#Elden Ring is an ARPG

[raspberrykraken]

I’m finally in the endgame of Diablo 4, by endgame I mean Act 6 to finally finish this campaign out. I did play Diablo:Hellfire on gog, Diablo2: Resurected, and the last season of Diablo 3 plus indie games while waiting for Diablo 4 to come out. Perhaps this will be a personal retrospective of the games and being a little upset because of how the campaign panned out for D4. Spoilers below.

In the opening scenes of Diablo 4 we are already having influences from Hell on two sides. Mephisto and Lilith. The first is more secondary than the second. Oh, why you ask? Because although you were “given” her petals she isn’t able to directly influence your character at all. You find signs of her throughout the game with more petals and visions. But the core gameplay is you being distracted by shiny things across the world while pursuing her.

Yes she has cut a path of cults and killed lots of people across the world. So has her former lover Inarius with his church. Both share extreme ideals, both are sides of the same coin. Lilith has more self awareness and understanding of her status, her mission. Inarius is a pompous jerk who wants to go back to Heaven and regrets ever being with her, doing any of this of creating humans, Sanctuary, the controversial Nephalem that are wrote out from Diablo 3. They get regulated to a group solving that problem as Diablo 4 takes hundreds of years into the future.

Diablo Immortal takes place in between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. It’s gameplay is refined Diablo 3. It’s okay.

On the side Mephisto gets to directly influence your character. Offering advice, help, guide you through certain areas. Prime Evil of Hatred who had the foresight that if he was helpful to random strangers then maybe they will help him. In previous games he was trapped but managed to influence people before being freed by his brother Diablo in Diablo 2. So definitely a mysterious character that hasn’t been explored throughly from a story perspective but this isn’t his story. Yes he can intervene as the Father, which he is as Lilith is his daughter, but he completely railroads the narrative to his side.

It boggles me that Lilith only directly talks to your character on the second time you use the Sightless Eye, an ancient magical artifact, and tries to influence you to joining her. Not whispering to you, taking to you, trying to justify her actions, how people who see her get it wrong. But no, the story is written as if its all been pre decided, which it has. I get it, can’t take any kind of risks of an ARPG game by adding the RPG elements of choices in it. Your player character has already made up their mind on the whole thing and accept her Father over her.

I know on one hand she is the villain of the game. On the other Mephisto has been too and wised up unlike his brothers. She helped create Sanctuary giving everyone something new to fight over as the Eternal Conflict will never end, she was looking for a safe place with Inarius. In the lore all this has happened before, it will happened again. Humans are just pawns in their game. And thats where the narrative is being left. Very Battlestar Galactica of it.

Exhausting is definitely the word for it. I’m not trying to justify her actions. Her and Inarius do. I just feel like there could’ve been more. And I am hoping the seasonal updates will help.

I guess I am spoiled by other ARPGs like Dark Souls series. Arguably they do give you some kind of choices, especially in Elden Ring, and I guess I wanted that.

And if you made it this far thanks. Thanks for reading. <3

[a-dream-seeking-light]

[mochillery]

Ranni the Witch on holiday ( hidden quest line) 🏖️

[kirkwallguy]

decided i will remain neutral on the combat until i actually play it but realising all the people comparing it to ac odyssey were doing so favourably made me go ohhh. perhaps this one just isn't designed for me.

[locuas642]

Okay I need to ask what do you all see here

[a-space-opera]

[hardcoregamer]

That said, RPG games are a beast to tame, and not every player can handle or even get the hang of these games right from the get-go. That’s where action RPG games enter the show. These have more accessible and conventionally fun combat instead of a turn-based system that many people find too slow to enjoy, somewhat toned-down RPG mechanics and a greater focus on action, just like the name of the genre suggests. These 10 Action RPGs are considered to be the best of the genre.

