Everything Elden Ring’s Story Trailer Reveals About Its Main Characters

Most of the characters in the new Elden Ringstory trailer have been seen in previous gameplay footage released by FromSoftware. The breathtaking cinematic scenes, creative character designs, and enigmatic narrator do, however, reveal a lot more about the storyline crafted by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R.R. Martin – the history and metaphysics of the setting they created, the personalities and powers of the game’s central characters, and even the bosses players are likely to fight in the full version of Elden Ring.

From Demon’s Souls onward, FromSoftware has prefaced every new game cycle of their fantasy RPGs with a cinematic intro, outlining the world setting they designed, the crisis player face, and characters they’ll encounter during their quest. In Demon’s Souls, the pre-character creation intro described the Old One awoken by the use of King Allant, the colorless, demon-infested fog that swept across the land, and notable NPCs such as Biorr of the Twin Fangs or Saint Urbain. The intro cinematic of Dark Souls was essentially a creation myth about how a pantheon of gods such as Gwynn, Lord of Sunlight, and The Witch of Izalith overthrew the ancient dragons and created an Age of Fire, the sins of their usurpation eventually causing a plague of Undeath to sweep across the lands of humanity. These cinematic intros, and the intros seen other Dark Souls games, consistently introduce important NPCs… and major Boss enemies players will have to kill.

The pre-character creation intro cinematic for Elden Ring, recently unveiled at this year’s Game Awards, describes the mythology and history of the world created by fantasy writer George R.R. Martin – a once orderly land torn apart both politically and metaphysically by warring factions of demigods and the mysterious figure who shattered the titular “Elden Ring.” This cinematic also sheds more light upon the divine beings, heroes, and monsters seen in earlier Elden Ring trailers, giving players concrete information and tantalizing clues about their names, positions, powers, agendas, and overall role in the final game.

Elden Ring Character: Godwyn The Golden

An important distinction to note: the demigod character called “Godwyn the Golden” doesn’t appear to be the same as the “Godrick the Golden” boss enemy that lies at the heart of the Stormveil Castle dungeon in Elden Ring. Indeed, it would seem the dangerous, limb-grafting being called Godrick is desperately trying to acquire the power and reverence Godwyn held by claiming the deceased demigod’s title.

The Elden Ring cinematic trailer, through visuals and soft-spoken narration, describes how a mysterious group of dark riders stole a relic called “The Rune of Death,” after which the “Demigods began to fall.” This suggests the dark riders used the Rune of Death as a weapon to slay the once-untouchable demigods; alternately, the theft of the “Rune of Death” simply removed the demigods’ immortality, leaving them vulnerable to anyone who wanted to kill them. After a black screen and the sickening sound of ripping flesh, the trailers show the corpse of Godwyn the Golden, blond tresses askew, lying face-first on the ground, bare back covered with cavernous gashes, with a strange substance wriggling under his skin and leaking from his eyes.

The gashes on Godwyn’s back look strangely similar to the ones seen in the very first trailer for Elden Ring, which showed a mysterious figure pounding on an object with a smith’s hammer, swinging it over and over even as cracks spread across his flesh like porcelain. This could mean Godwyn was the true culprit behind the shattering of the plot-important “Elden Ring.” Alternately, all demigods in the Lands Between fracture and fall apart when they’re made mortal by the Rune of Death.

Elden Ring Character: Queen Marika

Information on the Elden Ring website, coupled with lore details in the Elden Ring Network Test, have painted a fairly consistent picture of the unseen but important characters called Queen Marika. Sometime in the distant past, Queen Marika united the Lands Between under her rule, using the “Elden Ring” to create a “Golden Order” that maintained the cohesion of her kingdom and even let her alter the metaphysical rules of reality. As an immortal God-Queen, she gave birth to demigod children who ruled parts of the land in her stead and blessed her subjects with something called the “Light of Grace.” Those who could not, or could no longer channel her “Light of Grace” were reviled as “Tarnished” and banished from the Lands Between; each of the characters player create starts out as one of those “Lowly Tarnished.”

