FromSoftware’s success with Elden Ring is undeniable. Starting with its announcement, the game grew into a mighty wave, expanding with every drop of news, sweeping anticipatory communities into Shabiri-level Madness, and finally cresting by eclipsing six years worth of Dark Souls 3 sales in less than three weeks. The Lands Between offer incredible opportunities for freedom, exploration, and storytelling in enthralling landscapes that manage to feel both impossible and natural at once, yet at times the game seems to embody the region’s moniker - stuck in limbo on crumbling ground. At the core of Elden Ring whirls a tornado of passion and raw energy, yet that same rawness also breaks pieces of the surrounding game’s framework and widens cracks in the FromSoftware formula.
The Lands Between are massive in scope, narrative, and player choice, offering an incredible amount of content to discover and explore. Traversing the environments generally feels smooth and exciting with the mount, Torrent, and FromSoftware have done an incredible job of scattering in the tailored moments of awe that they’ve become known for in their more streamlined games. Exploring the world provides its own intangible rewards, as there are countless breathtaking vistas as well as emergent moments - exiting a cave or confined area to have the world explode around you - that are infused with spectacular surrealism. This is a triumph in a genre that can often turn into a treasure hunt for items or quests with the player beelining head down through an environment to get to their marker. Instead, Elden Ring turns the journey into a reward in itself. Some of the strangest creatures and twisted environments make their home in the Lands Between, and discovering them for the first time is a fascinating and thrilling experience amplified by the small terror of knowing that you are never safe.
The characters and narrative of Elden Ring are equally as strange and varied as the landscape. Whereas in the Dark Souls trilogy most of the characters with stories are human, in Elden Ring they also consist of four-armed dolls, wolf-men, goblinoid creatures, or anthropomorphic jars to name a few. The quest chains are also longer and more involved than almost anything else in FromSoftware’s history, some spanning the entirety of the game’s main story, which is also larger in scope than its predecessors. George R.R. Martin’s presence can be easily seen through the tangled web of relationships that weave between major and minor characters alike, though with the certain Miyazaki sprinkles of quite literally other worldly beings, as well as the tragic type storylines expected in his games.
When following questlines, heartbreak in the Lands Between is inevitable, as well as plenty of shocking moments that range from the fantastical to the grotesque and horrifying. Unfortunately, this heartbreak can also rear its head as dissatisfaction. Due to the open nature and size of the game, it is incredibly easy to miss a location for a character’s quest, causing it to sit unfinished without the player ever knowing why. Even when in the correct areas, it can be easy to miss a character’s information, as new dialogue options are buried at the bottom of the menu when resting at a particular grace point. This could be easily solved by placing the dialogue option first in the menu. Even worse, however, is that several of the quests were incomplete upon launch and some are still incomplete after several patches. Elden Ring is already hazy enough about its quest structure, and the fact that some quests are unable to be completed at all is dissatisfying and frustrating while playing and not knowing if something was missed and needs to be explored more, or if it is quite literally impossible at the moment.
With how much exploration is available, multiple endings, and a variety of character builds, as well as the built-in propensity to miss quest triggers or quests being added and fixed via patches, Elden Ring begs to be replayed in order to experience all that the Lands Between offer. However in another sense, towards the end of the game, the player will have already seen everything there is in the game. So many enemies, bosses, and assets are reused throughout the game that within the first three areas of the game, the only non-recurring enemies are two of the major bosses. Everything else reappears later in the game. This is incredibly jarring with a region like Caelid which the game tells us is unique because of a certain lore-event within the world, and yet its twisted inhabitants show up en masse in later regions of the game. Even major questline bosses end up being dungeon bosses later on, cheapening not only their second appearance, but making their first encounter feel less special. With one main boss in particular, it is reasonable for a player to come across the secondary version before fighting the original, making that questline just as Tarnished as the player. Dark Souls has always re-used enemies or bosses, often as a way to show the player just how far they’ve come since the beginning of their journey, but Elden Ring takes it too far - imagine if Quelaag or Pontiff Sulyvahn came back as another boss randomly. It is even worse when some of the repurposed enemies and bosses are paired together for seemingly no other reason other than, “what if there were two?” Duo bosses can be a fun combat challenge when they are paired together with purpose - one of the most famous bosses in the FromSoftware gallery is a duo boss - but when they are thrown together without care, it comes off as unsatisfying and uninspired. This constant reuse hurts replayability because, in a sense, the player is already replaying pieces of the game by the conclusion. When playing to finish quests that were incomplete, assuming they can actually be completed, all of this repetition leads the player to beeline head down towards map markers rather than continuing to explore - the exact opposite of what the game desires to accomplish. Elden Ring does not expect players to find it all during one playthrough, but at the same time it offers little to incentivize further exploration, as the reward will likely be an enemy which has already been fought, in a dungeon whose mirror image has already been seen multiple times. This is something that all open-world games seem to struggle with, so it’s not necessarily FromSoftware’s fault, however it does feel miles apart from the usual focused and polished experience players have come to expect.
