no matter how much you hate doing it because it's so worth it to finally win and if that's true for someone that's fine but it's hardly universal advice and not at all the intended experience if it was the summoning wouldn't be in the game at all that's precisely the case with skiro where they wanted to make an even stricter experience and so removed anything that introduced too much variation in the difficulty bloodborne like dark souls wants a player to win the intended experience is that you see credits that's it however you get it is a deliberate aspect of gameplay the satisfaction i received from summoning two other people and absolutely smacking the living [ __ ] out of this burly gross baby monster was tremendous there was joy in winning this way for me there was triumph and isn't that the whole reason why people offer themselves to the summoning pool to contribute to other people's victories and to share in the joy of them i didn't summon much besides npcs because i didn't feel like i needed them here in bloodborne the determination of how much is too much in terms of difficulty was left to me personally in a very open-ended dynamic way some players will try to belittle or bully others into feeling like there's some kind of one true way to do it but that is never experientially true bloodborne like all from software titles here's more about engagement than punishment you're never stuck if you're trying every option at your disposal something will always work if bloodborne is a hunter's dream remember that you are a lucid dreamer there's no reason to accept the orphan of coss exactly as he's presented to you you can pull in other dreamers and turn a nightmare into a beatdown even now i'm smiling thinking about it and that is not much the sign of an unsatisfying experience what's difficult in bloodborne generally stays difficult even at the top of a player's arc of power i felt in dark souls that the new game plus experience was just a revenge tour considerably easier throughout compared to the first time around and that just is not the case with bloodborne sure the beginning areas are still easier but as soon as the cathedral ward i found the scaling to be so significant that progressing was either equally difficult or more so especially the boss fights i had gone in expecting hoping to just stomp them out and get it done but instead i found that the fights were even longer this time around the pressure from them much more intense rather than creating a build that became progressively overpowered into new game plus cycles i found myself boxed in by the statistical soft caps and hard caps unable to create a character that trivialized any of the encounters the scaling takes bosses that are already difficult and re-tunes them so that you have to spend progressively more time and pay progressively more attention each playthrough i think this speaks to the intention of the encounters versus dark souls the way dark souls is designed in a more fundamentally forgiving and open way bloodborne is an experimental highly deliberate step away from dark souls the way it took away the shield the way it de-emphasized magic the way it doubled down on the personality and difficulty of its boss encounters after bloodborne came dark souls 3 which was an excellent game in many ways but lacks the strong unique identity of bloodborne bloodborne had split an entirely new branch of design philosophy off of the classic dark souls formula and in practice the main problem with dark souls 3 is that it does feel stagnant it doesn't share the boundary-pushing enthusiasm of bloodborne's design sakiro would continue to push those boundaries to take this new branch and grow it out far from the trunk of the tree instead of trying to apply the lessons learned here in bloodborne backwards onto the old template zakiro gave itself an incredible amount of breathing room to start almost from scratch as much as i enjoyed bloodborne and it was quite a bit i was really ready to be done by the end of three playthroughs and the chalice dungeons i longed for something new then endear of my enjoyment for all three playthroughs across bloodborne was this fella mikolash host of the nightmare now a fight against a warlock sort of figure is a fine idea but the gimmick at play is to take the run to the boss fight and then incorporate that period of repetitive almost idle activity into the fight itself there's waiting for an elevator then you have a chase then you have a short fight then you have a much longer chase and then a second fight with a high chance of a surprise one hit kill unless you can stun lock the ever living [ __ ] out of the guy the problem isn't how dangerous mikolash is with his magic that's fine it's that every attempt takes a minimum of three minutes of literally just running around trying to get to the guy and more realistically close to six to eight minutes of running around to do all two phases it is just agonizingly repetitive because you're putting in all this time for a single attempt at the actual fight portion i got through it pretty well the first time after a few infuriating attempts but then on new game plus one it suddenly became much harder because of the extra health and especially because of the extra damage that mikolash gets in the second phase i could not fight him just in his little blank box i had to stun lock him before he even got in there and that did work new game plus two rolls around and the encounter becomes just intolerable it was less fun than fighting the defiled amygdala because at least with the amygdala you're actually doing the fighting this ended up being the only encounter across all three playthroughs that i felt the need to deliberately break magic isn't meant to take down a boss's entire health bar in fact the entire way magic is composed in bloodborne runs counter to that impulse it's meant to be used like the firearms purposefully and rarely for a particular effect it's only if an enemy stands perfectly still for an unintentional unnatural amount of time that you could just magic missle something to death which is in this particular instance with mikko lash perfectly possible mikolash wants you to chase him so he will wait for you and he'll wait for you to jump down after him infinitely if you choose not to guns and magic are so heavily relegated to secondary equipment status that the designers didn't even figure it mattered if you could hit him with the magic missile from up here and if they wanted to put a stop to it they probably would have patched it out the studio has been known to do that rebalancing things through patches and tweaking the experience and this the final version of bloodborne it's not unreasonable to assume that this skip was simply left available as kind of an unofficial way to breeze past the fight there's a kind of looseness to bloodborne that it does share in common with dark souls a looseness that sakiro would spend a tremendous amount of effort ironing out playing the game a couple times in a row makes the highs the game achieves seem higher and the lows seem lower lows like mikulash do start to pile up in the experience by my third time through as much as i love bloodborne i feel like i had surpassed the threshold for what might be considered standard average engagement with the game i was real ready to put it down and let it go which is interestingly the narratively most satisfying ending of bloodborne supposing you're not committed to growing eyes on the inside of your brain you're given a choice at the end to either let german the old hunter behead you or to fight him to fight him without having consumed the umbilical cords leads to an ending where nothing changes the choice initially seems preposterous why play through this entire game just to give up so you fight you struggle and in doing so the moon presence just decides to tolerate your interruption and replace german with you doomed to an eternity of delivering cryptic darkly ironic dialogue to impatient player characters mashing the skip button chilling stuff indeed consider though what you know of the beast blood curse in the healing shirt ambition makes things worse bloodlust deepened the curse submitting to german's blade runs contrary to everything that came before yes in certain ways but that's the clue that this is the ending that actually changes something so here in the hunter's dream you die your blood mist hanging below the living moon and then somewhere beyond the dream you awaken to sunlight it's still yharnam it seems it's probably not all champagne and roses but the dream has ended the nightmare is over you have saved yourself from the hunter's nightmare from an endless degradation in the blood swamps because this ending requires no extra effort to achieve and skips an entire boss fight maybe even two it doesn't seem like it would be the best ending but narratively it clearly is which i think is just such a clever last minute subversion you can't move on until you let go so that's exactly what from software did as a developer with the whole player-centric dark souls design format abandoning the player in favor of the player character securo is at once the best game from software has made so far and the one i found myself most consistently frustrated by on a personal level the same way bloodborne seemed to be deliberately breaking mean to other players like me out of a defensive shield-driven playstyle zakiro accelerates and intensifies that demand by reducing the entire combat system to variations on two core actions attack and parry you only have one main weapon the kasabi maroon though later your tool set is expanded through attachments for your prosthetic arm the shinobi prosthetics are limited by ammunition the same way quicksilver bullets made it so that you could never completely rely on magic in bloodborne they have to be used with tremendous discretion using shinobi prosthetics all the time in basic combat will drain your ammunition past the point that you recover it naturally and buying the ammunition can be a very major investment taking away from your ability to purchase other needful things everything in securo is essentially reduced to those two actions attack and parry sakiro is the game where even more than other from software titles animations matter more than numbers every upgrade in the game feels almost imperceptibly incremental if you get every upgrade you end up maybe three or four times more powerful than when you began in hour one the curve is not mechanically very dramatic yet the curve of skilled difficulty the complexity of the challenges set before you is dramatic insanely so the bosses in the late game are flat out the most difficult in the from software catalog and it isn't even close they demand complete focus for minutes at a time the thing that i loved so much about dark souls and which was still largely true for bloodborne is that it never required a huge amount of player skill if you were making major numerical investments into your character's stats and inventory the right stat investments negated areas where i as a player was consistently clumsy or napped i gave to myself through the attribute system the margins of error that i felt that i needed and as such the games always felt surmountable even when i became stuck securo doesn't allow for any of that it has no statistics no attributes no experience points besides ones that unlock skills from a general list of skills common to every player most players acquire most skills eventually any customization is just a matter of prioritizing one skill over another sakiro's design has strategically removed a majority of a player's control over their experience like a junga tower of colossal proportions zakiro sometimes hasn't even considered a souls-like game by some players and some critics because of how much has been redacted and replaced i feel like it still is it's simply the farthest away from the initial formula the game can be without breaking its connection fully it's a mutation of what came before but it's impossible to play securo without feeling the myriad connections it still retains to the previous games that surround it its plot its atmosphere its pacing its user interface its player progression systems they are all instantly familiar if you've played another from software title familiar enough to immediately appreciate how big the other changes are and in trying to adapt to those changes to discover how tremendously clever they happen to be the most disappointing change is that it is entirely possible to not be skilled enough the game to complete it a player can be too slow they can be too clumsy and the game will simply hang at that skill ceiling until either through patience or through luck you manage to squeeze out a victory from a given encounter this is because of one singular essential difference that radiates a thousand changes in its wake it isn't even initially a mechanical kind of design choice the difference between sakiro and every other firm software title its most critical and far-ranging difference is that you play as a named protagonist with a defined personality securo's difficulty isn't driven by a desire to simply be difficult every element of its stoic severity and hostility is instead narratively driven in dark souls there is no protagonist there's really only you insecure that's quite the opposite there is no you there is wolf the shinobi his skills dictate the verbs of gameplay his struggle articulates the atmosphere around you his weakness and mortality compared to his opponents determines your vulnerability as a player nothing in this game is about you the player and that's what makes it such a staggering artistic achievement it's a goal of most any game to reduce the distance between player and protagonist down to its slimmest most convincing margin possible this is the whole idea behind immersion and a significant school of thought for game design in general the player character is an avatar an extension of the self when games do have scripted protagonists with defined personalities in potential conflict with the player's inclinations and assumptions the gameplay itself will usually close the gap between the two you're only given the opportunity in the game world to do the kinds of things these characters would do that's how grand theft auto 5 for example can invite a player to swap seamlessly between three radically different player characters because the verbs of the three characters lives all boil down to the same criminal misadventures the same gameplay verbs zakiro is both an extension of this tradition and a major variance from it securo uses the difficulty of its gameplay and the dimensions of its levels to ensure that a player can't do anything that wolff wouldn't do yes but it provides no options for overcoming these solutions that aren't also in a very specific way in character we talked in the bloodborne section about how the choreography and animations of its boss fights were narrative how these mechanical elements were used to develop the characters and express emotions how the non-verbal characterizations of movement and affect did most of the game's heavy lifting in the story department zakiro takes this even farther forcing the player to conform to the exact dimensions of its protagonist not only in how they're represented in the world but in how they must physically respond to it in doing so the game attempts to reduce the distance between player and protagonist to absolute zero you move as wolf would move or you die you think how wolf would think or you die you suffer as wolf had suffered while you die every misstep and ugly death creates sympathy and resonance between the two of you victorious synergy even more so because there is no distance between a player and protagonist as a player progresses through securo there is no gap at the climax between your experience and wolves what he has fought through you have what he has suffered you have what tragic and befalls him is determined by what steps you have taken in your journey to understand what was happening around you and force a more compassionate ending to happen every mechanical difference between sakiro and other from software titles stems from a narrative desire to create as much sympathy and resonance with its title protagonist as possible is someone gone because from software thinks it's a cheat obviously not summoning is not only a bedrock feature of the studio's other games but elden ring expanded the options for summoning hugely no summoning is gone because there are no other concurrent players in the narrative of sakiro there is only wolf to summon would be unsupported by the text of the game the script of it is magic gone because it's a shortcut to success no magic is gone because wolfe is not a sorcerer wolfe speaks through the kusabi maru the rhythm of that sword defines wolf's character as a human being the two are really very inseparable you rely on the sword because the development of his skills as a shinobi is also itself his arc of development as a character is the game so absolutely cruel and strict in its boss encounters because ferocity is the main goal of these games and the studio's just been holding back until now no again these bosses are so difficult so immovable and so impossible because to have them behave with less proficiency in combat or for wolf to behave less proficiently creates a gap between the intention of these characters and their actions on the screen player customization and choice is one approach to reducing this gap a player will dial their character to their own wavelength and thus the character is a closer representation of the player's will and presence within the game sakiro on the other hand gambles it all on the opposite approach the idea that by asking a player to perform in a manner imitative of a shinobi they'll start to feel like one it isn't quite like a simulational difficulty like kingdom come deliverance where large amounts of friction across a multitude of systems are meant to create an impression of fidelity within the setting instead the difficulty in sakiro is purely character driven it doesn't have a multitude of frictional systems instead it has a very focused handful of systems that are beautiful in their elegance and simplicity zakiro is the best game from software has ever made because it's also the best story they've ever told and never before have i seen a game where action and storytelling are so completely indistinguishable from one another it's very funny to me that the exact thing that makes sekiro such an artistic accomplishment is what also makes it so draining and aggravating for me to play in certain instances because as i've discussed across many videos and many ways i am not a master swordsman i do not have the temperament to be a master swordsman and rarely do games ever provide pushback to me about this d d style games and their bioware rpg descendants are a great example numbers matter a lot build matters a certain amount of basic strategy come into play but mostly it's about declaring what kind of dude i want to pretend to be and then pretending to be that way dark souls style gameplay has always prioritized instead animations how does the timing of two or more choices made at the exact same time counter or support those actions is it a parry or is it a miss is it a hit or are you interrupted can you stagger the enemy instead there's no dice rolling at all going on here because it's all physical or an imitation of the physical everything that happens makes visual sense and happens with the weight of a character's proportions in the world in dark souls and bloodborne then i created characters whose rhythms of combat and methods of interaction in combat were suited to my speed of thought and my own reaction speed my inclinations and gut responses there were ways for me to negate and diminish the enemy's array against me many times there would be some kind of climactic duel of equals kind of boss situation where my approach would usually be to create an inequality again through some combination of trinkets armor and magic and with elden ring i was back on my [ __ ] immediately sakiro however has removed all of these approaches and options from the game in a truly comprehensive way the game's ultimate boss of any playthrough ishinoshina says to a player hesitation is defeat every single mechanical game system is directing its force of will into making that statement true especially the biggest change to the combat system the splitting of the health bar into two interwoven elements traditional hit points are actually the secondary less important pool unlike bloodborne you can block as much as you like however blocking an imperfect parrying takes huge chunks out of your posture gauge a large orange bar only through aggression applying constant pressure to enemies and near perfect response via well-timed parries and the appropriate dodge response can you win because all posture bars yours bosses whoevers regenerate infinitely if you hesitate if you stop applying pressure to the enemy the enemy begins to recover and all of your hard work is undone if an enemy or you fail to block or parry then you take actual health damage the lower your health the slower you regenerate your posture so chipping away at health is critical because it allows you to keep the gains you make in combat if you do hesitate some people claim that the boss fights in securo are the easiest and shortest out of all of the from software games and if you're capable of playing perfectly that might actually be true because if you can keep up perfect pressure then the health really doesn't matter at all you can strike a critical blow at the end of a posture bar and two of those will fell most any boss if you make frequent mistakes however this means the opposite is true the fights in securo take longer than any other from software game because if you back off at all to dodge or to reassess the situation you lose the gains you've made in the posture bar only after significant health attrition is the posture recovery for an enemy low enough for me to make hits back off make more hits and progress that way in a more traditional dark souls kind of way hesitation is defeat isn't referring to pure damage it's referring to how the design of the game does not want you to disengage close quarters combat for any reason at any time any slack or advantage you try to give yourself by backing off the enemy simply mirrors recovering in their own way to the point where you can play perfectly for over a minute make two mistakes and have it be like nothing ever happened you're still no better off than you were a minute ago at the beginning of the fight bloodborne's rally mechanic was a matter of positive reinforcement if i play aggressively the way the game wants me to then i'll be refunded some of the health i lose by ignoring my own safety zakiro's posture bars are instead an element of negative reinforcement if i back off to reassess or gain advantage then the game rewinds and reverses the progress i had made as a punishment as an immediate and constant reminder that i am not really supposed to play that way with patience this can be overcome because of incremental progress made by tripping percentages off of the health bar zakiro's combat is meant to be more than anything else dramatic the posture mechanic creates a much more unpredictable back and forth where either protagonist or antagonist can make late fight mistakes or reversals that completely shift the balance of power in a fight it also makes maintaining a lead so much more important than it ever has been before in these games because a lead can be so easily taken away from you now zakiro's boss encounters require total focus not only that but for extremely long periods of time where any deviants from that focus is severely punished the game's final boss sword saint ishen took me an average of 10 minutes per attempt just an endless back and forth and back and forth where i was perpetually outclassed and constantly failing but not failing in a way that reset the encounter failing in tiny ways over and over minute by minute until eventually victory was simply impossible because i had nothing left and he had regenerated his whole posture bar again i truly and honestly hated the way posture made it impossible to brute force an encounter like i would have been able to do in the other games i understood the drama of it but the drama was diminished into nothing by the end of two hours of being stuck two hours that represented maybe only a dozen total attempts for the sword saint the narrative is that this guy is one of the best swordsmen of all time and wolf barely has a chance against him that's the underdog setup and the thing that gives the encounter such impressive narrative weight but it's also the point at which an impossible gulf was developing between me and wolfe the narrative required that he be ever so slightly better than ishan the fact is i'm not at all even close to as good as the ai they gave him i am not a shinobi i've been trying to tell wolf for this the whole time but if i'm not good enough he's not good enough and so the story ends there in failure until such time as i got lucky enough to win i didn't end up beating the sword saint because i learned how i beat him because one time out of a hundred he made an unusual amount of negligent errors in my favor and this was paired with me doing marginally better than usual he still would have gotten me if i hadn't been saving a rare item for just this sort of occasion to let me die one extra time didn't really feel like i won because i hadn't really i just got lucky i hated hated the time i spent stuck on this fight because the outcome was so obviously not in my favor i was never ever going to win through talent alone hours spent stuck on the five didn't get me any closer to winning because the posture system introduced so much unpredictability i could lose any time for any reason for really the sole reason of making two mistakes in a row if i had not been being paid to finish this game and critique it thoroughly i would have absolutely given up on the game and never touched it again at that climactic moment which is what it is for a surprisingly large amount of people the most common response to the question have you played sakiro seems to be oh man that is the best game i ever gave up on an impressive 30 percent of players have defeated sword saint eachine which is much higher than i'd guess it would be but that still leaves a good 70 for whom the official ending is you're not good enough which is something a certain slice of the player base really loves about securo any discussion of securo's difficulty that even suggests that it should make mechanical compromises is invariably met with a chorus of people saying how if you can't beat securo as it is you don't deserve to beat sakiro at all or it's the best because it filters out all the casuals like you zakiro is used in a lot of online conversations as a cudgel a way to shut people up and try to bully them out of having an opinion at all if they end up feeling alienated by its intense difficulty and the lack of ways to mitigate it here in sakiro there was an article a few years back by james davenport called i beat sakiro's final boss with cheats and i feel fine he actually goes into a lot of critical detail about how he lost patience with the game towards the end and used a mod that slows down combat with a slider he didn't even flatly put on god mode invincibility just slowed down the fight to the point where it made more sense to him based on his own reaction speeds