Alright, I really wanna try and keep this as concise as possible but considering the sheer size of the game and the many opinions I have, I think that's gonna be really hard. Strap in, because this one's gonna be a doozy.

Elden Ring is an excellent game with likely the best art direction I've ever seen. FromSoft's architecture in particular is so, so far ahead of every other videogame developer it's insane. The buildings and structures you come across in this game lend it an incredible level of grandiosity, the divine towers in particular. There's a lot of moments in Elden Ring that had me thinking "holy shit I can't believe how big and epic this all feels", none moreso than trudging across the gargantuan bridges up to those towers and taking the lifts up, while these imposing bells toll in the background and you see all of The Lands Between stretching out for miles before you. Getting into Leyndell for the first time and seeing the jawdropping visage of this decaying city finally revealed to me as the title card dropped will forever be one of this game's most memorable moments to me. Your first time in Leyndell is just unreal, a real Anor Londo moment, and this again is in large part due to FromSoft's uncontested art direction and environment design. It really feels like at least once every day, Elden Ring was throwing one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in a videogame at me to the point where, to be honest, I almost felt a bit desensitised to it by the end.

And this is because Elden Ring is big, like ridiculously big. I knew it'd be big, but I still don't think I quite expected it to be as big as it was. I don't think it'd be an exaggeration to say that it is - likely around twice the size of Breath Of The Wild in both literal scope and average playthrough length. This is awesome because of just how much time you get out of it, and how many options you have for exploration and unique playthroughs, but it's also not awesome because it means that - in my opinion, Elden Ring overstays its welcome by quite a bit. Don't get me wrong; I loved this game, I thought it was awesome, and I also don't know if I'll ever play it again because - boy howdy I am over 100 hours in and only now at the final boss and I am BURNT OUT. Booting this game up is a COMMITMENT, the likes of which I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to make again.

And this size contributes to my other issues with Elden Ring, issues that hold it back from achieving a perfect score for me; Elden Ring's open world is very busy, this is not a flat and repetitive open world like the ones Ubisoft make, not whatsoever. It is impressive just how meaningful and consistently surprising Elden Ring's open world is considering its mammoth size, HOWEVER

It also serves as a reminder to me of just how perfect Breath Of The Wild is as an open world game; particularly, how it handles traversal. Just moving around the world in BOTW is fun. Gliding over the world is fun, being able to climb basically anything is fun. And it's simple, and it's convenient. Traversing Elden Ring's significantly bigger open world is not particularly fun, because while you do have a horse, (that can double jump!) that's all you have. You will spend a lot of your time in this game, literal hours meandering around on your horse looking for something that the game will not help you find whatsoever, traipsing up and down the perimeter of big rocky cliff faces trying to find a way up - a lot of the time not even knowing that right now, there is no way up! This inconspicuous rocky cliff face (I'm looking at you, Moonlight Plateau) is randomly locked off from you until you progress in an incredibly cryptic questline much later in the game!

I know some people will say this is a FromSoft Soulslike, and is therefore not meant to be convenient or easy, and I'd agree when it comes to combat, or the act of...Playing the game. In the same way that I've complained about Souls' games boss run-ups not actually being gameplay and just being padding, I'd argue this is padding. When you're actually playing Elden Ring, it's fucking great, but you'll spend an unfortunate amount of time not playing Elden Ring. You will spend literal hours wandering the open world aimlessly looking for something that's not even there, and you'll have no way of knowing until you've wasted an inordinate amount of time.

Or, unless you've just looked it up online! And let me tell ya, that will be necessary! Repeatedly! Elden Ring is just as cryptic as every other FromSoft game before it - which - in a way, I have to commend. I mean, the balls on these motherfuckers to release a AAA game with this much hype and marketing surrounding it and still just not compromise on this stuff at all. One of the game's main story bosses and huge dungeons is literally down a staircase in an incredibly dark room that is HIDDEN BY AN ILLUSORY WALL and hardly any of the NPCs say anything about it. Fucking unreal. And in a sense it's awesome that they're still doing shit like that, because it lends the game a true feeling of genuine mystery and discovery the likes of which only - you guessed it - Breath Of The Wild has been able to muster up for me before. But again, because of the size of the game's open world, I'm not quite sure it works as well.

