"Elden Ring: The Road to the Erdtree" Gets No Maidens and Stacks No Runes

The official  Elden Ring manga manages to be both a joyless comedy and a woefully misguided adaptation of the game.

Warning: there will be minor spoilers for the first area of  Elden Ring and the first volume of the manga.

Like most, I was initially surprised to see that the official comic adaptation of Elden Ring would be a gag-filled parody manga. I took this in stride, though, since From Software's style of action RPG is full of hilarious slapstick and absurdity. One of the very first things that happens in Dark Souls is a giant boulder rolling down a hill and pancaking the player. Subsequent levels include poison swamps, cemeteries with resurrecting skeletons, trap-filled fortresses, and other exotic and deadly locales that clearly illustrate how much the developers delight in tormenting their audience. For over a decade, we've laughed along with them—after the embarrassment had passed, of course.

Thus, it's a shame that this humorous spin on Elden Ring so thoroughly misunderstands what makes its source material great and, in many cases, funny.

Let's start with what The Road to the Erdtree, Vol. 1 gets right. Nikiichi Tobita's art is generally quite strong, with expressive characters and highly detailed scenery (though some backgrounds look suspiciously like they have been scanned in from the game). As expected, the book also cleverly references the game's mechanics, frequently breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge things like leveling stats and using items. It also manages to streamline the game's sprawling introduction into a coherent story, incorporating sidequests and supporting characters at ideal moments. This is an especially impressive feat given the fact that players can take any number of paths through the opening hours of the game.

Much of the art is fantastic, deftly capturing Elden Ring's main cast in stunning detail

The primary issue is that when one looks past the clever allusions and the dialogue quoted line-for-line from the game, the writing itself leaves a lot to be desired. There are some laughs to be had here and there, like when one quest-giver's dialogue is said to contain "a lot of new proper nouns", but these are tempered by the book's tendency to beat jokes to death or wring every ounce of wit from a gag with excessive explanations. Some of this could be due to the translation: the panel layouts are already set, so the localizers had to adapt the dialogue to fit. Still, characters are often entombed in their own rambling text bubbles, a fate made worse by the fact that the text itself is so lackluster.

Furthermore—and more pressingly—the protagonist is an utter twit. The Road to the Erdtree focuses and amplifies every insufferable isekai cliche in a half-naked ignoramus who almost literally fails upward at every turn. Aseo*, as the hero is named by the maiden Melina, does experience many familiar pratfalls, such as being one-shot by the Tree Sentinel or suddenly teleported to a forest inhabited by ravenous runebears, but here's the crucial difference: at no point does Aseo ever accomplish anything. 

*Short for asebito, the Japanese term for the Tarnished

Subtlety is not the book's strong suit

The supporting cast carries the story and the protagonist, to the point where Aseo hardly ever lifts a finger. It's not presumptuous to say that the central mechanics in every Souls game are exploration and combat. So while Aseo does bumble his way through Limgrave in a realistic fashion, all of the major battles are all handled by other characters, and Aseo serves as little more than a passive observer. Even Melina is a more active combatant than her ward, who is content to stand on the sidelines making silly faces and/or asking the most obvious questions possible. There is precisely one scene in which Aseo strikes an enemy, and his target is, in gamer parlance, a trash mob. Both boss fights covered in this first volume end without Aseo so much as swinging his weapon. By the end of The Road to the Erdtree Vol. 1, Aseo is less of a stranger who has overcome grueling, borderline Kafkaesque obstacles in a strange land and more of a clueless man-child whose only personality traits are that he is out of his depth and incapable of fighting for himself. 

The Tree Sentinel is one of the few enemies that feels true to its in-game counterpart.

Part of what makes the Souls games so funny on their own is that absurdity and incongruity exist in an otherwise deathly serious world. The player begins at every disadvantage, lost in an unfamiliar environment that is actively trying to kill them. But as they progress through each game, they learn from their mistakes and can eventually laugh about the journey in hindsight. Many of the series' most memorable moments combine comical failure, such as being killed by explosive barrels or spin-kicked to death by a mimic, with the potential for success if one takes their time and approaches the encounter more carefully in the future. Roll into the Taurus Demon's swing instead of away from it to avoid damage and the threat of being knocked off the bridge like a hapless ragoll. Draw enemies to you, one-by-one, instead of running into their ambush and getting stabbed by a half dozen carefully hidden assailants. Carefully scan the shoreline to see where it's safe to walk and where one will sink into the lake like a sack of hammers. One must acknowledge their earlier mistakes—and amusing deaths—in order to beat the odds. This remains one of the series' core tenets, and it is noticeably absent in The Road to the Erdtree. 

Here's a brief example. Without getting into specifics, one of Elden Ring's first major bosses is a demigod with a flashy and complex moveset full of combos, feints, and ripostes. Even after over 400 combined hours with previous games in the series, I struggled to adequately answer this opponent's flurry of strikes during my first playthrough. Instead, I opted to leave and explore a completely separate region to gear up for the rematch. 

In The Road to the Erdtree, this foe becomes so frustrated with the protagonist's ineffectual and pathetic whining that he barely engages the fool in combat. Instead, he spares Aseo, gives him equipment, and explains where to go next. At first I thought this was an interesting, if still unfunny development, a painfully literal way of showing how all fights in Elden Ring are learning experiences. Then the boss disappears, and the victory text that players have come to know and love appears across the page. That's it. One of the book's first major adversaries—an opponent that perplexed and humbled countless players in the game—decides to give this wretched, incompetent lout an earful of advice and just...leave without a fight. If that wasn't already soul-crushing enough, this is the rest of the panel:

Palm, meet face.

The issue with The Road to the Erdtree is not that it pokes fun at the characters, plot, and world of Elden Ring, nor is it that the jokes miss more often than they hit. The flaw at the heart of this book is that its protagonist is a poor surrogate for a player experiencing Elden Ring for the first time, and his journey offers no new insights into the game. Aseo learns and earns nothing. His character arc is a straight line (or a concave one). There are moments where he professes a desire to seize the day and prove that he's "not totally useless" (his words, not mine), but these ring hollow when Aseo never makes good on any of his boasts. Might this be an issue with the first volume? Perhaps. Could the series improve in the future? It can only go up from here, and the teaser at the end of of this first volume hints that subsequent entries may cover the lore of the Lands Between, illustrating characters and conflicts that are only briefly referenced in the game's text. We'll have to wait and see. Regardless of what the future holds for the series, Book 1 of The Road to the Erdtree is a colossal disappointment.