Elden Ring

I won't lie to you, I didn't have a great time playing Elden Ring. I'd just come off of playing Dark Souls 3 and the finale of that series; fighting Slave Knight Gael in an ash strewn desert as thunderous lightning bolts and dark red face-like entities flew from his cape as he pounded his sword into the ground where I was with a frankly epic soundtrack, was pretty much one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. I was awestruck, an absolutely incredible boss, prehaps even the best I'd ever fought. Coming out of Dark Souls 3 was a massive high and I was so eager to get into playing Elden Ring that it was the only game I've pre-ordered since Doom 2016. Don't pre-order games is the only lesson I really have to give.

For reference I played most of the game on the Xbox One X and for the final boss I upgraded to the Series X which man, that framerate boost really helped.

The Good:

There's a magical touch to Elden Ring with it's large fantasy castles, beautiful lakes, enchanting forests, underground lairs and haunting dungeons and it's environments are all beautiful, the story is pretty good but again something I'd probably need to watch a video on to appreciate it a bit more. The characters were a bit forgettable besides the obvious Turtle Pope Boy, who was naturally, the best character. The music is pretty good but most of it is a bit of a step down from the boss fight music of Dark Souls 3, but walking Limgrave with that faint sense of sadness and mystery was really pretty no matter how long it went on for. The level design is pretty good with some places being exactly to the quality of Undead Burg or Yharnam in their shortcuts and complexity, which if you've played Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, then you should know this is high praise, but there are some places that were a bit too complex for their own good. There's so much variety in build with some of the most amazing spells and incantations ever seen in a souls game, the weapon line ups were incredible and the variety once again was just out of this world. The boss design's and enemy design's are so cool and unique but there's a lot of pallete swapped repeats which is a little disappointing. The day night cycle introduced a lot of opportunitys for things changing and exploration and there's a lot of game mechanic's to toy with from new spell types and damage types to ashes of war and spirit summons to make trying new things a absolute must.

The Questionable

My issue with Elden Ring is cut 50/50 between the bosses and the balancing and usually some kind of combination of the two. The early game is filled with bosses that can be challenging and don't feel too cheap, but include longer wind up moves to mess with your timing, which isn't cheap but felt like an easy way to bait out a players roll way too early so the boss could take advantage of your dumbo roll and smack you one on the noggin. This is really fine but a LOT of bosses do this and some enemies too which get's pretty tiring.

There's a lot of confusion on the difficulty spectrum when you factor in the open world. In Dark Souls games it was pretty much you need to defeat this boss to progress, so go defeat this one boss, but in an open world, you have more options can just ditch the big bad boss you needed to do and go explore other things and goof around elsewhere to level up and come back. This is good, except when it isn't rewarding. So there's a lot of bosses in Limgrave from the fire breathing dragon that cuts short your exploration of the lake in the area's middle to yet another guy who LOOKS JUST LIKE PATCHES hanging around in a cave who clearly bit off more than he could chew when he picked a fight with you, but there's a sort of discrepancy for the amount of runes you get for defeating bosses and their actual challenge. I'll just say it, the Crucible Knights are awful enemies to deal with, they're the dudes who hang out at the gym all day and really, really want to show off by beating you down, their agressive, highly difficult to attack since they have a massive shield and getting 3000 runes for defeating one in the first area of the game feels so painfully unrewarding that it left a permanent sour taste in my mouth. It was 1/8th of a single level-up.

This feeling just kept on going with certain enemies being incredibly difficult to defeat and yet yielding so little runes that I felt like I should have just done some boring grinding instead, the challenge of beating them was not compensated by the reward for defeating them and most of them weren't very fun to beat. Where this get's bad though is that in the open world I went and mapped out bosses who did a bit too much damage for me to realistically beat so that I could level up and come back later, and I found that as the game progresses I was mapping more and more bosses on the map, until I realised I had nowhere else to go but throw myself into these boss fights where the damage I received was multiple times the amount I'd taken from Slave Knight Gael. There were literally optional bosses who were doing as much damage to me as the final boss, but all I got for defeating them was some bell bearing's for the merchant to expand her inventory to include button-up shirts or something ridiculous.

The late game damage is EXTREME, it's okay saying "don't get hit", but with the long wind up moves and AOE attacks it was getting frustrating to not only time their moves perfectly, but not be in the same post code when it landed. Plus even basic late game enemies can casue a LOT of damage from attacks off screen if you aren't paying attention. The balancing is so poor that exploring Caelid was the same kind of nightmare that it's design makes it look like, you could one shot an enemy and then walk across the street to get wrecked by the same guy with a differing colour pattern on his armour set. The number of times I recoilled in shock to find out that the guy I was fighting had twenty times the damage output I did, after I just left an area where I was a goddess to these poor, backwards fools, had me burning up with rage.

There IS progression, in some areas. Some places lead onto the next perfectly with the kind of escalating difficulty that befits any game at all. But there are also a tonne of experiences and places so poorly designed and balanced that it made me wish I was playing Dark Souls 2. I will never find out what's at the bottom of the sewer system in the capital because exploring the tunnels was confusing and the enemies down there dealt enough damage to disuade me from ever bothering to go back. I went in 20 times but never once came out. Besides whatever lurked down there and Malenia, I beat pretty much every boss in the game, because I felt like I needed the levels to do it.

I eneded up respeccing constantly to try strength/faith/dex/magic/arcane builds, trying everything I could to beat various bosses and it felt like I shouldn't even try and attempt any of them without a spirit summon of any kind since they had more health than me and could tank the bosses hit's whilst I chipped away at it's health. I tried different weapons, spells, incantations, trying Comet Azur and other things but the late game damage made me feel like I was running around naked.

The side quests were difficult to follow without guides with some just ending randomly even with guides, uniting Corhyn and Goldmask was going swimmingly until I went back to the roundhold table and was just given Corhyn's things as if he died and the quest was just over. No explanation, nothing, fission mailed. I also got pretty sick of recurring enemies coming back in the late game with twice the health and damage output because it felt lazy. I got invaded a few times whilst helping other players and the invaders were all broken difficult with one guy being able to one-shot me with some kind of fire magic move in a corridor, that I didn't get to anaylse because it was over in seconds and this was what most encounters were like with invaders, we never encountered any normal players, just ones with broken builds or insane health or damage. It made helping my friends feel silly since I'd be more of a risk to them than a help by bringing invaders.

I love souls games, I really do, but I would take nearly every other souls game over this experience again and all my issues are so, so easy to fix, but I know they won't do it. I don't know how everyone else did with this game, but as long as it retain's it's surprising 5 star standard it's never going to be fixed I'll never be going back to it.