Elden Ring: Beautifully Designed, Escapist Trash

Elden Ring

What a tragedy! The amazing artwork, design, music and sound, all desperately trying to hide the lack of narrative, themes and ideas. Its huge success and popularity are, to put it mildly, alarming. This is escapism in its most true, yet ugliest form. It is cunning, slithering like a snake between the coils of the mind, and strangles the philosopher, the analyst, and the confronter, while it soothes their desperate cries with its comforting, bedeviling hisses.

After I played the game for the first few hours, I had mixed feelings, as I was stunned by the amazing art design, yet incredibly surprised by the serious lack of narrative and actual characters. And things went only downhill from there. There was no sense of purpose, you just meaninglessly dwell around in that dull puddle of 'worldbuilding'. A few hours in, and I had to fight my first bosses, I wondered why they were so hard, and where the difficulty settings were -- there were none. I wanted to get on with the story, if there was any, and after that frustrating, tedious experience, I decided to quit the game, as it felt like an absolute waste of my time and money. 

I've heard people proudly talking about how they died over one hundred times during a bossfight. But what is the point of spending eight hours battling a boss? Do you come away any different than when you started? Have you learnt a valuable lesson about life or the world? Was it amusing, doing the same thing hundred times again and again? That's at least what I expect when I willingly spend that much time doing something. 

Planescape: Torment

Like any art medium, games are a unique way to explore ideas and provoke emotions. Planescape: Torment -- a game I've started playing just a few weeks ago -- is the perfect example of that: it's enthralling, artful, insightful, funny, and explores ideas or reality and identity, in a way both subtle and immmersive. 

Miyazaki, director and co-writer, (no, not that one, the other one) himself stated: 

"We are always looking to improve, but, in our games specifically, hardship is what gives meaning to the experience. So it's not something we're willing to abandon at the moment. It's our identity."

"But we try to design the games to make the cycle of repeatedly trying to overcome these challenges enjoyable in itself."

Now, that's one way to
spend your time

Hardship is not always meaningful. Typing all numbers from one to million in words for example, will cause a lot of hardship (

this man spent 16 years achieving this goal), but it is not a meaningful experience, for that would mean that you have changed or learnt something about the world. The completion of a difficult task (and receiving a place in the Guinness world record book) may give a certain feeling of mild satisfaction, but that has nothing to do with a meaningful experience.

The inaccessibility should already make this game a no-go zone for anyone like me, but I, the kind person that I am, did some extra research for you, my reader, to make my review complete and my judgement final. Thus you and I wonder: is there, next to the pointless combat, an interesting story worth sharing? This is an open world game, meaning that the player can go wherever he likes, at least, until he is one-shot by some random creature. I have gathered some bits of writing and articles about the themes, and there was, unsurprisingly, almost nothing written about them. I did find a fairly good video essay that explores the weaknesses of the game in depth.

One of the major problems, as discussed (here and in Neverknowsbest's video), is the lack of characters and motivations. Even our PC is barely developed, having no real inner purpose, enforcing the idea that this game is only about the player, rather than its story, world and characters. 

Howl's Moving Castle (by the other Miyazaki)

Miyazaki has attempted to shape an artificial reality where you can do whatever you like in a fantastical world, that tries to avoid reality instead of confronting it. This is the pinnacle of escapism, or the way I've come to call it; sophisticated escapism. That is, meticulously creating a world, with miscellaneous lore, with complex art design and epic sound and music, allowing the player to dwell in his own ignorance, dimly imitating a sense of adventure and wonder that often makes life, and made other games as the aforementioned, so grotesque and beautiful, and here only partly succeeding because of the tremendously big production. Trying to make the player forget reality and trading it for a lesser, artificial reality instead, comforting, instead of confronting, forgetful, instead of insightful (I highly suggest Keely's article on this subject). 

I'm afraid of what the future might bring us, because technology, a double edged sword, will only improve over time, and a future reminiscent of Ready Player One might come, filled with escapism, for why learn things about our self and our world, when we can just forever mindlessly battle dragons and demons instead. And since this, along with LoTR, shows us again how naive and easily manipulated the masses are, and as a consequence of its huge success, it will take probably a long time before this phenomenon will fade, if it ever be so. 

Thus it is not shocking to hear that Miyazaki collaborated with George R.R. Martin, whose work he is a huge fan of, only imploring him to write the worldbuilding part. Why worldbuilding is a problem and why it is so popular would yet require another blogpost, but it seems that our man Keely has again preceded us: article.

Then, the worldbuilding and difficult combat are there to make up for the lack of story, themes and ideas, for I bet the game would be a hundred times shorter if you took those away.