14 reviews liked by kawi


This isn't a good video game but its a great Godzilla game.

This is a game I completely understand the hate for but simply cannot agree with altogether. It is absolutely a love-letter to the original Godzilla movies, and I find it incredibly endearing.

Better trilogy than Trails in the sky

What is a man but the sum of his memories.

The most 3 star franchise of all time, will only allow this and black flag to be rated higher.

Go play Dark Souls III or Sekiro instead. There are 2 good bosses in the game: Malenia and Rennala. The rest are an absolute mess of game design, easy, or just plain annoying. Soul of Cinder, despite not even being the best boss in Dark Souls III, is an absolute masterpiece of game design in comparison to whatever the fuck the final boss of Elden Ring is.

It's a shame because the overworld is quite fun to explore and the souls formula adapts pretty well to an open world format, but holy fuck is the rest of the game bad. Reused bosses (I've killed Godskin Apostle 5 times), artificial difficulty spikes by boosting health or damage of mobs/bosses, poor balance, lack of planning around certain builds, bosses become trivial with certain builds.

Elden Ring's boss design fails on both the perspective of a new player, and the perspective of a returning veteran. Everything I say is going to be in direct comparison to Dark Souls III which has a great difficulty curve and very enjoyable and memorable bosses.

As a new player, you require the game to teach you how to play itself. This isn't true for everyone, some people enjoy die and retry games, which admittedly souls games are, but there are a few a effective ways of playing Souls games that players would learn if they started with Dark Souls III. When starting Dark Souls III, you are greeted with three encounters. Iundex Gundyr, who isn't that amazing, but his purpose is something akin to showing the player how they will die and bosses will be challenging. As a new player to beat this boss you have to learn how to roll from attacks, or how to block and punish. Block/dodge and punish is the main way of dealing damage to bosses. The second encounter, Vordt, is the first colossal boss you'd face and what you will learn from Vordt is aggressively rolling behind a boss. I remember dying to Vordt a few times before friends told me to stick to his ass. The third encounter, a choice between Crystal Sages and Deacons of the Deep (both suck tbh) or the Abyss Watchers, is where a new player would seriously learn to watch for patterns, learn when to punish, and learn how to position themselves in regards to the boss, which is what is required to beat the Abyss Watchers.
In Elden Ring, you're greeted with Tree Sentinel who is hard to kill if you've never played a souls game, and lowsy dungeon bosses which effectively teach you nothing and aren't memorable. There wasn't a single boss in Elden Ring that I remember having deliberate pattern designs for the player to overcome in a specific way, other than Malenia. This is the price of freedom of gameplay, and this always leads to cheese. I could have easily beaten most of the major bosses by summoning a mimic or Luthel, popping my infinite mana physik, and doing Comet Azur. There are a few bosses designed with cheese in mind, like Rennala being a challenge (as a magic user) even if you summon something or Malenia dodging 90% of what you throw at her, but I am certain that Elden Ring doesn't teach you how to play souls games properly. There is always something you can do to make an encounter easier, you can easily respec, summons are op, spells are op, most builds are op, you can stagger most bosses with few strikes with str and dex builds, e.t.c. I'm sure new players can still enjoy the game, but they would have a hard time when trying out others in the line up.

As a returning player, what you're looking for in souls game is a fair challenge. You've had an excellent example of ramping and balanced difficulty in Dark Souls III, you've been through challenging and rewarding bosses, and Elden Ring falls flat on its face when it comes to providing a fair challenge, either with unfair bosses, either with not challenging bosses. I had to actively limit myself by not cheesing bosses with my magic beam and by not summoning to make the game challenging, and even then, most bosses were easy until you get to Maliketh or so. I will admit, up to Caelid, I was enjoying the game. After Radahn, I was hit with the classic more health more damage and would get two shot with 40 vitality, as well as bosses that are just roll to the side and wait, roll to the side and wait, rince repeat. Malenia is an excellent boss exactly for this reason, her attacks are hard to dodge, you have to react to them most of the time, Waterflow Dance will hit you, and to add insult to injury, she heals when she hits you, so you try your best to get every single hit in, and guess what, you get rewarded for it because you can stagger her. Malenia rewards well timed braveness, and god damn is it satisfying to dodge Waterflow Dance. After beating her you feel like you've climbed over a massive hurdle, like you could go back to earlier bosses and kick their ass because you've effectively gotten better at the game. This isn't to say that Malenia can't be cheap or can't be cheesed, she outright dies to str and dex builds because of stagger, but she's an excellent example of how bosses should be made. You should be rewarded for learning patterns, reacting, and punishing when necessary, you shouldn't be fucked over by RNG when punishing because the boss decided to prolongue his attack or delayed an attack AHEM RADAGON AHEM, a boss shouldn't just throw shit at you for long periods of time, a boss should challenge you as a player and require you to use everything you've learned up so far to beat them. This is what Elden Ring lacked.

It's as if nobody from Fromsoft playtested the damn game.

It's fucked up how good ds3 bosses are

The greatest to ever do it literally unmatched