I actually really enjoyed the way you spoke of the paintings. I was worried it was just going to be some insulting or enouraging rant in lamens terms but you knew what you were talking about and that made me glad I stopped by.
The one Kalè sells you is pretty great. Holy water pots are easy to get materials for, and they just *annihilate* tombs full of skeletons. I also really like the one sold by the merchant on Mt Gelmir. Volcano pots are such a nice pot to craft, and the materials are stupid easy to get hundreds of in minutes.
Unranked by Rusty: Cookbooks Prayerbooks Ruins Minor Erdtrees Night bosses Dragon bosses Sites of Grace Dung Eater alt names Weapon hit sound effects How each boss plays Mahjong NPCs with dialogue ranked by hot or not Jumping Puzzles Golden Runes Teleport gates Side quests Smithing stones Poison swamps
This would unironically be a goated thing to do... So much it'll be memorialized in RU-vid history. It's almost shameful you even came up with the idea before he did.
Would you consider ranking SKYBOX's in Elden Ring or other souls games? Sometimes they look like paintings that slightly change when viewed from another angle. Basically, you'll be ranking which clouds/ceiling look better.
I think this is my favorite ranking video so far. I wasn't expecting you to judge the art I thought it'd be just the rewards but that was a very pleasant surprise.
These videos if nothing else are both a wonderful source of information and entertainment. The Physik video in particular taught me a lot about some stuff that’s made every subsequent play through more fun. Thank you Rusty!
The Godfrey painting is in the game. While it’s not a quest it’s still a painting in the game. It’s in stormveil through the side entrance where the grafted sion is
Honestly, I think the paintings are some of the coolest things in the game. They force you to test your map knowledge, and I found it really fun to track down the exact location and angle they were taken from.
I love how the caelid artist went to the effort to find a place to paint that is just as hard to get to as it must have been for him waiting for malenia to ruin this continent so that his colour pallete worked
The archway in homing instinct is a very important piece to the painting because the negative space of the arch itself takes the shape of another tombstone. This Tombstone, however, is a beautiful and colorful depiction of later game areas, encouraging the viewer to see opportunity and adventure even through death. This is not only a core mechanic of the soulsborne series (teaching the player about hazards by killing the character with them, thereby encouraging the player not to worry about dying), but also a major plot point in elden ring itself (destined death and those who live in death being the major examples). The painting would not be improved by the removal of the arch. Rather, it would lose all symbolism in favor of scenery.
It would be so cool that you can find the paintings of all the remembrance bosses (most of them already have portraits) and if you interact with them you can relive the boss fight.
I do feel like the archway of the first painting can symbolize a lot of things, archways are after all paths to cross which means it invokes for me visions of starting a journey, of what to expect etc, and if you consider the broken up church and the growing erdtree in the background and the tumbs in the foreground it serves as a perfect reminder of why you're here, the church is broken, and you're here to regrow a tree from scratch, but the way is paved with cadavers The prophecy painting is actually prettily analyzeable by it's title so i'm not gonna bother but yeha the lines on it are nice and again, reminding one of the weary road ahead I agree wiht you that resurrection is pretty bad, and in a way i feel like it's one of the most interesting to analyze cuz you can see it as both a promotional picture of the academy but that also reflects a lot of it's failures, because it's more interested in the technical than in the meaning, which is also the big weakness of the resurrection that rennala provides, and has always failed to grow unlike the erdtree in the background You're pretty right about the redmane castle, but again it invokes the history of caelid and the redmanes themselves, now ruins that used to stand tall (hence the fortress fading away in the background) Champion's song is literally a warning about the fact that in this realm, champions just die, the thing in painting is a mausoleum, and also volcano manor actively hunts down champions for their power, it's as close to an anti war painting elden ring could have probably, the banner on top of the mausoleum and mount gelmnir being in game the site of many a massacre are hints of that Flightless bird i dont really know, the closests i could get to a meaning would be basically what ressurection wants to be, an elevation, ascending of the tarnished through the erdtree, like a flightless bird Sorcerer doesnt need that much analysis to a point across as a melencholic painting of how things used to be i think Anyway turns out it's really hard to find the paintings in good quality And yeha this is obviously overreading in shit but look, people have ways to invest in shit, you make tier lists about everything, i ascribe meaning to everything (i'm still not done wiht my music degree gimmie a couple years to become bitter about ti)
The arch in Homecoming was so close to mimicking the tombstones with its negative space, but it's a gothic arch and the tombstones are round. If it were intentional, then it'd be saying that the Minor Erdtree is basically an epitaph. Maybe they are? Their appearance was a sign that the age of plenty was dead.
