Elden Ring - It's probably fine 

I feel like From Software did a fantastic job making the Crystallians fit smoothly in the Lands Between. They never seemed out of place in the narrative and worldbuilding, at least to me. It speaks to their ability to creatively utilize existing material in new and interesting ways while retaining its identity

@@Gakulon With how crystal-heavy the setting already is, it was the best place they could've fit them in.

Makes me considerate the existence of Godefroy, one of the most heavily criticised boss fight in all ER... It was put just because the lore demanded it, and that was a suitable place? Or it was a repeated boss whose developers decided to give him a backstory?

You know what, I actually think bottom-up design is more important for a game as the games should prioritize 'gameplay' before the 'story'. This doesn't have to be the case for every game but this philosophy is just what Fromsoft mostly design their games with for so long and many people love this approach. To me it always felt like the stories of souls games were made up later and wasn't the priority.

I think that a balance between aspects that are largely explored in the lore and others that are much more vague helps making the world feel "real". Different granularity levels help immersion.

I can only think of the spin attack

That's it, I knew they felt familiar but wasn't sure what. Their skinny stature is also really similar

@@darkwhispersstories47 The one that throws discs is also similar to their shield throw move they can do if you stay far away for too long.

​@@darkwhispersstories47They have a wide sweep move too I think

Even those have more variety in their moves lol

They were 🗿 before 🗿even was a thing

Exactly why I like them.

lol they’re so out of place that it’s funny as hell.

​@@EchoStylesTheYveltalAre you sure? What if Elden Ring takes place in the future?

​@@Gakulonyes sir. Moai.

This. Probably with the exception of Bloodborne, most of the Souls games seem to feature the player cleaning up the messy parts at the end of one cycle to usher in another. The cyclical lore and custodial nature of the player is really something. I forgot DS2 allows you to end the curse at least for yourself so that’s something too I guess

@@alexanderbowlby4568 But then 3 basically tells you Wolnir hunted you down if you did that and killed you to melt your crowns into his.

@@vitriolicAmaranth I did not know that! So all your efforts get relegated into some bling for a joke boss

@@alexanderbowlby4568 Pretty much. It's weird how disrespectful base DaS3 feels toward DaS2 (ESPECIALLY with Wolnir) when the only thing wrong with the latter was that it was ostensibly a sequel to a game with which it had very little to do (and the graphical downgrade and false advertisement thing that kicked off the hate train for it that lasted several years- but that's not even a problem with the game as a product, it's a problem with bandai namco's scummy advertising), and then how Ringed City was the complete opposite and felt like a love letter to 2.

Unless you help Ranni lol

And give more insight on how the omens were hated, but their design really is the best part about them

They're Capra Demons with a new skin and name - an example of an enemy that was made and then inserted into the game rather than an enemy designed to fulfil a narrative need within this particular title.

@@skachor That's speculation though. The the whole Omen thing is really fleshed out as was their role society so Omen Killers might have existed ni the design and draft process before they knew they would re-use the capra demon. I don't think they had the Capra Moveset lying around and THEN thought that Omen Killers should be a thing, personally. If the lore idea came first and then they use existing game mechanics to fill that up it's still technically top down design because the lore and fluff came before.

@knightloltrec no its not. Play the games

@@skachor yes they are. play the game.

Smough Town just made this connection in another video and went into some theorizing about the connection and what it might mean, I was wondering if Zullie had seen that because its a deadringer for the Golem’s design

If Hawkshaw's color theory video is anything to go by, the red hue of the cloaks they wear may literally be the thing that gives them life.

@@endermage77 I saw the video but I don't think that piece of fabric would be that powerful, especially because I think Crystallians have an inorganic life far more strange that any Elden Ring could affect.

It’s likely a signifier of their creator. They wear a red cape because their creator did. Also because their creator put it on them.

