Hollow Victories

I really like how the Elden Ring DLC ends, and I want to try and explain why. Or at least I want to write this down so that I can stop thinking about it for a while.

In the main game the overall attitude towards the ending (s, plural) were pretty negative on release.

Understandable - while I personally would be excited to sit in a big chair underneath a big tree, it didn’t make for the most thrilling of conclusions for (what could be) an 120+ hour experience full of trials, triumphs, and tears. If you look at responses from the time there’s a lot of “oh - first time doing a souls game?” shit - typical pithy videogame fandom stuff; patently untrue for a series that tends to leave you full of bittersweet emotions and no end of questions at the close*. Elden Ring’s endings stand out in the series for unsatisfying they are - the various threads of the game grabbed and woven back into the cyclical narrative without too much ceremony and a mostly identical voiceover. I was cool with it though, I was like, “ok look that’s fine - I’ll get further clarity and closure later when the DLC comes out”. 

This is truly where spoilers lie ahead, but I did not get clarity or closure in the DLC - but I did get a little depressed.

*I’m not going to link these because there are so many - but “uh first time much” is such an insane attitude to have when people have literally built youtube careers doing souls ending: explained videos.

The extra shades are for sharing

My favourite aspect of soulsborne DLC is how they tend to act as extensions of an argument within the main game that forces you to reinterpret the events and re-evaluate your relationship with the setting. At its simplest (and most explicitly ambitious) you have Dark Souls’s’s Artorias of the Abyss DLC, where you are thrown through time to actually do the shit people think Artorias did. This concludes in an epic, setting-defining fight against Manus but, significantly more importantly, it irrevocably changes your relationship to Sif (who even gains a new cutscene post-DLC) and to the dwindling age of fire and its habitual mythologising of (and deliberately lying about) history.

In Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters you are exposed to an escalating, uncomfortable truth: this shit sucks, everything you have been doing sucks, everyone you have ever known sucks, and that the web of seemingly conflicting interests that texture the main game are all united in a singular, defining, desperately hidden sin that super sucks. Wonderfully bleak, it makes explicit connections between the factions and forces you to look at the setting as a series of tragedies that were allowed to happen by the complicity and callousness of the powerful - as well as highlighting the audacity of Yahrnam society’s mythologising of (and deliberately lying about) horrific events and dangerously flawed people.

I won’t go through the rest, but I want to emphasise how thoughtful the additional content is, how clearly they are seeking to add interpretation rather than just “more stuff” to the main game. If you find yourself in a Fromsoft DLC you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not look at how it impacts your relationship with the core text - they are honest-to-god re-litigations of your actions and your relationships, and they often take really odd, interesting angles on the conflicts within the main game that tend to make the world you were in just a little darker and a little worse.

All of them do this, but this one broke the rules a little and has been on my mind a lot. Apologies if we get a bit ramble-y.

I have never been more embarrassed in my life than I was when I was making this image

In the Shadow of the Erdtree when we finally defeat Miquella we are left with a gate made of corpses and a single memory from what was once the kindly demigod. Nothing else. 

Our companions throughout this journey are now dead or missing, their lives burnt out as kindling for Miquella’s ascension, and the story has abruptly stopped; the last possible thing left for you to do is to collect a flower at the corpse of St Trina and return without ceremony to the Lands Between to go and finish what you need to finish - rise, Tarnished, and become the Elden Lord etc. etc. etc. 

I was pretty unsubtle in choosing to say ‘Miquella’ is the end fight, but he isn’t. We never fight Miquella, the closest we come to contacting Miquella at all is when he deigns to embrace us briefly and steals our heart, but I think a great question posed is: why would we even bother fighting Miquella? Miquella (at this point) is a completely empty existence, having carved away every bit of body and spirit to prepare himself for, what he believes to be, a truly selfless godhood. His existence is a parallel to Marika’s, and a prelude to the same great and catastrophic failure to shape the world to a singular will. 

