I hate that I don't love this game. All the time I hear people singing their praises and love for this game and im left feeling like a crazy person. This game just never clicks, it legitimalty got me all existential and doubting if i even liked souls to begin with. Turns out i do. Playing Bloodborne or DS1 after this feels fresh and exiting. Especially Bloodborne, with its faster, more focused combat and design. Ive tried getting into Elden Ring a dozen times and always get burnt out and frustrated due to the progression of the game.

I appreciate the open nature of the game and the lack of direction, but there has to be a nice in between of ubisoft checklists and this. This game would greatly benefit from a subtle quest log, without it, youre left with missing great content and quests, or ruining your immersion by searching guides, thus making the games progression into a LITERAL checklist, the thing we were avoiding in the first place, It often feels like the game design is crafted around some hypothetical player that just gets it, Im not one of them. I often feel as if im always WAY too powerful or WAY too weak for most fights, leaving me unsure if the challenge is just classic souls hard or me being underlevelled or my build being bad. Ive tried so many builds, ive tried using mimics, ive tried using no mimics, ive tried everything, i still dont get it.

The game also has no story it feels, note that i say story. I know the game has good lore, but no one would ever know that if not for youtube. People lie through their teeth about how riveting and fun it is to read item descriptions and listening to monotone dialouge. Within the game itself, I have nothing to fight for, noone to care about, no quest to aspire to. All you know is to become elden lord and obtain the elden ring, abstract concepts that make no sense to the new player.

Im a huge fan of Fromsoft, but the Demon Souls/Dark Souls engine is holding back this game so much. The stat/upgrading system takes out all the mystique and importance out of weapons, boiling down to cold hard numbers. This game is beyond bloated and overwhelming, I cant get into the groove of the game with the thought that at any moment i could be locked out of a quest, lose the oppurtunity of an armor set or weapon I want. Nothing meshes together, the game is incredible if you seperate it into pieces, but all together, its an ugly and unituitive mess.

I still think that most if not all the early reviews of this game were made during the fantastic first half of the game, blinded by the fresh feeling of an open world to explore, visual spectacle and the seemingly endless content, combined with the fanatic from soft bias, no one dared to give this game anything less than a perfect score. These games being "hard" have made all reviews of the games useless, in fear of being mocked, they are forced to give perfect scores. Recently when the dlc dropped, game informer dared to be honest and was bombarded immediatly with mockery. There isn't a difficulty problem thats the issue, its the balance, its the bloat etc. I keep hearing that this is the easiest and most accesible game in the series and i feel as if im playing a whole different game. Ive beaten every boss ive encountred, but never felt triumphant, just relieved. Counter that to Bloodborne, where i could bash my head agaisnt a boss 30+ times and feel such joy afterwards.

There are lots of objectively bad parts of the game, the most obvious being the performance, the PS5 version of the game is hovering around 40-50 fps in a nausiating inconsistence. Ive had to downgrade to the PS4 version just to get a locked 60fps.

Ive played this game so much and the furthest ive ever come is around the fire giant in the snowy mountains. Riding through the empty and uninspired fields of reused enemies and bs half of your health striking enemies, i was left thinking that ive already experienced the best part of the game. Looking online, it seems i was right.

This review sucks and lacks proper structure, just like this game lmao

This game is something else. It captured a sense of mystery and awe that I had been missing from other games at the time. Environments ranging from stunning to eerie to peaceful, there is never a dull moment in the lands between. With how many weapons, spells, and armor sets are in this game, there are many options for builds.

Being my first souls game, I struggled, but I enjoyed the struggle. This game introduced me to souls games and I thank it for that. It has its faults, and that's why it doesn't get a full 5 stars but to me personally it's close to it.

I want to preface this by saying how ready I was to enjoy Elden Ring, and I gave it two absolutely solid attempts.

Fromsoftware is such an odd developer for me. On the one hand, they've made what's literally my favourite game of all time. I'm not really one for getting too excited for any one studio over another, but their games typically embody a design philosophy that didn't really see mainstream resurgence until the late 2010s, and certainly they're the best in their category.

I think unfortunately, a lot of my distaste for Elden Ring pares down to matters of personal taste as well, because for me, a lot of Elden Ring really isn't that bad, I just really don't think it's all that good either, and while I think a comparative review isn't the best approach, it's hard not to look back at Fromsoftware's other games- all of which I think are better, and I mean all- and not feel like this one was a tiny bit phoned in.