I say this with outmost sincerity but no matter how absurd the countdowns get I always tune in because the writing of these lists remains insightful and highly entertaining. Really love the analysis of that Redmane painting, for instance.
I think a problem with the paintings is that, playing on a TV from a couch, they're somewhat small to look at. It's hard to pick up details when you're trying to figure out where they're from. The one from the weeping peninsula, for example.... I had never noticed until now that it has the starting mausoleum drawn in it as a reference point. All I saw was "a waterfall and what I THINK is Stormveil in the distance"
The nice thing about the great hood is it gives you an intelligence boost without having to wear the glintstone crown. It also looks less stupid than the crown.
Imagine me saying this in my best Rusty impression: A meta rank of him ranking all his ranking videos and dogging on his own scripts and commentary seems like the kind of video that would make the goose lay the golden egg while simultaneously becoming so self-referential that there no longer becomes a self to reference. Ever wonder what happens when the Ouroboros finishes eating itself? That's what a meta-ranking video would be like.
Uh, my guy? That art commentary was terrific: glib and to the point but on the nose, like it should be. This is the one that's made me sub, and I don't know if that says more about the video or my own life choices.
I don’t think I actually collected any painting rewards. I remember getting one, trying to find the location, failing because the icon in your menu is supremely unhelpful, and then just kinda forgetting about it thereafter.
I adore the Homing Instinct, for the dark humor it contains and for the composition, which you didn't appreciate. The painting is basically about death, posing that every living being is instinct with a longing for transcending into afterlife. Imagine someone has dug you a hole in the ground and says: "Its time to go where you belong, time to return home, into a loving embrace of the earth". One would say that by submitting yourself to this longing for death you return to your roots, and it is then the arch behind the tombstones guide our attention towards the erdtree where the Golden Order piles its deceased citizens. It's just beautiful. There are many wandering ghosts in the Lands Between. Descriptions we get for their clothing and items inform us that they are searching for smth but never explicitly say what it is they are looking for. I believe these ghosts are guided by the homing instinct in the pursuit of a home (death) under the roots. The Resurrection painting hints on painter's knowledge of Rennala's obsession with respawning her dead "children". Which is interesting 'cause she was locked up in the library and noone was supposed to see that madness. The painter also recognised the significance of Radahn's festival and depicted the event in his Redmain painting.
The use of the word continuation in the commentary on the first painting was a bit of a giveaway on your educational pursuits. I went hard into STEM, the small number of external topics was to give my brain a break.
Rusty, with each video you seem to grow more depressed. I like your content and I hope you will sort out all of your problems. Thank you for your work)
These videos are one of the things I love most about you. You could actually rank blades of grass for 45 minutes and I would be excited to watch it. You makes these kinds of videos super fun!
the harp bow is gonna save my ass soon, im doing a series called "Elden ring as the DND classes" and i was so terrified of bard lol. Thanks for the help Rusty
I think there is a reason on why no painting just shows the Erdtree in all its might. The paintings you find mustve survived for quite a while since society collapsed centuries ago. And yet the spirits of the artists still linger on. So what kind of artist would linger on that long? Avant garde showoffs that told themself: "NO, I wont paint the cornerstone of our society and belief, I wanna paint gravestones!" So these paintings survived out of spite.
if you put double slash on a nagakiba and add a blood infusion you just have better rivers of blood -fire damage(and you could just use bloodflame blade instead, the longer blade makes it actually stagger enemies unlike the blood only part of RoB)
The resurrection painting is also interesting because it shows the academy being higher than the minor erdtree, perhaps symbolizing the greatness intelligence has over faith.
