Apples to oranges. I can just as easily say, you know why Gideon Offnir is tired and dismissive at first. You don't know why there's two giant snake muppets with hideous teeth trying to guide the protagonist into prolonging or ending the Age of Fire.
Sure you do, they both tell you. One's an ancient snake guy who was a servant to Gwyn and is now seeking Gwyn's successor to link the fire and stave off the Dark. The other's an ancient snake guy who's more of a rebel that wants to overthrow Gwyn and end the Age of Fire and from what he says and what you see his motives are highly suspect. Frampt isn't telling you the whole story either but he seems like he's altruistic.
And the turtle with the pope's hat tells you that he is the steward of the Church of Vows where Radagon and Renalla joined the houses of the Erdtree and the Moon in matrimony, and is full of information on both of these individuals. Which he gives you freely, directly and unobtusely. He doesn't know everything, but then, why should he.
You figure out their motivations as you progress through the game. Ranni has an extended series of monologues where she details her backstory, her plot, her reasons for doing what she did in the past and is doing now, and her end goal (becoming the new goddess of a new age).
I thought the talking tortoise was a nice surreal twist. Elden Ring does have a sort of dreamlike/nightmarish feel about it which is probably the thing about the game that I enjoyed most.
Fascinating stuff. But why is he a tortoise and has a pope hat on it?
We got weasel with pope hat on it, in Elden Ring it's a tortoise. Nothing out of ordinary.Fascinating stuff. But why is he a tortoise and has a pope hat on it?
If you want it to be?
In all seriousness it's not a pope hat, I doubt there were popes in ER world. It just serves a ceremonial function. Like in any culture master of the ceremony got to have a cool hat.
It may not have the exact, minute details and shape but it's the clear inspiration for it and it was named appropriately.
Yeah, pope hat is clear inspiration, but that's just it.
Emphasis mine. What exactly is "ER world"? Because all I see is a hodge-podge of different colored lands with caravans crossing to nowhere. This kind of semi-formed, dreamlike worldbuilding works in DS and BB cause their worlds are mythical and dreamlike in nature. It doesn't work in ER cause it's open-world attempts to communicate across the feeling of a real, inhabited place and it fails miserably at it, never feeling like a real place (the caravans feel artificial) nor entirely mythical or dreamlike. In the end, all it feels is bland.
A mistake made a second time does not cease to be a mistake.
They are plot-relevant NPCs that are central to the game's story, and you have no idea what they are, where they came from, what their deal is, or why no one has ever mentioned them before.
I find it fascinating we don't exactly know what Lands Between are. Probably because I like Lovecraftian style of iceberg storytelling. The one where you give a reader about 20% of what you actually prepered and ask "Why the hell should I tell you more? Why do you even should now how things work?". There are primeval beings who knows only a fraction of truth, why should you be all knowing? I don't have a feeling it tries to be real, inhabited place. It is a world shuttered both physically and metaphysically, you can see it watching a landscape and by interacting with NPC's. Some of them are literally fractures of what they were, when they were whole. Rennala is in katatonic state, her psyche snapped under the weight of loss - she is obssesed with her Amber Egg, constantly giving rebirth to those poor pupils of her, desperately trying to act like if Caria is at the peak of its greatness. Radahn is a shell of who he was, eaten by a rot, the only thing he got left is his might, any other part if his humanity gone. Radahn soldiers, bound to him by an admiration for his courage still fight the rot in Caelid, that's all they do. The caravan moves from place to place with the same route everyday. Do they even remember who to deliver? Fuck if I know, but it seems to me they don't know either. They are fracture of their beings, they are one dimmentional shells, stripped of their purpose. What you see is a shutter of who they were. There is Melicent, who only know a part of who she is after you give her unalloyed gold needle made by Miquella to stop an enthropy. There are only couple of entities that feels like they've kept their mind/reason/beings. That's how I see it playing the game, so it doesn't seem odd to me there is no "real" life there.
Not bland but I like Silva's kitchen sink.