This is kind of a shot in the dark; but it could represent scarlet rot. My only reason for thinking this is due to the past rot civilization int lake of rot being under a glint stone sky under the Reia Lucaria Academy (presumably built atop the glintstone Also the fact that the rotten crystalians exist, but that could also easily be explained by scarlet rot being able to infect non-organic substances like the land of Caelid

Building on what others have said, it's not so much "the only thing giving them life" as it is something to "aid" them. A little bit of red, to balance our their blue nature. The lore does specifcally state that the thought processes, their "cogitations" are basically fundamentally alien to a human perspective; their point of view is fundamentally different to a human's - which makes sense. They are crystal constructs, possibly crafted by some ancient hand. They don't do much - just sit around. They don't cooperate really with anyone. There is no outright mention of them being on friendly terms with any faction, even if you could make a case that they are somewhat amicable to sorcerors due to their locations. Many sorcerors seek understanding of the "primeval current" some mystic force or font of sorcerous power. The Crystalians natural talent for crystal sorceries displays their innate understanding/connection to it. Presumably many sorcerors have tried to communicate with the Crystalians. I think the red cloaks are either gifts or an attempt by one side of this attempt at communication to actually communicate. Perhaps the sorcerors gifted red cloaks to the Crystalians to establish a friendly relationship with them, as well as balance out their natures a little bit. To bring the Crystalians just that much closer to humans. Or perhaps the Crystalians took the cloaks up themselves in an attempt to reciprocate and understand a human mindset. Surely human minds are just as unfathomable and mysterious to these entities of Crystal as their minds are as alien to us?

My headcanon background for my BG3 character literally sprang from wanting to play a Great Old One Warlock, and stumbling on the heterochromia options and the eye tattoo that looks like writhing tentacles coming out of the eye. I find it really fun when your own character's backstory almost isn't even of your design. Just, like, "That is this character's backstory: I didn't create it." Kinda feels like how Michelangelo said he was liberating the forms imprisoned in the marble.

One character of mine sprouted from “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a tiny creature piloting a warforged mech?” And another was “Oh man, What if there was a kid who was taken from the streets and groomed into being the king’s underground worker” Leo and Oliver are my favorite characters I’ve made thus far.

Are they or were they mabye made with their weapons as a package?

It occurs to me that FromSoft would make great developers for a Final Fantasy spin-off, considering FromSoft's games and the FF series have similar recurring elements, like magical crystals... Coincidentally, back in the day, when Sakaguchi was conceptualizing the first Final Fantasy game, he considered naming it "Fighting Fantasy" (he wanted the game's title to be abbreviated as "FF") but obviously couldn't go with that option since the title was already taken and copyrighted.

It's more like retreading similar concepts

Others tie in characters, From Soft ties in lore

@@SleeplessZombie Bro what? The Lore Bibles are avaiable man, no such thing as making stuff up.

They are literally 🗿

Same haha

It's silliness is heightened by the fact that they are artificial beings. Someone deliberately made them that way.

perpetual "😬" face

Very true, even in FromSoft's King's Field games strike damage was more effective than slash and pierce weapons against golems and skeletons, long before Miyazaki joined the company.

I think it’s actually because it’s easier to smash a piece of glass or crystal with a hammer, than it is to try cutting it with a knife, or poking through it with a needle, or trying to chop it in half with scissors.

Bro, they took the design from the story. Why wouldn't you assume they took the weakness from the same story with the same characters?

@@milesedgeworth132 Did you miss them saying it's very much probable that they /did/. They were just pointing out another possible source, or in my opinion, the twinned source that reinforced that decision.

⁠@@milesedgeworth132 you don’t really know if they took the design from the story, and weakness to strike/piece/slash is something they add to a lot of enemies and there are some consistent rules to what weakness enemies will have.

absolutely. crystalians may also be representative of Jewish golems

Damn that’s two things I haven’t heard of

Deathtrap Dungeon was a direct inspiration for Dark Souls if I'm not mistaken

All roads lead to warhammer and berserk and than to lotro and Celtic myths. Xd

​@@Erick-tv8oq no it was Berserk

@@snakebebop A game can be inspired by two or more things at the same time

He took the "jumping attack is the most reliable move" to the extreme

SMH another non-parryhead bites the dust 😔

Lion’s Claw flattens them even without a stance break. Good way to deal with them since it’ll also hyper armour through the crystilian’s poking.

Yes, the easily avoided, long windup, very unique sound queued, attack that moves in a straight line. I think the Crystal boy here is not who’s sucking a fat one

@@bbluva20 I sometimes don’t feel like waiting 10 seconds for them to finish their hop pokes just to get one attack in.

im glad im not the only one who thinks this

Paul wegener (writer, director and actor of the golem trilogy) would be pleased.

Assets? Who was talking about assets?@@ZeroFanfare

Fighting Fantasy was the shit back in the day, I remember cheating to get a perfect character in Crypt of the Sorcerer just to have a slight chance at beating the final boss.

