>the world is female
>women are smarter and stronger than men
Woke slop

10/10 for the character named Dung Eater alone

Exceptional by video game standards.

>>24880562
/thread

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That game is lame.
What about the writing in pic related

>>24880562
>the world is female
This is like saying the world of ASOIAF is female, but when you look deeper into the philosophy of it, it's a clear showcase of why female rule would lead to even more ruin. The same can be said for Elden Ring. Although, the lore is sometimes a buzz of uncohesive information and you don't know who is puppeteering who anymore.

>>24881250
dark souls better

>>24880560
Too busy fingering maidens to answer you, maidenless chud

>>24881307
unironically maidenless behavior

Better than most games I guess. It isn't literary but it does have personality.

meant genuinely/as a compliment: grrm didn’t really click as a master of style to me until i saw his voice used to write item descriptions

but they are in fact really, really good item descriptions

>>24880560
ZANZIBART.... FORGIVE ME........

>>24881288
>um actually women ruin everything and the game’s lore is about that
I love how you retards always resort to this cope

>>24880562
But Goldmask is the smartest and Godfrey is the strongest and women ruin everything

>>24880560
The modern Cervantes? Yes Miyazaki is impressive.

On the whole it is probably some of the best stuff writing wise in the last decade, and I say this as someone who consumes zero (0) generaslop and denounces garbage like The Book of the New Sun in the strongest terms.


On the face of it I grant you we don't have much going on.
It's another anime "I resent and must kill the Christian God" plot (The Elden Ring = The Logos/Underlying imposed logic of the world = Johannine conceptualization of Jesus, which you are clearly supposed to destroy so you and Reddit can reach the stars with your robot waifu (who is a dom).)

Soulsborne atmospheric/community-pieces-it-together group storytelling is a genuinely new of doing things and clearly captivates.
Maybe not in terms of actual content, well actually definitely not, but mechanically inventing a whole new way to tell a story that requires effort (as opposed to just naturally accompanying the technology) is something very few people who tell stories have ever done.

>>24881647
>retards
I really don't appreciate the way you belittle me, my nigga.

>>24881701
Ranni doesn't destroy the Elden Ring, she just puts it out of reach of anyone who wants to impose their will on it. Her ending turns it into something more like an underlying principle of the world instead of something able to be controlled by fickle gods.

>>24881495
/thread

>>24880560
the vibe is great. but I've never paid attention to the plot of any of the souls games. the gameplay and the general atmospehere is enough.

there are games where the storytelling elements are turned up, like cyberpunk and read dead redemption, and some where gamplay is more important. that's what makes games such a great medium, in my opinion, its flexibility.

>>24880560
what writing lol

>>24881786
Literally the only engaging response to this thread at all

Lore isn't really... it's like if Tolkien only wrote the Silmarillion and left it at that. Lore & worldbuilding are appealing to nerds because they're discreet, memorizable pieces of information you can collect like funko pops.

>>24880560
Nonexistent.

Elden Ring is a 40+ hour game and 99% of that time is spent silently riding a horse or farming mute NPCs. Most people finish the game with no idea what's happening or who anbody is. They just kill whatever boss they encounter. If Elden Ring were a book it would be mostly blank pages, item descriptions that no one reads, and a few, short pieces of dialog that make no sense.

>>24882007
>having to expend effort to understand something is bad

>>24882007
Yeah, I like the world of Elden Ring, I think Fromsoft usually does a good job with making visually engaging worlds that clearly have interesting things going on in them.

But, the characters are boring, unengaging pieces of cardboard. The narrative amounts to the same as all nearly all Japanese games, which pretty much amounts to killing god in some form.

The frustrating thing about it is, it's undeniably an interesting setting, I just wish they'd do something narratively that's worthy of the gameplay and visuals

>>24880562
Retard
>>24881370
Actual /thread

>>24880560
Is there a lore reason for 85% of bosses being copy/paste fillers?

I just wish westerners would be less narcissistic so we could make games where we fuck up and confuse Buddhist themes the way From Soft does with Christian ones for similar kino. But that would require a whiteoid to have more interest in the subject of foreign cultures and their history than getting a Dharma wheel tatted on their ass. So a non starter.

>>24880560
It's honestly the weakest it has ever been in the series in my opinion. The lore is uninteresting and too character focused with revenges, assassinations, secret plots, brotherly rivalries etc. which would be much better explored in a book, and you can really see that they come from a "bookish" mindset, more specifically, from Martin's mindset.

