Elden Ring is not for me. I'm in the midst of starting over with a magic build, but I still don't think it's going to stick. I've criticised Elden Ring enough already, and I appreciate that it's a good game - though not the greatest of all time - but one of the worst things about it is how readily the built-in community overlook, and even exacerbate, its flaws - all while praising it as the most approachable FromSoftware game of all time. My biggest frustrations can be summed up in four words: try finger but hole.
I get the joke here. It sounds like 'trying fingering your butthole'. It's that juvenile, vaguely homoerotic humour groups of boys always come up with when they're together trying to impress each other. It was always strange to me that the boys at school who used "gay" as the most offensive insult they could think of also chose to fill up their free time by drawing penises - often highly detailed with pubic hair, circumcision, and ejaculating spurts. It's positively Freudian. 'Try finger but hole' is the FromSoftware version of drawing a penis on your desk.
It's not just 'but hole'. There are a few different common phrases that even someone with the scant FromSoft experience I have has encountered a few. 'Dog ahead' when it's a weird crab or a turtle or an... anything but a dog. 'Fort night', which is funny because Fortnite, I guess. I don't have any objection, moral or otherwise, to these in-jokes strewn across The Lands Between. In fact, as an outside observer, I think they're fascinating. Old memes returning from the Souls games, merging with new memes as the playerbase expands for Elden Ring, being built upon and reiterated in different ways like shitposts of shitposts of shitposts. It's turtles all the way down, except everyone is calling the turtles dogs.
The problem is it runs counter to how obtuse everything else in the game is. In fairness to the Soulsborne community, most of the discussions I've had about Elden Ring have gone deeper than the usual "git gud" jokes, and the counter to how impossible all the menus are to navigate and understand is that they're supposed to be. Elden Ring, like all FromSoft games, is not supposed to feel like a game, but more like a summit for you to ascend. Clearly the formula is popular, even if it's not for everyone.
Often, the debate around accessibility and approachability is reduced to 'add an easy mode', which apparently runs counter to the core vision at the centre of Elden Ring. But way more could be done than just reducing Margit's health. Menus are deliberately obfuscated, weapon descriptions are deep with lore but light on tangible advice, and no quest markers or directional suggestions exist because to have them would be to ruin the immersion that this is more than a game, but is an insurmountable experience. Oh and also try finger but hole.
New players should be offered no assistance. The whole point, you see, is that you don't understand anything in the game, so that figuring out how to change weapons on the fly is as big a victory as felling a great enemy. For new players, Elden Ring must be a deeply serious experience of trial and error, of grit and determination, of failure upon failure upon failure until you finally overcome the mighty battle that is figuring out how to upgrade your flasks. For returning players though, try finger but hole.