Returning To Elden Ring: Rivers of Blood Edition
After a few months off, I finally made my glorious return to the Lands Between, eager to make some new builds for the upcoming DLC which…remains upcoming. There is still no release date. And while that’s unfortunate, I’m still soldiering on with making new builds, because knowing FromSoftware, they’ll announce the DLC is coming out in a week on a random day and I’ll be caught unprepared. So I said “better safe than sorry” and got my Elden Ring grind back into gear. Well, partial gear. There’s still this little game called Fortnite I’ve been spending time with.
So, because I’m much more basic than I appear to be, I went with the most obvious build I was missing- that’s right, a Rivers of Blood/Arcane build. I know that part of the fun of the Souls series has always been trying out new weapons and new play styles. But I’m actually such a veteran that I’ve basically leaned into the opposite. I know what I like and my personal aesthetic and that’s how I play the game. And like 70% of the other people who play this game, that would be katanas and highly mobile dex builds centered around getting in as many hits as possible as opposed to trying to hit everything with the biggest fucking weapon I can find.
The hardest part of any Souls game is starting out. None of them are particularly easy to get going and Elden Ring is not exception. Like, when you first step into this world, everything is going to wreck you and nothing is going to come particularly easy. Then, like a boulder rolling down a hill, everything starts coming rather easily and you begin gaining momentum. I spent like 10 hours getting adequately leveled (read: overleveled) to fight Godrick. I had to get the Bloody Slash weapon art (which I did by accident), fight a bunch of lame early game bosses, do some optional side activities…then I finally felt comfortable with my build.
Then the proverbial “march to the sea” as it were, began. BOOM! Godrick, wiped. BOOM! Rennala, smoked. BOOM! Radahn, whipped (actually I almost died.) BOOM! Rykard….you get it. I carved a path of bloody, Arcane fueled destruction all the way to the Mountaintops of The Giants. Then, with some help, I defeated the Fire Giant, who was less pesky than usual this time (maybe I’ve “gotten gud"), then I ripped through Farum Azula.
Mountaintops of The Giants remains one of the most rugged biomes FromSoft has ever created.
Right now, I’m leveling to fight Maliketh. I’m level 96 and I probably should hit like 110, just so I don’t fall behind. Yes, I will beat the game again, but that’s not really what this piece is about. Really the point is…damn this game is awesome. It was awesome when it came out in 2022. And it’s awesome now in 2024.
Being away so long, I had forgotten the casual beauty of the Lands Between, the random encounters and the sheer wonder of discovery that exist in a world this detailed and meticulously designed. There’s a lot of open world games, but few of them are as layered and deep as this game. Every area is just so dense. You can get on Torrent (your horse-goat), and just ride around, and you will always find something new and interesting. It’s a welcome change from a lot of copy and paste style open world games where you get the same textures and designs in a various outlays. This is a world that lives and breathes and its existence doesn’t hinge on you living and breathing. Whereas other FromSoft games felt like the player was the key design point of their perception, in this one, it feels like we’re simply a traveler.
There’s so much life and death in this world that sometimes, so much history, that sometimes it feels like the player is always a little bit too late. I was in Dragonbarrow, specifically the Divine Tower. Normally, you jump on some branches, and when you land, you got up to the tower. But this time, I just kept going down, and to my surprise, there was a bottom. There was a little cliff with a bunch of chairs, and in every chair was a corpse. I found myself wondering- “what happened here? What killed these people? Is it still around? Or did it die a long time ago?”
It’s the questions in life that provide it with that ethereal beauty, and FromSoft has always known this. So far, in revisiting Elden Ring, I’m left with more question than when I initially played the game. The sheer contrast between beauty and brutality in the Lands Between is stark and confrontational. There are so many iconic moments that highlight this too. Malenia blossoming into the Goddess of Rot is a total mind fuck. Godfrey brutally killing his best friend, Serosh, with his bare hands. Radagon’s consumption by the Elden Beast….this list could go on and on. The point is, Elden Ring forces us to confront the reality that life just happens, and we can give it words, but those words aren’t what those things mean.
Rivers of Blood is a revelation as far as it comes to weapons in videogames.
Elden Ring is full of convoluted lore and rich backstories. This world has a history, one that’s not as clear as it would seem, but like a fossil, if you brush away the dirt, you can see the bones of what once was. In some cases, these fossils live, hiding in their ruined strongholds or decrepit castles.
Look at someone like Godrick the Grafted. He claims to be part of the Golden Lineage, the esteemed and legendary royal family of the Lands Between. He is…but many generations later, his blood is far less potent due to generations of separation from the royal line. When we meet him, he’s quite mad. Literally insane. He’s grafted tons of body parts onto himself to try and make himself as strong as his ancestors..but that’s completely the wrong approach. His ancestors were respected because they were strong and distant. Virtually gods. Godrick, by using his inherited wealth to augment his otherwise plain form into that of a disturbing, demonlike creature, comes off as wildly insecure, as well as batshit insane.
Bitter ex-boyfriend reaches level 1,000.
The lesson from Godrick is that this world is not just in decay, but in active mutation and deconstruction. And yet, the beauty remains. Even Godrick’s story has a small silver lining. After we defeat him-way afterwards. We run into one of his ancestors, Morgott. He calls Godrick by a different name. Godrick the Golden. I always assumed this was just a misprint, but rewatching it, there’s some real respect there. Godrick chased his dreams, even when it drove him crazy, even past that. He’s one of the few characters in the game who’s actually doing something. Everyone else is sitting around in a doom and gloom, but Godrick is still trying to fulfill his ambitions, even as the conditions that made those dreams dreams have long past.
He’s one of many characters in Elden Ring who I have come to respect way more this time around. It’s hard not to. As insane as this guy is, he’s also kind of admirable. He also gave us perhaps the greatest Elden Ring moment ever.
“Forefathers one and all, bear witness!” - Godrick the Grafted/Golden
I won’t dive too much into how cool this moment is. There’s no point, it’s obvious. He realizes he’s getting his ass kicked, rips the head off a dragon corpse, and starts shooting fire into the sky while chanting for his ancestors to witness his glorious death. It doesn’t get better than that.
The craziest part is that this is a relatively minor scene in the game. You could bypass this entirely if you so choose. Doesn’t make it any less cool. If anything it makes it cooler. That’s how big and organic Elden Ring is and also how powerful it’s lore and storytelling is. It’s an example of the classic FromSoftware dilemna. They make games for people who love games, but after playing FromSoftware games no other games hit quite the same. It’s like the first love all over again.
I’m realizing that this piece is going on a little long. It’s the first in a series, undoubtedly the first in a long line of FromSoftware essays. We’re returning to Elden Ring because it’s officially DLC-watch, and when it comes, we need to be ready. One does not simply enter the DLC without at least two new optimized builds. So keep your ear to the ground and listen for the waves, because the downloadable content cometh.
