At the very beginning of Demon's Souls, the game that signaled Hidetaka Miyazaki's rise to perhaps the most important designer of video games on the planet, you are sent to a looming, foreboding castle. You know nothing about this place, save that it is dour and gray, protected by soldiers who are more than capable of taking you down with a couple swings of their sword. Fighting your way through it is like pulling teeth. The first time I played it, I'm fairly sure, I gave up during my starting run up to the castle's walls. It took me a long time to give the game another shot, and to start weaving my way up and into it, cutting a slow clockwise path through its increasingly daunting protectors.
By the end of the second run, however, I got it—where by "it" I mean the sublime experience that Miyazaki has spent his entire career trying to refine. People will mention how difficult his games are, and they won't be lying. But what they struggle to describe is the sensation that you get as his worlds gradually blossom before you, each path you take somehow returning you to a place you've been before, doors opening and lifts activating to create loops, circuits, colonies. The genius of Miyazaki is the way he treats space as nonlinear and staggeringly interconnected, but narrows your pathways early on, creating linear paths that slowly unfold and converge. At the start of his levels, you confront something unfamiliar, hostile, seemingly unwilling to yield more than a single thread of possibility. By the end of them, however, you feel more than accomplished. You feel at home.
Miyazaki's next game, Dark Souls, put him on the map for good, and established what is perhaps the archetypal template for all his games. Dark Souls takes place in a quietly desolate land; there is a sense of peace, but there is also a faint undercurrent of dread, a sense that the world's downfall is not quite over. Its world has memories of nobler times, but nobility these days is scarce; the better people have mostly left, and the ones who remain have their own reasons for staying here, none of which are exactly happy. Its story is one of trying to reclaim that sense of glory, trying to be heroic in a land that no longer has need for any heroes... and at the same time it asks, were the good old days really as good as we thought? What's left, if not heroism? What does goodness mean, in a time of uncertainty and collapse?
But it asks these questions silently. For Miyazaki's stories are told mostly in silence, amidst grand and fallen places, with architecture hinting at what once was only once you start treating it as intentional and historic as it always is, and as few video games ever are. His tropes are never just tropes; one difficult thing about persuading people into giving him a go is that so much of what he does, so many of the patterns he finds meaning in, look the same as the dreck that other video games pepper in to take your mind off the fact that the "world" you're in is little more than a slot machine in a casino, dazzling lights meaning nothing than that they want you thinking as little as possible, feeling vague and nebulous emotions, pulling that lever again and again and again. To go from other video games to a Miyazaki is to go from Caesar's in Las Vegas to, well, Rome. The bullshit storytelling that barely rises above the level of cheap fanfic is nowhere to be found.
(And, to be clear, we're talking about the games that win prizes for their writing here: stories and plotlines that would get sneered at even on mediocre low-budget TV series get hailed, in gaming, as undisputed masterpieces. Gaming makes enough money nowadays to feign artistic credibility, but it's telling that Nintendo, who makes a big show out of not putting effort into its plots, remains the undisputed master of game design—in part because Nintendo doesn't delude itself into thinking its games are anything more than what they are.)
Miyazaki's approach to people is similar to his approach to levels: they are less secretive than standoffish, offering you the vaguest hints about who they are and what they're looking for. They reveal themselves to you only gradually, but the effect is that even the slightest new detail feels like a revelation; his writing style is such that someone who speaks thirty sentences to you across twenty hours feels loquacious, turning five brief chance encounters into something that somehow feels genuinely intimate. People are so few and far between that a new encounter with a person feels significant, even when it lasts for less than a minute. We are not here to be together, the feeling goes, but nonetheless, we are here together.
This explains the sharp juxtaposition between the perspectives of people who've been sold on Miyazaki's art and people who remain distant and critical. From afar, his games seem punishing, miserable, and joyless; experienced personally, they're anything but. The sparseness, the difficulty, the looming sense of decay, are all necessary to create the games' true experience, which is one of tenderness, gratitude, and appreciation. It's the feeling of gasping when you first discover a forest, and realizing only in that moment that you'd started to believe all the trees were gone; it's the moment when someone you'd treated as an oblivious airhead abruptly performs an act of shocking self-sacrifice, and you realize all at once that you and he have somehow wound up closer than anyone else you've ever met. And it's the feeling of a fantasy world that almost aggressively lampshades how much of a Fantasy World™ it is—so much so that it doesn't once bother explaining its mythology to you; almost all Miyazaki games open with a sense that the environment you're in may as well be completely genetic—slowly revealing poignancy and depth and maturity, without ever seeming to tell you anything out loud at all.