[smoqueen]

ill actually sit here and post about my tales of berseria playthrough i will do it, i will clog your dashboard with idle thoughts about an arpg from 8 years ago that im playing instead of bg3 or ac6 or elden ring

[themanwhomadeamonster]

tumblr seems to be all good with the news of dd2 so far but i think a lot of the more hardcore ppl on reddit, discord, etc expected too much from this game, especially with ppl comparing it to the likes of elden ring (soulsbornes and their impact on the arpg genre is another can of worms for another time tbh) and bg3. from the get go, the devs made it clear that it's a personal passion project that doesn't NEED to try to reinvent the wheel but wants to stick to its personal philosophy as being a primarily fun love letter to old school rpgs including the wacky mechanics of long rests, limited fast travel, etc. than trying to break new industry standards or whatever? idk. obvs i haven't played the game and shit and my opinion is probs gonna change as is normal when playing vs speculating but some ppl set their expectations too high when nobody ever promised mind-bendingly novel mechanics lmao. the game isn't perfect but it never wanted to be anyway

[leam1983]

Divots

Hidetaka Miyazaki and most copycats of his in the industry: "We've made some tweaks to make the Soulsborne formula more accessible. We're embracing the open-world format, which should allow players of all skill levels to find room to grow and face new challenges."

The Game: is as wide as an ocean and, difficulty-wise, feels like a shoreline as the tide recedes, with hours upon hours of low-level cruft to chip away at so you can grind at a pace that veers towards sheer sadism. Except, the tide swells back in when you least expect it, or you realize that the beachfront dips straight down to Abyssopelagic levels of difficulty with close to zero acclimatization zones.

This is why I Iove Soulsborne games, but hate Elden Ring in particular. I have an immense expanse I can grind mobs in to get stronger, but doing so turns a game that's supposed to be lauded for its narrative delivery into an absolute fucking slog.

I don't want to play the fucking Numbers Game, ARPGs at least have the sense to make their numbers fluctuate constantly, whereas you're stuck in the Lands Between, more or less begging the gameworld for enough Runes to sink into Vitality just so a single swipe from Mohg doesn't make you fold like an accordeon.

Compare and contrast with younger players skirting the edge of cardiac arrest by guzzling Prime on a Twitch stream, who head up to Rykard with some meme's equipment loadout and wipe the floor with him.

Nope, shit isn't "EZ" - you're just so used to cheesing the mechanics you've effectively defeated the game's very raison d'être. By that point, you're better off just not playing anymore.

[itswavelengths]

The JRPG

This morning saw the lifting of a preview embargo for the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, and with it a bunch of quotes from producer Naoki Yoshida that are being both praised and dunked on in equal measure depending on which interview you happen to be reading. One such interview that stood out to me came from a great video by critic SkillUp whose first question asking to clarify some earlier statements about the evolution of the JRPG genre elicited this response:

One thing he wants to get across is that when we create games, we don't go into them thinking we are creating JRPGs. We are just creating RPGs. The term JRPG is used by Western media rather than users and media in Japan. This is going to depend on who you ask but there was a time when this term first appeared fifteen years ago, and for us as developers the first time we heard it — it was like a discriminatory¹ term — as though we were being made fun of for creating these games. And so for some developers the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what was in the past. It wasn't a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan. We understand that recently JRPG has better connotations, and it's being used as a positive, but we still remember the time when it was being used as a negative. I remember seeing something fifteen years ago which was basically a definition of what a JRPG was versus a western RPG. It's kind of like Final Fantasy VII, and it has this type of graphics, this length of story — and compartmentalizing what we were creating into a JRPG box. And I took offense to that because that's not how we go into creating. We were going in to create an RPG, but to be compartmentalized we thought that was discriminatory.

I've been a bit hesitant to use the term JRPG over the past few months, as I started to question it myself around the release of Elden Ring. I'd seen some discussion online referring to the game as a JRPG despite not containing any of the mechanic elements I usually attribute to the genre. I asked myself why we use JRPG against other terms like ARPG (action role playing game) or SRPG (strategy role playing game) where the first word in the acronym describes how the player will interact with a game's systems². How is the word "Japanese" really helpful as a mechanic descriptor compared to "action" or "strategy?"

