Elden Ring is an action role-playing game made by FromSoft, the company that pioneered the idea of making games difficult, with games like Dark Souls and Game of the Year 2019 Sekiro. Elden Ring is their most recent title. Despite having a similar story to some of their previous games, it defined and differentiated itself with its open-world gameplay.

   Open-world is a genre of games that has become popular in recent years due to the success of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In short, open-world by its name means a game that doesn’t hold back the player in terms of exploration. Most games are segmented from level to level, while open-world games usually have one big world to explore with minimal segmentation. 

   The Elden Ring manga is written by Nikiichi Tobita and published by Fromsoft’s parent company, Kadowada. The new version is a comedic retelling of the story in the Elden Ring. The creators took all the seriousness of the original story and threw it out the window by using the introduction of Elden Ring  to explain the premise of the game. Then, it switches to the main protagonist, Aseo, who is extremely unintelligent.

In the story of the Elden Ring, the player is meant to find the pieces of the Elden Ring to become the Elden Lord. Aseo is a new character made for the manga to be the stand-in for the player character in the game and embodies what most people do when playing Elden Ring. Instead of actually doing his job of finding the pieces of the Elden Ring, he does everything else except that. Throughout the few released chapters of this series, some of the silliest things happen to Aseo in his wacky world, everything from homicidal maniacs owning a small farm to an underground thief business that sells licensed limestone figurines. It is great at being cynical about the world that Elden Ring has made, while being accessible to those who don’t play Elden Ring with only a few moments where people might get lost. But besides the manga itself, one question remains, “Why did they make it a comedy?”

   I have two reasons why I think the writer or Fromsoft changed the seriousness of Elden Ring for slapstick-comedy. First, social media, but mainly Twitter and Youtube. These two sites have provided Elden Ring content from other creators such as artists and animators who played the game and want to make a special piece of media because of how greatly they enjoyed it. But there are also those who take clips of the game to make an internet joke that are pretty funny without any context. Second, comedy in manga is popular. For those who know about manga, Chainsaw Man is a good example because the main character is a dense, poor individual who lives in a pretty grim world. Of course, I’m not going to compare them any further than that because they tackle different kinds of comedy due to how popular Elden Ring is outside of Japan.

   The main takeaway is that Elden Ring’s manga is a comedy based on trends in Japan and internet jokes, helping to grow its popularity outside of America.