What's so stunning about Miyazaki's approach is how reverently he treats the core elements of his gameplay—movement and combat, although movement is combat, and combat, in a sense, is just another form of movement. He gets away with being so quiet and so difficult because every encounter feels, not like a challenge exactly, but like a kind of weight. He is creating, not obstacles, but gravity. And it takes a minute to adjust to this, and to understand that you need to think of yourself less as an agent of strength muscling your way forward than as a guest slowly learning how to join in a conversation, but once you do, you are rewarded with a powerful sense of presence: of games, not as puzzle or obstacle or diversion, but as space. Miyazaki understands better than anybody else that games are unlike any other medium because they are lived experiences: they talk about life, not by means of parable or poetry, but by means of making you live.
So Dark Souls spits you out at the Firelink Shrine, which is only a "shrine" in the most nominal sense of the word, and offers you a clear path forward, up a path that leads to a tunnel that leads to a withered old settlement; it also offers you other, less obvious paths, one to a graveyard populated by vicious skeletons and another deep underground, to a haunted landscape of a ruined city by the sea. The first two men you meet are, respectively, crestfallen and standoffish; one is a liar, but not in the sense that he tells you lies, only in the sense that he keeps his truth hidden and never lets on that it's there. This is less a novel than it is a painting, one where the lighting matters more than the vague figures in it; when you come to see this place, not only as a sanctuary, but as a place of beauty, it is because you have let its paints seep deep into your skin, into your mind, into your heart. Your victory will not necessarily mean your triumph: it will be that you come to see yourself as a part of this painting too, a key figure rather than an observer.
And while secrets and lies abound, they feel less like shocking betrayals than like unsettling existential realizations—folds in this reality that can stay hidden for multiple playthroughs until you slowly discover hidden truths to these stories, conspiracies that remain entirely off-screen, less a matter of furtive pathways than a gradual realization that history is always stranger, and motives always more complicated, than you ever would have assumed. To discover that truth has been hidden from you seems less like a calculated manipulation, and more like the world seeing you as slighter than you see yourself. You are not guaranteed others' confidences, now or ever; you are not as central, not as significant, to whichever legend you've stolen for yourself as you may have thought. At times, the people who mislead you can seem, abruptly, to be your hidden nemeses; oftentimes, upon reflection, your final impression isn't one of malice, it's one of tragedy, the kinds of losses so painful that grief takes the form of reality shapeshifting, painting a new layer that doesn't quite hide the old one, with little flecks of color shining through that shock you, not because they are remotely loud or jarring, but because all at once you put something together and realize what must have been here before. Even when you realize it, there is nothing you can do with this information, save live in this place a little more wisely, and with an understanding that you, too, are just another brushstroke—not the first, and certainly not the last.
There is a moment—I will be vague as to when, or as to which of Miyazaki's games this happens in—when a man who has lied to you conspicuously, and betrayed you so many times that you've lost count, shows up in an unexpected place, surprisingly forlorn, so lost that he's willing to treat you as a comrade-in-arms. He asks you to do something brave and difficult, something which holds a great significance for him, and when you do, his response is to betray you yet again. But in that moment of betrayal, there is something that feels almost—dare I say it?—loving. As if this is his nature and always has been, and always will be; as if this has always been what you are to him, and him to you; as if, in doing him this great service, what you've given him is an opportunity to find his way again; as if, in doing you this last ill turn, what he's given you is a promise that some things will go on, that not everything will be lost forever, that the human spirit—impish and capricious in ways that are almost sweet and childlike in their malice—will endure, not just in you but in those who have been there with you, in ways you never asked for and never anticipated appreciating, until here and now, until the end of days.
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This was going to be a review of Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki's latest and most ambitious and most brilliant game by far—and a collaboration with George R. R. Martin, of all people, to boot.
I am a couple dozen hours deep into Elden Ring, but by its standards, I am barely far at all: it is vast, impossibly vast, and not only vast but as caring, as carefully and lovingly crafted, as any of Miyazaki's games, though the rest are significantly smaller by comparison. You could put his whole oeuvre into Elden Ring and not quite fill it, I'm pretty sure. And it neatly resolves what has been the single most frustrating thing about his method, which is that while its staggering difficulty serves a purpose, it has nonetheless remained staggeringly difficult, which can be rage-inducingly annoying when you're stuck at a bottleneck and the rest of the world lies beyond.
