With the Elden Ring plat in my back pocket, I still have more to say. Here is part one, and here is part two. This is part three, and it’s probably the last post I’ll do on the plat itself. Obviously, I’m going to keep talking about the game, but there is only so much to say about the platinum.
I will say that I feel a sense of letdown that I always feel after meeting a big goal. I think that’s human nature, though. This is different than a life goal for several reasons, not least because the only reason it took this long was a save-scumming snafu. So, in my heart, I already had it when I finished my first playthrough. I started a second just to have fun playing a different character, and then I raced for the finish in NG+.
By the time I reached the end of my second playthrough, I was ready for the plat to be done. I had some things I wanted to do before going into NG+ for the first time, but suddenly, I needed to get through NG+ and get the damn plat already. It’s funny, but it’s indicative of my personality in general. I can put up with a lot of shit, but then, when it nears the end of the situation, I cannot wait for it to be over.
Not that this was a bad situation, obviously, but a similar experience. I knew I had to play through the game two more times in order to get the plat. This after a 225+ hour first playthrough. I patiently explored a second time with a different character (because I’m saving my first character in NG for the inevitable DLC), and got my second ending in just under another hundred hours.
I spent half an hour doing things to prep for NG+, but not even halfway through, I said fuck it and went into NG+. I wanted that plat, and I wanted it now. I cannot emphasize hard enough how over the plat run I was. I don’t know why it kicked into gear when I hadn’t thought about it at all during the second playthrough (except to make sure the ending I chose for that playthrough was set up properly), but I suddenly could not get to the plat soon enough.
By the way. this is probably only humorous for me, but I didn’t get the vanilla ending until the third time through the main story. Normally, I play through the game and get whatever ending would be the typical ending. However, this time, with the plat in mind and the fact that Ranni’s questline took me roughly forty hours, I grabbed her ending first in case the save-scumming failed (which it did) so I wouldn’t have to go through her questline again if I didn’t feel like it. Her questline is easily the lengthiest.