Yea on a second playthrough it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Demi-humans, misbegotten, skeletons, perfumers, omenkillers, vulgar militia, dogs, wolves, man-bats, fingercreepers, ulcerated tree spirits, cemetery shades, kindred of rot...
There's plenty of stuff that's new but where the bosses are like, 80% new content and 20% reused but with added moves, the enemies are 50% reused and most of what's reused is totally unchanged.
People say this all the time but DS3 still had Irithyll/Ariamis which were very blue and demon ruins which was very red. Its color palette didn't feel especially bad when I first played it even if other Souls games are more varied.
The black knights also use crucible incantations and skills, and the music that plays during black knight boss fights is crucible knight music. The crucible is tied to human beings and humanoids having animalistic features, so maybe there's something there. Like, it was armor that was once use by both men and beasts who channeled the power of the crucible, or something.
I have just about 1,000 hours in Elden Ring. Including the DLC, the game has over 400 weapons, and most weapons are customizable with unique weapon skills called Ashes of War, of which there are over 100, and with special items known as whetblades, you can give each customizable weapon a unique damage property (such as magic, lightning, poison, etc.). In addition to this, you have over 200 spells, all of which you can use on the game's over 200 boss fights, in addition to the absolutely massive open world to explore.
You can do ten full playthroughs of the game and every playthrough can feel unique. It's just great.
I didn't even know that until I read it online, because when I was there something spawned in, died offscreen, gave me 28k runes and an Iris of Occultation. Apparently I'm not even the only person this happened to. Very janky and weird, but I guess I got lucky since it's just a dumb tree spirit.
That's not really what defines democracy though.
If you want to get all "uhm akshually* about it then we were arguably not a true democracy until both women and black people got the right to vote, because these demographics were being ruled over by a government that denied them fair participation.
As of right now, you may despise both political parties, but you can vote for one over the other, and in fact the supreme court that's handing down all these extremely unpopular decisions was put in place by Donald Trump, a man duly elected to the presidency.
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not voting is what got us here, and had more people voted against Trump in 2016 we wouldn't be here. Saying we're "not a democracy" might feel true but all you're doing is discouraging people from participating in the process that could've prevented this in the first place.
Unless you believe the supreme court appointed by Hillary Clinton would've also overtuned Roe v Wade, legalized bribery, eliminated Chevron deference, declared the president a monarch, and so on...
When you ask someone to make a hyper-realistic cake based on a human head but they're only paid minimum wage
So, I've theorized for a long time that instead of letting Nayuta die, Barem kidnapped her and starved her so Fami could control her. Fami seems to want as many pawns on her side as possible to fight Death, which is why her plan with the CSM Church powered up both Yoru and Chainsaw Man. Control could be a powerful ally, and we can assume Fami's powers can work on a horseman since she tried to use them on Yoru.
I'm willing to believe Nayuta's dead but from Fami's point of view it'd be smarter to starve her out and let Denji simply believe she's dead in order to get the 2-for-1 combo.
That's not copium, that's delusion. It makes me wonder how much this person is able to grasp reality in their day to day life considering the elaborate fantasy they've made up in their heads to explain away a single photograph they don't like.
I literally rolled through the first two of the Knight's three fire waves so I never considered jumping because if the first two are rollable why not the third?
Why not the third Michael Zaki?
Conservatives only pretend to hate things like that. At their core they're simple people: If it gives them power they love it, if it gives their enemies power they hate it. It doesn't really matter what "it" is, because they could hate it today and love it tomorrow so long as tomorrow it benefits them.
This is the same reason you can point out their hypocrisy hundreds of times and it never changes anything. They don't hate activist judges on principle, they hate activist judges when it doesn't benefit them. Today it did benefit them, so they love it, and this is only surprising if you assume they have any morals or principles, which they don't.
Radahn's attacks are at best visually disorienting, he has several moves that can make the entire screen flash white which is simply unpleasant no matter how you slice it.
I feel like we're back at Waterfowl discourse where people aren't really understanding the core issue people are having. Yea Waterfowl and Radahn phase 2 are dodgable, but they're not readable. When Margit lifts his cane and swipes it down, it's easy to know you're supposed to dodge to the side because of the readability of the attack. You can't tell how to dodge waterfowl just by looking at it, you have to use pure brute force, trial-and-error tactics until you eventually get it down, and almost the entirety of Radahn phase 2 is the same.
