I think elden ring is the closest thing I've seen to a perfect video game. I'm not saying it lightly, i have gone through this twice and now playing it for the third time and i easily spent around 60-70 hrs on both playthroughs, the point I'm trying to make here is, in all those hours i played the game i always kept finding new shit that kept me coming back to the game, hell i was addicted to this game. Genuinely think there won't ever be a game of this level and quality ever again. The open world is unarguably the best open world in a video game ever, like there's no denying that. They managed to make the map so fucking big and yet it never felt like it was too much or unnecessary space like most "open world" games do. Every corner of the map is open for you and isn't locked behind some stupid invisible wall, if you see something far in the distance you can actually just go there like it's so incredible how well they managed to make the open world so good. Every region of the map has unique atmosphere, enemy types, different dungeons or caves you can explore, they're also filled with so many bosses everywhere while not everyone of them is good but most of them are hella fun to fight. Often I find myself just fucking around the map just exploring stuff and completely forgetting about the main storyline and that imo is how you should make a good open world game. It's just not the map that is good either, Elden ring is by far the most beginning friendly out of any other souls games, the combat feels amazing and fluid, it's like they managed to be beginner friendly and still maintain that brutal difficulty that they're know for. The wide and I mean WIDE variety of weapons, armors, spells, incantations, spirit summons makes it so that every time you play the game it'll you give you a unique experience which will be just as fun as your previous one. As someone who's played the previous fromsoftware games, it's clear how much inspiration they took from those games and utilized it here which makes the game all the better. The presence of so many graces spread throughout the world so you're not forced to travel all the time and just easily teleport to any site of grave you've already discovered, the stake of Marika right before boss fights is such a good feature and i never understood why they didn't implement this from the beginning but ig it's better late than never. If there's one thing I'd like them to add is the ability to just pause the game anytime we want like in sekiro, not being able to pause it doesn't add any challenge to the game, it just adds kidney stones inside me while I'm holding my piss trying to get a hit in whole fighting something. But that's besides the point. Elden ring by far has the best lore and characters fromsoftware has ever written, I'm a sucker for dark fantasy shit and elden ring has just that, Miyazaki's way of story telling through NPCs, item descriptions, your enviornment, even the enemies themselves is so genius and under appreciated. The vague but intentional plot points scattered around the world that players just stumble upon is just amazing. The boss fights are a sight to behold, even though some bosses are not as good they're still well designed and that brings me to my next point, idk who was responsible for designing the bosses in this game but if i did I'd give them the craziest head ever. Every boss is so fucking awesome thematically, cinematically, mechanically and what not. They genuinely peaked with their designs in this game. The map is gorgeous to look at, no matter what part of the map it is, it looks mesmerizing and beautiful. People who complain about the graphics not being good are the definitely the kind of retards who think good graphics = photorealistic graphics, I'm glad fromsoftware doesn't give into that stupid stereotype, tired of companies making their games look like they're real life, games need to look like games not a movie and I'm glad this game has some of the best artstyles I've ever seen. There's so much other good stuff I'd like to point out but this already became lengthy enough so I'll just pick up some of my nitpicks from the game.
In no way do I think elden ring suffers with any severe or significant problems that just makes it unplayable, yet as I said there are some nitpicks for me. The most commonly stated one is the balance in the game, it's all the over the place, you'd fight and kill a boss fairly easily but the next mob will just shit all over you, but I also understand it's pretty difficult to maintain perfect balance when you make such a big map with so many different enemy types. The damage is another thing that feels a bit weird, like bosses will just one shot no matter your vigor level which is a bit frustrating but it's not a big deal. Tbh that's all the "problems" I can think of in this game.

Fav bosses (not ranked except the first 5):
1. Morgoat
2. Maliketh
3. Radagon
4. Godfrey
5. Radahn
6. Rykard
7: Placidusax
8: Malenia
9: Mohg
10: Astel
but design wise I'd say rykard is my favourite one like not even close.

Elden ring at its core is a phenomenal adventurous rpg game, one of the very few "adventure" games where you really do adventure your way throughout the game, ik a lot of people have already talked about this but i absolutely love the fact that they never spoonfeed you instructions on how to play the game, they totally leave everything upto the player to figure it out themselves which further emphasizes on the adventure element of the game. Sometimes the game does get too vague or confusing, especially with the npc questlines but then again it IS part of the adventure experience the game is trying to sell. Love it or hate it that's an important part of the game imo. In a world where big AAA companies with millions if not billions of dollars somehow managed to put out some of the buggiest, unnecessarily expensive, unfinished, souless, mediocre crap every year, fromsoftware has managed to maintain its reputation through and through all these years, the consistency with how many incredible games they've put out is amazing (we don't talk about ds2) Fromsoftware has mastered the formula of souls games and only have been improving on it since years, every game has the same fundamentals and core mechanics but they still try to innovate something new every game to keep it more fresh and fluid. They could've fucked up real hard with this game considering how massive it is but they somehow managed to deliver beyond people's expectations.
Overall Elden ring is a generational game, do yourself a favour and play it .