If you told me a week before Elden Ring came out that:

If you told me a week before Elden Ring came out that:
>Melina would be your travelling companion the entire game
>Melina would tell you comfy stories by the bonfires
>Melina would be a cool as fuck coop summon you can have during boss fights
>Melina would eventually sacrifice herself for you
>Melina would have a special dark ending where she vows to hunt you down for all eternity
I would have thought that she'd become one of the most beloved levelup girls of all time. It sounds near perfect when we lay it out like that. Not even Ranni could topple a girl that sounds that good.

But in practice it's just way too undercooked and underused. In realiry most players will only meet her at the start, play 50-60 hours, and she just auddenly pops up again at the capital. And the game somehow expects you to care when she burns herself. They had gold on their hands but didnt go all the way for some reason. Now I just miss the pawns from DD.

Not even a waifufag. Just disappointed in Miyazaki. Fucking Patches gets more love than her.

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its because she doesn't do anything or have any struggles. she may as well be one of the voices in my head

Melina
More like
Smellina

>No animations where Melina is feeding torrent in the background while you level up

Missed gold.

So, there's a ending when you can save your spiritual waifu from become a roasted chiken?

It's because they had this whacky idea of making her an epic character which means she has to be shrouded in mystery and act like a retard. It's not even just a Melina problem, most NPCs either want to use you or they fucking die because this is grimdark and you don't get to have nice things. Sellen is probably the worst example, they make a specific point about how grateful she is for your help, how much she admires how far you've come, how strongly she supports your claim for Elden Lord and how when you take the throne she will back you up with whatever you need, whenever you need, then they completely fuck her over and lock her in a room where you can't act so you're not even allowed to put her out of her misery. I get that all the games feature mostly bad endings for NPCs, but here you don't even get dudes like Stockpile Thomas or the Oedon Chapel Dweller who're just chilling and wanna help out even if they don't have some big major role to play. It's like they wanted to impress GRRM so they made everything extra grimdark and depressing.

If you take the Frenzied Flame then cleanse yourself you can effectively save Melina without destroying the world but she doesn't acknowledge it, after you take the flame she just fucks off and never returns even if you cleanse it.

Yeah, besides the moments where she shows up just to move the plot forward, she's basically non-factor in the experience as a whole.

I actually never liked her since the trailer announcement, and I ended up disliking her even more because her personality is so off-putting and monotone. I don't like the tone of her voice, and her design looks super generic and unconvincing for some reason, like she's a player-made character or worse, that tattoo looks like it could've been available in the character creator. Hell, there are even more interesting face cosmetics than that.

I still think the DeS has the best maiden by far. It just feels like FromSoft has been trying to waifubait with a lesser clone of the maiden in black since then. On a related note, holy shit is Melina's level up speech fucking awful. I just wanted to cancel out of the menu and level up in silence to not hear her terrible lines.

Who is she anyway? Ranni sounds like she knows Torrent (and I guess by extension Melina) but she never expands on that. Her name suggests she's related to Marika somehow.

She should've been a special summon with dialog options that you can use anywhere anytime.