I do not believe that you can do effective character-focused narration in a videogame where so much is supposed to be left to the player's imagination.
DS1 was able to manage everything with much more elegance because it was playing on a smaller scale. On the scale of DS1, environmental narration could be executed perfectly: a smaller character cast, fewer events and easier to trigger, made it so that characters like Solaire or Sigmeyer could be narrated to the fullest. In Elden Ring you'll often begin a quest and meet a character again after 10+ hours of gameplay, having completely forgotten who the fucker was or what he or she wanted. This further complicated by the fact that the characters often have complex, personal motives that you can't unpack without being updated on the lore. In DS1 Solaire is a guy who wants to help me beat bosses and find his own meaning in life, Siegmeyer just wants to go through the same parts of the map as I do but he's always stuck until I open doors, etc.: these are relatable goals, easy to understand and remember, that also tell something to the player about what kind of player you can be. And you don't need to know much about the history of the world to want to help these guys.

In ER, I think they did a better work with the DLC than the base game. The quests are mostly set out in the beginning and are easier to follow, there is a central understandable plot about Miquella, and environmental narration makes more sense with bits like the Shaman Village, Shadowkeep, Rauh, etc. There are lots of ideas. Some things are still bloated (one finger ruin would have been sufficient; and for as much as I love Igon, his quest and Bayle do not tie into anything relevant for SOTE), but overall they did a much better job in guiding the player through the story than they did in the base game.

Generally speaking, I think narration in DS1 is still their best, and its genius in its own way: it's engaging, it can feel very close to you personally and make you reflect about life, and it's "untranslatable" outside of the videogame media. Elden Ring is a great game and very fun, but it's not as deep from a lore point of view, and in terms writing it often feels bloated.

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>>24881250
>Secular humanism is a sin agains't humanity
>Science and civilization doesn't make humans any more civilized for they are still beasts inside, if anything the cures civilization has given us only makes us more bestial
>Plato was wrong about everything and attempting to achieve the world of forms will only bring about pain and madness
>The rich and powerful aren't inherently less animalistic than the masses and the plebs, if anything the fact they can get away with their fetishes only makes them bigger and more powerful beasts
>Believing pure rational indifferent and dettached logic is any better than emotional driven logic when working solely by both makes you a madman
>Class war not in a strictly socialist sense but a positivist "poor people are inherently evil and we are good" (which is portrayed as evidently wrong) sense
>Gothic aesthetics
>Graceful peasant
>Countless mentions of death
>Ultrarromanticism and Storm und Drag
>Doll girls who are imperfect materializations of romanticized version of a vile and sinful woman
I call it kino, the best, most aesthetically charged and powerful game Gromsoft has ever fucking made. It's about the silent war between the inhumane racionalists and the disgusting and filthy human side that lays deep within all of us

Demons Souls and Dark Souls are the best. Dark Souls 2 has some interesting ideas with rough execution. Everything else is some flanderization based on the "prepare to die" marketing bullshit.

>>24882007
Or it could be an epic book filled with your own determination

>Jank souls over elden rang

>>24881701
>It's another anime "I resent and must kill the Christian God" plot (The Elden Ring = The Logos/Underlying imposed logic of the world = Johannine conceptualization of Jesus, which you are clearly supposed to destroy so you and Reddit can reach the stars with your robot waifu (who is a dom).)
Absolute midwit take, but I get why you misunderstood the story as the game (like all From games) does’t do a good job of communicating what’s actually happening, and the few bits of plot are spread out over a hundred hours of gameplay.
I think that’s why Bloodborne’s plot resonated more with gamers because its shorter playtime made it easier to grasp the plot even though it’s way more vague than Elden Ring.

>>24881701
Your divinely appointed mission is to restore the divine order and the Elden Ring to become the Elden Lord (a sort of divinely appointed ruler). The Elden Ring is already destroyed, that’s the whole point of the game and that’s why you have this insane, degenerated nobility that has been abandoned by grace itself, but YOU the player have been chosen by this same grace to reestablish order. Ranni’s ending specifically mirrors the mythical theme of the different ages of man and the cosmic cycles. Don’t know if you noticed but Ranni being blue and having four arms is not a coincidence. And there are different endings anyway, you can plunge the world into chaos just as much as you can restore the order, it doesn’t force you into any particular one.