Here, there is tremendous difficulty, but there is no bottleneck to be found anywhere; there is always more world, a great banquet of a world, daunting in a brand-new way because there is simply so much of it, but in a way that nonetheless winds up feeling remarkably homelike. You are no longer confined to a single thread, or to a handful of threads, the way Demon's Souls explicitly offers you four paths through four jewel-like worlds to shift between as you see fit. Here, you are confronted with a resplendent tapestry—but because every thread remains interwoven with so many countless others, every impulse you follow and every route you take nonetheless winds up making you feel like it's taking you somewhere you belong.
A part of it's that, with these vast open landscapes—each one bewilderingly big, each one thickly layered with possibilities and richnesses and intrigue—Miyazaki is at last free to stagger his pace, giving you gentler groves and pockets of conflict and realms that work like movements in a symphony, some packing moments and discoveries and directions tightly together and others offering you yawning stretches to gather through, with magic and mystery concealed like veins of ore in the earth, or with sprawling castles that abruptly lock you into the denser clockwork that made him famous. And a part of it is that the game, thus far, hasn't had had a single moment of laziness: its imagination feels almost inexhaustible, to the point that I'm ignoring four-fifths of its mechanics because there's simply too much possibility to take in all at once. But a part of it is that Miyazaki chose, from the very start, to value precisely what developers of his ambition most frequently undervalue, which is to say the bread-and-butter of hacking and slashing, of moving against opposition, of earning your way in a world that yields itself to you just slowly enough that, by the time you make it through, you not only know it but understand something of it, moving through it the way you would whisper softly to a friend. If he can make two thousand encounters feel not just unique but meaningful, if he can throw a hundred different factions of enemy your way and make each individual unit in every one of them seem significant to you, it's because he is so keenly aware of his worlds' rhythms, of the orbits that form between masses in motion, that every moment seems to understand where you are and how you're feeling and what you're doing. Home, this time, means something vast, but the miracle is that it all still feels like home—in the sweeping motions and pointillistic details alike.
For the first time, Miyazaki might have bested Nintendo itself—and there's no other developer, no other collection of brilliant designers, who comes close to touching either of the two. The only game I can think to compare Elden Ring to is Nintendo's Breath of the Wild, which was similar in its mixture of vast landscapes and rich imagination and intimate attention to detail. But Breath of the Wild's early grandeur gave way to an unsatisfying climax; I found myself describing it to people as "the first 70% of the best game I've ever played." There is a ceiling to its challenges, past which its mechanics start to feel like repetition, its handful of enemy types became inconveniences I'd rather just avoid, and completing its shrines felt like busywork. While its landscapes were gorgeous and varied, and while each area's nooks and crannies are visually striking and a pleasure to navigate, the fact remains that most of its environs are designed to be explorable in any order, which means that after the first few that you explore, you're overpowered for all the others, and the challenge gets somewhat perfunctory—and the disposability of weapons and the gradual no-matter-where-you-are scaling of enemy difficulty completes that feeling that gameplay is entirely interchangeable. It's great gameplay, and its world is a great world, but there's an insurmountable disconnect between the world and the gameplay that leads to each slightly devaluing the other.
Elden Ring, on the other hand, is a masterpiece in specificity. Each weapon you find, each spell you acquire, feels like it could become a significant part of the story you tell; individual items are often found in only one location, and each gives you an advantage that is not only meaningful but unique. On some level, it feels almost like the game is cheating: it is at once sparse, in that treasures are rare enough (and hard enough to acquire) that each one matters a great deal, and abundant, in that its world is so infinite that there's no end to such treasures, or to the unique configurations you might find by mixing them together. In a sense, that's because Miyazaki has spent so long perfecting the art of individual encounters, individual items, in extremely confined spaces: once you master his other games, it becomes surprising how small they are, because at first they seem impossibly grand, for how they slow your early motion and make your relationship with every enemy and every possession count. Now, after five games in which he gradually honed his vision, pursuing refinements well past the point where he was already more thoughtful and more graceful than anybody else had even attempted to approach, he has finally made a game as huge as we're accustomed to fantasy worlds trying to be—and unlike every other attempt at this, he understands every inch of his world, not in terms of visual clutter or broader lore, but in terms of what the experience of living through it is. Elden Ring, in short, feels alive, because it is alive. And its life shows itself in the way that every random choice you make, every turn you make instead of a dozen other possible turns, seems to take you to what feels like the logical next step, like the only meaningful connection to be made from where you've been, until you loop back around and explore all the other pathways and discover how they're all connected to one another, they all mean something to each other, so much so that the game no longer needs to hold your hand and teach you how the loops connect the pieces.
