“Knowing you

You might hurt someone

Or yourself

You would tear

Everything apart

If you found out

Everyone you loved loved someone else”

- God is a Circle, Yves Tumor

Another graceless morning in Leyndell.

Queen Marika was driven to the brink. The great golden tree is her address and she will never open those eyes again. Bodies in my wake I remain, lashing out over this distance that separates me from her. Never just in one place at a time within the map. Ears perked-up. Blood salivating. A frantic gradient of blades and spells my fingers gleefully rearrange with the passing of the days. Radio static churns out a few cries and echoes. Enemy felled. Great rune savoured. One delicious bite at a time, never enough.

A sun of tar leaks onto my surface. When whispers spread of the existence of a third and final Dark Souls - and months later when that game finally lodged in memory - one image stayed with me. In it, an unnamed knight stands on the end of the world, all kingdom from ages past converging against the bleeding of a dark sun, pressed-in on themselves, moved to collapse as if by collective consciousness, the text springing forth like rattle-snake, a vision so terminal it verges on self-parody which nevertheless remains the most pregnant piece of iconography produced by that opus alone. Many places demand such reverence, few attain it, and in the recesses of Londor only this Kiln of the First Flame moved me so. With both feet firmly planted on the ashen sand and hands cusped in penitence to the eclipse, I lay in this space of merciful entropy. Yet further ahead a withered egg is hidden in the arms of Princess Filianore. Inside is the truth - that the cycle has run its course, that come the epilogue all that could possibly remain was you and Uncle Gael, two dogs fighting each other to feed on the blood of their ancestors. C’est la vie. There's a promise in the eternal struggle: “I will paint a new vision.” Without it we wouldn’t survive within these rote confines - but there’s still something to extract from those games. A Shattering, in so many ways, differs from a fading fire, yet is all the same for it. Much has been made of Elden Ring's affiliation to Dark Souls II's episode in experiments (for good reason, it is a game that contains multitude and seeks to go beyond its own scope at times) and while I tend to err on the side of historicity - recognize that Aldia offers a rich red-herring for understanding where things have come and gone both gameplay&aesthetic-wise - the true tie, the emotional stake of Elden Ring, remains this primeval blurring of time and space made manifest through the Lands Between, its world of atomized particulars spread about a now-open vault, the lone melancholy island, the freedom plateau with a blackened being called player-character at its center, eyeing us, at last, to say :

«Hello, other you.»

We were always compromised, morally bankrupt and torn between notions of ideal/optimization that see us scurry about the wet rubbles of Limgrave like the rats that we are, like the butchers that we will inevitably become in search of supremacy over the fragmented mythos; out of all the knaves and backstabbers engendered by FromSoftware us player might be the worst of the lot. We’d swallow the whole world if left to it. But these Lands are redacted, belong to no one, and will never give themselves wholly to the records of history. Ambiguous scriptures give way to conflicting accounts of events that morph entirely outside the delimitations of game narrative and into full-on theological approaches of the source material - death and rebirth become matters of philosophical debates between factions, heresy or sainthood redeemed, reversed, let loose in the hands of folklore - sometimes discounting the fact that losing yourself in the labyrinthine districts of Yharnam was often an act of evocation and evocation alone. Against this fog of war, Elden Ring posits a duality: Inside us are two wolves, the rushing, hypercompetent pillager borne out of a decade of iteration over the same design ideas – a body of work accumulated through bloody chess-pieces, us, the sole moving power in a series of stagnant vistas – and the vibes guy, who likes his decrepit kingdoms and bad knights just like so, oozing out of form and meaning one power structure over the corpse of the other ad vitam æternam. Where we choose to position ourselves in this mess has always underlined the fact that the dramatic tension at the heart of Miyazaki’s works is often a moot point; the forces stirring us into conflict overshadow our efforts by untold eons of curses and conspiracies whose ramifications will remain shrouded beyond any meaningful change the player might be tempted to enact upon the Lands Between. The only rational thing left for us to do is to act in the name of power and power alone - in Marika’s own lying words:

"The Erdtree governs all. The choice is thine. Become one with Order. Or divest thyself of it. To wallow at the fringes; a powerless upstart."

“Make of thyselves that which ye desire.”