The funny thing about this in Elden Ring (since you mentioned it), I never learned to use consumables besides the flasks. I’ve seen speedrunners make great use of some of the greases for example, but every time I use something I end up dying anyway. Really hurts because some of the consumables have limited crafting materials (St. Trina lily for sleep pots iirc?).
I ended up beating the base game without them.
The original. I played the GameCube version. There was a separate menu in the game that let you setup the Internet connection in order to play online.
I do remember being able to access the web browser through some tricky steps when setting up the billing. There wasn’t an address bar anywhere on the UI by default but some combination of forward/back revealed it. Not all websites were supported on this stripped-down browser but it was fascinating.
That’s a very fair take. I played a few play throughs of Elden Ring however and just never learned anyway, even though the items would’ve helped a lot on further NG+. I guess I also learned how to use fowl foots but that’s once a boss has died.