This might be the first game I can truly call epic. It’s not that other games dont have such qualities or that the rest of From Softwares offerings aren’t similar; they very much are and have a shared aesthetic interest in mediaeval fantasy and creationist mythology. It was just never like this, never on this scale. My journey with it felt Homeric and it took me four months and about a 100 hours to finish this shit. It's arduous as a good adventure should be and by the end of it I felt I actually went through something physical. As if I had been changed in some way and my soles should have hurt after all that distance travelled.

It is one of the few games that can back up all that talk of gods and men, birth, death, sin, light, darkness with actual gameplay and match it in its biblical proportion. The secret to this awe inspiring grandeur is that Elden Ring doesn’t fake the space. What my brain usually detects as skyboxes, here steadily reveals itself to be ‘’real’’ environment, my mouth gaping in astonishment. The ominous castle in the distance isn’t just decoration. It’s shrouded in fog, but I’ll get there. Or I won’t. Every piece of architecture has a life on its own and it doesn’t need my presence as a player to make it authentic. It was there long before and it will stay that way after me. The Lands in Between are so large, that the history of its digital world dwarfs you (that’s not even halfway through your quest. Fairy early on, you descend by an elevator that takes its time more than usual. Upon finally reaching the ground, your expectations of a middling dungeon are destroyed after you find out that you didn’t make a 10 minute detour, but discovered an underground world, the bygone eternal city of Nokron, a whole different dreamy universe than the one you left behind). As a result of this you feel like a hero part of the fabric of the mythos, doing your part in the shaping of the world of gods and men. Each zone of the map is like a massive canto from the epic of Elden Ring. It’s insane how many times you tell yourself ‘’ Wow, this is mental, there’s no way they can outdo this’’ but they do over and over. I won’t get into unnecessary enumeration, but the potential for adventure you sense after you get your sight on Liurnia when you exit Stormveil Castle is palpable. It is the perfect fantasy image to tingle your senses. Between the sharp rocky ominous formations is nestled a valley swallowed by morning fog. It looks unnatural, as if it's poisoning the ground and hiding evils within. In the far off, you can make out the silhouette of a twisted magical castle begging you to trudge and fight your way through the fog to uncover its mysteries. A perfect fantasy image. Also, the first glimpse you get of inner city Leyndel, after you penetrate its gargantuan siege walls and emerge on the inside, is a sight that will stick with me for a long time.

So, what’s the problem then? I can think of two, a major and a minor. The minor is repetition. Even Miyazaki's titanic talent could not manoeuvre around the open world blight. The most glaring and objective issue of the game is the surprising amount of uninspiring copy-pasted dungeons and the overuse of bosses. It cheapens the world that they have worked so hard to create, when they didn’t even have to do it. This excess of content was unnecessary.

The major one (apart from trivial imperfections and overcomplicated rpg elements that I’ve always found cumbersome in these games) is that I think From Software might have reached their creative limit. The ouroboros has bitten its tail. Is Elden Ring the latest innovation of the soulsborne formula or its last creative push ? To me it feels like the latter. Everything that began with Demon's Souls level design revolution of the 2010’s has blossomed here into its most complete form. It successfully fused with the open-world, a mark of ambition that just has one logical conclusion. You can’t go bigger than the biggest. How does the saying go ? Once you go open-world you never go back-erd or something of the sort. These questions might be more telling of an imagination deficit on my end but where do you go from here? How many different ways can you roll around a big ass knight and his giant sword ? How many times can you make delayed attack patterns to keep me on my toes? How many more castles can you make? How much bigger can the map to your game be ? I can keep going. How do you bring new ideas into a game that was the new idea? Are From Software too big to change ?

Anyhow, everything people are saying is true. It is one of the greatest games ever made, there are no two ways about it, but by the time I finished it, I felt that I had played it twice already and that’s saying something. I think of it fondly though and despite the stress from its many death encounters, I envision my time with the game in the calm of the ruins, under the golden light of the great Tree listening to the wind and resting with Melina's whisper in my ear. She tells me of the times before and prepares me for the times ahead. I’m not sure I'm following what she is saying, but it’s fine; most of my time with the game is like this, full of confusion about its story and gameplay systems. Half of the time (assuredly even more) I don’t know what I’m doing and what for, yet I don’t care. The poetic malaise of this world has its grip on me just that hard. This is what the peak of the mountain looks like; I glance around and take in the view to see how far I’ve come. After which I take a short break and prepare for my journey down. There’s nothing left to see.