This lack of polish also bleeds over into the otherwise excellent combat system of Elden Ring. Much like the enormity of the Lands Between, players have never before had the same amount of variety and choice in designing builds, choosing weapons, and synergizing spells. Summoning Spirits also offers the player unique opportunities to have companions with different styles and abilities to take different approaches in tackling challenges and bosses alike. Except while these things sound fantastic in theory, gameplay doesn’t always work this way, and the dividing line between player experience has widened into a canyon of difference.
Most of the disconnect between builds and playstyles won’t be encountered during the majority of the game unless the player is focused on comparing numbers. Most of the early and mid-game bosses are exciting to fight, and Elden Ring has some of the most well executed spectacle boss designs in FromSoftware's boss catalog. However towards the end of Elden Ring, the bosses begin to highlight build design and combat balance flaws more readily through their design. Playing as a solo melee character can feel extremely frustrating, especially if using a large weapon, as many of the bosses have small punish windows, or can switch up their punish windows as they cancel combos into new attacks. These cancels and redirects control the entire fight, as it seldom feels safe to retaliate because while the bosses don’t change up their combos every time, the mere fact that they can forces the player to play more defensively. Some of the bosses also do so much damage that new techniques such as the guard counter are neutered in their effectiveness since trading hits is not as viable for survivability. This makes several late game fights exercises in watching the boss attack and look cool while the player stands doing nothing, or runs away. One of the most consistent ways to dodge the most punishing attack in the entire game, for example, is to start by running away from the boss. This same attack is also random in its execution, so the player is forced to play defensively while waiting for the attack to come out - its entire existence governs the fight because if the player is hit with this attack it often equals defeat or at the very least wiping away the progress the player has made during the fight. Defensive play is not reactive or fun design when there is no gain from it, unlike in something like Sekiro where defense is actually rewarded, making both offense and defense both viable ways of overcoming obstacles. In Elden Ring, defense means boredom and frustration that becomes exacerbated when one slip means death. Another late-game boss can kill a 60 Vigor player with a three-hit combo that locks the player into a stun animation - if the first dodge is missed, the player dies. These are not insurmountable odds by any means, nor does it mean that bosses are nigh unbeatable - it just means that for a solo melee player many late-game boss fights are spent waiting which is not fun or engaging. For the first time in a FromSoftware game, it comes across as the player’s playstyle being the wrong choice. All playstyles are obviously not created equally, but Elden Ring punishes certain builds much harder than others due to design. It does seem like FromSoftware agrees with these issues, as they have recently patched the game making attacks for Colossal Weapons faster as well as adjusting the difficulty and behavior on several bosses, including at least two in the end-game.
Elden Ring does offer tools to mitigate this type of experience, however, through the use of summons or magic. There are 64 different Spirit Ash summons that can be used during the game, though they vary in usefulness and must be upgraded in order to be of any effectiveness later on. The result is that most players will only upgrade either one or two Ashes fully and use them throughout the game rendering 62 other Ashes useless to never be utilized unless the player inorganically goes out of the way to try them out. With the late game bosses being so punishing, it also means that most players using spirits are going to stick with the strongest spirits rather than experimenting. This issue of quantity over quality could easily be adjusted by having a smaller number of Ashes and making them non-upgradeable with different niche abilities, thus incentivizing players to actually use more than one or two.
While Spirit Ashes are an interesting wrinkle in design that deserves to be further explored, they too highlight issues with boss design. FromSoftware Boss A.I. is still as capable of handling two opponents as it was during Demon’s Souls, which is to say it is not. With the behavior of bosses built around leaving little openings for solo players, it might be easy to surmise that Elden Ring was balanced around the use of Spirit Ashes, however if this is true, that design is a failure, as bosses and other opponents become soulless and dull on the other end of the spectrum. If solo melee play becomes tedious due to waiting, spellcasting with Ashes becomes dull due to possessing little-to-no challenge. These two play styles seem like completely different games, neither of which are balanced very well. This is not to say that this balance issue exists within the entirety of Elden Ring - only in the latter half-to-quarter. However, it does dampen subsequent runs through the Lands Between, as the player knows what to expect at the end of the game, and as such must build characters with that in mind. Much like bosses having certain attack chains or mix-ups control entire combat encounters, the very existence of these balance issues influences everything else in the game upon replaying.