something that the granular difficulty of the soul series or elden rank would have already in some way basically accommodated he wrote of his modded victory quote the adrenaline was high the sense of accomplishment's strong the themes and motifs and memories are still flowing through me nothing is lost i love this damn game end quote it's pretty much exactly where i ended up with it as well i could have taken like 20 off the top in terms of damage received and gotten the exact same experience out of it a better one for me even one where i was able to better dial in the difficulty to make sure that i felt as little distance from wolf as possible because as bad as the gulf of distance is that occurs when a player character is supposed to be doing difficult things that the player finds easy the gulf of distance between a player character who is meant to overcome and a player who flatly cannot is more dire and more insurmountable the conversation around non-adjustable difficulty for securo isn't the same as it is for dark souls and its closer descendants in those games the complexity of player customization meant that the elements of difficulty were atomized across hundreds of different distinct categories there simply was no straightforward way to unify those different areas of individual choice into a global set of variables new game plus is close but the global changes it makes are just a desperate bid to keep the difficulty intact versus the player's growing strength shakiro is distinct from those games because it already has not one but two global difficulty variables that change the values for damage given and receive they just don't get a lot of attention because they only make the game harder the first is the demon spell this functions similarly to dark souls 2's covenant of champions as an opt-in mode you can turn on and off that voluntarily adds scaling in the enemy's favor zakiro's second difficulty modifier is only for new game plus cycles wolf has a trinket that kuro the divine heir gave him you can give it back and this will have the same effect as ringing the denon spell you can double up on them to add something like 40 percent total numeric difficulty to the game it is a huge distortion of the initial difficulty gradient making the game harder however is not out of character for wolf the idea behind zakiro's difficulty is that it ought to be towards the top of your abilities as a player you should be challenging yourself these customization options allow very skilled players to retune that difficulty closer to where they're at and maintain the same level of dramatic tension as it is for lower skilled players consider just what this means though the game trusts these higher skilled players to self-define the difficulty upwards if the game feels too easy why is this trust not extended downwards towards a lower skill ceiling consider one of the game's first true boss fights lady butterfly she's a lot like father gascion and that she requires a player to understand their own character to stand a chance against them her fight is in a small arena with nowhere to escape she has a hard-fought first phase and then a second phase that incorporates even more magic in an army of dangerous spirits defeating lady butterfly takes more concentration and more effort than any single boss in the main campaigns of dark souls 1 dark souls 2 dark souls 3 she is just relentless and because of the posture mechanic you have to be even more relentless or you'll die over and over and over this is explicitly your relationship in the narrative she was an old mentor she taught wolf what he knows so she must necessarily know more than wolf or the player at the beginning of the fight be better than they are she is still the teacher and wolfe is still the student at the beginning of the encounter to win the fight you must surpass her in skill both narratively and mechanically and because the two of those things are so intertwined surpassing her mechanically has not only the same weight of meaning as doing so narratively it creates that weight of meaning through the struggle of it a clear concern is that being able to reduce the mechanical difficulty will dilute lady butterfly's presence in the game as a teacher for the student to eclipse if she was any easier this would actually hurt her characterization as a person if you lose to her which i did over and over and over she chides you you are but a poppy she says in a melodic and rhyming tone after three [ __ ] hours of this i was tearing my hair out yes this is exactly correct i am a puppy i'm a puppy now pat me on the [ __ ] head and give me a goddamn treat cut me a god damn break lady butterfly call me a puppy all day long just let me move on i wouldn't have lost a damn thing from my experience if i could turn on puppy mode if puppy mode was an environmental toggle like the demon bell i would have loved the option to toggle it on and off at my comfort i would have liked the same trust extended to the top players to self-determine their correct dramatic temperature of combat extended down towards me here at the bottom the separation between player and player character is closest to zero at the very upper edge of a given player's abilities without the option to self-determine that margin downwards the way it can be bumped upwards another chasm of separation opens up one just as likely to poison the atmosphere of the moment as being too easywood too easy and the enemies don't have the time or the breathing room to express themselves to characterize themselves and contribute to the narrative too hard and it's the player themselves with no avenue of expression unable not just to contribute to the narrative but to move it forward at all there is a harmonious median there and when the game hits that median it is a jaw-dropping thing immersive in an astonishingly robust way zakiro hits that median for me at least two-thirds of the time and that is what kept me going because as soon as i stopped being stuck i was awestruck by it it's just that last third of the experience that made me want to tear my hair out and break my controller in half and it made me want to break my controller in half way more than any of these other games and it is all down to how the posture system punishes mistakes more consistently and more severely than any previous mechanical system in one of these from software games i mentioned davenport's article for another reason it provoked a legendarily unhinged response from the serious gamer crowd to davenport's article which praises zakiro more than anything and ends with the davenport talking about all the wonderful things about sakira that the difficulty conversation paves over and ignores a fellow replied quote you cheated not only the game but yourself you didn't grow you didn't improve you took a shortcut and you gained nothing you experienced a hollow victory nothing was risked nothing was gained it is sad that you don't know the difference end quote and by the standards of villains monologues written by from software super fans and left like little turds and comment sections this is actually pretty tame but it caught on like wildfire as a memetic reference for a long time because of what a dense little nugget of self-aggrandizing [ __ ] it is sakiro is not a tool for self-help or for self-improvement the thing about violence in video games is that nothing is ever risked and nothing is ever gained that's why it's fun it is inherently meaningless beyond the emotions it can provoke as a work of art zakiro is as difficult as it is as a storytelling methodology it's trying to create sympathy and resonance between player and player character by forcing them to walk the same path in the same shoes wolf's separate is always true to the player's effort because anything less means death a player's cleverness is always wolf's cleverness because the interactivity available to you is limited to wolf's tool set and tightly defined navigational boundaries to imagine what securo might be like without such a specific and well-defined protagonist replaced with more of a player insert avatar sort of protagonist you can watch a 1986 eddie murphy comedy called the golden child i'm quite serious to protect a child with a divine destiny a chosen one must defeat an array of supernatural villains and fulfill a little understood prophecy the chosen one in this case just happens to be a private investigator from la who looks for missing children eddie murphy bluffs riffs and rolls his eyes through every aspect of supernatural adventure in the movie which is goddamn hilarious making for a very strange film that suits murphy's comedic style really really well when a player is able to use cheese and underhanded tactics to defeat a boss the vibe is kind of like the golden child you're mockingly taunting the mysteries of the unknown with your big city swagger wolfe would not be behaving in character if he was able to outmaneuver his opponents with outside knowledge saving the day by archly refusing to take the challenges ahead seriously sakiro's mostly non-adjustable difficulty works in tandem with the player's tool set and the very linear level design to keep the storytelling focused in a laser sharp way the only way for different players to express contrasting play styles is to get deep into the prosthetic tools but the first playthrough limits what you have to what you need each tool is a counter for a particular boss when you receive it there isn't a single tool that isn't paired in some way with a specific encounter nevertheless all tools have a more limited effectiveness against all enemies they can be used to really shake up a strategy on our approach like bloodborne's bullets the resource you need to use them is finite and costly i often ran out of spirit emblems when stuck on a boss which requires grinding for cash to buy more yet another element of the game that accumulates punishments for the player when they get stuck sakiro is a limited player economy makes it impossible to rely on the prosthetic tools in any major way they can add extra pressure at critical moments but they depend entirely on the player choosing the correct tool with the correct timing and not just spamming the attack the way a player gets through a given encounter is largely prescribed from the beginning the bosses have slight and specific vulnerabilities that all players will probably exploit in similar ways if not exactly the same way in this way the difficulty in securo is not actually as complex as it is in bloodborne or eldon ring or dark souls as prescriptive as it is as rigid as it is as intensely limited in your player's tool set as it is the structure of the difficulty isn't atomized at all it is a concrete stable thing we already see how the demon's bell and crow's trinket can make that structure taller less surmountable the prosthetic tools provide some customization in some player choice but only in the way that skyscrapers technically do bend in the wind if the structure was absolutely rigid with no give and no take whatsoever it would shatter a skyscraper must be able to sway but it sways imperceptibly within a strategically limited margin zakiro's combat is at once more complex in its interactions and much simpler in its possibilities than other from software titles if the game can be made more difficult using global variable adjustments with no real friction it can easily be reduced in the same way puppy mode wouldn't throw the rhythm of the game off its axis if it readjusted the scaling more in the player's favor all it would take is a little bit of trust trust that the player will do what's most dramatically appropriate for them in a given situation elden rain for what it's worth completely walks back every element of securo severity in favor of player customization from software as a company and a developer is not committed to difficulty for the sake of difficulty the goal always is a difficulty appropriate to the story being told and that is a very hard thing to apply a single universal set of numerical values to sakiro's themes are instantly familiar to anyone who's played a modern from software title before tainted immortality a kingdom and decay supernatural corruption where it differs is in the way it frames and approaches these things and the ways in which a player can agree or disagree with the world and it's ending choices zakiro is a game in which all of its violence and all of its suffering is meant to provide a dramatic contrast to the true question at the heart of the story what are the limits of devotion only one of the four endings embraces the violence that you're embroiled in for the entirety of the game and that is the brightly telegraphed bad ending for wolfe the only thing that matters is kuro the mystical prince of the dragon's heritage that he has sworn to protect in dark souls and bloodborne immortality was a larger thing a cosmic thing a result of the forces of the universe being impeded or stopped up in some way in sakiro it's a rarer stranger magic that leads to more individually tragic outcomes kuro's dragon heritage is a true magic a fragment of the true supernatural immortality of the divine dragon in the spirit realm crow can spread this gift or curse as he chooses but he chooses not to because it only ever brings suffering his child's wisdom is constantly second guessed by the power-hungry adults around him they imprisoned wolf and the imprisoned kuro walking crow away until he willingly lends his magic to the kingdom of ashina so that they can conquer their enemies within and without wolf is the only person that kuro actually agreed to share his gift of immortality with when those who coveted koro's power came after him the first time in the flashback where you fight lady butterfly wolf was mortally wounded hero out of love used the dragon's heritage to save him in return for this there is nothing wolf will not do for curl including severing that supernatural bond that keeps them both alive as long as kuro possesses this gift people will not stop coming after him trying to use him horror and suffering will continue to follow in his wake wherever he goes kuro is portrayed as being very thoughtful and very kind he has a genuinely royal bearing to him and his dignity and his quiet resolve all the slaughter that churns around him is not entirely his fault and yet he takes responsibility for it and he wants it to stop that's the main focus of all of your activities in the game world gathering ingredients for a ritual that will allow kuro to find some measure of peace and in doing so bring peace to the larger kingdom of ashina what manner of ritual you perform determines the ending that you get it's not a very massive wide-ranging plot and it has very few twists in an m night shyamalan kind of way just a lot of clarifying details that add depth and context for the straightforward elements of the plot which leads to the smallest game world in the from software catalog it's possible the dark souls 1 or maybe bloodborne have less physical space and are even more compact maybe but both of those game worlds attempt to suggest a much larger world than the actual square footage programmed into them ashina by contrast is smaller even than what it's artistically suggesting there's the ashina outskirts where you see the castle in the distance and make your way there the castle itself the memory of the harada state battle the hidden mebu village under ashina the nearby mount congo and then the mystical fountainhead palace halfway between ashina and the spirit realm but that is pretty much it just an extremely tight compact neighborhood of maps all of them running right up on top of one another it creates a sense of ascina as being not only a cohesive kingdom but a convincingly provincial one it feels truly isolated and rural from the rest of japan by way of how small it makes itself seem it could easily be tucked away in some small corner of the world and have its own bespoke troubles and the idea that keeping those troubles from reaching the outside world is important is intensified by that consistent sense of isolation by assisting kuro wolfe is kind of sort of saving the world but those are never the stakes for him as a protagonist only his devotion to kuro matters to him and there is nothing he will not push past in pursuit of helping kiro end the curse that's the heart of the game right there wolf doesn't suffer the way he does killing all these impossible opponents for any kind of personal or selfish reason it has nothing to do with being the best nothing to do with competition nothing to do with a revenge nothing to do with punishment if it wasn't for the fact that wolfe was so constantly opposed by lethal measures he wouldn't have to draw a sword at all which gives it a tragic quality no one wants this the purpose of wolf's suffering is to alleviate the suffering of sheena as a whole and yet for reasons of power or reasons of madness or reasons of sorrow or maybe of ignorance almost the entirety of ashina is invested in making sure nothing changes and that the suffering just gets worse the act of the player overcoming the game's mechanical difficulty is a narrative mirror of wolf's attempt to overcome the insistence of this world on abandoning principles and compassion violence is the language that those in power use to destroy their own world violence in return is the only way that they can be forced to listen and the rhythm of the game's combat the exchange of blows is a dialogue of sorts where the most articulate speaker is the victor it's never about pure combat though it's about what's being said by each participant in the dialogue why they choose violence the way that they express that violence the conflicts of securo are spoken out loud from time to time in the script but the real script is written in code instead of english in blood instead of ink with each blow and perry intentional and active will a spoken bit of dialogue a declaration of intent the point of all you're fighting insecure is for the fighting to stop for love to triumph over hate or peace to triumph over war that's neither a simple nor an easy task and so the piece you win is given real powerful weight by the effort of winning it the determination and focus you as a player willingly gave the game that's the art of it not just telling you the moral of the story but through sympathetic participation creating the moral of the story together illustrating it with the work that the players themselves have done co-authoring the meaning of the experience with the audience itself zakiro is not special because it's the only game to do that plenty of games do it's one of the strengths of the medium of video games in general zakiro is special because of the clarity and the grace with which sukiro accomplishes those narrative goals it is doing more with mechanical storytelling than most games ever do because it doesn't seem to believe in any separation between gameplay and narrative because it has looked for the gaps where those separations occur and eliminated them almost completely that is special that is rare that is what makes sekiro the best of them instead of the repeating cosmic cycles of fire in the abyss and dark souls or the churning nightmare of bloodborne sakura's repeating cycles are tied to specific characters and small-scale storytelling the opening cut scene takes place many years in the past when ishan defeated the warlord that used to rule and the present state of ashina began to form ishin is still alive in the game's present tense of severe and mercurial figure all the major npcs in the game have extra dialogue if you bring them sake and drink with them ishen is the most unpredictable drunk out of all of them sometimes he's friendly in the way that a predatory cat can purr from time to time but often he uses these moments to taunt or to threaten seguro he knew al sekira's adoptive father who found him on the battlefield and only adopted him because he did not flinch from a killing blow ishan's distaste for owl is actually an act of foreshadowing in three of the four endings you fight your father figure mandatorily once optionally twice by way of another memory of the night that the harada's date burned the two fights especially the optional one are just about the hardest in the game because of owl's tremendous strength and vitality he takes longer to put down than just about anyone besides the final version of sword saint ishin he uses the shinobi's tool set just like sakiro does making his moveset extremely unpredictable let's consider how owl is developed as a character through his actions in these two fights we know him already as a severe even cruel person from his dialogue in the cutscenes he has some love and some pride for wolf but wolf is a tool to him and not a true person it was owl who arranged the attacks in the harada state he was the reason why lady butterfly fought you to begin with they were working together to oppose sekiro and to take kuro in the present tense of the story owl does it again using the interior ministry's attack on ashina is covered to infiltrate the palace and confront kuro demanding the prince share his immortality when kuro refuses owl tries to force his adopted son to make kerou do it demanding that wolfe adhere to the iron code that he grew up with which states that his loyalty to owl matters more than anything else any other pledge the narrative pull is towards rejecting that demand which branches towards three of the four endings fighting owl is like fighting a much larger more powerful version of your own character in the transition between phases of the fight owl pretends to be more wounded than he actually is trying to trick you he fights aggressively and he fights dirty nothing is sacred to owl nothing is off limits the narrative choice to reject owl's imposition as an authoritarian father figure is justified by the way owl behaves towards the player character in the fight he has no love no regret instead he's full of narcissistic wrath towards wolf's audacity in ever defying him in the first place the iron code was not a code of honor it was a shackle to keep wolf locked in a lifelong cycle of violence the flashback doubles down on this characterization both narratively and mechanically instead of great shinobi owl is now labeled simply as father you fight in the same burning box arena that you fought lady butterfly except now it's twice as difficult and twice as sad both of wolf's parent figures attempt to kill him in this same smoke-filled room they do this because they value their hunger for power greater than they valued him as a son or as a student they betray him in one of the most deep fundamental ways possible in wolfenstein the new colossus when bj blaskowitz is confronting his own father's betrayal along similar lines the moment is mostly relegated to a cut scene we experienced the scene passively actors exchanging dialogue in a controlled scene until just one moment of reaction only now that's not due to lack of creativity wolfenstein's first-person shooter mechanics simply don't dramatically support the mood of the moment with the verbs of its gameplay a shootout with the elder blaskowitz being able to soak multiple hits would cheapen the moment and sap it of its weight if he only took a single bullet then there's no real interactivity there to justify using mechanics to resolve the scene instead of dialogue at all here in securo with owl the mechanical aspect of the boss fight is used to express and explore the depth of owl's betrayal every swing of his sword is a spiteful act severing their bond even when the blow is parried all of owl's nasty tricks just underline his fundamental lack of regard or respect towards wolf and defeating him resolves what good there was in the relationship between them if owl taught his wayward wolf cub anything it's how to fight how to kill in being killed by his adopted son owl has triumphed despite himself in a very strange way the core of his being has still been passed on successfully his plans unrealized his only real legacy still continues in the world in the form of wolf's skills in that moment of death the great shinobi is proud of the lesser shinobi the mantle passes wolf is in victory finally free of him and free to define something new for himself a weight is lifted but the connection between them is permanent in learning in sword style the ashina style your teacher says quote it is our school of fighting but there are no hard and fast rules you just win your battles that alone is the most important rule of the ashina style end quote owl's method of fighting without hesitation or regret is what makes him the great shinobi he wins his battles no matter what he's no role model but he is a mere what wolf could become if not for his devotion to curl and indeed that's the entire point of the shura ending both ishan and emma warn about this during the sake drinking sessions emma talks about how she was trained to use a sword but only in her capacity as a healer she would only kill a demon ishman explains what sort of demon wolf is at risk of becoming quote those who go on killing will eventually become shura they don't even remember why simply enraptured they kill solely for the joy it brings them i see it in your eyes too the shadow of shura give me cars and i will kill you it would do you well to remember that so in this ending where you stay loyal to the iron code and go fetch crow for owl both emma and the old issue oppose you it's a much easier ending than any of the other climactic models emma is a fierce opponent graceful and swift but she is not as aggressive as even lady butterfly was cutting emma down is sad the relative ease of doing so underlines what's sad about it because she knew that this ending would happen just this way and opposes you anyway because it's still the right thing to do shura the rising hatred this aged version of isian that you fight next has only one arm he uses it well but he even has one less phase as a boss than his supernaturally younger version and the other three endings of the three fights owl emma the older isian owl is mechanically the hardest because the act of doing the right thing is narratively the path of most resistance it requires bravery rejecting the bonds of childhood when those bonds become toxic it requires dedication pushing past this ending for hours more gameplay and even greater spikes in the mechanical difficulty it requires skill greater skill than defeating a lifelong pacifist in an old man zakiro is a tremendously violent game yet at nearly every turn of the narrative it treats violence with sadness and regret in staying loyal to owl the one armed wolf betrays himself and staying loyal to kuro staying true to himself he betrays his whole upbringing and in rejecting that path saves himself from the consumptive fires of shura owl is not the only potential future for wolfe reflected in an npc storyline one of the most tragic figures in zakirow is the sculptor a former shinobi who also lost his arm and once crafted for himself the prosthetic that he gifts to wolf following the events of the introduction the sculpture story only ends up rising to significance if the player does not choose the shura ending the game must go on through several new chapters to suss out the totality of his fate the sculpture story comes out extremely slowly and involves threading together some very disparate objects and interactions long ago the sculptor fought alongside ishin under the name orangutang and in doing so almost lost himself to shura ishin cut off the sculptor's arm to prevent this transformation this