The Crushing Oppression of Discovery

Like sand through the hourglass, so our the days of our lives…


Or deaths, if one is using the regular time keeping metrics
involved while playing Elden Ring…

To my last point with the flippancy involving time keeping practices : it would be absolutely fabulous if FromSoftware allowed you to do more with death in Elden Tree. Just even *a counter* would be lovely, but I imagine with a little more sense of humor imbued with the practice, you could do a lot with those numbers, but I’m guessing a game where one of the bosses rips off one of his own legs and then proceeds to beat you to fucking death as an eyeball volcano that’s grown out of his chest isn’t really going for the big laugh vibe.


Unless you’re playing Elden Ring on the PC in which case it is
batshit fucking looney tunes up in the Lands Between

For anyone following my writing on the regz, there’s a chance you’re looking forward to more of my ramblings involving the Castlevania: Dominus Collection, in all of it’s near non-Belmont featuring glory. Alas, I still haven’t put much more time into the experience since my last write up, for various reasons. I seem to have a truly terrible habit of playing all of the games *except* the one I should be focusing on. I’m not sure where this habitual hypocrisy originally sprang from, but it haunts my every day like an old friend fucking with me from beyond the grave.


I had nearly forgotten I was being quite literal with this sentiment

Having said that, I will likely have to confront the fact there is no realistic way I will have any of the Castlevania games beaten in the immediate future, making my write ups more of a passing fancy then anything else. Which ultimately, is how I usually must operate due to time constraints. C’est la vie. One such title that has suffered a similar fate of delayed enjoyment is the expansion pack to Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, as I am just now getting to the expanded content. Inspite of my insistence…..to myself, that it would be okay to be more leisurely with guides and the like to get a better grip on how to more expediently progress through the games obtuseness and obscure nature, I have stubbornly *not* consulted with any external information on helping me with the title, which has continued to make my march forward a slow one.


I seemingly beat games at the speed of a Quad Glacier

To wit: I didn’t want to start the DLC to Elden Ring until I had finished the main story in the game, which I was quite close in doing so when the expanded content dropped (I basically just started the game this March). Even after having bested the Elden Beast, I then wandered for several weeks in search of both end game content and the entrance to the DLC access point itself. Unlike a normal person might have done, in terms of just googling whether the god damn entrance was to a game I had just bought, I remained bullheaded and said “it would be cool” and that “its right around the corner”.


If you squint real hard, you might be able to see
one out of the ten billion corners I was referencing

In any case, I did finally find “the corner” it was “right around”, and was thusly exposed to the Erdtree in all of it’s chaotic madness. The DLC so far has been quite predictable in regards of what to expect, as there was quite a lot of dying fairly soon after entering the Realm of Shadow, which you know, feels like it goes without saying that was going to be the case. I struggled with a min-boss phantom bloke, as he was surprisingly resilient and straight forward in his fighting pattern, but down he eventually went, even if it was a slightly delayed victory.


The face I *somehow* always make when I get to the 2nd
phase of any Elden Ring boss

I’m now about halfway through the first major dungeon I believe? A castle of sorts, that had a pretty cool looking lion…thing that went down without much of a fight. Bunch of zombie…undead guys not happy with my presence before that…I don’t pay attention to anyone’s name in this god damn game. The idea of the lore sounds cool, but it’s all just vague dark fantasy to me. Given that I don’t pay attention to any of the backstory of Elden Ring, and that I’m going in completely blind all of the time with this game, both in regards to the narrative backdrop of what is happening and the meta-game on how to play the fucking thing correctly *at all* continues to remind me how hilariously out of my depth I am with Elden Ring in it’s entirety. The fact this remains true even after I’ve beaten the game is a delightful absurdity, with my regular frame of reference for anything involving the game boiling down to “yay, he ded” or “nay, I die.”


With most of my boss fights in Elden Ring feeling like the end
of The Departed

I decided to ride the struggle bus both metaphorically and literally by playing and writing about Elden Tree today, in that I didn’t feel I had the creative juice I needed to for a write up on Portrait of Ruin, but I wanted to get more than a headline out. With the conclusion of this paragraph, I will have successfully done so, though I will leave you with one last thought. Don’t worry yourself into a frenzy about not doing something amazing and then failing to do something all together…just focus on doing anything at all.

Till next time.

~Pashford