Elden Ring is a massive leap for the Souls genre in terms of scale and presentation, but it struggles at creating an organic, balanced difficulty. First, I’ll sing its main praises; the Lands Between are gorgeous and massive, and ER grants the player immense freedom, offering the largest build diversity in a Souls game to date.
Most of its flaws can be attributed to not being able to find balance. For example, Elden Ring often lies in limbo between being too easy with summons and feeling cheap without them. Its combat far too often relies on memorizing specific, arbitrarily delayed attacks that only exist to catch rolls. Almost every major boss has at least one roll-catch attack, and they all feel like a cheap way to punish the player for reacting to the overall movements of the enemy and missing the hyper-specific tells. It comes across as artificial difficulty, and feels even worse when examples like Hoarah Loux’s grapple can outright one-shot you for a roll that isn’t delayed enough to Miyazaki’s liking. This all turns into a non-issue, however, when you can mentally stun-lock the boss by calling a summon to hit them every five seconds, which trivializes even the hardest encounters.
The lack of balance permeates into the open world as well, where it is immediately apparent that the devs focused much more effort on the legacy dungeons as opposed to the freely-explorable landscapes. For the record, this is a great decision on their part, it’s just that once the player realizes this they might as well hop on Torrent and run by everything, as very little is genuinely worth exploring.
Overall, Elden Ring is a very good game and maybe the best entry point into the genre, but its added so much scale that some missteps were bound to sneak their way in as well.
Most of its flaws can be attributed to not being able to find balance. For example, Elden Ring often lies in limbo between being too easy with summons and feeling cheap without them. Its combat far too often relies on memorizing specific, arbitrarily delayed attacks that only exist to catch rolls. Almost every major boss has at least one roll-catch attack, and they all feel like a cheap way to punish the player for reacting to the overall movements of the enemy and missing the hyper-specific tells. It comes across as artificial difficulty, and feels even worse when examples like Hoarah Loux’s grapple can outright one-shot you for a roll that isn’t delayed enough to Miyazaki’s liking. This all turns into a non-issue, however, when you can mentally stun-lock the boss by calling a summon to hit them every five seconds, which trivializes even the hardest encounters.
The lack of balance permeates into the open world as well, where it is immediately apparent that the devs focused much more effort on the legacy dungeons as opposed to the freely-explorable landscapes. For the record, this is a great decision on their part, it’s just that once the player realizes this they might as well hop on Torrent and run by everything, as very little is genuinely worth exploring.
Overall, Elden Ring is a very good game and maybe the best entry point into the genre, but its added so much scale that some missteps were bound to sneak their way in as well.