bloodlust was driven partially by the loss of the woman that he loved a warrior named kingfisher they traveled through the monkey-filled lower valleys of ashina moving like the monkeys living like them swinging through the trees and answering to no one however there was one ape in the valley unlike the others undying corrupted hateful kingfisher fought with it and she never returned to find the first ingredient of kuro's incense to access the spirit world you've got to fight that same ape in one of the most famous boss encounters in securo guardian ape is unafraid when you meet him sitting in a sad little swamp with his back turned when you get close he does turn around just like vicar emilia did with that same predatory smile that is absolutely chilling then it's on he behaves like he looks as a beast colossal and strength towering in his rage he'll pick you up and bash you into the ground tossing around like a ragdoll and that's not even the best part several of his attacks involve literal [ __ ] if you're attacking him from behind he will shart on you in a poisonous cloud if you're very far away from him he'll toss a boulder of his own poop at you to stun you as he leaps in for the kill the guardian ape has to put it lightly no sense of dignity and no sense of self-respect he is pure animalistic spite and hatred personified it's a hell of a fight too so unlike anything else in the game the movements are closer to a traditional dark soul-style boss encounter than most any other but even then the guardian ape is faster meaner more distinctive and this rude farting phase is just one of four stages in the encounter the phase ends with wolfe grabbing hold of the rusted blade still embedded in the guardian ape's neck pulling that sword through and finishing the job that kingfisher could not the screen flashes shinobi execution the task is done and what a hard-won victory it was it's over right so you walk away and then the body quivers animated by a kind of strange centipede the body attacks wolf anew except all of its movements have changed to a languid and serpentine rhythm that is hugely different from the previous moveset it's aggressive but in delayed and arrhythmic patterns if animalistic spite was the characterization before now it's insectile difference an alien uncomfortable thing in every way when you come back this way again the body is gone fled further down into the ashina depths phase three is just the same as phase two but it's only a warm-up upon reaching the fourth phase the headless ape is joined by his old mate another colossal ape however this brown one isn't immortal and doesn't have the same monster strength of that supernatural aspect it is a more manageable phase than it looks like at first the added opponent even provides an opportunity to recharge a point of your resurrective power if you've gone down one in the previous phase here finally you've rested that centipede from the fleshy refuge it's found itself in and you slaughter it severing the immortality a whole new on-screen message later a spirit boss appears in this room and drops kingfisher's old ring this is paired with a treasure that you pulled from the guardian apes corpse the first time you killed it a severed finger that once belonged to kingfisher as well if you give the finger to the sculptor to turn it into a tool he creates a whistle out of it it plays a sad song that mesmerizes certain enemies now all game long the sculpture has been carving buddhas to try to quench his hatred and to stave off the oncoming shura transformation he knows one day he will fail towards the very end of the game that day comes he's gone when you go back to him and if you follow in his tracks through an entirely optional retread of the ashina outskirts area you find him consumed by shura and fully transformed into the demon of hatred one of the only purely supernatural creatures in the entire game if you have kingfisher's ring and her finger whistle you can create an object called malcontent the strange sad tune of this whistle affects only the undead and the demon of hatred the song stirs a memory of love of devotion to something beyond killing and violence in the sculpture it stops the demon in its tracks but like father gascion's music box it only works three times and then enrages him the demon of hatred is an almost impossible foe without mouth content it's close to impossible even with it but you push through it for the same reason ishin cut off the sculpture's arm the same reason that emma tries to kill you if you follow the iron code because if shura burns away everything that the person used to be the only way to honor that gone away person is to extinguish the flame of hatred before it consumes and burns everything around it it's an act of compassion a dispassionate violence put towards the goal of ending the intemperate violence of hatred and there but for your own careful exploration as a player goes wolf in the most basic ending besides the shura ending the only way wolf knows to sever kuro from the dragon's heritage is to slay him with the mortal blade your god-killing sword the same thing that lets you kill the guardian ape wolf hesitates for the first canonical time hiro insists though this last measure of loyalty of devotion is the hardest allowing kuro to sacrifice himself thus ending the cycle of violence by ending his own existence it works in severing the bonds of immortality as the mortal blade was fated to do but it doesn't work in ending the cycle of violence one armed broken wolf begins carving the buddhas now too staving off sure until it finally overwhelms him in the end the last scene of this ending has emma bringing him back the prosthetic not for wolf to use but to pass on to the next shinobi all that effort for nothing for no one wolf will carve the buddhas until he loses his last battle the battle for his own soul when the fires of hatred the flicker at the edges of his vision grow so bright is to blind him to everything that he used to be it's actually only in defeating owl the father during that optional fight that a better ending than pensively carving the buddha even becomes possible because it turns out that owl was the perpetrator of a small seeming crime with far reaching implications outside the shaina castle is a mystical tree the ever blossom and one day someone stole a branch from it nothing has been right since the entire kingdom of china is geographically united by a river flowing from the divine realm above to the depths below the ever blossom is a gift from the divine realm and in herding the tree the theft of that branch caused damage to the greater spiritual fabric of the entire kingdom now instead of just water corruption flows down from the fountainhead palace pooling in that swamp for the guardian ape dwelled the way the curse of immortality works in shakiro is interesting because there's both a spiritual and a practical explanation for it the spiritual explanation is that it's a corruption the divine dragon's immortality kind of like how kuru can spread immortality through the dragon's heritage but made common and foul through the damage done to the ever blossom the practical explanation is not unlike the plague of beasts in bloodborne let's actually venture back a bit to the deepest parts of the chalice dungeons there's a boss in there called the bloodloving beast but according to independent translations the original japanese title of the boss is host of the beast blood implying that it's one of the oldest of yharnam's beasts there's three versions to fight two normal one headless and it's the headless one that's so surprising in how it connects forward mechanically and visually this is very clearly a prototype version of the guardian ape fight phases two through four tucked away here where hardly anyone will find it a centipede sprouts from his neck controlling the body the infestation might be unrelated to the curse of the beast but i feel like host of the blood implies otherwise i feel like it implies that this controlling worm is the purest form of bestial corruption the centipede is the source of all this false toxic immortality that you see throughout sekiro through many bosses and even through some npcs in fact you meet someone infested with a worm almost right away in the dilapidated shrine that serves as the very limited hub area for securo there's a despondent warrior who cannot no matter what he tries die he agrees to be your sparring partner you can practice most of the basic techniques of combat on him in a resource neutral environment before you risk it all by going out into the broader game world when you acquire the mortal blade many many hours later he's intrigued he asks for a day to prepare then he can come back and kill him finally wolfe slices him open pulls forth the centipede and lets him die at last what a way to live is immortality still appealing to you if your body is just a husk for a parasitic insect seems unpleasant and also puts the poisonous parts of the guardian ape into more disgusting context the insides of its body must be mostly dead and what isn't dead is probably corrupted beyond measure imagine being conscious of this process to some degree to find the source of the guardian apes corruption just move upstream the fountainhead palace is built around a lake a lake filled with carp the great carp never dies the great carp is worshiped and fed and the great carp is infested with just the same centipede you find the skeleton of another carp at the bottom of the lake and its bones are filled with these glowing green worms larva perhaps if you poison the great carp at the behest of one of the mutant nobles who want to take its place its corpse washes all the way downstream to the guardian ape swamp arena for all the religious and political significance placed on the gift of corrupted immortality the game goes out of its way to portray it as a biological problem even if it has a supernatural root and political implications the fountainhead palace is guarded by a monk who's also got the corruption this fight is one of the most beautiful arenas in the game a painted bridge with trees waning sunlight filtering through the leaves the corrupted monk's rhythms are much like the guardian ape once it loses its head serpentine looping fighting earlier bosses requires kind of an instant response but undead and corrupted bosses in securo delay the impact of their attacks from the initial movement in unpredictable ways this difficult to predict rhythm is extremely engaging forcing a player to pay attention in a way contrary to their established habits the corrupted monks attacks are gorgeous whirling motions the characterization that comes through is split then between the skill and wits of a time before and the creeping insectile influence of the immortality granting parasite within them the elegance of their former life emphasizes the creepiness of what happened to them later to corrupt them the fountainhead palace itself is crumbling too a beautiful thing suffering from tremendous neglect fighting through it is difficult but at the top is a small mountain where the divine dragon can be found the first phase of the fight with the fine dragon is fascinating because it so clearly shows the difference between the corrupted immortality and the dragon's heritage you find a resplendent and massive manifestation of the ever blossom and all these small aspects of the dragons swarm out by hitting them you purify them scraping off the poison with the edge of your blade when all the corruption has been swept away the dragon is freed allowed to appear in its full glory mechanically it's kind of a gimmick fight but artistically i think it's very beautiful one of the most truly gorgeous boss fights in the entire from software catalog critically you are not trying to kill it you need only a single tier your fight is to subdue the dragon get close to it and then extract what's sympathetically called the gracious gift of tears it is impossible to kill that which is truly timeless and unchanging but to take the tear is to borrow the essence of the dragon if you only have the tears crow must die if you have the branch that owl stole elso the branch taken from the ever blossoms aspect in the mortal realm another ending is possible only wolf was given the pure version of immortality by kuro if this one connection to the spirit realm is severed and the branch restored the burden of the dragon's heritage will just dissipate only wolf has to die and for him that's a very easy choice kuro said to him earlier quote how many times have you died and come back for my sake two three times or perhaps a number so large that it cannot be counted i do not wish to bind you to an eternity of on death end quote that line hits so hard because for the average player the number is already beyond counting and this acknowledgment of the depth of effort on the player's part and wolf's part refocuses on the single reason wolff does it devotion curl is what matters to wolfe he would do anything for curl this last final step of the journey is hardly a burden it's simply his own gracious gift of tears there's a resonance between that ending and bloodborne sunrise ending where you willingly allow german to decapitate you waking you from the hunter's dream zakiro isn't as forceful with a theme as dark souls but the idea in really all of these spin-off titles is that sometimes the greatest act of virtue is in letting go especially if the letting go is hard it would follow the same pattern of endings as bloodborne that would be that for sakiro but instead the actual best ending is a matter of even greater player investment and exploration interacting with an entirely different set of side quests and themes one of the most interesting places in the game is the senpu temple on mount congo a buddhist monastery that's cast aside his teachings to worship instead the corruptive worm the game doesn't spell it out with total clarity because it kind of assumes familiarity with buddhism but to become obsessed with eternal life is to stray about as far from the teachings of the buddha as it's possible to get in the buddha's second sermon he describes the importance of understanding that your existence is not something you really own or have control over quote consciousness is not self worth consciousness self then this consciousness would not lead to affliction and one could have it of consciousness let my consciousness be thus let my consciousness be not thus how do you conceive it is form permanent or impermanent i say it is impermanent is what is impermanent painful or pleasant i say it is painful are those which are impermanent and painful since subject to change fit to be regarded thus this is mine this is i this is myself is feeling permanent or impermanent is perception permanent or impermanent are determinations permanent or impermanent is consciousness permanent or impermanent so because any kind of form whatever whether past future or presently arisen whether gross or subtle whether in oneself or external whether inferior or superior whether far or near must with right understanding how it is be regarded thus this is not mine this is not i this is not myself end quote in buddhism rebirth or reincarnation is an incredibly important aspect of belief all humans are trapped in samsara the endless wandering circles of life and death only enlightenment can break those cycles buddhism positions itself as the path and process by which to achieve enlightenment to transcend the self and by doing so also transcend the repeating cycles of life and death however transcending the cycle means accepting that the self is largely an illusion the sermon continues quote when a noble follower who has heard the truth sees thus he finds estrangement in form he finds estrangement and feeling he finds estrangement in perception he finds estrangement and determinations he finds estrangement in consciousness when he finds estrangement passion fades out with the fading of passion he's liberated when liberated there is knowledge that he is liberated and he understands birth is exhausted the holy life has been lived out what can be done is done of this there is no more beyond end quote so you can see here that this is spiritually the opposite of eternal physical life it is quite deliberately accepting that there is no more life once samsara is transcended a translation of the word nirvana from sanskrit reads as blowing out or extinguishing the self suffering continues for as long as you hold on to ignorance and desire you will live and die an uncounted ocean of lives until you finally release yourself from samsara through a determined thoughtful disengagement from the very idea that you have ownership of your body and your mind that these things are permanent or unique with the fading of passion you are liberated if the right understanding according to buddhism is that one must say to the form they inhabit this is not mine this is not i i am not myself then eternal life in a single physical body is a complete rejection of just about every basic tenet of the religion it is heresy sacrilege a sin in some sense although buddhism doesn't much use the word sin more it is fundamentally cruel in a spiritual way to trap a being in a single form not only denies them the chance to transcend samsara through enlightenment it denies them the chance to participate in the karmic cycle of being reborn into higher or lower realms you cannot learn or improve as a spiritual being while stagnating in such a way the monks of senpu temple here in saqiro didn't stop at spiritual cruelties either they sure killed a lot of people they tried to create a divine heir of their own one they could control one born somehow from the tainted immortality of the infestation the monks experimented on children and they were partially successful kuro has a twin of sorts and the divine child of the rejuvenating waters the innocent result of the terrible experiments by the monks she holds the mortal blade and will give it to anyone who survives on sheathing it wolf dies of course but he can do that from time to time so he does get to keep the blade eventually the divine child asks for help understanding what she is and why she is necessitating a search for some of the monk's scant few documents if you arrive at mount congo early however a monk will just straight up give you the papers apologizing for what they had done and wanting her to understand the text reads for an age i have been blessed by the worm to be undying is to walk the eternal path to enlightenment thus i must become enlightened to understand why i cannot die it is said the holy dragon's origins were in the west so i wonder how did this worm come to be bestowed upon me end quote the latter half of this is tying the lore together attaching the origins of the worm to the decay of the ever blossom the early part however is illustrating the train of thought that derailed the entire monastery if nirvana is the thing that lifts people out of samsara and the wheel of samsara stops spinning doesn't that mean enlightenment has been achieved haven't they reached to the end of their spiritual journey that they were on just by way of a supernatural shortcut other characters in the game constantly emphasize how these monks abandoned the way of the buddha but you can see how they arrived at that conclusion and that's what makes it tragic one of the best netflix series ever made was midnight mass a vampire story that takes an unusually deep interest in catholicism this is a spoiler if you have not seen the show but the twist that's done so beautifully is that the church's flock are being transformed into a vampire worshiping cult by the priest who discovered the creature trapped under the sands on a church-sponsored trip to jerusalem in the holy land he describes the moment in third person saying quote those eyes eyes and skin and hands but also wings a sense of great wings unfolding him and his mind finally found the word the word was unearthed by his fear like the tomb was unearthed by the storm and the word was angel angel and he was so afraid end quote the vampire showed the priest what the priest wanted to see and the priest did not ask questions he gave himself over to the religious ecstasy of finally seeing proof of his faith after a lifetime of only prayer angel he thinks and angels are good godly his faith is corrupted from that moment forward because he does not question he believes uncritically and in doing so allows his faith to be twisted into something truly dark he accepts what's right in front of him without interrogating the ways it actually contradicts all of his lifelong beliefs which is what happens to the monks of senpu temple with the infestation the worm gums up the wheel of samsara it stops the wheel of samsara from turning and if the wheel has stopped then we must have arrived the divine child understands this too but can't bring herself to forgive them the grievousness of this mistake which is understandable the only thing she can do is try to use her powers to help so when she hears of karo and his quest to sever his own immortality she sets her whole being to the task of helping him do it the divine child's desire to help kuro creates a kind of parallel main quest where while he's trying to find the ingredients for an incense that will allow access to the fountainhead palace she's trying to find two serpent's hearts that will cause her to undergo very strange changes she can give shakiro a powerful item that quickly restores posture a pile of rice that she simply wills into existence giving wolf this rice exhausts her eventually and then she'll ask for a persimmon fruit this symbolic fruit will restore her essence to truly help kuro she asks for two very special persimmons one dried one fresh these aren't actually fruits she's asking for the hearts of two giant serpents one long dead whose heart was placed in a hidden temple and one still alive who corners wolf in a deep valley very early on in the game wolfe stabs into the eye in a spectacular way during that encounter and during the regular course of play the serpent isn't much heard from again after that but there is still a secret hidden path that allows wolfe to ambush the serpent and take its heart there's no fight just a long drop to a magnificent kill however these last two items are even more obscure than the incense ingredients those lie at the end of the main paths these flesh persimmons are deeply hidden in order to kill the living snake you have to use a very late game ability that allows you to temporarily turn enemies you kill from stealth to your side one very particular enemy at a very particular place flies a kite if you use this technique the kite then becomes a grapple point and off you go unlike bloodborne whose optional content was truly optional finding all the endings in securo requires exploring pretty much every inch of the map and exploring the broad majority of all npc character interactions the insularity of ashina as a single rural kingdom in an actual historical period allows all of the world building to weave together tighter than the other games that from software's done dark souls and eldon ring had to invent whole cosmologies pantheons they had to define the boundaries of their settings on the fly zakiro instead is free to focus on a small window of a couple generations of time and just a few square miles of physical space almost every single thing in the game has some sort of explanation or connection to something else almost nothing exists in a narrative vacuum the cohesion is frankly amazing there's even a strange gimmick fight that people like to point out as an example of something being underexplained in an obtuse detail that isn't actually meaningful there is one single european style knight in the whole game guarding a bridge to senpu temple he can't be killed by your blade though his plate armor is simply too tough so you have to knock him off the bridge instead and let gravity do the work as he goes down he screams robert and obviously for a name to ashina so what's his deal is he just like a reference to the dark souls games that came before well no you find clarifying details to discuss how he had ventured from the far west to try to appeal to the monks of senpu temple to use the rejuvenating waters to heal his son robert he opposes you because he thinks you're cutting in line essentially and as he falls to his death his last thought is of how he failed his own son so it's not actually just a surface reference it's a whole integrated side plot just a very small one the density of detail and purposefulness of detail in sakiro really is a rare thing this has helped along considerably by the game's artistic sensibilities when it's doing cut scenes and dialogue sure it has some referential connections to classic anime titles like ninja scroll or roni kenshin or berserk but none of that has any bearing on the main aesthetic instead the closest point of reference is going way back in japanese pop culture to the heyday of akira kurosawa and the samurai epic these movies can be slow in the pacing by modern standards but the set design the costume design the cinematography the deeply emotive acting styles of that era are incredibly close to the whole vibe that sukiro is going for as of this writing there's a lot of nice restored versions from the criterion collection of a lot of kurosawa films and there are times when you could one for one transfer certain elements of kurosawa movies over to sakiro and have it feel right at home especially like this shakespeare influence 1957 title throne of blood that movie's mood its visuals its costumes the whole forest of fog and ghosts with the ill-fated fortress hidden at the center it's with this tradition that securo best fits in it a ghost woman tells the ambitious and doomed samurai his prophecy and when he tries to buck his fate she offers him some new advice she says quote if you choose ambition lord then choose it honestly with cruelty if you would make a mountain of the dead pile it so that it reaches the sky if you would shed blood let it run as a river end quote the ghost offers this advice knowing it will lead to ruin but it will also lead to victory for a time and is this not what the fickle hearts of mortals desire to burn brightly before being snuffed out when i heard that line i thought a lot about ishinoshina and his grandson genocido your principal antagonist what is the cost of a shina style to win your battles no matter what well the cost is that the battle never ends endless life fueling an endless war that's what genachiro wants from kuro that's why he's kidnapped the divine air and why he and sakiro are fighting over the boy ganochero has embraced what the protagonist of throne of blood embraced too to the same effect his ambition is limitless and he is honest about it at one point in throne of blood an old samurai sings a song and he might as well be singing about kenichiro he sings quote all of you wicked people listen while i tell of a man vain guileful vile who though ambitious and insolent could not escape his punishment ganojiro would do anything to escape that punishment ducking the cost of his ambition even if it takes rivers of blood flowing from mountains of the dead to do it a fantastic choice on securo's part is to default to its original japanese language voice track with subtitles vocal performances are incredible that way even if you're reading the subtitles the rhythm and intonation of the original japanese is really important to making sure the characterizations all come through plus the setting is so