"Liar Ahead." Between the three of us, we spent a ton of time playing this game and loved every minute. From lowly tarnished to becoming the Elden Lord, join us for a conversation about one of the best games of 2022, Elden Ring.
"Liar Ahead." Between the three of us, we spent a ton of time playing this game and loved every minute. From lowly tarnished to becoming the Elden Lord, join us for a conversation about one of the best games of 2022, Elden Ring.
In this episode, we journey back to the Lands Between and relive our experience with Elden Ring. This game is MASSIVE, and we spent over 830 combined hours exploring the world, running away from giant lobsters, and stabbing fools in the back to the most satisfying sound effect imaginable. After a quick overview, we chat about our favorite characters and highlight some of our most hated enemies—damn dogs. Willie and Taylor realize they never advanced the questline for Boc the Seamster, and somehow Willie completely missed the tutorial cave at the beginning of the game, lol. We also touch on how much lore and information is in the weapon and item descriptions and how easy it can be to feel lost in the game. Ashes of War, spirit ashes, golden runes, and rainbow stones come up during the game mechanics discussion, and we spend some time remembering the visual graphics and depth of the environment. Later in the episode, we dig into the sequencing, texture, and overall theme of the 67-track OST, which is masterful in its own right. We wrap with some final thoughts, and Joseph reads a 1-star Amazon review for the game. "you don't have the right, O you don't have the right."
Other games briefly mentioned in this episode: Deathloop, Dishonored, Prey (2017), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Ghost of Tsushima, Red Dead Redemption 2, Bloodborne, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Horizon Forbidden West.
Here's the full transcript for this episode.
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The music you hear on the podcast is by ELFL, Lexica, and Christian Nanzell.
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00:00:00
[Alienated by ELFL plays in background]
Taylor: That's classic Souls tutorial.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Like that is the most, like you're a wretched nothing [Joseph laughs] skeleton, nasty man. You are rising in the ranks and you fight your way through a little jail cell and kill your dude-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -and it's like, put on your nasty man helmet. Okay. Now you've got a nasty man dagger. [Taylor and Joseph laugh] And you know, and then you come out and you're the Lord of Light.
Yeah, that's classic dude.
Joseph: I think some of my favorite characters were, obviously Torrent.
Taylor: [Laughing] Yes.
Joseph: Love, love the horse.
Taylor: Shout out to Torrent.
Joseph: Yeah, shout out to Torrent.
Taylor: Whoever made that horse, whoever fought, [Joseph laughs] whoever, suits, they had to beat the fuck down to say no, this horse is gonna be able to double jump up to a mountain top if you want.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: I praise that person. I give them all the fucking praise. [Laughs] Cuz you know, somebody was like, no, we need a ceiling.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: We need to have an invisible- and he was like, fuck you, you put that ceiling in, and I walk. That's how I imagine it in my head anyways. [Taylor and Joseph laugh.] Yeah. Yeah. Go on though. Torrent. Yep. [Laughs.]
[Intro theme plays - Tiger Tracks by Lexica]
00:01:22
Joseph: What's up everyone? Welcome to Berries and Blades, a place where we analyze and break down some of our favorite video games. My name is Joseph Bullard. I'm here with my friends Willie Garza and Taylor Garratt. We're just three lowly tarnished, trying to avoid being ensnarled in a transporter trap, but I digress.
So what have you guys been up to lately?
Taylor: Not a lot, man. Just been chilling. Um, I've been playing some Deathloop, doing some, uh, I don't know, might call it, uh, Groundhogs Day scenario, but with a lot more murder in it.
Joseph: Oh, is this the game that's based in like the sixties or fifties or something?
Taylor: Yeah, it's very retro looking.
Um, it, it's one of those where it's, everything looks retro from fifties, sixties, but it's got a lot of futuristic stuff like-
Joseph: Got it. I remember.
Taylor: -and powers that you can use. Yeah, overall it's a little timelooper, which I'm a fan of anything that time loops and has done good, you know, movies, games, whatever. If it's a cool time loop, I'm into it.
But it's nice. It's a really good engine and I- it's kind of the culmination of a bunch of different games that I enjoy, like the Dishonored series and, uh, Prey and all that stuff from Bethesda. So it's, it's been a lot of fun.
Baby's been good. Uh, otherwise just hiding in a hole.
Joseph: Word.
Looks like you're muted.
[Laughter]
Taylor: Willie's been on mute.
Willie: Yeah, I need to, I need to check that game out. I've been meaning to since we talked about it. I downloaded it and I still didn't even didn't even do it.
Taylor: I think you'll like it.
Willie: Yeah, I'm sure I will. It had a lot of praise. It had like five star ratings and stuff when it came out on PlayStation, so I'm sure-
Joseph: mm-hmm.
Willie: -it's good.
Joseph: Where's this game at? Where can you get it?
Taylor: Game pass on the Xbox.
Willie: Yeah, and it's on everything now-
Taylor: or PC.
Willie: -Like it just recently went to multiple platforms cuz it was- I say everything but I, no, am I wrong? I think maybe it just came out for Xbox, but it was only on PlayStation for, you know, the last couple years or whatever it's been.
Taylor: Yeah, it was one where they met in the middle-
Joseph: Ohh I see.
Taylor: -did the compromise of releasing it on PC and um, and PlayStation, but not on Xbox. We had to wait a year.
Joseph: I think I've only seen a trailer for that game, but long ago.
Taylor: It's good. It's a good concept. They have a little multiplayer aspect in there where, so say Willie plays it, I can be an invader.
So he wants to break this time loop as the main character. And then you can also be an invader who wants to protect the loop. That's the multiplayer aspect where I could invade Willie's game, uh, a certain amount of times per level that he's on and just straight up hunt him and attack him like with all my powers, and he can defend himself with all his powers.
And it's just an interesting aspect of having this giant level that is totally fun to go through and manipulate and explore by yourself. But then you have that element of there could be a, a real person strolling through there hunting you and trying to kill you-
Joseph: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: -And they could have invisibility or, you know, shifting or whatever. It's fun.
Willie: As interesting as that is, like, I like the idea, but I think the thing that we do most is play co-op games together.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Willie: So that's one of the reasons I think that I haven't played it yet, cuz it's like, if I'm gonna play something with y'all, I don't necessarily want to like fuck up your game.
It's just like, not the way- I know it's like part of the game-
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: It's just not the way that we play stuff together.
The other part of that is though, is it's hard to do because I feel like both Taylor and I sometimes put ourselves on "appear offline," And so you don't even know that your friend's playing the fucking game. So it's like I-
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: I can't do it as a surprise. Right? I can't even just hop into the game as a surprise cause it'll be, "Hey Taylor, are you on right now?" And then he fucking knows something's coming. Like, it's like, so it's, I haven't done it.
Taylor: [Laughs] Yeah. About to get raided.
Joseph: Hmm.
Taylor: It might be fun though. We'll check it out.
And I, I could see us, uh, before, before it's all over, we'll just be partnering up and taking out people and the level and shit.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Before it's all said and done, but yeah.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: We'll see what happens.
Joseph: Hmm.
00:05:13
Willie: Oh, and the other thing bef, before I forget your intro reminded me to ask this question, are there some transporter traps that you can't evade?
Like sometimes you can open them and back off, right? But are there some that you just can't do that?
Joseph: I don't think so.
Willie: Because I felt like I ran into one. I could've sworn I backed away from it and it just, it wouldn't let me.
Joseph: Hmm.
Willie: I don't remember where it was. It was in some cave or tunnel somewhere.
Joseph: I only found this out recently, but, when you immediately back away to not get trapped, you can walk back into the mist and it's like deactivated at that point.
Willie: Oh.
Joseph: Which is pretty cool. I hadn't realized that cuz I'd never tried it. Just cuz it just seemed risky.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: But if you walk back into it, it won't trap you, which was pretty interesting to me.
Taylor: Hmm.
00:05:56
Joseph: But anyway, our listeners won't notice this, but we actually took a month long break from recording so I could move across the country.
And this is our first episode back, but we're excited to be back because we're finally talking about a game we've all been dying to talk about. Elden Ring.
Taylor: [Mimicking angelic choir singing] "Ahh"
Joseph: Our format is pretty simple. We start with our overall impressions and then move on to a few categories. The main storyline and character analysis, game mechanics, visual graphics, the music, and then our final thoughts.
But before we dive in, just wanna warn everybody that there might be spoilers after our overall impressions. We don't plan to intentionally reveal anything major, but there's always a chance it could happen. So consider that before continuing on if you haven't played the game or you're not finished.
And, uh, before we get started, I did also wanna mention that unlike a few other reviews I've heard about the game, all three of us have actually become Elden Lord and have played a total of at least 830 hours of this fucking game, which have all have been amazing.
But Willie, do you wanna start us?
Willie: Yeah, overall I really dug this game. It's one of the first things I played in a long time that I've like just been sucked into and just kept playing. I probably said this already, but I have a hard time like finishing stuff lately. I did not have a hard time finishing this game.
I like sunk hours into this game every day for a few weeks while I just wanted to know what was happening, even though it was kind of hard to know what was happening, which we'll get into later. But I, I do just overall, like the gameplay, the style, the, the difficulty is like difficult but like not too difficult compared to other From Software games.
For some reason it felt different and I think just because there was a co-op aspect to it, it also made it a little bit easier. Like when you were having trouble you could just pull somebody in and like to pull y'all in and like play through something you might have already played through or maybe you haven't.
But either way it was just like doing that together like was just a lot of fun.
Joseph: Nice. What about you Taylor?
Taylor: I feel very similar. I've played all the other Souls games, you know, a lot of 'em. I played with friends and played a ton of hours and definitely feel like they nailed it on this one as far as just coming together of all of those aspects, but doing it in a very fluid and less punishing way.
And it seemed to be like the smartest thing they ever could have done [Joseph chuckles] because it created this thing where like, just like Willie said, you can call in your boys, have 'em come help you. You could go random with people easily at any time and just stroll across giant swaths of the map and fight anything random that you come across.
And it was amazing. It, it was almost like they captured that Breath of the Wild kind of mystery and. Amazing. Just that draw to make you want to go somewhere to make you see a thing and make you hop on your horse and set out and go to that thing. They nailed it.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: And the art and the music and everything was on point as always. They didn't slack anywhere from what I could see.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: And that's pretty typical for From.
Joseph: I guess I'm the only one here that had never played a From Soft game, so this was my first From Soft game and I thought it was amazing. Easily one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played.
Taylor: It's a fortunate one, to be the first
Joseph: Yeah. To start with?
Taylor: Yeah. It really is.
Joseph: Some of the funnest combat I've ever played in a game too. Overall, I think the game, well, it's huge, huge playable areas, huge map. But also it's huge in a way that wasn't overwhelming. Like I sometimes feel from other games, like when you unlock a new area and you just spent like 30 hours in, in one section of the game and then you unlock a new one, you're like, fuck-
Taylor: [Laughs] Yeah.
Joseph: -and I'm gonna have to spend like as much time in this new area.
I'd never felt like that about this game, which stood out to me. And then the game is challenging, but it's not overly frustrating. Like it, you can win the game, you can beat hard bosses and it's one of the few games that has actually, for a real good stretch of time, I was playing every single night.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: It was like scheduled in or like penciled into my schedule and I played every night and Meg was watching me play a lot of those hours and it, it's just the kind of game that made me wanna get better. And not like quit, not quit because it's too difficult. It was like challenging in a way that made me want to continue-
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: -And like overcome the obstacles, which is awesome.
Taylor: That's something I think you probably missed out on, on the Souls games.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Now I bet you could go back and you can still get some enjoyment because the, especially in Souls two and three, maybe one, like very similar combat style, you can lock onto the dude, you can go around, you can roll. It's based on weight.
You can have different weapons to be faster, slower, heavier, magic, whatever. A lot of the same stuff is in there, but there was just this unforgiving element. Sometimes you would get to a boss, a giant dragon that you just cannot beat unless you get leveled up enough and or have people with you that were, you know, also super leveled.
This one seemed to do a great job about not backing you into corners like that. And I think that was a major one, that people like you that were new to the, those series and those games probably is gonna lock you in for a long time. If they can keep, you know, just build on that right there. They're not gonna lose. Like-
Joseph: Mm-hmm
Taylor: -they're only gonna be gaining people and keeping.
00:11:44
Joseph: Word. So I guess at this point we're gonna move on to some of the other larger categories. So at this point there could be spoilers. Honestly, I don't know if there will be, because what is this fucking game even about? Sometimes you feel that way. Still.
Taylor: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Joseph: [Laughs] Even after 300 hours, but. There is a lot of story in the game, like if you go looking for it. The game doesn't give you shit, unless you do want to find it, which I think is awesome. And from what I could tell, that seems to be like the way of doing things for, From Soft.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: But it might be the first game that I played where you have to spend like 30 hours before you're really finding out.
Like you start finding out things that kind of help you understand what the game's about. But Taylor, what's your, what's your, your hack and slash version of what the game is about?
00:12:29
Taylor: Game is about a dude who wakes up and is dead and got killt and, um, must emerge from a cave to-
Joseph: "Got killt."
Taylor: Yep. He got killt and he must emerge from his dark cave to hug thine maiden and lie head on thine bosom [Joseph laughs] and then go kill them dragon and stuff, like any good game.
Honestly, the mechanics and everything, and the, the mystery of this game were so deep that I barely remember much of the story at all. Like, I could tell you all kinds of stuff as far as enemies and tactics and weapons and spells, but as far as the story, man, it took a backseat for me. Even though the story seems amazing, like the bits of it that I do remember and, and definitely were into.
