By Bryn Gelbart

Ok, I’ll admit it. I think most Fantasy sucks. We are talking capital F, dragons, dwarves, or druids. High Fantasy bullshit — Final or otherwise. This stems, I suspect, from a lifelong appreciation for Tolkien which, if read at a young enough age, will naturally lead you to the derivatives. As far back as I can remember, my father read me the Rankin and Bass illustrated edition of “The Hobbit” and I looked at the pictures. My tiny ass was in that movie theater seat every December from 2001 to 2003 as the Jackson films enveloped me. So naturally I read much of the young adult high fantasy fiction that was being targeted directly to me as my dad waved a Terry Brooks novel desperately in my direction.

In retrospect none of that YA sludge is as derivative and corny as most of what I would begin to see in video games. More so than in TV, comics, or any medium I’ve grown up to see go mainstream, Fantasy has always had a dominant place in games. Most video games in the popular vernacular are power fantasies, and where better to start than the genre in the name?

At a young age the act of playing pretend — my fantasizing — was always inspired by Tolkien’s worlds and the art it inspired. The same years I spent playing make believe with wooden swords were the ones I spent pouring over The Art of the Brothers Hildebrandt. The imaged and illustrated worlds I saw gave me a very gamified view of ‘exploration’ at a young age. Still, the exploration of fantasy worlds and the most fantasy-like areas of our personal worlds — where and whenever they might be  – are inseparable pleasures. Every time a hike starts to feel like a quest. Every time a video game world makes me want to go outside. These are the feelings I associate with a genre that many games like to associate with plodding stories and overflowing quest logs.

Knowing this, you can now understand why when Skeleton said “play Crimson Shroud” I told them “JRPGs can fuck off.”They said “it’s not really an RPG, more of an old school dungeon crawler.”

The dungeon crawler was part of the GUILD project at Level-5 Studios, where well known Japanese ‘auteurs’ got a chance to do experiments that would only end up in the US via the 3DS eShop.The Seaman guy made a baggage claim puzzle game called Aero Porter. Liberation Maiden was a SUDA directed mech shooter from Grasshopper. Released as part of Guild 01 in Japan, Crimson Shroud was the baby of ​​Yasumi Matsuno and a small internal team at Level-5.

JRPG fans will admit many of the genre’s offerings take about 6-8 hours to get started.In a similar time frame I completed a first playthrough of Crimson Shroud. I’ve bounced off countless games in this window, each time thinking whichever unique combat or narrative hook this one offers will pull me in. They don’t. So when Skeleton said Crimson Shroud is not an RPG, they were right in a sense. It’s really not an RPG like that.

Playing an RPG “like that” means seeing the same cliched opening play out with slight differences title after title. Seeing the same puckish rogues and scrappy street urchins taking a quest that leads them to meeting royal lords and ladies doesn’t do it for me. How many games are just Final Fantasy 6 with different proper nouns?

Now, it’s worth noting genre fiction doesn’t bother me. You can likely lodge a similar critique to mine at horror films or detective novels and I would gladly admit the tropes are something I like about those works. The difference, to me, is time. It is a worthy investment when to spend the first 30 minutes of a 90 minute slasher retreading familiar ground. When those 30 minutes become hours I start to slip.

Crimson Shroud takes heavy influence from tabletop games, placing a focus on the many ways those games use dice to influence mechanics. Ability success rates and combat bonuses are tied to good dice rolls, as are other vital battle maneuvers like lifting fog of war or recovering from an ambush. In the turn-based combat, chaining various skills and attacks together will earn you bonus dice to apply to your next attack’s accuracy or damage. On every level, from the dice to the hand painted figurine look of all the enemies, Crimson Shroud is taking more influence from a tabletop dungeon crawler than any Japanese video game.

If this sounds like something you would at any point in your life enjoy, it will only be available for purchase on the 3DS eShop until it shuts down next March. Credit card support ends later this  month, so your window to purchase Crimson Shroud in a legal, reasonable manner is closing. As always there are alternative methods but there is something to many of the little 3DS games I’ve discovered as I browse the eShop for hidden gems that make them all feel best on the hardware they were designed for. I’m not a simp for Nintendo and it won’t offend me if you choose to emulate Crimson Shroud, just food for thought.

Working your way through four stages of the game’s dungeon, you control a party of three; the brawler, the archer, and the mage. Your party doesn’t level up in the traditional sense. Stats and abilities are all determined by the gear equipped, eventually allowing each character access to a vast, dynamic move sets. In one of Crimson Shroud’s most inventive twists, you only have enough room to take a limited amount of the loot that drops after an encounter.  Prioritizing which loot you take is key to building out your characters. Do you need a new weapon for your character build or an extremely valuable healing item?

Each item requires a certain amount of BP to put in your inventory, which is determined by your performance in the battle. Each enemy you defeat gives you a set amount of BP but you lose some every time a character takes damage. Often, the best choice is to take one or two of the good items available while using the remainder BP to stock up on healing items and Azoth, the material that lets you combine duplicate weapons to power them up. The melding mechanic enhances the stress of the post-battle decisions. Do I take a mysterious new weapon or a duplicate of one I know I already like?

