2 out of 5

I’ve read comedy manga before, but I haven’t read an ongoing parody series before, so it’s a little unclear where to set my expectations on this. I’m coming into the series a bit disingenuously, perhaps, because I honestly felt like the “simplified” presentation might be a fun way to fill in some very basic Elden Ring lore for me, because I just have not been able to absorb it through the usual bevy of youtube sources… ER leans just a bit more into fantasy than my brain likes, and having an illustrated cheatsheet of sorts seemed helpful. And it has been! Obviously I know the stuff here isn’t exactly canon, but the broad strokes have been matching, and that’s been nice.

But that’s certainly not the main intention of the series, I don’t think. So how would I / should I evaluate a parody of a specific property, whether or not it’s manga? Again, I have some basis with parody in general, but when it’s hyper-focused like this… not so much. It seems like it’s acceptable to expect a reader to know something about the focus, which means I can factor that in: does the humor reward the fandom? Is it enjoyable to read as a story, or as a series of gags?

That’s where I do think the manga format comes into play a bit, since the above questions have somewhat unfavorable answers. Unfortunately, I’m stuck there – in terms of adjusting my rating based on qualifiers – with my limited experience in “hyper-focused ongoing manga parody,” and so here we are.

Elden Ring the manga, lore-wise, is appreciably pitched at a level that works for casual gamers. It touches on mostly mandatory path stuff, with some characters you’ve likely interacted with via major questlines, and if not, you’ve at least heard their name uttered by others. This is probably the “right” level, as deep cut jokes on the forums tend to merit a shrug except from those with the exact same take on that weapon, or that enemy, etc., at which point it becomes an echo chamber on the same joke. Meaning it would be hard to fluff that out to something that works well for a significant percentage of your readers, even if you assume them all to be lorehounds. At the same time, this kind of underlines a problem with this book: Elden Ring is a relatively young game. The parodies that work (in my opinion) either attack a genre, or something that’s more established in the culture. So, for example, I think a humor manga on Dark Souls could be successful, even if that has a smaller overall audience versus ER’s massive reach, because its existed long enough to have more of a foothold in the scene. A “bear seek seek lest” joke takes me further than joking about Ranni dolls, even if the latter is more contemporaneous.

Anyhow, that sticks us at a very surface level for the gags, with the rest of the jokes being general gamer stuff. Which are not unfunny, but – obviously – are very general. So nothing hits all that hard humor-wise: while there’s some inventiveness with the direction some jokes are taken, the subject matter is all low-hanging fruit. The “inventiveness” is also subjected to hinky translations, joke timing hitches overall, and instances where it feels like the punchline was chosen because it’s silly, but doesn’t necessarily feel right for the overall tone. To be fair, fast-twitch tone changes are part of manga – bouncing from slapstick to tragedy within panels – it’s just so uneven here, backed up by the art, which is part photo stat, part standard fantasy, and part comedy stylization. And that combo is also not so out line in manga, except no tone is carried through for more than a panel at a time. So it never feels like we settle into a joke or the story.

I do wonder if the translation plays a part. The actual language of the jokes often comes across as slightly off, and where I suspect some cultural context might make something funnier, certain translators will try to bake that in, but it’s here presented as-is, which only furthers the shallow “you should be laughing just because we namechecked a game character” feeling.

Dialing back closer to where I started, the pitch for the book is to follow a particular tarnished, named Aseo, as they’re guided by Melina towards the Erdtree. Boiled down to the basics of a good ol’ quest, it works, and pitching Aseo as a dullard that Melina must kind of do everything for is funny. The other wrinkles on the characters tickle a similar bone; if the entire thing had stuck to being a casual run in this vein, it’d probably work. But because the creatives try to do several things at once, nothing is very effective, and each piece underlines the shallowness of the others.