Elden Ring

[M3xus]

Did I miss a summon sign or is it inevitable he races ahead and carks it?

He dies regardless. I didn'tsummon him and came back to find him dead.

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

For a moment after the final boss I wondered if I was the baddie, but then I saw Ansbach's corpse. Did I miss a summon sign or is it inevitable he races ahead and carks it?

This is the biggest DLC recontextualization for me, everything else is just lore retcons, but Mohg stands right in front of you and rants about how he's gonna make a dynasty with his manwife, and then it turns out Mohg got magically gay-converted and led astray from his original goals, used as nothing but a tool to get Miquella into the Land of Shadow. Mohg got done dirty.

I'm still not sure if the Land of Shadow is a Lovecraft-style Dreamland or actually an island somewhere, or when Messmer was sent to raze the place, or why Marika wanted Messmer to raze the place. At first I thought it might have something to do with Marika wanting to destroy the Mother of Fingers grafted into the Scadutree if you buy the interpretation that Marika was trying to get free of the Greater Will, but Messmer seems to be doing a piss poor job of that if that is his purpose, and it's total conjecture besides that.

The Lands of Shadow used to be part of the Lands Between but is now displaced, althought the maps are of different scale the Shadowlands fit in the center of the Lands Betweens internal sea with even the geography lining up, the Scadutree overlaps with the Erdtree while the Shaman village is near the capital. Jagged Peak is next to Caelid and when Faram Azula was still part of the mainland it would fit alongside them, which makes sense and Bayle fled Faram Azula to Jagged Peak and the mother of modern dragons lives in Caelid. The Cerulean coast to prospect town used to form the boarder of a smaller inland sea stretching from Lirunia to Limgrave, and the Abyssal used to be a central area alongside the suppressing tower which as it's plaque says used to be the center of the Lands Between.
The creation of the Erdtree and Scadutree forcibly displaced them and they exist in another dimension now, but in the era before the Erd tree they were part of the continent.
For Metyr and the Greater Will, I think Ymir makes it clear the Golden Order never represented the Greater Will, in Gold Masks questline it's even said the Golden Order in founded on Marika being the one true god. The Fingers don't even follow it's guidance, they follow their mother who is mad and is currently dead/overthrown.
Saying something is grated into the Scadutree seems to just be a phrase used for the remembrances and not be describing the bosses themselves. Messmer's goal was probably to kill the Hornsent/Tower Folk but it's also said in item descriptions Marika feared him due to him also being the reincarnation of an ancient god like Melania is, but unlike Melania his power is antithetical to the Erdtree.
While we don't know what set Marika off, I think it was the first burning of the Erdtree, the one that isn't talked about explicitly but is implied to have happened as the Erdtree today is just a stump while in ancient times the Erdtree was a functioning tree with sap, leaves, and bounty.

 

[Raging Capybara]

Minor Erdtree is the worst spell in the entire series (worse than seek guidance) but still requires 70 faith.

Beautiful balancing.

 

[Sniperwoof]

I really enjoyed Elden Ring but I do hope they go back to their traditional linear level design for whatever the next SoulsBorne entry ends up being. The biggest issue in the both the base game and SOTET is that the good content is tot far spread out.

For every Royal Capital and Volcano Manor there's a really empty and boring field devoid of content. Bloodborne was peak level design with how dense and stuffed with content it was.

 

[Mega Black]

I don't know how anyone takes anything from the DLC as woke. Every time these sorts of things are shown in Elden Ring, it's shown as horrific, unnatural, and evil.

The only thing that stuck out to me in the DLC was that every woman you encounter is some kind of badass sword wielding warrior and all the men are weird effeminate roles.

I really enjoyed Elden Ring but I do hope they go back to their traditional linear level design for whatever the next SoulsBorne entry ends up being. The biggest issue in the both the base game and SOTET is that the good content is tot far spread out.

For every Royal Capital and Volcano Manor there's a really empty and boring field devoid of content. Bloodborne was peak level design with how dense and stuffed with content it was.

I'm cool with them abandoning the open world so long as the next game is still relatively open for progression. Dark Souls 3 is way too linear.

 

[Sniperwoof]

The only thing that stuck out to me in the DLC was that every woman you encounter is some kind of badass sword wielding warrior and all the men are weird effeminate roles.

Baldur's Gate 3 also does this. All of the warrior unga bunga greatsword smash party members are women and all of the male party members with the exception of Minsc are casters or mages.

