I’m pinging back and forth between loving and hating Elden Ring. My overall vibe is one of love, obviously, but the things I hate about it are congealing with time. In part because they haven’t changed over time. If anything, they’ve just gotten worse. It’s my age-old complaint about, well, everything in media. Things don’t change. That’s part and parcel from anything.
Let me explain. I read mystery series. I’ve read thousands of mysteries over my years, and that’s not an exaggeration. Well, maybe one thousand, so a slight exaggeration. One thing I noticed is that most series were really good for seven or so books, then just went downhill from there. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the alphabet murders. No, that’s not the name of the series, but it is how they are defined. “A” is for Alibi, “B” is for, uh, Bullets? “C” is for, er, Clues? All the titles are crime-related, in case you hadn’t guessed. Google tells me that “B” is for Burglar and “C” is for Corpse. It was written from the first-person perspective by Sue Grafton, and the protagonist was Kinsey Millhone, a female PI. Now, in 2022, that might not seem like a big deal. The first book was published 40 years ago, though, and it was a huge deal–even by the time I started reading them, which was roughly a decade later.
She was a hard-drinking, hair-chopping broad who was good at her job and bad at relationships. She lived with her 80+-year-old landlord who she claimed she would marry/jump in a heartbeat. She was hard-bitten, but, yes, had a good heart. She was a fucking revelation, and I devoured every book in the series.
One of the gimmicks of the series is that each book is taking place in real time with in relation to the last book. So the entire series is set in the ’80s, which is….an interesting choice. For the first dozen or so books, it worked really well. But “M” is for Malice was the last book in the series that I really enjoyed, and that was published in 1996. After that, though, it felt as if Grafton started reaching for material. Part of it was the real-time feel of the books because well into the next millennium, she still had no cellphones and other useful technology in her books.
Interesting Note: She died in 2017 just after/around “Y” is for, ah, Yesterday (thanks, Google), so there is not a “Z” is for Zero. That was planned to be published in 2019, but now, presumably, the alphabet ends with Y.
Anyway. The last few books were better than the middle dozen or so, but I have to admit that I was glad that the end was nigh. Though I did wonder what Grafton would do after she finished the series. Sadly, we will never know. By the way, the Wiki for the W book mentions that the story is inexplicably set in the ’80s. It’s not inexplicable at all! The whole series is set in the eighties–in a span of about five years. Sheesh. It’s not fucking rocket science!
Ahem. I liked Kinsey Millhone quite a bit. She wasn’t my favorite mystery novel protag of the time (that would be Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone), but she was refreshingly different than most of the others of her ilk. For starter, she was a she and not a he. That was big in the nineties (yes, still, even then). She was a plain-spoken PI who didn’t take shit from anyone. I really appreciated her in that time, but it was frustrating that she didn’t change much with time.
I get it. The things that make a series popular need to be in every book otherwise fans get mad. You can’t change someone drastically and expect your fans to go along for the ride. You have to earn those changes, and that can take time. So saying Kinsey cuts her own hair in book one, for example, better be mentioned in every subsequent book, by god. By the twentieth book, however, it’s not a quirky fact about Kinsey any longer–it’s grating and annoying. Yes I KNOW Kinsey cuts her own hair. So what???
I understand why people want those comfort points. Repetition can be soothing and it’s a way to reinforce that this is a real and discrete person. But, in real life, people change. I’m not the same person I was forty years ago. Or five years ago (Apparently, the span of the books’ real time). Granted, I had a huge medical trauma that hastened that change in the last year, but even before then, it wasn’t as if I was stuck on ice.
So. Let’s apply this to From games. The first thing they are known for is how difficult they are. Well, that was what they were known for. They’re being retconned as ‘you need to be thoughtful about how you play them, but they’re not hard’.
Bitch, please. They’re hard. At least for those of us who are not uber-gamers. Here’s the thing. The journalists who review the From games are probably From fans to begin with. They are not games you can throw at someone who’s never played one and say, “Review it in a week.” Most gaming websites seem to have their one From person–the one they go to when a new From game comes out.
I like to say that I’m good at the games in the gen pop, but that I’m mediocre at them in the world of the From fandom. If I was asked to review a From game, I have a good base from which I could view a new game. For someone who’s never played on or who’s given up on them, it’s pretty brutal to expect them to review a brand new one.
So, for example, Dan Tack is the From guy at Game Informer. Aoife Wilson in the one for Eurogamer. Tamoor Hussain in the go-to From fan at GameSpot, etc. It’s changed with Elden Ring because so many people have gotten into it, but before this game, there usually was one From fan per website. They have played every From game, probably several times each. They tend to have the ‘must beat every boss solo’ mentality, along with the ‘magic is easy mode’ ideology as well.
Side Note: It’s been amusing to hear games journalists repeatedly say that magic is easy mode or not as satisfying as melee, but then admit in the same breath that they have never TRIED the magicks in the games. That seems very non-journalistic to me–making a sweeping statement about something that you have no experience with.
Anyway! What was I talking about? Oh, right. When series go stale. Which is NOT the case with FromSoft games, by the way. Elden Ring is fantastic for the most part and only a hair behind Dark Souls III in terms of my favorite From game. I fully expect it will pass DS III by the time I’m done with it, so I’m saying all of this with love. I just want it to be better.
The point of this post. I was cleaning up some content yesterday, including a series of bosses that were related.
*SPOILER*
There is a kind of boss called the Crystalian. Their deal is that they are encrusted with crystal so you have to crack that outer crust before you can actually do damage. The thing is, there are four of these bosses. In three of the four boss fights, there are multiples. There are three different kinds. Wizard, spear, and, uh, ring/discus. I ran into one of the duos first and quickly gave up. They were impossible for my magicks build, and I was getting too frustrated. Yesterday, I took a deep breath and tackled them. I demolished the single boss and two of the duos. Then, the last one, the hardest one, the one that made me rage, there are three of them–one of each type. Even with a spirit summon, I kept getting my ass whupped. Oh, in addition to their crystal crust, they inflict scarlet rot, a particularly potent status effect. I had 9 boluses that get rid of scarlet rot, but I did not have the recipe for making them. I thought about going to get that recipe, but I just wanted to finish this fucking boss so I could be done with the Crystalians.
I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. So I looked up the cheese. There was one that used Night Maiden’s Mist, a sorcery that eats away at the health of anything in the cloud (including the caster). It’s the equivalent to Pestilent Mist in DS III, which I used liberally. I had the sorcery, so I decided to give it a whirl. I will say that I screamed many bad words fighting this boss.
It was everything I hated about a boss fight in one. Three bosses (I hate multiples) with one of them (spear guy) having insane reach. There really wasn’t anywhere I could go in the room to avoid his poke. Plus, they all did scarlet rot damage, which, once the bar is filled, continually ticks away at your health more rapidly than some other status effects. Also, with three of them of differing heights, it was difficult to keep them all in my eyeline of sight.
I don’t mind a boss that I need to figure out their attack pattern while chipping away at their health. In this case, there was no learning because I just could not get the DPS needed to crack their exterior without getting smashed in the face. Even with my spirit summon. So I did the Night Maiden’s Mist cheese in which I slowly walked around the room, keeping an eye out on spear guy because he is absolutely the worst. I did not attack the boss at all with my weapon, but just let the mist do its job. Once two of the three were gone, I could have attacked the third with my blade, but decided to finish it as I started. Once I was done, I didn’t feel any triumph at all; I was just glad it was over.
That’s how I feel about the worst bits of Elden Ring and why I will never give it a 10. It’s damn good, but it’s not even close to perfect.