The only other game I can think of that gives me remotely similar feelings is Outer Wilds, itself a masterpiece, whose story was told not narratively but spatially, literally embedding bits of its tale across various delightful miniature planets, and devising that story in a way where every piece, no matter where you started, managed to lead you down a path that made your starting point feel like the beginning, concealing from you the possibility that, had you gone another way, it would have served equally well as the very ending. And for all that there are people scattered throughout this world—my favorite thus far is a pompous nobleman with the delightful name of Kenneth Haight, who huffs and puffs and looks down his nose at you to conceal that his estate no longer matters as much as it once did, and that it honestly wasn't that impressive to begin with—this game's story is similarly told in the world, rather than merely upon it. It's difficult to describe its scope, not because other games and other stories haven't had similar scopes of their own, but because it's hard to explain how groundbreaking it is for a designer whose specialty is finding meaning in miniature, a master of sonnets abruptly tackling an epic. Character sagas that would have spanned the entire breadth of a game like Dark Souls or Bloodborne are now merely first chapters in longer, farther-reaching stories—and if other games have told stories with chapters to them too, well, so what? Those games treated chapters like they were mechanics, each dutifully giving you a scrap of meaningful occurrence; they have nothing in common with storytelling like this, which speaks volumes with every breath, and hides meanings in every inflection; each bit is so laden with significance that, when the plot arcs and twists, it catches you by surprise, because you were so lost in the moment that you'd forgotten to expect any kind of development at all.
If this sounds a bit breathless, well, that's because it is; there's a reason I'm implying further parts to this write-up, that's because there's no possible way I can discuss everything I want to discuss all at once, not when I'm still only a fraction of my way into the experience, and have yet to get a sense for the shape of its whole, let alone had the time to meditate and reflect. I'm not saying that this game is perfect (I could gripe endlessly about tiny aspects of its controls, which have occasionally had me seething through my teeth), just that it realizes the potential for video games as a whole so much better than anything I've ever encountered that it feels almost laughable to stack anything up compared to this.
I could name games with even greater visions—not even Elden Ring touches the sophisticated vision of games by Ice Pick Lodge, particularly Pathologic, which still feels like it's a decade beyond anything else 17 years past its release. I could name games with more gorgeous writing and characters and worldbuilding, by which I mean Kentucky Route Zero still exists. I could name games whose gameplay feels more innately delightful (both Outer Wilds and Breath of the Wild qualify), or whose gameplay suggests greater possibility than Miyazaki bothers touching—the games of Erik Svedang, particularly else Heart.Break(), feel like they hold a potential in them that I haven't found anywhere else. And I could even say that Elden Rings still feels conceptually antiquated, on some level, compared to the revolution ushered in by things like Minecraft, and that was over ten years ago.
But none of those games are as fully realized by this, not by a mile. Elden Ring is the only game of its scale that hints at what games of this scale are capable of becoming; we'll know better twenty years from now whether it merely hints at that possibility or whether it has arrived, fully-formed, as perfect in its way as Super Mario Bros. 3 was or as transcendent as the Mother series was or as strangely, weirdly timeless as something like Twin Peaks was for TV, with all its most-dated qualities somehow feeling the most prescient, the most insightful, the most aware of what games are and could be and must be, if they are to stand the test of time the way that any other work of art aspires to. But I am certain that we will be talking about it twenty years from now, and I would bet on us talking about it fifty years from now too, just as I knew ten years ago that we'd still be talking about Minecraft today, just as I knew as a kid that Shigeru Miyamoto's games would be a part of my life until the day I died.
Some big hits are hits because they capture a moment; others are big hits because they define all the moments to come. Elden Ring, unlike Fortnite or Among Us or Overwatch (remember Overwatch? lol), is the latter. It's impossible to talk about contemporary game design without talking about Miyazaki, a fact which was true the moment Dark Souls came out in 2011 and has increasingly become truer ever since. With Elden Ring, Miyazaki's accomplishments have increased by an order of magnitude. This isn't just groundbreaking for the history of game design: there's a decent chance that it will wind up being groundbreaking for the fantasy genre as a whole.
