Over the past few years I have enjoyed (I say with a bit of sarcasm and sincerity) some of the well-known games of FromSoftware. From Dark Souls to Elden Ring, these games are often acclaimed for two things: 1) unapologetic difficulty (signified in the mocking pop-up text “YOU DIED”) and 2) atmospheric lore that receives very little exposition. My gateway to these games came through other cult classics that imitated these elements and remixed them with other gameplay modes and mechanics: Hollow Knight, Salt and Sacrifice, Ender Lilies, etc. In my most recent foray into the Lands Between of Elden Ring, I was struck by a central conceit in all of these games: their setting in the post-destruction of a decadent world.
Perhaps it is exactly because Elden Ring had so often been called a beautiful game in my exposure that caused this realization to sink in so deeply or perhaps it is this particular social-cultural moment in our own world, but as I stepped out of the opening cemetery area into the open landscapes of Limgrave, I was struck by how beautiful the sight was, but I also noted that it was beauty in the midst of great decay. Not only are there hanging bodies, which may or not be the dead, but are definitely tortured, but there were ruins everywhere. Partially collapsed edifices of a former age of grandeur function as a kind of spice of the landscape. As one wanders through the ruins, it quickly becomes clear that not only were these structures massive, but the people who built and used them must have been much larger as well. The military forces of any given regional war lord in this once united land begin to appear the small and petty forces of the small and petty bosses that one defeats along the journey.
Take, for example, Godrick the Grafted. Godrick is the first major boss players are likely to encounter and he was my first major challenge. His soldiers were the first enemies my character dispatched. (I avoided the initial Tree Sentinel boss because it seemed ill-advised to fight a large calvary man when I had just stepped out of the grave.) At first my character could take down one of Godrick’s men with a sneaky backstab and a couple follow up strikes, but it was not long before the sneaky backstab would take down a soldier. I learned of Godrick himself from a number of characters and their accounting of him continually mentioned his “grafting”. A local noble I met criticized him harshly stating that he hardly qualified to even rule, despite his lineage from the former “golden” lord. The critique asserted Godrick’s own smallness. I discovered what all this meant upon walking into the courtyard before Godrick’s throne room: Godrick had attempted to make himself large like his ancestors and those past people by cutting up the bodies of other people and attaching their body parts to himself, a process he called grafting. Even with his numerous arms and numerous weapons, though, he remained quite a bit smaller than even the throne he supposedly used. Limgrave and its ruler are a pale shadow of the former glory of this once great society. Not only that, but in his desire to become great, he became a twisted monstrosity that bore no resemblance to the splendor of the former age of prosperity.
This pattern is true throughout the lands I’ve visited in FromSoftware titles. An age of glory gave way to an age of complacency or decadence, a tragedy occurred, and the world as it now exists is not only a pale shadow of its one-time glory, but has become a twisted, monstrous shadow of that glory. It is an image that springs to my mind often in the US, perhaps pointing to the beginning of a turn from Ross Douthat’s “decadence”. In middle America, in the places not experiencing great economic revival or continued economic prosperity, empty, run-down buildings spot or dominate the landscape. People lounge or walk listlessly in streets. Occasionally loose animals can be seen roaming around. Stories from these locales show the same: drug overdose deaths rise, full employment remains elusive in spite of continuing demand for workers, people have less hope for the future, fewer young people are pursuing education, and most Americans believe some version of a horror story awaits on the other side of the 2024 elections. (Moreover, one presidential candidate’s vulgarity and disregard for law and custom is perhaps more than a bit reflective of Godrick and his own vulgarities, disregard for responsibility, and pursuit of self-aggrandizement…) Mayhap, the desolation of the post-decadent society does not await us, but I have found myself wondering whether FromSoft’s success with these titles may have a little to do with their possible prescience for a future many may instinctually predict in our inner selves.
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