It was hard not to see the writing on the wall early on either. I think I'd been part of a few people who were disappointed with Sekiro not being Dark Souls 4 or Bloodborne 2, and were eager for Fromsoftware to make a return to their signature medieval dark fantasy, but things kept coming up that were omens that this one was not going to be a title for me.

Scale was one thing. In an age of £70-80 AAA games, customer and company alike have bought into the pounds per hour thinking, after all, games are expensive to make too. What this disregards is from whence the scale. I don't actually know how much the average player knows about game development, and I don't like to assume, but for the people who were thrilled at Elden Ring's eye watering size, it did make me wonder if they knew that meant necessary sacrifices (or perhaps if they cared, after all, there's nothing wrong with wanting a lot of the same thing if you like it).

When you do something as big as Elden Ring, you can either work on it for the time it needs, or you can start copy pasting material. I know they took a while, but for a game of this scale, not nearly enough, and I think it shows. It was always one thing to deal with repeat bosses in other souls games, and I don't really think they're all that awful, after all, the bosses are very well designed usually, and take up maybe 15-20% of an average playthrough, so I don't take umbridge at the re-use of a particularly well made boss if it's once or twice, or maybe serves some narrative purpose. When you start coming across the same town layout or fortress or encampment repeatedly, or the enemies are all the same but in different colours, it's hard to cut it the same slack, given that it's that more significant chunk of the gameplay.

Of course, with a new IP, comes some changes. I know I can be a bit unfair with this too, I absolutely hated Sekiro the first time I played it, only to come back after 3 years and a funny youtube video, and love it so much I went through to get every ending. Of course, Elden Ring was no exception for me. In the first instance, hearing they cut strength scaling carry weight out from the demo was a pretty low blow, dex tanks had always been a personal bugbear. Then there's the removal of infinite combos, which feels literally like a spanner being thrown into the works mid fight. We already had a way of cutting those off, and it was the stamina bar. Add into the mix a whole load more magic than the souls games, a system that I find irksome at best, and offensive at worst, and suddenly you have a balance that seems to be tipped in favour of mages, be it pure or battle, or multiclassers.

The first time I played Elden Ring, I think it was that surface level stuff that bounced me off. Sekiro was the same with a system that left me feeling like I was trying to emulate a chasethebro stream if I engaged with it (this is a bad thing). Considering I had just replayed Sekiro though, shortly after, I tried Elden Ring again, hoping that letting the changes settle a bit more, that I would be able to engage with the game for what it was, rather than comparatively. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect. At once I want to engage with the game as intended, but feel like I'm told no when I say melee only. For me, it's far less fun to play some multiclassed demigod who's levelled 3x past the old souls meta (80-125), than it is to play some variety of sword fighter. Coming back into it revealed to me how overinflated a lot of the numbers are, and while this is partially a level/world design issue, it does leave a lot of the combat feeling like I'm shooting myself in the foot without any sort of reward.

I shouldn't be surprised either. I think there's been a tremendous amount of toxicity coming out of the souls fanbase for over a decade now, and it's only ever gotten worse as it's soaked up more people. Perhaps Elden Ring is Miyazaki's attempt to really hammer home that there's no shame in using all the tools available. I just wish I didn't feel like not using all of them was making me have a worse time.

Then we get to balancing. Elden Ring for me really does compound every single one of its issues by insisting on being open world. There are so many ways to make open world work as well. Generally the most beloved games that do insist tend to avoid such systems as scaling, and they lean into the natural push and pull of players naturally being attracted to areas where they feel the right amount of challenged, and repulsed from areas that are too much of a slog. Fallout New Vegas's "easy" route to the strip is such a great example of that sort of soft level design. While Elden Ring doesn't resort to scaling up enemies, I did find that it suffers from a platinum games style scaling issue, where instead of having your enemies get more complicated, or aggressive, or giving them different weapons, it feels more like enemy health is the only thing that goes up. The other problem this causes when you engage with the system and go level up, is that should you forget to come back until too late, you'll steamroll an otherwise fun boss, and ruin your own fun. It's ironic considering that this is an issue they could have fixed by making the game smaller, and spending more time polishing and detailing, but by making it smaller, there wouldn't have been this widespread of an issue with the balance they have, rendering it a non-issue.

Then we get onto matters of taste. I don't actually have to justify myself here, the review score for me comes more from the paragraphs before this. This is all just stuff that made it easier for me to give up playing.