And wouldn't it just be something if, after three decades of working on it, A Song of Ice and Fire wound up being the second-biggest thing that George R. R. Martin was known for creating? I'm not quite ready to bet on it, but it's a very pleasant thought.
By the end of the second run, however, I got it—where by "it" I mean the sublime experience that Miyazaki has spent his entire career trying to refine. People will mention how difficult his games are, and they won't be lying. But what they struggle to describe is the sensation that you get as his worlds gradually blossom before you, each path you take somehow returning you to a place you've been before, doors opening and lifts activating to create loops, circuits, colonies. The genius of Miyazaki is the way he treats space as nonlinear and staggeringly interconnected, but narrows your pathways early on, creating linear paths that slowly unfold and converge. At the start of his levels, you confront something unfamiliar, hostile, seemingly unwilling to yield more than a single thread of possibility. By the end of them, however, you feel more than accomplished. You feel at home.
Miyazaki's next game, Dark Souls, put him on the map for good, and established what is perhaps the archetypal template for all his games. Dark Souls takes place in a quietly desolate land; there is a sense of peace, but there is also a faint undercurrent of dread, a sense that the world's downfall is not quite over. Its world has memories of nobler times, but nobility these days is scarce; the better people have mostly left, and the ones who remain have their own reasons for staying here, none of which are exactly happy. Its story is one of trying to reclaim that sense of glory, trying to be heroic in a land that no longer has need for any heroes... and at the same time it asks, were the good old days really as good as we thought? What's left, if not heroism? What does goodness mean, in a time of uncertainty and collapse?
But it asks these questions silently. For Miyazaki's stories are told mostly in silence, amidst grand and fallen places, with architecture hinting at what once was only once you start treating it as intentional and historic as it always is, and as few video games ever are. His tropes are never just tropes; one difficult thing about persuading people into giving him a go is that so much of what he does, so many of the patterns he finds meaning in, look the same as the dreck that other video games pepper in to take your mind off the fact that the "world" you're in is little more than a slot machine in a casino, dazzling lights meaning nothing than that they want you thinking as little as possible, feeling vague and nebulous emotions, pulling that lever again and again and again. To go from other video games to a Miyazaki is to go from Caesar's in Las Vegas to, well, Rome. The bullshit storytelling that barely rises above the level of cheap fanfic is nowhere to be found.
(And, to be clear, we're talking about the games that win prizes for their writing here: stories and plotlines that would get sneered at even on mediocre low-budget TV series get hailed, in gaming, as undisputed masterpieces. Gaming makes enough money nowadays to feign artistic credibility, but it's telling that Nintendo, who makes a big show out of not putting effort into its plots, remains the undisputed master of game design—in part because Nintendo doesn't delude itself into thinking its games are anything more than what they are.)
Miyazaki's approach to people is similar to his approach to levels: they are less secretive than standoffish, offering you the vaguest hints about who they are and what they're looking for. They reveal themselves to you only gradually, but the effect is that even the slightest new detail feels like a revelation; his writing style is such that someone who speaks thirty sentences to you across twenty hours feels loquacious, turning five brief chance encounters into something that somehow feels genuinely intimate. People are so few and far between that a new encounter with a person feels significant, even when it lasts for less than a minute. We are not here to be together, the feeling goes, but nonetheless, we are here together.
This explains the sharp juxtaposition between the perspectives of people who've been sold on Miyazaki's art and people who remain distant and critical. From afar, his games seem punishing, miserable, and joyless; experienced personally, they're anything but. The sparseness, the difficulty, the looming sense of decay, are all necessary to create the games' true experience, which is one of tenderness, gratitude, and appreciation. It's the feeling of gasping when you first discover a forest, and realizing only in that moment that you'd started to believe all the trees were gone; it's the moment when someone you'd treated as an oblivious airhead abruptly performs an act of shocking self-sacrifice, and you realize all at once that you and he have somehow wound up closer than anyone else you've ever met. And it's the feeling of a fantasy world that almost aggressively lampshades how much of a Fantasy World™ it is—so much so that it doesn't once bother explaining its mythology to you; almost all Miyazaki games open with a sense that the environment you're in may as well be completely genetic—slowly revealing poignancy and depth and maturity, without ever seeming to tell you anything out loud at all.