As a genre definition, most people attribute it to games containing turn-based combat, games made in Japan, or maybe some combination of both. Yet in the year 2023 we're far enough removed from the early days of Pokémon and Dragon Quest to be blessed with new titles inspired by those franchises and created by developers all over the globe. 2022's incredible Chained Echoes contains all of the trappings of the JRPG genre, but was created by a small team out of Germany. The upcoming Sea of Stars — similarly inspired by Chrono Trigger — is from a studio based in Quebec. Forum-arguers on the internet would likely disqualify both of these titles from the genre, despite allowing a franchise like Kingdom Hearts — which lacks turn-based combat in favor of real-time action. What this means in our current vernacular is that most would argue an RPG is the "default" terminology... unless it's made in Japan... and that seems like a super incorrect way to consider or classify genre.

In light of these comments from Yoshida³ about JRPG possibly being read as discriminatory, along with its definition being so broadly applied as to become almost amorphic, it seems like the term needs a rethink. In my eyes, it's not too much of a leap given the other RPG sub-genres already in use to say that "turn based RPG" is what most people mean when they say JRPG. Going forward, that's probably what I'll be using to describe games like Dragon Quest alongside the more general "RPG."

That said, all terms used to describe genre can and should be malleable. They should grow, evolve, or dissolve with the times. The most interesting and forward-thinking RPGs of today bear small resemblances to the games that defined the genre, but can be classified as RPGs all the same. What we considered to be a Metroidvania ten years ago looks very different than it does today, and I've gone as far as claiming a Sudoku app can be a roguelike so I'll always be the first to tell you to rethink the vocabulary used to describe creative works.

---

¹ There's also the entire bit about the lack of diversity in FF16 and Yoshida's disappointing response. His obviously horrible and close-minded take about a made up fantasy setting only having room for white people doesn't discount his very valid feelings about JRPG as a descriptor.

² Next up we'll need to figure out a new one for CRPG considering a lot of those games are available on an Xbox, which is kind of like a computer... but not exactly.

³ None of this really gets into Yoshida's larger point about finding genre trappings in general to be creative constraints he wants to break free from, and that leads into why people are dunking on him relentlessly for saying blitzball doesn't fit into the world of Final Fantasy which he envisions as a dark and gritty and Game of Thrones-adjacent world instead of one capable of containing small joys in the face of great darkness. I sympathize with wanting to chart your own path — especially when it comes to a franchise like Final Fantasy which was built on a foundation of innovation — but to do so while ignoring the legacy and successes of the past titles will only serve to anger the very people you're hoping to win over.

⏆

[retronoob]

How to Get More Healing Charges in AI Limit: Explained If you want to know how to get more Healing Charges in AI Limit, you need Life Dew as it is the main...

[nullset2]

Dark Souls - An In-Depth Critique and Review

I cannot sleep, so I figured it'd be a great time to start writing my next piece.

We cannot talk about the "Barren Wasteland" game, as I mentioned in the MGSV review, without covering the primordial Barren Wasteland game: Dark Souls.

Hidetaka Miyazaki and FROM Software's Dark Souls is the 2011 Open World media darling that solidified the modern ARPG. It was such a runaway success that it created a genre of its own (Souls-likes), propelled FROM Software to International notoriety, made Japanese games relevant in the Seventh Gen, and other Japanese games furiously co-opted all of its design elements (and still do to this day) --when Nintendo themselves start designing Zelda titles around the Souls framework, you know you did well.

Ever since its release, Gamers revere it as one of the best games of all time, and that people who don't clear it are tasteless, stupid fucking eunuchs (it is still common to refer to particularly difficult games as the "Dark Souls" of their genre). Dark Souls is pretty much the second coming of christ for some gamers.