 

[Mega Black]

Baldur's Gate 3 also does this. All of the warrior unga bunga greatsword smash party members are women and all of the male party members with the exception of Minsc are casters or mages.

Yeah, it's really blatant. Nowadays the roles are flipped so often that it feels like having a male who uses a big sword is somehow more unique than the opposite.

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

The only thing that stuck out to me in the DLC was that every woman you encounter is some kind of badass sword wielding warrior and all the men are weird effeminate roles.

But that isn't true though, sure Moore is shy and Thoiller a simp but Ansbach is the most noble character in the DLC and is on a quest of vengence for his lord, Dryleaf Dane while a foot note is a warrior monk, the Hornsent character is also a warrior on a quest for vengeance and isn't feminine, and the Hornsent as a whole are an all male faction of with the exception of the Empyrean Grandmam who sends the Divine Beast against you.
Really it's only Ymir and Miquella who are feminine, and they're both insane and evil. The two sword girls also fall into the obsessed crazy one sided romantic type, Freya is presented better than Leda, but she still disrespecting Radhan's wishes and going against the rest of his followers who wanted to give him an honorable death to put his souls at rest.
Messmer himself is a mommy issue guy, but I wouldn't call him feminine.

 

[Local FloRida-man]

For the subject of the Three and Two Fingers, the Three Fingers are still wrong. Their argument is literally, about how since pain and suffering exist that all existence should end.
Their quest is pretty clear about that and even their demons like Shabriri and Haeta are clear, they want to end all life forever and destroy the Erdtree which is the embodiment of all life, everywhere

I personally like the frenzy flame ending because it's the only ending consistent with what Miyazaki and co have been hammering into our heads for years:

Ohh, ohh, finally, you've come!

Oh wondrous Ash, grant us our wish. Make the tales true, and burn this world away. My Lady must see flame, and you have only to show her. You are Ash, are you not? Is it not fire that you seek? Surely you've seen the rot that afflicts our world. But that witch fooled the good Father, and buried the flame. After we had all made up our minds, too. So, please, grant us one wish. Make the tales true, and burn this world away. My Lady must see flame, and you have only to show her.

Oh, please, it must be you. I'm so terribly frightened, of timidly rotting away... Like those... Like those fools on the outside.

The devs can't go on and on about how drowning the world in darkness/burning it all to ash when things get bad is good, but then conveniently flip the script when it's a broken world they actually want to keep going (for monetary reasons)

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

The devs can't go on and on about how drowning the world in darkness/burning it all to ash when things get bad is good, but then conveniently flip the script when it's a broken world they actually want to keep going (for monetary reasons)

Yeah, but fire, flame, and burning things down means different thing in Elden Ring and Dark Souls, while both series have an overarching theme about people in power holding onto it even to the end of the world and causing things to drag out and not continue naturally, fire itself means something different in each story.
In Dark Souls, Fire is the order of the world and represents order and reason, trying to keep the flame of going even to the end of the world is causing space, time, and life to unaturally warp horrifically. In dark souls letting the world burn to ash is letting the age end and move onto the next age naturally, you aren't making your own order or unnaturally extending the current one like what Gwyin did when he cursed humanity and started the whole mess due to not wanting to give up power.
But in Elden Ring, Flame, especially the Frenzied Flame is chaos and death which nothing will arise from, instead of anarchy or letting nature take it's course the Frenzied Flame is Nihilism and entropic chaos.
As the lord of the Frenzied Flame, your goal is to you end all life, forever.
Committing a worse sin than Marika when she tried to remove Destined Death from the world.
Just look at what happened to the abyssal woods, the devs clearly aren't endorsing the Frenzied Flame, it's demons inhabit the corpses of people and try to trick you and rant madly about chaos taking the world.

 

[Local FloRida-man]

Yeah, but fire, flame, and burning things down means different thing in Elden Ring and Dark Souls, while both series have an overarching theme about people in power holding onto it even to the end of the world and causing things to drag out and not continue naturally, fire itself means something different in each story.
In Dark Souls, Fire is the order of the world and represents order and reason, trying to keep the flame of going even to the end of the world is causing space, time, and life to unaturally warp horrifically. In dark souls letting the world burn to ash is letting the age end and move onto the next age naturally, you aren't making your own order or unnaturally extending the current one like what Gwyin did when he cursed humanity and started the whole mess due to not wanting to give up power.
But in Elden Ring, Flame, especially the Frenzied Flame is chaos and death which nothing will arise from, instead of anarchy or letting nature take it's course the Frenzied Flame is Nihilism and entropic chaos.
As the lord of the Frenzied Flame, your goal is to you end all life, forever.
Committing a worse sin than Marika when she tried to remove Destined Death from the world.
Just look at what happened to the abyssal woods, the devs clearly aren't endorsing the Frenzied Flame, it's demons inhabit the corpses of people and try to trick you and rant madly about chaos taking the world.