It's incredible. Like it's, you know, R.R. Martin level of storytelling, which does make sense since he was involved, but I don't know. It's, uh, you know, you, you beat it. There's a big dude, a, a, a boss man, if you will. And that's it. [scoffs]
Willie: Yeah, I mean, I, I do think that, uh, part of that was the fact that one, yes, the story is like very well hidden as, uh, Joey was saying, like, you have to go find it if you wanna.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: Everything is like hidden in. Not everything. Like there are cinematics obviously that tell you some of the story and you get your quest from people and you sort of hear the, what you're doing, like your tasks. But then if you really want to dive into the lore, like everything is hidden in text, each weapon you pick up or each piece of armor, there's some piece of lore for the world, which is wild, that like-
Taylor: Yeah
Willie: -actually tells you what's going on. It helps you understand this whole thing.
But I think, you know, what makes sense is when we were playing, it was long ago now, like our, the majority of our time playing was over two months ago now or something probably. So those 300 hours each of us did, or I think in my case, close to 200, they were crammed into about like four weeks time or something, like three months ago.
And we were all trying to keep up with each other through the game. There wasn't a lot of time to digest everything or just like get in a few hours. Even though you're like exploring everything.
Taylor: Yeah. You're just kind of rushing through it. Uh, so you can get as much done with your buds as you can. Yeah. That was probably a major part of it.
Willie: I think that's, that's a probably a big part of it. I did actually, you know, I mean, I, I did pay more attention to the story as I could and did enjoy the, the lore behind everything and read as much stuff as I could, but it wasn't everything. It wasn't until like I finished the game that I went back and watched other people's videos on stuff to like actually understand what was going on, which is-
Taylor: That would probably help.
Willie: [Chuckling] Yeah.
Taylor: Be a lot of help.
Joseph: It definitely helps piece together the game, especially if you're kind of lost because the game is very easily- it's easy to miss lore. It's easy not to know which step is next. In your quest after you've talking, you've talked to an NPC and you've fully exhausted their dialogue to know that you need to then go do something else and then come back and talk to that NPC again.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: There's no mission log, there's no quest journal.
Taylor: Yes.
Joseph: That gives you step by step directions and kind of guide you along, so like you can easily miss things. And a lot of people played this game with some type of online tracking system or a map that reveals the locations of things so that you kind of know what to do.
And I saw a lot of reviews where there were people that played 30 hours in the game and they're like, this game sucks. You know, like there's no story. And because you can literally play the game very easily for like 50 hours and not really run into any of the main NPCs, which is kind of incredible, you know, because of the open world nature of this game, there's all kinds of shit to learn about.
Like Willie was saying, a lot of the lore is buried into the weapon descriptions and item descriptions, and it's amazing how many of the dots can be connected by reading all of that stuff and exhausting all of the character dialogue. But the main, the larger points are that you are this kind of lowlife person, a lowly tarnished, and you've kind of been resurrected.
And uh, there are reasons you can't remain dead once you die and why you keep coming back to life. But you're essentially looking for pieces of a ring, uh, the Elden ring, and you're trying to basically recover those rings so that you can reforge this, this powerful ring.
But yeah, there's the Erdtree. The Greater Will, Tarnished, the Shattering, Night of the Black Knives, the Two Fingers, and then all sorts of NPC characters. Taylor, I wanna come back to you. What were you gonna bring up earlier?
Taylor: Oh, um, I was gonna ask, so I wanna say one of the reasons that it was hard for me to keep up with, uh, with a lot of the lore and stuff was, uh, not only because, I mean, we would, I just had a kid and like, you know, I was barely sleeping. There was a lot of that going on.
But there's not like a general book or glossary or anything that you're like filling out as you do it, right? Like if you, if you see some story, like some big part of lore and it's because you just beat a boss and you're about to go to bed, uh, from my memory, it, it doesn't remember or like write down what happened.
Then some games you'll boot it back up and you'll go back and it'll be like, well, you just beat Johnny the Murderer or whatever. And, and now you gotta do this and that. And like you said, there's no list of things that you've done or, or here's what the story is doing or where the story is at. And that may have been a, a thing that really kept me from exploring it more than I did.
Willie: I wonder if there was a way, I mean, I know there probably is, but I wonder if it would make, if they would ever consider doing stuff like that as far as like just doing the loading screens where it's like telling you the story that you've revealed so far.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: Like some other games do. I don't know that that's necessarily their style, right? But-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: I wonder if that would help in that aspect.
Taylor: It'd be a hell of a mod for people like me [Willie and Joseph chuckle] that, that are like real distracted or have like distracted lives or ADHD and have to go through playing it. Because you'd be able to, you know, I love when games do that.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: It's like, so-and-so did this and it made their journey perilous because of this and that. And it's like, oh yeah, it's that stuff I did the other day. [Laughs] Yeah.
Joseph: I immediately think of Wild Hunt and the way that they-
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: -handled like, uh, rejoining the game and booting the game back up and restarting.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: It would do one of those cinematic, or not even really cinematic, it was like more of a animation, but almost in like a comic book way.
It was almost like a comic book scene that they would play. And then it had that kind of strange, kind of strange like, dub over the top, like the voiceover was kind of strange and it was like this weird announce announcer. [Willie chuckles]
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: You know what I'm talking about, Taylor?
Taylor: Yep. Oh yeah.
Joseph: It's kind of weird. But.
Taylor: Yeah, they had a, they had a very special delivery and a lot of people love and hate that. I hear a lot of people complaining about that in Cyberpunk. Even in the anime [laughing] where they like, they don't say "I" a lot. It's like the way they talk in their games, I guess. But a lot of people have been annoyed about it.
00:19:48
Willie: With all that being said, I, maybe this goes into game mechanics a little bit, but like, you know, it's, it's really easy to just get sidetracked and not be doing the main storyline, right?
But also-
Taylor: Mm-hmm
Willie: -if you wanted to, and you're just following the Sites of Grace on the ground and the ones on the map that have like directions on them, if you're literally just following those arrows, you can take yourself through the main story like fairly easily. Now-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: If you did that, I don't know how hard it would get, like, quickly.
Joseph: You would get fucking wrecked.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: Immediately. I feel like you'd be in places that are sort of, you're under leveled for, and you would be trying to fight a boss and that would be the problem, right? Like you would, you'd follow those arrows. You get to the place where you're supposed to go and you're like, oh, I can't be here yet.
And then-
Taylor: Mm-hmm
Willie: -you have to go back and just like search everything to fight some more enemies, find some equipment, find something that's gonna help you with that boss. But if you-
Taylor: Yep.
Willie: -didn't want to do that, if you didn't follow those arrows, like you could literally just be in Limgrave for 30 plus hours without [chuckling] doing anything else.
Joseph: For sure.
Taylor: That was my first album. [Willie laughs] In Limgrave for 30 Hours.
Joseph: In Limgrave for 30 Hours.
[Laughter]
Taylor: That was, yeah. Dropped it. A lot of, lot of maiden talk, A lot of golden knight stuff.
00:21:07
Joseph: Taylor, from, from what you can remember who, who might be one of your favorite characters from the game? NPCs or bosses.
Taylor: I don't know if I have a favorite when it comes to bosses. Like all of the, all of the bosses that I can recall are amazing, just like their animations and the art that's used on 'em.
Character-wise... I don't know if anybody really stuck out to me. There was the whole, um, I forget the guy's name. Where you-- the sorcerer, you had to go deal with him in his tower. There was that quest where that dude turned out to be pretty, pretty quirky.
Joseph: Punk ass.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. Punk ass [laughs] sorcerer.
Joseph: You know he beat up a lot of people in that tower. [Willie laughs]
Taylor: Oh, for sure. Man. There were people, [laughter] people, people had their heads hanging down. Ghost, or not, for sure. They had a lot of amazing characters, I think like the, the rot guy who was near the table, who was always a mystery.
Joseph: Mm.
Taylor: Uh, the guy with the, with the weird armor that was covered in... scabs or teeth or something.
Joseph: You're talking about the round table?
Taylor: Dung. Dung Eater. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's,
Joseph: Oh, Dung Eater yeah.
Willie: Oh, you're talking about that guy?
Taylor: Yeah. That guy. I, I always like the, their characters like that, that are real mysterious and they're not giving you any extra information on that dude-
Joseph: [Chuckling] Mm-hmm
Taylor: -unless you dig and find it and learn it. He's not gonna have a little plaque around him that's like, this is this guy and this is what he's about.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: [Laughing] You're gonna find that out 40 hours later.
Joseph: Willie, you have anybody that sticks out?
00:22:39
Willie: Uh, yeah, definitely. And I, I just wanna be clear with anybody who's listening, this is where we're probably gonna start. If we start naming stuff, we're gonna probably start getting into spoilers.
Cause I'm gonna, I'm gonna say some stuff. So this is your, this is your warning to, to turn it off. If you really want to know nothing about this game before you start playing. Dung Eater was really good and like yeah, it's interesting that like...
You don't really know much about that guy, but that's like, also leads you on a path to one of the major endings of the game if you go that route. But you might not go that route and you never see any of that stuff about that.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And I said all that spoiler stuff because I think my favorite character, there's a couple things, there's Ranni, is probably my favorite character, whose ending is the one that I unlocked. And honestly, I think it was just from the aesthetic of the like, Rennala fight. That fight in the library with her, with all her like-
Taylor: Oh my god.
Willie: -little minions singing stuff around on the ground and like-
Taylor: Yes!
Willie: -dropping her to the ground, and then eventually... Is that the first fight where there's a second round, like there's a second phase?
Taylor: I believe so. And you're having to shatter the moon or the shield or whatever, yeah.
Willie: Well, like you shatter her... but then like it had a second health bar though, right? Like that's the first one where...
Taylor: I think so yeah.
Willie: -that's the first one where you fe... you defeat her and then you end up in this plane of water with the moon over the surface. And that place is just beautiful. And that fight is, I feel like that is the first time, if you're going in order, the first time that you have a boss that has like a complete second phase like that. It's more than one health bar, I should say.
So like you thought you won and then you realize you didn't, and you're in this really beautiful place, and you're like running around with no cover, trying to like stop this thing from destroying you. And she's throwing, you know those, I guess it's Rennala's Dark Moon or whatever, something like that.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. And she's summons too.
Taylor: Oh yeah, yeah.
Joseph: Yeah, and she's summons a bunch of stuff.
Taylor: Oh yeah. I, that place is beautiful.
Joseph: And if you've, if you've never been there, it's like, um, imagine this endless plane of ankle deep water, and then there's like the cosmos, like above.
Taylor: Any of the deer type fights were like, epic. I love the, the animation of the deer.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was beautiful boss fight.
Taylor: Oh man. Just so beautiful. The, like, the way they had 'em kind of flying around and it got me killed a lot. [laughing] Just standing around looking at the beauty happening.
Joseph: [laughs] Willie, what minor characters did you like, if any? Because Ranni did feel like a main character.
Willie: Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. She was.
Joseph: She was like the main character of the game in my playthrough.
Willie: Right. Same for me. Like that was the one that I like. Like I said, that was the ending that I got and it was the first person that I was like, I'm gonna do all of your quest, whatever you say to do, I'm gonna do those things.
I'm trying to think about minor characters that I would classify as that. I can't think of the blood dude's name. Something with the V and I just can't remember. The guy you meet at the very beginning of the game, who ends up being like a-
Joseph: Oh, the White, White Varre.
Willie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joseph: Or White, White Varre, White-Faced Varre.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: White-Faced Varré.
Willie: I like that guy. That still seems like a little bit of a major character depending on what run you're playing through. And he also like, gives you some important stuff to like advance to later stages if you want to.
00:25:53
Joseph: It's interesting they worked him in as like a character that feeds into the game mechanics.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Because like it's him, right-
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: -that you, you first experience like how multiplayer works? And then you actually need to do that to kind of progress his quest line, which is pretty interesting, that it's kind of baked in.
Willie: Yeah. You have to raid five people using the bloody finger that you get from him. Like he... Yeah, the fact that the mechanics are baked in and that's the thing about the game. All the mechanics are baked in like that.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Is there even a, there's gotta be a controller list, right? Like of what the buttons do, [chuckles] but other than that-
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: [Willie laughs] Yeah, yeah. I think there is.
[Joseph laughs]
Willie: But other than that, like there's some screen tips, you know, between games, which some of them I didn't even understand actually.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: I found out way later that I wasn't really switching between one-handed and two-handed fighting in the best way.
Joseph: Right, right.
Willie: I thought it was like, uh, you know, I was playing on Xbox, so I thought it was like hold Y and hit left bumper and right bumper at the same time, but that's not what it was. It was saying hold Y and hit left bumper or right bumper. But other than that, like the mechanics are hidden.
And so like learning like, I need this finger from a character to do a thing like was really cool. And I think the way you learned to use the golden finger was probably on a piece of parchment or something, the game is telling you, but there's not a tutorial for that.
Taylor: Nope.
Willie: Which, by the way, I completely missed the tutorial cave that other people were like, how could you possibly miss that?
Joseph: [chuckling] Really!?
[Taylor laughs]
Willie: There was a big discussion about it on the internet, and then they changed it so that the, like, there was a popup later.
Taylor: Ah.
Joseph: Mm, interesting.
Willie: So that it like tells you when you walk by, like, jumping down to this cave is going to do a tutorial. I did not do that at all, the first time.
Joseph: Wow.
Willie: I didn't even know until way later when I was looking at a guide somewhere or something that said that.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And that I had missed a seed or that I didn't miss the seed, but I had missed a, a Site of Grace that was down there.
Joseph: A lot of people took issue with the tutorial format, right? And that there isn't much of a tutorial.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I felt like there was enough in that tutorial to kind of learn like the, the controls for the game and stuff like that.
Taylor: That's classic Souls tutorial.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Like that is the most, like you're a wretched nothing [Joseph laughs] skeleton, nasty man. You are rising in the ranks and you fight your way through a little jail cell and kill your dude-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -and it's like, put on your nasty man helmet. Okay. Now you've got a nasty man dagger. [Taylor and Joseph laugh] And you know, and then you come out and you're the Lord of Light.
