5/5 ★ – daneh's review of Elden Ring.

Notes before starting the review: - No major spoilers will be mentioned; however, I may sometimes call later areas by name or might mention a few boss fights. Which isn’t really much of a spoiler but y’know. Just in case you care about that. - In case you don’t want to read this whole thing, skip to the final paragraph for the conclusion if you want. - I know Elden Ring is not a part of the flagship Dark Souls series Fromsoftware is known for, but the gameplay similarities between the two titles is undeniable and there’s obviously a lot of influences at play here, so I may compare both ER and DS series frequently. Just keep that in mind. Starting the actual review now — What can be said about Elden Ring that hasn’t been said yet? As it stands today, it’s been widely considered Fromsoftware’s magnum opus after their long history with the Dark Souls series, and although the only games I have played from the studio prior to my Elden Ring playthrough were Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls Remastered, I can see where this statement comes from. This is such a refreshing game to play, it’s so unique and it’s absolutely massive. I am confident that I have never played a larger game than this, and the work of hundreds of developers over years can be seen clearly on this project. This feels like a labor of love, from the studio, to the series that has grown their name for the past decade. And yet I feel Elden Ring is an extremely frustrating game, not necessarily difficulty wise, but more on how it’s designed, as it fails to understand sometimes what made previous games work, and then it doubles down on annoying game mechanics that don’t complement the game well at all. There’s quite a bit to dig in here so I’ll first mention the aspects of the game I don’t have as much to say about, first being the music. Usually, these kinds of games are pretty quiet most of the time and reserve their grandiose themes for boss fights and similar moments, and I think that still stands true for Elden Ring, although I’d argue the soundtrack this time was far more memorable, with the overworld still keeping the mood of the game in check at any given moment, and the fights being made a lot more intense and exciting by the orchestra. Namely I’d have to say the theme for the first phase of the final boss of the game stood out to me – I will avoid spoiling it, but it was a massive highlight, it genuinely felt like the stakes were suddenly being raised and it felt like such a cool callback to another track while adding more complexity to it, I love that. Apart from that, there is not much to say about the soundtrack other than it being appropriate for the game. An unrelated thing to mention would be the lore of the game, which is usually a big thing in Fromsoftware games as a big part of the fandom enjoys theorizing about the small shreds of story left there to explore, but unfortunately, I’m not really the kind of person who gets too fixated on item descriptions and dialogues and all, it’s all too big for me to comprehend lol. But if you are interested in that kind of stuff, I feel like the game has a lot of hidden lore to offer and uncover, it feels like there’s so much behind this fantasy world and it’s easy to tell every single detail was placed carefully to uncover the bigger picture. An aspect where I’d say Elden Ring excels in almost a genre-defining way is its presentation. From the very second you start the game, up to the very end, you are constantly showered with gorgeous views and scenes, every single detail in this game is placed in such a way it complements the bigger picture shown on your screen at all times – be it the shining Erdtree far away, or the ruins in the distance desperately calling for you to explore them. While Elden Ring undoubtedly assumes a much more fantastic setting with more beautiful vistas from out of this world over the atmospheric and medieval vibe from Dark Souls, the game does not shy away from getting dark and oppressive. It’s able to switch between moods so smoothly, and it manages to be great at all of them. Now, for the real reason I’m even writing this review in the first place… the gameplay! If there’s something Fromsoftware is especially good at, it’s the gameplay, after all they basically grew a new genre that has become widely recognized over the gaming landscape as the form of “souls-like”. So, the main question remains, does Elden Ring live up to the standards previously set, not only by the studio, but the genre as a whole? Well… yes and no. It’s pretty complicated, and tackling that question is quite difficult considering that, being an open world game, ER is bound to be a lot more different than traditional souls-like games. Considering the transition to open world can be very rocky and can fail horribly for a lot of franchises, Elden Ring actually pulled through really well, even if it comes out of the other side with a few typical issues that can happen from growing the map to a ridiculous scale. Let’s boil down