It’s the year 2022 Hand Ringrelated to Miyazakirelated to Malaysia. The highly anticipated FromSoftware title choked the industry for months, dominating the conversation around difficulty, damage scalingand player structures (including everyone’s favorite nepo doll, Elon Musk). IT taken on streamingIT changed the name of each animal to ‘dog’ IT legends created.
After more than a decade of FromSoftware games appearing in court as the quintessential ‘git gud’ series, locking us out without being a discursive masochist, Hand RingThe open world of ‘s opened doors for an entirely new player base. Because of this, Hidetaka took Miyezaki’s work to entirely new heights: Hand Ring is by far the best-selling FromSoftware title, Grabbing GOTY awards like Rowa Fruitand 10 months after its release it is still generating passionate conversations.
By deftly straying from the tried-and-true FromSoftware formula and giving us unfettered gameplay in a single, punishing, linear path, From hand ring itShe presented the Lands Between on a beautifully decorated (but slightly Tarnished) silver platter. And we swallowed that mess.
Feeding the Difficulty Discourse Machine
This spirits The game rhetoric has almost entirely revolved around difficulty. Previous Hand Ring published, FromSoftware’s Yasuhiro Kitao told Eurogamer that the game is “made for players of all kinds”, not just “hardened veterans”. This baffled fanboys, but intrigued those who could never enjoy the punishing gameplay of FromSoft’s work.
AND I wrote about Kitao’s quotes when I was on GamesRadarsuggesting what to do Hand Ring Approachability would be great, and that approachability is made possible by its open world. Difficult areas are much easier to avoid if you can run around them on horseback, but before spirits The games forced you to choose between the hard way and the way to hit your head against the wall as it is impossible. The promise of wide choice, maybe, just maybe, Hand Ring It might be a game that I will enjoy.
backwards, forbes posted a reply to my post, one who hopes Hand Ring‘s open world wouldn’t have ruined the FromSoftware feel by focusing too much on “making these games approachable instead of tough and gritty.” That was months before its release date, but the rhetoric machine spun and spun and spun, smoke gushing from every inch of it, its gears squeaking and squeaking with every new take that went into its open mouth.
Until February arrives and brings with it the Lands In Between, like a darker, more deadly world, wide open for exploration. Breath of the Wild. Players learned this quickly many mistakenly skipped martial trainingand he learned a little slower that the first boss (that damn Tree Watch) was avoidable. Many of us who could never be locked into a FromSoft game willingly clung to it Hand RingWe had learned that we could actually ride a horse and escape from a terrible, uncanny monster.
As we continue on our way together Hand RingWe’ve been given a gift that only truly comes in open world games: seemingly endless exploration by ourselves, our friends, and other players on the internet.
Brave Brutal Battles for a Look at Beauty
beauty of Hand Ring teeming with life, both friendly and deadly, bubbling and gushing, provoking and terrifying with its sights, calling and excluding you in a single breath. I find this beauty in many moments during my time with the game, for example when I accidentally go down. Siofra RiverIt didn’t take long for my game.
I step onto a platform in Limgrave and am swept down, down, down, until I stumble upon an astonishing area: a fully realized night sky in various rotten colors, full of pinholes. The collapsed classical architecture blurs my view of this impossible galaxy, and tombstones line the path, which shimmered a strange green as I descended, but now diverges from the stationary platform.
As the kids say, I’m gagged and aimlessly walking away from the platform, paying little attention to what enemies might be in front of me for the first time since booting. Hand Ring. This is a mistake I quickly paid for when entering a pack of Claymen directly. They move slowly but they hurt me and my level is too low for this area. One of the unarmed magicians takes me out in seconds with his strange bubbles and sends me back to the Place of Blessing, right next to the platform that brought me here. When I came back to get my few hundred runes, the same man took me out again.
“Fuck it,” I muttered before stepping on the stone circle in the middle of the elevator. “I’ll come back later.”
And I will do it much, much later. After discovering that I am a warmage with an affinity for gravitational magic and summons, and long after I knocked down Tree Watcher with a single Rock Slingshot, I return to the Siofra River from a completely different direction and devastate it. its inhabitants. Then, after collecting every single item dropped by a fallen NPC and collecting all the Ghost Glovewort my eyes could see, I gave myself a second to breathe. That night, which was still impossible, I looked up at the sky and exhaled. I won this. Hand RingUnlike other FromSoftware games, it gave me the chance to hoard the tools and experience I’ll need for a short time.
Hand Ring Eternal
But Hand Ring It’s not just somber and serious, it’s not just a grueling game that lasts for hours with short, meditative breaks. As is the nature of all FromSoftware games, it’s silly as hell. There is nonsense messages. Dozens of ways to die scattered all over the place that will make you giggle in disbelief, and the always popular but always somehow corrupt online game encourages players to make love to each other.
It’s this combination of punishing gameplay, compelling story (thanks, George RR Martin) and silly antics that make FromSoftware games so special, especially this one. Hand Ring gives enemies like Star trouble Radahnone moment it will break your brakes with huge meteors blasted from a blood-red sky, and another moment it will put you in a fit of hysteria when you realize that it is actually sitting on a very small horse. . Hand Ring He plays with you, presenting you with head-scratching prophecies and moral dilemmas, but undermining it with both incidental and purposeful nonsense.
Hand Ring gives you a giant turtle wearing a pope’s hat. It actually gives you weird, disturbing stories about grapes with eyeballs. A giant bat squeezes grandmother between a rocky ledge and gives him an unforgettable song to sing forever—or until I cut through her leathery, gray skin. It extinguishes your hope for humanity at one point, to rebuild it at the next.
It takes you hours to explore this incredibly crappy world, fall in love with some of its characters and humiliate the rest, challenge you physically and mentally with enemies plucked from the deepest depths of game design hell, and in the end, it gives you a few options that don’t really matter. It does all of this while making itself playable for us FromSoft plebs, so it means (clever) that more people will be talking about it than any game that has come before.
When we look back involuntarily Hand Ring Ten years from now, it will be hard for us to remember exactly how much it defined the spirit of the times, how much it permeated popular culture outside of gaming, and how much we couldn’t stop talking about it. But now, in these months since its debut, it’s hard to imagine living in a world without it.
