Hardly a real review, I have 28 hours into my first run of Elden Ring which I always planned on dropping when Final Fantasy VII Rebirth came out anyway... I swear, it was never a matter of anti-Elden Ring bias- only "Rebirth is going to eat my life and I welcome this rapture-esque fate whole-heartedly" bias. But since Godrick now grafts his ashes to the winds, and great Tarnished warrior Bizzle Epistole rides off to reach Raya Lucaria... eventually... I have a lot I need to say. A lot I want to say.

Because it is so beyond liberating to say I get FromSoftware now.

For years upon YEARS, I stayed away from Dark Souls for an endless list of reasons. Hard fantasy was never really my thing (I'm coming around slowly), why would I want to play a game that hates me, isn't it all just stupid rage bait, and on and on and on. But now that I've been forcefully brought before a FromSoft game with an open mind, I realize I was wrong about so much. Putting aside Elden Ring's open-world innovations to the formula (the ability to run away from something dangerous and come back stronger after doing other stuff, to be precise), as this first-impressions piece is more about broad genre strokes than a dedicated review, this is a formula that's dedicated to trial and error. You encounter, you examine, you die, you return in PB time to where you died, you overcome, you die again. And what makes this work is how... forgiving it is. Not of each mistake, GOD no you'll get ripped to shreds in five seconds for breathing the wrong way, but of the making of mistakes. The most you lose is currency, which is both easy enough to recover if you're paying attention and easy enough to re-accrue if you have the time and patience. For the most part, the game is an accommodating practice space. The game feels like it's actively telling me "it's okay. Take this at your own pace, no one's going anywhere. We know that swamp is evil, but once you have it down you have it down forever." I didn't expect Souls to feel so... cozy.

And you do have it down forever. Pattern recognition is your everything, as you decide when to attack with what weapon to stagger out of this one specific move as opposed to the moves you can afford to guard counter which is also opposed to the moves you absolutely HAVE to dodge-
yeah there's a lot. But it slowly gets memorized, and soon you could do what once had you taking a walk to clear your head and refresh blindfolded. That feeds into the increasing speeds- if it takes you an hour to practice a small dungeon that's objectively five minutes of travel time long, you'll be able to blitz that five minutes on command to get to either a new Grace or the next challenge. The process may start over from there, but you've unequivocally got this now! Adding to that the brilliant shortcut design (yes I totally get the FromSoft shortcuts now) to make it somehow even smoother, and it's overall a mastery of encouraging design.

I'm so happy I finally get it. Hope you FromSoft aficionados have fun dunking your summer into Shadow of the Erdtree. Bizzle Epistole will for certain continue his journey through the Lands Between...


...eventually.