the main gameplay loop of Elden Ring; the game will present you with a massive area full of enemies but also items, crafting materials, landmarks, overworld bosses, underground cavers, ruins, and a whole lot of other unique stuff out there. This all exists basically for the purpose of making your character stronger, levelling up and fleshing out a build that suits your playstyle with the wide array of weapons and armor and spells the world offers. The main reason you want to do all of this is for the legacy dungeons; to progress, the game essentially guides you into a massive dungeon you would explore very similarly to Dark Souls areas, very detailed castles or forts or cities with massive amounts of care and detail and very thought-out level design, with usually a very difficult boss by the end of it. Elden Ring’s basic gameplay is throwing you a seemingly insurmountable challenge in front of you, and then it’s up to you to go out in the world and find what tools you will use to get past everything in your way, and I think this is honestly the best way they could’ve translated the soulsborne formula into an open world. However, this is where the main issues with the game start to pop up in my opinion. While there may be unique landmarks and situations that happen in the overworld, most of your time might be spent looking through caves and ruins as these have the most enemies to gather experience from and can also have materials. But these areas can be so uninspired sometimes, they feel almost randomized, it always feels like you’re in the same set of rooms as every other cavern in the world with little enemy variety, which is really weird to see in a Fromsoftware game considering that their games are known for the high number of enemies in there. Sometimes they aren’t offensively bad and exploring them can even be a bit fun, but it just gets old very quickly considering a lot of it feels like recycled content. Plus, it doesn’t help that one of Elden Ring’s issues is its reward system. You can struggle in some underground tomb for an hour and fight a million enemies just to get a spell or item that isn’t even relevant to your build; of course, I understand that’s sort of natural for a game that offers so much variety in how to approach it, a lot of items aren’t going to be useful to you. But that basically renders most exploration useless, it makes a significant portion of the game feel almost like a waste of time, and if you want to avoid spending an unnecessary amount of time looking for a specific item in hundreds of identical-looking caves, then you might have to hop into Google and look stuff up, which is always a quick way to spoil some of the magic in these games. I know coming up with a solution to this is tough, but I think having more universal items as rewards that would benefit all builds would work. Or maybe making the rewards you’ll be getting a lot more explicit before exploring something might do the trick (e.g., Caves in Raya Lucaria should be focused on maybe giving spells/somber smithing stones, or Caelid should have a focus for strength-based players? I’m just throwing ideas out here. I’m not saying these would work necessarily but it might be a better idea than what the game currently does, which is just throwing you whatever random item may or may not be useful to you, which I find that pretty annoying). Game progression and character growth in Elden Ring, being an open world game, is a bit rough compared to its predecessors. Dark Souls character growth was very natural, since it was a somewhat linear game, every area felt appropriate to your level, at least mostly. Each part of the game flowed nicely into the next and grinding never felt very necessary unless you wanted to quickly be able to wield a stronger weapon or spell, although that’s up to the player. Elden Ring, on the other hand, makes it feel like grinding is necessary. Of course, as I mentioned before, the main gameplay loop relies on the player’s exploration of the area to get stronger, but when so much of that is a lot more open therefore the content each player goes through is almost always different, level scaling per area can feel broken at times. Multiple times I either had to go out of my way to grind and farm runes to survive, or I was maybe too strong for another area making every enemy, including bosses, go down in only a few hits. I went into the game with the mindset of exploring every nook and cranny, but when a lot of that starts becoming very bland and boring, as I talked about in the last paragraph, my desire to move on grew stronger and so I took the alternative of just farming the same enemy over and over again to level up my character because I couldn’t take another underground tomb that looked the same as the last one but with an annoying gimmick. This definitely made progression throughout the game feel very rocky at times and it never felt like I had achieved stuff on my own merits. I know this can come off as just me playing the game wrong and I should’ve just explored further and gotten stronger naturally, but when the methods of doing so ironically feel more grindy than just farming runes, I think the game is somewhat at fault here. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a ton of memorable events from exploring the overworld and some underground areas, there’s definitely some standouts. Siofra River, Eternal City, getting ambushed by a dragon in the overworld, getting invaded, exploring a cave with other players through online multiplayer, these are all moments I absolutely loved from exploring, and the thrill of going through these parts were worth the effort alone. There’s still a lot to be seen in Elden Ring, and I think there’s probably more highs than lows here, I just wish the lows weren’t so uninspired and boring, and I wish there were better rewards overall. One of the greatest benefits of going open world and growing your map to a massive scale is the sheer amount of stuff there is to collect; I know I may sound like a hypocrite because I just complained for two paragraphs straight how the huge amount of stuff causes most rewards to become obsolete to your build, but my issue is not with the rewards themselves, rather how they are presented. Anyways, back to positive stuff, the large amount of stuff to gather brings with it an insane amount of build variety. You could wield a giant greatsword with both your hands which is slow but strong, or maybe dual-wield two katanas that make enemies bleed out. Perhaps you’d prefer to be a mage? Summon dragons via incantations? Power through the game with towering shields? A mix of some of these? You got it. In Elden Ring, that’s entirely possible, and one of my favorite additions to this game was the miner bell bearings. Sure, finding them is ridiculously hard but once you get them, you can basically buy a lot of upgrade material easily instead of having to find it. Long gone are the days of me grinding for hours in Demon’s Souls to finally upgrade a bit more my crushing greatsword. The bell bearings essentially make build experimentation a lot more viable and can encourage using new tools, as upgrading them is not as much of a daunting task anymore, for most of my playthrough I would be a mage user with a Moonveil katana and an average-sized shield, but later I decided to dual-wield katanas, and maxing out a blood uchigatana was very easy (albeit a bit expensive, but that’s alright). There’s also the ability to reset your character to level 1 and get all your runes back, which is really cool in case you want to try out completely new stats and abilities, it’s these little things that make experimentation in Elden Ring so fun, and even though I’m still not a big fan of how rewards are handed out, this does soothe that a bit since you could use different items you’ve gathered by changing your build (although it’s still a bit of a commitment). Alongside this, Elden Ring brings a whole slew of combat options and customization, it’s impressive. First, there’s guarding and stances: when an enemy hits your shield if you immediately retaliate, you’ll do a strong attack that might break the enemy’s stance. You could also do a lot of damage consecutively to break their stance, but the point is: when you succeed in doing so, the enemy will be completely open for a critical hit. This is a big mechanic and guides a lot of Elden Ring’s combat, as aiming for breaking stances is a completely viable strategy and can even deal a ton of damage to bosses. This is complemented very well with the new ability: Jumping. I know, it sounds funny, but past Souls games didn’t really have that too polished, and they weren’t a main mechanic. Here, jumping brings completely new options, especially for melee players. Falling down on to enemies with a strong attack can break their stance and it can also be done from a distance, making it a lot safer than normal heavy attacks. Then there’s also ashes of war which is too big for me to get into detail, but it’s basically new moves you can add to your weapons, and this is where most of the customization comes from. This is genius, it adds so much more to the aforementioned build variety, you can add bleed or frost or whatever status you want, you can add magic damage, you can add physical options, even defensive options. There’s so much here that it makes combat so much more fun to mess around with. There’s also the wondrous physick to apply buffs in the form of a replenishable consumable item, and more magic spells that are really unique and so fun to play with, and a ridiculous number of incantations that have an effect on a lot of things and this is definitely getting out of my hand! There’s so much here to talk about combat-wise and how much freedom there is to approach it, this is definitely one of my favorite aspects of this game. I guess now it’s time to bring up one of the main aspects of the souls-like genre: The boss fights. This is definitely one of the hardest aspects to talk about Elden Ring, as I enjoy them but still think there’s a ton of issues that I just can’t ignore. Let’s start with