Yeah, that's classic dude.
Joseph: I think some of my favorite characters were, obviously Torrent.
Taylor: [Laughing] Yes.
Joseph: Love, love the horse.
Taylor: Shout out to Torrent.
Joseph: Yeah, shout out to Torrent.
Taylor: Whoever made that horse, whoever fought, [Joseph laughs] whoever, suits, they had to beat the fuck down to say no, this horse is gonna be able to double jump up to a mountain top if you want.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: I praise that person. I give them all the fucking praise. [Laughs] Cuz you know, somebody was like, no, we need a ceiling.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: We need to have an invisible- and he was like, fuck you, you put that ceiling in, and I walk. That's how I imagine it in my head anyways. [Taylor and Joseph laugh.] Yeah. Yeah. Go on though. Torrent. Yep. [Laughs.]
Joseph: Yeah. Love, love Torrent and just, uh, yeah, horse combat and just riding the horse in the game in general. Like, I don't know, it was good. Like in the, in a Ghost of Tsushima way.
Taylor: Ah, so good.
Joseph: And 50 times better than Roach in Wild Hunt.
Taylor: I would say better than Ghost of Tsushima, just in the fact like, that you're flying around double jumping and like...
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Just the sword action, the weapon action as you're flying... It- it, once you got better at it, you quickly realized... you would be with your buddies fighting some big boss and it's like, oh no, no, no, y'all leave. I'll just kick this dude's ass on Torrent. [laughs] You know, this is nothing.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: I just have to fly around him and swat him in the face and dodge.
Joseph: Exactly.
Taylor: Yeah. And uh, oh, that horse. Best horse ever.
00:29:41
Joseph: Other characters. I like Blaidd. I liked, uh, Iron Fist Alexander. I like Boc.
Taylor: Oh Alexander, yeah.
Joseph: I thought Boc's story, that quest line was just really cool.
Willie: What is that one?
Joseph: Kind of unexpected.
Willie: I don't remember.
Joseph: Boc, he was the, like the Seamster.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: That would alter your clothing, and he would show up at Sites of Grace.
Willie: I don't know that I ever, I mean, I got stuff to alter my clothes.
Taylor: Hmm.
Willie: But I don't remember seeing a person. [laughs]
Joseph: Oh, shit. [laughs]
Taylor: Right. I think at some point I could just do it at the, at the main table.
Joseph: Oh my gosh.
Taylor: Like, I just noticed it was, it just said, oh, you can, you can change your clothing here.
[Joseph gasps]
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Boc, he's, he's a character you find uh… in a cave, in Limgrave, and then you start his quest line.
Taylor: I bet I never found his ass, [laughing] I bet I never found that dude.
Joseph: He's one of the, I forget what the, what the race of creatures is. He kind of looks like he has monkey like features.
Willie: Oh! Never saw that guy. [laughs]
Joseph: Aww man. Wow.
Taylor: I'm glad you brought up Alexander. I think that was probably my favorite character overall. He did that classic thing. He had a decent story. Like he, he looked stupid as fuck when you first see him.
[Joseph and Taylor laugh]
Taylor: Like, why does a fucking pot have arms and legs?
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Oh, of course. I have to stab him. There's something to make him do a thing, but then as you move on, you just start to learn more about him and that he has kind of a rich backstory.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: Especially for a pot with arms and legs, and then the way that they incorporate those characters to help you later on, I thought was amazing. I'd never had a moment like that in a Souls game.
Joseph: Mmm.
Taylor: Where everybody was, you just had almost an army, you know? And everybody's like, charge! Let's go! And that was amazing. I'm glad you brought that up. I, I forgot all about that kind of area. I don't wanna spoil this but...
Joseph: Yeah, he's great.
Taylor: Oh man, he was such a cool character.
Joseph: Think like, overconfident warrior.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: You know, that, that you kind of question whether or not he could actually prove himself in battle.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: But it... has definitely presented himself in, as the, you know, the champion of all champions, which I liked about his personality.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. And he gets, um, almost the inevitable outcome of such a thing too, which is cool.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: I love that about the Souls worlds in general is that, a lot of the time, most of the time there's not the best outcome for stuff, and for characters, and for people. And I think that it's a, an important reflection of the world that we live in too, sometimes.
Joseph: Taking one step back, I think it's amazing that Taylor has played over 300 hours and he never even found Boc. Never even went through Boc's quest line. [Taylor and Willie: Yeah] And same with you, Willie. Like that's, that's incredible.
Willie: I had to look it up because I, I was like, what is, what are you talking about? I see the person now-
Taylor: Don't recognize ’em?
Willie: -no, not at all. I never saw that person [chuckles] at all. And I think the reason is, is because I, I'm looking at it and I think the first time you see him is the coastal cave, and I didn't go to that cave for a very long time.
Joseph: Oh, you know what?
Taylor: I didn't either.
Joseph: I think that's not actually the first time you experience him, because I think he's a bush.
Willie: Oh, that's, that's the one time-
Joseph: I think he's a bush.
Willie: -and then I never saw him again after that.
Joseph: Okay, so then it would've been coastal cave after that to continue the quest line.
Taylor: Wow.
Joseph: Yeah, but he's the guy in the bush that you find.
Willie: Yeah. You were there with me the time that I found that bush actually.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Willie: I was walking by and you hear that voice-
Joseph: That's true.
Willie: -just like calling, calling out for some reason.
Taylor: [chuckling] Oh God.
Willie: And then you like, yeah, go to the bush and, he runs... he ends up running away.
Taylor: I love that. I love those types of, those types of quests [laughing] where you just hear somebody going, "Hey, hey!"
Joseph: "Over here!" [laughs]
Taylor: Yeah. And you're like, okay, surely they'll be dead in no time. I'm just going to slowly go by, on my way. And they just keep, and, and finally you just say, okay, I'm gonna go check it out. Jesus, what do you want?
00:33:37
Joseph: Hmm. The honorable mentions for me are Master Hewg, who's at the Roundtable Hold, um, blacksmith, basically, and War Counselor iji. I don't know, just his voice. Whoever did the voiceover and his, like his size I think is really cool.
Taylor: Who is that?
Joseph: Uh, he's the guy that's up by Carian Manor. He's like the big, uh, troll, right? They're trolls.
Taylor: Oh, gotchu.
Joseph: I think they're trolls.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: He's the one, he's the guy that's sitting down and he's like, huge, and he's just like hammering.
Taylor: Okay. He's also a blacksmith. Got you. Okay. Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: Yeah. That one is very cool.
Taylor: He's over in the creepy lands. Yeah. He's badass...
Joseph: He's got the, like shiny, just like full face helmet on.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: But yeah, he was awesome. I liked him. And then, uh, Malenia, I thought she's a total badass.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: The, the cut scene for her and this whole -like, Malenia - Miquella connection, the fact that it's so mysterious still.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: I really hope that the DLC has some like information and lore about Miquella and, you know, all, all of that kind of stuff.
Taylor: Oh, and those character designs for those, like the humanoid bosses and stuff that you fight are really good. I thought they did a great job of not making them like, sometimes in a game that is so much fantasy and so many gigantic creatures. Sometimes you kind of lose that element of beauty and grandiose with the smaller bosses when you're fighting a, a more humanoid boss or something like that.
And I thought they did a great job of just making the outfits look amazing and their move sets really did a good job of like flourishing any cool hanging like garments that they had or anything it was...
I could probably go and watch some of that shit at half speed and just get a lot of joy out of just watching all the animations and all the artwork happening in there. It was beautiful.
00:35:26
Joseph: We've talked a lot about game mechanics already, but before we like officially jump into that deeply, I'm just curious from each of you, what was one, like the, one of the most hated fucking creatures in Elden Ring?
Willie: I don't know what those things were called, but the, uh, things with multiple legs that shot out the spines at you. What the fuck were those things called?
Taylor: [laughs] Bunch of 'em. Yeah, they, oh!
Willie: I hated when those were in a group and they kept doing that thing. What's that thing called? Pest something? It's...cause I have the incantation. It's great.
Joseph: Oh!
Taylor: They're like a millipede that stands up. They're disgusting.
Joseph: It's got the staff?
Willie: Yeah. Yeah.
Taylor: Oh man, I hate those.
Joseph: Uh, I don't remember what those are called.
Willie: The incantation is pest threads, I'm pretty sure.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: It, it mimics their, like, shooting of those things, but I don't remember what, what that thing is called, but I hate those.
Joseph: Yeah, they'll mess you up. I'm almost, I almost always like stealth killed them, backstab them.
Taylor: I would say for me is the hands.
Willie: Oh. Yeah, for sure.
Joseph: Oh...yeah.
Taylor: The hands were disgusting and scary. [Joseph and Willie laugh] And they would drop on, they knew what they were doing. Whoever-
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: Just as I want to give a wonderful gift basket to the Torrent person. I want to give a gift basket full of face slaps, just medium [Joseph laughs] face slaps to the person that-
Joseph: That'd be cool.
Taylor: [laughing] -that said... putting those hands everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those hands that comes out, and face slaps them, okay?
Joseph: Nice. Yeah, those finger spiders, or I forget exactly what they're called, but I'm just gonna call them finger spiders, but they're some of the, they're mo... probably the most creepy thing in the whole game.
Taylor: The one in the gap in the mountaintop, where you're having to jump across the gap either on foot or on torrent.
Willie: Oh.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: And it looks like you could barely make it. And there's a big one that comes. Fuck you.
Willie: Yeah. I know exactly what we're talking about.
Joseph: Yeah. Savagery.
Taylor: I hate you. Whoever did that. I hate you.
Joseph: And for me it would be the Revenant.
Willie: That's what I was gonna say next.
Taylor: Oh!
Joseph: Those are things I would run away from and just attempt not to fight.
Taylor: Was that the dude on the horseback? Like the...
Willie: No, those are the...
Joseph: No, they're the ones that come out of the ground.
Taylor: Oh!
Willie: The creepy... yeah.
Joseph: And they can just like transport and come up right next to you.
Taylor: Oh yeah. The shack, shack men. They... at midnight...every once in a while.
Willie: No, no. These things are like creepy. They look like they're wearing a crown.
Taylor: Oh, hold on.
Willie: They're creepy, witchlike things to have multiple arms, that crawl out from underneath the ground.
Taylor: I remember the name. Let me see here.
Willie: There's a bunch in, in the Haligtree at the bottom.
Taylor: Oh no, that's awful.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: But there's also some just randomly spread across the world.
Taylor: Gotchu.
Willie: I also hated those things until I finally started using like, healing magic on them
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: Until I finally started using like Lord's Prayer or whatever.
Joseph: The Lord's Heal.
Willie: The Lord's Heal, yeah. To like-
Taylor: Yes.
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: -to just kill those things as quickly as I could.
Taylor: Dude, the one that's right before that giant ladder, remember there's the part where there's a huge ladder that you have to run over to, and there's one of these guys off to the side. So when you run to that ladder, it alerts him, and as you're barely climbing up the ladder, it's running over to you and starts swatting and could-
Joseph: Uh-huh.
Taylor: -if you have one single misstep, like if you even turn and look and you say, "oh, that's one of those," you're not gonna make it up the ladder. It's just gonna fuck your world up.
Joseph: There was one in the shady castle that was a fucking nightmare for me.
Taylor: Uhh.
Joseph: But um, the white dogs.
Willie: Mm.
Joseph: Fuck the white dogs.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: Because they were like, they would one hit you man. [Willie chuckles] And I was like, "really?" [Joesph and Willie chuckle] They would, they would kill Torrent with a single hit too. And then they would just like, one shot you and then, um, the fucking lobsters dude. The lobsters with like this infinite shot and like the distance, which lobsters can hit you. I hated.
Taylor: Yep. They had a sprint or something. They had some sort of super sprint.
Joseph: It was like acid or spit or something, or water that they would shoot out. And it just like, the range of it was ridiculous.
Willie: Yeah. There were some under the Capital that I remember.
Joseph: Oh, right.
Willie: It was terrible to try to like run by.
Taylor: Oof.
Joseph: I didn't kill that one because there was something down there that I didn't get. That you got, Willie and I don't remember what it was.
Willie: I, I'm gonna guess it's one of the shackles, I think it was the shackle for, um, for the Lord of Blood. For that fight.
Joseph: Oh, got it.
00:39:38
Taylor: Looks like some of the Revenants have different faces, like there's one that... has like a baby face or something. [Joseph and Willie laugh] That's awful.
Joseph: Yeah. [laughs]
Taylor: Whoever, if that's photoshop-
Joseph: Yeah. Don't look at the details, man.
Taylor: Don't. Oh my God.
Joseph: Yeah. You find some stills.
Willie: That's how I felt about the finger creeper.
Taylor: Ugh..
Willie: Every time I saw that thing and just like noticing extra stuff on it.
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: And like, it's basically two hands, almost overlayed each other.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: [laughing] Yeah, like combined.
Willie: Yeah, and they just, just crawl towards you and the... yeah, the big one sucked.
Joseph: Fire. Fire is good against those. If you encounter those in uh, Carian Manor or like up on Mt. Gelmir.
Taylor: Running [Willie laughs] is also your friend. Just go ahead and run.
Joseph: Torrent, yes. Hop on Torrent. Use some of those i-frames.
Taylor: Yeah. Run to a sunny place.
Willie: I remember what those other things are called. Not remembered, but look them up. They're the Lesser Kindred of Rot or something like that.
Joseph: The centipede things?
Willie: Those like centipede type things. I, I really do hate those things so much. They're called Pests, also known as Lesser Kindred of Rot.
Joseph: Okay. And they're white, and they have like a, kind of like cardinal style hat or something on.
Willie: Yeah, something on them. And it's weird that a bug is wearing a hat that's, [chuckles] you know.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. It's just all creepy.
Willie: Yeah.
