I’m taking a break from talking about my mental healt because something else came to mind. The RKG boys have been spoiling us with trailers for Season/Series 2, which starts on Saturday.
The first thing they gave us was an almost-twelve-hour video of all the bosses Rory has killed in the first season. It’s a good wy to quickly (well, more quickly than watching the whole series) catch up on the first season.
The first trailer was set to Shania Twain’s Man! I Feel Like a Woman (which was Mama Finchy’s theme song. Aunty Finchy, this player characetr, is her sister).
Here’s what you need to know about that. Krupa is doing a shadow playthrough on the PC with a ‘no-enemy’ mod running so he can do all the NPC questlines and get all the great shots/B-roll. In this trailer, he matched Aunty’s clothing/hair/movements to the song, which is wild. Such as turning her around on ‘let’s go girls!’, making her hair teal instead of pink for ‘color my hair’, making her wear the marionette’s armor and no pants for ‘man shirt, short skirt’, a shot of Astel for ‘really go wild’, ‘making her naked (well, bra and skimpy panties as that’s as nude as you can get in the game) for ‘gonna let it all hang out’, having a mustache for ‘forget I’m a lady’, and the first night shot for ‘going out tonight’ are some of them–if not all. I didn’t catch them all, but I got them in the comments/RKG Discord. And a few from Krupa himself. And, no dislikes! And no negative comments! (I scrolled, so I might have missed a few, especially at the end). That means this trailer is exempt from what I’m about to say in the rest of the post.
I will say it’s a superb trailer and if it wasn’t for the other trailer, this would have been my featured video. It truly is one of the best teaser trailers I have ever seen. It’s clear that Krupa put so much effort and time into it (And maybe Gav helped out? But I’m sure it’s mostly Krupa), and everyone loved it. I have watched it at least a dozen times and have gotten hyped each thime.
It helps that they dropped a date that was earlier than we expected. Which was also brilliant marketing, by the way. I think they told us they were aiming for June, or we just all collectively thought of it because it was the accepted timeframe for the new season. “Rory’s birthday.” Heh. Inside joke. Gav asked him waaay back in season one of Prepare To Try when his birthday was, and he said summer. He refused to give a date for several minutes while Gav and Krupa scolded him for being so weird.
I was on Rory’s side, honestly. When I was younger, I never gave out my birthday because I hated being reminded about it. Not because I was getting older, but just because…well, that’s for another post. He finally and reluctantly gave the date (June), but the running joke is taht anything happening in summer was happening on Rory’s birthday.
Anyway, the second trailer they dropped a few days ago is the one I included in this post. I would have chosen the last one until this trailer dropped. Once I clicked play, it became my immediate favorite trailer of all time. Why?
Let e give you the backstory. For Retry Elden Ring, they have been using an intro that is different from anything they’ve ever done. It was catchy, done wdth on orchestra (which I will always love), and really got the blood pumping.
I seem to remember they told us that they got an orchestra to do it? Or maybe I just assumed they did. Because it was something they would do. Well, this trailer shows that they did, indeed, get a live orchestra to record it (and a choir). They also commissioned someone to write the original score. did I know this? I feel like I did. But maybe I’m retconning it.
At any rate, seeing the live orchestra play it sent chills up and down my size. The person who composed it is a uni friend of Krupa’s, which is cool, too. And the boys included snippets from what they’ve filmed already in Nokron, which only whetted the appetite even more. There were six dislikes on it, but no negative comments. So, this, too, is exempt from what I have to say later.
Finally, the boys made public a previous producer video. It’s the last Roundtable Hold (their biweekly (every other week)) show in which Krupa gave a quiz about the first season to Gav and Rory. They were competing with each other. those of us who were producers/posh slugs got to see it the day after the season ended. This was…ah…back in February? Maybe? Months ago, at any rate. February 3rd in general release, so a week before that for us Early Access patreons.
Now. I want to talk about the comments on the first and last of those videos along with in general on Patreon. I normally don’t read comments on YouTube because, well, it’s YouTube. The RKG community in general is better than most other YouTube communities, but regresses to the mean on the YouTube channel. Not in a gross way, but in a ‘git gud’ kind of way.
So this is what I want to talk about (finally!) in this post and why I will never stream a FromSoft game. I feel bad for Rory if he reads the comments on the videos. I’m guessing he doesn’t, but, man. 93% of the comments are lovely, but that remaining 7% of comments are so annoying.
About half of them are of the ‘omigod you can’t play the game this way’ ilk. So many people hate the smorgasbuild (Rory is very in mthe moment and rarely looks at the big picture or to the future. So his build is all over the place) and insist that he will be stuck at Point A, B, C, and now D because he got through the other three (otherwise known as Limgrave, Liurnia of the Lakes, and Caelid).
There was so much angst about his health/vigor because it hovered around 20 for a long time. I’m not defending that because it’s a low number, for sure. But I had 18 Vigor for the first hundred hours, and I managed to keep on pushing. I fought the last boss Rory fought with this health, and it was hell, yes, but I pulled it off eventually. Yes, he could kil lme with one shot of his goddamn greatbow if I didn’t have my shield up with full endurance. I ceesed the hell out of this boss, but I did beat him.
Again, I would not recommend it and Rory now has over 30 Vigor, I believe, but my point is that it can be done, even if it should not be.
Emphasis on can. Because so many people said it can’t. They were emphatic about it, stating it as if it were fact. They also said that he had to choose a build–which, again, yeah, better to focus on one build to be more effective. But you can do a smorgasbuild and keep on going–as proved by Rory himself. And me. My first playthrough of a From game is always a hot mess. I start out determined to be a pyro of any kind. Weirdly, I did not use the pyro in my first playthrough that much. I did focus on incantations, but the sorceries kept slipping through. Oh, and of course that meant I needed Mind (another stat) so I could cast my magicks–and use the big spirit summons (except the biggest of all, which costs HP, and is the reason I finally pumped my Vigor up to 23 or 24!)
It’s late and this is running long. I will write more later.