the amount; technically speaking there would be over 200 bosses in the game, which is just insane! That’s really cool! But… of course, a lot of them are repeated content. Well. That’s alright, can’t expect to have such a ridiculous number of unique fights, and honestly repeating good content can be pretty beneficial at times, I don’t mind sometimes finding the same guy I beat a few dozen hours ago. A big complaint I usually see thrown around is how repeated content like this really dilutes the fights, and while I don’t care too much for normal boss fights that are just meant to be the ending of some random cavern you found, I really do agree when it comes to main story bosses. You can meet up with this crazy legendary fight in the context of the story that’s really exciting, and then few hours down the line you’ll find the same legend just chilling in some evergaol or just straight up repeated in a more difficult way in the main story too. That’s the equivalent of going through Dark Souls, beating Queelag, and then later in the game she appears as a mandatory boss again but with a slightly different move set. I get repeating content for optional dungeons that most players won’t see anyways, but Morgott? Godfrey? Couldn’t Fromsoftware come up with a different fight instead of having to challenge them both twice to beat the game? I know it sounds like nitpicking, but repeating important fights really dilutes the experience of the first time you challenged them and makes the second one just a boring retread of what you already did, especially when some of these are ALSO repeated in random dungeons or evergaols. Still, most fights are pretty fun, a lot of them can blend together and not stand out too much but that’s alright, most of them fulfill their purpose and that’s perfectly fine. But even though I just complained about boss fights for a full paragraph, get ready. I’m about to do it again :) The design philosophy Fromsoftware used for the creation of the bosses is very flawed in my opinion. Fights that are meant to be very difficult rely a lot on fast combos and a lot of aggression, with the punishment for failure sometimes costing your whole health bar. Elden Ring’s combat, while great, is not very appropriate for fast moves like this; I’ve heard from people who have played Sekiro that the fights feel more akin to that game, however the tools to counteract them are just not present in Elden Ring. Bosses will pull out huge strings of moves and if you successfully dodge them, very rarely do you have a chance to actually punish since they already have another move ready on the way. A lot of times fights become annoying for this reason, and the counter to them might end up being a specific build your character is not made for. I think aggressive and fast bosses can be great fun, but they shouldn’t do an entire health bar worth of damage off a single combo, and they should be able to be punished for using strong moves. But I do believe there’s a reason for all of this – Elden Ring is definitely meant to be a bit more accessible than past Fromsoftware games. That’s not to say it’s much easier, rather there’s a lot more options for newcomers to tackle the game in their own ways. And it’s via this decision that a new mechanic was introduced into the game: Spirit Ashes. Basically, these are like NPCs you are able to summon either with FP (focus points, equivalent to “mana” in other games) or HP. While most of these aren’t extremely strong, they do take focus away from you during intense fights. And in paper, this is a pretty good mechanic because it allows new players to ease into the combat a lot better and makes the game a bit easier, while not being necessary for experienced players if they don’t want to use them. However, I feel like Spirit Ashes are part of the reason Fromsoftware decided to design the bosses with such quick attacks and almost unpunishable; they were probably always intended to be fought in a 2v1, therefore it makes sense to let the player attack once the heat is off them and onto their summon instead. But, if I’m being completely honest, this is not fun. Having to rely on an NPC to beat a boss feels cheap, and undeserved for me, it negates a lot of the satisfaction that came from finally overcoming the odds and standing above a strong enemy in something like Dark Souls. And sure, it’s still a completely optional mechanic, any player could simply ignore Spirit Ashes if they wanted to and it’s still entirely possible to succeed, but as I mentioned before, the bosses really don’t feel like they were designed that way and it feels like I’m actively being punished for playing 1v1 in fights that don’t feel fair or properly designed for the kind of game Elden Ring is. That’s not to say there aren’t any fun fights that feel a lot fairer as a 1v1 and where I’m able to feel that rush of dopamine when I finally overcome the odds, but it was definitely a bit rarer than I’d like to admit. Now, I’m sorry for staying in this sort of rant for quite some time, but I just want to talk about two