I’ve heard a lot about this game, the supposed undisputed GOTY for 2022. With a highly-anticipated DLC on the horizon, I thought I’d try it out. Unfortunately, I can say without exaggeration that Elden Ring is the worst game I’ve ever played in my life. Given its renown for punishing difficulty and intricate world-building, my expectations were admittedly quite high going in. There’s also the inherent hype from knowing they paid George R.R. Martin for the right to put his name in the credits so they can say they technically paid a writer in the course of developing this game. After defeating the Elden Pokémon and witnessing...whatever the hell happened in that ending cutscene, I couldn't help but question why the hell I wasted the past 5 hours slogging through the mind-numbing boredom that was Elden Flop.
First, the gameplay is shit. While I’ve seen Elden Ring lauded for its challenging combat mechanics and expansive open-world, the reality is more depressing than the Berserk manga the game so blatantly rips off at every turn. You will spend minutes in mind-numbing hack-and-slash combat, devoid of any semblance of strategy or nuance. Most of the combat boils down to popping 12 buffs, then walking in the room and activating a laser beam until the enemy health bars disappear. Thankfully, Fromsoft took a page out of the gacha genre’s playbook and included an auto-battle option in the form of “spirit ashes” which summon dudes to fight every boss for you, allowing you to bypass some of the game’s most painful segments.
Next, as many people with brains have noted, the game’s UI is incomprehensible. To select the game’s “piss-easy baby googoo gaga” difficulty, you have to equip a weapon that inflicts bleed, then go to the level-up menu, scroll down to ‘Dexterity’ and ‘Arcane’ and keep hitting the right button on them until the numbers go up. The game never explicitly tells you this either; you have to figure it out on your own, which is pretty bizarre for a so-called accessibility feature. The game is littered with design like this. For instance, infamously, to pause the game you have to go into the graphics menu, set everything to max, look at any asset in the game and try to move. Alternatively, you can play the aptly-named “Prepare to Pause Edition” of the game on last-gen consoles and achieve the same effect without having to sift through any options.
The character and enemy designs were puzzling to say the least. I was expecting some kind of dark fantasy setting full of neat designs and backstories. What I got is softcore porn that is only a fantasy for foot fetishists. Most of the characters in the game have feet. Hell, one late-game boss you have to sit and slap its feet (which makes a fap sound with each swipe) for like 5 minutes—while it shoots bullshit projectiles at you off-screen with no telegraphing—before it starts the second phase of the fight. The game similarly has these regular enemy giants which are really easy to fight with just one hand on your controller while you circle around their feet, hacking and slashing until they collapse and you catch a glimpse of those sweet, sweet callused soles. Other sexualized designs include this like really big hot dude in a castle who has hornily-grafted multiple other bodies onto himself, allowing him to have feet for days in all the right places. The fight itself is not hard at all, especially on piss-easy baby googoo gaga mode, with the only challenge being when you dodge roll and the busted camera inevitably zooms in on some of the boss’s feet while he juggles you with his many, many other feet. Other bosses include: Malenia, Foot Queen of Miquella who has never known the Feet (a lie); the Foreskin Duo; Rennala, Mooning Queen; Asstickle, All-Natural of the Void; Dragonlord Flaccidusex; Giant Cock with a face, Lord of Blasphemy; the Dungeater; and some stupid piece of shit on a horse who spawn camps new players at the start of the open world but whom I definitely beat on my first try.
Now, believe me, I could write a whole review just on feet in Elden Ring. But you’d probably like to hear more about the rest of the game. Fine, that won’t take long since there’s very little of it. Elden Ring was famously developed in just 3 days, a feat/feet the game repeatedly nods to throughout in a kind of meta joke by repeating the number 3 in its design elements. Along with the only 3 different [viable] weapon types in the game, there are 3 different areas and 3 different bosses, if you don’t count all the recycling of shitty repetitive dungeons and empty scenery you can traverse atop your goat-horse, Mario.
As for the lore and story? Awful, just fucking awful. Thankfully most of it is found in item descriptions so you can ignore it. The rest is found in an incomprehensible deluge of seemingly unending cutscenes masquerading as profound storytelling but feeling more like a bad movie than a video game. I skipped most of these cutscenes starting around season 5 and found the story made a lot more sense that way.
Lastly, the presentation. As the game is notoriously more unfinished than Metal Gear Solid V, you’ll notice right away they didn’t even make music for a lot of the game. Which is probably for the best since most of the tracks that are there just sound like feet slapping on violin strings. I eventually turned the music off and listened to kpop while I played, like it was just another session of Overwatch. The graphics on the other hand I must admit look exactly like what you’d expect from something that could be the best-selling game of all time. Unfortunately, the best-selling game of all time is Minecraft and that seems to be where Elden Ring drew its inspiration here from as everything is a cartoony blocky mess. It took me until halfway through the game to realize that was a fucking tree in the middle of the open world, not the sun. Real trees don’t glow, wtf.
I’m sorry to say that Elden Ring is exactly what I feared it might be: more overrated, generic, lazy, bloated AAA drivel not worth your evening or money. It has single-handedly made me more cynical about the future of gaming. I post this review as a status update because if I made it a review, I would be forced to give this game at least 1 star, which it has not earned in my eyes. I give Elden Ring 0.1/10. May its feet rot in the deepest depths of this swamp.
