Elden Ring (2022)

What I love most about this game, I think, is just the random things I stumble upon as I explore the world.

I thought Breath of the Wild gave you this massive world to explore, and it did, but so much of it was barren. Here, you will find random castles, huts, fortresses and other things as you go about.

Sometimes I just love riding my horse around and finding new places.

I just have to be careful, because a lot of times as I'm doing this, enemies are out and about and unexpectedly they kill me, haha.

Yeah, Breath of the Wild 2, get rid of the "weapons breaking" BS. It's not a fun mechanic at all and I love having a weapon and keeping it.

I don't want to write a full review for this game at the moment, or maybe even ever, but I am really let down by most of the bosses in this game. Balancing bosses to hit harder and move faster than ever before, while using Dark Soul's slow movement just makes it feel like any time a boss is "hard" its because it was built to be done with another person, or a summon to take aggro off of you. I feel very little achievement in doing virtually anything in this game. Just glad when a boss is over. Sekiro Bosses, with Dark Soul's combat. Shout Outs to Mohg and Margott for being really good though.

I really like the legacy dungeons and overall exploration, even if the non-legacy style content is a little repetitive and the rewards for completing side dungeons are usually nothing. The Legacy Dungeons and how fun traversing the terrain is basically carry the entire game. Still kind of wish that they just made a more curated, straightforward game like Dark Souls 1 or 3 instead of an open world though. I can tell, like Persona 5, Fire Emblem Three Houses and Doom 2016, this is going to join the ranks of the games I feel more sour on over the course of time, despite being at least good games at their core. This could have been so much more. Here's to hoping we get Armored Core 6 next.

Forgot to talk about jumping! Besides summons and the open world it's the other main new addition to the series in Elden Ring, and it's an incredibly mixed bag.

For the level design, jumping is a huge plus. Even though there's only like 7 real dungeons in the game, basically all of them constantly tease players with opportunities to clear gaps and scale stuff, and there's almost always a nifty hidden treasure or shortcut to uncover if you bounce far enough off the critical path. Double jumping around the open world on your horse is also great fun, especially the janky delight of scrabbling up cliffsides on paths that feel barely intended.

When it comes to combat design, though, jumping is an unbalanced, overpowered mess. For a melee character, the new jump attacks in Elden Ring are simply always the best option available to you. They have better range and damage than all your other attacks, come out just as fast, and are uniquely capable of stunlocking pretty much every non-boss enemy in the game. Approaching regular fights in any other way besides running straight into enemies and jump attacking them 2-4 times is hugely suboptimal, and this lack of combat variety becomes ever more keenly felt across the game's absurd playtime. Hopefully a potential ER sequel will figure out some way to introduce different dominant strategies for different combat situations.

Took a long break from Elden Ring due to computer and life troubles, but I've beat it now, including all the optional bosses and dungeons! The open world does nothing for me and I think it's a fair step back from its predecessors in terms of combat, encounter, boss, and level design, but overall I enjoyed my time with it and the art direction is lovely throughout.

Far and away the most successful addition to the game is the new spirit summoning mechanic, which I didn't use but allows players great flexibility to set their own difficulty curve. FromSoft didn't nail the balance just right: summons are arbitrarily limited to certain areas instead of being available everywhere, and the two NPCs who teach you how to use and then upgrade your summons are easy to overlook for no reason.

The boss design also suffers for FromSoft's attempts to keep summons from trivializing fights, with almost every boss having giant AoE attacks and retreating slashes that give them an edge against your minions but make them feel kind of tedious and interchangeable. But overall I think summons are a super clever idea and I hope FromSoft becomes more comfortable with letting them be overpowered player aids going forward.

After 152 hours and 180 levels, I think I liked this game.

The exploration was the big draw for me. I found myself staying up late at night saying… just one more dungeon. However it was the sense of accomplishment that was an even bigger part of why I stuck with it. I probably died a dozen times to the low-level, beginning enemies in the game before I figured out how to eek out a few wins. I preferred to tour the entire world first only occasionally pushing myself against dangerous monsters. Little by little I got more powerful and learned how to read the enemies. By the end I was stomping on some powerful foes, even the Royal Revenants. I had so much satisfaction being the big badass by the end.

I loved the enemy designs, so many awful and vicious creatures. Clearly at some point in development someone said “no spiders in the game” and the design team smirked and said okay. They came up with a couple of horrible and creepy monsters that were technically not spiders but inspired the same sense of dread in me.

My biggest gripe in the game were the NPC’s. They barely moved or animated, the voice lines had no relation to the mouth movements, and you often had to reload an area to get them to advance their quest. This just felt lazy and unfinished. One NPC is literally T-posing, which I realize is a joke but I found it all just lame.

Further many NPC quests would be accidentally cut off if you explored too far or if you ran another’s quest too far along. There was no in-game warning or reasoning for this. I know many have lauded FromSoft’s open world take but I actually think they did a great disservice here. One of the things I love about most open world game design is that you can run all the quests and see all of the game in one play through. I don’t want to be forced into NG+, though I realize I may be in the minority.

That being said I still have fond memories, and I can’t wait for the DLC.