Criticism of ‘broken’ Elden Ring strategies misses the point of Souls games

Summons don’t count. OP builds don’t count. Magic doesn’t count.

Some corners of the internet would have you believe that the only acceptable way to play Elden Ring was by using the beginner sword, beginner armour, and using a broken controller. If you’re not actively having a terrible time, then you’re not playing it properly.

I personally find these types of complaints incredibly tiresome, and never more so than when it comes to players discovering “broken, strategies.” These are, in essence, the game not functioning as intended, or a combination of mechanics that FromSoftware hadn’t accounted for coalescing in a way that resulted in combat abnormalities.

Take the much-talked-about Comet Azur, for instance. The poster child for “broken” mechanics in Elden Ring, in its original guise, this build essentially allowed players to unleash an unbroken beam of pure magical energy at every enemy in the game. Discovered soon after the game’s release, and even by reviewers, the “Nuke Build,” was the first of many Elden Ring builds that made playing the game, frankly, trivial.

However, one wrinkle to these builds that almost everyone seems to forget is that the game doesn’t actually delete itself from your console if you don’t use them. In fact, in order to use these builds, there are often several annoying steps that need to be completed to gather all the required pieces.

Beyond that, even if you do all of the steps, create your build in exactly the way that the guide tells you to, and do it quickly enough before FromSoftware patches it, there is absolutely nothing forcing you to play the game this way.

There’s some kind of collective paranoia in dark corners of the Souls fandom wherein if someone isn’t playing a game the way the hardcore want them to, then they can’t enjoy it. It’s the exact same type of critics that bemoan you for watching the latest Christopher Nolan film on a plane. Why do they care?

It’s an especially strange hangup to have around Souls games for multiple reasons. What they, and everyone who complains about these builds, fail to realize is that swapping OP strategies is as inherent to the franchise as resting at bonfires and praising the sun.

When Demon’s Souls was released in the US in 2009, I paid £100 to import a copy of it. That might as well have been £1,000,000 to 14-year-old me, but I was enthralled.

“Who is anyone to tell you what kind of fun to have? Hidetaka Miyazaki himself said that he uses summons. Furthermore, he put them in the game. Are you going to tell him that he’s building the game incorrectly?”

The game, which had been talked about in whispers by the US games press, not to mention the imperious Keza MacDonald (to our knowledge, the first person to review the game in English), became an obsession. It was stupidly hard, ran terribly on my terminal PS3, and I was enthralled. I could barely get to the first boss.

Back then, when virtually no one had even heard of the game, you had to go to scrappy corners of the internet to get some kind of help. Players were documenting their adventures and uploading blurry 480p JPEGs they took with their phones to show off the secrets they’d found. When someone found a weapon, or indeed a build that “broke” the game, it felt like a victory.

Exploration is at the heart of every Souls game, and that feeling of getting one over on the developers used to feel like an achievement, instead of something that I’m supposed to be ashamed about. Granted, the speed with which the internet is able to discover absolutely everything about these games and disseminate that information has never been quicker, but you can just… not look at that stuff?

Further reading

‘It’s better than the original’ – Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree Review Roundtable

VGC's Jordan Middler is joined by three other critics to discuss FromSoftware's latest

Sure, some examples in Elden Ring are comical, like the recently patched Ash of War that allowed Shadow of the Erdtree players to kill every boss in the DLC in two hits, but honestly, I wish they’d left it in. Who cares? Who was that hurting? The game doesn’t really have proper PvP,  or leaderboards. “You’re ruining your own experience!” but it’s their experience. Don’t you have better things to do than making sure other people are having fun on your terms?

Who is anyone to tell you what kind of fun to have? Hidetaka Miyazaki himself said that he uses summons. Furthermore, he put them in the game. Are you going to tell him that he’s building the game incorrectly?

I finished both Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree pre-release with no guides, no walkthroughs, and no TikToks showing off a 40,000 damage build. I have had the purest form of Elden Ring it is possible to have. Those people who flew through the game with Comet Azur and the Mimick Tear had just as legitimate experience as I did.

Does breaking every boss and speedrunning the game like that seem fun to me? No, but that’s why I don’t play the game that way. But I respect the people who discover these builds.