There are few games as utterly captivating as Elden Ring. Throughout it's runtime, I found the game's world and it's dungeons just absolutely sucking up my play sessions and spitting me out on the other side, way past 11pm and wishing i didnt have work the next day. It's a hard game to drag oneself away from, with an open world that constantly rewards curiosity, enormous main dungeons which you can now have a degree of vertical exploration and platforming, and constant beauty to be found in it's locales and vistas.
The world design and the main levels of Elden Ring are just astounding. If you exclude the copypasta mines and catacombs, which fortunately arent too common, nearly everything else is high tier Fromsoftware stuff, and the world design itself is fantastic. It's kind of like New Vegas in that whilst it's very open, there's a clear route the game is always nudging you in, and the world design being much longer than it is wide ties into that. Towards the end of the game it also gladly funnels a bit more, so just as the open world fatigue feels like it might set in and the world looks like it might be overstepping, it pulls it back just enough.
The gameplay itself is basically dark souls 4, which is pretty much what everyone wanted, so cool. If there is a significant difference between them, it is that Elden Ring is a game that encourges far more resourcefulness and usage of tactics and items that were pretty useless in previous games. The item crafting allows lot more liberal use of things like firebombs and knives, crossbows and bows are massively more viable, and multiclassing a melee build with some magic is a natural path to take as scaling seems way less important than stat requirements for wepons and abilities. With spirit ashes as well there seems a fairly large emphasis on using a wider variety of resources available to you, which is a good change, and discourages the R1-roll-r1 that souls can sadly boil down to.
On a core gameplay side, the only real issue i have is the scaling of enemy health and damage. It's just a bit overtuned. Unlike other Souls games, Vitality basically has to be your primary stat here - having about 40-50(!!!) seems appropriate for the endgame, in a game where other stat demands remain basically the same compared to previous games. Enemies also get vastly inflated health pools in harder areas than where you should be, and whilst i get the purpose to sort of corral the player in the right areas, it's a bit much. It leads to coming back to early areas being a cakewalk whilst lacking a few upgrades in a lategame area to be a nightmare - something that can easily happen becasue the drops required to upgrade weapons are kind of a mess to get and you may well end up in a situation where missing one low level stone prevents a massive jump in power. Reducing this quite massive range would have helped a lot, and I don't really get why the decision was made to be like this when none of the other souls are, excluding the chalice dungeons and the New game plus cycles - which is kind of what going to a new area feels like in gameplay terms.
The bosses are also a very mixed bag. Many are great, of course, but there's some serious dark souls 2 energy to quite a couple of them - bosses with really weird wind ups that track your position to an insane degree with only tiny windows to fight back with. And worst off, very occasionally you'll get to fight two of those fuckers at once.
There's also just too many bosses in general. I know they're often the best part of these games and that since you can run past so much of everything else in this game, it might be neccessary, but there's a large amount of copypasta of the minor bosses in particular, a lot of similar dragons - and the game basically ends with 5 bosses directly after each other, which is a bit much. They could have toned it down a bit.
Other than that, perhaps the biggest dissapointment for me is the narrative and world "lore". Especially in the early hours the world of elden ring feels a bit like bootleg dark souls, to the point i dont know why they didn't just make this a direct spinoff. There's so much stuff which is just "dark souls stuff but named different" that it feels a bit fake, and wheras something like bloodborne could get away with it due to a vastly different setting, Elden Ring's really is quite similar. The conflict of the game is also quite poorly defined unless you're really paying attention to stuff. Fortunately some very good NPCs (ranni my beloved) and the world design itself rises to the occasion, but yeah, I really think they should have made this just a dark souls spinoff, it just means it feels awkward at times, especially in the early hours which are just straight, boring high fantasy.
To be honest, there's an overwhelming amount of nits to pick with Elden Ring. I could write a review much longer than this one alone about individual locations in the game that feel like they were given to the team who made shrine of amana, or the weird quest design, or wonky performances issues or whatever. But, y'know, that's From. Every last one of the souls games - and all the earlier games of theirs i've played - have problems that I would dumpster other games for. I will forever make fun of the Cathedral level from Code Vein, but you'll probably catch me defending lost izalith if you got me drunk enough. Because just the general play experience of Elden Ring is so damn strong.
It's not the best soulsbornekirofieldtowerring - the honour still goes to bloodborne by a long shot as far as i'm concerned. Ultimately i do think enough of the issues i've mentioned, particularly the wonky balance, large amounts of reused stuff and some bad bosses definetly knock the game down a peg. But it's still clearly the best open world game since Gravity Rush 2, and FROM's first crack at this really doesn't feel like the sellout my cynical self thought it would be. It's like they've been doing this all along.