The view of fire is different in both series. Fire is abhorrent to the edtree and treated like a grave sin because... well it's a tree and it hates fire. There's much ado about how "evil" and "sinful" the frenzied flame is, but these same accusations are made about the fell flame (which wasnt anymore evil than marika, maybe less considering it wasnt as war hungry) and the ghost flame (which from all accounts was pretty benevolent to it's subjects). The hatred of fire is just a self serving narrative to protect the current order. From the erdtree and golden order's twisted view an outer god of perpetual rot or a new order of eternal seedbed violation and suffering forever are A-ok, but burning those two things to ash to let something better take it's place is considered reprehensible. And they need to be burned because nothing else in the setting seems to be able to get rid of them.

The frenzied flame of course wants it's age of fire to last forever too, but I don't think it has a choice. Just like the ghost flame and destined death gave way, just like the immutable golden order gave way, so to will the chaos flame.

It's also hard for me to see shabriri and co possessing dead bodies as all that bad when you have the deathbed faction giving people necrotic stds, molesting a god's corpse and dragon best friend, and endorsing a world of unholy necromancy; or the dark moon dropping rocks on the planet that painfully turn people and animals into living stone or giant balls made of faces. The devs clearly want us to think the frenzy flame is evil, but they forgot to make it do something the other factions aren't doing already too.

 

[Xerxes IX]

Freya is presented better than Leda,

With the reveal she didn't need Miquella's gay (straight?) mind control, Leda's more of a pedophile than Mohg is.

And any "feminine" traits Messmer has are because he's an emo brooding anime character straight out of the 2000s, cursed seal on his eye and all. He's the kind of character whod be popular with women more than anything.

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

The frenzied flame of course wants it's age of fire to last forever too, but I don't think it has a choice. Just like the ghost flame and destined death gave way, just like the immutable golden order gave way, so to will the chaos flame.

The game is pretty clear about the frenzied flame being the end of all life.

"All that there is came from the One Great.
Then came fractures,
and births,
and souls.

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 One 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 all away. As the Lord of Chaos.

No more fractures...no more birth... (sighs)

The Fenzied Flame considers the creation of the Microcosm a mistake, Heytta even notes it wants to get rid of births, souls, and that life itself is a mistake.
Melina's dialogue further reinforces that

If you intend to claim the Frenzied Flame, I ask that you cease. It is not to be meddled with. It is chaos, devouring life and thought unending. However ruined this world has become, however mired in torment and despair, life endures. Births continue. There is beauty in that, is there not? If you would become Lord, do not deny this notion. Please, leave the Frenzied Flame alone.
I ask you, one more time. Please, seek not the Frenzied Flame. As one who strives to become a Lord, deny not the lives, the new births of this world. Those who would are not fit to be called Lord. When the land they preside over is lifeless.
Please put a stop to this madness. The Lord of Frenzied Flame is no lord at all. When the land they preside over is lifeless.

The Frenzied Flame devours life and thought endlessly, it will put an end to births and the world the Lord of the Frenzied Flame rules over is lifeless.
The inquisitors aren't even Erdtree inquisitors, they're Hornsent Inquisitors so clearly other orders hates the Frenzied Flame just as much as Marika and the Erdtree does, even Melania who has some connection to destined death wants to avoid the Frenzied Flame at all costs, even it's own cultists Midra endured countless years of endless suffering to hold it at bay until we put him out of his misery.

It's also hard for me to see shabriri and co possessing dead bodies as all that bad when you have the deathbed faction giving people necrotic stds, molesting a god's corpse and dragon best friend, and endorsing a world of unholy necromancy; or the dark moon dropping rocks on the planet that painfully turn people and animals into living stone or giant balls made of faces. The devs clearly want us to think the frenzy flame is evil, but they forgot to make it do something the other factions aren't doing already too.

