First of all, I got my shingles shot on Thrusday (it’s Saturday now), and I was fine for the first ten hours or so. I mean, my arm swelled up and was hot and sore to the touch, but that was a given. Then, the exhaustion hit, and I could barely keep my eyes open.
I was exhausted and my arm was feverish all day yesterday. I could barely keep my eyes open, and I had no energy at all. I’m better today, but still ready to sleep. I attended the first half hour of my Taiji class to do the stretches, but that’s it. I was getting hot and sweaty, which is the time to quit. My teacher has told me that if you have a light sweat, you can keep going. If you break out in a hard sweat, you stop. I was somewhere between a light sweat and a hard sweat, but did not want to overdo it.
*SPOILER WARNING*
Back to the topic at hand–difficulty. It’s coming up in the Retry episodes because Rory has been using the Mimic Tear on the regular. Which has made some people very mad. One person unsubbed because of it. At the end of the last season, Gav laid out some rules as to when they would use the spirit summons. This caused a spirited debate in the Discord with most people wanting Rory to summon whenever he wanted. There were a few who wanted it so that he could only summon out in the field (and not for bosses).
This season, it seems the rule is gone, which makes me happy. However, more than one person has commented that it’s no fun when Rory immediately pulls out the Mimic Tear–which is the best summon in the game. It’s you with all your abilities and whatever consumables you have equipped.
This is the tension with these games, especially Elden Ring. Oh, by the way, it amuses me how much I was pinging back and forth at the end of the last post. My brain was not in any shape to concentrate. I’m a bit better today, but still so tired. I’ll try my best, though.
There are two camps of FromSoft watchers (meaning fans who like to watch other people play the games). One is filled with those of us who just like watching people have a fun time playing the games. Weird, I know. The other camp is filled with people who are VERY LOUD about how someone should be playing the game. I’ve seen content creators apologize for something that is perceived as being cheese or saying they don’t want to be known as a cheeser, and I just shake my head. I’ve seen YouTubers shamed out of their personal preferences, which annoys me to no end.
Games are meant to be fun. At the end of the day, I mean. I know this is hard to believe, but different people have fun in different ways. I don’t like that people think if they are a patreon or a subscriber, they get to dictate what the content creator does. I’m not saying they have to support someone they no longer like, but that’s different than trying to demand the content creator does exactly what you want them to do.
I don’t get the flounce; I really don’t. It was very popular back in the days of LiveJournal and such. People announcing loudly and huffily that they were LEAVING FORVEVER! It was clear that they wanted people to beg them to stay, which was so wild to me. And gave me such second-hand embarrassment.
I even saw it on Ask A Manager a time or two. Someone declaring that the site was too woke for them, and they were Not Coming Back. Ok, bye? Don’t let the door hit you on the ass as you go. I don’t quite understand why someone feels the need to announce their departure in such a way, but have at it, I guess.
I had been happy that for the most part, with the RKG community. The sexism is minimal, and the other isms are kept at bay as well. Of course there is a group mindthink as there is with all groups, but it’s bearable in this situation. I was happy that the ‘git gud, noob’ crowd was nearly nonexistent. What I hadn’t realized at the time, though, was that I had never actually been in the Discord when a FromSoft Retry was being released. Which meant I did not know that the mentality of ‘git gud, noob’ did, indeed, exist. Not in those words exactly, but in the belief that Rory needed to play without the spirit summons.
When Gav declared that Rory would only be allowed to use the spirit summons in the open world (i.e., when there isn’t a boss), a subset of the RKG Discord rejoiced. Another subset (including me) were not happy about it. I don’t want to dictate that Rory has to summon, obviously (and he doesn’t always summon), but I did not like that he was restricted from summoning.
For whatever reason, this dictum was retracted for the second series. Rory usesthe summons whenever he wants (which is not all the time). And there are people who are NOT happy about it. And mention it in every Discord post (when the new episode is posted, I mean). It should not surprise me. The last series was Demon’s Souls, and they did not summon at all. You can’t summon in Sekiro, and they only summoned the NPCs a few times in Dark Souls II.
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t consider the Spirit Summons to be the same as summoning humans. Yes, the Mimic Tear is pretty powerful, but the bosses are tuned up as well. Rory has been doing surprisingly well so far, and I think people have to remember that he’s not even halfway into the game yet.
It just reminds me of how old and tiresome this argument is. I don’t watch the boys for the hard boss fights (though those can be enjoyable). The reason they’re legendary, though, is because they were few and far between. Everyone talks about Laurence, which was an hour of edited footage of Rory grimly fighting him. Over and over again. By the end, they weren’t even talking, really. In Dark Souls III, it was, weirdly, Soul of Cinder and not-so-weirdly, Sister Friede in the first DLC.
I think this is the fork in the road, and how FromSoft goes from here will dictate the next ten years of if we still have this discussion or not. People have said that the ‘Prepare to Die’ tagline on the Western copies of Dark Souls was a product of Western marketing, and really set the tone for how Westerners would perceive the games.
I’m tired, so I’ll end this here.