I got my copy of Dark Souls from someone who insisted that I should play it because I was too much of a pretentious Phil Fish (Fez) wannabe and that I wouldn't recognize an actual good game if it hit me in the face. The fact notwithstanding that I used to mostly be on a diet of PC Indies and retro games because we couldn't afford a good enough computer to run beefy games back then (it was an event at my house when we finally got Half-Life 1 --not 2-- to run that we went out to Tacos Pipe, a local shop, and I got ourselves some badass tacos with their characteristic Tlaquepaque style salsa, and we enjoyed Half-Life a whole bunch that night), I do appreciate that I was forced to move on, because it is truly foolish to remain stuck in the past --even though I still believe the retro game's value is majestic and it will never fade away, and that it goes beyond the aesthetic and NES Hard. In fact, retro difficulty in particular is something that I believe Dark Souls inherits from retro games and arcade games to great success.

Predated by cult classic Demon's Souls, Dark Souls excelled at one thing: whereas gaming had become a travesty by then, with stale, ultra-rehashed franchises full of hand-holding and dark patterns (such as Microtransactions or all of the Games-as-a-Service malaise that I abhor), Dark Souls reinvigorated gaming by, lo!, believing in its players' intelligence and, behold!, actually innovating. It was a breath of fresh air in an Industry which had and has become plagued by moviegames and yearly iteration Sportsball, FPS and Assassins Creed games.

But is Dark Souls truly all that it's lauded to be? After all, it led to so many other games that the genre has received the moniker of rollslop, due to the prevalence of the roll mechanic in games of its kind, such as the rest of the Dark Souls Series, Sekiro, Bloodborne and Elden Ring. Its Melancholic themes being punctuated by the perfecting of cool Internet-powered mechanics in what's come to be known as Seamless Co-Op, I will now explain why I do believe Dark Souls to be a worthwhile use of your time, even if I am a bit cynical about it still.

Part 1. "Fuck you": The Video Game

A visibly pissed off Gabe Newell, giving "I really don't want to be recording this stupid fucking video right now" vibes while signing the eye of providence/ok sign with his hand said recently in the Half-Life documentary, paraphrasing:

"And so, we had to come up with a definition of fun. We knew it was an ad hoc definition, and it was: "the degree to which the game recognized and responded to the player's choices and actions." In Behavioral Science this would be known as reinforcers, and what the reinforcement schedules were...

The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it (and nothing happens), to me it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me. So I was trying to convey to the player a sense of, “Yes, you are making choices; yes, you are progressing.” Which meant the game had to acknowledge that back to you. If you shoot at a wall, there have to be decals. If you shoot a bunch of Marines; the Marines have to run away from you, right? You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you've made. Otherwise it loses any sort of impact."

Games usually try to avoid Narcissistic Injury, making their games amicable, signing the praises of the player and providing feedback. Dark Souls manages to be appealing by going completely against the grain, effectively becoming "fuck you" as a video game. I've theorized even, that people fell in love with it out of an Stockholm syndrome situation, with how ruthless and unforgiving the game is. But it's not simply that, nor that there weren't that many good releases back then (this was the first "really difficult" game that released in a while back then).

Arcade games are about playing a risk-and-reward, high action game and clearing it with one credit. When I play an arcade game, I am placing rules for myself, that if I break I know are going to lead to a restart of the run. Then, I engage in a little dance, with a bit of memoization, which I rehearse little by little to improve my skills. Thus, arcade games are vastly recognized as the pinnacle of skill-based gaming: I am competing with the machine for my precious money; the machine is doing its best to take as much money as it can from me, and I am doing my best to not die and give it any more money, and if I lose a life I simply restart the run. If I lose a life in Metal Slug, I know it wasn't the game pranking me, or punking on me, or playing Jedi mind tricks on me, or being an asshole and oneshotting me (usually); it was my fault. It means I didn't do well enough this run, and that the run must be restarted if I want to achieve a One Credit Clear. It means my skills aren't good enough, but they can be if I stick with it for long enough.

