5/5 ★ – forlornronin's review of Elden Ring.

+This is a great open world game. This is a great relief to me, as a lifelong fan of open world games, as many series making the jump to open world are doing so in bad faith. this really makes titles like breath of the wild feel like a joke. Outstanding job +Exploration feels sooooo good, and every effort to build your own adventure in the world is very very adequately rewarded and incentivized +The game takes a TON of inspiration from Princess Mononoke which is very welcome to me -Weapon variety for normal blades is incredibly lacking - literally every single boss item and almost every dungeon/quest reward weapon that isn't a spell is a greatsword. in my 95 hours with Elden Ring, I found 3 normal blade weapons. The rest were greatswords or colossal weapons. disappointed in this -The last third of the game re-uses a lot of bosses. This really breaks my heart as the distribution up until this point was phenomenal +So many INCREDIBLY memorable boss fights, moreso than any other From Soft title I've played. really out of the park +Margit is one of the best opening bosses in any game I've ever played +Few bosses that aren't great their first time around. Every souls game has a lot of encounters that just aren't really fun or feel unfair, but Elden Ring keeps these to an enjoyable minimum. There are bosses I spent two hours on in Elden Ring that felt like a blast, while there are bosses in other similar titles that have only taken thirty minutes but were thoroughly unenjoyable the whole way through +Score was utterly fantastic. Even Bloodborne has a majority of unmemorable songs that leave no real lasting impression. Almost every major encounter in elden ring is accompanied by a beautiful unique track that's unlike anything in From Soft's previous projects. Fantastic work here +The world map is massive, and every area in it is very visually distinct in colour grading and actual environment design +The linear map progression makes the game feel great to progress in the main story but there's so much content in each section that I never felt the need to move the main story more in order to have more side content. so dense with objectives -Farum Azula is shit. Lame and/or reused bosses and unmemorable, barely navigable level design +Combat is the best Souls has ever felt to me. It’s fast paced but feels great and very fair - it feels like they learned from Bloodborne that you can make fast-paced combat without sacrificing the deliberateness the slow combat created in Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls. +Build management got a huge boost in Elden Ring. There are more mechanics at work that you can customize your build with and the existing ones got great unintrusive qol that DOESN'T come at the cost of dumbing anything down. Elden Ring feels great to experiment in +NPCs also got a massive boost in Elden Ring. The character writing and design is top notch. A lot of these characters truly feel like the hero of their own story and their paths intersecting with yours for better & worse and them reacting to you and growing dependently is what open world experiences should truly be all about -Crafting is unnecessary, but I don't feel like I would like it more if it WAS necessary. It just doesn't make a great addition to the experience, it's largely a weird unneeded addition. On the other hand, it definitely stays out of the players way so I don't mind it at all. Its very much a "there if you want it" feature +Magic is finally just as fun to use as other cooler weapon types +Ashes of War being interchangeable also means that you aren't really "missing out" on some great spells just because you wanted a sword build +Storytelling is much more direct but doesn't beat you over the head either. Just subtle enough +95 hours and there's still twice as much content I still haven't seen +Just utterly beautiful in every way. Fantastic art direction -Performance issues on my new PC, maybe could’ve used a little optimizing +Very memorable great bosses: Ancestor Spirit/Regal Ancestor Spirit, Radahn, Margit, Mimic Tear -Less than ideal bosses: Godskin Duo (fucking really?), Commander Niall, Malenia +Variable swing-times is a fantastic addition to the game and making move reactions tighter and more direct is a great way to raise the skill floor fairly. I love it and I hope to see it in their next games. Run time: 95h44m Incredible 10/10