Sutokkingu
1 review liked by Sutokkingu
Elden Ring
2022
I can't write for shit but i've opinions so here goes nothing.
Elden ring is by far the oddest modern FROM software release, on one hand an incredible, massive ARPG whose sheer size is mind boggling, on the other, it has a 3rd act so rushed by developer constraints that makes playing it some of the least fun i've had with any of these games.
Straight off the release of Sekiro, succesfull in its reviews and with some mild push-back from fans that for some reason wanted more dark souls, FROM took the idea of souls-like BOTW and absolutely ran with it. And for the first couple acts, it works so absurdly well it often has you pausing just to try to take in what you're playing. The first half of Elden Ring stands as a testament on how to not only revitalize the stale genre of open world action games, but to make it a protagonist in it of itself, MGR5 could be striped down to just modular missions like Ground Zeroes, Elden Ring could never be a modular metroid-vania like the original Dark souls.
I don't recall who it was, but one of the original "I wanna climb mt everest" guys was once asked in an interview why exactly he'd want to do it, knowing the risks it entailed, he answered something along the lines of "we want to climb everest because it is there". FROM uses this basic human spirit will to guide you through their game, you don't need quest markers, or a story journal, or side-content icons, or a mini-map. None of that was ever necessary to entice a player to See Big Tree, Go To Big Tree. Its a gameplay progression that happens, at times, so organically that's almost remeniscent of how it felt to play levels designed by single persons back in the early days of FPS, but on a scale much larger than we could've imagined back then.
The art design in all their games has always been consistently stellar, I won't comment much on it as i've nothing interesting to add, genuinely the prettiest sky boxes i've ever seen in a game!
But then there's the combat design. Like I said, They had come straight from Sekiro, whose combat was the main meat of the game as it had the formula's RPG elements removed. In that game, combat felt like a dance, all moves were so perfectly coreographed you never felt at odds with the game's design, not once would you be taken out of the experience by something being so dramatically different from the core combat loop it seemed like from a different action game. The same can't be said for Elden Ring, here the regular overworld enemies behave mostly similar to how they would in Dark Souls 3 (Which is what I imagined they had in mind), but once you enter a fog gate, you get faced with a team trying as hard as they can to make their game "difficult" to uphold a silly reputation they garnered with people who think beating ARPGs makes them good at their hobby, Again, I don't need to be stating this, bosses holding up their arms for 3 to 4 seconds before doing the attack just looks silly. In the shooter genre theres a thing people coined as "Shooter trance", where you're so invested in constantly moving and aiming and all that, that you basically get really really immersed in the game, which is good! This could never happen with Elden Ring, the fundamental design of the boss fights makes it so you'll never have a good combat flow, you'll always need to be overriding your brain not to dodge and wait a few seconds while the guy holds his arms up before striking. I won't go into it much, but I also believe Malenia is the worst boss they've ever put in a game of theirs and we got robbed from being able to actually enjoy that fight in Sekiro.
It'll be forever a shame that its as successful as it was, as it means FROM will continue down this design route instead of focusing on the tight design of Sekiro and Bloodborne. Elden Ring is a fantastic enough game to be the best game released whatever year it could've wanted to come out on, but its so fundamentally flawed that playing it will never be as fun as it could've been had they dropped the need to have its weird boss combat flow and extend the game for an extra act that felt empty and unpolished.
Elden ring is by far the oddest modern FROM software release, on one hand an incredible, massive ARPG whose sheer size is mind boggling, on the other, it has a 3rd act so rushed by developer constraints that makes playing it some of the least fun i've had with any of these games.
Straight off the release of Sekiro, succesfull in its reviews and with some mild push-back from fans that for some reason wanted more dark souls, FROM took the idea of souls-like BOTW and absolutely ran with it. And for the first couple acts, it works so absurdly well it often has you pausing just to try to take in what you're playing. The first half of Elden Ring stands as a testament on how to not only revitalize the stale genre of open world action games, but to make it a protagonist in it of itself, MGR5 could be striped down to just modular missions like Ground Zeroes, Elden Ring could never be a modular metroid-vania like the original Dark souls.
I don't recall who it was, but one of the original "I wanna climb mt everest" guys was once asked in an interview why exactly he'd want to do it, knowing the risks it entailed, he answered something along the lines of "we want to climb everest because it is there". FROM uses this basic human spirit will to guide you through their game, you don't need quest markers, or a story journal, or side-content icons, or a mini-map. None of that was ever necessary to entice a player to See Big Tree, Go To Big Tree. Its a gameplay progression that happens, at times, so organically that's almost remeniscent of how it felt to play levels designed by single persons back in the early days of FPS, but on a scale much larger than we could've imagined back then.
The art design in all their games has always been consistently stellar, I won't comment much on it as i've nothing interesting to add, genuinely the prettiest sky boxes i've ever seen in a game!
But then there's the combat design. Like I said, They had come straight from Sekiro, whose combat was the main meat of the game as it had the formula's RPG elements removed. In that game, combat felt like a dance, all moves were so perfectly coreographed you never felt at odds with the game's design, not once would you be taken out of the experience by something being so dramatically different from the core combat loop it seemed like from a different action game. The same can't be said for Elden Ring, here the regular overworld enemies behave mostly similar to how they would in Dark Souls 3 (Which is what I imagined they had in mind), but once you enter a fog gate, you get faced with a team trying as hard as they can to make their game "difficult" to uphold a silly reputation they garnered with people who think beating ARPGs makes them good at their hobby, Again, I don't need to be stating this, bosses holding up their arms for 3 to 4 seconds before doing the attack just looks silly. In the shooter genre theres a thing people coined as "Shooter trance", where you're so invested in constantly moving and aiming and all that, that you basically get really really immersed in the game, which is good! This could never happen with Elden Ring, the fundamental design of the boss fights makes it so you'll never have a good combat flow, you'll always need to be overriding your brain not to dodge and wait a few seconds while the guy holds his arms up before striking. I won't go into it much, but I also believe Malenia is the worst boss they've ever put in a game of theirs and we got robbed from being able to actually enjoy that fight in Sekiro.
It'll be forever a shame that its as successful as it was, as it means FROM will continue down this design route instead of focusing on the tight design of Sekiro and Bloodborne. Elden Ring is a fantastic enough game to be the best game released whatever year it could've wanted to come out on, but its so fundamentally flawed that playing it will never be as fun as it could've been had they dropped the need to have its weird boss combat flow and extend the game for an extra act that felt empty and unpolished.