East meets West: a review of Elden Ring

I used to think of Elden Ring as the synergy of Easter and western narrative tropes, but its really just western sprinkles on a Japanese cupcake, which is great.

In the same way that every movie can be improved by being a western, every country can be improved by becoming what Japan thinks it is.

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The first boss you encounter is Morgot, an old man in rags guarding a bridge. A hard but fair master, he is there confront and reject your tests and attempts. Much like Socrates, in facing him one is forced into self-examination, like in a mirror. The player is forced to explore and understand all the mechanics of the game -- block, roll, parry, dodge, shield, one hand, two hand, etc., etc. -- before giving up and returning much later.

Morgot teaches you stoicism and honor. He reminds you where the game mechanics and design is, which is in the timing, telegraphing, and reacting. Elden Ring is actually not that hard if you fight "without honor". You can cast magic from far away, or summon helpers so that you can attack from behind while they are distracted. But Morgot reminds you of where the game mechanics and game design is. And the only way to repay the honor he has shown you, in his tutelage, is to best him with the only real, honorable way to play the game, i.e., up close, with sword and shield, rolls and parries, memorized timing.

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The most famous boss is of course Melania, the goddess of rot. In the game and in real life, her name is whispered and heard well before she is encountered. I.e., in real life, she is likely what draws many to buy the game, me included, and in the game, she is foreshadowed by the results of her devastation. In the lore, she has infested a vast region with a sickness known as the scarlet rot, but out of that death and decay emerges a weird world of giant fungus and sentient centipedes called pests. In other words, a goddess of gardening, a Buddhist transhuman Valkyrie of death and rebirth. She pays no heed to the pests that worship her because they are but an intermediate stage in the rebirth of higher forms of life. Her final encounter is inevitably anticlimactic, but, as a minor critique of the game, it has certain wasted an opportunity to associate her, her traces, her foreshadowing, etc., with a definite musical theme to anticipate the final encounter so it is a bit less anticlimactic.

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Now, the most interesting boss is certainly Miquella the Kind, brother of Melania. A man of boundless intelligence and compassion, he clearly is intended to evoke Jesus, or at least an Asian or Buddhist misunderstanding of him, with his cross symbols and his ultimate desire to bring an age of gentleness and compassion. In the game, his land is that of an enormous tree to which is drawn all the minor deformed monsters of the game we had been mindlessly slaying before, gathered in peace.

Sometimes, I would ride through the vast world of Elden Ring and I would feel so lost and lonely. There would be no clear place to go, and there are monsters to fight without any definite reward, treasure to find without any definite application, and at that moment, all I would want is for a voice, any voice, to guide me. I.e., what most people want to encounter the most, in Elden Ring, are so-called NPC's, non-player characters, someone that would add form, structure, or some kind of humanizing intention or direction to the game.

In the vast empty world of Elden Ring, there is in fact no one who is not a friend. Even, as in most cases, if such friends are ultimately competitors, enemies, or, narratively, people that may have to die by our hand. But whatever the narrative or thematic direction, there is never a doubt that there is a cohesiveness, or unity, or sense or respect and honor among all.

This is what I called the Japanese cupcake. I can just imagine, as an example, working as a nurse in Japan. I may be wrong but -- I can imagine going to work, and being treated with a baseline level of respect by everyone (excluding supervisors -- but even then, perhaps like Morgot...). I can imagine at work being valued in the most minor interactions I have with people. I can imagine coming home and not being forced to drink to drown out all the little annoyances, and just being OK with everyone I came in contact with.

So, I would imagine -- things I would not have to deal with here. I could never be a nurse in the US, but in Japan ... well, even here, upon reflection, I have gotten the one job, in the legal field, where almost all interactions without exception are of the utmost respectfulness. Not to say that all interactions are formal, but they are almost without exception always respectful, sometimes friendly and familiar, sometimes adversarial, but respectful even then (barring supervisors -- but again ...). I hate to think that that some weird, subconscious, deep-seated need of the Asian in me has pigeonholed me into a career, but ...

It's easy to identify, as a list, a dozen or two dozen recurrent tropes in Elden Ring that is found elsewhere in Japanese media. I used to think this was a limitation, but no longer. There is something there, maybe like a vast network, that binds everyone to themes of a common epic. I believe the Japanese love each other, and Japan, or perhaps their community, in a way that those in the US most certainly do not.

And that is Miquella -- superficial thematic evocations of Christ, but really, the age of compassion he brings is, much like his power, imagined darkly as an age of manipulation is that of what I call the collective epic, the holism of recurrent tropes of honor, sacrifice, purity, survival, apocalypse, provinciality, etc. etc. that bind together the Japanese or their communities into a place of cohesiveness.

But Elden Ring imagines Miquella's world, which may be Japan, as evil as undesirable, and imagines the coming of the future, the protagonist, as the destruction of that bewitching world. The world the future brings might be, among other things, one of the golden order, which seems to distantly evoke the West, or of logic, structure, formalism, etc.. In other words, Elden Ring is, not so much as one would assume in the beginning, a synergy of East and West, but rather, a self-reflection before an iconoclastic West poised on the edge of the realm.