Elden Ring, our next fromsoftware souls adventure. Out of all the sorts of games I play, “souls” games are what I’ve always been drawn to most. So naturally a game like Elden Ring would appeal to me, and appeal to me it has! A grand celebration of all the previous titles, echoes of past adventures all stirred into one delicious pot of content. But before I give my praise to the Elden Ring which despite being impressive af, it does bring along a major balancing issue post capital area. There is a decline starting from the mountaintop of giants area. Everything at this late-game point seems to have been doubled up, which created this sense of “artificial” difficulty. Enemies and bosses just have too much health in these endgame areas, while you also don’t do enough damage. And the damage you receive feels a bit much. The overworld dungeons start to feel samey, the bosses in these samey dungeons are repeats of old bosses or just added enemies, or the classic copy paste, two old bosses at the same time! Sure this isn’t really a big issue, but it does need to be said. I do understand that these big open world games need to do a bunch of this copy-paste stuff. I am conflicted with my opinion, because these issues are most certainly present, and they did soil a part of the game for me. But I do not want to ignore how amazing it was to receive a game like this. Universal praise, everyone online collectively playing and discussing, discovering together; it’s a blessing when we get a game such as this, the gaming community as a whole really feels involved. The world, the characters, the cutscenes, the epic boss battle music, the presentation, the awesome weapons, the beautiful armor sets, a great character creator, fun exploration, the voice acting, the dialogue, cryptic sentences accompanying mesmerizing scenery; yep it’s a fromsoftware game and there’s so much praise I want to give it, truly something special.