gloriously rich in historical references it is simply more immersive to have everything culturally consistent one of my favorite horror movies in the past few years is the platform a spanish title where a lot of the violence is largely symbolic to sell the heavy allegory though are some extremely charming and strange performances if you watch it in spanish i've tried often to recommend the movie and the folks who bounce off at the hardest are generally the people who tried to watch the english dub version it just doesn't have the same sly intricately atmospheric delivery as the original actors in their original voices i know sakiro comes with an english dub but i can't imagine the game would have the same impact playing it that way an incredibly large amount of the atmosphere and tonality comes from the voice work and presentation alone an equally large portion comes from more universal elements like the critical hit system once any enemy's posture bar is fully depleted and you go in for the killing blow marked by a moody red dot the camera swings in close and often at entirely different angles than the default one you're always invulnerable during those moments so you can focus on the visceral thrill of them enjoy the small rush of victory without worrying about it each enemy has different death animations so while after many hours with the game there's certainly a lot of repetition it takes plenty of time to get to the point of those animations being oversaturated and the thrill for me never really diminished rhythmically it is so perfect every time that red dot appears a crescendo to your flurry of blows that fluidly resolves the whole series of motions in a dark way these animations are often quite striking and almost beautiful the invulnerability during the animation is such a kind and clever idea too because the way it allows the brain to focus on and enjoy the victory free from an immediate worry that puts you at risk it is never a risk to win that way it's only ever a good thing one of the few mechanics in the game without an obvious downside that clink clink clank stab rhythm when working through weaker enemies just never gets old it feels absolutely goddamn incredible every [ __ ] time and as a final release of tension built up by the aggressive pressure you need to apply to the bosses it could not possibly feel more climactic as such the new game plus mode of securo is very different from the other from software titles the goal is not to dramatically alter the difficulty so much as keep it in total stasis after the first maximum thresholds for health and damage are reached you don't really scale beyond them much on any new game plus playthrough health not at all and damage output very little the bosses scale pretty highly however and this is mostly to negate the new prosthetic tools that he might be fighting them with making sure that there's no automatic victory even with inventory you would have not otherwise possessed in the initial playthrough the game is balanced just about exactly where it wants to be in all ways and even when it does begin to sway and distort into higher tiers of new game plus scaling it's more interested in preservation than experimentation if the numbers change out of sync too much the physical rhythm of the game will also change too much i've talked a lot about how alienating and excessively frustrating it can be to become stuck in securo but i only really ever got stuck on a few of the bosses and when that was over i was breathlessly immersed once again zakiro was one of the most surprisingly artistically dense titles that i have ever played i was so put off by its reputation for difficulty and its actual difficulty on playing it that i nearly passed by all it had to offer but i'm glad that i stuck with it long enough to figure out what i would have been missing otherwise zakirow is cinematic in ways that cutscene driven games have only ever gestured towards i'm still in shock that this one of the hardest action games that i've ever even tried to play uses every ounce of that difficulty for dramatic purposes to tell a better story in a more novel way take the most offensively spiteful mechanic dragonrot as you die and come back your resurrective power doesn't come from nowhere you drain and you sicken those around you if you become stuck dying over and over and over over hours you become unable to complete quests for any npc who becomes ill at first this seems like a heavy burden and a huge consequence and i admit it made me almost not want to even start the game when i was initially reading about it to be actively punished in my ability to complete the story because i suck at the mechanics that sounds like [ __ ] except this two is story the dragon's heritage is much more curse than gift mechanically speaking dragon rod loses his bite by the mid game you can cure every afflicted npc with one use of a pretty common item you just need to wait until you get past the point where you're stuck and then you can erase the consequence immediately and if you're on a boss loop you don't really need the npcs available to you immediately anyway ordinarily a person would discharge their own karmic debts through the wheel of samsara without that the consequences are just applied outwardly indiscriminately a supernatural rot that parallels the endless wars of genetics ambition narratively speaking this lends urgency to kuro's quest to sever this connection and it lends weight to the final ending where you don't sever that connection at all the divine child of the rejuvenating waters uses those serpent hearts to create a place in her own being where kuro's whole essence dragon's heritage and all can rest and be returned to the west from which it came kuro does die in a physical way but both divine children become two as one the rift is ended the opposites are unified sakiro carries on his duties as a shinobi and they all prepare to make the journey to the divine dragon's true home an ending of hope and restoration only made possible by a player's completionist exploration by their insatiable craving for answers to the game's myriad cryptic questions unlike dark souls being cryptic is neither the point nor the procedure for sekiro it is a single concrete story being told in an atomized but comprehensive way it's tight compact and indifferent to an individual player's preferences in face of its own storytelling priorities that was enough to make sakiro a masterpiece but it wasn't the right formula to make it a hit and so a game studio that had achieved its most diamond dense creation yet pivoted away from almost every design priority that securo championed to deliver instead the most staggeringly decompressed dungeon crawl that the gaming industry has seen in years eldon ring could never have appeared in a vacuum it's a transformative milestone for open world game design the way skyrim had been back in 2011 but like skyrim the studio had decades of games before it that struggled to achieve mega hit status skyrim would never have been so impressive without oblivion before it elden ring would not have been the incredible game it is if not for dark souls demon souls bloodborne sakiro going further back into kingsfield all these games taught lessons about what works and what doesn't what mechanics and themes people engage with or don't and all these lessons accumulate into a plan for the future sakiro is an incredible beautiful title but its strictness was isolating dark souls and bloodborne had made more impact on pop culture and the broader discussions about from software in general sakira was comparatively more of an art house effort and it had an art house impact it takes effort and context for the audience to truly get the most out of it little about seguro is instantly recognizable or familiar elder wing's first key to success was that it didn't alter the formula of combat that from software had been refining for so long it didn't debase or diminish itself in any way to create that element of familiar connection that was a little bit lacking in secure instead of altering the formula it altered the format having a big open world isn't much of a notable thing anymore open world formatting is one of the most prominent elements of the ubisoft style monogame further including unlockables light rpg progression and an endless series of map icons assassin's creed far cry horizon zero dawn and forbidden west days gone watchdogs there are creatively distinct things about all of these games but when it comes down to it an understanding of how to progress through one game is extremely transferable to all of the others they aren't surprising so much as they are comforting a player develops a groove the sequels and sibling games lay down that groove again it becomes a habituated process at first it seems like elden ring being an open world game is kind of a risk and kind of a leap for the developer but i'm inclined to argue that the open world aspect of illinois is actually the most creatively conservative aspect of the game keeping the strange and extremely particular style of combat rhythm that from software has been perfecting for so many years is the risky part of it the leap is in continuing to make games in just the way they've always done despite all prevailing trends and fads common wisdom says that to popularize you have to compromise eldon ring i think is such a uniquely impactful title because it ignored that wisdom instead of compromising changing format allowed her to compete in a creative subgenre that had been rather comfortable and stagnant for a good few years running it didn't matter that the dark souls gameplay loop dates back to 2009 compared to the open world games around it eldon ring was as fresh as the fallen snow the basic marketing pitch of eldon ring is that it's a big aaa open world game that's a little more deliberately challenging than most and a good deal more visually striking that's all it needed to be to get people started on being curious on the surface level it seems approachable familiar in format familiar and purpose familiar in some of the visual language of high fantasy that it uses under the surface it is the same level of open complexity as any of the dark souls games the same vibrancy of world building as bloodborne and the same breathless speed of combat as securo it doesn't start out as wickedly hard as bloodborne does either creating not just a tutorial area but a whole tutorial region that is remarkably forgiving buy from software standards there's time to find your footing as a new player breathing room to adapt to the expectations ahead by the optional end game areas elden ring is certainly as hard as anything that from software has ever done it just takes a whole hundred hours of boiling the frog to get there incrementally advancing through a lengthened power curve and an ever-expanding map where securo was focused and committed to a single character with a limited tool set elden ring seeks to be as expansive and free as possible with hundreds of potential builds based on hundreds of different spells and weapons in an interview with the playstation official blog franchise creator hidetaka miyazaki said quote in elden ring we have not intentionally tried to lower the game's difficulty but i think more players will finish it this time as i mentioned the player's level of freedom to progress through the world or return to a challenge later are all elements that i feel will help people get through the game at a more leisurely pace also there isn't a focus on pure action the player has more agency to dictate their approach against for example the field bosses in the overworld and how they utilize stealth in various situations we've even reduced the number of hoops that you have to jump through in order to enjoy multiplayer so we hope that players embrace that idea of receiving help from others and we feel like the overall clear rate will go up this time because of these things end quote as shocking and painful as it may be for some from software super fans to hear miyazaki's creative goal is not to filter out the casuals and create a rarefied realm of gaming where only the most hardcore can flourish his goal is to create a complex world where players can thrive within that complexity eldenwing's genius is that it does not on the surface appear to be an especially novel or challenging game it seems familiar and approachable oh hey a big open world fantasy epic i know that one once that door is open though and the player steps across the threshold every brilliant facet of the game's unique creativity just glows all the brighter elden ring is not a perfect game but it is idiosyncratic which is almost as good and just as rare nothing about eldon ring is unfamiliar if you've gotten really into dark souls or bloodborne or especially both but the open world format helps pace and distribute the content in a wholly new way that makes it much more approachable there are long dungeons in the game even whole cities as dungeons that are every bit the length and complexity of irithyll and dark souls 3 for example but these are climactic and rare instances for the most part the open world allows for small dungeons and discrete encounters that take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes part of what's intimidating about dark souls style game design is the density of it careful exploration of every part of the map before moving on is more or less an essential survival tactic they are massive commitments of focus and attention as far as games go consider sakiro a game whose few individual levels could take over an hour to complete punctuated by boss fights so intense they could take hours more not everyone has the emotional bandwidth or the free time for that kind of game experience broad appeal isn't always about being without friction or inoffensive these dungeons and side bosses can be exceptionally difficult especially in the later regions broad appeal can instead be approached by reducing mental barriers to entries such as decompressing the dungeoneering into hundreds of small chunks instead of a dozen overwhelmingly intricate maps the player's pavlovian rush from success comes earlier and more often the player's frustrations with failure represent a smaller time commitment and less overall time lost to fail states it's an easier pill to swallow that way all the way around another way this contributes to broader appeal and accessibility is that in making those dungeon chunks so small and generally manageable this hundred plus hour game can be tackled an hour at a time and still allow a player to feel like they got a lot done and really got somewhere you could clear two to four major encounters in that time where i'll spend a whole hour tackling the better part of a major dungeon like the volcano manor or nokcon there's just simply so much aggregate content in eldon ring that those hours start to pile up into huge drifts which is where the value of the open world as a pacing device comes into play by separating these small instances with a traversal where you get to look at beautiful art and be tempted by corners of the map you haven't seen a player is put in a better position to mix things up to their own liking consider the difference between elden ring catacombs and bloodborne chalice dungeons both are essentially the same thing optional content with repeating bosses and repeating architecture deep in hidden places to hide a better quality of treasure than the main path provides chalice dungeons are formatted densely three to four layers each taking 15 to 30 minutes apiece if you're exploring everything and engaging in combat not accounting for time spent on bosses one layer after another you can hop in and out but the total commitment is large and monotonous when it comes to a given chalice dungeon elden ring abandons the idea of layers and just makes each dungeon individual which feels like more of an accomplishment than incremental progress through a larger hole it also mandates a tonal visual break from the template dungeon rooms traps and hallways obscuring the repetitive nature of them by keeping them farther apart from each other both experientially and geographically sure after several dozen of the catacombs you get the same sense of sameness as the chalice dungeons the format is familiar enough that you can see how the same rooms are remixed over and over and over less obvious than with the chalice dungeons but still the same effect the open world helps alleviate that fatigue too by putting the dungeons in intriguing spots a sense of mystery and individuality is created beforehand this is generally punctuated by having a boss that's tied to that location in a lore-related way personality is injected through storytelling and the world map's interconnectivity it's slight like how thrumerian bloodborne was mostly a matter of inference instead of reference but it is enough if a player is invested to keep the catacombs more consistently engaging and memorable than any of the chalice dungeons and because they aren't sequentially layered if you ever found yourself so frustrated as i got with it filed amygdala you can just [ __ ] dip out and hit the bricks no reason to stay just come back later if you feel like it and if you don't that's just one treasure out of hundreds that you're missing out on i took a completionist approach and did just about every catacomb tomb cave and mine that i could possibly find in doing so i assembled a player's toolkit so versatile that i used it to create two completely different builds on two subsequent new game plus cycles and i didn't ever need to redo these catacombs you keep what you get from them and can easily respect your entire character after completing the reya lukaria dungeon and unlocking the rebirth mechanic if you go back and redo catacombs on a new game plus cycle they just offer a duplicate of the same reward that you got before so not only are they optional they become utterly tangential after you complete them just once to make a world as large as eldon rings a lot of material had to be recycled from templates a great deal of thought has been put into making this recycling as invisible and as tolerable as possible it is impossible to completely disguise the recycling entirely on account of the open world formatting however this disguising goes hand in hand with a pace of content distribution that is much more approachable than before a player interacts rather casually with content that is casually optional and very intensely with content intended to be intense margate the fellowmen is the game's first major boss in the game's first true open-ended question your direction right off the bat points you towards stormville castle the seat of a mad prince named godric the grafton it takes hardly any time at all to roll right up on the gates of the castle which is when margaret crashes your party and crushes your dreams he's one of the most intensely difficult first bosses out of all of these games even saqiro had you facing gyobu on horseback first a notably easier encounter than most any to come after in that game market's intense spiteful difficulty is meant to cleave players into two camps those that persist and those that go elsewhere market is not only massive but fast fast in a way more closely related to sakiro's boss pacing than the bloodbornes or the dark souls games he spins and reorients especially fast he can't just hide behind his back like the bosses in those earlier games would allow or even encourage then he amplifies his aggression in the second phase with magical attacks punishing a player at range when before he was just dangerous close up the thing is margaret is not actually a teaching boss like lady butterfly or father gascion he's an obstacle if a player is skilled right off the bat they can take him at even the lowest level because if you truly are a master of this style of combat then it's a matter of fast response and reading the extremely brief windows where a move is telegraphed that's all you need if a player is like me slow on the uptake and low on the damage then margie the fellowman is a total roadblock and in that way he's a reminder that there are many more roads in eldon ring than ever before in these sorts of games godric's castle blocks the way north unless of course you pay attention to your map and look closely there's a path on the right that is clearly visible and can take you right to the regions behind the castle without engaging him or the other boss at all if that's your speed that region learning of the lakes is harder but not so hard in the smaller chunks of content spread out across the map as to be impossible for low-level characters you'll earn a better rate of experience and a higher quality of loot making it very easy to come back and just beat his ass or else bypass him entirely in my third playthrough i skipped both godric the grafted and ronald of the full moon the chard bear boss for the learning of the lakes region the end game only requires two of the initial four shard bearers to be defeated in order to begin there is a tremendous amount of space for a given player to remix and reinterpret the most obvious order of progression a huge amount of customizability compared to a linear series of dungeons that require bosses to be defeated in a set order like the games had before dark souls 3 was slightly mutable in that way but hardly at all in comparison to alden ring if you don't choose to follow the shortcut north the clearest direction then is south this small southern land mass doesn't have any shard bearers at all and not a lot of story content but it's absolutely chock-full of important upgrades for your health flasks and a high quality of early game equipment and plenty of upgrade materials if you spend three four hours wrapping everything there is to wrap on the southern aisle including a very impressive castle on the bottom most tip then most any player will find themselves well leveled and well-equipped to take on market and it isn't even any kind of formal quest it's all done with putting mechanical pressure on the player and letting them figure it out for themselves marget creates a choke point that propels players backwards and away from the intended path onto an unscripted series of quests where the unifying goal is to become less fragile dungeon by dungeon treasure by treasure level by level a player meets the demands of the primary content by drinking deeply from the secondary content eldon ring doesn't demand a player do these things it just gestures towards these things as possibilities making the player mostly responsible for the shape of their journey where they go what they find the game tries to recede into the background and let a player take ownership and authorship of their experience in a way that checklist style questing doesn't allow for find the 30 shards of whoever it is means each player will go to the same 30 places or else give up on the quest it's a homogenizing quest structure elden ring instead unpredictably distributes the tools necessary to progress across its map but makes some of the tools equivalent and interchangeable like individual weapon choices or which school of magic to pursue so the ways a player chooses to explore also affects their build they are crafting a character in cooperation with guesswork and happenstance guess well get the kind of tools you want very quickly and it's back to market to show them what you've won guess poorly or guess hungrily and you're spending way more time out in the wilds trying to find towns and tombs where the next best thing might be waiting every single aspect of the pacing is self-determined broadly this is true for most open world games like he could easily say the same thing in general terms of tom clancy's ghost recon wildlands but the lack of feedback from the elden ring user interface really is significant it's not you discovered x of y amount of item good job keep hunting or mr big shot says to talk to dr eyebrows over in la la land climb the tower to unlock lala landmarks and find the doctor it's completely dependent on the player themselves self-determining a course of action based solely on contextual clues and personal curiosity without being told to do something a sense of ownership is established over the decision-making process it becomes more personal than getting a gold star in your quest log so you have a game where the basic format of play is familiar seek landmarks and claim prizes but where the particulars of gameplay and content arrangement are extremely complex and clever where a player uses that outside knowledge of how to behave within an open world format to create highly individuated paths throughout the game even among completionists who see most of the content in aggregate players will stack their journeys with that content in completely different orders prioritize completely different aspects of the experience and engage with the content in completely different ways aaa open worlds are often concerned with making sure the players see what's available they worry that a player will miss stuff and so they tag it as being impossible to miss eldon ring doesn't care at all if a player misses something because it assumes if a player feels something is missing they'll go back and look for their own damn selves it's a game that extends a tremendous amount of trust towards a player to curate their own path and experience in this enormous dying kingdom it isn't the square mileage of the map or the way the quests branch that make this open world feel so genuinely uncommonly open it isn't the impact the player has on the world it is the actionable control given to the player in just how to approach all that's laid out before them the more personal the choices within a fictional world the more personal the connection to that world don't get me wrong i love narrative games and rpgs with branching quests more than anything but those games are about presenting a dramatic illusion of control that cannot actually exist within the game there is no technology in the world that exists yet to allow a player to go off script in a narrative rpg you're making do with playing pretend elden ring is all pretend too of course but in largely ignoring traditional narrative in place of a decentralized and cryptic approach there isn't a sense that you should be able to affect the story too strongly outside of a few key choices what's left and what matters is the actionable present tense where to go what to do how to do it a player's agency in choosing to go absolutely wherever their whims take them creates the narrative tells a story more personal than the developers could have pre-scripted for these players fantasy speaking generally about the genre can rely heavily on patterns of tropes and patterns of storytelling elden ring has plenty of them and allowing every single player to individually remix those tropes partly based on willpower partly based on circumstance the arc of a player's adventure can feel incredibly novel and surprising this can be beautifully illustrated by an incredibly cruel excruciatingly funny prank that the developers placed just outside the starting waypoint and some nearby ruins it's all very first level stuff a few rats some wandering zombies slow and weak prey to suit a fragile and unsure beginner in the ruins is a path leading down into a basement with a tempting chest a typical dungeon master goof would be to trap the chest with damage a punishment for a player's hasty greed elden rain instead teleports the player to the middle of a mine in a wretched swamp of supernatural rot so much higher level than