Finally playing Elden Ring, 12 hours in and, well, I don't know guys. I mean don't get me wrong, this is a very good game. But. Wow, people lost their minds over it when it came out. Best game ever, the game against which all modern games should be measured, etc.

Its good, very good, consistently fairly entertaining but twelve hours in and I cannot say that anything I have experienced in this game has been truly great. Its all good though? I think that might be the problem. It gives you a lot of decent to very good, but never really reaches higher.

Maybe it is just my imagination, but it feels like it is spread thin. There are places in the game that are interesting level design, the kind that really propped up previous souls games, but those bits are literally spread out in tiny chunks across an open world with design that is solid, good, but not really inspired. An open world is supposed to facilitate exploration, but I got a much stronger feeling of exploration working my way through the tight corridors and mazes of previous games. There's this sense of "What's around that corner? Maybe an item or chest?" or "Maybe there is a bonfire soon if I just push my luck a bit further" filling every minute of, for example, Dark Souls but that feeling is much more dilute as I make my way through Elden Ring. Most of the world is just landmarks on mostly empty space. And they are close together landmarks, but they don't feel cohesive when taken as a whole. I don't think Elden Ring is utilizing its open world very well.

I don't know maybe at hour twenty it'll pick up and blow my tits off with how good it is but I'm not feeling it yet. Honestly even if it gets great at hour 20 that in and of itself is a problem.

As it is I will play it more and have fun, but given how long the game is I can't see myself finishing it before getting bored and moving on.

AND ONCE AGAIN I THINK IT IS A GOOD GAME, like B+ territory. It is just impossible to say this is merely a good game without addressing how people think this game is the bitch's tits of all time. I think people bought into the hype train a bit much.

'thotiana is a long story' you have my attention

oh man thotiana lore INCOMING

ok so back in 2018 my boyfriend and i had a brief simultaneous obsession with the song thotiana by blueface, this was largely due to a single tiktok of some grilled chickens dancing to said song which had a truly absurd grip on both of us. at the same time he had soft-moved into my apartment bc he (justifiably) hated his roommates at the time and during that process his ps4 ended up in my living room, which i took as an invitation to start playing bloodborne because i absolutely love bloody gory fleshy eldritch horror

this is when thotiana was born.

thotiana was my first earnest soulsborne character, i had tried dark souls a few times before but i was REALLY bad at it bc i had no idea what i was doing, so i just made very generic characters for it. i was DETERMINED to be good at bloodborne though, so i decided to actually spend time on my character and make them unique. i decided to name them after the song i was indescribably obsessed with at the time.

thotiana was the result. i spent over an hour in the character creator perfecting thotiana.

thotiana, in all his splendor, looked about like this:

thotiana was the most wretched, accursed man in all of yharnam. his chin could cut the moon in half. his stats were terrible because i insist on being a magic main in every soulsborne game even though it's the worst fucking strategy every time. thotiana barely beat the cleric beast and could NOT get past father gascoigne. thotiana was never destined to live.

i abandoned thotiana shortly after creating him because i deeply hated fighting father gascoigne. it did not occur to me to try a non-magic build. but two years later, after i had moved across the country, i decided i wanted to git gud and actually beat a soulsborne game, so i fired up dark souls 1, which i had owned for five years but had never made any real progress in. as soon as i reached the character creator, i knew what i had to do.

this is when thotiana ii was born

thotiana ii was the scrawniest, palest bitch in the history of lordran. she rivaled the crimson chin for the title of most prominent chin ever. she was a pure mage in a game that is extremely hostile to mage builds. she looked like a lizard. i deeply wish i could find screenshots of her but i just spent a hot minute looking for them and couldn't find any. suffice to say she had no business existing. she defeated gwyn, lord of cinder and linked the flame.

she was reincarnated in dark souls 2, and so thotiana iii was born

thotiana iii was even more wretched than her predecessor, and the same was true for thotiana iv in dark souls 3. (thotiana iv actually never finished her journey -- the thotiana lineage is one of mages, and the two princes fight in ds3 is extremely stacked against magic users). thotiana v was summoned into the lands between during my second playthrough of elden ring, she is a frenzy mage and absolutely terrible at everything

the sixth and current iteration of thotiana is the man pictured above -- my boyfriend gave me his ps4, the very same on which the original thotiana was created, after he got a ps5, but because of the way psn accounts work i had to get my own copy of bloodborne and start from scratch. this thotiana (just thotiana, not thotiana vi) is a recreation of the original, designed with as much precision as i could manage four years after the fact. he is actually a viable character because i'm halfway decent at these games by now, but he carries the spirit of his namesake in being an absolute wretch.