This kind of gaming had vastly become extinct by 2011, again, in a toxic industry that believes more that the gamer should be fed narcissistic satisfaction with the least amount of effort possible. All players in the Industry are guilty of this, from the flashiest FPS of the era with their spelled out tutorials and Quick Time Events, to the piss-easy Legend of Zelda games which literally block off parts of the map and place big dumb fucking X markers on your map so you cannot stray from the next objective because Nintendo thinks you should be treated like a toddler, otherwise how are you going to look at all of the 80 hours of cutscenes they're prepared for you? It was even worse when games started coming out with features where little tracks are drawn on the ground to literally spoonfeed you where to go, like they do in Dead Space, or features where you don't even need to play the game anymore, it will play itself for you if you want to, and we'll label it a "Cinematic" difficulty.

Dark Souls, in contrast, is so ruthless and abandons you so heavily that a lot of people report never even passing the tutorial level, the Undead Asylum. Personally, I'm guilty of not being able to make it past the Taurus demon in 2013, then picking it up again and dropping it after the first Bell.

The game is not only ruthless skill-wise: sometimes the game simply is an asshole to you. Sometimes, even if you're high level, the game decides it's going to fuck you up with a small rat or an unarmed undead or another low level mob, because you walked into it at the wrong angle. Combat is stiff and tense, the boss battles are shocking and horrid and simply surviving is scary. Sometimes you will have 40,000 souls (the currency/experience points of the game which are actually expendable), and you will lose them all simply by accident. Sometimes it's going to be because you weren't careful and you swung your sword a fraction of a second too early or too late, but most often times it's going to be because you're on your 30th pass through an area and the game simply decided it was going to be an asshole to you that one time.

Here's the thing: even though Dark Souls claims to be hard, this is mostly just the illusion of difficulty. I will elaborate on this later.

How's your Narcissistic Wound doing? Is it looking rounder and rounder, like a circle, much as the emblem of the game?

Parenthesis: I like flotation tanks. I find them incredibly soothing and great for relaxation and recovery after workouts. One time, during a session, in complete pitch darkness and silence, I saw the Dark Souls ring in the dark.

In Dark Souls, you are an Undead: a being which by some mysterious condition is not quite dead but not alive, escaping from an overcrowded undead asylum in ruins commanded by the "fate of the Undead", a myth circulated among the Undead, that one is to be chosen to go to Lordran, the land of Lords, to fulfill their destiny. Undeads can go Hollow: pretty much a living corpse or a zombie down to the bones like a meth addict. Miraculously, you're still not Hollow, and if you play well enough you can still regain your humanity during your adventures in Lordran.

Grab yourself a brew? The Undead are dependent on Estus, a flask of which is one of the biggest staples of the game, which you have to drink from every twentieth step or not if you want to survive.

Here is where it starts getting crazy: bonfires, another one of the staples of the genre, are your main checkpoints, from where you will respawn if dead. The game being open world, it's up to you to find and kindle the bonfires you can find in Lordran at your own pace and with no guidance of any sort. At bonfires, you can refill your flask, level up and regain your humanity (which you find from corpses and after defeating enemies in the game world). Most enemies will respawn after visiting a bonfire, so you will have to deal with them all over again, which is risky but at least will allow for additional souls to be collected.

I could also say that bonfires are the "save points" of the game: however, shockingly, Dark Souls has no actual save system at all. Whereas other games usually allow you to Save and Reload your file (either at specific points, with the pause menu or with a save state), Dark Souls has none of this at all and it robs agency from the player. Every action you take in the game is irreversible and final. If you turn off the game while you're walking down a hallway, the game will simply resume from the exact same position you left it in the next time you boot it. It is impossible to avoid the consequences of a game over by closing out and reloading a save. This means that there's no cutting corners: the game is going to hold you by the bleeps, and you're going to have to make do with it.