>>24881786
I'm still convinced Diablo 2 has the best level of storytelling for video games.
> go kill that guy, quest starts
> I want to know more, 5 npcs will tell their opinion on the quest
> see boss, One line about killing you, you fight

>>24881786
>the vibe
Stopped reading there little zoom zoom.

>>24882007
I guess you didn't like Blood Meridian either?

>>24880560
>Milena's Napkin
>A torn piece of white cloth with one corner stained brown
>The more she drank the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew.

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Ummmmm wtf?

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>moon sorcery takes up more brainpower than deep ass space sorcery
>only women have been smart enough to see the moon, not men
BRAVO MIYAZAKI

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>>24881495
>>24881767
>>24880560
We will never reach lit kino like this again

>>24880560
It feels like a parody of the Souls formula.

>>24882194
tl;dr nihilistic anti-west jap shit.

>>24884189
Is has nothing to do with the west. It's about hubris, arrogance and the hunger for knowledge that dwells into the arcane. That anon has his own interpretation of themes which I won't debate, but the game is essentially about how hubris destroys

>>24884191
bugmen do not grasp the faustian spirit, yes.

>>24883012
Blood Meridian has prose. Elden Ring doesnt. I dont know how you think the two are even remotely similar.

>>24884199
What did I expect in a /lit/v/ crossover.
Won't engage further, lesson learned

>>24884207
just go sit under a tree and meditate.

>>24880560
The writing in these games fucking sucks and has sucked since dark souls 3. Im sorry but you can only make as much "Zanzibar...forgive me...but i must go all out *transforms into Cunningulus the great*" gimmick till it starts to get old and with no substance. Obviously just to bait 10 hour long lore videos because an NPC mentioned "Cunningulus of londor" or some shit. It's fucking lame as shit and it stopped working a long time ago, also the difficulty in this game is fucking ass and artificial.

>>24884213
These games never had good writing. Dumping lore onto you by opening up an item and reading its info text is one of the most unimmersive means of integrating the player into the world of the game.

>>24882012
There's effort as in analyzing themes, which is fine. But effort as in scavenging a map the size of France looking for scraps of lore? Yeah. Fuck that. That's fucking ridiculous. Imagine if books were like Elden Ring. "Oh, you didnt find chapters 20, 48, 66, 82-89, and 124-126? All of which were scattered around a giant fucking open world? Guess you just have no idea what the story was about." Give me a fucking break.

>>24884215
*opening up a menu and selecting the item, rather

>>24884215
Not good writing but good world building. Bloodborne still has, to this day, one of the most immersive game worlds i ever had the pleasure of experiencing.
Elden ring doesn't have good world building though and everything in that game damn near feels like a parody of what someone that never played any of these titles thinks the games are like (ironic considering this ended up being the entry title for alot people)

>>24883000
>Diablo 2
Being a millennial with ADHD is not an excuse to praise this mediocre slop.

Dark Souls 1, Bloodborne and Sekiro have very good stories. They present a cohesive, interesting world that gives me the impression the dev had much more in mind than what the give us, but I feel that Dark Souls 2, 3 and Elden Ring don't really had that behind it.

>>24882194
AGP ahh post.

>>24884235
Why are broccoliheads so bitter? Is it because they missed out on literally everything good and have to make do with leftovers?

>>24884294
>geriatric seething when you say his cookie clicker game where you spam 1 or 2 abilities against hordes of helpless mooks is actually bottom of the barrel trash

>>24884296
>instant effeminate tantrum
Take a tide pod and calm down

>creating two miniature moons, 72 intelligence
>creating a miniature universe, 42 intelligence
Wooow, Miyazaki

>>24882031
>Retard
Um, explain >>24883440

>>24884263
Dark Souls 2 is really fun and the story reminds me of the works of Vico because of the cyclical nature of the game's universe

>>24884332
All of them integrate the cyclical nature of a gameplay loop very nicely, it's a nice merit and a high bar to set. But story-wise it just feels like team B with no sincerity. Even 3, well done as it is, feels the same. Nothing captures the magic as Dark Souls 1 or Bloodborne for me.

>>24884340
When you come back from ringing the second bell and the bonfire is out is such a kino moment in gaming. I had a huge amount of souls and no estus, so my brain went straight up to the bonfire close to sens fortress and I just zipped up there, just to find out it's the exact place I should go
Masterclass gamedesign

>>24884332
Dark Souls 2 never should have been made but I do appreciate the Aldia character.

