I Miss Dark Souls (Or, My Thoughts on Elden Ring)

I miss Dark Souls. That is the thought that crossed my mind when I felled Malenia, Goddess of Rot. After that moment, there was a single feeling that washed over me: exhaustion. I was exhausted of playing Elden Ring. Thoroughly and viciously, I was utterly exhausted. 

To be upfront about it, I have quite a love-hate relationship with Elden Ring. Sometimes, I hate it. I wonder how some of the stupendously idiotic decisions and enemies and encounters even made it past initial conceptualization. Other times, I am in love with it. I cannot fathom how what I'm seeing was dreamt by a human mind, how it coalesced into something so incredible. Mostly? It's both. There was rarely ever a time I felt indifferent to it.

I have no idea where to start when talking about this game. I have tried to put my thoughts into words three times so far, and all of those times they completely failed to convey my feelings. I think it comes down to one thing: I am saddened by this game. I am not angry at it, nor am I disappointed. It's not a raging sadness, one filled with mistrust and betrayal. It is simply a lonely, quiet sadness: a feeling of melancholic acceptance. There is nothing about Elden Ring that is offensively bad. There is nothing that made me genuinely angered or even upset. 

It is a walking corpse. A retread. It is the dream that is not allowed to die, a work that is not allowed to be simply be. It must be something more. More. More is the key of Elden Ring. There are more enemies. More bosses. More story. More lore. More endings. More world. More music. More, more, more, there is so much more, but there is no justification. I guess I would liken it to an artists greatest hits, in the sense that it doesn't feel like something new, like a new record from your favorite singer. It's not a new direction, or a new beginning. Elden Ring is the end. There is nowhere for this corpse to go. Fights like Malenia and Malekith push this series so hard, harder than even Artorias or Gael or Sister Friede that I genuinely think it has gone too far. In its effort to be bigger, to be better, Elden Ring feels empty.

That is what saddens me the most. This game feels so fundamentally, wholly, not there. In a series so poignant, so focused on the idea of letting go, of realizing when one has gone too far, its finale charges forward, bluntly and drunkenly. There is nothing new here. There is nothing one has not seen before, nothing unique that you couldn't find in the series' other offerings. Is that a bad thing? I believe so. In a medium with such blood, sweat and tears poured into it, there must be a reason. When there is, quite literally, nothing fundamentally new, nothing fundamentally innovative, then it is just more, and no reason for it. There must be a cause. More is not an excuse. It's a selling point. 

Elden Ring is the ashes of a fire gone cold. The ashes are still warm, but the fire is gone, the brilliance absent. In a world where accepting that there is indeed an end, it clings to life, grotesquely and vainly. The ashes cannot burn bright. The flames cannot dance across the canopy of the dark night sky. All it can do is smolder and smoke and die. A cold, lonely, pitiful death. And that is all there is to it: cold, lonely ash.