Yesterday, I was talking about the NPCs in Elden Ring and how I thought Gav and Rory were going to react to the end of different NPC questlines. There are so many NPCs in this game, it’s wild. Some ore little, self-contained stories such as Irina and Edgar. This is a weird one that I still can’t wrap my brain around.
You meet Irina fairly early on as you make your way through the Weeping Peninsula. That is, you can go through the Weeping Peninsula really early in the game. Irina is on the side of the road and distressed because the castle she was from was under siege. The castle? Castle Morne. Her father was the castellan there.
This pricked my interest because there is an Irina in Dark Souls III. She is a blind Fire Keeper wannabe. She has a minder, Eygon. They are both from Carim. His armor is the Morne’s Set, so you can see why I was so excited by this whole situation in Elden Ring. She asks you to bring a letter to her father in the castle. When you get to Castle Morne and find her father, his name is Edgar. Which is close to Eygon! You give him the letter and then go about your merry business.
Once you clear up Castle Morne and go back to Stormveil, you can ride by Irina again. And she will be dead. A big cleaver to the head. Edgar will be there, mourning her (Morne-ning her?) and lamenting that he had stuck to his duty rather than return to her. He vows to get his revenge.
Later, two things happen. One, you run into Hyetta, who has the exact same character model as Irina. And she (Hyetta) has her eyes covered, much like Irina in the first game–well, she was blind. Why does Hyetta have the same character model? No idea.
The second thing that happens is that you’ll stumble across the Revenger’s Shack in Liurnia. Edgar invades you, and you have to kill him. Well, you don’t have to, but if you do, you get a sweet halberd as a reward.
It has to be a nod to Dark Souls III. There was no way it was just coincidental. In DS III, Irina’s questline is more elaborate. And if you give her a naughtyBraille tome, Eygon will drag her away. Then, if you go to a certain place, he wants to fight you. I believe if you defeat him, Irina goes back to the Firelink Shrine. It’s been a while since I’ve done her questline that way because I like to summon Eygon for Dragonslayer Armour (boss fight).
At the end of her dark questline, if you put on Eygon’s gauntlets and touch her, she thinks you’re him. And she asks you to do what you promised–which was to kill her. It’s very grim.
Anyway. Thats’ such a weird little quest in Elden Ring, but it’s not the only one. You meet Rogier pretty early on in Stormveil Castle. You can summon him for Margit. And find him in the castle. He leaves a message for you that he’s investigating the secret under the castle. If you go down there, you can see his bloodstain in the back room near a talisman, Prince of Death’s Pustule and a horrific face.
Then, you find him sitting near the balcony in the Roundtable Hold, and there’s a blanket over his legs. If you look carefully, he’s trapped in thorns and has flies buzzing around his legs. In my first playthrough, I missed all his questline after this point because you have to do tihngs in a certain way and check in with him every so often.
I will say that if you’re going to play Elden Ring for the first time without many spoilers, you will miss some of the questlines. The game is massive, and it’s so easy to miss huge chunks of it. FromSoft has always been fine with you missing whole areas in their games. In this game, you really don’t have to do much of anything. For my third playthrough, I decided just to hoon it through because I wanted to get the plat. All I needed was the vanilla ending (I did the two harder ones first). My first character is parked at the end of the game (post final-boss), waiting for the DLC. Which, any day now, FromSoft! So I took my second character and just raced through NG+ as fast as possible towards the end. I summoned all the humans I could and blazed through NG+ in a dozen or so hours.
So, yeah. It can be done. I wouldn’t recommend it on a first playthrough on NG, but it was fun to do.
This game is more generous with missing NPC dialogue (and being able to continue the questline) than in the past games. I think they had to be because of how huge the game is. But there times when you go past the point of no return and cannot continue with an NPC questline. There are also NPC questlines that conflict with each other, but this is par the course for From games.
Krupa has said that he wants to have as many of the NPC questlines open to them for as long as possible. He had to stop Rory from killing Patches, which was only to be expected. I love Patches. He is one of my favorite characters. I have waxed poetically about him several times. He is the one constant in all these games, and you know he’s going to be a shithead to you every time you see you. He’s going to push you down a hole or lock you in a cell or send you some place dangerous. You know he’s going to trick you somehow, and to me, that’s soothing.
It’s funny in the RKG Discord, there is a deep divide between those who are #TeamLetPatchesLiveHisBestLife and #TeamKillPatchesOnSight. I’m on the former, and I only kill Patches if I need his gesture for the plat.
It’s wild to think that they will meet several more NPCs. I do wonder how they will eventually feel about Millicent, who has a very elaborate questline. I’m sure they will fall more in love with Ranni, and Krupa is pretty sure that’s the ending Rory will pick. It’s a fantastic questline, but it’s not my favorite ending. Burning everything to the ground is, which is the hardest ending–well, I’m not sure. Ranni’s questline took me roughly thirty hours the first time around, which is beefy. The Lord of the Frenzied Flame ending itself is grueling, yes, but it’s undoing it that is harder than hell.