I think European copies of rare games are generally worth less than the US version. When I checked what my copies of Ninja Cop and Gotcha Force were worth it wasn't that much.

Elden Ring isn't actually THAT hard, turns out the people who yell "git gud" hamstring themselves by ignoring like half the mechanics and acting like it's cheating to use them.

I'm skeptical that anyone on the crew who is on the fence about Elden Ring would enjoy the game using summons and that other stuff. I haven't used it myself, but watching some other people play, it seems like they just let them do the work while they spam roll for most of the fight (which is fine, I just can't imagine this crew having fun like that). There is probably a happy medium to be found, but I think it's hard with the way the mechanics work. The game is still very hard in the sense that you can easily wander into a fight and still get one-shot.

That's also a pretty weird way to characterize playing Elden Ring like a classic Souls games. It's like saying people who don't play on the easy setting in an otherwise difficult game are hamstringing themselves or not using steer assist in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is ignoring the mechanics. People should just enjoy games however they want, there doesn't need to be shade thrown on either playstyle.

Anyway, I would argue that while Elden Ring is still difficult, the real way it makes the series better is by taking out a lot of the other frustrations around its difficulty. Cutting down (or outright removing) the slog back to pretty much all the bosses in the game, having a million options to go elsewhere and make progress if you don't want to deal with a particular boss or area at the moment, being more generous with bonfires, etc. It's still a hard game, but they smoothed out a lot of stuff around the difficulty that made it frustrating.