The narrator of the Elden Ring trailer only only mentions Marika once, describing how she was “driven to the brink.” Afterwards, the trailer shows a scene of Margit the Fell, the main boss from the Elden Ring Network Test, laying a crown down upon an empty throne; Queen Marika, it would seem, is dead, vanished, or grievously hurt in some way. The statement “driven to the brink” suggests that Queen Marika tried to do something incredibly difficult and strenuous – expending all her divine power to stop death from claiming her demigod children, perhaps. Alternately, the shattering of the Elden Ring might have shattered Queen Marika as well, scattering her power, or perhaps even her very being, into fragments players of Elden Ring may try to re-unite.

Elden Ring Character: The Blade of Miquella, Malenia The Severed

The first trailer for Elden Ring showed a scene of battle and a mysterious warrior; a Valkyrie-like woman with long, blood-red hair, a winged helmet with an eye-veiling visor, and a prosthetic arm fastened to a harness on the stump of her right shoulder. The newest Elden Ring trailer revisited both this character and her bloody battlefield, revealing more details about the “Valkyrie” who is currently the unofficial mascot of the game. Her name is Malenia and she bears two epithets: “The Severed” and “The Blade of Miquella.” Both these epithets seems to refer to her magical prosthetic arm (similar to the silver prosthetic worn by Prince Nuada in Celtic Mythology) and the long, katana-like blade attached to said artificial limb.

The Elden Ring trailer also reveals Malenia’s role in the game’s backstory. She was one of the mightiest warriors to survive the conflict known as the Shattering, a devastating war fought between the children of Marika over the Great Rune Fragments that comprised the once-intact Elden Ring. If not a demigod, Malenia The Severed is certainly on the level of demigods, given her status as an Elden Ring boss character and the utterly gargantuan foe she confronts in the new trailer.

Elden Ring Character: The Conqueror Of The Stars, General Radahn

General Radahn, a gigantic warlord with the epithet “The Conqueror Of The Stars,” was also shown in the first trailer for Elden Ring, then formally named in the newest Elden Ring story trailer. He has the same long blood-red hair as Malenia, suggesting a possible family relation, but has a craggy grey face, glowing demonic eyes, and massive armor sculpted to resemble a beast or dragon of some kind. Just before confronting Malenia the Severed, Radahn uses some kind of magic to lift his massive double blades into hands, levitating the debris around him as he does so. If this magic of his does involve manipulating gravity, this may explain how General Radahn, a massive giant, can sit on his normal-sized horse in Elden Ring without snapping its back in half.

General Radahn’s “The Conqueror Of The Stars” epithet has very interesting implications for the plot of Elden Ring, depending on how one choses to interpret it. If the full version of Elden Ring has science fiction elements, as some suspect, this may mean that General Radahn traveled into outer space to conquer other worlds. Alternately, General Radahn’s epithet may instead refer to the Carian Royal Family, a peerage of nobles who created many of the cosmos-themed Glintstone Sorceries in Elden Ring and used the Telescope item to study the movements of the stars.

Many of the Sorcery-related items seen in the Elden Ring Network Test have descriptions detailing how the Carian Royalty Family lost their prestige and power oncee Queen Marika and her demigods established their new Golden Order; General Radahan may well have been the demigod general who conquered the lands of the star-worshipping Carian nobility.

Elden Ring Character: The Fractured Narrator

The last character explored in the new Elden Ring trailer appears at the very end, the camera slowly panning up to reveal the true form of the trailer’s soft-spoken narrator; a four-armed woman in an elaborate dress and wide bonnet, skin pale and smooth as milk or porcelain, scars or cracks around their throat and clavicle, and a translucent ghost emerging by her side, mirror every motion she makes. This enigmatic narrator, who stares directly at the player and coyly suggests they “take the crown” and become the new Elden Lord, has the alien uncanniness and fashion sense of the Plain Doll from Bloodborne, suggesting they may also be an artificial being. More importantly, this narrator seems to be “fractured” on a physical and spiritual level; her body marred with fissures, one of her eyes missing, her very soul misaligned with the body it was meant to inhabit.

The mysterious narrator of the Elden Ring trailer refers to Queen Marika as a person separate from herself, though this doesn’t prelude her from being a fragment of Marika that was split off when the “Elden Ring” was shattered. The narrator’s lack of a right eye may also hint at her connection to Melina, the one-eyed NPC in the Network Test who helps the player’s Tarnished character level up, a ghostly figure who claims to work on behalf of her “mother inside the Erdtree.”

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