Also the Dark Moon didn't destroy the nameless Eternal City, Astel did, and the Nox worshiped the Dark Moon but lost it's favor when it turned to Rani, and it's never implied that it's the one sending stars on meteors down on the planet.
The only party ever said to do that sort of thing are the Stars themselves and the Greater Will, both of which aren't Moons.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

Not true, I think Bloodborne probably has the most straightforward and easy to follow plot of all the Souls games. The only real point of confusion is what the fuck the Moon Presence is.
Though I do wonder if I only think that because it's cosmic horror and unanswered questions are part and parcel of the genre.

Dark Souls 1 is the only game of theirs with a mostly cohesive plot you can piece together, all the others are usually a mess of dropped or unfinished plot points, lore that doesn't align, and last minute changes.

It's Demon's Souls, the plot of the game is literally "get buff to make the big evil thing stop doing evil shit." I'm not even being that reductive. The plot and its major participants are made 100% coherent to anyone who sat through the two exposition dump cutscenes at the start. The lore is cohesive in that everything that is important is spelled out for you and only the unimportant background details are presented as vague flavor text. Stuff like what Mephistopheles' ultimate goals are or who the legendary "Big M" is isn't really all that relevant, after all.

Dark Souls and onward made the background details more relevant to the plot and Elden Ring went a step further by having the plot exist almost entirely in service to the background details, rather than the other way around. Neither style of storytelling is bad but I do much prefer Demon's Souls' story to all the other games barring Sekiro, even to this day.

 

[Local FloRida-man]

The game is pretty clear about the frenzied flame being the end of all life.
The Fenzied Flame considers the creation of the Microcosm a mistake, Heytta even notes it wants to get rid of births, souls, and that life itself is a mistake.
Melina's dialogue further reinforces that

The Frenzied Flame devours life and thought endlessly, it will put an end to births and the world the Lord of the Frenzied Flame rules over is lifeless.
The inquisitors aren't even Erdtree inquisitors, they're Hornsent Inquisitors so clearly other orders hates the Frenzied Flame just as much as Marika and the Erdtree does, even Melania who has some connection to destined death wants to avoid the Frenzied Flame at all costs, even it's own cultists Midra endured countless years of endless suffering to hold it at bay until we put him out of his misery.

Well yeah, when you burn things they tend to die, and an embodiment of fire would wanr to consume everything into itself. None of this refutes what I said though. Every soulsbornekiroring game and it's lore has been about how every age, regardless of philosophy or methodology, will end and give way to the next. This will be true of frenzied flame as well. Even Malenia, the most ardent hater of frenzied flame, believes this is possible with her comments in the ending.

And the two characters most closely tied to destined death, Malekith and Godwyn, show that no, destined death is no better than frenzy. Godwyn's deathblighted corpse has become an all consuming plague that curses everyone it touches to painful deaths and unlives. And Malekith spends his days hiding away crippled in pain and fear trying to hold it at bay until eventually unleashing it on the player, just like midra.

Also the Dark Moon didn't destroy the nameless Eternal City, Astel did, and the Nox worshiped the Dark Moon but lost it's favor when it turned to Rani, and it's never implied that it's the one sending stars on meteors down on the planet.
The only party ever said to do that sort of thing are the Stars themselves and the Greater Will, both of which aren't Moons.

The primeval current and starspawn (and their glintstone conversion curse) come from the stars, which absolutely come from the moons. Otherwise we'd have to believe that the meteorshower after the Radahn fight, the fact it landed directly over nox and opened a way to the city that worshipped the dark moon and was destroyed by starspawn when it no longer needed them, all in order to unlock the tool needed for Ranni to achieve the order of the dark moon... were all just a coincidence. Or that sorcerers around Renalla, the queen of the full moon, keep turning into glintstone and graven balls of glintstone (which again come from the stars) is also... just a coincidence.

 

[Tablet County]

It's Demon's Souls, the plot of the game is literally "get buff to make the big evil thing stop doing evil shit." I'm not even being that reductive. The plot and its major participants are made 100% coherent to anyone who sat through the two exposition dump cutscenes at the start. The lore is cohesive in that everything that is important is spelled out for you and only the unimportant background details are presented as vague flavor text. Stuff like what Mephistopheles' ultimate goals are or who the legendary "Big M" is isn't really all that relevant, after all.

Dark Souls and onward made the background details more relevant to the plot and Elden Ring went a step further by having the plot exist almost entirely in service to the background details, rather than the other way around. Neither style of storytelling is bad but I do much prefer Demon's Souls' story to all the other games barring Sekiro, even to this day.