thotiana is an absolute fixture in my life. every time i start a new game that has a character creator, i create a new iteration of either thotiana or cheekbones mccoy (my other cursed character from mass effect, i think i have a few pictures of him on here somewhere). the thotianas are one of the few constants in my life and they will always be there to haunt me. i adore them. long live thotiana

👠FASHION SOULS👠 - LOWER CONTINENT

Starter outfit 🌟

Limgrave 🌱

Raya Lucaria 🔮

Caelid 🔥

do u think elden ring speed runs are so fast bc the game is still so new meaning more bugs? (Idk if those runs rely on exploits cuz I’m not trying to spoil myself) or is it like less linear than other fromsoft games or smth ?? like I’ve been watching soulsborne speed runs since i got ER and they’re crazy fast to me but less than an hour seems relatively rare for those. 7 minutes seems so EXTREME lmao

so the thing about speedrunning soulsborne games is that they generally all work the same under the hood, with a few minor differences here and there between the games that allow for more specific tricks. this is why techniques like using the Cat Ring/Hush spell/Silvercat Talisman/etc and quitting out right as you hit the ground to survive lethal falls, wrong warps, and triggering the death plane camera without actually dying to run through unloaded areas are common in all 3 dark souls games, along with bloodborne, sekiro, and demon's souls. the first week or so of speedrunning a new game will usually fall back on these tried and tested techniques to get some obvious sequence breaks before some game-specific trick is discovered that blows the unrestricted any% category wide open.

for Sekiro, this technique was airswimming. for Dark Souls 2, it was parrywalking. for Dark Souls 3, it was the teardrop glitch. all of these glitches require you to perform an extremely precise set of actions at a very specific spot, but reward you with the ability to clip out of bounds and basically just walk (or swim) directly to the final boss. the Elden Ring equivalent to this is called "zips", which let you teleport forward a truly absurd amount of distance, like, literally halfway across the game map in one frame at one point. however, while the first three glitches i mentioned require a fair amount of setup and have to be done in specific places, zips don't and don't, respectively. you perform a zip by holding Block while moving forwards for a very specific amount of frames, and some interaction between the block animation and the walk animation zips you to God knows where. the timing is really difficult to get down, and it feels inconsistent because you need a steady 60fps in a game that gets random lag spikes for fun, but you can do this literally anywhere. this has opened up routing immensely.

before runners figured out how to do zips consistently, the WR route hovered around 30ish minutes and actually involved fighting some enemies. the current sub-7-minute route completely skips most of the game, including getting access to your horse, using zips and a few wrong warps. the route goes like this:

as soon as you leave the starting building, instead of dying to the tutorial boss, zip yourself into the very end of Stormveil Castle and then walk out the back door into Liurnia. side note: if youre playing casually and haven't beaten Godrick yet, the speedrun is now already ahead of you about 30 seconds in

zip from there to the Raya Lucaria bonfire (the pvp hotspot one), then zip from there to the Four Belfries

pick up an Imbued Stonesword Key and use it to open a portal to Crumbling Farum Azula, an extreme endgame area. this teleports you to a platform way the fuck off to the side, giving you a preview of the area like 60 hours before you actually get there

lol just kidding, fast travel and alt+f4 at the right time to perform a wrong warp and respawn at the normal starting spot for CFA

using zips, get from the starting area to [SPOILER]'s boss room. bear in mind that your character has never leveled up (or even sat at a site of grace) and is still using the starting equipment

lol just kidding kill him by zipping out of the arena twice so he falls to his death when the floor unloads under him (have to do this twice because he has two phases)

this teleports you to [SPOILER]. walk 2 feet from your spawn point and perform a zip to skip directly to the final final boss fight, skipping about 10 minutes of running and 2 bosses in the process

perform one final "mega zip" to yeet yourself literally to the farthest possible corner of the world map. if you do it right you'll get pulled back into the fight with the boss you skipped over

but the final final boss is already registered as dead, so you just need to stall for like 5 seconds before the GOD SLAIN message pops up. the route used to do this by quitting out at a specific time but now just deliberately dies to a piledriver from the boss because it's way funnier and doesn't actually lose any time

you spawn in directly in front of [SPOILER]. walk forward 2 feet, press Interact, and stop the timer