Build balance issues have carried over to PvP as well, which has been a step backwards for FromSoftware in almost every way. The reduction of players from six to four has removed the cooperative nature of fight clubs, as well as the thrilling chaos that ensues with several covenants fighting each other in the open world. Left over for those craving contests of skill are lopsided invasions or duels - neither of which are a bad option on their own, however build issues have changed the way these contests operate. In Elden Ring, Ashes of War have offered the player more flexibility than ever, offering the ability to customize their weapons to their playstyle. However, just like Spirit Ashes, not all Ashes of War are viable and players tend to stick to one or two higher damage weapon arts - notably bleed. Just like the end-game bosses, these weapon arts deal massive damage, as well as building up status effects even while being dodged, leading to either short fights or highly defensive play styles. In Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, armaments had weapon arts or trick-weapons with different forms and abilities which were used as compliments to the main move-sets of the weapon. In Elden Ring, the weapon arts do so much more damage than normal attacks, they take over the weapon, leading to spamming without strategy. Some of the weapons’ Ashes of War are even stronger than some of the most powerful spells builds have to offer. Faith builds in particular are more effective using a certain sword’s weapon art rather than using a spell both for damage and FP cost. FromSoftware seems to acknowledge this as well, as they have recently patched incantations to use less FP, added poise, and increased damage on some of the spells, however their response to imbalanced gameplay seems to be to buff everything, which only exacerbates the damage issues. Even with patches, there are balance issues that have not been addressed - notably Quality builds are worse on every single weapon in the game compared to Keen and Heavy, even with optimal stats.
Despite these issues, Elden Ring still stands as a triumph of excitement and adventure. It is a fantastic game and world to delve into and get lost in with gorgeous views, wonderfully written characters, and a haunting OST. FromSoftware have set the bar so high with the amount of polish and care they’ve given to their games from Demon’s Souls to Sekiro, so it is easy to see design flaws and blemishes because they’ve already proven they know how to do these things right. Ultimately, Elden Ring stands as one of the best open world games ever created, and hopefully a gateway for many players into the wonderful catalog of soulful games that came before it.
The Lands Between are massive in scope, narrative, and player choice, offering an incredible amount of content to discover and explore. Traversing the environments generally feels smooth and exciting with the mount, Torrent, and FromSoftware have done an incredible job of scattering in the tailored moments of awe that they’ve become known for in their more streamlined games. Exploring the world provides its own intangible rewards, as there are countless breathtaking vistas as well as emergent moments - exiting a cave or confined area to have the world explode around you - that are infused with spectacular surrealism. This is a triumph in a genre that can often turn into a treasure hunt for items or quests with the player beelining head down through an environment to get to their marker. Instead, Elden Ring turns the journey into a reward in itself. Some of the strangest creatures and twisted environments make their home in the Lands Between, and discovering them for the first time is a fascinating and thrilling experience amplified by the small terror of knowing that you are never safe.
The characters and narrative of Elden Ring are equally as strange and varied as the landscape. Whereas in the Dark Souls trilogy most of the characters with stories are human, in Elden Ring they also consist of four-armed dolls, wolf-men, goblinoid creatures, or anthropomorphic jars to name a few. The quest chains are also longer and more involved than almost anything else in FromSoftware’s history, some spanning the entirety of the game’s main story, which is also larger in scope than its predecessors. George R.R. Martin’s presence can be easily seen through the tangled web of relationships that weave between major and minor characters alike, though with the certain Miyazaki sprinkles of quite literally other worldly beings, as well as the tragic type storylines expected in his games.
