4.5/5 ★ – TheCriticalPandaBoi's review of Elden Ring.

So I have a little story to tell before I continue to write this review because it’s something that makes me feel really stupid and it’s just a confession that I have to do. When it comes to Souls games and any game made by FromSoftware, I have never really been too interested or engaged in the style and type of gameplay they provide, a lot of it was obviously to do with me being terrible at the Souls genre and since this was back in 2018 when Bloodborne was for free on PlayStation Plus, I was obviously too young to understand the controls and learn about the game. Unfortunately, because I didn’t like Bloodborne back then and I looked into the Souls genre and found out that Bloodborne was considered the best game in the Souls series, let’s just say I just completely ruled out every Souls game. When Elden Ring released, i legit instantly ruled it out due to it being a Souls game, as well as not really particularly being a big fan of open world games besides some exceptions like Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 5. I bring all this up and talk about this story and share this information is because Elden Ring really blew all of those behind thoughts and mild expectations out of the water, I truly never thought I’d love this game as much as I did, this was truly a great experience! First thing I have to mention is that this voice cast is actually stellar, I was actually pretty surprised by how good this voice acting was since FromSoftware is a Japanese studio I believe so you’ll have to dub the language in English and as seen from games like Resident Evil, the voice acting isn’t exactly the strongest with it’s writing or voice acting. I also wanna mention that the open world is one of the best open worlds I have ever seen in a video game, it really puts studios like Ubisoft to shame because this is a fully immersive open world that truly felt like it had no limits. It’s very smart and interesting the fact that you have the option to do as much exploration as you want before even fighting yourself first boss, you are even able to take full advantage of the open world exploration and over level yourself for the boss fights, I tried not to do that, I wanted it to still be a bit of a challenge but when I was back tracking getting the legendary items for achievements, and in Limgrave, I was wiping the floor with them enemies that once wiped me on the floor. You can also pick your class when you start your run of the game, I picked the samurai class due to the katana which is a great starter weapon as well as just the best starting class according to my friend. I also named my character Roy Borkus, so I just find it funny that now the name of the current Elden Lord of the game is named Roy Borkus. Now, Roy Borkus had a journey so enormous and that was pretty much the story of the game, you play as your own customised character, in this case, Roy Borkus is a Tarnished, who is the weakest level role in the Elden World and he or she or they had one objective, fight your way to the top. It’s such a simple story in concept but that’s all I needed. If that’s not enough for you then don’t worry because this game is just so filled up with lore and theories that are so vague but also so interesting to where it’ll keep you wondering, every night when I hopped off the game, I would go on YouTube and go down a rabbit hole of story explained videos and lore videos on the game, it was truly an obsession. Truly, I was enamelled and immersed fully into this world and I just wanted to learn more about it, which i haven’t done with a game since I played Alan Wake for the first ever time. It also helps that the lore and the lands feel very much inspired by Celtic countries and mythologies, so like Ireland, Wales and Scotland and since I’m Irish, there may be a tiny bit of bias. The gameplay here is also pretty smooth, you can tell that FromSoftware has learned from the previous Souls games and have just defined it, any time that I died during combat and the gameplay is completely my fault and I learned very quickly that it’s a massive skill issue that I had, the game never really felt unfair in a way and everything felt possible. Yes it takes a lot of learning to get used to the controls and the gameplay, it’s not exactly a cake walk or anything, it will take you time and once you finally learn the basics, then you can find the best build for you. There’s so much great weapons you can get by either purchasing them from merchants or exploring, and any weapon you can obtain, you can level them up to get more stats up and make them more powerful. I don’t really have a weapon recommendation for you to use per say since different people will enjoy doing different builds that suit their preferred weapon types but the weapons i personally used the most were the Icerind Hatchet and Rivers of Blood due to the frost bite affect and the bleed affect they both inflict respectively. You can also level up your character, i think by the end of my playthrough, Roy Borkus was level 132? I could be wrong. The individual stats you can level up can be purchased with runes by killing enemies and bosses and the way you level up your character is by going to the site of graces which are also just used as checkpoints. You’re also able to level up your flasks for either giving you HP or FP by finding golden seeds around the map and you are also able to level up how much health or focus you can retrieve back by going to these churches and collecting sacred cups. There’s also these summons you can summon to help you fight certain battles that’ll use your focus, or if you prefer something more competent in earlier stages, then you can go to summoning pools and summon other players to help you which I’ll admit I used a good few times. I didn’t really use the incantations or sorceries that you obtain in the game, i personally didn’t find any use for them in the build I was running so I did a pretty much magic-less run if you don’t include the mimic tear summoning. If I do wanna get a bit nitpicky with the gameplay, I do need to mention that the lock on feature is a little bit poor? Like I’ll try lock onto an enemy or a boss with my camera pointing right at them and I’d press the lock on and the camera spins out and faces the opposite direction, i only found it an issue because some bosses are really fast and if they move too quick then the camera can’t catch up to them and just sorta breaks? But it’s not a massive deal because I’ve played games with worse cameras, like Shadow of the Colossus is a similar game in this genre and the biggest fight I had in that game was the fucking camera so there’s obviously worse cameras than Elden Ring’s. And now we get to the talk about the bosses, and here’s where I’m mixed about them, now there’s no denying that these bosses are fantastic and unique and challenging, yes I lost my shit sometimes but that’s classic gamer rage, even though I loved a lot of these bosses, I think there’s only 3 I truly struggled with. A big complaint I have about the bosses is that because there’s so much variety in every boss and there’s a lot of unique move sets and different bosses, you do really start to notice when they start reusing assets and repeating bosses, it became more noticeable near the end of the mid game and it just kinda griped me a little bit. But the bosses that aren’t reused or duplicated are fantastic and phenomenal, my favourite 3 bosses in the game were Lichdragon Fortissax, Astel, Naturalborn of the Void and Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon if we’re talking about designs, they were the visually appealing and coolest ones. The 3 hardest bosses for me were Starscourge Radahn, Malenia, Blade of Miquella and the Elden Beast, but out of those 3, Malenia, Blade of Miquella was EASILY the hardest one, I was struggling for 2 hours without getting her health any lower than a fifth of her bar so I had to cheese it and summon other players to help me, but don’t worry, it was still a massive pain in the ass and still took me a long time even with the assistance. You can also pick multiple endings in the game, I’m pretty sure there’s 7 confirmed endings? 3 of them are actual unique endings and I went for the Ranni ending personally, so I’m currently married to a Demi-God so sucks to suck maidenless tarnished out there!! Overall, Elden Ring is a masterpiece in fantasy that I truly think any of the criticisms are tiny specs compared to how incredible this game is, in highly recommend this game if you somehow haven’t played it already, trust me, you’ll get some maidens if you beat the game.