While Souls games naturally predate Elden Ring by more than a decade, FromSoftware's masterpiece sent shockwaves through the industry, creating bigger waves than any release before it. The Soulslike RPG subgenre transformed forever on February 25, 2022, and the winds of change carried a few games away straight into the mouth of oblivion.
Over the last few years, every other RPG has seemingly started incorporating Soulslike combat, producing a handful of great games and a lot of redundancy. If we eliminate FromSoftware's stuff, there really aren't all that many fantastic Soulslike games, so we should celebrate those few that excel in one area or another. None of these forgotten RPGs are Elden Ring, and that's not a complaint.
"Perfect" is an exaggeration, but each of these games shines in its own way.
Also, none of these games flopped, but Elden Ring's presence neutered their impact, longevity, and recognition.
I don't know if it has aged perfectly, but I adored Ashen when I played it about a year before Elden Ring. FromSoftware's epic was the first open-world Souls RPG to blow up, but it wasn't the subgenre's first attempt to embrace a sandbox structure. A44, a New Zealand studio, cracked that code more than 3 years before FromSoftware, crafting a smaller-scale experience that felt massive for its era.
Unlike Elden Ring, which takes a maximalist approach to open-world design, Ashen opts for minimalism in both presentation and content. You are dropped into a cel-shaded world with faceless, wordless NPCs, one defined by simple beauty and depressive darkness. Rather than traveling across a never-ending country, you gradually build up a small hub town by recruiting characters, before heading on expeditions to explore dungeons.
While mostly replicating Dark Souls' combat, Ashen tried its hand at a few new ideas, including dropping the conventional Soulslike leveling system in favor of a gear-based one. Most RPGs shouldn't replicate it, but the system works well in a 20-hour campaign with a strong sense of adventure.
Elden Ring blows Ashen completely out of the water in sheer spectacle and, crucially, exposure. Consequently, it gets credit for transitioning Soulslike RPGs to an open-world structure, despite an indie game doing the same years earlier.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/elden-ring-soulslike-rpgs-nobody-remembers/