A lot of the game's ridiculously cryptic NPC sidequests that basically necessitate a walkthrough will see NPCs travel across the world to a highly specific location that you would never in your life think to go back to, or have to get incredibly lucky to bump into. Blaidd's questline comes to mind, one in which a character goes back to an Evergaol, (a boss arena) a type of area that - in no other point in the game do you ever have any reason to revisit, nor is the idea that you should ever revisit any of them ever put in your head whatsoever. There are tons of these fuckin' things! And you never have to go back to any of the others!

I appreciate the crypticness is part of FromSoft's design, but I think it finally somewhat jumps the shark here. I think the world is simply too big for it to be this cryptic in its NPC sidequests. Even in the rare cases where an NPC tells you - or at least hints at where they're going; it's not nearly enough! Because wherever they're going or hinting at going is going to be HUGE and you're just gonna have to traipse around this whole area for possibly over an hour in search of an NPC who is almost definitely just gonna be standing around in the most inconspicuous part of it possible!

Use a walkthrough for NPC quests in this game, guys. Jesus christ. And also accept that as a result of that, you're almost definitely gonna end up unintentionally spoiling yourself on some of their resolutions and therefore - some huge chunks of the game's story. Yeah, it sucks. It happened to me (I had the end of Blaidd & Ranni's questlines spoiled for me because of how much I had to look them up) and I think it's further proof of how FromSoft's uncompromisingly cryptic design doesn't quite work here.

All this is to say; when you're playing Elden Ring, it's fucking great. Combat has more options and player expression than ever, bosses are so diverse and so epic and across the board, the locales and moments this game presents to you are unbelievable from both a visual but also a "holy shit I can't just believe I just found this" point of view and the game's secretive nature does often make exploration satisfying and fascinating like little else I've ever played.

But of course, you'll spend a lot of time not playing Elden Ring as I've already said. A lot of your time will feel wasted, wandering around aimlessly or scanning through walkthroughs, desperately trying to figure out what to do next without getting spoiled on the game. When Elden Ring is a soulslike, it's amazing. When it's an open-world game? It's fine. It's a very double-edged sword. And while I think the open-world experiment was a great and worthwhile endeavour for FromSoft to try, and that they largely did a great job with it, I'd like to see them return to a more focused, Dark Souls-style experience again in the future.

Favourite Area: Academy Of Raya Lucaria/Leyndell
Favourite Boss: Godskin Apostle

"Immense" is the only word I can think of when it comes to Baldur's Gate 3. Rarely ever is a game as deep as it is wide, and yet this is one of the few that is - it is incredibly replayable due to just how many ways the game can diverge and change based on your actions. It's the most reactive RPG I've seen yet, and I can't recall playing anything that felt this ahead of other games of its kind since The Witcher 3 (which is a game that this one made me think of quite a lot, actually.)

I will almost definitely replay BG3 one day - maybe pretty soon! Despite the fact that it's so massive, I'm not sick of it at all. Its combat and systems offer so much expression and variety, its characters and dialogue so much nuance and depth. There's just a ton to see and it's astonishing to think that having rolled credits on an 80+ hour playthrough, I still feel like there's so much more to do! Different companions to recruit, different builds to try, different decisions to make and then watch in awe as the game reacts to them up to 50 hours later. For a long time RPGs have promised that "your decisions matter" and that you can be "whoever" you want and whilst no game - not even Baldur's Gate 3 has ever fully been able to live up to that premise, I'd say it's maybe the closest we've yet gotten. It feels like a benchmark, like a huge step forward in actually achieving the promises made by the likes of Fable and The Elder Scrolls.