Who we actually fight at the end is Radhan, the legendary general we fought in Caelid, but returned to his younger form to take the place of Miquella’s consort. But are we? This Radhan is a homunculus, the tired spirit of a deeply loved brother stuffed inside a fleshy prison of another, less cared-for demigod. Radhan was chosen for his “strength and kindness”, but here he is lifeless and devoid of personality, a tool of pure violence piloted by a now uncaring Miquella. 

But was Mohg, the vessel of Radhan, not also beloved? The most genial and wise character we encounter is an old vassal of Mohg, Annsbach - if we can’t bring ourselves to care for the Mohg dynasty or Mohg himself, then is this man’s love not enough for us to see value in the person Miquella used and desecrated? If the world Miquella wishes to create is one of compassion then why are the harms caused to these characters - and others - necessary, and the justification for causing those harms beyond any kind of reproach and isolated from any kind of question of reparative or restorative justice? 

The Miquella that we encounter doesn’t embody kindness or love or compassion, but detachment. The mortal struggles that happen on his doorstep and the corpses that pile up around him mean nothing, and in his abandonment of everything remotely human his ascension renders him as distant and inhospitable as the stars. We cannot ever really fight Miquella or get an ending from Miquella because he’s already long gone, and our journey up to this point has been one of grieving what he once was and what others thought he could have been*. 

So where does that leave us, the victor?

 

Miquella reframes and mirrors the player experience so that the desire of the character and the desire of the person playing are the same: what we do, how we feel, how we connect, and how we value and interpret the world is as important here as it is in real life. We cannot reduce our journey to ‘combat’ to ‘hitting things until they die’ to ‘Cool Boss Guide 27: Guaranteed Easiest Way To Beat’. Miquella did this - he’s a Power Gamer. He’s solved the lore. He’s a huge fan, piloting the sickest warrior to win. 

You are playing against a character who is just as cynical a reflection of the player as Slave Knight Gael was in Dark Souls 3’s Ringed City. We, the players, are under the microscope here in a way that we never were in the main game. It’s uncomfortable, and deeply lacking in catharsis because we can't really "win" - even if the game let us fight Miquella for real. 

*Poor Moore, man. That guy really deserved a fucking break.

 I love these stupid guys, fan since DAY 1 RIDE OR DIE FOR THE CURSE FROGS

Our power, our premium-brand player-controlled agency is clear in the fight against Leda: according to this world we are strong and we can affect it in ways the other characters we talk to and journey with can only dream about. We can dream in ways these characters cannot even comprehend, our ambitions greater than the gods themselves. Miquella shows us what the player-focused idea of power and agency looks like reified - the embodiment of the player who solved the game and all the elements in it, the player who put themselves above the scenery and the mechanics and the stories to become a god. So what we get from this ending is a pretty simple, personal message: enjoy the journey, you’ll have more fun if you do. 

We can see this theme played out by characters all throughout the DLC: Messmer is stuck prosecuting a genocide that will never end, Midra is stuck waiting for an ending he failed to bring around and no longer wants to strive for, Thiollier exists to die, his only drive a suicidal one that may bring him closer to St Trina (it is a weirdly beautiful touch that in Thiollier’s quest we're even able to die better than the characters around us), Igon’s entire world consisting of an impossible, doomed, obsessive hunt. 

We, the players, the people actually interacting with the game, need to be better than our endings and our eternal gods, we need to be able to enjoy our brief journeys through the Lands Between or Yharnam or our actual real lives - we need to embrace contexts, histories, people, what they care about, and how we can care for them. We need to learn the lessons shown and not get caught spending our whole lives chasing something that will always be out of reach. The souls games have always been hopeful, they've always been about a positive, affirming personal journey for the player even in an increasingly lost and terrible world, but in Shadow of the Erdtree we're left with a stunning snap back into our reality that threw me for a bit of a loop and forced me to confront a bunch of thoughts and feelings. It's weird, and well crafted, and it made me feel strangely empty.

Endings happen all the time in ways we can’t even comprehend until it happens to us. Miquella's last words are "I'll make the world a gentler place". I don't know if I can do that, but I know that I can pay attention to others, to be present for them, to care for them and to hope that the way I travelled through the world helped more than if I did or didn't reach my goal.