Boss attacks being readable is part of what makes them fair. Getting to Radahn phase 2 for the first time my reaction was "what the fuck is going on" because half the time you can barely tell what's happening on screen due to the constant flashbangs and teleporting around. Yea he's beatable, yea he has openings, but learning the fight isn't fun because visually he's a complete mess in a way most other DLC bosses aren't.
Midra and Messmer are prime examples of bosses receiving far fewer complaints if any, whose attacks just so happen to be way more readable.
Right? I honestly teared up a bit seeing Maikeru finally get Shin'uchi. He put his heart and soul into that and and he's been through so much since Shinta's expulsion, he worked hard for this and he couldn't deserve it more.
Counterpoint, unlike weapons and spells which have stat requirements and damage scaling, summons merely have a single requirement of FP (or HP) and the only thing affecting their damage is upgrades. There's simply no reason to not default to the strongest thing in your inventory.
It's that old quote, "when given the chance players will optimize the fun out of playing a game". Plenty of summons are crappy and barely help, but players aren't given any incentive to choose those over the strongest summon their FP can afford.
The spirit dialogue is actually much more tragic than that.
"How will you salvation offer... to those who cannot be saved? When you could not even save your other self?"
The implications are huge. The way I see it, Miquella does want to save the Lands Between and everyone in it, but for whatever reason, he believed he had no choice but to abandon St. Trina in order to become a god. Thus, he couldn't save his other self, and so what hope does he have to save anyone else?
I just want to thank you for having media literacy and being seemingly one of the only people on Reddit who actually understands Ranni's ending instead of reducing her to a selfish backstabber who's just pure evil.
I'm not seeing anyone bring this up so I just want to share this tip since I found it makes dealing with them much easier (and also there's a developer message telling you about it on the path to the Cathedral of Manus Metyr):
Not every golem can be killed this way but off the top of my head I can think of 5 that I killed using this method. You'll still have to run around avoiding their attacks but I found this to be incredibly consistent and never really took that much time.
Agree to disagree, I suppose. She says things like that in confidence to you when she has nothing to gain from it, so it reads as genuine to me. She's definitely not a morally pure character but I get the impression that she believes what she's doing is good.
I think the corpses in front of the Manse are also hinting at previous attempts to create Lords of Frenzied Flame. Their heads are all conspicuously missing, which is what would happen if someone went full Midra, but we're told even Midra himself wasn't strong enough to become a true Lord.
I've never read Ranni as that much of a self-serving character quite frankly. At one point she laments how much Blaidd and Iji have sacrificed for her and tells you to tell them she loves them. You could assume this is some 500 IQ manipulation to get you killed but it's far simpler to believe she's just genuinely compassionate towards them. She also constantly tries to carry the burden of her Empyrean ascension herself and hardly ever asks the player to do anything, in fact we practically barge in to her office and demand to assist her unprompted, then do it again when she hides as a doll.
Her whole dialogue in her tower after marrying her also seems entirely about what she thinks is best for the Lands Between, but a lot of players seem to miss that.
It also feels like they have a lot of room to improve on Elden Ring's success. Fewer empty or mostly empty areas like , or Consecrated Snowfield. Better horseback combat. Tighter boss design. Quests that are easier to follow without needing to use a guide.
I really want them to make another open world Soulslike to see how they can iterate on what they've made here. Sure, it doesn't have to be Elden Ring 2, but if they do make another open world Soulslike why not make it Elden Ring 2? Elden Ring feels like it has way more room to expand its story than the original Dark Souls did.
Yea so long as you don't go to an altar it'll stay in whatever its most recent form was at, so you could have all 3 by NG+2 if you wanted to.
Spoilers I guess but I doubt most players will find this out without a guide so if you wanna know here you go
I highly recommend
Minor note that once transformed, it can't be turned back into the Stone-Sheathed sword, although most people probably won't care about that.
JJK fans try not to spoil literally the entire plot at every single moment challenge: Impossible
Well, Asa is just selfish, Barem is a psychopath, Fami is holding her cards close to her chest, and Denji has been shuffled from trauma to trauma so much he can't think straight.
At least as far as I can tell everything is mostly playing out exactly how Fami wants, drawing out black CSM and powering up him and Yoru to fight Death. We still don't know how Fami intends to get CSM's power on her side, or the extent to which she lied about being able to separate black CSM from Denji.
Even Denji himself has noticed that both Fami and Barem know a suspicious amount about his contract with Pochita, something they couldn't possibly be present for. Denji's sure to rampage next chapter but I have a feeling this is exactly what Fami wants and she's already prepared on what to do for when this happens.
It makes sense
ChainsawMan