I’m a huge Dark Souls fan, but honestly it’s due way more to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s penchant for intricate-yet-passive worldbuilding than to the gameplay. I hate stat min/maxing, I’ve never bothered with PvP, and I don’t want to explore different builds or experience multiple endings or whatever. I want to use a simple class, one simple weapon and/or a few spells, play through one time, and soak in the lore and the atmosphere. Fighting is always sticky-feeling and occasionally exhilarating, but more often than not you’re really just… you know… target-lock-strafing around big dudes and hitting them in the ankles and learning when to dodge roll. It’s fairly rudimentary and can feel repetitive. (Is that just me? Are there other, wildly different ways to fight in these games?) It’s fine, but all I’m saying is that I TOLERATE that stuff to get to the really good shit: item descriptions.

I said “Dark Souls fan” instead of “Soulsborne fan” up there^ for two reasons. First, to make a clear distinction between the Souls series and what I consider the BEST Soulsborne games –Bloodborne and Sekiro–which trade playstyle variety for more focused combat feel… and, second, to suggest what many other people have also posited: Elden Ring is Dark Souls 4. It’s Dark Souls Breath of The Wild. It’s clearly the next step in the evolution of that particular series and all of its idiosyncrasies.

This is important because, while I remain a massive From Software fan, I’ve decided I might not be the biggest Dark Souls fan anymore. Elden Ring exhausted me. The twentieth giant boss I target-lock-strafed around on my horse and flogged in the ankles to death, I was like, “alright. Maybe that’s enough of this.” I had always been sort of ambivalent about the combat, but the worlds, and the shadows of stories within them, had ALWAYS whisked me through it…and I was desperately searching for those same hooks here, and found none.

Elden Ring’s story and world just ain’t it. I don’t know if it’s GRRM’s fault, or whether the game is just so big that it was impossible for Miyazaki to create those little narrative details that are so potent in the previous games, or whether my tastes have just changed… All I know is I yearned, HUNGERED, to read every single item description in every Soulsborne game prior to this one, and I felt no such compulsion here. I also know that the previous games did not need multiple NPCs whose sole purpose is to spout expository diatribes about the relationships between all the characters and the world details, like Elden Ring apparently does. If I’m remembering right there’s like 4 lines of dialogue in the original Dark Souls, and the story in that game is soooo much more cogent than the one here.

Two things can be true, I think: that Elden Ring is one of the best open world games of all time (it definitely is!) and that its open worldness straight-up ruins its story and narrative feel. It plops you out into a stupefyingly massive world and says “go anywhere, do whatever, good luck.” How can there be any careful pacing? How can a brilliant designer like Miyazaki leave his signature breadcrumbs amidst a fucking ocean of places to go and stuff to see? I stumbled around like an idiot and wandered into caves and got tortured by shit that was WAY too hard and couldn’t find the key to the goddamn academy until I had like ⅔ of the map uncovered and all the while I had NO idea, and did not care to have an idea, what was supposed to be going on, or how it was all supposed to be connected, narratively-speaking. That’s a bummer.

In spite of that one huge flaw–which almost certainly is what caused me to put the game down after 40 hours, even as I was in the middle of maybe one of the most gorgeous levels in any of these games (Leyndell, Royal Capital)–there’s a ton to love about Elden Ring. It’s simply too big not to have SOME stuff to love. I certainly loved the fucking astounding vistas and views (see that gigantic castle 30 miles in the distance? Go ahead and ride over there!). I loved the way entire, meticulously designed levels are just kind of hidden away in corners of the map for you to happen upon. I loved the look of all of the spells, even if I didn’t actually use any of them. I loved certain boss designs (Radahn, Erdtree Burial Watchdog, Ancestor Spirit). I loved summoning spirits to help me out, and leveling them up, like they’re my pals.

There is so much I could say that I loved… and that I hated (collecting materials and crafting fucking sucks, you can only find enough smithing stones to upgrade like 3 weapons unless you go farming for them like a DORK, negative status effects are stupid, etc)... and then after saying it all I would have to admit that I probably, literally, only saw around 50-60% of the game. That’s just insane! Whatever else it is, Elden Ring is astonishingly ambitious and gargantuan; and that it largely succeeds in filling out its Open World with fun stuff to do and see, for around 40 hours at least, is an almost unfathomable triumph. Had I gotten into the world and the lore, it would be GOAT material for me. As it stands, unfortunately, it’s just a very good fantasy RPG playground that, sometime, I may eventually return to.