When following questlines, heartbreak in the Lands Between is inevitable, as well as plenty of shocking moments that range from the fantastical to the grotesque and horrifying. Unfortunately, this heartbreak can also rear its head as dissatisfaction. Due to the open nature and size of the game, it is incredibly easy to miss a location for a character’s quest, causing it to sit unfinished without the player ever knowing why. Even when in the correct areas, it can be easy to miss a character’s information, as new dialogue options are buried at the bottom of the menu when resting at a particular grace point. This could be easily solved by placing the dialogue option first in the menu. Even worse, however, is that several of the quests were incomplete upon launch and some are still incomplete after several patches. Elden Ring is already hazy enough about its quest structure, and the fact that some quests are unable to be completed at all is dissatisfying and frustrating while playing and not knowing if something was missed and needs to be explored more, or if it is quite literally impossible at the moment.
With how much exploration is available, multiple endings, and a variety of character builds, as well as the built-in propensity to miss quest triggers or quests being added and fixed via patches, Elden Ring begs to be replayed in order to experience all that the Lands Between offer. However in another sense, towards the end of the game, the player will have already seen everything there is in the game. So many enemies, bosses, and assets are reused throughout the game that within the first three areas of the game, the only non-recurring enemies are two of the major bosses. Everything else reappears later in the game. This is incredibly jarring with a region like Caelid which the game tells us is unique because of a certain lore-event within the world, and yet its twisted inhabitants show up en masse in later regions of the game. Even major questline bosses end up being dungeon bosses later on, cheapening not only their second appearance, but making their first encounter feel less special. With one main boss in particular, it is reasonable for a player to come across the secondary version before fighting the original, making that questline just as Tarnished as the player. Dark Souls has always re-used enemies or bosses, often as a way to show the player just how far they’ve come since the beginning of their journey, but Elden Ring takes it too far - imagine if Quelaag or Pontiff Sulyvahn came back as another boss randomly. It is even worse when some of the repurposed enemies and bosses are paired together for seemingly no other reason other than, “what if there were two?” Duo bosses can be a fun combat challenge when they are paired together with purpose - one of the most famous bosses in the FromSoftware gallery is a duo boss - but when they are thrown together without care, it comes off as unsatisfying and uninspired. This constant reuse hurts replayability because, in a sense, the player is already replaying pieces of the game by the conclusion. When playing to finish quests that were incomplete, assuming they can actually be completed, all of this repetition leads the player to beeline head down towards map markers rather than continuing to explore - the exact opposite of what the game desires to accomplish. Elden Ring does not expect players to find it all during one playthrough, but at the same time it offers little to incentivize further exploration, as the reward will likely be an enemy which has already been fought, in a dungeon whose mirror image has already been seen multiple times. This is something that all open-world games seem to struggle with, so it’s not necessarily FromSoftware’s fault, however it does feel miles apart from the usual focused and polished experience players have come to expect.
This lack of polish also bleeds over into the otherwise excellent combat system of Elden Ring. Much like the enormity of the Lands Between, players have never before had the same amount of variety and choice in designing builds, choosing weapons, and synergizing spells. Summoning Spirits also offers the player unique opportunities to have companions with different styles and abilities to take different approaches in tackling challenges and bosses alike. Except while these things sound fantastic in theory, gameplay doesn’t always work this way, and the dividing line between player experience has widened into a canyon of difference.
Most of the disconnect between builds and playstyles won’t be encountered during the majority of the game unless the player is focused on comparing numbers. Most of the early and mid-game bosses are exciting to fight, and Elden Ring has some of the most well executed spectacle boss designs in FromSoftware's boss catalog. However towards the end of Elden Ring, the bosses begin to highlight build design and combat balance flaws more readily through their design. Playing as a solo melee character can feel extremely frustrating, especially if using a large weapon, as many of the bosses have small punish windows, or can switch up their punish windows as they cancel combos into new attacks. These cancels and redirects control the entire fight, as it seldom feels safe to retaliate because while the bosses don’t change up their combos every time, the mere fact that they can forces the player to play more defensively. Some of the bosses also do so much damage that new techniques such as the guard counter are neutered in their effectiveness since trading hits is not as viable for survivability. This makes several late game fights exercises in watching the boss attack and look cool while the player stands doing nothing, or runs away. One of the most consistent ways to dodge the most punishing attack in the entire game, for example, is to start by running away from the boss. This same attack is also random in its execution, so the player is forced to play defensively while waiting for the attack to come out - its entire existence governs the fight because if the player is hit with this attack it often equals defeat or at the very least wiping away the progress the player has made during the fight. Defensive play is not reactive or fun design when there is no gain from it, unlike in something like Sekiro where defense is actually rewarded, making both offense and defense both viable ways of overcoming obstacles. In Elden Ring, defense means boredom and frustration that becomes exacerbated when one slip means death. Another late-game boss can kill a 60 Vigor player with a three-hit combo that locks the player into a stun animation - if the first dodge is missed, the player dies. These are not insurmountable odds by any means, nor does it mean that bosses are nigh unbeatable - it just means that for a solo melee player many late-game boss fights are spent waiting which is not fun or engaging. For the first time in a FromSoftware game, it comes across as the player’s playstyle being the wrong choice. All playstyles are obviously not created equally, but Elden Ring punishes certain builds much harder than others due to design. It does seem like FromSoftware agrees with these issues, as they have recently patched the game making attacks for Colossal Weapons faster as well as adjusting the difficulty and behavior on several bosses, including at least two in the end-game.