In my playthrough as an opportunistic Dragonborn Warlock who sought power but never wanted to bow to gods, I felt served almost every step of the way. I played nice with The Absolute right up until the last moment, when I stuck the knife into Ketheric Thorm, I let murderous urges overtake me until I was right in front of the God of Murder himself - and then I rejected him, when the Githyanki goddess confronted me and I was commanded to kneel - I gave her a sarcastic wave and turned my back on her. These were all choices I was able to make through gameplay and dialogue, which meld together more beautifully here than most any other RPG I've played. I could go on, this is a huge game and there's so much to see. It's a great big, huge, beautiful RPG that allowed me more player expression than anything I can remember.

This being said - it is janky, still, especially in Act 3. The last stretch leading up to the final battle is technically a bit of a disaster right now. The game could not handle this many enemies and effects on-screen at once, models started glitching out, idle animations stopped playing so everyone was just sat there like a stone statue whilst sound effects and damage numbers fired off all like a half-second too late - and the audio started getting all fuzzy and crackly like this part of the game's brokenness was about to blow my fuckin' TV up. Really, all of Act 3 is all still in need of some polish. Acts 1 and 2 are so beautiful both visually and in terms of content, but the game is a bit scuppered by Act 3. It's not a disastrous fall-off by any means, but I think BG3 definitely peaks early.

It also needs be to said that while it is basically bigger and better than Larian's last game - Divinity: Original Sin 2 in almost every way, I can honestly say I think it suffers with almost all of the same flaws. By which I mean that constant quicksaving and save-scumming is basically a necessity in this game. Baldur's Gate 3's cardinal sin is that failure isn't fun like it is in say - Disco Elysium, usually it's just combat or missed content. And if you aren't constantly quicksaving, what's gonna stop you from losing out on 2+ hours of progress if you suddenly get roped into an incredibly hard combat encounter you were woefully unprepared for and had no way of knowing was gonna occur when you picked this particular dialogue option or wandered onto this highly-specific part of the map? A word of advice for anyone playing their first Larian game - QUICKSAVE. LIKE, A LOT.

The actual maps and level design geometry of BG3 is also - like Divinity: Original Sin 2, pretty wonky and hard to orient yourself around. Paths often don't wind or extend in the way you expect them to, you'll occasionally be roadblocked by some pretty surprising invisible walls and the "gnarled roots" and "cragged rocks" that you can sometimes climb up and down to navigate your way around some of the game's weird path design are often weirdly hard to see and easy to miss, which can make orienting yourself in BG3 pretty frustrating sometimes. Also - damn D&D is complicated as fuck!! Like I'm sure this game is doing the best it can to ease people in and make it all make sense to new players but sheesh was I glad to have played another Larian game before this!

The negatives and flaws are there, but if the speed and effectiveness of Larian's patches so far are anything to go by, this game's rating is liable to go up to 5 stars for me, because the good already outweighs the bad to the fuckin' Nth degree. It's just a masterpiece, especially in Acts 1 & 2, which are so visually gorgeous and dense with content. It again makes me lament the relative brokenness of Act 3 bc damn I need to see that city in a higher framerate. Baldur's Gate itself when it isn't chugging along like we're back in D:OS 2 would probably be more stunning than anything else in the game! Alas, again, it can not yet really handle that much stuff on the screen at one time I don't think, hahaha

This is the new measuring stick for RPGs. Colossal in content and endlessly replayable. This is what happens when a privately owned studio with 2 decades of experience in the genre get as much time and money as they need to execute on their vision. That's the reason this game has set the world on fire the way it has - a lack of corporate intervention. Artists and creatives having the resources to do their job, and then just being left the fuck alone. That's why you don't get games like Baldur's Gate 3 very often, and you need to cherish them when they come around.

EDIT: I've decided to go back and give this 5 stars. Its flaws are still there but man, this game is too good at what it sets out to do. It's dominated my headspace since I finished it. I did a second playthrough on Tactician and loved it even more, its combat and systems absolutely sing at higher difficulty, this is just the best, most immense and deep and enjoyable RPG in a long time.