The world design and the main levels of Elden Ring are just astounding. If you exclude the copypasta mines and catacombs, which fortunately arent too common, nearly everything else is high tier Fromsoftware stuff, and the world design itself is fantastic. It's kind of like New Vegas in that whilst it's very open, there's a clear route the game is always nudging you in, and the world design being much longer than it is wide ties into that. Towards the end of the game it also gladly funnels a bit more, so just as the open world fatigue feels like it might set in and the world looks like it might be overstepping, it pulls it back just enough.
The gameplay itself is basically dark souls 4, which is pretty much what everyone wanted, so cool. If there is a significant difference between them, it is that Elden Ring is a game that encourges far more resourcefulness and usage of tactics and items that were pretty useless in previous games. The item crafting allows lot more liberal use of things like firebombs and knives, crossbows and bows are massively more viable, and multiclassing a melee build with some magic is a natural path to take as scaling seems way less important than stat requirements for wepons and abilities. With spirit ashes as well there seems a fairly large emphasis on using a wider variety of resources available to you, which is a good change, and discourages the R1-roll-r1 that souls can sadly boil down to.
On a core gameplay side, the only real issue i have is the scaling of enemy health and damage. It's just a bit overtuned. Unlike other Souls games, Vitality basically has to be your primary stat here - having about 40-50(!!!) seems appropriate for the endgame, in a game where other stat demands remain basically the same compared to previous games. Enemies also get vastly inflated health pools in harder areas than where you should be, and whilst i get the purpose to sort of corral the player in the right areas, it's a bit much. It leads to coming back to early areas being a cakewalk whilst lacking a few upgrades in a lategame area to be a nightmare - something that can easily happen becasue the drops required to upgrade weapons are kind of a mess to get and you may well end up in a situation where missing one low level stone prevents a massive jump in power. Reducing this quite massive range would have helped a lot, and I don't really get why the decision was made to be like this when none of the other souls are, excluding the chalice dungeons and the New game plus cycles - which is kind of what going to a new area feels like in gameplay terms.
The bosses are also a very mixed bag. Many are great, of course, but there's some serious dark souls 2 energy to quite a couple of them - bosses with really weird wind ups that track your position to an insane degree with only tiny windows to fight back with. And worst off, very occasionally you'll get to fight two of those fuckers at once.
There's also just too many bosses in general. I know they're often the best part of these games and that since you can run past so much of everything else in this game, it might be neccessary, but there's a large amount of copypasta of the minor bosses in particular, a lot of similar dragons - and the game basically ends with 5 bosses directly after each other, which is a bit much. They could have toned it down a bit.
Other than that, perhaps the biggest dissapointment for me is the narrative and world "lore". Especially in the early hours the world of elden ring feels a bit like bootleg dark souls, to the point i dont know why they didn't just make this a direct spinoff. There's so much stuff which is just "dark souls stuff but named different" that it feels a bit fake, and wheras something like bloodborne could get away with it due to a vastly different setting, Elden Ring's really is quite similar. The conflict of the game is also quite poorly defined unless you're really paying attention to stuff. Fortunately some very good NPCs (ranni my beloved) and the world design itself rises to the occasion, but yeah, I really think they should have made this just a dark souls spinoff, it just means it feels awkward at times, especially in the early hours which are just straight, boring high fantasy.
To be honest, there's an overwhelming amount of nits to pick with Elden Ring. I could write a review much longer than this one alone about individual locations in the game that feel like they were given to the team who made shrine of amana, or the weird quest design, or wonky performances issues or whatever. But, y'know, that's From. Every last one of the souls games - and all the earlier games of theirs i've played - have problems that I would dumpster other games for. I will forever make fun of the Cathedral level from Code Vein, but you'll probably catch me defending lost izalith if you got me drunk enough. Because just the general play experience of Elden Ring is so damn strong.
It's not the best soulsbornekirofieldtowerring - the honour still goes to bloodborne by a long shot as far as i'm concerned. Ultimately i do think enough of the issues i've mentioned, particularly the wonky balance, large amounts of reused stuff and some bad bosses definetly knock the game down a peg. But it's still clearly the best open world game since Gravity Rush 2, and FROM's first crack at this really doesn't feel like the sellout my cynical self thought it would be. It's like they've been doing this all along.
2 Comments
...how is GR2 not an open world?
This comment was deleted
They had like, 15 different stagger attack animations, and yet reuse the same boat boss with 2 attacks 4 times in the game
NOWITSREYNTIME17
2 years ago