While the story falls into all the Fantasy potholes I loathe, the writing in Crimson Shroud has a “your talented best friend’s first attempt at writing a D&D campaign” that I love. It’s a little by the book, but it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes there is nothing better than a smarmy little bit of text that reminds you “hey a human wrote this’ ‘ especially when that human is your 14 year old best friend. It brings me back to the first tabletop session my 8th grade buddies ran, a disastrous campaign where each of us rotated in as Dungeon Master. My turn as DM was a test of my imagination, one I failed so rigorously I wouldn’t touch a tabletop RPG again for half a decade.

There is an endearing over-use of the second person as the Crimson Shroud talks past the player character, the brawler Giaque, and directly to you. It is the warm embrace of a writing style that has been lost to the advancement of shaders, rendering, and graphics cards. The 3DS is a weak-ass little machine, but it only takes a quick glance back at the history of video games to see the power the written word once had. But maybe I’m just a bitter writer-type so take that with a grain of salt.

I recently spoke with Gareth Damien Martin, designer of the TTRPG inspired Citizen Sleeper, about merging mechanics of the two mediums and how we are still relatively early in exploring those possibilities. It didn’t make it into the piece, but they brought up how Disco Elysium has dozens of checks you can just fail, and then just kind of not progress for hours with a particular character. Drenched in table-top influences, even the groundbreaking Disco feels like it is still taking from a handful of fundamental texts. The world of tabletop games has expanded in so many fascinating ways that aren’t reflected in video games (which have since the beginning taken those influences and ran with them). Citizen Sleeper is trying to solve this, but goddammit I also feel like a sequel to Crimson Shroud could do so much right.

You won’t see the true ending until after New Game+. It begins as an innocuous victory lap, but soon you discover the back half of the game has radically changed on your second run through. Real Nier route B vibes. Comparing it to Nier sparks wild ideas about how to revitalize Crimson Shroud with modern trends in mind. It is easy to imagine an expansive run-based sequel in the vein of Hades. Even better, think about the knowledge Yasumi Matsuno could bring to another stab at the game after his most recent work, Dungeon Encounters, took a minimalist approach to dungeon crawling.

///

Elden Ring is the latest of only a handful of video games to tap into that childhood sense of wonder I’ve been hopefully more than vaguely evoking here. Getting lost in fantasy, having the lightness of being to give all your being to it, every inch of your mind and body. That was a spark that I had. Did I lose it somewhere?

I have been a Souls fan for some time. I drink the Kool-Aid. Even if I still prefer the cosmic horror of Bloodborne or the Japanese myth of Sekiro, I admit the Dark Souls trilogy is bereft of Fantasy Bullshit. It follows its own maidenless path that side-steps the usual souls you meet on a hero’s journey, instead filling the land with wretched untrustworthy remnants of what once was perhaps, a living being. And yes, sometimes you will see a dragon. But more than any Souls game before, Elden Ring is the first one to remind me of Tolkien. And in thinking about Tolkien, I was stricken by sense memory. I used to love Fantasy.

Elden Ring is like taking a journey into one of those old art books, the ones they made in the ‘70s. The kind of art you’d see on Metal albums. The kind of Metal albums we all think they don’t make anymore, even though they do.

The entire game is so fucking scenic. Coming around the ledge behind Castle Stormveil to see another, bigger vista than the one you saw upon entering the world isn’t only breathtaking, it’s a dare. A challenge to let this wash over you. Do not try to conquer every inch of this land. It will conquer you. At least for now — give it time, my child.

These moments of beauty reinforce the vastness, and the cruelty. Each area is a little more unhinged than the last, beginning with the rotting Caelid, until soon the world makes no logical sense at all. This too is the way of all Souls worlds, but Elden Ring begins more intact. There is a sense of wholeness to the world at the start. It is fracturing, not fractured. Not yet.

This is not the story of Elden Ring. Not really. There is a lot more about bloodlines and holy orders. Trees. As far as I’m concerned though, the story of these games never matters beyond what your eyes can see. Flipping through old fantasy art books, it doesn’t matter if the inspiration was Tolkien or Warhammer or something more righteous and obscure. What matters is when you look at an expansive landscape, or a foul beast inspiring a cadre of cowering men, you begin to tell stories. Stories about how and why we got to this single frame. Stories about what lives here and why. Questions that can’t be answered by wikis.

Elden Ring is already undoubtedly on its way to becoming one of the most influential games ever made. I worry about that. I’m afraid other games will take influence directly from it. They shouldn’t. If you are going to learn anything from Hidetaka Miyazaki’s creative output, learn to look outside of games.

When discussing his influences, Miyazaki said “My pool of inspiration derives from various sources, but if I have to choose one, in particular, I would say books… I have shared this before, but my biggest pastime is to imagine and fantasize while reading text-based books. It is one of my inspirational sources for game development”

Like Miyazaki, I find the fun in fantasy to be the fantasizing: the space between the gaps. All his games are the result of a childhood full of books, illustrations, and manga but Elden Ring is so fucking earnest about it in a way that makes me feel it too. This allowed me to resurface memories, happy memories that had long since been dormant, to the front of my mind every time I sat down to play. These memories aren’t just mine, they are Miyazaki’s, and maybe yours too.

Bryn Gelbart (he/him) is a writer and critic. He knows you won’t pronounce his name right in your head and he forgives you. You can find him earnest posting @FeelTheBryn