00:40:48
Taylor: Give me a horn tooting mush, uh, marshmallow man, anytime-
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: -over all that stuff.
[Joseph and Willie laugh]
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: There's some, some of those in bad positions that really fucked you up on the Haligtree though.
Joseph: Oh yeah.
Taylor: What a character. [Taylor and Willie laugh]
Just blowing the bubbles at you like-
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Oh gosh. Oh yeah.
Taylor: -that is one of my favorite Souls things, that they will embrace stupidity in a way that nobody else will. I mean, you would have a producer, it'd be like, we can't have this. No marshmallow man twirling around, tooting a horn.
Joseph: Uh-huh, with the, with a horn.
Taylor: It's so, it's so extra. I love it.
00:41:24
Willie: I think I have two other hated characters real fast cuz they were early on. Well, one of 'em was anyway, one is just the, any of the like flying haw- eagles, like the war hawk or the bladed talon eagle.
Joseph: [Laughing] Ohh
Willie: Those things were-
Joseph: Yeah
Willie: -fucking me up so bad early on, in Stormveil Castle when I like, went around the edge onto the cliffs.
Joseph: The ones with the explosive barrels, right?
Willie: Those also suck. Just the ones with the bladed claws though.
Joseph: Yeah, that's true.
Willie: Early on when I had low, low health and I was using a sorcerer like- they were too fast. Like I couldn't get off magic quick enough to stop them from hitting me.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: And I died numerous times trying to mess around in that section, trying to go find stuff that wasn't even really that great. I just didn't know it at the time.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: You're just not America enough [Willie laughs] to enjoy those eagles.
Joseph: [Laughing] Yeah.
Willie: And then the, the other thing were the harpies, I don't know what they actually were called, but the harpy-like creatures-
Joseph: Mm.
Willie: -that are chanting sometimes. There's a couple of those, when they're in pairs, that suck.
Joseph: Yeah. There's some over, um, in Caelid where you kind of run through that corridor and there's like four of them.
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: Kind of staggered.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. I know what you're talking about. I love that song though.
00:42:36
Taylor: Yeah. There's a lot of good NPC music. There's the, um, I guess, we'll maybe we'll get into that, but like the, you know, just all the singing characters.
Joseph: Hell yeah.
Taylor: Like the ones, uh, that, that amazing video where the guys got himself on the green screen. He goes over and starts dancing [Joseph chuckles] with the ladies. I think I shared that with y'all at some point. He's a, I, I don't recognize the streamer, but he's, it's him in the corner [laughs] and he like backs up and he starts dancing with the village ladies. [Joseph laughs]
Willie: [chuckling] Oh, yeah yeah
Taylor: And like dancing-
Joseph: Oh!
Taylor: And laughing and shit. And he is like giggling with them. He is like, hee-he-he like, [laughs.]
Joseph: Oh, okay. So up by the windmill. The windmill village.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah, yeah. That, that might be one of the best like clips of video that I've seen in a long time.
Joseph: Nice. Yeah.
Taylor: That's probably in top five of anything ever. Just like that dude's joy of like being able to dance with them and how he was-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -doing his own dance.
Joseph: First discovery of that area was kind of creepy.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Cause they-
Taylor: Yes, oh, its's a- oh yeah.
Joseph: You're just kinda like, are they going to attack? And there's that creepy laugh.
Taylor: And it was just close enough to where that eye, like the giant-
Joseph: Oh yeah
Taylor: -eye of Sauron thing that would kill you. It was close enough to that still that I was in that village thinking, man, that eye is gonna be able to see me again all of a sudden.
[Willie and Joseph chuckle.]
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: Murder me.
00:43:51
Joseph: Alright, so we've talked, yeah, we've already talked about a couple of game mechanics, but let's talk about some of our favorites or, or just them in general.
Combat. I, I think that reigns supreme and there's so many different, I think just characteristics of the combat in this game, like being able to, two hand weapons, being able to, two hand a shield. Being able to dual weild the same weapon and just like power stance your way through.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: Spirit Ashes were really fun and super, super helpful. If you're playing with Spirit Ashes, I know there were a lot of people that didn't play with any kind of summoning, which is seems insane to me.
Taylor: Same.
Joseph: Of like how you can finish this game because you can literally have builds in this game that make boss fights very, very difficult.
Some bosses are easier with, with magic builds and other bosses are easier with like a melee build. Being able to go through the whole game with just a single build and never have co-op players or never summon Spirit Ashes seem like incredibly difficult.
Uh, Ashes of War were also pretty kick ass.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: And being able to put those on different blades and just like have different abilities, and there's so many of 'em. But love that. Uh, what about you guys?
Willie: Yeah. The thing about Ashes is there's so many, the Ashes of War, there's so many of them that, like, I know I haven't seen.
Joseph: Oh gosh, yeah.
Willie: I ha-, there's so many things I haven't seen in the game, and I just stuck with the things-
Taylor: Yep
Willie: -that I found kind of early on that I really liked.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And some of them aren't necessarily Ashes, but they're just, I guess they are like Ashes of War, but they're tied to specific weapons and you can't remove them. Right?
Joseph: Right.
Willie: Like I have a, I think there's a thing called. The blade knife or the black knife that has a blade of death on it where you just, like-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Your character hops up in the air and throws like a red spiritual blade, like at stuff. Like, I love that one. That's one of the Spirit Ashes that I really dig.
And then just recently I found, um, I don't know, say it's called the Regalia of echo-chad or echo-kide ["Eochaid"] or something like that. I'm not sure. I haven't actually heard it said out loud.
Joseph: Hm.
Willie: It's a long sword that has something called the echo-chad or echo-kide's like Dancing Blade and like when you thrust it, like sends out the blade in front of you and it just like slashes a few times and then comes back to you in that same-
Joseph: Oh ok
Willie: -sort of red, spiritual manner, whatever, like that thing.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Is pretty cool. And I just found that.
Joseph: It's like the bell, the Bell Bearing.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Uh, homeboy.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: With like, he throws the blade out and it kind of like swings around and like-
Taylor: Ohh
Joseph: -returns. Like a boomerang, it's like similar to that?
Taylor: Nice.
Willie: Yeah. That thing is-
Joseph: Yeah. That's badass.
00:46:31
Willie: That thing is cool. I just found that recently, but again, I think going back to like the game mechanics that the game doesn't tell you, there's just some weird stuff.
Like, I know this is not, this is not groundbreaking or anything, but just the fact that like, you know, when you're using your, uh, what is it, it's your quick inventory, but I don't know what it's actually called.
Joseph: The pouches?
Willie: What is it?
Joseph: Or the other side? The pouches or the, the main kind of inventory slots?
Willie: Uh, the pouches, I guess? It's the, you know, the main four slots that you have.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Yeah. I guess it's your, where you put your equipment right in the bottom section or whatever.
Joseph: Yeah, like main slots.
Willie: Yeah. So like, The fact that like you can put whatever you really like in the first slot and be anywhere in your menu and then go back to that first slot just by holding down on the directional pad instead of like cycling to it. It's like not groundbreaking. It's like, that makes sense, but like you wouldn't know how to do that really unless you did it by accident or someone told you to do it.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: I haven't played enough From Software games to know if that happens all the time.
Joseph: It's from other games? I definitely found out about that in a video on YouTube where it was like, "Hey, 25 Things to Know."
Taylor: Yeah, me too.
Joseph: And that was one of them. And it was like, it's a thing that can be life or death for sure in the game is like cycling through your equipment and looking for your flask. But yeah, being able to hold down. You can also, in the top slot, you can hold up.
Willie: Yeah. Yeah.
Joseph: And it'll, it'll jump to the first slot in that one too, which is pretty badass.
Willie: Right.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: Yeah. I love that too. Those kind of things like that you just don't learn unless you've been playing for a while or hear someone else say it. It's wild that that's not somewhere in tutorial, but that's always been their-.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Their sort of MO for their games. It's like you just have to figure it all out.
Taylor: Or go online and look it up.
Willie: Yeah, exactly.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
00:48:26
Willie: And I feel like, yeah, to that conversation earlier, like there's nothing, there's a whole debate about yeah, using Spirit Ashes or not, but like you do whatever you gotta do to enjoy the game. [Laughter] Like have fun with it.
Taylor: Yeah, exactly.
Willie: That's the point.
Joseph: There's definitely a part of me that would prefer to finish Elden Ring than like, never use Spirit Ashes or summon anything and then just never finish the game.
Taylor: Absolutely, man. There's enough going against you, um-
Joseph: [Laughs] Yeah.
Taylor: -at any point to not finish the game anyways. Don't, I don't need to make it- like, I'm not so good and so like robust with time that I need to make that shit even more difficult.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: No.
Joseph: I think it was a fantastic feature of the game to like be able to summon like this variety-
Willie: Right
Joseph: -of Spirit Ashes.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: And they had different strengths, they had different weaknesses, different, you know, heights in which they could attack and like I thought that was just fucking totally badass.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: And it's like-
Taylor: I'd love to see more of them too.
Joseph: -part of the game that allows you to, it just lets you customize your build even further.
Taylor: I mean, I don't, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler. I guess we already said we were doing spoilers, but I feel like once I found the Mimic, uh, Ash, that was all I used. [Laughter]
Like I never used another one because I guess I was already on a, like this journey to basically create a super powerful character. And I did that I guess with my ideal build and everything.
And then I found a thing that allowed me to double that and just have that as a partner. [Laughing] Ruining. It just was a, a killer. I, I never encountered anything that me, and that, that mimic couldn't murder together.
Willie: Yeah. And to be clear, the, the Mimic Ash is like one of the mimics in the sort of underground section, like turns into other things, right.
Like you battle yourself. It's like a ball, a silver blob of energy that turns into you and you have to fight it.
Taylor: T-1000
Willie: Yeah. Exactly.
Taylor: [Laughs] T-1000, shit.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Totally like Dark Link.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: But yourself, like whoever you are, it's like the dark version of yourself.
Willie: Yeah. And you fight yourself. And then after you fight yourself, you get that Spirit Ash, and so then you'd summon a copy of yourself and whatever build you have.
Yeah, to have that with you is pretty powerful. I did use that for quite a while, but I think there were a couple that, that were-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -better for my build because I was mostly sorcerer, and I wasn't controlling what the sorcerer was doing. It was kind of hard sometimes to like-
Taylor: True.
Willie: To get it to do the thing I needed it to do. So I would summon things that were more melee based, so I could stay at sorcery and they could melee.
Taylor: Once I understood how that mechanic was working, that you could, um, control what they had. Like you said, you can't get granular enough. Maybe you could maybe, maybe you could just have the spell-
Willie: Yeah
Taylor: -that you want them to be able to cast equipped.
Willie: Only that.
Taylor: There were ways to do it and you could play it. And if there was somebody that was difficult enough like that, um, that crazy fox, the giant fox or whatever that was underground, things like that. I wasn't scared to cut some corners. [Laughter]
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Make my guy a little more badass or whatever. It was funny if you were using that- um, I was using mostly the, uh, Sword of Milos and um, the, uh, the blood sword. I forget the name of it.
Willie: Oh right, yeah. We talked about it.
Taylor: With all the arms all over it. Yeah.
Willie: Yeah. What was that one?
Joseph: Yeah, you get it from um, Praetor Rykard.
Taylor: It's like the sword of-
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Savagery or, or, oh man. Yeah. It just escapes me.
Joseph: There's also so many weapons. [Laughter] So many weapons in this game.
Taylor: Yeah, that too. But if, if like the tear or the mimic has that and I have that-
Joseph: Right
Taylor: -and we're both doing the fire in an X over something, it's over.
Joseph: [Laughing] Right.
Taylor: It is over cuz it's, it's like staggering the shit out of 'em and also burning them and, and giving me health.
It's, oh man.
Willie: Blasphemous Blade.
Joseph: Blasphemous Blade.
Taylor: There we go, there we go.
Joseph: Yeah. I like the strategy of trying to choose like the right Spirit Ash combination with like your build.
Taylor: Yes.
Joseph: Like I thought that was fun and it changes from boss to boss. Or just just like a a, you know, a group of enemies didn't even have to be a boss cuz there's some tough shit out there that isn't bosses.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Or aren't bosses that you could still get your ass kicked easily.
Taylor: The game, it rewarded you when you link the stuff together correctly, either on your own build or mimic or whatever. Man, it rewarded you so well. It just felt like it lumped it on. It was like, oh you're doing good now and you're gonna see that you're doing good.
00:52:53
Joseph: One thing I was just thinking about is that all three of us had different builds. I was a dex build. Taylor, you have a strength, right?
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. And then Willie was, you know, magic based.
Willie: Yeah, I was int.
Joseph: Which is pretty badass. Cuz when we played together-
Taylor: Funny how it worked out that way.
Joseph: -It really helped. It, it really helped us defeat some bosses because Willie's, you know, fighting at ranged and casting and I'm up there with like Moonveil or the Uchigatana or Rivers of Blood slashing away.
And then Taylor's like using the huge weapons that I don't even have enough strength to wield.
Taylor: Yeah, the ultra swords and, um, what I loved about-
Joseph: The dragon breath.
Taylor: Well, yeah. That dragon breath.
Joseph: Rot breath?
Taylor: Yes. Yeah, the rot breath was a spam. What I also liked was the dual shield, like you talked about it earlier, how you could dual wield things like being able to dual hand the, you know, one of the most powerful shields.
Joseph: Right.
Taylor: Just because you're strength-based. That was awesome because like you're saying on our builds, you're up there kind of defenseless, you know? So for me it was easy to go up behind it, whack it with the shield two handed, and then that gives you all the time you need to kind of whack away at it before he pulls agro again.
Yeah, it was beautiful. It's beautiful seeing all that stuff work together.
00:54:04
Willie: General mechanics wise, I really like, I do like the system of like runes for leveling. I wish there was some way to calculate how many runes, how many levels you've lost [laughs] over the course of the game.
