Elden Ring is NOT the sequel to Dark Souls

 Hearest thou my voice, still?

Okay, everyone's had fun with these concerted and absolutely conscious attempts to piss me off through way of getting the absolute simplest of facts wrong, but I think it's gone far enough. We're all really excited about the new Elden Ring game from Fromsoft, and I understand fully how anticipation for getting the scoop on a title as promising as this one is going to get in the way of some games reporter's ability to do basic research. (Trust me, I feel that all the way.) But there comes a point where you're hammering home an easily fact-checked mistake, to the extent where entire articles have been published headlining specifically it, and it begins to seep from innocent unfamiliarity to wanton ignorance. So let me make it very clear for everyone at the back right now; Elden Ring is not the sequel to Dark Souls. It is the successor, but there's a world of difference in that simple synonym which diverges the definition significantly. So let's start at the simple beginning.

This really began when people began to note how similar Elder Ring looked to Dark Souls, with them both going for European Medieval fantasy settings as opposed to the feudal Japan cultural influences of Sekiro or industrial Victorian influence of Bloodbourne. (I'm not as familiar with either of those two titles and the lore around them, so I won't bring them into this, which should be fine as no one else seems willing to do that either.) Rationality would dictate this is because of the same base inspiration within the hearts of these worlds, Berserk, but without having played Elden Ring that's merely a supposition. Whatever the reason, the indication is clear; this isn't just going to be another one shot, this could very well be FromSoftware's next flagship series that they come back to now that Dark Souls is buried. Making it the Dark Souls successor. But regardless to what some art trying to claim, that doesn't automatically make it a sequel series.

In fact, when we really break it down to it's core, theorising that Elden Ring is a sequel to Dark Souls doesn't even really make sense if you understand what the Dark Souls franchise was about on even a base level, not even touching on the deeper hints of the lore and the various factions. And I don't care what 'George R.R. Martin' had to say about his work on a video game he'll never play and a series of games he hasn't played. This is a man who doesn't care about games, just telling stories, so I'm sure that when he heard this was a game that would follow Dark Souls he just went "Sure, it's a sequel. Whatever." Let's not use the ramblings of a 72 year old man as conclusive evidence fully detailing the structure of the FromSoftware library of franchises, not when there's a lot more very simple explanations that we could be learning from.

Let me lay it out for everyone, and bare in mind I'm about to spoil the entire Dark Souls franchise right now; there is literally no way that Elden Ring could take place within the Dark Souls universe, because that universe doesn't exist anymore. Or at least, everything recognisable and identifiable which makes the Dark Souls world stand out, was erased at the end of Dark Souls III. That was the entire purpose of that game, to close out that franchise as conclusively as possible. And given the tidbits of lore we've heard about Elden Ring so far, such as it being set in a universe ruled by demigod warlords, the new game isn't a prequel either. Remember that Dark Souls, as a franchise, rather helpfully covers the birth of the world and it's death, aligning with one of the utmost key themes of the series in the natural cycle of life. Nothing is meant to persist, all things wither, and everything ends eventually. Just like Dark Souls ended. It would be a literal betrayal of theme to continue it on in a sequel.

At the beginning the Dark Souls of timeline there was the 'age of ancients', an age characterised by a world still very much in formation and consisting of just the basic elements of nature and some Dragons, because I suppose Dragons exist outside the natural order of nature. (I guess they can, as a literary trope, be largely allegorical, so it's thematically justified.) In this age are Hollows, soulless husks of beings devoid of any higher function typically required for tasks such as thought or assuming purpose. That is until they stumble upon the First Flame, a primordial force of nature representative of its element; the First Flame is the personification of life, desire, drive, and the very concept of a soul. It's from the First Flame that these Hollows are ascended, gaining the souls of Lords, transforming them into god-like entities. These are Gwyn, The Witches of Izalith, Gravelord Nito, Seath the scaleless and the Furtive Pygmy. Together they overthrew the Dragons and ushered in a new age, the age of fire.

All the Dark Souls games take place at various points within the Age of fire, and the worlds we explore, Anor Londo, Dragleic, Lothric, are all kingdoms birthed from the age of fire, crafted through the power granted from the First Flame. These are kingdoms ruled by gods and other wielders of immensely powerful souls, and the size and prosperity of their domain is a direct reflection of the strengths of those souls. As such, it's no mistake that every single Dark Souls game takes us through these kingdoms in their twilight years, when the grandeur has faded and decay has set into every stone tile across the land. That is because Dark Souls tells the story of the time when life has reached its end for the first flame, because fire, as something which consumes to live, can never last forever. Lord Gwyn, however, was a man who built all he was around the power granted to him by the flame, and thus the reason these stories exist is because he struggled to prolong the flame indefinitely, and spat in the face of the natural order through doing so.

And make no mistake, prolonging the flame is an affront to nature. We're told right away how The Witches of Izalith tried to create their own artificial flame to replace the dying one, and in doing so created a profane uncontrollable chaotic flame that lashed out and destroyed their home, burning and mutating all in it's wake. As a force of nature, it is the fate of the First Flame to burn gloriously, to shine resplendently, and then to sputter and to die, but Gwyn couldn't accept that. For whatever reason, I suspect pride, he tried to keep the flame going by feeding it with the very souls it had granted him, anything to preserve the life and world that he had cultivated. His stubborn refusal to accept the inevitability of the end marks him as an enemy of fate itself, and the more he defies fate the more the world and its people suffer. It's even indicated, as the series goes on, that some of the most grotesque and twisted parts of the Dark Souls world are a direct result of this process of recycling souls that artificially prolonged the Age of Flame far beyond its appointed time. The suffering of the Dark Souls world comes from nature screaming out, begging to be allowed to die, because from that death something new can be born.

The age of Dark is foretold to follow Dark Souls, and though we don't know what that actually entails the promise is that it will resemble nothing of the god-ruled age before it. It's an unknowable quantity, a literary device given value for the very fact we will never see what it is and can only guess as to its look and function. Somewhere on the otherside of that will likely be a new age of Fire, but nothing of what Dark Souls is right now will survive to that new age, because as the fire dies so too does everything its power built. (As evidenced by the literal implosion of the worldspace in the final scenes of Dark Souls III) Dark Souls III ends, no matter what choice you make, with the First Flame either dead or moments from dying, granting the inevitable end of all Dark Souls was. It's a beautiful finale, and an exhale of relief for the struggles that characterised Dark Souls.

As such, Elden Ring cannot, under any circumstance, be a sequel to Dark Souls else it would be a total invalidation of what that ending, 5 years in the making, meant. Theoretically, at the furthest stretch, we could look at the world of Elden Ring as the next age of fire, but there seems to be entirely different world rules and overarching forces of nature, which have no relation to some primordial flame; that tells me we're seeing something entirely different. Sure, one might draw some base conceptual parallels between the Urdtree and the First Flame, as central forces of something important probably tied to the nature of the world, but that's just a trope of fantasy worlds. Or else are we going to wind in the Crystal from the various Final Fantasy games as evidence of how FF is within the Dark Souls universe? Make no mistake, no one who went to the effort to tell the story that Dark Souls did, about fighting against and then accepting the ultimate end, would sully that with a sequel; it would be the height of dishonesty to your own message. Dark Souls had been put to rest, and now something utterly new has arrived, it's time we approach that reality with the respect it deserves. And stop with the "is this a sequel?" articles, for everyone's sake.