While the concept of ranking the in-game paintings is quite novel, I don't think you did the most superb job ranking them imo. In fact I don't think there was a single point where I agreed with your ranking barring the Flightless Bird. I feel like you didn't spend enough time dwelling on the significance of the paintings in regards to the deeper lore and instead relied on a more opinionated lens to analyze them through. For example, Homing Instinct is one of the absolute best paintings in the game hands down. The archway creates a hard stop in order to guide your eyes from the tombstones to the erdtree. While you could say something pretentious about the nature of death and existentialism, to me it's quite obviously conveying an entirely different meaning. In the world of elden ring --before Marika removed the rune of Death from the Ring itself-- it's heavily implied that the souls of the departed were returned to the erdtree to be reincarnated once again through the rite of erdtree burial. From this, I can gather either two perspectives. It's either simply conveying the nature of death in the lands between or if you want to spice things up it hints at the all-encompassing nature of the erdtree, so overpowering that even in death the soul is drawn to its incandescence. With this in mind, even the very name of the painting, "Homing Instinct", holds deep significance to the painting itself. So as you'd imagine, I was appalled to see it ranked so low. Now I know that this video has a rather sarcastic undertone to it (Or at least I hope so because if not some of these "criticisms" made would be kind of embarrassing), but sometimes it really just felt like there was no actual passion to the reviewing, and whenever there was it seemed so misguided. Paintings aside though most of the reviews for the reward items were pretty spot on, so props for that one.
i'm just gonna dump my commendation here, consider this a rating of sorts: first of all; the way you write and perform is fantastic! it's funny, AND informative. second; i never zone out during your videos, and i've got ADD so you KNOW that shit is fire. third: the editing is great, your fashion souls is always on point, and your analysis is brutally honest without being genuinely hateful. best souls-content i've ever had the pleasure of watching. easy S-tier.
I've never played Elden Ring or any Dark Souls games, but I think the games, especially Elden Ring are graphically stunning & the difficulty makes it fun to watch a stream or video of someone playing it. I've watched pretty much all your videos about this game at this point. I think maybe it's your sarcasm & dry wit that keeps me watching these. And when I'm bored, they make for decent entertainment.
The Redmane one being right next to a completely unique enemy that has more health than half the endgame bosses and a unique attack makes me appreciate it more.
I'd love to see weapon categories ranked by their moveset and damage type, I think it would change from the usual formulae of ranking "Top Ten best Weapon"
Rusty, any chance we can get a ranking of the starting classes and how they'd ask someone out? Because the chess video was when I got really invested in these videos. I loved it.
My next run through, I'm gonna try to play as Vyke. I just got the bandi figure in the mail from Gamestop and it's fucking beautiful. Though I hope at some point they'll make it to where you can submit your character design that's in elden ring and have it made into an actual figure. Yeah it'll cost a lot of money (probably), but for me it's worth it.
I lowkey wanna watch a ranking of seats and chairs now. Could be funny to see whatever comfortable thrones you can find and whatever other random surfaces you could place a butt on down to some pointy stick that some poor bastard got impaled on.
I got a sense of smug superiority from the resurrection painting. The Erdtree in the background is *almost* but not quite as tall as the painter's version of Raya Lucaria. Like they're trying to brag "Yeah, the Golden Order is fine but we're better".
It's okay, Rusty. I hate college too. And I didn't even go. I told my mom I wasn't going to college because it cost too much in high school and she just shrugged and was like "yeah, wish I had figured that out before I tried to get my Masters degree that I'm still paying 20 years later that did nothing for me. You do you, kid."
the first one is that death leads to the erdtree: the arch represents a gateway, and the minor tree represents the erdtree, and as well know, death actually leads to the erdtree
ok you have a lot of ranking ideas but what if you made a reference to your old bloodborne video and make a creepiest areas in elden ring vid. I think theres actually a lot of fun choices there though actually. Caelid, maybe some of the catacombs, dominula, the frenzied flame village and ailing village, the war torn mount gelmir, volcano manor covered in blood and just a medieval yharnam-eque city, the cursed dragon hybrid dwelling of castle morne with hanging bodies and more of them forming a whole entire hill, the ant caves and nokron which is filled with pale ghouls, the subterranean shunning grounds littered with rats feeding on corpses and cursed monsters covered in horns like a mutant demon, the shaded castle with its ghostly seeming horsemen and poison swallowing the fortress whole and covered in zombies and the fucking revenants. So many options, and I probably missed some other ones.
I just leveled my faith up to 43 last night, I feel attacked 😂 Though not as badly as everything that has been absolutely chewed up by Miquella's rings of light on the halo scythe... I wanted to do an easy run for my 3rd character playthrough, and this is pretty much working. Just need to speck a different damage type weapon for when I get to radabeast...