the player that the very sky is red with warning you're stuck in the mine until you find the entrance not too far away but past some enemies that are extremely deadly at an early stage now once the exit is found most players just fast travel home like i did all restrictions on fast travel have been removed in eldon ring you don't need an item anymore like a homeward bone you can choose any site of grace waypoint that you've discovered before at any time and travel there for free it is a wildly forgiving system compared to what these games had before however if you stick around in kaelyn and try looting some nearby locations not even fighting the enemies but just dodging through them and stealing [ __ ] you can pick up stuff that completely changes your trajectory through the game i didn't think to do this i like clearing an area and so it didn't really occur to me to just run past everything and as such i missed an item that would have kick-started my character's career as a sorcerer my own path took me to a chance encounter that skewed my character's development another way in dark souls 3 i had really enjoyed playing a pyromancer and how i ended up with a very jack-of-all-trades kind of character so i figured if i was looking for a mage slash warrior well i had never tried dexterity and intelligence so i picked prisoner for my starting class dexterity intelligence builds turned out to be a major trend supported throughout the game with some of its most powerful combinations of spells and weapons just like i chose the same starting setup as the guy on the front cover of bloodborne i ended up choosing a more or less default kind of build for my elden ring experience as well many players approach mage with a build style called glass cannon where a player prioritizes damage output over survivability stats to just knock the hell out of bosses i was interested in an opposite approach a true half and half hybrid of mage and warrior an average investment into a wide range of stats finding that meteorite staff and caled past the portal trap might have changed my mind about that prompting me to ramp up my spells casting stats immediately and exclusively instead the starting spell that the prisoner gets gave me a strange advantage over an early game boss and locked me into the idea of refusing to specialize prisoner class gets a magic missile with both a delay and a homing feature this spell absolutely destroys fast and twitchy enemies because of this delay an enemy will dodge when the spell is first cast seconds later when it triggers the homing dart just strikes them full in the back using this spell i beat an optional boss called bloodhound knight darwil for any regular melee class this is a fast and vicious foe quite difficult for the early game but for the auto homing delayed missile his own ai was his worst enemy his initial attempt to dodge the spell breaks the aggression then when the spell hits he isn't expecting it and doesn't dodge again he bequeathed unto me his curved greatsword it would require stat investments in strength that i was not really intending to make further generalizing my build but what a tempting weapon and what a long game to come by trying to create a character capable of adapting to most any situation my theory was that i would get to see most every situation and get a very complete experience from elden ring and the very first test is whether to stick to common knowledge and pump points into intelligence or whether to let circumstances dictate my response and choose the big sword i chose the big sword all players will have a unique story along those lines points in their exploration where they found something so cool compelling or tempting that it altered their intended trajectory through the content my stats weren't individually high but in exploring so thoroughly i had a wealth of upgrade materials i was always sharpening my fancy sword and adding attack points well beyond my level range and because of how thoroughly i was exploring how many levels i was beginning to acquire in aggregate generalizing also kept me from becoming too out of step with the regions that i was in i leveled according to whim if i got hit for too much damage time for maybe five points in fatality if i want an extra swing with my sword time for maybe five points of endurance a new spell is just a few intelligent points away well why better pivot to that the worst thing about dark souls 2 was surely its adaptability stat but consider the purpose of that stat in a more open world with a larger number of encounters a player's progress on the curve has to be artificially staggered and extended compared to the tighter design of dark souls 1 or bloodborne instead of a higher rate of experience points spread across an extra survival stat like dark floors 2 headed eldon ring takes a page out of bloodborne's book and adjusts the soft and hard caps at which levels stop scaling bloodborne scaled them down low to keep the curve tight once you hit a hard cap just add a different stat to your build that'll do more for you than trying to go above it the hard caps came at around 50 for bloodborne in elden ring it's 80. using the same calculations for experience received versus gaining level that goes all the way back to dark souls 1. so eldon ring is deliberately balanced around having a huge amount of content to complete compared to its sibling games with damage scaling that goes up much higher in the end game the unpredictable thing impossible to fully account for is how many players will complete what content there is so much inherent freedom of choice that there's a complimentary chaos of outcome the game's balance can only account for trends of player choice not every outlier some players will be teleported to caled take one look around and nope the [ __ ] out some players will see those same hateful red skies and think to themselves you know what this fetid swamp smells like opportunity both are correct both are accommodated by the game's extremely long curve of advancement which tries its absolute damnedest to even out the variations between these two massively different approaches eldon ring is easier to min max and statistically break than other from software titles but that's not exactly the fault of its design it simply assumes that the player is responsible enough as an author of their own journey not to work against their own enjoyment the most controversial mechanic is the inclusion of spirit ashes npc allies that can be summoned whenever a little icon appears on your screen there are a huge variety of spear dashes occupying a good percentage of all the rewards that you can get for completing dungeons they're upgraded with their own material ghostwart and greyfort which is usually only found in catacombs what bothers people so much about them is that spirit ashes confer all the advantages of summoning an npc to help you out without any of the previous disadvantages used to balance out getting that help if you summon another player to help you or even an npc via the traditional summoning sign system boss health is always doubled this is something i've always actually appreciated about these games because having to fight for longer evens out the extra dps from the companion character the pacing of the fight is more or less preserved that system is even still intact in elden ring so why add these spirit ashes without having them function in the exact same way well it seems to me the explicit purpose is to provide an entire additional tool set to help players who would otherwise really struggle against this game format i talked a lot in my dark souls essay about how the beauty of the difficulty is in its granularity the way a player can use the toolset to create a customizable difficulty well tailored to them as an individual spear dashes help extend that difficulty downward broadening the accessibility of the game by making the aggression of its enemies more manageable the spare dashes are i think an incredible way of adding an option for lowering the difficulty because they are themselves such a robust and complex system there are dozens of choices for spirit ashes and each has a unique utility there are groups of weak allies you can summon they do little damage but create huge distractions and much chaos flooding the field with four little ape goblins can confuse a boss in the most satisfying way or you can lean on a spear dash to complement your play style summoning a tank in pc if you're a ranged caster or vice versa picking a major bow-wielding spirit ash to pull aggro from behind to break the enemies out of their combos as you fight them head-on because that's the flip side of the lower difficulty created with the spirit ash system on a fundamental level elden rings bosses and enemies are much faster and more aggressive than those in previous titles besides sakiro those bosses are often repeated with multiple double versions of the same boss or two complementary bosses that try to trip the player up in two ways at once even when they're not repeated these bosses attack so many times in a row with such extremely limited opportunity for staggering or redirecting them out of these combos that if you did approach this game entirely without the spirit ash system it would be another order of difficulty higher than dark souls 3 or bloodborne was there is much less slack in breathing room securo for the first time in this discussion represents the more forgiving design because all those bosses were designed around a standardized tool set and often around a deliberate explicit weakness to a particular prosthetic tool a player could be expected to have the correct counter to any given boss at any given time because eldon ring is so much more chaotic in its player outcomes not only might players be missing those counters they might not ever find them at all in their individual playthroughs it's possible that any given player might run up against a boss that is just completely mismatched to their strengths and weaknesses creating a major difficulty spike this was always possible in bloodborne or dark souls but the lessened aggression of those bosses and the frequent opportunities to counter-attack meant that even if your build wasn't optimal this was fine because you can even out any kind of numerical inefficiency by just following the boss pattern and counter-attacking in the correct windows for a little longer than you would otherwise without the previous generosity in the counter-attack windows that becomes less viable it's much harder to withstand the attention of the boss and a much longer wait for your opportunities if you play utterly alone solo this can lead to feeling like something is missing from your build a pressure to optimize even more and a sense of punishment for not aiming for perfect optimization this is of course because something is missing from your build the spirit ashes very few of the spirit ashes add a significant damage to what you're eating out of the big health bar of a boss the primary utility of each and every one of them is in their ability to interrupt and distract from these brutally long boss attack chains they often die before the end of the fight anyway which seems to be by design to make that last little sliver of a given boss fight more intense and dramatic the spirit ash has helped for the majority of the fight and then it's one on one for the big finale the complexity and depth of how spirit ashes have been made a major element of player customization shows that they are a very intentional aspect of the game bloodborne took away your shields sakiro took away your tributes eldon ring has taken in its turn your solitude this is a dying world but not a dead one and everywhere you are surrounded by npc allies player summons and heaps upon heaps of new spirit ashes to choose from it seems to me that insisting that the game is meant to be played solo avoiding such a huge aspect of the game's basic mechanical design is just a reflex a hold over from previous titles that were actually much more forgiving with that sort of gameplay insisting on playing the entire game without spirit ashes and then saying it doesn't feel right is like playing bloodborne with a wooden shield exclusively or choosing not to parry in securo and saying those games don't feel right of course they don't when a player deliberately refuses to engage with a bedrock mechanic of intended play i didn't even really get into spirit ashes until i started getting my ass kicked in the early areas magic alone was often plenty enough of an advantage for me when i began to feel too much friction i took active steps to reduce that friction with the tools i had which meant exploring the spirit ashes system that's what dark souls taught me after all and what even shakiro explicitly tells you win your battles no matter what again and again people who approach these games with the mindset that you are only supposed to use the fewest possible tools and suffer through failure are at odds with the explicit text of the games themselves one particular spirit ash complicates the debate about their influence on the overall difficulty curve when i ask myself what would be the most dangerous enemy in the entire game there really is only one answer and that's my own character with its massive toolset but played correctly without any of my hesitation or human error what a goddamn unstoppable monster that would be and the game just hands you the guy the memoctaire has a bad reputation for being easy mode personified trivializing the encounters before you even get into them but the fact is that the mimic tear is only broken in proportion to your own character if you have assembled an expansive and complete tool set with a huge character level your mimiktair will be min-max in exactly that way if you are behind and struggling then your mimic tear will be equally underpowered and more obviously in keeping with the intended difficulty curve clever min-maxing of the mimiktair is both what people hate about the mimik tear and what i find so absolutely thrilling about it there are very very few encounters in the game that actually require the mimiktair other spirit ashes will do just fine and keep the encounter paced better it's also a mid to late game item anyway i was maybe 50 hours deep in the game before it was even an option and i didn't start leaning on it until the very late game areas where i felt so completely outclassed that i needed to create new advantages for myself and that's really what the mimic tear is a wild card slot for your spirit ash lineup each other spirit ash has an intended utility and purpose a predetermined mix of strengths and weaknesses the mimicter's strengths and weaknesses are completely customizable they mirror precisely whatever you have selected the moment you summon them so using your own multiple inventory slots you can swap out your own active loadout to something different right after you summon the mimic this allows you to set your mimic up with a range tool set while you go for the up close or vice versa this is how i accomplished the greatest feat of boss cheesing of my entire gaming career melania the goddess of rot we've already talked about a little in the context of lady maria of the astral clock tower but let's talk about millennia now in her full glory as the game's true apex of mechanical difficulty playing eldon ring at launch was amazing because of the rolling conversation as the bulk of players moved through the content when players began to hit melania a collective scream of frustration rose up from the internet too hard unfair unbalanced broken all sorts of accusations melania's difficulty comes down to two factors her bomb attacks and her health regeneration without an extremely high armor and poise rating she has triple combos called the waterfowl dance that will straight up one hit kill most players followed in the second phase by a scarlet rod explosion that often does the same if you have enough hit points to survive such a thing the health regen means that even choosing to make these attacks can refill melania's health bar by a quarter or more blocking doesn't disrupt this regenerative benefit she'll still get the health even if you're clever enough to prevent the damage to yourself so it becomes in a certain way a race defeating melania isn't so much about avoiding her moves as it is about preventing her from doing those things in the first place locking her down and then outpacing her damage per second she literally cannot be defeated on a back and forth damage basis you'll die she'll be just the same amount of alive as she was at the start there's two prominent damage bonuses that can eat huge chunks of extra health from enemies bleed and frostbite these have actually been around since dark souls 3 but here in elden ring they're another one of the forbidden tools the ones the no summoning types yell at people for using i honestly can't think of a single mechanic better suited to the melania fight these periodic damage bonuses are the thing that does allow a player to outpace her regenerative ability to run her bar lower and lower one hit for one head won't do it sure if you're a dodge master you don't need bleed or frostbite but her huge area of effect swing seemed designed to make dodging less effective than usual i am not a fast or reactive player i get hit and since getting hit is punished in this fight in an unusually severe way i needed to stack the odds back in my favor using different systems i took what i had learned from artorias in dark souls 1 stacking armor and poise until i could no longer be interrupted by her attacks i could just swing through and stagger her instead i took what i learned from sister freda and dark souls 3 and chose magics that would interrupt stun and distract her from her devastating attacks and since i was better with magic and my mimiktair was better with swords less distractible and more relentless i arranged it that way between us what should have been one hit kills barely scratched the mimic and left me well alive between my magical barrage and the poise tanking attacks of the mimiktair she spent much of the fight stunlocked and with the swords i gave my mimiktair doing both huge bleed bonuses and frostbite bonuses her bars melted long before she could regain any meaningful amount of health on my second try on the hardest boss of the game and perhaps the souls like genre in general i managed to use my tool set to completely min max my mimic tear so that all of her formidable advantages melted to nothing i was able to completely shut down and bypass just about every individual element of her difficulty there are people who would tell you that there is no way that this is satisfying that it is not a fair fight and therefore not a valid one i disagree i don't know if i have ever personally felt such absolute incandescent joy after a boss fight not across any other from software games where i fought in a way that was more obviously fair this fight had cost other people hours of their lives i've been there i didn't want to be there again in my desperate desire to win by any means necessary and avoid being stuck on the 120th hour of the game i went so far past what was necessary that my mimikter represented a more dangerous and unbalanced foe than melania herself this to me is not a cheese it is a triumph perhaps the greatest triumph of my entire experience with sprum software games in general sure the one-armed wolf of sakura would never fight like this it wouldn't be in character he is a protagonist who by design is impossible to narratively or mechanically distort to this massive degree here in elden ring the character is mine the story is mine and in any case a shinobi would know the difference between honor and a victory i think it's notable also that even with the mimik terror that success or failure in a given situation is very build dependent on my second playthrough in new game plus i was using a strength and faith build wielding a great sword instead of the lighter and faster weapons and lacking in either bleed or frostbite without any kind of damage bonus like those the fight is kind of a hopeless stalemate so i relied on a spell that added bleed but a patch had reduced its effectiveness in this fight and as a result the bleed bonuses were spaced out much farther than my previous attempt had allowed for because she attacked so much faster than i did gaining health back at a higher rate while losing at a slower rate the fight was typically fatal for my mimic tear this time around i tried a few rounds experimenting with dual building but in the end i found best success with this build where the mimic also had magic especially the bleed spell because those extra bursts were the thing that really let me progress in the fight it took me solidly a couple dozen tries with this build to get melania down again and in the end the winning was not even too dramatic i just caught a lucky break in the middle of some fiddly micromanagement the third time was entirely different again for the last go-round i decided not to use any magic at all and by dual wielding two curved greatswords i was able along with my mimiktaire to stun lock melania more consistently and more easily than either of the two magic driven approaches so why not ditch the mimic tear entirely and do it solo well because i like it with the mimic tear i enjoy being able to use the many available systems against the bosses to reconfigure the whole encounter to my advantage much more than i enjoy trying something over and over and hoping for some kind of incremental skill improvement on my part you couldn't even call what the melania fight is trying to accomplish a battle of equals in a straight up fight the deck is stacked spectacularly against you that's why she's the most deeply hidden optional boss her design is intended to be as dangerous as possible to as many builds as possible accounting for discrepancy and player strength by blowing out the far end of the difficulty curve completionist play is just as good a weapon against her as any other and the mimiktair is so rewarding in the context of a completionist toolset because of how wildly overtuned it can become getting stuck on new game plus one was an interesting lesson in the limitations of the mimic tear and how it too is a variable element of difficulty and not just an instant win button gliding through again on new game plus two was a satisfying reaffirmation that there is no one path to victory on paper it sounds like a no magic quality build contending with melania scaled up a couple notches in terms of hit points and damage would be the hardest attempt of the three but instead it was just about the smoothest there is so much in elden ring that's based purely on player preference that it is impossible to say with any authority that any one thing or any one approach is better than any other it is chaotically dependent on a frothy mix of player skill self-imposed limitations build choice character level the amount of content a player has already completed and in one order eldon ring isn't just fun and enjoyable in one way it's a meaningful and engaging experience in a thousand different ways to millions of different people its difficulty is so variable that it is virtually impossible even for the hardest boss in the game to remain difficult in the same way consistently across not just players but basic build differences for some players her obstacle will be a steep wall with few handholds to others a fence low enough for a fluffy sheep to jump over the fact that this variability contrasts so much with sakiro is not a quality difference it's a difference of comfort the narrower approach requires a player to adapt the wider open approach more readily allows a player to overcome it's almost a shame that the secondary content doesn't have much replay value because the experience of trying different builds is tremendously fun although the melania fight was more difficult for me as a strength than faith build that was just about the only thing that was divine spell casting has a much wider range of visual effects than arcane spell casting a wider variety of elemental damage to act as a counter to a given boss and spells that are generally speaking much more visually spectacular when they pop off getting to start off new game plus with so many new spells and already upgraded weapons made it a learning experience of a different kind where each boss was an opportunity for me to explore my new combat options it wasn't until the end game that things were mechanically tense for me again even with the scaling of new game plus that scaling seems designed to best accommodate players who bypassed large chunks of content the first time around and are no going back in to fill in the gaps if you did absolutely everything in your first playthrough the curve is blown out from the start in the player's favor and further over leveling just carries over to new game plus two taking the edge off that curve as well once advantage is gained advantage is accumulated which is essentially the thing sekiro was trying to prevent with its austere rigidity and how experientially similar its new game plus was to the initial attempt elden ring's new game plus experiences for me stood in huge contrast to the first go-round like in dark souls the playthroughs were shorter but how much shorter was kind of startling because i had done all the catacombs i could find or cared to find because even if i did replay these sections the rewards would be pointless duplicates i focused simply on new story content i decided that a faith builds most appropriate ending would be the most heretical the path of madness on the way to becoming the lord of the frenzied flame to re-explore the world and find new things i needed to find for this ending it took me 22 hours versus roughly 130 for a completionist first playthrough it felt like i was absolutely demolishing my way through the game despite not hurrying anywhere and taking my time to fiddle around and see what other outcomes i could create in some of the side quests yet the whole world felt smaller these regions that seemed so intimidating were in truth just minutes across and sprinkled with the lightest dusting of mandatory content it made it clear that so much of my enjoyment of the game came from not just the struggle of mechanical progression but through the struggle of being truly lost in an unknown landscape it seemed so vast at first and then so small on the second and third playthroughs that the transformed perception was a genuine shock to me it took every single hour of the first 130 to establish context and to be able to picture the full extent of the world map i was propelled along in that first playthrough by a hungry gnawing curiosity into every corner of the world once i had that context once i was comfortable within the game world a great deal of both my curiosity and motivation vanished as if it simply evaporated not to say i didn't enjoy it simply to say that when it came to elden ring the not knowing turned out to be much more powerful as an artistic experience than knowing with a certainty my third playthrough was oriented mostly around trying to complete a set of npc quests that can trigger variations of the game's default ending and i decided not to use magic both of which i figured would add to my time investment in that playthrough from the 22 hours of the strength faith build i was wrong again my last circuit threw the lands between clocked in at 10 hours i did it essentially in a single sitting faster pretty much than any dark souls playthrough i'd done and nearly as