>>24884306
You're just a disgusting pig fit to be slaughtered by humans, soilennial.

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>>24884385

>>24881701
>community-pieces-it-together group storytelling is a genuinely new of doing things
That's something Miyazaki gets from the Elder Scrolls games. The whole minimalistic game design leading to the players interpretation of the characters and the gods is pure Skyrim

>>24880560
>Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v "The Nibelungenlied"

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>>24884189
It's profoundly pro human actually because it's about how being overly rational and believing science is the cure to all problems and that humans can somehow rise to a higher state of being beyond their animalistic roots by the power of it is simply retarded. If you are american im pretty sure you're not familiar with positivism but it was particularly popular in France and the UK arouns the time the game is meant to take place in (mid-late 19th century) and advocated that all humans are nothing more than a product of their enviroment, thus poor people are inherently bestial, and that science and advancement could solve everything by getting rid of human emotion and human flaws. If anything this game is anti bugman and stands agains't japanese values of orderly conduct as a cure to societal ilk. It's a silent war between the belief rationality and platoist thought will eventually work out even though it entirely contradicts human nature and it's biggest advocates are as lowly or even worst than everyone else
>>24884191
I believe it's not the hunger for knowledge but rather the belief one is smarter and purer than everyone else based on arbitrary fact. Lawrence was sure he could eventually find out how to cure everyone with blood healing because he believed he knew better than everyone and his thesis would inevitably be proven right. Micolash wasn't hungry for knowledge he sacrificed a fuck load of people alongside his cult of fellow wannabe scholars (who believe themselves beyond other to the point they can't open their eyes to other things or pathways beyond their own as seen with their cage heads symbolic of a closed off mind) because he believed and thought he knew exactly what would happen. It's about hubris but not a definite search for knowledge, rather a search to be proven right. The only one who dedicate dhis life to pursuing knowledge was Willem and he turned into a decaying and forgotten mushroom man because no man could ever hope to truly grasp it all in a lifetime

>>24884652
Surely hubris is a huge thematic beat of the game. When you see Micolash mummy and all of the corpses of people sacrificed and taken into the nightmare, it really hits. It's like hundreds of ingamr corpses, on and on. Awesome game.

>>24880560
writing?

>>24884235
Diablo was never about gameplay but was always about constructing a vibe. The theme, voice acting, mobs, music, attention to detail (item drop sounds, portal sound, interaction noises) and especially each zone's design made you feel something. The procedural generation also helped you remember the immaculate vibes (as opposed to remembering levels). My proof of this is that no diablo clone has exceeded the level of vibes polish, even if there are better ARPGs out there via story/gameplay. I totally get that its age + the nugraphics make the original vibes hard to fish out tho.

>>24884652
>pro-human
LMAO
It's another episode of "humans are the real monsters" which was the theme of just about every RPG at that time.

In the end it's proven that the humans deserved exactly what they got. That's the big reveal, that the good guys are actually the Old Ones, punishing humanity for being greedy viscous and stupid - murdering the Orpan's mother and causing the nightmare.

The Old Ones just want to have happy families. Humanity wants power, wealth, immortality, etc.

Oh and the final solution to the Nietzschean question is that you need to become a cosmic squid to transcend that shitty humanity, le "muh singularity" answer, the most anti-human answer of all.

In no sense is the game "pro-human".

>>24882143
Decent analysis. Elden Ring narrative is dogshit and they have never made anything similar to DS1 since years ago. Is funny how some people think they're hot shit and not just throwing garbage at the wall with their "lore" and see what sticks.

>>24880560
0/10, Grum is a hack and the Japanese are soulless.