So for the music, I wasn't at all a fan. What I've always preferred in my souls games is a strong sense of theme, and where better to get a theme than a leitmotif. As such, Dark Souls an Elden Ring have deeply forgettable soundtracks for me. Dark Souls II as well doesn't help itself either. The through line here being Motoi Sakuraba, who seems like he wanted to explore atonality, but like a GCSE art student claiming they "could do a picasso, it'd be so easy", he didn't first understand the basics. Harmonically, his music does absolutely nothing. It goes nowhere, it says nothing, and it's overcrowded. There are a couple of nice moments, but it's a sea of vague emoting, and there's only so many times I need to see the angry emoji to get the idea. You may know that it was actually Yuka Kitamura (Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne among others), Tsukasa Saitoh (King's Field among other things), Tai Tomisawa (according to google, it does say sound designer though), and Yoshimi Kudo who wrote for this. Not a Sakuraba in sight thank goodness.

Unfortunately, this makes it worse for me. Kitamura I think had some excellent scores in Dark Souls 3, deeply expressive, with a solid use of most of a symphony orchestra (the instrumentation leans a little late romantic, and shies away from the less soloed instruments, but it's still good). Tsukasa Saitoh (who did Dark Reality from King's Field at the very least, the ambience in those games is like nothing else), Tai Tomisawa and Yoshimi Kudo are more unknowns for me, but ultimately, and I'll try not to hypothesise too much, it came across as too much of a homage to Dark Souls, which for me, will forever be the worst soundtrack of the souls games.

Add to that an overreliance on midi instruments (something they apparently had the budget to avoid back in Demon's Souls 2009 even, like they hired a bassoonist! The bassoonist had solos! It fitted thematically!!!), more repetition, a departure from no ambient music, and a return to that 20th century style of orchestral writing, and you have a score that seems to emote without depth for hours on end. Deeply uninspiring.

Lastly, I find a lot of common conceptions about the past much more boring than the real thing. Maybe I've been overexposed to the kind of fantasy that has its roots firmly in Tolkein and dungeons and dragons, while superimposing characters who wouldn't be out of place in the modern day, but I find it irritating how an element that's seldom explored is just how damn weird a lot of fiction from the middle ages was. Blame sanitisation, or the victorians (please do, bloody victorians), and whatever else, but nothing upsets me more than the knowledge that in the past, people were just as interested in surrealism as I am, which is a huge blow when you've been sold on them all being proper English (victorian) knights (even the peasants). It's a very long winded way for me to say that for me, Elden Ring is very much in with the kind of unweird, less surrealist fantasy that I don't like.

You might argue that there is plenty of surrealism to it, and you wouldn't be wrong, but here's where I get really infuriating. It's not the surrealism you tell, it's the way you don't, and Elden Ring crosses the line for me into that Destiny/Bungie proper noun story telling. You hear about a thing. You learn about that thing, then you learn about the sexy family drama that's occurred alongside it, and gee whiz, I wonder who's to blame for that GRR Martin. Back in the old days of souls, you wouldn't even hear about a thing. You'd see it attack you on screen, and then you could either content yourself with not knowing, or you could go watch a souls lore video about it you're one of those, so for all of you Game of Thrones enjoyers, you vaatividya watchers, I hope it makes you happy. Dear lord, what a sad little life.

For real though, I think there's a lot to be said for a piece of media that doesn't tell, and doesn't show either unless it really really has to. Confusion is a much underutilised story telling device, and for my money, everyone could do with making themselves familiar with the good and bad kinds, because I sound crazy trying to talk about how much I love being the good kind of confused, and I'd appreciate it if I didn't. GRR Martin is very much a writer obsessed with demystifying the past by bringing it into the present. Many of the characters in his books wouldn't feel out of place in any drama set in the modern times. I often like to say that Daenerys' dragons could have been replaced with flamethrowers, and they still would have had the same plot impact, and frankly, while his books are mostly easy reads, I just wish he hadn't gotten his grubby mitts all over this game. Miyazaki was far better at environmental storytelling before.

So that's about it. It's a game I was extremely disappointed with twice, and sure, you can put some of that down to nostalgia, but I stand by my thinking. Elden Ring is a veritable buffet of all things souls like, and unfortunately, they'd run out of all my favourites, the service was middling, and the quality just wasn't there.

+1 star for being somewhat competant
+2 stars for killing time while I was on painkillers recovering from surgery
-1.5 stars for getting GRR Explain Everything Martin on board.