fast as my third time finishing bloodborne from stepping out into the waving grass of limgrave and having no idea what lay before me to knowing my way through the world so well that i was knocking out an entire region of the world just about every 90 minutes elden ring is an absolutely massive open world but the amount of things that are relevant and interesting to do within it shrink down into an ever smaller pool of content as you complete your adventure it is in this way not quite as replayable as a linear dungeon crawl because in a linear dungeon crawl every element of the level design is still critical to your advancement a player still needs to explore to get what they need when you've done something in elden ring with a few exceptions like the incredible capital of lindell it stays done and never becomes fresh or important again the world contracts and shrinks down to the parts of it that actually are linear and then the rest fades away those linear mandatory areas are roughly the shape and length of a mainline dark souls title all those extra hours all that extra content is just a massive decompression and dispersal of other more tangential elements of player choice and player build connected constellations of weapons spells items and talismans in both the game's intro and outro the narrator says the fallen leaves tell a story and this is true because that's how these tools and rewards have been distributed leaves blown by the wind and to the crevices and hidden places of the world and the story of the player is the story of how they too are born along the breezes of chance and curiosity to collect these fallen relics once those winds stopped blowing i had to find the motivation myself to propel myself along which wasn't so hard in the end if i was no longer as invested as i was before in my own story it was an opportunity to better seek out and understand the story of this melancholy world around me in a general sort of way elden ring's story treads a great deal of the same thematic ground as the games around it a tale of a cursed dying kingdom plagued by on death and the corruption that follows in the wake of unnatural life the story of god-like royalty demanding worship and deference from downtrodden and exploited common people who are twisted into nightmare versions of themselves as their world decays around them subplots about feminine moon magic and a set of endings where you can either support overturn or subsume the cosmological status quo unseen manipulators from beyond the stars a tyranny of religious blindness refusing to see what is hard to admit elden ring was marketed as being a major creative partnership with george rr martin the man who wrote the game of thrones novels among dozens of others in practice the story beats and characters are so absolutely familiar and in such direct sequence with from software's previous worlds and stories that i can't think of any single element of plot or character that feels solely attributable to martin the only thing he might have influenced is that the story is much more concrete than that of dark souls with a clear order of historical events and more obvious connections between the various characters i don't necessarily consider this to be a wholly positive development part of what connected me to the dark souls trilogy so strongly was its sense of poetic allegory the idea that nothing being said or conveyed was completely straightforward or even true dark souls greatest storytelling strength was i feel and how truly vague and open to interpretation it could be that's a lot of what turned me off about dark souls 3 a greater focus on name recognition and threading familiar elements together into concrete patterns i didn't want concrete patterns i wanted beautiful allusions to things that might not even be real in a lore kind of sense elden ring storytelling has the tidy completeness of securo but in lacking a scripted protagonist to go along with it is unable to leverage it as well into a coherent narrative it is still completely decentralized and arrhythmic storytelling leaving it to the player's exploration and willingness to read item descriptions to piece it together without offering a sense of direction about where to start or where you're going while writing this script dragon age 4 was announced and i hadn't played dragon age origins in nearly a decade so i played one of the prologue portions and was struck by how about three quarters of the time i spent in the opening chapter was just asking questions from a list and listening to complex explanations i don't mean this at all as an insult i wish more games were still doing that consider what this heavy exposition does in terms of providing direction a well-framed comprehensive answer to a world-building question doesn't just answer that question alone it suggests what question to ask next it gestures towards gaps in your knowledge and exceptions to established rules that you can actively seek out and anticipate answers for having a scripted protagonist in sikiro accomplished a similar effect with a lighter hand the act of trying to figure out how wolf's personal relationships connected the characters to one another naturally reveal the way the greater mythology is connected in the timeline of events alden ring's protagonist is not only silent but a complete outsider in every way you blow in from the void outside the lands between like the way in dark souls 2 any life your character had before the curse before drangleic is immaterial there are no personal connections to discover an elden ring no connections at all really besides historical ones that are alluded to in the vaguest possible terms and without the strong suggestion that this is all allegory and symbol i don't have the connection of trying to map meaning from the game's artistic suggestions onto my own system of understanding i am not in dialogue with the game as an audience with the things the game is telling me with its story it isn't until many many details are slowly revealed that the story of the game begins to take shape and become even remotely comprehensible because the path to understanding is just as haphazard and chaotic as the path to anything else most players will have an incomplete picture of what's going on there's enough to get the general idea but it honestly did take all three playthroughs until i felt like i actually knew what was going on and even then unreliably and incompletely in dark souls this essential vagueness was a positive it interacted with the mood and the message in wonderful ways in bloodborne the narrative refusing to fully explain itself leaning instead on implication and misdirection is a core element of the lovecraftian subgenre in elden ring there is no specific storytelling reason for this particular approach to building the narrative beyond keeping tradition with from software's house style instead of intensifying the narrative the obfuscation just delays a player's ability to ask the right questions and put information in the correct context once the correct context is established the answer isn't even always an especially satisfying one either part of this is a strange obsession with double identities two names or two aspects of one character presenting twice margaret the fellowmen is the first of them he's actually the guardian of the capital city itself morgot the omen king if you skip the fight with margeet and fight morgot first marget ceases to exist it's definitely just the same dude with the same attitude so why the implied difference a lot of very obscure lore details it turns out morgot the omen king isn't a reference to the general concept of omens but lore specific one where capital o omens are these diseased creatures who have cancerous animal features most notably boils and horns their souls don't absorb back into the roots of the aired tree like everyone else when they die which is why they're hated by the culture and religion that worships the tree morgot to rule the capital used to hide his nature so when he went out in public to do war or enforce edicts he went by margaret instead now it's not that necessary because everything is stagnant and dying but he still dons his big cloak and uses his old name with you out of nostalgia or habit none of that is remotely clear from playing the game casually or even taking a less than completionist approach to finding item descriptions and exploring the lore and even then it doesn't feel like it means very much exactly the omens are a strange and interesting thread that runs through a lot of parts of the game but you have to hang on to those questions for so long piecing together such small scraps of information in context that the dramatic experience of morgot in the game pretty much is completely separate from the narrative supporting him marget is such an iconic fight such an excellent introduction to the world that having a rematch at the climax of the initial arc of the story feels like maybe a diminishment of it really this guy again now with that context of morgot using the alter ego of market to act as his will in the world it is more interesting without it it's a little confusing and more than a little disappointing then morgot dying is so much smaller and frailer than he was before what happened there i still have no idea it's interesting damned if i know what's going on or what it's supposed to mean though morgot's arena gets reused for another duel of dual identities this time at the game's final climaxes you fight godfrey the first elden lord this is also a rematch you fight a spectacle version of him on the way to morgot the first time without much explanation the explanation once you have it is very strange godfrey was once a warrior named horolu who changed his name when he became consort to the goddess queen america he led america's armies slaughtered the giants and sired many of the game's other bosses morgot was his son though both morgot and his omen twin moog were locked in the sewers for their defamations when there were no more worlds to conquer godfrey wept and was abandoned by the greater will the god whose guidance is seen at the sights of grace and whose spirit animates the golden order makes sense too bad moving on being abandoned by the greater will meant that godfrey was no longer suitable husband material for america so she gave him the boot making him the first tarnished yora tarnished in exile from the lands between called back by the greater will when he burned the herb tree and triggered the endgame godfrey returns to steal the throne of elden lord out from under you his history is important his actual presence in the story is absurd he's this vain swaggering giant who shows up at the last minute as a kind of usurper which is great characterization because it gives the player an immediate tangible antagonism towards him the absurdity comes halfway through the fight and the transition between phase one and two this makes no sense to me but he bonded his spirit to some kind of spectral cat to make him more civilized and appealing to america when they were together in trying to defeat you he consumes the essence of his ghost cat assuming his former identity now i fight as horollo he bellows and i literally died laughing because i was still cracking up when he started trying to murder me now our fight as horolu is just phenomenally atonal to the rest of the game it's a stray fragment of the wwf fallen into the lands between you can just hear the announcer declaring what a moment one incredible energy in the erd tree arena here tonight as godfrey the golden murders his own ghost cat in a fit of rage the crowd is loving it that's right tom we haven't seen an appearance by horolu since he won thunder from down under in 1986. i'll tell you anything can happen tonight at the foot of the herd tree and probably will after this brief message from our friends at lane del chevrolet and that's the kicker man horolu even fights with a moveset like a wrestler all grabs and body slams plus a little bit of that good old beast magic from software games are often very funny and this certainly strikes me as a joke of some sort but what a joke to choose for the second to last boss encounter of the entire game this isn't side content this is almost the pointy bit of the pyramid that over a hundred hours of game have been building towards and it is so atonal that the entire mood of the climax has to flex around it now i fight as hororoo you sure do pal you sure do there are plenty of fights in elden ring that have as much narrative context as the bosses of dark souls and bloodborne and there are plenty of bosses in those games too who exist merely to look cool but the thing that eldon ring lacks in comparison is support from the thematic framing you could have just a big sad night in dark souls and the guy would feel connected to the narrative because of the existential implications of the setting here in alden ring the plot is built less from mood and more from proper nouns arranged into historical timelines horolu godfrey is a hugely important character to the narrative and all this silly [ __ ] actually tracks from a lore perspective yet he sticks out like stone cold steve austin at a magic tournament because there's less emphasis on unifying themes and little pressure for him to be unified with what themes exist eldon ring's story is a big sprawling mess that sometimes feels extremely compelling and sometimes feels pointlessly convoluted or even completely absurd i'm not inclined to say that this is a completely negative thing it's actually very in keeping with the patterns of history to have the whole world come down to unpredictable selfish decisions made by a handful of nobles who were too busy fighting or [ __ ] each other to notice their kingdoms dying around them i'm arguing that by having a more traditional narrative than dark souls it would have benefited from more traditional exposition as well not a ton just enough so that the major boss fights are prefaced with the information necessary to make them dramatic something that shakiro excelled at sakiro's narrative was hardly an aggressive or overbearing approach to exposition and storytelling it doesn't have to be a dragon age origin style okay now tell me about the elven pottery situation question list but without an understanding of how the characters connect prior to a player's only actual interactions with those characters elden ring is short-circuiting its own dramatic presentation talking about how choreography was characterization occupied so much of what i wanted to talk about with the previous two games but there is much less of that with eldon ring and i wish that wasn't the case i wish instead there were more bosses like general radon the story of the great and tragic general aurodon is beyond being a major anchor of the game world's history essentially the tale of a man utterly unwilling to abandon his beloved horse no matter how dire and supernatural his circumstances became and i just love him for that his absurdism works in favor of the game's mood and themes it supports them in a way that horolu smasher of folding chairs did not radon was a great champion a demigod like america's other children and he clashed for power and territory with melania and her army magic in elden ring is a little different than in dark souls as it's all tied to space in some way the glintstone magics are shards of stars and celestial bodies the infamous comet azure spell and lore is constructed as opening up a window to space and just letting it through then there are the purple gravity magics radon was a master at those he used those magics to thwart the lunar witch ronnie to stop her from bringing about a new order his attempt to also thwart melania was doomed her curse was the curse of rot and as they battled had spilled out from her into the land itself caled every part of it from the mutant skulls embedded in the cliffs to the pools of stinking bubbling bile that fill it swamps to the tumors that are upped out of every deformed creature that lives there khalid bears the scars of the fight between these two demigods the idea that war is a disease and a poison itself is a constant theme in elden ring but caled is the place where this becomes literal it poisoned radon made him monstrously huge took his mind away but his last thoughts rattling around like a single penny in a mason jar were of his horse leonard leonard who never did him wrong always constant always faithful using those gravity magics he suspends himself above the horse who wanders with his old master mindless and emaciated it is funny it's absurdist it is absolutely a joke but it's also kind of tragic and intricately tied to the lore of the world in a way that's established not just by the implications of the landscape but by a whole ass cut scene which frames the dramatic dimensions of the encounter to come very rarely a festival is thrown where the world's best warriors honor adan by trying to put him out of his misery usually failing rather than summoning being discouraged you can summon something like eight npcs to aid you in this fight and if they die you can just summon them again it is a festival of violence an apocalyptic party whose goal is to finally put an end to an entire era of suffering and corruption in this world it is just a fantastic encounter from stem to stern and i loved it every time i played and it shows the strengths of decentralized world building when there is some direction to the questions the player asks and the answers they receive the biggest question for me what is the scarlet rot anyway answering that question threads together the entire landscape of elden ring and most of the characters and the answer also ties the game to bloodborne's lore quite well everything happening in the lands between is part of a conflict between an unseen pantheon of deities from the depths of space called the outer gods the erd tree is also from outer space the cosmos is filled with cold unknown horrifying things the worship of that great black unknown is the heretical path of lunar witch ranny the focus of intelligence-based magic from this blackness came the greater will who heralded its rival not with the blue fragments of stars that the glinstone magic represents but golden stars it brought an entirely new magic into the world golden miracles of the golden order this is faith-driven magic instead of intelligence-driven magic but the greater well is not the only outer god who creates miracles dragon magic is classed as faith magic his dragons ruled this world before the earth tree dragon and beast magic aren't native to the lands between natural magic like glimstone type but terrestrial faith-based divinely drawn from the old gods then there's the heretical magics of the giants chaos magic of flame with which the player will eventually burn the earth tree itself or the outer gods like the formless mother worshiped by moog lord of blood who seek to replace the greater will with his own outer god and new dynasty or how about another unnamed outer god who fell from the cosmos and was imprisoned at the bottom of the world hidden miles underground are the ruins of cities that were buried and cursed for their devotion to the wrong outer gods naskella the eternal city was one moog's palace of blood overlooks it from far away in the vast caverns of the underground but go deeper go older go as far far down as it is possible to go in this world there you'll find the lake of rot it's not only the rot of caled that flows down there and stagnates like the swamp of the guardian ape insecuro it's that this is an even more ancient source of the rot itself an ancient lake of it it is the most disgusting unwelcome level i have ever seen from software loves a poison swamp and there are so many in elden ring already but hiding a swamp of pure incandescent disease down here is just a stunning shocking navigational revelation it's said that the rot came from an outer god who was imprisoned and down here you find a temple more ancient than anything else in the game it's architecture different from any known civilization it houses estelle natural born of the void estelle destroyed nocron above estelle is absolutely alien to anything in the game a literal embodiment of the unknowable hungry cosmos it's said that millennia was cursed with the scarlet rot because she was the product of divine incest a god sirening an heir with an alternate aspect of their own selves and yet this lake of rot predates her has nothing to do with her melania's curse marks her as falling outside the reach of grace and the greater will she serves the dynasty of a different outer god instead the one behind the rot there's a subplot involving a woman named millicent who seems like possibly a daughter of millennia or a lesser fragment of her somehow you find her dying of the scarlet rod but you can arrest its progress with a golden needle that's said to ward off the influence of any of the outer gods with this needle embedded in her flesh this wayward daughter fragment finds her way to the halligree itself and fights her own sisters in an attempt to find herself and fulfill her destiny melania's rot causes her to bloom into a terrible divine flower she says in her cutscene that it will happen three times the third bloom being the worst the first has already happened the flower is discarded in a room preceding the fight with melania and then the second happens during her fight in the transition between phases then this third blossoming is left open-ended millicent feels that strange bloom coming on and rather than allow it to happen she removes the needle causing her sickness to resurge and kill her consider the guidance of grace and the erd tree are how the greater will manifests in the world is the scarlet rot not simply an expression of will from a competing god it seems to me that it is especially on account of how millicent's needle is not the only one that can thwart the outer gods deep deep down below the capital of lane del is a horrifying and heretical creature not only the omens that were cast down there to live and die in darkness no something much weirder with much farther reaching implications there is a physical manifestation of the greater will that you come across from time to time the two fingers once you've defeated your first demigod a room in the hub area will open up and the finger maiden who reads the waving of the fingers will translate what the greater will wishes to say to you but just like there was another primordial serpent who will tell you an alternative story of the world back in the original dark souls the two fingers and the maidens of the golden order are only one orthodoxy of several instead of a whole serpent there's a woman who wishes to become a finger maiden named hyera she's blind but whenever she eats something called a shabriri grape she sees what she understands to be the golden guidance of grace so she follows it seeking the grapes she doesn't know that they're actually the eyeballs of the long-suffering dead to complete her pilgrimage she needs one last grape one last eyeball that was touched by the outer gods themselves she asks for this even once she knows what the grapes are this leads to an entire alternative ending of the game the lord of the frenzied flame ending by the statistics it is by far the least chosen ending so unpopular that it's actually the achievement with the lowest completion rate in the whole game on steam at least by the lore it is almost the default ending it's what happened to the guy on the box lord contender vike was storied to be the tarnish knight who got the closest out of anyone to becoming elden lord and restoring the golden order but something strange something terrible happened he went far underneath the capital city and was burned with a flame of madness madness is like scarlet rot a magical affliction but yellow like the guidance of grace instead of order it is pure chaos a yellow flame that dances and consumes hayata when she's found her home down in those lost dungeons after eating vice's eyeball explains the history of the world better than any other npc like the serpent cath did in dark souls one she says the greater will was once represented by the one great a whole five-fingered hand hayata says all that there is came from the one great then came fractures and births and soul but the greater will made a mistake torment despair affliction every sin every curse every one born of the mistake and so what was borrowed must be returned melt it all away with the yellow chaos flame until all is won again those who gave me grapes howled without words saying they wished they were never born become their lord take their torment despair their affliction every sin every curse and melt it away as the lord of chaos end quote there is such an interesting resonance here with the mythology of dark souls with the creation myth of a world of fog and dragons that suddenly shattered by the coming of fire and the disparities it introduces the two fingers represent the original intentions of the greater will the golden order it sought to create if you hold out your own hand you will actually see that the two fingers and the heretical chaotic three fingers really are all five fingers of a single hand like the middle and ring fingers were cleaved away from the rest you have to approach the three fingers entirely naked or as naked as the game allows no weapons no armor nothing to protect you you must choose to become lord of the frenzied flame this ending is unlike an age of darkening in dark souls where the flame of creation is let to burn out this is like cranking the oven of the cosmos up to the self-clean setting and letting the whole world turn to undifferentiated ash once the fingers have you in their grip their fingerprints burn into you cursing you with madness the golden glow of the same magic that the greater will uses but unbound from order reason and form you are locked into this ending permanently with one tiny sliver of a chance to change your fate defeating melania allows you to upgrade millicent's needle if you take that needle to the lost city of pharah missoula crumbling as magical storms tear at it you can find a secret path into the heart of the storm if you lay down in an open grave time stops reverses and you can step through the primordial tornado to confront the elden lord of the time before there even was an erd tree the dragonlord placidisaks i think this fight with a two-handed dragon from before the beginning of the current mythological era is one of the most amazing and beautiful in the game just visually spectacular and packed with fascinating lore in the normal course of play placido sax is simply a sly secret finding him involves going way off the main path jumping down some platforms that are extremely easy to just run right past to follow such an obscure path and find at the end of it one of the best fights in the game is a great example of the joy of exploration in these games you're almost always awarded for following your nose rarely so spectacularly but still now that needle of millisense after her death the item's description updates to include her wishes for it the item description says quote there is something i must return to melania the dignity the sense of self that allowed her to resist the call of the scarlet rot end quote take this needle and plunge it into her flower and it becomes another needle nickel is needle and only here in the heart of the storm beyond time which forever consumes the ancient city of beasts and dragons can this needle be used for you lord of the frenzied flame the needle