Wile E. Coyote vs Acme
FromSoftware Edition
Newsletter #118
A little over a week ago, FromSoftware released an expansion to their 2022 open world roleplaying game, Elden Ring, titled Shadow of the Erdtree. Boasting lore written by George RR Martin, Elden Ring reproduced the grueling risk-reward gameplay that the Japanese company had perfected over the course of 15 years producing and refining the “Soulsborne” genre, a name portmanteaued from the titles of the company’s own Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls trilogy, and Bloodborne. These five games don’t share much narratively, and tell their own murky, standalone stories, but what truly links them are the gameplay loops, the art design, and recurring themes.
It’s difficult to convey the total package these games represent: the often-frustrating, but ultimately rewarding battles that seem initially insurmountable; the tragic majesty of their decaying worlds, and the narratives weaving through them, of which even the most dedicated players only ever suss a fraction. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the entire oeuvre is my favorite collection of titles in gaming with Bloodborne, the series’ full-on foray into cosmic horror, retaining the title of my favorite game of all-time despite Elden Ring’s valiant attempt to claim the throne. Shadow of the Erdtree, a masterful expansion to an already expansive game, may finally tip the balance in the latter’s favor.
So here’s the problem: there’s just nothing like them. I suspect I’m not alone in this, but one of the many ways I enjoy prolonging the magic of a favorite game, movie, series or other narrative entertainment is by experiencing things like it. When I play Bloodborne, I read a lot of Lovecraft, and watch a lot of horror movies. When I go on a kick watching Star Trek, I plumb for all things Trek, read the novels and comics, and play the often disappointing licensed video games. I do the same with Star Wars and comics and the post-apocalyptic genre as a whole.
It’s damn near impossible to find anything that scratches quite the same hard-to-reach itch that FromSoftware’s roleplaying games scratch. The Soulsborne games aren’t just known for their punishing-but-fair difficulty, though, but also for the unique method in which they deliver their narrative. Cinematic cutscenes exist, but are sparse. There is no narrator, nor does your hero have a voice. Story in FromSoftware’s games is not laid out in a linear fashion. Soulsborne games dole out world-building, story, and characterization in the form of item descriptions and world design, in bits of dialogue from strange NPCs. The lore in a FromSoft game is, ultimately, what the player and larger community makes of it; there are as many different versions of “the story” as there are people who’ve played the game. This postmodern approach to interactive storytelling is no accident: creator of the genre and now president of FromSoftware, Hidetaka Miyazaki, came up with the idea based on his childhood struggles understanding some of the finer points of the English language in the fantasy novels he borrowed from the library. He found that - wherever he misunderstood or could not translate the lanaguge - he made intuitive leaps, filling in the narrative gaps with flourishes that ultimately made the stories feel like his own as much as the writers’.
Ultimately, I can’t find stories like Elden Ring or Bloodborne or any of the other Souls games because they’re as much about the act of building individual interpretation as they are about understanding an objective narrative truth. Many precursors carry the FromSoftware DNA - Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, the aforementioned Lovecraft - but, ultimately, the Soulsborne games are that most magical of diversions: something that looks like a lot of things we’ve seen before, but that takes those things and presents its audience with something new, wholly unique, and greater than the sum of its humble parts.
I’ll see y’all here Wednesday for our first installment of Smee and again Friday for our next bit of The Neon Tempest. Be kind this week, to yourself and others.
Wado!