By far one of the most disappointing game I've ever played. I went into it with such high hopes that I eventually tempered them before playing for the offchance it disappointed me......and it still disappointed me.

First off, let's get over the positive aspects of the game that I genuinely admire : the art direction, the soundtrack and a couple of (4) bosses. The art direction has always been a pillar of FromSoft games and ER is no slouch, every frame is a painting, a highly imaginative painting at that, each location is carefully constructed to have a sense of grandeur or a mystic air into it. The soundtrack absolutely slaps, although it's not as good as their previous offerings. And I genuinely enjoyed fighting Placidusax, Malekith, Radahn and Mohg..in that order.

Now onto the negatives because I have quite much to say about it.

The open world is what I would call standard, not incredible, not terrible, not innovative, not revolutionary, just standard. There are still points of interest in this game such as graves, catacombs, caves and ruins that almost always play the same, have different puzzles but aren't the focus of that interest, it's the reward and the highly possible presence of a boss before it and it completely breaks the immersion for me so much that it screams "this is video game" to me. The catacombs are especially prone to this as there are so many of them in this game that they end up feeling monotonous half of the time, and really become tiresome. It doesn't help that the enemies in these catacombs are THE SAME (It's either imps, the undead or the skellies, with sometimes crabs thrown in). The open world and I truly say this is nothing special, in fact I'm going as far to say that it's very akin to a Ubisoft game too. While lack of minimap, quest log, overabundance of map markers IS good game design and it does motivate players to explore, I'm afraid to say it is good game design in UI, not the open world itself. Because it doesn't affect where the poi's (points of interest) are located, it just doesn't tell you. It's the same exact world.

Now let's talk about combat. Now FromSoft souls combat formula is iconic, it's satisfying and it works, everyone knows that. It's the main goddamn reason I play them. But having multiple options, heavy and light, special attack, ashes of war, poisture, stagger, lightning and other status effects (aka the options the player has) is only half of what constitutes the overall combat. It's the enemies you utilise your combat against (Eg. it doesn't matter if there are 5 different variations of heavy attacks if only few or even none of the enemies are weak to it, and you instead get punished for it. Not talking about ER in this specific example, just an explanation as to what I'm trying to say). There's simply put way tooooo many bosses in the game, worse yet wayyyyyy tooo many repeated bosses. I can only fight so many cemetery shades and bloodhound knights, crucible knights and tree guardians, ulcerated tree guardian, and watchdog guardians and tibia mariners and 70 (hyperbole) different dragons before I become bored and annoyed. To make matters worse, they not only reappear as bosses, but also as regular enemies, which is just lame, pathetic and ultimately lazy, it's so mind boggling to me, that what made every FromSoft enemy unique in the first place is noticeably lost here (Godefroy the grafted, I'm talking about you)......And I'm not even talking about the flatout terrible difficulty scaling that happens mid game, how is Caelid supposed to be so easy that after Limgrave, I manage myself pretty well when it comes to the regular enemies there, but whenever it comes to bosses, they are extremely and I mean extremely difficult to work against, like yeah bosses are supposed to be tough, but this far above tough, it's such a fucking mess that the supposed super boss of the area, Radahn isn't even the hardest boss of the area, not even remotely close, decaying ekzykes, greyoll, the godskin apostle and the gargoyle in dragonborrow are significantly more difficult compared to the already terribly difficult bosses of the region. This is true in Altus plateau and especially Mt. Gelmir, where the main boss of the area is significantly less difficult (I'm considering it as Rykard here, but you might say I'm a hypocrite because of the paragraph below) in comparison to something like Fallingstar Beast. Let's not even talk about Haligtree and Malenia herself, which imo is simultaneously one of the most difficult and one of the most poorly designed bosses in the game by virtue of having waterfowl dance. It especially doesn't help that I'm one of the few people apparently who doesn't think this style of combat fits well into the open world, in fact I think it conflicts with it. I find the premise of all your hard work being evaporated and your progress lost, just because of the already present terrible difficulty scaling extremely demoralizing and direct opposition of the freedom this game apparently boasts of offering you.

I cannot believe I am going to say this, but after finishing it, an overwhelming majority of my time (90%) feels like a gigantic waste of time to me. It's not the worst game of all time, no. It's not even the worst FromSoft game, as I atleast finished it. But I have truly never felt such massive disappointment from a game by a studio whose games I generally adore, that I am writing such a wall of text, that would probably get completely ignored by, or skimmed by or get made fun of by. But I don't care. I'm done with this fucking game.

Easily the 2nd worst FromSoft game I have ever played.

EDIT: After much introspection, I realised that I dislike it more now

3.5/10