Joseph: Wow yeah.
Willie: Just cause [laughs] you know, it's so many.
Joseph: That's a great idea. Yeah, like total runes lost if it was just a number of those.
Taylor: Oh man. Just on a, on a load screen [Willie laughs] after you die, it's just like lifetime- oh, that they need to add that badly. Just put like a scrolling, like, how many times you've died-
Joseph: Yeah, for sure.
Taylor: -How many runes you lost. Oh my God, that would be amazing.
Joseph: I do wish it had the level of stats, like the detail and the stats like Red Dead two has.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Where you could see like number of headshots. You can see like how many enemies of a certain type killed. You can see how many times you like fell to your death. Like that would be awesome in that game, but even just like a simple death counter would be rad.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: For now, I'm sure people will depend on a mod or something to do that. That sounds like a very mody thing to have.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Just a running list of, of good stuff.
00:55:07
Willie: One of the things that I really didn't like about…the sort of inventory management was like the golden runes. Like when you were thinking about leveling and you needed to like pop some runes to get more runes and you know, level, is that you like never necessarily knew how, like a golden rune three, like what's that worth? No fucking idea. Like unless you're at a vendor selling them, you don't know.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: But if you're just sitting at a random campfire or Site of Grace, you have to either look it up or you have to like just remember what they are. And there's golden runes one through 11, 12?
Joseph: Like 12, dude. [Laughs]
Willie: And then there's a hero rune and a whatever, a something else rune, and like whatever. And it's like-
Taylor: Yep.
Willie: Some of those are worth 20,000. Some are worth 200. It's like I know that the lowest one is probably 200, which was the one, but beyond that, I don't really remember the numbering system.
Joseph: You just had to memorize it.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: After all these Souls games, they've never just added a pop all of these button-
Willie: [Chuckling] Mm-hmm.
Taylor: That is probably one of my few small nitpicks about it is that you're already gonna dedicate a shit ton of time to this game.
Like it's just a given. It's an amazing game. You don't have to gotcha people into it or anything. I feel like they could do a lot of quality of life stuff on there like that. Just let me press, let me select all of those stacks knowing that I'm gonna pop all of them and do it. You know what I mean? It's so simple, but I probably spent two hours of the 300 hours or whatever the playing, just popping stuff and just managing-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -things like that. And it gets to be a little frustrating, but it's, again, it's a super small nitpick. Because out of 300 hours, if you spent two hours doing that, that's not that big of a deal.
Joseph: I guess if you've never played the game, Willie brought this up that there is a system in which you can level up with runes, which you acquire by defeating enemies, and then you can level up at different Sites of Grace, which are essentially checkpoints or um, I guess campfires in the other Souls games.
And if you die before you have leveled up, you will lose- you will drop all of those runes and you have one chance to get them back. But if you die a second time, then those runes are gone forever. But they just kind of sit in place. Wherever you died, you drop them, you can go and recover them. And it's like kind of frustrating because where you can drop them sometimes because it can be really difficult to get back to them. But-
Taylor: Or impossible. [Laughing]
Joseph: Yeah, or impossible.
Taylor: Sometimes when you fall off a cliff and it saves it on like, a sub cliff of that cliff. Yeah.
Joseph: I love that it made, uh, it kind of made you fear death in a way.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: Like it really changed and it made you strategize and it changed your route. Or it changed when you did a specific thing because you had like 80,000 runes that you, you know, there's a high likelihood of you dying and you didn't want to lose those.
So then you would like backtrack and then go try to level up first and then come back with like no runes so that when you die, [chuckling] there's like no risk.
Taylor: Well, it's funny cuz it made you fear death, but it also made you get over the fear of that death too, right?
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: You would eventually become so saturated with [chuckles] like those situations of lost runes that eventually you just say, I don't, I don't really care. I'm just gonna go try that again. This time I'm gonna beat that dude's ass.
And you stop, you kind of stop caring about the runes at some point and you just start having them and using them.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: And then you're really going.
Joseph: I mean, I think at all three of our levels, Willie, I think you said you're 177?
Willie: Yeah, uh-
Joseph: 176, 177?
Willie: Yeah 177, yeah, yeah.
Joseph: I was 174. Taylor I can imagine is probably a little higher than those. But at that level you need like 250,000 runes to like level up anymore.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: I think mine might be around a million now or something. [Laughter] Mine's a pretty insane amount. You gotta kill the bird a lot of times, heh, heh, to level up.
Willie: Yeah. I'm looking at mine right now- or from 176. At level 176, it was like 224,000. No. Is that what it is? Yeah. Yeah. 224,567.
Taylor: Oh, okay. I'm not that bad. I'm 337,000 to level up.
Joseph: Gosh, yeah thats a lot.
Taylor: And that's level 208. Yeah.
Joseph: [Laughs] Damn.
Taylor: I gotta get swole. I like my, gotta be that Terry Cruz level of swole.
Joseph: Nice.
Taylor: Yeah, I don't mess around with anything less.
Joseph: Cheeseburger Eddy.
Taylor: I don't want like Christian Bale. Uh, just got swole for this role. I want, like this dude got swole for the role of life.
00:59:44
Joseph: Uh, this is kind of switching directions, but Rainbow Stones. Loved Rainbow Stones. Once I learned that you can use those to gauge height and like drops that you could survive, I like kept those in my inventory for, I would say probably 70% of the game, especially when just like traversing like the different, you know, the, the lands between and just trying to drop down from ledges and stuff. I use rainbow stones all the time.
Willie: Y'all definitely told me about those. Was there a, did you learn that from a video too, or did you figure that out at some point?
Joseph: I found it in the video and then, um, I think it might be a part of other Souls games or something similar.
Taylor: Yeah, that's an old Souls mechanic.
Back in the days, uh, it might still be like this, but if you had to drop down in a super dark a- or black cave full of giants, [Joseph laughs] you had to find the right spot to drop, drop down. So you would drop it and you have to listen and then, I, I think if you, if you heard it, then you could drop or how, how does that work?
If you heard it, crack then you die?
Joseph: It- It'll crack, like shatter.
Taylor: Okay. Okay.
Joseph: And then you can see them because they, emit like a, like a small glow.
Taylor: Oh, okay.
Joseph: So if they remained intact, they would also be glowing.
Willie: Yeah.
01:00:56
Joseph: Another little thing was the white souls, like when you die, you see that little like gasp of whites. Not when you die, but when you kill enemies.
That's how you know that they're gonna drop something is that little bitty white animation of souls that kind of escapes their body. And I think it made gameplay faster because you didn't have to stick around after every kill to like try to see if they dropped something. Catching onto that I think was awesome and just kind of sped up the gameplay and was like that perfect quality of life thing that I like in games that don't slow you down as much.
Willie: I don't think it was till I was reading through some of the notes that I even like noticed that, that I paid attention to that that actually signified that they were gonna drop a thing. I just sort of felt like I always saw it, but that isn't the case. It just happened to be the times I noticed it.
Joseph: Yeah. That was so helpful, especially if you're like on the move, on the move.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I also love that you could pick up items from Torrent in mid-gallop, like in a, the Ghost of Tsushima way, not in the Red Dead way, where you have to like-
Taylor: Oh my God. [Willie laughs]
Joseph: You have to get off the horse-
Taylor: Go through an animation,
Joseph: have to like go through short animation,
Taylor: you gotta see him cough, cough some blood
Joseph: yeah [laughs]
Taylor: [groans] Then he grabs it.
Joseph: I gotta pocket an herb in my satchel.
Taylor: [Laughing] You gotta cut it. Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: "I don't like the puffy stuff." And he picks it off one by one. Yeah.
Joseph: [Laughing] Right.
Taylor: Yeah, no. They killed it. They killed it. Yeah.
Joseph: That's perfect quality of life feature for me. And the sense that you don't have to see something a billion fucking times and it also doesn't slow you down so much.
Taylor: They did a great job on things like that, on really streamlining, which also is what surprised me, like I said about the runes earlier, is things like that. It surprises me that they kind of cling to those things while they're still willing, clearly-
Joseph: Right, right.
Taylor: To streamline other stuff. Maybe they'll get there eventually.
Joseph: It's like at the heart-
Taylor: I mean, this might be a whole new leaf for them. What's that?
Joseph: I was gonna say it's just like at the heart of their games.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: You know, like Souls and runes. It's like it's such a big part of the way they've designed these games.
Taylor: Absolutely. Dude. And it can't be a light decision, I'm sure, to say, okay, we're gonna forego this, uh, this typical design for our stuff and do something new.
I'm sure it was super exciting and they had played the game so they knew it was gonna be badass. But I'm sure there was some element of are we going to wreck our community? Or people gonna be mad because we've made this kind of mainstream. But it seemed like overwhelmingly, uh, people loved all of those changes and that's cool.
That's really cool. Especially nowadays, I think when people can glom on so much to bullshit hate over petty stuff. Elden Ring brought us together.
01:03:34
Joseph: Yeah, for sure. You guys wanna move on to just general art direction and graphics in the game?
Taylor: Oh, yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. My overview, to put it, uh, in simple terms, I would say the graphics are not the best ever, but they're really good.
Taylor: You've just described a Souls game, my friend.
Joseph: [Laughing] Yeah.
Taylor: I mean that's, that's how I felt about every single one, is that these are not the best graphics I've seen at x time. Whatever time you're living in, uh, you know, gaming wise or otherwise, but they work, they work perfectly for what they set out to do. It's, uh, very similar to what Nintendo does to me, and that they don't have the strong hardware.
They don't have some badass X or you know, five or whatever. It's just like, here's this little Samsung phone almost thing [laughs] that you can hold and play. But yet they push the art design as far as they can with that and they make it work and they make it successful and wildly successful. And that's what Souls games do.
They have this weird thing where when you look off into the distance, there's a beauty to it. It delivers the art like it should, but there's also a slight translucence to certain pixelation and you can tell how some things are kind of curtained over other things, but it doesn't hurt it. In the end, you still feel like you're taking in the Rembrandt, that you're looking at.
It, it's just delivered in the way that they can for it to be smooth and have the frame rate and the 4K and all this stuff working together. DLSS. And you know, they probably have some element of ray tracing in there. I'm not sure. I've never looked into it, but the lighting is amazing. They played that dance perfectly to deliver like the art and everything and just have it look incredible, yet still functional.
Really, really functional.
Joseph: When I was like, hey, these aren't the best graphics ever. I was still surprised at moments in the game where it did kind of blow me away for a second and it just like, was really beautiful and I was like, wow. Like that is like exceeding my, the like, the standard I set for this game.
There were moments within the game where it just exceeded that.
Taylor: Dude. Yep, absolutely.
Joseph: So that, that was really cool. And the boss designs are fucking amazing.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: That's where it really shines is when it, when you see those details, whether it's the, the, the, the video of it before you know it's the setup for it or while you're fighting those details.
Mind blowing.
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: Yeah, I was say, I think there are two things there, which is like, just the expanse of everything is pretty awesome. Going to stand atop of one of the towers and just like look at everything
Taylor: Mm-hmm
Willie: -and be like, oh, I was down there earlier.
Joseph: [chuckles] Yeah.
Willie: And again, the graphics aren't that great when you're doing that, but like you were like, oh, I can see like every place around the map that I've been so far.
And it does feel like the view gets a little distorted. Like the distance, the scaling gets a little weird in some cases.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: But it's also still really cool just to be able to see at all. Just to be like, oh, that's literally the starting point, you know?
Joseph: Yeah. I like that too. The depth and the, uh, the atmospheric perspective.
Taylor: And the character draw distance was surprising too.
I noticed that with characters like the Golden Knights, uh, that were riding, you know, like the horseback Golden Knights?
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: You would see them from a fucking mile off.
Joseph: Oh, true.
Taylor: [Laughing] Literally. And just know, alright, I need to go the other direction unless I'm ready to get wrecked.
Joseph: That is true. You could see things from pretty far off.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: And were already loaded in the game, which is nice.
Taylor: Yeah.
01:07:18
Joseph: Taylor, you mentioned cut scenes for a second. Love the cut scenes.
Taylor: Ah.
Joseph: I think I love them so much- they, they look beautiful and I think they're, well, they're well rendered and designed, but I also love that you don't experience very many in the gameplay.
So it's like when you get to one, it really is like a special scene because you, there aren't very many in the game.
Taylor: Yeah. It's an oasis for sure, where you're just like, you can take a breather and then you get to experience this crazy art and cinematic design that they have behind all this. And then you experience the rush of like, oh my God, this thing just transformed into a giant whatever, [laughing] and I'm about to have to fight it.
So you're like gripping the controller and kind of sweating a little bit cuz you know that shit's about to get real. And if you're watching the cinematic then you probably haven't fought the boss yet. So, or, or someone there with you hasn't. So there's gonna be that extra element of kind of sheer excitement.
Like we're about to, we're about to do this with a real big nasty,
Willie: I'm gonna talk for a moment, but I'm not gonna say anything of substance because there's a garbage truck outside. [Joseph laughs.] So I'm just gonna keep talking until they go away and then I'll answer what Taylor just said. But I feel like they're taking forever now.
Joseph: Well, don't, don't forget what you're gonna say and I'll mention, um, the first time I was kind of blown away by the cut scene graphics in the game was when you get to Godrick the Grafted. And you're in between phase one and phase two and the like dragon scene in that boss fight, the, the like mid phase two cut scene was just like, oh shit.
And then also the f. Yeah. [Laughs]
Taylor: Refresh. me on that-
Joseph: Cuz it was just Godrick dude, Godrick-. What's up?
Taylor: What? Refresh me on that one. I don't think, I don't think that'd be a bad spoiler. That's a pretty early boss, right?
Joseph: Godrick. He's in uh, Stormveil castle.
Taylor: But I mean the, the dragon part. Yeah. Yeah. Go through the, uh, trans, transformation, cuz I'm trying to remember exactly what that transformation was.
