Elden Ring Symphonic Adventure was…kind of disappointing

Let me just start off by saying the performance itself was great. Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Eric Roth were all fantastic. That being said, the production as a whole was, at least in my opinion, the least well done of any official video game music concert I’ve been to (NieR, Final Fantasy, Stardew Valley, Death Stranding, and now this).

So the show format is presented as an abridged playthrough from opening cutscene to a montage of all the endings. They would briefly play some of the ambient music with a montage of some sweeping shots of the zone, then move on to a boss theme while the fight played. The problem is that they would inconsistently have game sounds from the video playing during the songs, so you’d have these amazing orchestral arrangements being overshadowed by random impact sounds or spell casting noises etc etc. Even in the same fight, some clips included game audio, and some didn’t. The first half of the show also featured a lot of dialogue, which felt a bit forced since none of the characters aside from Melina made any additional appearances in the show. It felt very much like a montage of “I’m Blorpo”s and ruined the quiet ambient tracks.

I could see if they used game audio sparingly for hype moments or kills, but it was very frequent. As an example of missed opportunity where it would have aided the presentation: they didn’t include the “nihil!” chant audio whatsoever, despite it being a pretty iconic moment of the Mohg fight and marking the phase transition both in gameplay and theme.

On that note, the video / performance sync was off. There were multiple times where the boss fight part of the video would start and they’d still be playing the ambient track, as well as some instances of the orchestra starting the “phase 2” tracks before the video did or vice versa. The most egregious example of this was in playing Farum Azula’s ambient track while showing about 20 seconds of the Placidusax fight, then immediately jump cutting to Godskin Duo and their theme. It felt very jarring.

Most remembrance bosses got played, however despite putting both Mohg fights in, neither Fortissax nor Placidusax’s themes made the cut (there was some footage of Placi, but Fortissax wasn’t in at all). As expected, no SOTE / Nightreign music, no encore.

All in all, I’m still glad I went and would recommend it to fans of the game, but there’s certainly room for improvement (in my opinion). Has anyone else gone? Curious what others thought!