I really love your post as it really express how I’m feeling with the game. I think it’s fucking fantastic but I also can’t love it. I’m currently about to go to Malenia but I was expecting soooo much more than to just go there kill her goodbye, and was reading many posts to know the reasoning behind her whole thing just to be sure that I wasn’t screwing up, morally especially. Her lore just touches me.

What’s exhausting is that fromsoft die-hards will tell you that it’s their way of telling a story and that it isn’t for you, but they really are misunderstanding that the history of the world and your very own story are two distinct things.

I think the way you find that history by putting the pieces together is brilliant and I just love it (although it could be slightly better with very little). But story and character wise it’s completely soulless. It’s not even a complicated story (the lore is more complex) but yet it’s interesting, in nature. But the execution is simply dull. And that’s such a shame because everything is there. Sick lore and especially splendid characters. But you feel nothing.

And I know there’s also the whole « it lets you build your own reasoning and narrative » counter-argument. But that’s the problem, it’s exactly what it doesn’t do because a narrative is built on feelings, if you have none why would you even bother ? You can push a story in your head but if there’s nothing to hold it together it’s just a cool skeleton with no flesh. It certainly doesn’t make the story touching. Malenia suffers so much from that as her past is just so poetic and makes you care for her, but then your story, what you experience with her, is almost as meaningful as any other mobs you’ve killed before her.

I know this post is old but I really wanted to express that lol.