What's so stunning about Miyazaki's approach is how reverently he treats the core elements of his gameplay—movement and combat, although movement is combat, and combat, in a sense, is just another form of movement. He gets away with being so quiet and so difficult because every encounter feels, not like a challenge exactly, but like a kind of weight. He is creating, not obstacles, but gravity. And it takes a minute to adjust to this, and to understand that you need to think of yourself less as an agent of strength muscling your way forward than as a guest slowly learning how to join in a conversation, but once you do, you are rewarded with a powerful sense of presence: of games, not as puzzle or obstacle or diversion, but as space. Miyazaki understands better than anybody else that games are unlike any other medium because they are lived experiences: they talk about life, not by means of parable or poetry, but by means of making you live.
So Dark Souls spits you out at the Firelink Shrine, which is only a "shrine" in the most nominal sense of the word, and offers you a clear path forward, up a path that leads to a tunnel that leads to a withered old settlement; it also offers you other, less obvious paths, one to a graveyard populated by vicious skeletons and another deep underground, to a haunted landscape of a ruined city by the sea. The first two men you meet are, respectively, crestfallen and standoffish; one is a liar, but not in the sense that he tells you lies, only in the sense that he keeps his truth hidden and never lets on that it's there. This is less a novel than it is a painting, one where the lighting matters more than the vague figures in it; when you come to see this place, not only as a sanctuary, but as a place of beauty, it is because you have let its paints seep deep into your skin, into your mind, into your heart. Your victory will not necessarily mean your triumph: it will be that you come to see yourself as a part of this painting too, a key figure rather than an observer.
And while secrets and lies abound, they feel less like shocking betrayals than like unsettling existential realizations—folds in this reality that can stay hidden for multiple playthroughs until you slowly discover hidden truths to these stories, conspiracies that remain entirely off-screen, less a matter of furtive pathways than a gradual realization that history is always stranger, and motives always more complicated, than you ever would have assumed. To discover that truth has been hidden from you seems less like a calculated manipulation, and more like the world seeing you as slighter than you see yourself. You are not guaranteed others' confidences, now or ever; you are not as central, not as significant, to whichever legend you've stolen for yourself as you may have thought. At times, the people who mislead you can seem, abruptly, to be your hidden nemeses; oftentimes, upon reflection, your final impression isn't one of malice, it's one of tragedy, the kinds of losses so painful that grief takes the form of reality shapeshifting, painting a new layer that doesn't quite hide the old one, with little flecks of color shining through that shock you, not because they are remotely loud or jarring, but because all at once you put something together and realize what must have been here before. Even when you realize it, there is nothing you can do with this information, save live in this place a little more wisely, and with an understanding that you, too, are just another brushstroke—not the first, and certainly not the last.
There is a moment—I will be vague as to when, or as to which of Miyazaki's games this happens in—when a man who has lied to you conspicuously, and betrayed you so many times that you've lost count, shows up in an unexpected place, surprisingly forlorn, so lost that he's willing to treat you as a comrade-in-arms. He asks you to do something brave and difficult, something which holds a great significance for him, and when you do, his response is to betray you yet again. But in that moment of betrayal, there is something that feels almost—dare I say it?—loving. As if this is his nature and always has been, and always will be; as if this has always been what you are to him, and him to you; as if, in doing him this great service, what you've given him is an opportunity to find his way again; as if, in doing you this last ill turn, what he's given you is a promise that some things will go on, that not everything will be lost forever, that the human spirit—impish and capricious in ways that are almost sweet and childlike in their malice—will endure, not just in you but in those who have been there with you, in ways you never asked for and never anticipated appreciating, until here and now, until the end of days.
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This was going to be a review of Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki's latest and most ambitious and most brilliant game by far—and a collaboration with George R. R. Martin, of all people, to boot.
I am a couple dozen hours deep into Elden Ring, but by its standards, I am barely far at all: it is vast, impossibly vast, and not only vast but as caring, as carefully and lovingly crafted, as any of Miyazaki's games, though the rest are significantly smaller by comparison. You could put his whole oeuvre into Elden Ring and not quite fill it, I'm pretty sure. And it neatly resolves what has been the single most frustrating thing about his method, which is that while its staggering difficulty serves a purpose, it has nonetheless remained staggeringly difficult, which can be rage-inducingly annoying when you're stuck at a bottleneck and the rest of the world lies beyond.