Fighting Fantasy did reasonably pretty well in Japan, there was a decent niche for tabletop formats in the mid-late 80s. Remember that Record of Lodoss War, their first big home grown fantasy IP, began as transcripts of tabletop games played in various formats, printed in Compatiq. Fighting Fantasy's companion magazine Warlock published all the way into 1997 in Japan, when its publication ended in only 3 years (83-86, 13 issues total) in its home country.

​@@gtf234It's a pretty interesting rabbithole that continued today. Japan surely has its core TTRPG fandom of players, but it's quite different form the West. At the same time, pseudo-TTRPG things are very popular. Just Yesterday I was browsing through some import stuff and I stumbled upon a couple of decks that looked out of some collector cards game, but were actually Japanese RPGs! Basically, you make a character and the game is developed by picking up a card and the group roleplaying (with some guidance from the rules) the events as by the cards. It's a weird mix of card game, no-GM cooperative RPG and storygame with focus on roleplaying over merchanics. I'll never stop being surprised that this kind of stuff is popular in niches over there, Call of Chtulu is extremely popular and that WOTC still fails to sell DnD in Japan and the East in general lmao. The last bastion of TTRPG outside of 5e DnD influence.

As one who has only played ER and knows a bit about the Souls series, is the Omen Killer the same rig as the Capra demon? And the avatars are the asylum demon?

​@@argentum909The omen killers pretty much use the Capra demon's animations and the Tree sentinel's the Asylum demon's respectively.

@@argentum909 Yes, they are. The differences are in having animations with different timings and a different way to string them together as well as new ones to use with that animation rig/animation skeleton. (And of course the skin, so to say.) The asylum demon actually even dates back to the vanguard demon from Demon's Souls.

@@Sinhsseax Ah that's super cool

@@justsomeone883 the asylum demon's is the erdtree avatar not the sentinel.

Welp, now you know how to break them easier, at least?

They also got nerfed later on, like many other multi bosses. Specifically, their AI was limited so they wouldn't all attack you at the same time.

​@@CrombellsThat really was a fucking game changer. I tried so many times to just aggro a single one with an arrow or spell from behind the crystal structure, but they'd all just rush at me. But it was a completely different experience in NG+, after it got modded. 😂

​@@Crombellswhere do you get that info? Without summons, they still wombo combo me into submission

@@KABLAMMATS Yeah if you run in front of all three they definitely will all attack you

You should one day

@@ky7501 What he said ☝

Elden Ring has been described as being Dark Sould 4, 5 AND 6.

look at the dunkey video of elden ring, even if you replay the game it feels huge, not boring or empty, huge, It is like skyrim for me in the sense that is a confort food that I like to go back and replay more than once.

Oh you have no idea how huge it is until you play it lol and when you do it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger

That's because Zelda is the GOAT when it comes to charm

Played Elden Ring feels more like playing classic Zelda than modern Zelda does. Every time I go through Stormveil I end up humming the Hyrule Castle theme.

Ancient Cistern is such a good theme

What do you mean by the books being bastard hard and unforgiving? Is the narrative devastating like many beloved characters are killed and such?

@@somerandombub Fighting Fantasy is a gamebook, basically a choose your own adventure story book with dice-rolling.

@@somerandombub I meant unforgiving in that, depending on how the book was written, literally ONE single mistake could screw up your entire run, forcing you to start over from scratch... well, unless you decided to cheat; which, tbh, I usually ended up resorting to in the end! Basically, trying to do a 'flawless' run of your average FF gamebook was the equivalent of trying to play through a "Souls" game without saving once - yeah, _technically,_ it was doable, _BUT,_ you truly needed to be a special kind of masochist to even try..!

@@unrighteous8745 "Kill the tree" is only really accurate if you're going Frenzied Flame. More broadly the story is "Become Elden Lord" and "Mend the Elden Ring", the first part being the same for everyone and the second part being where the endings diverge.

@@unrighteous8745my boy there’s like a character driven drama as a central narrative foundation of the game it’s just not in uh, in cutscenes

​@@unrighteous8745It's in Eastern story format. If you want the details, you must hunt for the context. Every item in the game helps pull the story together, so long as you're willing to read.

1 year to be exact…

Soooo many years…… it’s been eons….. decades even…

@@xxXKogasaWe3dL0rd420Xxx All the same this statement could be a generalization for all the stuff Zulie has found across the entire souls series, which WOULD be so many years. Not to mention the idea for these things came from 2009

The game came out like last year, it wasn’t that long

Same here. I still have my copy of Out Of The Pit.

Same