Beating Elden Ring made me cry and it’s all thanks to my fellow cooperators – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader explains his emotional reaction to completing Elden Ring and how much it meant to be playing alongside other people.

Elden Ring is, as you may know, very difficult. It’s also very, very long and many people take upwards of 300 hours to complete it all. That’s exactly what happened with me and it’s interesting to see so many people finishing at around the same time, staggering bleary-eyed into the summer heat, after having had a deeply emotional gaming experience.

I’m not a big fan of stories in games. I don’t want to stop playing to watch a cut scene or, even worse, just walk or drive along doing nothing as people babble away, stopping me from getting to the actual gameplay. A linear game like The Last Of Us, which might as well be a movie (or in fact a TV show) for all the difference it makes does not interest me, so I certainly never got emotional about that kind of thing.

Elden Ring does have a story but it’s very obscure and open to a great deal of interpretation, especially as you can miss entire chunks of narrative, and whole characters, if you don’t pay careful attention. I think I understand most of it now but that is also not why I got so emotional about the end of the game. I cried real tears, not so much from the relief of beating the beast (literally) of a final boss but the game as a whole. And I suspect my fellow cooperators might have been reaching for a hanky too.

If you’re not familiar with Elden Ring or other FromSoftware games I’m assuming that knowing it takes 300 hours to beat already says a lot, but it is a very long journey to the end. Not only do you want to explore everywhere but you kind of have to, in order to level up enough to take on the various enemies. There’s a flurry of boss battles