2/24 EDIT: I wanted to add an update to my feelings of this game as I'm revisiting it, something I never thought I would do, but the press about the DLC has me hopeful that I'll actually REALLY enjoy that, but because of how bad the PC port was I played on PS5 and need to get a character up to speed on PC. Anyway, my feelings remain the same. Such dissonance between the field design and legacy dungeons. If anything, I actually feel worse playing this game again because I forgot how much cool stuff IS in here but I only remember the vast swathes of boring, bland, repetitive catacombs and ruins. The one positive is all the stuff I said about the PC port is fixed, game no longer stutters and is buttery smooth, so that's good I guess. I still stand by DS2 being a better version of this game, and Lies of P is superior to this AND DS3. Trying to be optimistic for Shadow of the Erdtree.

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Alright, I know since I didn't give the game 5 stars that no one is actually going to pay attention to this review because this is the god game to save all video games, but that's fine. There's a lot of critique going around right now that is completely superficial or outright racist ("Japanese video games are bad wow when will they learn I hate anime and their culture and history and they should conform to our Western standards that we made and abandon anything they have accomplished!!") and I wanted to give critique that isn't any of that. This is a game I should love, but was ultimately disappointed by.

I guess I'll talk about the bad first. The PC performance is awful. It isn't a hardware issue, it is a software issue, DX12 takes a lot of the responsibility of performance off of the hardware driver and places it on the software using it. This is a double edged sword because while it can be very powerful, it has to be utilized correctly. Elden Ring does not accomplish this and is riddled with stuttering and loading lag as new assets get loaded in and compiled in real time. This is happening whether you notice it or not, so don't try and say "Well it's fine for me!" because it isn't, you just aren't sensitive to the frame hitching. I've seen footage of people who said it was fine and it was hitching. I've seen footage of speedrunners using autosplit and their time lagged as the game hitched. It's an issue, it exists, and if you are sensitive to framerates, as I am, it was unplayable.
So I already had a sour taste in my mouth for the game, but hey, I have a PS5, I picked it up there, and running the PS4 version ran at an incredibly smooth 60 FPS with no issues whatsoever (I guess this is a positive but it make more sense to include it here.)

Gameplay-wise, it's Dark Souls 3 again. This is kind of a bummer since I found DS3's combat to be a little too simple and every fight inevitably winds up being spamming R1 and rolling. Never really had to question my tactics, and anytime I tried using R2 or even power stancing and throwing in L1 and weapon arts, I would leave the encounter going "That would've been half as long if I just spammed R1." Balance-wise, it's kind of rough right now as well. Arcane, my initial build, is completely bugged and doesn't scale correctly so I was banging my head against the wall for the first 40 hours wondering why everything was so spongy. I unlocked respeccing and switched to a Dexterity build, which then wound up becoming nothing but R1 spam and later Hoarfrost Stomp spam because it was so overtuned.

Maybe my biggest gripe with the gameplay was the complete trivialization of multiplayer. I love the multiplayer aspect of these games. I love the tension of getting invaded while exploring a big, scary new area just as much as I love the thrill of invading someone else once I'm confident with my knowledge of the zone. I never got invaded once. It was only when I started invading for an NPC questline that I realized you only ever get invaded if you have other players co-op with you. Every invasion was 1v3 and invaders never get backup either. After about a dozen or so failures I promptly ignored the NPC and went on with the game. A complete waste of time to even have that feature in the game, and a true disappointment. PVP is the one time that R1 spam fails, and with so many fun and unique spells and weapons, I was crafting all these builds in my head only to realize that there was no point.

The open world is probably my biggest point of contention. It keeps getting so much praise as being wholly unique and vast, but it really isn't. Every catacombs is the same, every cave is the same, the same ruins are scattered throughout the entire map, the same enemies get used everywhere, etc. This in turn hurts the game's lore, as I really can't find myself getting invested when over half of the things I'm finding are just reused fights. The Crucible Knight Evergaol was the first fight where I really went "Wow okay this is gonna be good!" but after running into the 20th knight I just got so tired of it. It wasn't fun anymore and just felt like a chore. The constant reuse of fights and factions really made it hard for me to get invested in the game's lore, which is one of my favorite parts of Fromsoft's games. It's especially frustrating voicing this complaint when everyone just yells "The lore doesn't even matter you're just gonna watch it all in a YouTube video anyway!" because no, I'm not. I've never watched a Souls lore video, I just play the games and pay attention. They do such a good job writing these worlds and building up situations and stages that tell the story if you just explore and look around. This game simply feels like it was written by 2 people who didn't collaborate at all so they could just market a well-known name (🤔)

I don't have much else to say in terms of audio, but the music is really lackluster. For having the most tracks of any of Fromsoft's games, there were like, 3 that I can even remember. Most tracks are completely incidental or generic. Most of the voicework is also pretty weak (Rykard's VA was super sick though.)

Transitioning into the (few) things I legitimately enjoyed, the set pieces dungeons (Stormveil Castle, Raya Lucaria, Leyndell, a couple more that I won't spoil) were where the game truly shined. This was the world building I was talking about. They are some of my favorite stages in all of the Soulsborne titles. The game also has such a well realized aesthetic. The vistas are awe-inspiring and some of the creature design is top-notch.

I wasn't super hyped for this game so it's not like it just didn't meet any lofty ambitions that I set for it in my mind. I went in having only seen the reveal trailer from last year and the knowledge that I like Fromsoft's dark fantasy games. It's ironic that the game being touted as "too Japanese" is maybe the most Western game they've made and I think that it suffers greatly because of that. I clocked in at around 107 hours, with over half of that time spend running along cliff edges, going through cookie-cutter Skyrim dungeons, getting to the end and saying "Well, I'm sure the next one will be cool."

At the end of a Soulsborne game, I immediately fire up a new game to play it a totally different way with my knowledge of what is where and how to get it as fast as possible. But as the credits ran on Elden Ring, the only thing I was thinking of was installing a different game.