I'll concede immediately that the premise of the title of this post is flawed. Arguably, Elden Ring has a sequel, with Nightreign.
While I've been doing my best to follow the lore of Nightreign as best as I can, I have a certain allergy to live-service style games - I play WoW, which is kind of the exception that proves the rule, as I don't want to get sucked into the weaponized FOMO that such models of gaming use to keep you stuck with them (WoW got its hooks into me twenty years ago, when such models were far rarer).
Still, I'm also given to understand that Nightreign is sort of apocryphal - imagining an alternate timeline for the Lands Between. The lore that it explores - again, as I understand it - is less about fleshing out more about Elden Ring's lore, but more about exploring the individual characters' stories within that lore.
Naturally, this is all up for debate - the nature of FromSoft lore tends to be that any aspect of the lore is open to interpretation, to the extent that sometimes I wonder if they put references to lore that intentionally contradicts itself: for instance, I wonder if the Nox and the Shamans are both off-shoots of the Numen, or if Marika's past as a shaman is actually inconsistent with her being a Numen.
I think one could potentially read Nightreign as what would happen with Ranni's Rain of Stars ending, which has apparently been the most popular ending people have gone for when playing Elden Ring (the fact that it's the one with the most involved quest chain does help it feel like the "truest" ending). But maybe not.
Let me make this clear: Elden Ring's lore is my favorite FromSoft has given us. I like it better than the lore of Dark Souls and Demon Souls, and even though I adore Bloodborne, I think I like Elden Ring's lore better.
Now, that might be in part because I got on at the ground floor with Elden Ring, playing it only a month or so after it came out (the only reason I delayed was because I thought I could only buy either the PS4 or PS5 version, and hoped to upgrade my console, but then realized I could get it for both as a single purchase). I never beat Dark Souls, getting stuck on Ornstein and Smough (I got much farther in DSIII, only leaving Midir, Gael, and Soul of Cinder - the latter out of fear that it'd lock me into NG+ if I beat it).
But having played Dark Souls III, I wonder if there's a message there about sequels. DSIII is a game I read as an allegory for franchises and sequels losing their potency over time. The world has constantly been refreshed and rebooted as countless Lords of Cinder have reignited the First Flame, and you can feel the entire world straining under the ashes of an Age of Fire prolonged far, far beyond its intended period. Even the first game shows a world struggling with stagnation due to Gwyn's linking of the fire, but while that game perhaps leaves open some interpretation that following in his footsteps might at least grant the world some good times once again, the final game truly makes the linking of the flame feel futile.
Both Dark Souls and Elden Ring are about the dangers of stagnation, of trying to keep a good thing going past its time. That being said, I don't know that Elden Ring is as primarily concerned with stagnation as a natural inevitability.
The truth is that there's so little we know for certain about how Marika's age turned sour. Shadow of the Erdtree suggests that the seeds of its downfall were there from the beginning, the madness of Metyr and her Two Fingers setting things on a catastrophic course, and the cycle of hatred and violence and revenge making freedom-fighters into tyrants.
Still, my reading is that the most important event in the timeline that is never addressed directly is when the Erdtree burns down the first time. That might surprise you if you hadn't heard this argument before, but basically, Leyndell is already filled with ash when we get there, and the tree we see looks more like a ghostly spirit than a physical organism made of wood. There are references to Marika distributing the Erdtree's sap as a blessing in some earlier age of abundance, but with the tree in its incorporeal state, its tangible, direct benefits have literally dried up, making the world's devotion to Marika an article of faith alone.
I suspect this is also what precipitates Godfrey's exile and his replacement by Radagon, which would neatly tie the two Elden Lords to their respective eras.
If we assume that the player is a completionist, finishing both the base game and the DLC and defeating every boss, we can probably check off most of the key figures of Elden Ring's pantheon. Miquella is dead. Radahn is dead twice over. Mohg is dead. Morgott is dead. The last of the Fire Giants is dead. Placidusax is dead.
But who is still alive?
Well, Ranni, at least in her doll body, is still alive. Even if we don't go for the Age of Stars ending, I don't believe there's any way to kill her.
Marika might still be alive. If you get either of the two special endings, the Lord of Frenzied Flame or the Age of Stars, she seems to pass away (more peacefully in the latter). But if you use any of the Mending Rune endings, or the Age of Fracture, Marika is presumably still a god and still the vessel of the Elden Ring, though likely bereft of agency similarly to how she is when we find her.
Interestingly, though, I wonder if, even if Marika persists, if Radagon is dead. His body becomes the sword wielded by the Elden Beast, and we don't see it change back. But his body is Marika's body, so... It's not clear.
Rykard is dead... probably. Arguably, he was dead before the game started when he fed himself to the God-Devouring Serpent, but that allowed him to become a part of it, and a rather dominant part of it. We see Lady Tannith eating what remains of him in an act that I imagine is meant to allow him to live on within her. As Rykard says, "a serpent never dies," which is actually a weird thing to say because serpents for sure die in the real world. But the God-Devouring Serpent is, I'd guess, linked to the idea of an Ouroboros, the snake devouring itself that symbolically represents eternity. I suspect that Rykard's dominance of the serpent's will might be over, the the serpent itself is probably still around in some form (I wouldn't be shocked if Tannith transformed after consuming it. We can kill her for some special loot while she's doing this, and fight off her Crucible Knight bodyguard, but I'm not as convinced that that event would be treated as canonical).
Malenia is also an interesting story: the hardest "superboss" in the base game (I haven't gone back to fight her again, but boy after fighting Consort Radahn, I suspect she'd feel easier,) there also seems to be some implication that she's not truly dead, with the Aeonian bloom she leaves behind perhaps giving her a path to rebirth. (How literal should we take it that her second phase calls her the Goddess of Rot? We don't get a "God Slain" victory toast when she falls, but is that because we haven't actually killed the goddess?)