leverages the quiet of being in the eye of the storm to cut your connection to the three fingers and free you from its machinations if you choose to use it if you instead embrace the ending that you have been cursed with it is the most apocalyptic and visually impressive of all the endings not only do you burn the earth tree those flames of chaos spread across the world your own maiden swears revenge the world is destroyed all at the behest of an unseen divine being who when confronted by doubt split into two gods one of order one of chaos there is no throne for an elden lord of this sort chaos reigns consider some of the mythological implications of this ending however madness the scarlet rot and the guidance of grace are all various manifestations of the will of various outer gods only dignity selfhood the preservation of one's own will in the face of them can allow the lands between to flourish and the people within them to live decent lives madness disease orthodoxy all equivalent afflictions in elden ring equivalent corruptions of the self so it's not that elden ring is not making grand thematic statements with its lore focused plot it's that you have to turn over a hell of a lot more lore than usual to uncover it what's most fascinating to me about the choice of endings is which of them ended up being the most popular choice lunar witch ronnie's ending where the whole golden order and the will of all the outer gods are cast off to allow the terrifying darkness of the cosmos above to flood down and take dominion this is closest in flavor to the age of dark endings in the dark souls games and in fact there's a lot of overlap of not just general motifs but even echoes of certain specific lines of dialogue from the dark souls trilogy here also is a return of this symbolic concept of femininity being tied to the moon to magic mystery and blood like bloodborne was so focused on so where in all of this is george rr martin i honestly have no idea whatsoever taken holistically it's just in such linear keeping with the themes and symbols of other from software games even in the details it is quite particular to hidetaka miyazaki's artistic motifs ronnie is a strange character with cryptic dangerous goals so why is this very dramatic rejection of the order of the world filled with dozens of extra steps compared to a more basic ending the most popular ending by such a large margin because i think ronnie is the first character most anyone meets who seems like she knows what the hell is going on and is willing to explain any of it starting her quest requires completing the karya manor in learning of the lakes which happens pretty early on but the manor is actually a more obvious path than the critical one to the atlas plateau you can assume most players will make it there ronnie asks you for your pledge and comments that not many would give it but that's assuming that the person she's speaking to knows the meaning of what kind of ending she's offering i pledged my service to ronnie without having even the slightest idea what the [ __ ] she was talking about because she gave me the impression that eventually she might actually explain it the contextual understanding of her plan came so much later than the choice to assist her with it that it's almost immaterial to the choices i made at the time i was making them and the pledge is just a pledge after all you can choose a different ending at the end no matter what you've promised her ronnie is an enigmatic mysterious presence just as a character she once had an actual body but when she committed day aside and killed one of her brothers godwin the first of the golden lineage the first demigod ever to die she was magically ejected from her body she killed godwin's soul but could not kill his body now it spreads errata on death through the lands between the rune of death broke apart and one half branded her killing her body and permanently separating her soul so she lives on in this forearmed blue doll held together with magic and string her quest takes you to fascinating places for fascinating reasons her quest is the only narrative reason to visit nokron the eternal city and the lake of rot beneath those are some of the most amazing areas in the game her quest goes hand in hand with a player's environmental curiosity her path is the path to all the best content enochron is a blade that can kill the two fingers once you give it to her she disappears and you have to trudge through the lake of rot to find her again and pledge your service as her consort now there's a really amazing and hilarious interview with miyazaki that made the rounds on twitter before eldon ring's release from what i can find this is a real interview it goes like this quote miyazaki i sometimes get this question from foreign media and i answered with a no i was asked why are you so sadistic i don't know about the other staff members but i'm actually a masochist i'm a huge masochist so when i make games like these this is how i want to be treated i want to be killed this way that's how i make it it's just that sometimes people don't understand it this is for my pleasure interviewer really you want to be killed deep in the forest getting punched by a huge mushroom miyazaki yes yes and the curse area when i get cursed interviewer you want to die from a barrage of arrows miyazaki it's gratifying i like that i just wanted to emphasize it i don't know about the other staff members fantasies but i'm not making it from a sadistic stance but from a masochistic one i want this done to me end quote i just love how upbeat and excited he sounds about it and once you've started considering the game from a slightly kinky angle it is hard not to unsee it am i saying that just because the game has you trudging through a literal lake of disease and waste suffering every step of the way only to kiss the hand of a broken doll who even in disgrace is more beautiful and powerful than you'll ever be that this is the artistic output of a masochist i mean not necessarily it could just be a total coincidence that ronnie is the only character in the cast where a player willingly flings themselves at her dainty blue feet i don't mean this by way of criticism or being puritanical i just think it is extremely funny how well ronnie's quest structure acts as not only the most compelling way for a player to become immersed in the plot and see the best parts of the world but also acts as an extension of the lead designer's most intensely personal artistic impulses this is what makes eldon ring so delightfully idiosyncratic it goes hard on ideas mechanics and motifs that are not market tested and triple checked by corporate pr firms it takes artistic gambles and big risks and even throws in a lot of stuff that feels as if it came from an actual individual and not a committee of dozens ronnie's ending is narratively the most satisfying because it upends all of the stagnancy that has been destroying the lands between before the climax she explains it all like this quote mine will be in order not of gold but the stars and moon of the chill night i would keep them far from the earth beneath our feet as it is now life souls and order are bound tightly together but i would have them at great remove and have the certainties of sight emotion faith and touch all become impossibilities which is why i would abandon this soil with mine order what's thou come with me even now my one and only lord and quote she would scatter the souls of the world like stars in the sky blinking together across the void like letting the fire fade and the abyss of humanity rise up in dark souls in her final closing words ronnie says 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 end quote this is very reminiscent of what aldia says in the age of dark ending in dark souls 2. the scholar of the first sin then in tones quote there is no path beyond the scope of light beyond the reach of dark what could possibly await us and yet we seek it insatiably such as our fate and quote in both of these endings existential certainty is traded for exposure and vulnerability we all want to cling on to linger to be as we are forever this is bad for us gradually we all slip into the chill night that encompasses all to meet it with open eyes and open arms is a frightening proposition but it's a proposition through which a person might reckon with their existential position as a fragile transitory thing more honestly the age of the stars is an age of boundless formless self the kind of creature rani already is with no body and an indestructible soul she lives in a world of terrifying and total exposure to both nature and nothingness it is fascinating to me that the majority of players who finish elden ring are so willing to meet her there in that dark place there aren't detailed statistics on how many people completed what variant of the elden lord ending but there are a huge amount of differences between these endings far more than groping them under a single achievement would suggest each of the endings revolves around oddly one of the characters who were announced in such centorian tones way way back in the opening cut scene the ever brilliant gold mask the loathsome dung eater fear the deathbed companion sir gideon off near the all-knowing when the game first came out there was no system for tracking the whereabouts of npcs that was added later in a patch even with the patch it is harder to follow some of these variant plot lines out to their conclusions than it is to get the other endings the simplest ending is the age of fracture the one revolving around sir gideon of near offnear is the imperious knight in charge of the hub area roundtable hold similar to how german was present throughout the hunter's dream before fighting him at the climax of bloodborne off near through his studies came to the conclusion that queen america's intended legacy was for the tarnish to struggle for all eternity without ever succeeding which goes to show you that he never fraternized with his employees the smith of round table hold once made an oath to queen america that he would forge a weapon that could slay a god america wanted things to end it was an act of vengeance and desperation to shatter the elden ring in the first place gideon's got the wrong of it but persists in his disbelief to the point of trying to stop you at the climax he's not much of a threat by that late stage of the game just a warm-up for the next two boss fights with horolu and radergon america's other self like so many other characters queen america has two contrasting but equal identities she's the god queen and she's also her second husband radukon at first it seems like it might just be a confusion of the two characters but over on the gold mask side plot there's a whole interval where you can perform a specific miracle in front of one of america's statues and it will explicitly flip to her male form instead saying that they are in fact the same being redragon is the one who's still able to fight america strung up as punishment along the rune arc of the elden ring itself is now nothing but stone and dust retron bursts from her to defend the greater will's ambitions in this world this last fight is a two-parter first it's this duel with a redheaded god his area of effect smashes are incredibly fast and powerful and his aggression ramps up considerably as the fight goes on those last few hits you need to defeat him are quite difficult to land his main purpose is just attrition wearing you down using up your resources knocking your spirit ash out of the running if you can from his ashes arise an avatar of the greater will itself the elden beast visually the fight is spectacular it reminded me a great deal of the end of princess mononoke one of my favorite of the studio ghibli animes and certainly its most violent where a spirit of the forest rises up to try and defend itself against an industrializing nation the elden beast moves beautifully for being so large but it also moves very far away a lot of the fight is spent in transit timing dodges deranged attacks that come from a long way off and that feels anticlimactic to some people in repetition it is certainly frustrating to be stuck on the elden beast but i was surprised to find that by the time i got to new game plus 2 i was doing more damage to it and having an easier time with my melee only build i was hurting it so much every time i caught up with it that i wasn't spending as much time chasing it down it is such a beautiful fight that it's a shame that the choreography of the fight can be frustrating the elden beast is the living embodiment of the guidance of grace it spews the golden stars which differentiate the greater will from the cold and dark cosmos it came from it feels wonderfully climactic in how the elden beast fight brings together the lore the player's personal narrative and the repeating visual motifs found throughout the entire game and what a massive game to have finally reached the climax of slaying the elton beast is such a feeling of relief the end of a long and winding path of both suffering and wonder now reaching its final terminus and here upon its death is where these different endings are branched only now in this final moment unless you're cursed with a frenzied flame of madness in which case you have no choice the age of fracture amend the elden ring into the exact shape it was before the shattering what was broken and misguided in the greater world before is just folded back into the room the broken parts are rayified and the age of fracture begins gideon off near wanted eternal suffering for the tarnished in the age of fracture ending he basically gets his wish in perpetuating the status quo and that's where the other plot lines of the elden lord variants differ the ever brilliant gold masks plot is a darkly comedic story brother corin a true believer in the golden order goes to seek out the fundamentalist scholar gold mask gold mask is mute but traces strange and complex patterns with his finger which the brother dutifully records once you bring the two of them together as your journey goes on into its later phases you run into them over and over and the brother begins to despair does the gold mask have any idea what's going on actually did he make himself page and scribe to complete madman i mean of course he did this guy is definitely unhinged although in this case crazy like a fox brother corrin denounces him as a secret heretic but the philosophical conclusion that gold mask reaches is that disparity and ambition taint the greater will gold mask reaches essentially the same conclusion that the three fingers did difference creates suffering the desire to be perceived as good creates a desire to perceive others as evil so the gold mask created the rune of perfect order instead of burning it all to ash like the three fingers want it seems that this ending freezes it in place without the possibility of changes there can be no ambition if a thing's nature is fixed it is neither good nor evil supernatural stasis perfect order a place for everything and everything in its place forever and ever amen which if your gold mask a fundamentalist for divine rationality sounds great or you could take literally the opposite approach and support the loathsome dung eater his quest is the hardest to finish because it's a scavenger hunt what the dung eater looks like inside his armor is impossible to tell but even the outside is covered in polyps abscesses and tumors someone who went to jail with him long ago says that the dung eater not only killed their cellmate but defiled his corpse in the most horrifying disgusting possible ways in the guts of his victims he plants the seed bed curse a contagious version of the omen curse cutting them off from the aired trees so that their souls can never be reabsorbed and they stay defiled forever it is flatly evil and very gross and i would be really curious what the actual statistics are for what percentage of people decided you know what the necrophiliac coprophiliac rapist murderer has a very valid point to be fair the dung eater is not above this happening to him his quest line involves harvesting five seed bed curses from his victims and then defiling his own body with them until he becomes so absolutely disgustingly corrupted that a divine rune is created through which that corruption can be spread permanently throughout the whole world and to behold his ending is by far the most viscerally unpleasant the frenzied flame ending was apocalyptic dire but not nearly half as gross many a 13 year old has declared that this whole world is [ __ ] but few hold on to the dream long enough to make it a magical reality the dungateer does if you let him this ending is called the blessing of despair the final variation seems like it would be even bleaker than that but in the supernatural context of the game it's actually among the more compassionate possible endings this one is called the age of the duskborn an age where the rune of destined death is reintegrated into the elden ring and mortality resumes across the land between for everyone commoner and god alike this ending is tied to fia the death bed companion her role in the society she comes from is to steal essence from passing tarnished and then release that energy back into a corpse giving the corpse another chance at life whenever you accept a hug from her this transfer takes place and you lose five percent of your total health her goal is to use that essence to act as a deathbed companion to the first of the demigods to die godwin the golden his corpse rests at the base of the aired tree rotting it with poison and horribly deformed the arena looks set up for a fight with a giant almost incomprehensible corpse lying flat in the corner but godwin's whole point is that he is empty his soul was utterly destroyed and his body now lives in death the poison seeping from it creates a plague of zombies and skeletons and other fowl creatures the death root that he gather for yet another npc traces all of its roots all the way back to godwin's diseased repose he doesn't fight you because he has no animating intelligence at all thea if you accept her as she is and choose not to cower from her intentions dies at godwin's side slipping into the dead god's empty dream if you follow her there you fight a mighty creature named a lich dragon forta sax according to the lore the dragon was actually once godwin's friend and then it came here trying to save his remains from the cursive on death that grips it instead the curse corrupted the dragon 2 trapping him in an endless nightmare of entropic decay which is where you fight him the sky miserable swirls of red and black the old dragon relentless in its hatred another beautiful fight a spectacle of color and violence with a fascinating series of justifications behind it in the storytelling killing the lich dragon ends the nightmare and fear's gift is bequeathed onto you the mending rune of the death prince it's made up of two hallow brands a centipede-shaped rune one half of which was branded into godwin when his soul was obliterated one branded into ronnie when her body was severed from her the centipede shape seems to be a nod towards the immortality curse of sakiro where the hollow brand seems quite clearly tied to the hollow's dark sign of the dark souls trilogy reuniting the centipedes closing the circle of the hallow brands and then reintroducing this rune into the pattern of the elden ring creates a world of total and lasting mortality it is a drastic difficult change for the lands between and better by far than no change at all where the rune of perfect order enshrines a stagnancy into a permanent state arresting the decay by freezing the movement or where the rune of the foul curse accelerates and intensifies the decay into something even worse and more disgusting the rune of the death prince instead makes permanent the process of change by way of returning mortality all six endings in elden ring offer some unique perspective on how to manage the disparity between the will of the outer gods and the lives of those who live in the lands between all six endings are philosophically opposed to one another somehow which makes for a very satisfying choice of endings for such a very long game and a surprisingly complex resolution of an opening cut scene whose main concern is shouting the names of people you won't come to fully understand for dozens of hours looking back at eldon ring at the past six months that i've devoted almost entirely to the from software catalog it's not any of the endings that sum up the experience it was the feeling i got the first time that i discovered the underground part of the world map here in eldon ring down this jaffa river well in the forest so near to the start area such an unobtrusive and unassuming building the elevator in there goes down and keeps going enough time for a little bit of boredom a little bit of confusion to set in and then the vista glittering stones across the ceiling of a cavern so huge it looks like the night sky the scope of the world nearly doubled for me in a moment my sense of the aesthetic of the world the ways in which it can be beautiful expanded and transformed my anticipation for the game to come and the possibilities arrayed before me dialed up to an even greater pitch in exploring the underground area i was initially frustrated to be unable to find a way into the upper ruins i thought what a waste but then so much later after defeating radon and following ronnie's quest for the city of nochron i did arrive every object every place that you can see in the vistas of these underground areas you can eventually touch and explore and i wanted so badly to explore to understand this world and witness its wonders for myself people have different reasons for becoming fans of the from software style of game but for me it's that intensity of curiosity that i feel when trying to navigate their worlds that really does the job there is such a depth of detail and artistic intention behind every one of these games and it's an uncommon joy to be able to be swept away so completely in all of those details the ending matters little against my first glimpse of pharah missoula glittering in a sharp grey sunlight as dragons swarm around magical storms all the imagery that i had loved when it came to the dragon area in dark souls 2 but intensified and expanded on far beyond what i would have imagined for myself i love a good fantasy novel but it's limited by my own visual imagination i can only picture things based on things i've seen games like eldon ring expand my entire imagination by giving me a broader visual vocabulary i would never have been able to paint such complex beautiful landscapes or such dense intricate cities let alone with such skill that they all cohere and mood and tone myself and my own imagination it is beyond what my imagination knows how to do and now all those things have seared themselves in each playthrough i made through the game world made it a little smaller but i'll never forget how small i felt within the world starting out hell even at the end i was still being blown away by how much more map there was constantly getting revealed mastery of this world diminished the lands between for me the endings were satisfying but not as satisfying as the work to get there the narrative of the world was compelling yet not half as compelling as my own agency to choose within the present tense of that world in this way alden ring is representative of the very core of what makes games unique as an artistic medium their interactivity the way the developer and player co-author the experience and the uncanny power of an experience in which that collaboration feels strong elden ring was not the surprise hit of 2022 because it was the apex of what an open world can be or the best possible version of one it resonated with so many people because it gave people much more room to meet it in the middle than most open world games do by being difficult by being obtuse by being so deceptively large and making you so small within it plenty of games are concerned with making sure that a player sees everything that a developer has to show them alden rang is instead concerned with motivating a player to see those things of their own volition with years of design precedent going into the psychology of how to evoke that motivation and connection within a player eldon ring connects players to its world through art and through agency it connects players to each other through shared struggle and withheld information it connects players to themselves by making philosophical suggestions that a player must choose to agree or disagree with and behind it all is a sense of humor and a sense of beauty and most of all a sense of artistic harmony everything in eldon ring is intentional working together to create a cumulative whole like shakiro did like bloodborne did mechanically all variations on a theme versions of the same systems of combat and loops of player engagement artistically each a truly unique game and a truly gorgeous example of the power of interactivity to transport the self into an imaginative space and dwell there for an awfully long time i wish i had understood what these games were earlier in my career as a game critic but i did not because the popular conversation around them was so focused on the abrasiveness of their difficulty things that i didn't even find to be wholly true when i played the games at last eldon ring changed the conversation for a lot of people it isn't so widely beloved because it's hard it's widely beloved because it is so easy for any given person to form lasting and meaningful memories and connections with the game in moving past dark souls there was a fear among many people that popularizing the formula meant diluting the formula across these three games we can see how unfounded that fear was the formula is remarkably strong and remarkably flexible the art that surrounds it can be reconfigured into any number of different genres the only way to dilute it would be for the developers to assume that the player is incapable of authoring their own stories within the worlds they're given too much of the conversation around these games is about the right or the wrong way to play them not enough is said of the intricately clever ways they make it so singularly enjoyable to play them at all in all the elden lord endings the narration follows the same thread what will the descendants of this world say about those who shaped it these three games all descended from the same family tree that began all the way back with demon souls in 2009 the tree gets taller the branches get longer and with every experimental new sequel the fallen leaves tell a story thanks for watching i'd like to take a moment to thank by name some of the people who are currently donating ten dollars a month or more on the website patreon it's because of you guys that i'm able to do these videos so here goes people like josh smith ron gervais arvid carlstrom yena oma midji maruna vozaru peter from denmark alex hansen nikolai vladimirov anonymous patrick moduleed tyler collins conor mclaugh eli bergmas sg response tiernan garces john paul kweller eddie burton james sullivan jay sizzle miyazco seahawk zoe sheikh zak millington carew woodbury carol henderson cato corey beaufil costas dan burton dan tadaxby daniel phillips dennis clark elijah king industrial robot jack dawson jake demarast maze jason mackimer marcelo ferrara mr mosh patrick robertson sean barrett 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and i really appreciate it until next time