Humanity is a vital concept. You're initially dropped in Lordran in a Hollowed state, in which you can't use the seamless-coop features in the game. You have to grind until you find humanity and use it a a bonfire, after which you will be able to summon players, either AI or from the Internet, and see signs. Humanity can also be offered to "kindle" a bonfire, which will increase the amount of doses you can fill your estus flask with at that point.

Control wise, the game presents a deceptively simple system. You have your left and right hands, which you can assign an item both to. You usually end up with a shield and a weapon, but weapons can be wielded dual-handed or single handed with the Y button.

Both hands have a low and a strong attack, performed with the corresponding left or right bumper and trigger respectively. Additionally, you can perform a kick attack if you hit the right bumper while tilting forwards on the stick, and a lunge if you hit the right trigger.

The parry, riposte and backstab mechanics are advanced. If you manage to deflect an incoming attack with a shield with just the right timing, this will trigger a parry, which usually leaves enemies wide open. If you successfully input a low or strong attack after this, this will cause a critical hit in the form of a riposte, and finally if you can strike an enemy in the back with a low attack, this will trigger a backstab to devastating effect.

The B button provides maneuvering abilities. Holding down B makes you run, hitting B while running forward makes you jump and hitting it while standing still makes you step back. Hitting B while strafing in any direction will allow you to roll, a vital mechanic since rolling provides you with fractions of a second of invincibility, critical usage of which must be made when fighting enemies.

Additionally, the character can also use items with the X button, such as your recovery flask, and perform Miracles (spells) with the up arrow on the directional pad. The A button remains a simple action button.

Here's the kicker: all actions are bound by an stamina meter, which slowly depletes upon taking actions and refills over time. Running will consume more stamina than walking for example, rolling will consume stamina, and strong attacks will consume more stamina than low attacks. Stamina will refill if you rest or refrain from attacking, but it will refill faster if you lower your shield rather than keeping it raised.

If you face a Game Over (and you will, hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of times), you will lose all of your souls and humanity and become hollow. However, if you return to your last bloodstain and touch it, this will allow you to retrieve your resources: this is why the game tends to be described as a "Rogue-like". You ought to be careful, though, because if you drop your souls and fail to touch your last bloodstain again, then they are completely forfeited.

Finally and controversially, there is no pause menu, and all decisions inside the start menu must be taken in real time. If you need to pause the game, you will quite literally need to quit to the menu screen, and return to your game. The developers were trying to go for additional tension, I guess, since having to use items while time keeps flowing makes you more vulnerable and enemies can flank you at any time.

My only caveat about the system is that, even though the game boasts about how great of an ARPG it is, it's not actually as much "A" as it is "RPG". Dark Souls clicked for me when I realized that I ought to play it as a resource management game, not as an action game, even though ARPG proudly displays a huge A in front of it. It's a game, like JRPGS, about numbers going up or down but with an element of synchrony. Sure, it sort of plays like a Zelda game with XBOXHUEG windups (which I've always found hilarious ever since they started becoming stereotypical in the Monster Hunter series, and which Zelda itself now also has by the way), where if you need to swing your sword it will take 1.5 seconds after you punch in a command for it to happen. The input buffers are massive and cancelling is everywhere, you can sort of imagine that you have a fighting game buffer behind the scenes and input commands into the buffer, and that's the only way that the game will make sense.

It is absolutely not an action game like Bayonetta, where twitch reflexes and flexibility are all that matters. I would describe it, instead, as a game about dealing with inertia.

Part 2. Don't Go Hollow --With a little help from my friends

Imagine The Legend of Zelda but you walk two steps and you get gangraped by a bunch of meanies every two minutes, and that would be an initial approximation to what the Dark Souls experience is like. You will continuously die, and die, and die; and they you won't die, and you'll walk into a new room, and you'll die again; and finally after much grief and sorrow you will not die, but then woops, it's time for a Boss Fight who will just spring up on you, and the Boss Fight will be a total jumpscare; and after dying ten more times, you will finally get somewhere with the boss, only to discover that he has a second or third phase and refills their health.

