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FromSoftware the president of FromSoftware Hidetaka Miyazaki's affection for Kentaro Mura's late manga as well as the animated series Berserk is the biggest kept secret within the Elden Ring Runes gaming industry. While he isn't willing to openly discuss the connection between his games and Berserk, it's clear that every Miyazaki-helmed project since 2009's Demon's Souls has been influenced in some way or another by the epic fantasy of the dark Miura wrote over the course of 30 years up to his death in 2021.
This tendency to refer to Berserk is evident in Elden Ring, the Souls successor that was released last month. Even before the game launched the game, players scoured each piece of promotional material to explain how the armor resembled something from Berserk or how the design of the enemy appeared to be drawn from Miura's work. As I've spent close to 100 hours playing the game over the last few weeks, I couldn't help but observe these similarities, too.
Let's get the most obvious Berserk homage over with first.Elden Ring's vast universe includes various areas I've named "sword fields." I'll admitthat the title isn't exactly innovative: They're simply small fields adorned with swords, all of which are stabbed first into the ground to allow them to stand upright. The middle of each one is a huge sword, with an inscription that typically provides a vague bit of information regarding the game's history.
The first time I came across one of these fields, it instantly brought back me of Berserk's famous Hill of Swords. In the manga and the Elden Ring Items buy anime, this Hill of Swords is meant as a tribute to the dead soldiers of the Band of the Hawk, a mercenary force that serves as the show's main characters for much of its initial run. Rickert is one of the remaining soldiers of the band, forges the countless blades of the Hill of Swords as tribute to his former fellow soldiers.