Melina is also in an interestingly ambiguous position. Ironically, despite the state of the world in it, the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending quite emphatically portrays Melina as alive, because she's on her way to put you down. (Is she the Gloam-Eyed Queen? Possibly, but I had some other theories about how she got that indigo eye). However, if we don't have the Frenzied Flame, she uses herself as kindling to burn the Erdtree, seemingly perishing in this conflagration.
(I've never tried this, but if we want to be cheeky, I think we can have her burn herself to burn the Erdree and then get the Flame of Frenzy, which I believe removes the stinger on the end of the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending.)
Still, I'm not even convinced that Melina is actually dead even if she does burn herself. Again, there's strong evidence that the Erdtree burned once before, when it was still a physical tree that granted tangible sap. I think it's very possible that Melina already performed this role once, which might be why she's so emphatic about not worrying ourselves about the role she has to play. The Flame of Ruin that she is kindling is not the spirit-burning Frenzied Flame, after all, so maybe she's literally fine (though we never see her again after she kindles the flame). Sure, if she were around, she ought to still be around to threaten the Lord of Frenzied Flame, so... Hm.
(If we're considering a full clear canon, we might imagine that the Tarnished does save her by using the Frenzied Flame but then uses Miquella's Needle to cleanse themself, leaving her pissed off that they did something so dangerous but without the need to slay them.)
Rellana's alive - a character that I think we are truly unable to kill, even though we fight her in a boss fight. While she's in a sadly pathetic state of mind, one wonders if Radagon's defeat might break her out of her funk, and if Ranni has truly ascended to godhood, I could imagine one of the first items on her agenda would be to restore her mother to her former state of glory (though we should also probably expect Ranni to be a distant and non-interventionist deity).
Friendly NPCs that survive the game are somewhat few in number. Kenneth Haight and Nepehli Loux are still around, now presiding over Limgrave (along with Gatekeeper Gostoc). Jarbairn is still there in Jarburg with the surviving Warrior Jars. Boc the Seamster survives if you convince him not to undergo a rebirth ritual. Selen is... kinda sorta alive if you complete her quest and side with her, though if you go against her, I believe Witch-Hunter Jerren survives as well. Other than a whole bunch of merchants, though, that... uh, that might be everyone. (Oh! Sage Gowry as well, whatever the hell he is.)
Of course, listing the surviving NPCs is hardly going to tell us whether you could make a sequel. If there was one, it might be ages later, and the NPCs that we know might be long dead, even just of age (assuming that the end of Marika's age means that that happens now).
The question is what threads could be picked up.
Godwyn feels like a huge dangling thread. Many assumed the DLC was going to focus on him (though had it done so, I feel that there would be an equal if not greater contingent wondering what was going on with Miquella). While his horrifyingly distorted body is kind of just a stationary object, it is his soul that is said to be dead, while his body yet lives.
What... uh, what does that mean? Is that what it means to "live in death?" Is soulless life what the Deathroot is and spreads?
Perhaps I'm conflating the works of George R. R. Martin too much, but I feel like Godwyn plays a similar role to Rhaegar from A Song of Ice and Fire. Rhaegar comes off as the most ideally heroic would-be protagonist of the series, only he died like fifteen years before the books start. Like Rhaegar, Godwyn seemed to be an honorable man, turning the dragons from enemies into allies, and was seemingly universally beloved. His diplomacy with the dragons and his horrific assassination with the curse that spread from it, but also his apparent offspring and lineage, mean that Godwyn touches a ton of the lore for a posthumous character.
It always seemed he ought to have some greater presence in the lore, and that he deserved some time in the spotlight.
Of course, the other figure utterly shrouded in mystery is the Gloam-Eyed Queen, only ever mentioned in item descriptions and never mentioned (to my knowledge) by NPCs. The GEQ is the ultimate "center of the conspiracy corkboard" figure (I believe Gwyn's banished son held a similar place until we fought him as the Nameless King in DSIII - kind of the Malenia of that game). Said to have been "defeated" but not explicitly slain, From's got the narrative elbow room to have her show up if they want.
Another figure who remains mysterious but I think gets far less discussion is Renna, the Snow Witch who mentored Ranni, and whose appearance the doll is based on. Given the structure of her name, it would not be unlikely to find that Renna was a Carian, perhaps the mother of Rellana and Rennala and thus Ranni's grandmother. Or, perhaps, given that her tower is one of the Three Sisters, perhaps she is Ranni's aunt, and sister to Rellana and Rennala.
Hell, she could be the Gloam-Eyed Queen.
The truth is that an Elden Ring sequel could introduce a lot of its own new lore. We have seen some interesting new ideas brought forth in Nightreign, especially with the Forsaken Hollows DLC giving us the Balancers and the Dreglord. Again, I don't know how seriously to take Nightreign's canonicity, especially when it brings in figures like the Nameless King and Artorias from Dark Souls (I'm given to understand these are more like world bosses, rather than actual Lords of Night).
The mass and breadth of Elden Ring lore is fitting given how huge the game's world is. At the same time, though, I wonder if the creators at FromSoft might be burned out on it, having had to come up with so much stuff for it.
Only Dark Souls ever got direct sequels (again, not counting Nightreign) of From's souls-like games, and like I said before, I think that the third entry is itself an argument against sequels. But I'd still be really excited to see what they did with a revisit to the Lands Between (or Yharnam/wherever a Bloodborne II would take place).
No comments:
Post a Comment