Here, there is tremendous difficulty, but there is no bottleneck to be found anywhere; there is always more world, a great banquet of a world, daunting in a brand-new way because there is simply so much of it, but in a way that nonetheless winds up feeling remarkably homelike. You are no longer confined to a single thread, or to a handful of threads, the way Demon's Souls explicitly offers you four paths through four jewel-like worlds to shift between as you see fit. Here, you are confronted with a resplendent tapestry—but because every thread remains interwoven with so many countless others, every impulse you follow and every route you take nonetheless winds up making you feel like it's taking you somewhere you belong.
A part of it's that, with these vast open landscapes—each one bewilderingly big, each one thickly layered with possibilities and richnesses and intrigue—Miyazaki is at last free to stagger his pace, giving you gentler groves and pockets of conflict and realms that work like movements in a symphony, some packing moments and discoveries and directions tightly together and others offering you yawning stretches to gather through, with magic and mystery concealed like veins of ore in the earth, or with sprawling castles that abruptly lock you into the denser clockwork that made him famous. And a part of it is that the game, thus far, hasn't had had a single moment of laziness: its imagination feels almost inexhaustible, to the point that I'm ignoring four-fifths of its mechanics because there's simply too much possibility to take in all at once. But a part of it is that Miyazaki chose, from the very start, to value precisely what developers of his ambition most frequently undervalue, which is to say the bread-and-butter of hacking and slashing, of moving against opposition, of earning your way in a world that yields itself to you just slowly enough that, by the time you make it through, you not only know it but understand something of it, moving through it the way you would whisper softly to a friend. If he can make two thousand encounters feel not just unique but meaningful, if he can throw a hundred different factions of enemy your way and make each individual unit in every one of them seem significant to you, it's because he is so keenly aware of his worlds' rhythms, of the orbits that form between masses in motion, that every moment seems to understand where you are and how you're feeling and what you're doing. Home, this time, means something vast, but the miracle is that it all still feels like home—in the sweeping motions and pointillistic details alike.
For the first time, Miyazaki might have bested Nintendo itself—and there's no other developer, no other collection of brilliant designers, who comes close to touching either of the two. The only game I can think to compare Elden Ring to is Nintendo's Breath of the Wild, which was similar in its mixture of vast landscapes and rich imagination and intimate attention to detail. But Breath of the Wild's early grandeur gave way to an unsatisfying climax; I found myself describing it to people as "the first 70% of the best game I've ever played." There is a ceiling to its challenges, past which its mechanics start to feel like repetition, its handful of enemy types became inconveniences I'd rather just avoid, and completing its shrines felt like busywork. While its landscapes were gorgeous and varied, and while each area's nooks and crannies are visually striking and a pleasure to navigate, the fact remains that most of its environs are designed to be explorable in any order, which means that after the first few that you explore, you're overpowered for all the others, and the challenge gets somewhat perfunctory—and the disposability of weapons and the gradual no-matter-where-you-are scaling of enemy difficulty completes that feeling that gameplay is entirely interchangeable. It's great gameplay, and its world is a great world, but there's an insurmountable disconnect between the world and the gameplay that leads to each slightly devaluing the other.
Elden Ring, on the other hand, is a masterpiece in specificity. Each weapon you find, each spell you acquire, feels like it could become a significant part of the story you tell; individual items are often found in only one location, and each gives you an advantage that is not only meaningful but unique. On some level, it feels almost like the game is cheating: it is at once sparse, in that treasures are rare enough (and hard enough to acquire) that each one matters a great deal, and abundant, in that its world is so infinite that there's no end to such treasures, or to the unique configurations you might find by mixing them together. In a sense, that's because Miyazaki has spent so long perfecting the art of individual encounters, individual items, in extremely confined spaces: once you master his other games, it becomes surprising how small they are, because at first they seem impossibly grand, for how they slow your early motion and make your relationship with every enemy and every possession count. Now, after five games in which he gradually honed his vision, pursuing refinements well past the point where he was already more thoughtful and more graceful than anybody else had even attempted to approach, he has finally made a game as huge as we're accustomed to fantasy worlds trying to be—and unlike every other attempt at this, he understands every inch of his world, not in terms of visual clutter or broader lore, but in terms of what the experience of living through it is. Elden Ring, in short, feels alive, because it is alive. And its life shows itself in the way that every random choice you make, every turn you make instead of a dozen other possible turns, seems to take you to what feels like the logical next step, like the only meaningful connection to be made from where you've been, until you loop back around and explore all the other pathways and discover how they're all connected to one another, they all mean something to each other, so much so that the game no longer needs to hold your hand and teach you how the loops connect the pieces.