Elden Ring does offer tools to mitigate this type of experience, however, through the use of summons or magic. There are 64 different Spirit Ash summons that can be used during the game, though they vary in usefulness and must be upgraded in order to be of any effectiveness later on. The result is that most players will only upgrade either one or two Ashes fully and use them throughout the game rendering 62 other Ashes useless to never be utilized unless the player inorganically goes out of the way to try them out. With the late game bosses being so punishing, it also means that most players using spirits are going to stick with the strongest spirits rather than experimenting. This issue of quantity over quality could easily be adjusted by having a smaller number of Ashes and making them non-upgradeable with different niche abilities, thus incentivizing players to actually use more than one or two.
While Spirit Ashes are an interesting wrinkle in design that deserves to be further explored, they too highlight issues with boss design. FromSoftware Boss A.I. is still as capable of handling two opponents as it was during Demon’s Souls, which is to say it is not. With the behavior of bosses built around leaving little openings for solo players, it might be easy to surmise that Elden Ring was balanced around the use of Spirit Ashes, however if this is true, that design is a failure, as bosses and other opponents become soulless and dull on the other end of the spectrum. If solo melee play becomes tedious due to waiting, spellcasting with Ashes becomes dull due to possessing little-to-no challenge. These two play styles seem like completely different games, neither of which are balanced very well. This is not to say that this balance issue exists within the entirety of Elden Ring - only in the latter half-to-quarter. However, it does dampen subsequent runs through the Lands Between, as the player knows what to expect at the end of the game, and as such must build characters with that in mind. Much like bosses having certain attack chains or mix-ups control entire combat encounters, the very existence of these balance issues influences everything else in the game upon replaying.
Build balance issues have carried over to PvP as well, which has been a step backwards for FromSoftware in almost every way. The reduction of players from six to four has removed the cooperative nature of fight clubs, as well as the thrilling chaos that ensues with several covenants fighting each other in the open world. Left over for those craving contests of skill are lopsided invasions or duels - neither of which are a bad option on their own, however build issues have changed the way these contests operate. In Elden Ring, Ashes of War have offered the player more flexibility than ever, offering the ability to customize their weapons to their playstyle. However, just like Spirit Ashes, not all Ashes of War are viable and players tend to stick to one or two higher damage weapon arts - notably bleed. Just like the end-game bosses, these weapon arts deal massive damage, as well as building up status effects even while being dodged, leading to either short fights or highly defensive play styles. In Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, armaments had weapon arts or trick-weapons with different forms and abilities which were used as compliments to the main move-sets of the weapon. In Elden Ring, the weapon arts do so much more damage than normal attacks, they take over the weapon, leading to spamming without strategy. Some of the weapons’ Ashes of War are even stronger than some of the most powerful spells builds have to offer. Faith builds in particular are more effective using a certain sword’s weapon art rather than using a spell both for damage and FP cost. FromSoftware seems to acknowledge this as well, as they have recently patched incantations to use less FP, added poise, and increased damage on some of the spells, however their response to imbalanced gameplay seems to be to buff everything, which only exacerbates the damage issues. Even with patches, there are balance issues that have not been addressed - notably Quality builds are worse on every single weapon in the game compared to Keen and Heavy, even with optimal stats.
Despite these issues, Elden Ring still stands as a triumph of excitement and adventure. It is a fantastic game and world to delve into and get lost in with gorgeous views, wonderfully written characters, and a haunting OST. FromSoftware have set the bar so high with the amount of polish and care they’ve given to their games from Demon’s Souls to Sekiro, so it is easy to see design flaws and blemishes because they’ve already proven they know how to do these things right. Ultimately, Elden Ring stands as one of the best open world games ever created, and hopefully a gateway for many players into the wonderful catalog of soulful games that came before it.