Joseph: Oh yeah. So you get to phase two and then there's a moment where he's like, summoning the, the power of this dragon that's like a, a dragon corpse that's like nearby and he basically rips the head off this dragon.
Willie: Yeah. I mean he grafts it to his arm [laughing] which is why, why he's the Grafted.
Joseph: [Laughs] Yeah. He grafts it to his arm. [Taylor laughs.]
Godrick the Grafted. Yeah. He grafts it to his arm and then like right before his phase two starts back up, you get this much wider perspective, like the camera zooms out and then he's just like standing in the middle of this like bridge this passageway. And like he puts his arm, dragon head grafted arm up into the sky and it's just like, what?
And it was just like mind blowing. But that was the first time I was like, okay.
Taylor: That was an amazing one. And he was already grafted, right?
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Like he's a tree, or part tree.
Willie: He's got a bunch of stuff on him.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: He, this dude has a problem with grafting.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: For sure. You gotta be careful around somebody like that who will just graft anything into themselves.
Willie: Well, and it's a bunch of arms too, right? Besides that.
Taylor: Right.
Willie: That's the thing. Again, back to the lore. If you go into the lore of people who are grafted, there's a reason that they're doing that and there's like a process that's important to them. It's basically sort of sacred. I, I don't exactly remember, but it's like there's a level of, um, authority that comes with the number of grafts that you have on you, and it's like-
Taylor: Wow.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Oh, man.
Willie: And the fact that he has so many things and yeah, he just, grafts a dragon head onto his arm for that fight is wild to me.
Taylor: It was wild.
Willie: I think that it speaks to, to in general, right? Like you said it earlier, Joey, but the enemy design is just so great. And we alluded to it earlier that they're just like, let's just put whatever we can together.
The thing about the enemies-
Taylor: Anything.
Willie: -is they're like, they're so unique compared to everything.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Like, you might be playing in another fantasy game and see the, like typical orcs and trolls and stuff and you know, whatever goblins might exist. And that's just not, I mean, there are trolls in this game, right? But they're a little different.
But then everything else is like, just so weird and so like finely detailed too.
Taylor: And it's their own. They make it their own. Like even if it's a piece of lore that's from other pieces of lore, it ain't like this. [Laughter] They don't do it like this. And it, it made me think for a second before I lose this thought, and I don't want, I want you to lose your thought, but I would love to see someday just a big chart of all of the fucking From bosses. [Joseph laughs]
I'm talking Bloodborne, all the Souls.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Just a chart of like 3D models I want
Joseph: That would be cool. That you could, could rotate.
Taylor: Dude, that would be incredible. If it exists, somebody let me know, [laughs] because I would love that.
Willie: I'll look it up here in a second.
01:12:06
Joseph: Willie, I know you've played, uh, Batman: Arkham Knight.
Willie: Oh yeah.
Joseph: There's like the collection of costumes in Arkham Knight that you can like really zoom in on and twist around and-
Taylor: Oh yeah
Joseph: -like basically rotate the way you want. If Elden Ring had something like that, that would be rad. But-
Taylor: I would love that.
Joseph: There's way too much equipment in the game to like literally build everything into that.
Taylor: Well, what if they did it like Skyrim? I hate that more people don't. Just have the like eh- Well, they don't have a loading screen for one.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: I guess that could be problematic cuz everything's instantaneous. Well.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: I guess that breaks that. So.
Joseph: Like a museum of equipment and weapons would be sweet in the game.
Taylor: Well, when I was just thinking, uh, where I was going with that thought a second ago, it was like, what if the future of From games was some sort of Dark Souls or Elden Ring infinite where you could like create your own maps levels, things like that. Imagine the trillions of hours of like-
Joseph: Oh gosh
Taylor: -replayability that would have, because they have such a deep lore, so much art to pull from.
Such a just huge following and the people that follow it follow it so deeply. The lore to the biggest fans is everything. Like that lore is 100% what they're there for. And they will beat that game relentlessly for hours to find out that lore and to get to the bottom of that story and to get all of that and to imagine those people becoming like the D&D um, masters or what, what's it called? The, uh
Joseph: Like a Dungeon Master?
Taylor: Yeah, the Dungeon Master. Like to have those people kind of, uh, take the reins and be able to make their own-
Joseph: Build worlds and-
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: -encounters.
Taylor: I don't wanna go too far off, but man-
Joseph: That would be sick.
Taylor: I just had an image of that. [Laughing] It would be nuts, man. And it would be- Just because you could just, I mean, and you could let people maybe get nasty, maybe let people put a bunch of arms and stuff on-
Joseph: Seriously.
Taylor: -on their bosses that they're creating. I dunno.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I'm thinking like the Mario-
Taylor: Ah
Joseph: -the Mario, uh, level builders.
Taylor: Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Joseph: What if Elden Ring had that and you had just-
Taylor: Yes.
Joseph: -access to all the different enemies in the game. Like there would be unbeatable [Taylor laughs] player built worlds and bosses and enemy sets that you would not be able to conquer.
Taylor: Oh my God. You go in and it's just 15, [Joseph laughs] like as many bosses as you're, uh, you know, 4090 can handle. [Willie laughs] All ray tracing off of each other. Oh-
Joseph: Uhhuh.
Taylor: [Laughing] Oh my god. I want that.
Willie: I started looking up 3D models of Elden Ring characters.
Taylor: Ooh.
Willie: Which people have like-
Taylor: Oh.
Willie: 3D printed stuff so you can find some.
Taylor: I bet some of it's horrific.
Willie: Sure. Yeah. [Taylor laughs] Always with 3D printing there's like a steep learning curve, but there are obviously people who are doing it well. And then-
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: One of the first things though that I noticed is that there is a 3D model of, uh, of the player, LetMeSoloHer.
Someone, someone-
Joseph: Oh wow
Willie: -made that character with, uh,
Taylor: Of course.
Willie: You know, no clothes, no armor, just a jar on their head-
Joseph: That's cool
Willie: -holding two Katanas.
Taylor: The grand, [Joseph laughs] the Grand Shepherd.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yes. [laughs]
Joseph: That's pretty awesome.
Willie: There's some really cool painting, like painted models of it that look really good.
Taylor: That's awesome. That's what I mean by the fan. The fandom of these games-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -is like, it's so deep and it's so many people that are already artists in their own rights and like amazing loreists or whatever, you know, that's a- loreist, I don't even know if that's a real thing. I know a florist is a thing, but
Joseph: Loreist, I like that. That works, for me.
Willie: I feel like that's actually for real though, too.
Joseph: I like that.
Willie: Maybe it's not- no-
Joseph: No?
Taylor: No?
Willie: This, this thing says a loreist is a person who studies epics, so sure.
Taylor: Yeah, that sounds right.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Taylor: That's what I, okay, cool. But anyways, we're, so nobody say anything about our From, uh, venture here, because that's gotta be on the down low. [Willie laughs]
We're gonna make that work.
01:16:02
Willie: Yeah. Without going too far off track. And I don't know a lot about it, [Taylor laughsz] but there is, uh, they did build an Elden Ring mod for, for, like D&D 5e. They have their own role playing game, actually.
Joseph: Hmm.
Taylor: Oh.
Willie: I don't know if it's actually based on the 5e system. It's built on something else that has similar things, but I don't think it's exactly the same.
Oh. But they did it and people didn't really like it that much. Like it's kind of okay, but it's, it's kind of also, there's too much and too chunky and it's broken. According to what I had seen very briefly about it. So I never like, tried.
Taylor: Uh, that sounds like the probable outcome of something like that, anyways, so. All right. Well.
Joseph: Wasn't there a board game? Were we, was that pass passing along your messages recently?
Willie: Yeah. With Meg and Barbara.
Taylor: Huh. An Elden Rings?
Willie: Yeah they're kickstarting an Elden Ring board game.
Taylor: Oh, that's gonna do, okay.
Willie: I have the Dark Souls board game that I got years ago.
Joseph: Oh.
Willie: And I don't know if it's the same people who are making it. I feel like it's probably not-
Joseph: Mm-hmm
Willie: -but um, yeah, I, I signed up for that to be notified when that Kickstarter.
No. Cause this is by Steamforged Games, and I don't think they did the Dark Souls one.
Joseph: Man. Too bad we never played that. I don't even know if I ever knew you have that.
Willie: Oh, it is by Steamforged Games. Somehow I just didn't know. Yeah. I almost thought about it like right before y'all moved, cuz I felt like at that point you would've, now that you knew enough about From Software-
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Willie: -You'd be like, oh yeah, we should check that out.
Joseph: Yeah, I probably would have. Have you played it?
Willie: No, not really. Only when I bought it. I've gotten it out of the box a couple of times and-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: I, I played it before I bought it. I went through a demo when I bought it.
Joseph: Gotcha.
Willie: And then I've like gotten it out to look at all the miniatures that are in it cuz they're awesome. And then read some of the rules and was like, man, no one's ever gonna wanna play this with me. So. [laughs]
Joseph: [Laughs] Yeah.
Willie: And like Barbara and I, every time we sit down we're like, ah. I don't know.
Joseph: Maybe not, maybe not.
Willie: Because the instruction book is, you know, it's huge. It's like-
Taylor: That's a demise of a lot of board games.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: I, I've pulled out multiple with Eric. He had some cool ass looking games. But you would pull it out and then you'd unfold. And you unfold the board. And it unfolds eight ways and then you unfold the instructions. And it's 76 pages and it's dense and the text is small.
Yeah. That uh- [laughs]
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: For sure, yeah.
Taylor: Sometimes you just pull that shit back up and put it up.
Willie: Maybe I shouldn't say this on the podcast, but we actually almost gave Taylor the Dark Souls board game for like Christmas or something one time.
Joseph: Really? [Laughs]
Willie: Cause we were like, we're never gonna play this shit. It's not gonna happen. It had already been like- It's been years, man. Since we've, since we got that.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: And then I was like, there's no way Taylor's gonna play this either. [laughs] Like that's, it's just gonna sit at his house. So I was like, fuck it-
Joseph: [Laughing] Oh, man.
Willie: -One day I'm gonna play this game.
Taylor: Best call. Yeah.
Willie: I was like, at the very least, I'm gonna paint the miniatures at some point.
Taylor: Oh yeah.
Willie: Might as well keep it.
Taylor: Oh yeah. And, and we could do it on a video call [Willie laughs] or something. I'll, I'll play my character-
Joseph: [Laughs] Remotely?
Taylor: Yeah, remotely, I'm not against that.
Willie: I mean, we could totally do it. I could set it up to make that happen. Cuz I think it would be fun to play. It does have some cool mechanics as far as-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -Like getting back to the games. Like, you know, everything's based on either your health right. Or your, like your vigor or your FP
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: Or your stamina, right?
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: You have the stamina mechanic in that board game, so that you only have so much stamina on your bar. You can increase it. But like with each action you do, you have to take a block of stamina away. And if you run outta stamina and you can't block a character that's attacking you, you can't block. Because you have no stamina.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: So you're gonna take more damage than if you had saved your stamina.
Taylor: Hm.
Willie: So like each attack you do takes a, you know, set amount, like one or two or three, and you get to choose how much stamina you're gonna use. And so you're sort of just trying to find the right balance in each encounter.
Taylor: It's familiar.
Willie: It's, it's the game. [chuckles]
Taylor: [Laughing] Yeah, it is the game.
01:19:50
Joseph: I, I totally had glazed over the, uh, HP, FP, and stamina bars, but, I love the balance in this game.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Even if you're blocking your stamina regens, like at a slower pace, right? So like if you just continue to like sit there with a shield blocking, like eventually you will be punished by the game.
Taylor: Sometimes real quick, depending on the-
Joseph: Yeah
Taylor: -on the character. Like some of 'em just drain you instantly. You may get one block if you're good and that's it.
Willie: There's another interesting mechanic when you're on Torrent, and you're just like, you know, running and suddenly your stamina bar starts going down. You're like, oh, there's an enemy. There's something nearby [laughter] that I should either just keep running from or just deal with right now.
Even just those tiny little bits of uh, information that you're getting from the game are really helpful.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: Yeah. Audio cues too. Audio cues that are like within the combat and things like that I think are really cool, but. Man, I feel like we just scratched the surface at game mechanics too. Like there's still so much we could talk about.
Taylor: Oh yeah.
01:20:51
Joseph: But I think we should move on to music.
Taylor: Okay.
Joseph: Because it's pretty damn epic.
Taylor: Yes, yes it is.
Joseph: Especially the, the main theme for Elden Ring, like you see on like the startup screen.
Taylor: And they of course do a good job of maintaining that theme kind of-
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: -through, through it and having different iterations of it.
Joseph: Yeah. I love that.
Willie: I think something you just said about like those cues, those audio cues is really important here because Elden Ring soundtrack just came out recently for us, cuz the time of this recording. Like, and the number of tracks on there is like 67 and-
Joseph: [Laughing] Yeah.
Willie: -and it's because they're all like two, three minute songs.
Some are longer, you know, there's obviously background music. So there's like, if you're in the tunnels right, or if you're in Stormveil Castle, or if you're in, you know, the Eternal City. There's like obviously soundtracks there.
But then there are very specific enemy soundtracks, but there's even smaller enemy soundtracks. So like when you're near one of those enemies, like you start hearing those audio cues for the music shifting just enough that you know that there's something going on.
Taylor: Yeah, it gives you a little clue and gets your [chuckles] heart pumping a little bit. Stormveil Castle, definitely.
Joseph: The themes throughout the game, so like if you go into the catacombs, like it's always the same catacomb theme.
But yeah, like Willie was saying, there's the location themes, like a song for Limgrave, a song for Caelid, Mount Gelmir, all the different places in Elden Ring.
But then there's like lower level enemies and they have themes and tracks.
