The new, open-world structure feels like an intentional decision by FromSoftware to extend a fig leaf to folks who bounced off other Souls games, many of which were far more linear experiences than Elden Ring. Mind you, Elden Ring isn’t the monster it and its predecessors are made out to be by diehards and detractors alike. All the texture, all the personality that door previously clutched in its creaking joints was gone, replaced by a whispery smoothness that hid its existence rather than adding flavor to the world. The first time I opened it following his turn as a handyman, I fumbled with a brief weightlessness when I wasn’t greeted by the exact sound and sensation I expected. It’s like when my dad recently greased the hinges of an old screen door in my childhood home. Souls fans often make hay over the feeling of accomplishment that comes from overcoming the genre’s much-vaunted challenges, but it’s more than that. And those rough edges cannot be sandpapered down without fundamentally changing the game’s entire raison d’être. How do I make you feel the way I felt every time I encountered a merchant or enemy creating the most mournful diegetic music I’ve ever heard in a video game? What words can I use to bestow the same soothing nostalgia that rushed over me the first time I hit a wall with my weapon and it finally faded away to reveal a hidden path? How do I spell out the perfect onomatopoeia to capture my reflexive groan when I was ambushed by a nest of smoke-spewing basilisks, immediately aware of their dangers from encounters in previous Souls games?Įverything in Elden Ring comes bundled with its own kind of friction, designed to rub you the wrong way until, finally, it rubs you the right way. I’ve long since made peace with the fact that reviewing Elden Ring-that is, providing an adequately thorough accounting of my time with the game-is nigh impossible, at least with my limited skillset.

I’ve since spent more than 90 hours journeying through Miyazaki’s sub-conscious, and let me tell you, it can be a pretty weird place. Since then, Miyazaki’s established himself as the creative genius behind FromSoftware’s biggest projects, including Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and now Elden Ring, which released for every major gaming console (apart from Switch, which can’t typically handle such vast games) on February 25. But by the time he was 33, he was already working as director on Demon’s Souls, the PlayStation 3 classic that created the oft-imitated Souls-like pseudo-genre as an enduring facet of gaming history. Miyazaki started his career in game development relatively late. As such, while playing FromSoftware’s Elden Ring over the last month, I couldn’t help but pore over studio president Hidetaka Miyazaki’s biography, if only to feel a little worse about myself. I find myself overly concerned with what I’ve accomplished and what I’ll leave behind, especially in comparison to other people-both successful and otherwise.

I spend too much time, at least for someone with only 33 years on his odometer, thinking about legacy.

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