AS Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson hangs his gloves in mixed martial arts, he might just very well go down as the greatest fighter the world has ever seen.
His greatest challenge though didn’t come inside the UFC Octagon or the ONE Championship Circle – it actually came in the Lands Between.
Speaking in the press conference of ONE 168: Denver hours after his emotional retirement, Johnson – a known gamer – was asked about what’s harder: playing Elden Ring, or beating people up in MMA?
And anyone who actually played the critically acclaimed game developed by FromSoftware won’t be surprised with his answer
“You know what, I haven't even beaten the new Elden Ring DLC yet,” Johnson said, referring to the game’s highly-touted DLC Shadow of the Erdtree.
“So, you know, that just tells you that Elden Ring is a bit harder. But, you know, I've been playing games since I was a kid, and yeah, no comment,” he added sheepishly.
Johnson retired from active MMA competition after an illustrious 18-year-career which saw him defend the UFC Flyweight World Title 11 times, before coming over to ONE Championship and winning the ONE Flyweight MMA World Title, and the ONE Flyweight MMA World Grand Prix.
READ: Demetrious Johnson, one of the GOATs in MMA, announces retirement
He’s forever gonna be credited for putting the spotlight on smaller men in a sport that has been dominated by big guys, all while doing it without controversies, and without ever pissing positive for performance enhancing drugs.
The most impressive thing about it? He’s doing it while being an active gamer – continuously streaming popular games like first-person shooter battle royale PlayerUnknown’s Battleground (PUBG), being an absolute boss in fighting games like Street Fighter and running through the Horror Survival series Resident Evil.
But there’s nothing quite like playing, and beating, Elden Ring, a game that Johnson actually tried to stay away from when it first came out in 2022, citing how the lore’s pretty much all over the place, and of course, the dreaded difficulty that comes from “Souls-like” games.
For reference, the term “Souls-like” actually came from the Dark Souls trilogy – a game that tested a lot of people’s patience with their unforgiving combat, lack of a reliable map, and the lack of a traditional “checkpoint” other RPG games have.
“Elden Ring, not going to play it. I've done it many, many times and I don't want to get pissed off and break something,” Johnson said in an earlier interview.
But Johnson got challenged – he eventually caved in and late last year, he finally finished the base game – with his reaction after it trending in the world of MMA, as fans made a side-by-side video to the time he beat the game, and the time he won the UFC Flyweight World Title for the first time.
WATCH:
Now that he’s retired from the world of MMA, he’ll finally get more time playing Shadow of the Erdtree now - dealing with the likes of Promised Consort Radahn, Mesmmer the Impaler and Bayle the Dread. He can only hope to have the same type of success against these bosses, like he had in MMA.
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