And then there's of course like all the boss battles, which is like the most badass part of the Elden Ring soundtrack. It's like the last 20 tracks and it's like all the major boss battles and. Man, I have so many favorites. Starscourge Radahn is probably my overall favorite track on the entire soundtrack, but I also like the Godskin Apostle's song. I like the Regal Ancestor Spirit boss fight music.
Taylor: So I couldn't tell you one from the other. Uh, like I, I literally couldn't play one for you right now on a, on a keyboard or anything. I know I loved them. When you're listening to them in like an album format, you know, listening to the soundtrack, do they vary, like pretty pretty vastly?
Like are they different way different songs and feels and everything? Or do they all kind of fit the same motif or theme of music? I guess the difference being like an album of a band you could listen to for 30 minutes and you know which song is which. Um, whereas some soundtracks, a lot of times you could listen to an hour of the soundtrack and never know that it changed songs.
If that makes sense.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: It's more diverse than you remember.
Taylor: Okay.
Joseph: Like if you went through and listened to it. There's a couple of stretches where like three or four songs are like dragon boss fights, so like they're very similar.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: But then you'll get to something like The Song of Lament, which is the, the song at, um, Radahn's castle, like after it's been cleared and it's just like very, it almost sounds like a cathedral.
Taylor: Yeah, sure.
Joseph: So like, there's a lot of range in there, and the sequencing I think, kind of helps except for a couple of spots where there's like three or four tracks back to back that it kind of feels like the track never changes. But then you'll get to a moment where it's sequenced very well and it's like there's good variety and, and differences in the tracks.
Taylor: Ok.
Willie: And I think that speaks to the, it is that organization of the tracks, right? Early on it's mostly location based stuff. And so you might not notice as much early in the beginning because when you're listening to location based, it's literally like you're playing the game, right? And you slowly shift from one area to another and the music has changed over time. And so like-
Taylor: Oh.
Willie: -You, they just like do that, right? They're just like, it's now you're in a new area. But at the end, like Joey was saying, there's bosses, right? You get to like 20 tracks of different bosses and those all have like pretty different feels to them that are obvious.
Taylor: Cool. Uh, I'm gonna have to check that out just because it's been a long time since I've listened to a soundtrack and I feel like that's one that I can definitely relate to and enjoy.
Willie: Yeah and-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: It's like, it's like three and a half hours of music or something? Yeah, it's like three hours and 20 minutes-
Taylor: wow.
Willie: -it's like 23 minutes.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
01:24:59
Willie: It is really good. I say that and then, based on what Joey was saying, you know, he was talking about like they all feel sort of different, but they're also also, you asked about if there's like a theme or texture to everything. And I think there is, right? They all fit together really well. The one thing-
Taylor: Yeah
Willie: -that was really interesting to me about the game in general though, was how out of place the like end credits song was. [Joseph chuckles] Like out of everything. [Taylor laughs] Like you get to the end credits and suddenly the feel is completely different in the music.
Joseph: I agree.
Willie: It's kind of jarring and then it goes back. It goes back to some of the main themes that you hear throughout the game. I think after like that song, but the first half of that song is just so different and epic and in a different way.
Joseph: I totally agree.
Taylor: I wonder if that's maybe like a Japanese cinematic thing? Or it could have just been a personal choice by, uh, Mi- Miyazaki or, I dunno.
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: It does feel intentional, but it is definitely the, the most different sounding track in the entire soundtrack.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: And I wonder because of its placement, that was like a really deliberate design decision to like, make it very different from everything else because it was the end credits and like the, the con- conclusion of the game.
Taylor: That was, that was kind of what I was thinking about it too. I mean, I think about, I don't know, a handful of Japanese games that I've finished, or Japanese movies that I watch and-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -it does seem like they like to have like a pretty stylistic song that's like, I don't know, just different.
Willie: About this one in particular. It's much more upbeat and like energetic, like it's frenetic in like-
Taylor: Oh
Willie: -a way that is, it just has the rest of the game hasn't been that. Even if the, the game has been like nerve wracking and intense and whatever, like, none of the music makes you feel like that sort of energy, fast-paced energy till the end credits.
That's why it feels weird cuz it should be a moment of relief and it feels like a, like you're just getting to something-
Taylor: [Laughing] There's still something left?
Willie: -intense, like- [laughs]
Taylor: That's that new game plus song, dude, that's why.
Willie: I guess so. Yeah.
Joseph: [Laughs] Yeah. Jump into your next adventure.
Taylor: Yeah. Now when you start new game plus everything's um, you know, there's a bunch of paradiddles and triplets and sixteenths and everything's real fast. [Laughs]
01:27:15
Joseph: I just had a wild thought, but what if it was different music in the new game plus play through? [Willie chuckles]
Taylor: That- if I was making a game, that's how I'd have to do new game plus. I would want it to be-
That's where I think that they're getting a little bit stale in their designing and mechanics is that they're really relying on the old ways of the new game plus, which is that the enemies are harder, they have more health. You get all the same stuff, like all the same equipment every like. I want it to be like a unique ass new play through.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: In some way, you know, other than it's just harder, it'll make you madder, or something to that effect. It would be cool to have different music, like more intense music. I see a lot of that in the world of like NFTs and stuff where you, if they have different levels, one may have music and it's just kind of tinny and basic, and then the middle level is like better music and then the next one is like real full of bass, but- a similar concept of that in the game where you're on a new game plus and now you really kick in like some new basses and maybe you get to hear like some tracks that they didn't wanna release on the first one.
You get to hear some concept tracks that pop up. Things like that. I feel like they could really take it to the next level and deliver to fans. If to have a new game plus that was just totally, check this shit out!
And a lot of stuff could, you could cheese a little, like you could have a different version of a sword that like has different colors or like an alternate form that some artist would be happy to make and be paid for. [Laughs]
Joseph: I like the idea of some type of, um, more of an evolution in the new game plus. Like, I, I feel the same way.
Taylor: And then, and then you could take it further where each new game plus is like different stuff. Like by the last one you have fucking some dude on a, on a Tool ass drum kit doing [Joseph laughs] fucking crazy [Taylor vocalizes drumming] and some dude just like [singing] "I can't believe" or whatever, you know?
And it's. I want that and maybe it gets ridiculous. Maybe we need to make a game. That's the problem.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Oh gosh, yeah.
Taylor: -is that we're not making games.
Joseph: I don't wanna act like I'm a developer in that would like be-
Taylor: No [Willie and Taylor laugh]
Joseph: -simple to do. Cause [laughing] that seems insane.
Taylor: Yeah. Maybe the most, insane, they may have kicked somebody like me out.
Willie: [Laughing] You're just making two games basically.
Joseph: [Laughing] Yeah, exactly.
Willie: You're just making two different games at that point.
Taylor: Yeah. Nah dude. It's just an extra piano riff on new game plus.
Joseph: Uhhuh.
Willie: That is what I'm trying to figure out. [Taylor laughing] Like are there any games? I'll look into it for future episodes, but is there a game that truly changes with new game plus that's not just harder, that doesn't just lower your health or like make the enemies harder?
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: You know?
Taylor: I think the most unique that I've seen, and I can't like put my finger on any immediately, but I think I've seen somewhere the AI is decently more smart, like on the, you know, new game pl-, uh, play through and things like that. But I don't, I don't remember there ever being like an evolution. Other than like Evoland or something, like a game that's literally designed to evolve as you, as you get through it. But yeah.
Willie: I'm curious. I'll have to look into that.
Joseph: Word. Taylor, if you go through and listen to the soundtrack, you should definitely listen to that Starscourge Radahn-
Taylor: Okay.
Joseph: -track. That's my favorite. The whole thing because it's just so epic.
Taylor: Fits the battle. It fits the battle man.
Joseph: Yeah. Earlier we were talking about the music. The overall tone I would say is like, um, very dissonant and minor for a lot of the tracks. Like none of them are uplifting.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: [Chuckles] You know, it's like this is a dark fucking unpopulated world, you know, that you're just like basically fighting monsters and there's almost no real people to interact with in the entire game.
Taylor: Yeah. Some of the more uplifting, uh, notes that you'll hear are coming from giant, scary creatures. [Joseph laughs] You know, bat creatures that want to murder you and feast on your insides.
Joseph: The soundtrack is great.
01:31:10
Willie: I will say since you liked those bosses, Taylor, the like Regal Ancestor Spirit track is a good one that's like-
Joseph: Hell yeah.
Willie: That is a little bit more up-
Taylor: Ok. I remember that battle.
Willie: -uplifting and like has a different feel to it.
Taylor: Yeah, that was a beautiful battle too. Oh my god. That was beautiful. Oh yeah.
Joseph: It's like I almost didn't wanna do it, you know?
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Like there was no choice, but you didn't want to like finish the battle. I definitely had that feeling.
Taylor: Like it was too easy.
Joseph: It just felt wrong.
Taylor: As you were finally beating. Yeah. You were just like, why am I killing this beautiful thing? What is-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: [Laughing] What's wrong with me? Enter the Souls world. You'll kill everything you love. Want to kill this maiden? No, you did it anyway. Sorry. Right Bumper. No.
[Laughter]
Taylor: I've done it.
Joseph: I accidentally attacked Fia. Like after the Praetor Rykard fight.
Taylor: Oh my God.
Joseph: I accidentally attacked her. And then ended up fighting, uh, what's his face?
Willie: Oh, right.
Taylor: Oh, right.
Joseph: I forgot the- man, I forgot what they, they're called. Those guards.
Willie: Yeah. I'm not sure.
Joseph: It starts with the C, but I'm blanking on the name. But anyway, he pops up and I was like, oh, shit, I didn't mean to do this. I didn't mean to do this. [laughs]
Taylor: Well, what's odd is I, for some reason, my outcome, you know, I'm not gonna go into depth about it, but my mental outcome on that was I also killed her. Even though, like I, for some reason, I listened to the dialogue and I was like, uh, let me kill you real quick.
Joseph: Oh, interesting.
Taylor: I went through the exact same thing that you did. Yeah. So I, I don't know. That makes me, I wonder if that was just kind of the natural, inevitable conclusion.
Willie: What is that place called up there where they- where Rykard is? Why can't I think-
Joseph: Volcano Manor?
Willie: That. I couldn't think of that for some reason. I was like thinking it's Lava Manor, and I was like, that's not it.
[Laughter]
Joseph: Yeah. It fucking feels
that way.
Taylor: That's where you fight that lizard.
Joseph: Oh yeah, man.
Taylor: Ugh.
Joseph: Those things are assholes too.
Taylor: They are.
Joseph: Oh!
Taylor: Sliding around.
01:33:12
Joseph: Oh, I just remembered one of my other most hated enemies were the ulcerated tree spirits.
Willie: Oh, right, right, right.
Joseph: They're so thrashing. You can't, I can't ever tell like what attack is actually going to damage me because it's chaos.
Willie: That was one of the first bosses, like side bosses that made me lose runes over and over again cuz there's one under Stormveil Castle that I went to go look for.
Joseph: Oh yeah. The golden seed.
Willie: Yeah. And I went down there to fight that thing and I just kept losing over and over again. Those things are super way too fast-
Joseph: They were tough.
Willie: -whenever you first start out.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: It's hard to even see like what is happening and, and see the attacks, but yeah, I had trouble with those.
Taylor: Incredibly nasty.
Joseph: They're everywhere too.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Like it's one of those repeated bosses, which to Elden Ring's credit and probably all the Souls games, even though I haven't played them, is that the bosses are very diverse. Like there's a lot of different bosses.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: And the number that repeat is, I think small. Hats off to From Software for creating so much just diversity in the boss fights.
Taylor: E- even when they repeat, a lot of times they'll do something different. Maybe it's that boss and another boss or-
Joseph: or modified.
Taylor: Yeah. Sometimes it'll be modified. So you're used to this flurry that he does, well now he does an extra one or extra four at the end or whatever. And-
Joseph: Yeah, I'm immediately thinking of the draconic tree sentinel that's outside of Lindell. Yep. That asshole, with lightning attacks.
Taylor: And they varied it up. There were a lot of those dudes, but
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Kept you wanting to kill every single one of them. [chuckles] Still feel bad. [Joseph laughs] Every time I explain what I'm doing in this game, like I don't want to tell my my grandma, you know, she's gonna be like, so, you killed the trees. Yep. I guess I did. And the people protecting them. Oh God.
01:35:00
Joseph: Taylor, do you, what was the name of your character?
Taylor: Uh, sun. Sun Lord? Or, uh-
Willie: It's not Suns Spear, is it? No.
Taylor: No. It was Sun something Sun Warrior.
Willie: Sun Warrior, yeah yeah.
Taylor: There we go.
Joseph: Sun Warrior. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Yes.
Joseph: Sun Warrior. And Willie, what was the name of yours?
Willie: Uh, Azgar, I think.
Joseph: With a G or with a D?
Willie: Uh, A Z G A R.
Joseph: Oh.
Willie: It's just my last name mixed up. [laughs]
Joseph: Got it. [laughs] Okay.
Taylor: Odin-son.
Joseph: Nice, nice. Purpose behind it. I like that.
Uh, mine was Takashi, just cuz I chose the Samurai class.
Taylor: You were very choppy.
Joseph: My first Samurai character was, um, wait, I think I had like three. It was Satoshi.
[Laughter]
Taylor: Oh.
Joseph: That was my first Samurai character. And then I ended up restarting. So then I chose to, to rename him from Satoshi to Takashi. I was just curious. I couldn't remember. It was Sun Warrior.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: But yeah, Dex build for me, strength for Sun Warrior and intelligence build for, what was it? Azgar?
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Azgar. Yeah. The highest stat I had was vigor 58. I didn't really crank up vigor until I had reached 50 in dexterity.
Willie: It wasn't until I finished the game that I started like leveling a bunch.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: My highest stat is now intelligence and it's just I, I'm, I didn't cap it all the way, but it's at 75.
