#i don't even wanna think about him seeing alt dd again I NO NO WANNA

[phonification]

how fucked up would it have been for slick to have survived s collide and after so long after EVERYTHING he gets the chance to see midnight city again with jasprose's portal . how fucked up would it be for him to find out that an alternate version of himself threw it all away . how fucked up would it b

[coffee-in-veins]

As someone who (very casually) enjoys Eldin Ring, I am very curious what you think

thank you for the ask! ^^ that was quick xD

well, then, i hope you won't be upset about what i have to say about it. i genuinely love it from worldbuilding perspective and it looks cool and thrilling more often than not. other things, though...

for the context, i did my best to like it for like casual 80 hours or so, playing very slowly, very cautiously, and probably very inefficiently, because i would often just chill at the location, so those hours mean almost nothing. i managed to kill the grafted guy, the moon lady, got to meet Ranni (god i remember at least one name from it all without cheating!) and got to the point where i was supposed to get into the autumn plateau which name i won't remember even if you torture me.

and this is my first gripe with the game. this one is more of a personal struggle, so take it with a grain of salt. i struggle quite a lot with remembering names, both irl and in media. i remember visuals, i remember voices, i remember plots. but names? beats me. hell, i only remembered Dis and Rey after like half a year of a deep dive into DD, if it gives you any perspective.

with that explanation out of the way, comes the gripe itself: most of the time, i was completely, utterly and hopelessly lost who were those people, whom they wanted killed and where they wanted me to go. my quests would go something like this:

"Go fight General Radahn!" someone said. I think I saw their helmet, twice, and I remember they are a blacksmith. probably. i remember the voice tho. they are genuinely nice to me, so i'd probably do it.

however, not a single braincell rumbled in that head of Tarnished of mine as i sat in front the screen and looked at them blankly: "Who?"

but the NPC already continued: "They are in Caelid!"

not a drop of recognition. "Where?" okay, i sit and think frantically, i have a map, maybe it has parts named, maybe i won't have to wander for half an hour before giving up and going to the wiki again...? no? well, fuck, maybe some locations are named? right! locations. jackpot, some have 'caelid' in them. ah, the red poison swamp! dude, why didn't you say so? on my way!

me, meeting Radahn: aaahhh, that big dude on a tiny horse! sure! from the promo! wait, who asked to kill him again? and why?

and that was every time. there are dozens of names and places and they all are deeply connected and you somehow are expected to keep it all in your head or make notes on a piece of paper, idk. call me whiny, or call it an aesthetic (put a pin into that, we will return to it later), but wouldn't it be convenient to have something like bestiary that Witcher 3 had, with a tab for people you met or heard about? nothing too concrete, hell, this series is know for being frugal with explanations but... like, something, so i don't have to keep wiki constantly open and ready to alt tab to understand who am i talking to and who are they talking about.

and while we're talking about dialogues, BG3 made me understand how much i need a tab where i can re-read recent dialogues. if not to understand things better with all the ye old-english-y words some of us filthy non-eng speakers have no idea even exist, then to see how those names are spelled so we can search them in wikis later.

and have you noticed a thing which is going like a red string through all of my writing? wiki. hell, i'm writing all of the above using wiki because i still don't remember how those people are called. you get used to it just to know who's who. wanna laugh at me? because i was so stressed out by the first bosses, i completely blacked out at the first boss, only seeing vague shapes, and i genuinely thought that Godrick and Morgott were the same guy for the longest time because i was stressed out, didn't have enough time to look at them and was frantically thinking of moves and skills instead of actually watching the cutscene with proper attention. it didn't help that they both spoke with similar tones and in a ye old-english-y way, and were in the same location. so yeah, you can imagine my confusion during the game later on...

there's one thing, though. constantly checking names in wiki makes you feel like it's fine to check other things too. and, Io and behold, before you know it, you're just tired and grumpy and look up where the hell are things you need, quests you missed, resource nodes... and suddenly, the best part of the game (exploration) is gradually chipped away, without you even noticing.

i mean, i had to look up how the horse is called and I love Torrent to bits, even if he is as responsive to controls as a DD2 bangwagon that was put on two very greasy, very non-cooperative pigs on skis. which is another gripe of mine, but the poor guy is so abandoned in the second half of the game, that it's genuinely depressing.