specific bosses which really highlighted my issues with the boss design in Elden Ring: Godskin Duo, and Malenia. First with Godskin duo: This is a very surprising fight, I never thought Fromsoftware, the people behind the iconic Ornstein and Smough fight from Dark Souls, could do a bad 2v1 boss fight. But this is awful, it disregards literally everything that made the DS1 fight work so well, probably because each of the Godskin characters were already previously bosses on their own. Throwing them both in a single arena won’t miraculously make a fun fight, they have absolutely zero synergy and each just does whatever the hell they feel like doing. The Godskin noble is big, but for some reason is somehow faster than the skinny Godskin apostle?? They literally just feel like two tough enemies thrown into a single confined without a care in the world, and they’re a mandatory fight. But that’s not even the worst part, the boss fight isn’t even just a simple 2v1 where you have to kill them both and that’s it, as they both share a health bar. Oh, but each one of them probably has their own HP that’s worth half the total boss fight health bar and you just have to take each one down? Nope. Both of their health bars combined don’t even make up for the fight health bar. They literally respawn even if you killed them both at the same time, the only point of the fight is to deal enough damage, doesn’t matter if they already went down. Who designed this? What is the point of this fight being like that? It makes zero sense and I’m still amazed these were the same people that made one of the best 2v1 fights of all time over a decade ago. Anyways, enough of that, now it's time for me to complain about Malenia. I think the way she’s designed frustrates me even more, not because she’s completely awful but because she had the potential to be one of my favorite boss fights, not only in Elden Ring, but of all time. She has such an awesome moveset and it’s such a badass fight, the music here is intense and it’s genuinely exciting to go against her. But unfortunately, they just HAD to make her do ridiculous amount of damage with almost undodgeable combos, and even worse, she heals a lot every time she hits you – or rather, every time she even hits your shield. The fight simply does not progress, if you’re not frame-perfect with every dodge, Malenia will always stay at full health, and you will eventually be one-shotted by a garbage move that came out in less than half a second. So, of course, time to pull a Spirit Ash I guess because I’m just not perfect enough to play the game in a way it wasn’t intended: a solo fight against a single opponent. And as I said, it’s so frustrating because there’s not a shred of doubt in my mind this would be one of my favorite boss fights of any game ever if she wasn’t screwed over with shitty mechanics at the last second. I know I’m being overly negative about the bosses, and maybe about the whole game in general. But I say this because I genuinely love this Elden Ring, I just think the intense fights would be better off if they weren’t focused in either distracting the boss with some Spirit Ash or playing 1v1 with perfection. I still had a lot of fun and many of the bosses ended up being my highlights from the game. Regarding the boss fights, I think I feel the exact same way I feel about the whole game in general: The highs here are very high, they are genuinely some of the best gaming memories I’ve had not only the last few years, but ever. But the lows in this game are REALLY low, it can have some of the most annoying, disappointing, and frustrating content in any game ever… … And yet, I still love Elden Ring. For a 5-star review, I’m sure this came off as very negative, but I genuinely believe the highs massively outweigh the lows, even if I’m a bit salty this game could’ve easily been on my top 3 favorite games of all time if I would’ve enjoyed more the cave/tomb/ruins exploration, the main gameplay loop in regard to levelling up, the rewards for going through a tough dungeon, and especially the boss fights. But despite all this, there’s still a lot of value to be found in these aspects of the game and I mostly had fun with all of them, Elden Ring presents such a lush and vibrant world, which doesn’t shy away from becoming dark and oppressive. It’s fantastic, it’s beautiful and it’s genuinely a joy to go through, it feels like I’m walking into a painting and I’m having MY own adventure. Rarely do games reach this level of freedom while also having so much to do, discover, and play around with. It’s one of the most grandiose games I’ve ever played, with possibly my favorite combat system ever, and I love this game so much I can’t shut up about it. I feel like anybody who enjoys videogames has to give this one a try at some point. It might not be for you, but just maybe it will click with you, and if that’s the case then I can guarantee you it will be an unforgettable experience. 10/10. Thank you for reading. Or not. I don’t know if you did. I just had fun making this review lol.