Taylor: Yeah. There were certain points where you just had to stop. I started looking at those guides where they really dialed out the math on 'em.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: They had some clear points where you just were getting diminished returns and
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Yep.
Taylor: It was just for funsies.
Joseph: I love finding those videos and those charts where it had like the soft caps and the hard caps, and you could see the math and how many points are actually being added.
Willie: And 75 is the one for an intelligence build because it's just like, if you like, wanna go all the way to the max, like you might as well do that.
And then with the, you know, we didn't really talk about talismans, but when you add a talisman that adds intelligence to your thing, or, or if you're running, um, you know, certain helmets or whatever to add intelligence, like, you're gonna get up to, to 80 with that. And that's, that's the cap. So like, you don't need to go more than, than 80 as an intelligence build.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: So 75 plus my, whatever I'm carrying on me puts me at 80.
01:37:16
Joseph: Yeah. All right. Well, let's move into just kind of final thoughts of the game. Um, I think it's amazing.
I think you, it's the kind of game you need to play for hours and hours and hours to kind of start to feel like you're understanding a bit of the story. Uh, because there's no true guide, you don't have to do the bosses in a certain order.
You can really pave your own path and end up in Caelid accidentally, and then think you're in a fucking horrific circus. Um, like I did.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: But the lore is baked into the items. It's baked into exhausting the character dialogue or the NPC dialogue.
So it's there if you're willing to look for it. And if you really have a lot of trouble, just find a guide, find an online guide, or a couple of YouTube videos that can give you some like really basic tips for exploring Limgrave, or the earlier parts of the games. One thing that I've noticed about some of those videos is that people are really good about not revealing later game bosses in later game areas.
So if you find some of those tip videos on YouTube, They do a really good job of staying in like the main two areas, the first main two areas of the game, so you can actually learn a lot about the game mechanics and some of the features of the game, and also avoid spoilers or major spoilers at the same time because a lot of people creating content on YouTube for the game do consider that and basically avoid some major spoilers, which is pretty awesome.
Taylor: Absolutely.
Joseph: Music is great. The combat is some of the best I've played and the horseback combat is some of the best I've experienced too.
01:38:47
Willie: I would have to second all of that. It's definitely, I think anybody who likes action RPGs should play it if they didn't somehow already do it. But know that yep, you will be sinking a lot of time into it if you choose to do so, because there's so much to explore.
There's so many, like if you start looking at those guides and like thinking about what build you want to do, you're gonna put yourself on certain quests just to like, go figure out where to find that thing. And that in itself is a whole nother game. You're building a different game for yourself by being like, I wanna do this build and I have to get all of these pieces, which means I have to do these, I have to find these people to get these quests to go to that place.
And that's not true for every item. Sometimes like for me, I had a, you know, uh, the meteorite staff for the very first half of the game, pretty much just using that. And you can get that very early on, and it's pretty powerful. But you have to put yourself in a position to go to Caelid and you're severely under leveled if you go there early. But you could do it. Yeah. You can build whatever game you wanna play out of it. And it's, it definitely is a lot of fun.
And I, I'm definitely not done with it. I don't think I, I have gone back recently, like the reason my, my game time has ticked up is because I've been like going back and beating every dragon that I can, which I think I did now. I think I've killed every dragon that I could.
I cleared every tunnel, cleared every cave, cleared every grave, whatever. And every catacomb finished, all the evergaols. I, I think I'm at the point where I've done everything I need to do to clear everything.
Oh, now I need some runes to buy all of the, all of the, the items I'm gonna use to upgrade before I start new game plus. And I do wanna try it one time. I wanna go through at least one game of new game plus, cause I haven't even done that. I'm probably overpowered for new game plus one, but-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: I still want to like do it and-
Taylor: Mm-hmm
Willie: -take in more of the lore that I missed the first time. And I just really want to get a different ending.
Cuz I think in total there's six endings. I think three of them are similar and three of them are like very different. Something like that. I can't really remember, but I, I haven't seen all of them yet, so I wanna see at least one other one.
Joseph: Same. Yeah. The only one I have seen is the game ending I went with, which is what you did, Willie. And that's literally the only one I've seen despite them being like very accessible on YouTube.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: To like see all the endings pretty easily. I've avoided all of those.
Willie: Same.
01:41:17
Joseph: Taylor. What, what about your final thoughts?
Taylor: I love it. Can't wait to go back to it. I'm at that point of I've beaten it. I don't think I'm gonna go and do much anymore.
Like I'm, I'm just waiting for everybody to get to either, are we gonna do new game plus or start over or whatever and try to make those decisions. Cuz I don't know. There is an appeal that I do want to fight some of the earlier bosses with my badass ultra swords and character [chuckles] and see how-
Can we just wreck them?
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Are we just plowing through them or whatever? And, and it may make the lore a little bit more accessible and digestible. If we're going through with our good gear and. But I don't know. I don't know. I might try to get some spells in there or something too.
But overall amazing game. The art and just how everything worked together and clicked perfectly to create an experience that was very, very, very bug free and that the drop in dropout co-op was pretty freaking perfect and they made all these compromises on their typical formula to make it more accessible to people and keep the legs there and keep the player counts high.
I feel like they made all the right moves on this one. The from top to bottom, left to right, everything was perfect and I wanna play more of it. I wanna play DLC.
Joseph: For sure.
Taylor: I would love to see mods. I would love to see people... it'd be cool- we're going into a world of AI and I mean, I wanna see people start modding visuals with AI and stuff, you know, what would happen if this game was 4K Ultra and you know, people were able to, to really run it to the max and see what kind of visuals you can get out of it.
I, I definitely want them to do another one. Like this should be a whole new series that they pump out one every three or four years and I would play every single one of 'em.
Willie: Yeah, I definitely would play it. And it, it's a little weird that they haven't said anything at all about D L C, I mean, cuz it's not been out for super long, but it's been almost a year. Right?
Taylor: I think that's just how they are too. I don't, I don't think they're very vocal about upcoming DLCs until. They clearly feel it or have a reason or whatever.
Willie: I only think it's a little weird just looking back on their history of games where they're making one like every two to three years. For the last 11 years or so, they had something coming out, whether it was Dark Souls or you know, or Bloodborne or Demon Souls.
Taylor: Yes.
Willie: Or since they started doing Dark Souls every two to three years they had something. So it's a little weird to like, not know anything else but about one of the most successful games of this year or of, you know, the past year.
Taylor: Well, they may also have a lot of irons and pots.
Willie: Yeah, exactly.
Taylor: You can't help but wonder are they working on another Dark Souls? Do they have another Bloodborne-
Willie: Right.
Taylor: -in the works? Which in they're all totally viable. And they could- what if they went, what if they did this with a Bloodborne universe? Or, or world or, or whatever you would call that. I mean, that would be insane. Just a huge bloody, [laughs] it would be disgusting [Joseph laughs] without a doubt.
But all of it is perfect. Like they could go forward with anything. They're just doing so good.
Joseph: And I think with this game they roped in a lot of new-
Taylor: Mm-hmm
Joseph: -people into their series. Like, like me, having never played any From Soft games. I think a lot of, for a lot of people, Elden Ring was that entry point into, you know, their style of games and, you know-
Taylor: Yeah
Joseph: -the, the difficulty level of the games, which I think is amazing. I think it's successful on that front for sure.
Taylor: They're strong. Like if people who are new to the series are suddenly like, oh, here's Bloodborne and it's free on the PlayStation store or whatever. They're gonna go experience that and get a very similar experience, man, because their technology was- had come quite a ways.
And then you can hop in Dark Souls three or two, same thing, man. You're gonna be like, oh, this sword swings like that sword. Or this dude, you know, this ring gives me dex like this did.
And you could literally, there was a ring you could put on in Dark Souls II, I believe that would give you a back flip. You no longer do rolls. You back flip and cartwheel places.
Joseph: No.
Taylor: Trust me brother. Trying to kill somebody who was good with that, [laughing] who was invading your game [Joseph laughs] was a joke. Some dude with a turkey leg for a head is just in underwear. [Willie and Joseph laugh] Cartwheeling around you. Wailing on you And then, nothing makes you feel worse than that.
01:46:04
Joseph: I mean, I guess we should point out that we haven't been very critical about the game. Like there are things, I think there are areas where we could be very critical and, and review it in a a more neutral kind of way. I think we're all huge fans of the game, so I think our breakdown of this game and our experience with it definitely leans towards us overlooking a lot of the shortcomings of the game.
But I did find a review, a one star review for the game that I wanna read from Plant Nerd.
Taylor: Oh nice.
Joseph: And it's from April 11th, 20, uh, 2022. And the title of the review is called Overrated with Terrible Combat Mechanics and Animation.
Taylor: Oh, go on.
Joseph: "I heard all of the hype and decided that I had to try this game.
I just finished Horizon Forbidden West and was looking for something to fill my gaming void. Elden Ring seemed like a good bet. I was wrong. You start the game with no direction, 80 hours in, and I still don't know what I'm supposed to do. The game expects you to fight creatures and win to level up, so you often end up just fighting the same creatures over and over again until you have enough to level up. Rinse, repeat, and then after a few iterations, maybe you'll feel strong enough to try that tougher monster over there.
But of course you lose to that monster, not because you're not strong enough. No, it's because the combat mechanics are awful. You'll swing your poleax right through the Giant's leg, but the game tells you that you missed. Then you'll get hit by his sword that looks like it never even came near you. Rinse, repeat, die.
Or maybe not. Maybe you'll win the fight. But even winning doesn't bring me joy in this game. It's just a sense of relief, then annoyance when I realize I just have to keep doing it to advance. The game seems designed to suck the joy out of your soul. I write software. The scenery is great in an emo sort of way, and worthy of a released game.
The gameplay. The gameplay mechanics are not, they are alpha or beta quality at best. Not something I would even consider releasing. I did my time with this game and now I'm uninstalling it. It's not even worth trying to finish. Maybe I can make a SunCatcher with the install media or something."
Taylor: Oh my God.
Joseph: Four people found this helpful in the reviews from Amazon. [Taylor laughs]
Taylor: Any true Souls fan would read that and immediately know that it was the right game for them.
Joseph: Totally, totally.
Taylor: No, this is, this is exactly what I want. Yeah. Cuz anybody who tries to compare Forbidden West, you know, a, a game like Horizon that has like buttery smooth, like you can do physically impossible shit. You can do like a leopard jump roll in four different directions in three seconds.
Joseph: Oh, right.
Taylor: Yeah. If that's what you're looking for, you ain't gonna have a good time. [Joseph and Taylor laugh] So let's, cause that's just-
Joseph: Yep.
Taylor: Yep. Rinse and repeat. You gotta be ready to do yourself a, uh, a time loop. Uh, just as we started this off with our own little time loop in which we've talked about this game for a long time and yeah, that's, uh, that's weird.
Joseph: Certainly a game with a lot to unpack. I mean, we didn't even venture into multi-player gameplay mechanics. You know, there is the idea that you can only carry so much weight in the game, and if you carry too much, it slows you down. There's so many smaller details of this game that we've only really scratched the surface of what this game is about.
The lore within it, the variety within the different areas of the game. The level of customization with weapons and builds and armor that you can spend 500 hours playing this game, which we probably eventually will do. I mean, we're mostly the way there.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: To playing this game for 500 hours. But I guess the best advice I can give is to give it a shot, give it a try, a shot.
And the only thing I would ask is that you don't quit the game too soon. It is the kind of game that you probably do need to play for like 25 hours to kind of get a sense of the, the gameplay flow and the mechanics and maybe find a couple of NPC characters that are gonna pique your interest. But coming from us with people that, uh, almost 850 hours of gameplay, in my opinion, it is very, very much worth the price point and that number of hours.
Taylor: Yeah. Hell of a value.
Willie: Yeah, and definitely I would, you know, Joey already said this earlier, but I'll just reiterate, don't listen to anybody who says like, you have to play it a certain way.
Do whatever you want. Look up some guides to it. Look up what build you want to do. Don't be afraid to call people in. Don't be afraid to use Spirit Ashes. Just like-
Taylor: Hell, nah, play it your way.
Willie: -play the game. And just-
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: Those game mechanics exist for a reason, so use them all. [Laughs]
Joseph: Mm-hmm. I think they make the game more enjoyable because if you don't use them, there is a good chance that you'll just get overly frustrated and not-
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: You'll just put the game down for, for good.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: It's not embarrassing to have to get a guide.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: Especially on a game that massive and expansive and mysterious and hard, it, it helps to have something to kind of look back to.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: But we're looking forward to the DLC whenever that may be. And just kind of maybe playing a new game plus. But yeah, thanks so much for hanging out.
[Outro theme begins to fade in - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
This is probably gonna be a longer episode and I think we're just gonna let it be as long as it needs to be because, uh, there's a lot. [Laughing] This game is very involved and there's even more than we can talk about probably in a whole series.
Willie: [chuckles] Yeah.
Joseph: Or a whole podcast season, uh, and really break down this game.
But, uh, yeah. Thanks so much for hanging out. It's been awesome. Looking forward to the next one.
Willie: Yep. Later.
Taylor: Peace.
01:51:48
[Outro theme continues - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
Joseph: Berries and Blades is an independent podcast created by Joseph Bullard, Willie Garza and Taylor Garratt. Thanks for tuning in and consider subscribing if you enjoyed listening to this episode. You can also support us by telling your friends about the show, and we hope to see you in the next episode of Berries and Blades.
Until then, thanks again.
[Outro theme fades out - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
Taylor: Yeah, man, everything was great. Yeah, we got a sick ass little house in South Austin, um, that was like 15 minutes from downtown. Um, the price was right, it was like $90 a night, but I'm pretty sure the mattresses were stuffed with like the previous occupants. [Willie and Joseph laugh]
So, so we had to tell 'em to definitely, you know, get some new mattresses, motherfuckers skimping.