It's easy to glance at FromSoftware's last decade of Dark And Darker Gold games and call the studio a one trick pony. It's always the same tragically immortal player, the same third person combat, the same broad themes and monsters.
But rather than a lack of imagination, I see a focused, disciplined imagination. There's a reason that so few of the Souls-likes sprouting up in FromSoftware's wake don't stick with me.
They might feature a depressed knight and a backstabbing dragon, but FromSoft's interpretation of these motifs is sharper and more memorable than the rest by a mile. Hollow Knight's ability to make me care about cartoon bugs is the closest any game's gotten.
I look at most dragons and think: OK, cool, badass. Dungeons and Dragons, sure. I look at a FromSoftware dragon and think: Jesus, what happened to their fucking life?!?! (I catch my image in the OBS stream monitor.) What happened to my life?
The same new way of seeing follows a person through every From game after their first Gaping Dragon moment, and so Elden Ring's mountain-sized, crimson lightning-tossing dragon doesn't just read as a dragon to me.
It reads as its own novella written in scales, and even a couple seconds of trailer footage has my mind racing. Unless FromSoftware has failed us all, I will be watching 20-minute dissections of every dragon in Elden Ring 10 years from buy Dark And Darker Gold now. All eyes on you, VaatiVidya.
