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It's Dark Souls like Dark Souls is Demon's Souls 2, or Demon's Souls is King's Field 4, and so on. Elden Ring looks like Dark Souls because it basically is Dark Souls. Clearly, the team at FromSoftware is making what they want to make. This is a studio resisting mainstream trends, stubbornly and admirably focused on doing its thing. When asked about whether Elden Ring would have towns, he said, ".it would become a bit too much, so we decided to create an open world-style game focused on what we are best at." What it's called doesn't matter as much as what it does. Name a sadder, cooler knight than Artorias. I think of mainstream open world games and I think of villages, NPCs, simulated societies and ecosystems, but Miyazaki says nah. I don't think anyone at FromSoftware cares much either. I don't care how similar it looks or whether it carries the same name with a number attached. Throw in another onion knight, another Patches trap. Nearly 30 years of development history over 17 games (out of 60 total) is enough collective time spent to safely say From's mastered the art of dark fantasy in videogame form.Įlden Ring could be Dark Souls 4, sure. But it always eventually comes back with a new spin on ruined cathedrals and mad magicians.
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The studio would go on to take big departures from dark fantasy, creating horror games in the Echo Night series and branching out the furthest into mech warfare primarily via the Armored Core series. So many bong rips rippling through spacetime trace back to King's Field. It's where From's implicit mission to make rad dark fantasy began and the inspiration for so much rad fantasy to follow. I get a transdimensional contact high looking at King's Field. The catacombs are massive and seemingly infinite, the NPCs soft-spoken and isolated, and the monsters are genuinely creepy. I played a good chunk of King's Field via an emulator recently, and while it's been made much clumsier and goofier by time, it maintains the basic essence of a Souls game. Hollow Knight's ability to make me care about cartoon bugs is the closest any game's gotten. They might feature a depressed knight and a backstabbing dragon, but FromSoft's interpretation of these motifs is sharper and more memorable than the rest by a mile. There's a reason that so few of the Souls-likes sprouting up in FromSoftware's wake don't stick with me. But rather than a lack of imagination, I see a focused, disciplined imagination. It's always the same tragically immortal player, the same third person combat, the same broad themes and monsters. It's easy to glance at FromSoftware's last decade of games and call the studio a one trick pony.
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That repetition would only be a problem if the similarities weren't so intentional (or just so goddamn cool). Every new Souls game is a spiritual sequel to the last, a reinterpretation of FromSoftware's favorite doomy motifs and signature game design.
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I was also surprised as I processed that E3 trailer, but after watching it a few times I took a breather and remembered that this is what FromSoftware does. People have been quick to point out that Dark Souls and Elden Ring look and sound exactly like one another, at least at a glance.