Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and other FromSoftware titles are popular for their penumbra storytelling style, signature Grimdark settings, and incredible sense of scale and discovery. They are also notorious for being punitively harsh.
For some dedicated players, that last part is all that really matters. The difficulty and subsequent investment of time and energy into mastering the game’s melee combat system is what makes FromSoftware’s games what they are. Many of those same players would tell you that this is the way to go she play, and they don’t begrudge other players their different playstyles or where they find satisfaction in the game.
And then there are the others. Those who would – and do – tell everyone, whether they ask or not, that if you don’t play like them and match their skill in lightning-fast saves, dodges, and precisely executed combos, you’re not playing legitimately.
For some, Elden Ring’s various systems, like summoning Ash to defeat difficult encounters, spamming Comet Azur from afar to melt a dragon’s HP, or even including multiplayer co-op partners for boss fights, tantamount to breaking the game. If even these tactics are illegitimate, then “cheesing” is the true mortal sin of the Elden Ring.
Broadly speaking, Cheesing uses unconventional tactics to advance in the game, which some claim are exploitative and violate the spirit of the game. If that grafted scion is too big to physically fit through a door and you’re on the other side, draining its health with arrows or rhinestone shards while staying out of range of its attacks, then you’re little better than a cheater .
I’m here to tell you that not only are they wrong, but that fighting your way to the Elden Throne is more in keeping with the spirit of the Soulsborne genre than their precise dual-wielding katana builds and dodge abilities could ever be.
Exploiting weaknesses is what winners do
You didn’t hit her. You used a subpoena. You used bleed. You spammed ranged attacks. You used ashes of war. You upgraded your weapon. You upgraded your character. You used a controller. You turned on the screen. You used electricity. You used the concept of time. pic.twitter.com/sgie5Zu7EQApril 3, 2022
The way you win in a Soulborne game is by ruthlessly exploiting enemies’ weaknesses. For a melee build, that means getting in closer, learning attack times and parrying and dodging to expose an enemy’s weak spot so you can hit them hard while you have an opening.
But FromSoftware didn’t make a game just for melee builds, they made a game with a rich magic and affinity system and area damage that applies to both enemies and the player.
Some enemies are immune to poison but weak to lightning. So you’re encouraged to hit them with any lightning spear you can throw at them. Pump enough points in Arcane and Faith and you’ll never have to worry about the Fire Giant’s sturdiness, as it absolutely melts under a torrent of Glintstone Breath.
If you’ve found that a boss can’t reach you at some point, or that a boss could actually roll his gigantic butt to his death on the side of a waterfall, then it’s perfectly legitimate to take advantage of it.
FromSoftware can and has placed an invisible barrier around an arena to prevent an enemy from falling off a ledge Gargoyles stupid enough to roll to their deaths while being impossible to dodge your attacks?
Spring. If there’s one lesson you must learn in every FromSoftware title, it’s that a small mistake can be instantly fatal. There’s no reason why this should only apply to players.
Soulsborne games aren’t all about playing in a very specific, melee-oriented way with perfected attack times. You can do that if you wish, as this brings you to the ultimate goal of any Soulsborne game: win by any means necessary. It’s about perseverance to endure and overcome the challenge. How you do that is up to you.
Anyone who tells you that using the game’s built-in mechanics to win is cheap or somehow beneath the dignity of a true Soulborne player is fooling themselves. Winners beat games. Losers complain about how other people beat games.
Elden Ring is made for cheese
I’m sure the Elden Ring developers put a lot of time and effort into making the game’s tough combat mechanics beatable for anyone with the time and patience to master them. It’s been a hallmark of the entire Soulsborne genre ever since Demon’s Souls released on the PS3, and that tradition has continued in each of FromSoftware’s games ever since.
You know what else was included from the start? Enemies too big to follow you through a door, which you could then turn into a porcupine made of poison arrows. That spot on the wall where that one spider boss’s Flame Breath attack couldn’t reach you, but you can still hit him with ranged attacks? That was in the original Demon’s Souls and it was still there unchanged in the PS5 remake. If FromSoftware considered such tactics to be out of bounds, they had several games to fix them.
Still, I can cut an excruciatingly difficult boss fight short by raining Rotten Breath on them from a rooftop in Lyndell, and there’s absolutely nothing a pair of mounted Tree Wardens can do about that other than slowly dying like the computer-generated golden hounds who they are.
One would think that veteran developers, who have arguably made one of the best games of all time, would have considered this possibility and done something to keep you on the steps where the twin sentinels of the trees fight you fairly could come. But, you know what? FromSoftware thought about it, and they no doubt approve of such innovative problem solving to solve a challenge.
That giant runebear can’t climb a cliff to meet me in Caelid while I rain down spell after spell until he’s dead? Tough. Git gud, runebear. It’s not like I can do this to every single one of you, so I’m damn sure I will if I can. If the developers didn’t want you to climb cliffs to devastate overpowered enemies, they wouldn’t let you climb the cliffs over enemies.
Elden Ring cheating. You don’t owe him anything.
Anyone who has tried to swing a great sword down a narrow hallway knows that a world of pain awaits you from this giant rat.
As your Claymore bounces off the wall harmlessly, that puny little rat and the one behind you, would you not know it, will do just enough damage to take your SL100 character down as if you were a SL10 character fresh came out of the house grave.
Do you know who doesn’t have this problem? Pretty much every enemy in Elden Ring. We’ve all seen a Lazy Tree Spirit swing a claw right through the wall’s geometry to remove 60% of your HP in one hit – if it doesn’t kill you instantly.
FromSoftware knows exactly how to program hit animations of actors to interact with the level geometry. However, one of those crazy kidnapper damsels in Volcano Manor can send her little scythe shots straight through a cliff or ledge and kill you, although the physics in The Lands Between should still work. Unfortunately, it really only works for you. Everything else lives in its own personal singularity, where matter is too abstract to be an obstacle.
Do we call that cheating? Sometimes we do, in particularly egregious cases, but more often than not we just accept that our opponents will not only be overwhelmed from the start, but receive any borderline calls in their favor from the referee. The deck is always stacked against the player in these types of games, so any advantage you can gain helps bring things closer to par, though never completely.
Consider it fair if you want, but unless you’re hacking a game, using cheat codes, or exploiting an obvious bug (pushing an enemy off a cliff and knocking an enemy through ground geometry are two very different things , for example), nothing is off limits in a Soulsborne game.
You can tie a hand behind your back and say never cast a spell on an enemy that can’t reach you, but you better believe that if the roles were reversed, that enemy would attack mercilessly. As Tarnished in the Lands Between, we are at war with the world because the world is at war with us. There’s no shame in realizing that and being so ruthless.
