Elden Ring’s bizarre manga is hilarious and worth reading

Elden Ring, one of the greatest games of our generation, has a hilarious manga – and fans should definitely check it out.

Elden Ring hit the world by storm, bringing fans new and old to the new Soulslike realm, bringing

bringing profound lore, abusive difficulty, and a lot of bosses with it. While we eagerly await the DLC, The Shadow of the Erdtree, fans should take advantage of the quiet and catch up on some required reading for the FromSoftware title.

Elden Ring takes itself exceedingly seriously and offers little recourse to raise the mood outside of a foul-mouthed crab meat and prawn monger. So, no one would imagine that the tie-in manga for the game is supposed to be funny, changing stoic characters into hilarious caricatures of themselves that only fans would come up with.

Elden Ring’s The Road to the Erdtree manga is ridiculously funny

We don’t have to worry about character builds and min-maxing your stats when reading the hilarious Elden Ring manga. Just remember you read it from right to left; there’s that element of FromSoftware difficulty applied to the page.

Starting as most of us did when we started playing Elden Ring, our “hero” is very confused with what’s going on and what they should do, and at some points, saddened that the difficulty is holding them down; a sentiment shared with all newcomers to The Lands Between that feel the cold sting of the Tree Sentinel as he crashes onto your body with a giant horse.

Even bosses aren’t immune to the gag manga logic as our hero guilts Margit into letting him pass with his patheticness, but not before giving him a pep-talk to keep going. Godrick the Grafted previously plagued our exit from Stormveil castle with a firebreathing dragon for an arm. In the manga, instead of fighting him, we beat him in a grafting fashion show until his soldiers commend him for his efforts.

Where we had to fight our way to victory, our hero just sort of wins out of happenstance, leading to more comedic situations. While Rennala may appear sinister in her in-game boss room with all the children singing and crawling around, the manga turns into a daycare where an overworked Rennala needs a vacation. The manga is simply delightful.

The Road to the Erdree also does an oddly fantastic job of expanding on the characters outside of making them funnier; the best example is when the protagonist celebrates their victory over the magic dragon in Liurnia with Patches, Rya, and Blackguard Big Boggart, all chatting away with camaraderie.

Yen Press

It’s these small moments that give the characters of Elden Ring a semblance of humanity while breaking up the constant gags and over-the-top action. A moment of calm can still add plenty of gags, with the situation only lasting a panel or two as the calm breaks after Rya causes an argument, saying Boggart prawn is really crayfish. Everything oddly fits as these moments aren’t totally out of character for these people.

Despite the comedic nature of the manga, the art style is still taken extremely seriously, with beautiful landscapes of The Lands Between and action scenes done justice as we would see them in-game. Yes, that is our hero almost naked, lying face down in the mud with a disclaimer setting the tone if it wasn’t already obvious. You can’t deny it’s incredibly well drawn.

Fans who want a serious story may want to go back to the lore masters on YouTube who analyze Elden Ring to the smallest degree to figure out the story of the game. This is a comedy in every sense of the word, with every gag at Elden Ring’s expense making us want to keep reading. Who knows how the writing team will handle Malenia, Blade of Miquella, who has never known defeat? The jokes already write themselves.

That’s why we think the Elden Ring comedy manga is worth a read. For more of adventures from The Lands Between check out every Berserk and Game of Thrones reference we could find in Elden Ring, our guide on understanding the stats of builds in Elden Ring, and our rankings of the best Soulslike games to play in 2024.