2 out of 5

What I wanted: a manga that would use Elden Ring lore as a springboard for parody, maybe some fourth wall breaking.

What I got: That, except the parody is more Friedberg and Seltzer than ZAZ, and fourth wall breaks that are kinda just like gaming mag tutorials. Neat!

Volume 1 of the Elden Ring manga hung closer to my hopes for this series, with a translation that didn’t seem to capture cultural humor very well – or that the material wasn’t very funny – somewhat acceptable amidst cleverly silly / willfully stupid spins on ER’s storyline, using generic tarnished dullard Aseo as our springboard to meeting Varre, and Ranni, and so on.

Volume 2 gives us the showdown with Godrick at Stormveil, and it somewhat maintains that silly / stupid vibe except we’ve had the “joke” of Godrick in this version of ER spoiled multiple times over by this point, and the showdown essentially just hammers that same bit home, though at least with some nods to the actual boss fight in the game. That’s… acceptable. But as we proceed to the Roundtable Hold, the series’ issue with joke timing makes the entire sequence – chatter with Ofnir, Enia, and Fia – fall very flat, and then we focus on Bernahl for what seems like forever, equally poorly timed and leaking cleverness from that silly / stupid combo en masse, and clarifies that the m.o. for this book is going to be exactly this: retelling the game in an approximate sequence, and finding the most obvious character trait to exploit very likely every NPC and boss, and spending way too long retelling a single joke about that trait. While there will likely continue to be wrinkles of creativity along the way, the translation / timing makes that hard to enjoy, as does the stiffness of the art, locked in to digital reprints / photo stats or whatever, static art looks pretty cool, but anything that requires movement or to go off model amounts to posing action figures and is rather lifeless.

Part of me wants to hang in there to extract the high level lore, but I don’t know if it’s actually worth it, as the reading experience is a bit of a drain. Since the goal was to enjoy myself while getting that lore… that equation suggests I not worry to hard about finishing this series. But we’ll have a few more reviews to go as I picked up several tankobons of it to start.