which brings us to my second most gripe in the game: menus. remember that aesthetic pin? let's get it out. menus are a genuine pain in the ass to navigate, they don't respond to mouse (oh, we're gonna return to that. oh, we're gonna...), and for the first thirty or so HOURS i wasn't aware there were other tabs in the inventory. genuinely. i simply wasn't aware. i hovered the mouse on tabs, they weren't scrolling, and knowing that this is primary console game, i didn't pay much attention to the keys besides those, assuming (rightfully, as i thought) that those were for consoles to switch tabs. forgive me for my 'pc master race' mentality, but i'm not used to things in the menu not being responsive to the mouse. so some of the quest items you see in there somewhere? any tab after keys? nope, i didn't know they existed.

remember painting quests? i loved those. but also i had no fucking idea you carried a copy somewhere in the bowels of the inventory tab. thus, like the moron i was, i would come to them, make a photo of my screen on my phone, and try to go around, keeping the photo up on my phone as a reference. or go back to the actual in world painting to check. my frustration was immeasurable and my pain was immense. or maybe you wanna find the weapon you just looted and see if it is of any use? pff, good luck, hope you remembered its name or how it looked, or didn't have anything in your inventory, else get ready to go through a warehouse of other gear you carry. not to mention that sorting on those is extremely non-intuitive. why are lantern and looking glass and prattling pates in one section but wraith calling bell and mimic veil have separate ones? why is horse whistle with flasks and flasks 2.0? why are memory of grace with the flasks and horse whistle? am i missing something?? genuine question.

quick side note while we’re at the topic of prattling pates, should i even mention how notoriously convoluted the better ending for my sweet boy Boc is…?

not to mention that 'Switch display' option is very... unexplained, to say politely. it turns out you can see how many runes exactly is Golden Rune [7] - if you switch the view. because having explanation of 'use to gain many runes' on one screen totally gives you a hint that it would say 'use to gain 2500 runes' in another.

i mean i get it. the series has a reputation. it is dark souls 4, 5 and 6 with a new coat of pain (or maybe paint), it has to be hard, you gotta 'git good', you have to fight for every sliver of lore and then listen to 12 hours of youtube explanations anyway just to have a semblance of understanding what's going on. but - and this is an important but - there's a difference between working for the lore and being unable to understand what the hell you looted and not being aware you can actually know how rune [6] 'many' differs from rune [9] 'many' without trying to go and use it and make a table with those orrrr - say it with me! have the wiki opened.

also the fact that nowhere does it say that spirit ashes can be summoned only in specific areas AND you need a bell you need to get later on somehow bumbling into Ranni is simply false marketing. i took twin imps as my trinket and boy ho boy, lemme tell you someone was pissed for the first hour of the game...

which brings me to creme de la creme of my gripes. the controls. pc port is... well it exists, and i still haven't recovered from that. it makes you extremely aware from the word go that you're not the target demographic. that you're unwelcome here. that no one looked at it and thought: huh, we have battles where we expect Tarnished to get on and off Torrent mid-fight, so how shitty of us would it be if we make Torrent summon be "F + [arrow up]" for keyboards? you know, so the player would have to get their hand off the mouse. mid-battle. naaah, that would work just fine, ship that bad boi as is! oh, and make it non-mappable too. they have keyboard with 75% keys being unused? who cares! it mirrors gamepad, and that is what truly matters.

i said it once when a pal of mine let me use his acc and try Dark Souls. i think it was the third one...? well, my experience was - 'i'm not fighting the monsters, i'm fighting the game'. and it's pretty much the same for Elden Ring. did you know there's a power off hand attack? i didn't. did you know there's a way of switching your weapon to hold it in two hands? i didn't did you know you can make it on the fly? i sure as hell didn't. did you know your RH attack is bound to your LMC and it fucks your brain when you play because here it plays role and you can fuckup by using weapons in 'wrong' hands? yeah, that i experienced a plenty.

do you know how i know all those? i plugged in a gamepad and oh god all of the mapping makes so much goddamn sense! i had to reverse-map things because i only played FF9 with a controller, and was extremely uncomfortable with it in a non-turn-based game. which left a taste of bile in my mouth.

loading times are awesome thought. i dunno how they achieved that, but that's hella impressive for a game this big.

i ended up liking the world. vistas. lore that people dig into. but this game isn't for me. not because i'm not interested but because i have a setup they clearly don't care about. and it's okay, i guess. but i have too little free time to spend it fighting not the monsters the game sets in front of me as a challenge but the game itself

hope it wasn't too convoluted ^^'

and thanks again for the ask! :}