The only other game I can think of that gives me remotely similar feelings is Outer Wilds, itself a masterpiece, whose story was told not narratively but spatially, literally embedding bits of its tale across various delightful miniature planets, and devising that story in a way where every piece, no matter where you started, managed to lead you down a path that made your starting point feel like the beginning, concealing from you the possibility that, had you gone another way, it would have served equally well as the very ending. And for all that there are people scattered throughout this world—my favorite thus far is a pompous nobleman with the delightful name of Kenneth Haight, who huffs and puffs and looks down his nose at you to conceal that his estate no longer matters as much as it once did, and that it honestly wasn't that impressive to begin with—this game's story is similarly told in the world, rather than merely upon it. It's difficult to describe its scope, not because other games and other stories haven't had similar scopes of their own, but because it's hard to explain how groundbreaking it is for a designer whose specialty is finding meaning in miniature, a master of sonnets abruptly tackling an epic. Character sagas that would have spanned the entire breadth of a game like Dark Souls or Bloodborne are now merely first chapters in longer, farther-reaching stories—and if other games have told stories with chapters to them too, well, so what? Those games treated chapters like they were mechanics, each dutifully giving you a scrap of meaningful occurrence; they have nothing in common with storytelling like this, which speaks volumes with every breath, and hides meanings in every inflection; each bit is so laden with significance that, when the plot arcs and twists, it catches you by surprise, because you were so lost in the moment that you'd forgotten to expect any kind of development at all.
If this sounds a bit breathless, well, that's because it is; there's a reason I'm implying further parts to this write-up, that's because there's no possible way I can discuss everything I want to discuss all at once, not when I'm still only a fraction of my way into the experience, and have yet to get a sense for the shape of its whole, let alone had the time to meditate and reflect. I'm not saying that this game is perfect (I could gripe endlessly about tiny aspects of its controls, which have occasionally had me seething through my teeth), just that it realizes the potential for video games as a whole so much better than anything I've ever encountered that it feels almost laughable to stack anything up compared to this.
I could name games with even greater visions—not even Elden Ring touches the sophisticated vision of games by Ice Pick Lodge, particularly Pathologic, which still feels like it's a decade beyond anything else 17 years past its release. I could name games with more gorgeous writing and characters and worldbuilding, by which I mean Kentucky Route Zero still exists. I could name games whose gameplay feels more innately delightful (both Outer Wilds and Breath of the Wild qualify), or whose gameplay suggests greater possibility than Miyazaki bothers touching—the games of Erik Svedang, particularly else Heart.Break(), feel like they hold a potential in them that I haven't found anywhere else. And I could even say that Elden Rings still feels conceptually antiquated, on some level, compared to the revolution ushered in by things like Minecraft, and that was over ten years ago.
But none of those games are as fully realized by this, not by a mile. Elden Ring is the only game of its scale that hints at what games of this scale are capable of becoming; we'll know better twenty years from now whether it merely hints at that possibility or whether it has arrived, fully-formed, as perfect in its way as Super Mario Bros. 3 was or as transcendent as the Mother series was or as strangely, weirdly timeless as something like Twin Peaks was for TV, with all its most-dated qualities somehow feeling the most prescient, the most insightful, the most aware of what games are and could be and must be, if they are to stand the test of time the way that any other work of art aspires to. But I am certain that we will be talking about it twenty years from now, and I would bet on us talking about it fifty years from now too, just as I knew ten years ago that we'd still be talking about Minecraft today, just as I knew as a kid that Shigeru Miyamoto's games would be a part of my life until the day I died.
Some big hits are hits because they capture a moment; others are big hits because they define all the moments to come. Elden Ring, unlike Fortnite or Among Us or Overwatch (remember Overwatch? lol), is the latter. It's impossible to talk about contemporary game design without talking about Miyazaki, a fact which was true the moment Dark Souls came out in 2011 and has increasingly become truer ever since. With Elden Ring, Miyazaki's accomplishments have increased by an order of magnitude. This isn't just groundbreaking for the history of game design: there's a decent chance that it will wind up being groundbreaking for the fantasy genre as a whole.
And wouldn't it just be something if, after three decades of working on it, A Song of Ice and Fire wound up being the second-biggest thing that George R. R. Martin was known for creating? I'm not quite ready to bet on it, but it's a very pleasant thought.