Undeniably sweet, charming and wholesome… even when you spend all of your time drawing dicks, scrawling obscenities, splatter-painting every surface with hideous globs of color, and generally creating a bunch of horrifying MS Paint monstrosities that everyone trips over themselves to praise and fawn over. I vandalized their entire village and they loved me for it.

Deducting one star because of the high number of gamebreaking bugs that continually stymied my progress and made me restart — ESPECIALLY a truly egregious bug that kept freezing up my game during the last boss fight. Totally inexcusable.

Okay, I clearly have a FromSoft problem.

In my Bloodborne review, I talked about how I had initially picked the game up when I first bought a PS4 and bounced off of it pretty hard after hitting that first major difficulty spike (stupid sexy Cleric Beast). Then, prompted by nothing other than boredom and a lack of anything else to do, I picked it up again much later and absolutely fell in love with it, plumbing its depths, defeating every boss, and scouring every area. It wasn’t long before I realized that Bloodborne was one of my favorite games of all time. I went from bitten to smitten, from doubter to devotee.

And wouldn’t you know it? It turns out I had the exact same experience with Elden Ring: initial investment, a hard bounce after that first surge of difficulty (Margit, you turd-burglar), and then an eventual comeback where I was captivated, carried away, and empowered, oscillating wildly between acting as a conquering hero and a humbled little bitch. I was blown away and gobsmacked and ready to declare this one of my all-time favorite games too.

No bones about it: this is a great goddamn game… and a total time-gobbler. I’m about 150 hours into it and am still (despite having already gotten one of the endings) chugging along and playing it here and there.

Plus, I still haven’t beaten Malenia. Fuck Malenia.

So yeah. Another positive Elden Ring review. Toss it onto the rubble pile with all the other ones.

Like an old, ratty, moth-eaten security blanket from your childhood: cozy, comforting, and capable of mustering up a lot warm nostalgic fuzzies, but ultimately a little threadbare, leaving you feeling cold and a little bummed out. There’s a lot to like about this game—the pixel art, level design, and basic mechanics are all superlative—but the whole thing is hampered by the inert pacing, needless repetitions, dogshit writing, and some of the clumsiest storytelling I've ever seen in a video game (especially as it careens into a multi-car pileup of narrative convolution and interconnected "shared universe" building near the end). It doesn't help that the game's entire roster of characters are a bunch of bland ciphers, lacking the depth and dimensionality of even the thinnest planks of cardboard. I just... didn't care... about anything that happened... to them or to the world they inhabit.

Not terrible, sure... but hardly worth all the hoopla. In the grand scheme of things, I'd much rather just replay Lufia II.

And I am most certainly NOT going back for that True Ending.