To be fair, I've never played Demon's Souls. Though from what I've read I wouldn't mind getting another game in the same setting, though I know some would be afraid of From spilling their spaghetti and over-elaborating on the setting.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

To be fair, I've never played Demon's Souls. Though from what I've read I wouldn't mind getting another game in the same setting, though I know some would be afraid of From spilling their spaghetti and over-elaborating on the setting.

I actually think a Demon's Souls 2 could work if they made the plot of that game contemporary with the first game, but have it take place entirely within the Northern Limits, which was a zone that was cut from the original game. It'd be a neat enough way to contextualize why the arch stone that should let you teleport you there was broken in the first game

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

Well yeah, when you burn things they tend to die, and an embodiment of fire would wanr to consume everything into itself. None of this refutes what I said though. Every soulsbornekiroring game and it's lore has been about how every age, regardless of philosophy or methodology, will end and give way to the next. This will be true of frenzied flame as well. Even Malenia, the most ardent hater of frenzied flame, believes this is possible with her comments in the ending.

And the two characters most closely tied to destined death, Malekith and Godwyn, show that no, destined death is no better than frenzy. Godwyn's deathblighted corpse has become an all consuming plague that curses everyone it touches to painful deaths and unlives. And Malekith spends his days hiding away crippled in pain and fear trying to hold it at bay until eventually unleashing it on the player, just like midra.

Yeah, but the Frenzied Flame wants to commit genocide on the entirety of the Microcosm, no matter how shitty the other options are they're still better than attempted Microcosmic genocide since they aren't irreversible, when, if the Frenzied Flame does win there is no hope for a next age since literally everything is dead, perma-dead, no more life ever again.
But I do agree, Melina does probably stop the player.

The primeval current and starspawn (and their glintstone conversion curse) come from the stars, which absolutely come from the moons. Otherwise we'd have to believe that the meteorshower after the Radahn fight, the fact it landed directly over nox and opened a way to the city that worshipped the dark moon and was destroyed by starspawn when it no longer needed them, all in order to unlock the tool needed for Ranni to achieve the order of the dark moon... were all just a coincidence. Or that sorcerers around Renalla, the queen of the full moon, keep turning into glintstone and graven balls of glintstone (which again come from the stars) is also... just a coincidence.

The Stars control fate, including Ranni's so they needed to be unstuck, the Fingerslayer blade could've just been given to Ranni by the Nox if they were listening to the Dark Moon. Rellana, Renalla sister is also still blessed by both moons despite her lack of Glintstone corruption, and fucking off to work for Messmer.
I don't think the Dark Moon threw Astel at the Nox, in the first place Linruian and Nox sorcery and in turn the ancient astrologer people is based on the spell Founding Rain of Stars, which mentions the Primeval Current but not the Moons. The gravity sorcery of the Sellians is based on the Alabaster and Onyx lords, who again, come from the Stars.
While Thorn Sorcery is based on study of the Blood Star, not a Blood Moon, a Blood Star.
The only non-star based sorcery are the Death sorcery and Rykards Magma sorcery, both of which come from the systematic study of a divine power.
The only moon sorcery are from the full moon school, which are founded on the study of the Full and Dark Moons, the fact that they are set apart from the other types due to this fact is proof enough. With the only practicers of Full Moon sorcery being Ranni, Rellana and Renalla who were blessed by the moons, and maybe the Snowy Crone who taught Rani Cold Sorcery.
And when you look at the Nox ruins, what do you see? Fused together shaman/nox/neuman corpses, just like the ones that make up the Gate of Divinity and the ones the Hornest Potentates thought carried the secret to manufacturing saints.
Astel may have wiped out one of their three cities, but whatever happened to the other two is the fault of the Nox themselves, and given that the Starscourge conflict and the subsaquent freezing of the stars happened when Radhan was still young and he's one of Ranni's siblings, and Ranni discovered the Dark Moon when she was young. It's more likely the Dark Moon favoring Ranni is a reaction to the destruction of the Eternal Cities, rather then it killing it's own loyal vassals for no reason.

 

[Mega Black]

It's Demon's Souls, the plot of the game is literally "get buff to make the big evil thing stop doing evil shit."

You're right, sorry, I forgot Demon's Souls. That and Dark Souls are the most straightforward of their games.

 

[斯尼 德之王]

This game seems so lame and faggy only a gay stoner could love it.