Opened up immediately with some vagina fisting lmao
That was quite an opening.
Day one, blah blah blah.
But this also really highlights an incredibly unexplored "setting" for Souls games (or even games as a whole): Battlefields.
To my knowledge, only Nioh 1 (and to a much lesser extent 2) ever really approached that. The feeling of being one unstoppable murder beast of a guy sprinting from cover to cover as what feels like hordes of mooks with rifles unloading on you. Diving into a trench to try and limit the directions you can be attacked from. And storming into an officer's camp to assassinate them.
Instead, we always get there after the war (which will likely be the case here since the story stuff is almost always set "in the past" for ER) or we'll be off on our own and just hear a few rumbles in the distance.
In Dark Souls 2, the giants memories were active warzones, with active npc fighting and artillery. Not in a field though.
Giant Lord or whatever TLG's old name was has some vibes of it where explosions happen until the boss fight starts. But it is still very much on the outskirts of a battle with just a fancy skybox.
For games as a whole, I will go way back to Medal of Honor: Frontline. All the Medal of Honor games are about war (mostly WW2) but this one really stuck with me for its depiction of storming the beach on D-Day. You really did have to sprint from cover to cover where there was barely any while soldiers around you get mowed down by MGs from the bunkers ahead. It was intense and one wrong move would have you annihilated. There’s definitely a long list of military shooters depicting battlefields where you work your way through from cover to cover, but this one was one of the earliest I can think of that did it well, depicted a real battle, and really drove home the absolute insanity of the situation those soldiers went through.
On the complete opposite end there’s always the dynasty warriors games where you melee fight through battlefields full of soldiers, but those are ridiculous for being completely unrealistic in the process. However, they do all retell the classic stories of real battles that took place between the ancient Chinese battles, and for the ones I played pretty much every level involved navigating a huge battlefield to turn the tide between two armies clashing as you went.
Giving up fate itself is a huge deal in the lore of these games. I hella wanna know what Miquella thought was important enough to do that.