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 460,885

Keywords: Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, From Software, Retrospective, Review, Critique, Lore, Explained, Analysis

Id: hPRo4arGaSk

Length: 280min 14sec (16814 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/JakalDX]

I'm really surprised by how glowing his review of Sekiro is. I love Sekiro and I feel much the same as he does, but so much about what he liked in Dark Souls, and his disinterest in grinding out difficult fights, made me think he'd be unhappy with it.

[u/Rickeon]

His experience of the melania fight (around 3:10:00) was very interesting in comparison to my own and really highlighted to me why discussion on difficulty in these games tends to get so obnoxious. To summarize:

Him: Used mimic tear, beat her right away, felt like I figured out the game, loved it.

Me: Tried fighting her straight for an hour or so, got bored, tried mimic tear, beat her no problem, rolled my eyes and quit.

I mean, obviously he played it wrong... if he had my brain, which he (presumably) does not. Really, he enjoyed it so he was playing it right, but I realized after consistently not being able to empathize with most of his experiences is that our perceptions of difficulty are literally inverted in a somewhat fundamental way. I tend to view a boss that takes one try as a trivial boss, a boss that takes an hour as a very hard boss, etc., so if I use a cheesy strategy that makes an infamous boss easier, I didn't achieve anything, I skipped the hard fight and replaced it with a trivial one and feel like I missed content. In fact, I'm happiest if you just give me a single stick, lock me in a room with a boss with no other options, and let me beat my head against it for a few hours. e.g. I had a very similar experience to Noah on the Isshin fight, taking a long time to finally barely beat it, he seems to have come away disliking it, I came away with "wow that took so long best boss fight ever"

(I think this boss-mindset difference alone explains a decent portion of the difficulty discourse. "oh my god you got to spend 3 hours on the taurus demon? I wish I could have spent 3 hours on the taurus demon, you're going to have so much more fun than me when you get stuck for 15 hours on no wait where are you going why do you hate fun")

Man is that a hell of an inferential gap, and it has absolutely nothing to do with skill. He just seems to sort of fundamentally interface with this type of game differently. My ideal for this type of game is something like a series of super difficult perfectly tuned bosses that take near perfect execution of a very few carefully balanced options to beat, he seems to like having tons of options and variety, and being able to modulate the difficulty. Fromsoft does a ridiculously good job of catering to both mindsets, Sekiro more the former, Elden Ring more the latter. But, there's an inherent tension there that can't really be fully reconciled. If you're the former and don't realize the latter exists, you look at spirit ashes as "Fromsoft literally added a button that just makes the game less fun?? don't press it it's a trap you'll thank me later" and be completely right for their specific mindset, while the latter might go "why would you complain about options they put them in for a reason" and also be completely right. Basically every bit of well-meaning advice from the former will actively make the game worse for the latter and vice-versa. They might be using the same software but they aren't playing the same game.

Thankfully everyone on the internet has great theory of mind and is able to realize others might have different preferences and handles disagreements maturely so this never causes any problems.

[u/brownie81]

I replayed Sekiro right after beating Elden Ring and I think it's my favourite one. I like that it's a more narrative-based action game when compared to the build-focused RPG nature of Souls/BB/ER.

[u/domogrue]

Whelp, time to cancel my afternoon plans, new NCG video is up.

Poor guy is so apologetic in his Patreon post for being late on his own self-imposed deadline and I'm just thankful he exists to deliver some of the best insights into games that I've seen on the internet, period.

[u/Schwarzengerman]

This is Noah Caldwell Gervais btw. Forgot to add that to the title.

[u/GhostNo7]

This might be a nitpick overall with the video, but is it me or is NCG's characterisation of genichiro kinda off? He seems to view the man as ambitious, trying to dodge the consequences of his own actions and wanting the dragon's heritage solely to defeat enemies "within and without", when he came across to me as someone driven to pursing immortality out of a desperate desire to protect his homeland from invading forces, even if it meant throwing away his own humanity. Maybe there's some lore I'm missing, but it feels like NCG either missed something or tried to shoehorn genichiro into a particular spot for the analysis

[u/BearyJohannes]

Still on the BloodBorne part, but thus far as wonderful a video as I was expecting. Glad all the work turned out wonderfully

[u/YashaAstora]

Man, I deeply disagree with him on Hourah Loux and Morgott. The latter is hilariously awesome and a perfect example of Fromsoft's Japanese willingness to have completely earnest cheesy stuff alongside complete deathly seriousness (see the Yakuza series for another example of this habit in Japanese games), and Morgott's introduction and fight are absolutely incredible moments.

[u/AviusAedifex]

I am so impressed by Noah almost completely ignoring both parrying and mikiri counters and the jump attack. Instead focusing more on prosthetic use. He seems to have completely brute forced the game and yet still finished it somehow.

Completely opposite of the way I've played and it looks really unfun.