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>>24885029
Quite literally, most Elden Ring quests feel like pic related, but it already started feeling disjointed and forced as soon as DS3, where they clearly had no idea besides "here's DS1 again" - and they tried to somehow turn it into some meta-bullshit about creating a "painting" with the Dark Soul (??) with Ariandel and Ringed City. Bloodborne feels equally disjointed but it's somewhat redeemed by the lovecraftian feeling that the more you get closer to figuring out what it is about the weirder it gets (hence the Madness indicator).
But with Elden Ring, again, the scale made it so that the whole game functions as a giant magnifying glass on everything that they cannot do well in terms of both writing and gaming, and you can really see how the lore is full of dead ends and ideas that weren't fully developed in the minds of the creator, or that were abandoned half-way, or recycled, etc. And even for those where they had clear ideas, such as Ranni's questline, the pacing is abysmal. You either consume the whole quest halfway through the game and then Ranni disappears until the very end, or you play it a bit slower and it makes sense. No ideas why there are no Ranni related events in the Halig Tree or Mountaintops of the Giants or Farum Azula, where the game suddenly becomes almost devoid of quests. Limgrave and Liurnia have so many characters giving you stuff that it becomes difficult to remember them, and then the second half of the game is fucking empty for no reason.
Again, the DLC played this much better by having a cast that you can bring along until the end of the game (Igon apart).
But DS1 was really the only one consistently developing characters questlines for all parts of the map: Solaire and Siegmeyer through the whole game; Rhea in the Tomb of the Giants; Laurentius, Quelana, Kirk and the Fair Lady in Lost Izalith; Logan in the Duke's Archives. If you follow the questlines, they always tell you something about the world while giving you opportunities to expand your playstyle to reward you for the attention you gave to a certain part of the world.

>>24885074
>Althoughbeitfully
When did this shit start/happen

>>24884764
>Diablo was never about gameplay but was always about constructing a vibe.
Diablo 2 isn't Diablo 1.

>>24884272
Troons are disgusting but wtf does his post have to do with that?? Sounds like you're hallucinating

>>24885365
Anime pic and likes Souls games.

>>24880560
I didn't notice any. Was I supposed to be reading item descriptions?

>>24885009
Bloodborne is an exaltation of returning to the womb by steeping yourself in submission and ignorance to and of external forces. From Miyazaki's perspective, the only pro-human attitude to take is for everyone to return to matriarchal longhouses and to never question the wisdom of the female shamans and priests.

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>>24880560
>>24880560
The "writing" is very very good but not in a way that maps well onto writing as associated with movies/novels/stories. Its strength is not in clean narrative arcs or well written effective emotional moments or characters.

It is a world with a history that does not want to be discovered, but which if paid attention to, slowly reveals whats going on beneath the surface. It is interesting because it makes worldbuilding not a neutral framework for a world, but something that tries to trick you, fool you into compliance. And it is a great commentary on what history ultimately is: fact and interpretation happening at the same time. What we piece together are traces of facts and interpretations that those that make history would prefer you to forget.

I think this way of writing "antagonistic lore" is very unique to the medium of games, where that kind of information can be hidden in things most players ignore or take for granted: item descriptions, small details in textures, enemy and item placements, and so on. The closest literature has gotten to something like that is Pale Fire, and it essentially does it by 'gamifying' the book, making you flip back and forth, taking multiple routes through the book.

>>24885438
Read Robert Coover's short fiction if you actually want multiple routes.

>>24884314
Those two crystal dudes mog the moon queen sorry

>>24882924
That is the plot of the game.

The Elden Ring is the Logos/Jesus.
The Elden Ring is literally the Christian symbol for the trinity and the final boss is hanging on a cross when you meat them.

It's extremely enjoyable though to see gigachuds talking about heggin BASED NIPPON souls games are when you kill Tranny Jesus.

>>24887079
GO WOKE (and cloak it in basic philosophy/theology so sub 80 IQ chuds don't realize what you're up to) GET RICH

>>24885074
For me bloodborne is as thematically cohesive as dark souls. I feel like he had a very clear idea and direction of what he was doing. Dark souls feels more earned in its world, Lordran feels like a real place (nothing in Bloodborne tops it imo), but still I would put bloodborne up there. All in all the story is quite simple, but I agree it's much harder and it takes much more effort to piece together.

>>24880562
Fpbp

Smartest wizard? A woman.
Strongest warrior? A woman.
Best politician? A woman.
Main protagonist? A woman.

>>24887965
Stfu chud

>>24880560
Like an introduction to esotericism and the hermetic traditions of (mostly) western countries. BB and DS2 had some much more compelling moments, BB in the motifs and DS2 in the writing.

>>24884191
>Is has nothing to do with the west.
>Victorian London's aesthetics
>Church is main factor on societal influence
>inspired by Poe and Lovecraft
>inspired by Masonry
>totally not Western
What drugs are you on?

>>24891518
Ok, I might have expressed it badly. Sorry. The game is not anti-west. It borrows themes and aesthetics from west tradition, but the game and notably what the game points at as being a problem is arrogance, hubris, unimpeded course for knowledge that has no quealms for anything else than its own pursuit.
I was more in awe about the stupidity of that anon. Is Lovecraft anti west too? Anyway.