Summary
Elden Ring and Yu-Gi-Oh have more parallels than you might think. Dark forces are at play in both, you do battle with powerful creatures beyond mortal comprehension, and- damn it I can’t keep a straight face.Elden RingandYu-Gi-Ohare nothing alike, but Shadow of the Erdtree might change that.
Shadow of the Erdtreehas previewed incredibly well. It was never going to do terribly, of course, as an expansion to one of this generation’s most groundbreaking titles by a developer so beloved we created a new genre to describe its games. But the response has been glowing – a stark contrast to the gritty world that the game takes place in.
I never finished Elden Ring because I was playing on hard mode – trying to battle gods in a game you can’t pause with a newborn baby – but the creativity and originality of The Lands Between and the creatures therein stayed with me. Fantasy is so often derivative, in any media, and Elden Ring bucked the trend.
It backed this magnificent world up with exemplary mechanical depth and frustratingly sparse lore. Dozens of hours in, I had no idea what the story was or even my main objective. But that all works together to draw you in, to make you care, to make you want to explore farther and improve your skills further.
Shadow of the Erdtree seems to continue in this spirit. The central premise is that Miquella has opened a portal to another world, and you must collect the parts of his body in order to, presumably, worship or destroy him. Somehow I don’t think resurrecting a god will be that simple. But still, the Exodia parallels immediately become apparent.
As much as I joked in the opening paragraph, Yu-Gi-Oh has a similarly dark and convoluted lore lurking just beneath the anime’s surface. Many people will have played the card game completely unaware that, in-universe, players can actually summon Egyptian Gods to do their bidding in battle. It’s become a meme at this point, but the antagonist of the show’s early seasons sends Yugi’s grandpa to the Shadow Realm – hell, or purgatory, or some other dark place where he’s subjected to perpetual horror.
I bet it’s Birmingham. The Shadow Realm is definitely Birmingham.
I’m not saying Elden Ring is ripping off Yu-Gi-Oh here, I don’t think the Tarnished is going to win the day by believing in the heart of the cards. But I do see Miquella as Exodia in a different form. He’s trapped, destroyed, or otherwise inconvenienced. We know from the base game that he stripped himself of his flesh in order to break free from his curse of eternal youth and save his sister, Malenia, from the rot that threatens to take her.
We know that Miquella traveled to the Land of Shadow, we know that he is awaiting the Tarnished to guide them through. We know that Mohg stole him away in order to become his right-hand man when Miquella eventually ascended to godhood, and perhaps our fate is to take Mohg’s place in Shadow of the Erdtree.
All of that is quite metal, and none of it is particularly Yu-Gi-Oh. But first, we have to gather the pieces of Miquella’s body, the parts of Exodia. I can’t see a world in which we do not try to combine them, or at least are given the opportunity to. Whether we try to ally with Miquella or vanquish him, whether we summon him or not, this feels like the spectacular ending to a match. The Tarnished believes in the heart of the cards and top decks the Right Arm of the Unalloyed One in order to save the Lands Between. Or whatever it is we’re actually meant to do, I’ve never really worked it out.