There's a certain Zen-like beauty in all of this grief. Even though Dark Souls wants you dead, and will not budge an Inch, even though it will not even give you a Map screen, nor it will give you any story blips or even a hint at all, the game is still enticing because you see yourself getting better at it with every retry, much as it happens with an Arcade game. This is why I've said that it's a breath of fresh air.

However, it is also possible for a game to be ridiculously unfair, so something surely has to work out in the player's favor at some point for them to not rip out their hair and drop the game forever, right? Well, enter Dark Souls biggest innovation: Seamless Co-Op and Async multiplayer features. Both of these concepts caused such a ripple effect in the industry that most games still implement them in 2025.

What? Going to people's homes and sitting down on a couch and playing games locally, what are you, nuts? Are you from the past? What are you, 30, gramps? We don't do that shit anymore, what kind of Maniac are you? We play over the Internets.

You see, once you acquire the White Soapstone item in-game, it is possible to lay down an invocation sign, and if you desire you can summon an online player to invade your world and play with you to fight through a tough boss or area... or they can join you to wreck you up and steal your resources. The game amazingly gives you the option to play PVP or PVE in a completely seamless manner.

Besides Co-Op, Dark souls also provides the ability to leave pre-formed cookie cutter messages in the game world, which can be rated up or down like social media posts. When you play the game you connect to a certain instance of the game where messages are shared by other players. Messages they leave in their game worlds will seamlessly appear in yours, causing a very interesting effect where people will actually try to aid each other, or celebrate tiny moments of joy. Even though the messages are very dry, sometimes they can have a quasi-cryptological personal feeling to them.

"Whoa, cool bosses!" is what people get out of this game, unaware of the finer undertones, of how the Elite, commanding a World of Undead, are willing to sacrifice it all before relenting their position of power.

Now, this is the part where I'd normally talk about the plot but I wish there was a plot itself in the game to begin with. The game puruse something called "Environmental Storytelling", a technique where story exposition is almost never cinematic or scripted, but instead it is up to the players, through exploration and careful analysis, to actually figure out what's going on with the plot.

They did this because they realized that they can have a boss simply yell a random name after dying or something incredibly vague like that, and this will make the fans go crazy speculating, to the production of endless hours of youtube video footage to discuss the story.

You meet a bunch of Undead also struggling in Lordran, and every undead you meet has a creepy laugh at the end of every paragraph --which is how they talk in Seattle by the way (ba-dum-tsh). Maybe the game is trying to say that we are all undead, and the ones who think are not are the most dangerous.

Since the lore is very complicated and I do not wish to spoil myself yet, I will write a second part with more observations once I actually have a better grasp of it.

[kirkwallguy]

okay let me actually do lucanis act 2 quest now tho and ill see how i feel about him after

[dust-drop]

READER

I think Black Myth Wukong is an interesting arpg game,The game doesn't just rely on conversations between characters to put the plot forward.Unlike the Elden Ring, this game combines gameplay and animation, it makes the plot more complete and rich,also can allow the player to focus on the battle or watch the plot.

Journey to the West is not a completely familiar story to people around the world. The work has been adapted in terms of plot to make it more accessible to players who have not read the original book.This makes the story's narrative process relatively complete, I think that's the relative success of this game.

Frey, R. (2024) Black Myth: Wukong - a new era of Chinese game design, FictionTalk. Available at: https://fictiontalk.com/2024/10/29/black-myth-wukong-a-new-era-of-chinese-game-design/ [Accessed: February 4, 2025]

Foley, J. (2025) Original art shows Black Myth Wukong character designs in stunning detail, Creative Bloq. Available at: https://www.creativebloq.com/3d/video-game-design/original-art-shows-black-myth-wukong-character-designs-in-stunning-detail [Accessed: February 4, 2025]

[digitalmarketing0000]

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Media Contact Details

GAMEBUYGOLDNetwork Technology Limited

Email: Support@gamebuygold.com

Phone number: +1-315-636-668

City: New York

Country: America

Contact person: Rita