Elden Ring

Elden Ring is by far the biggest game FromSoft has made to date and it is also my favorite as of writing this post.

I think it has every aspect I loved about the other souls games I played but boosted by like 10 times. I think, these games are at heart, Metroidvanias and Elden Ring feels most like one. The open world and literally do anything whenever you want nature of the game make this game feel way more like a Metroidvania than the others. I’m glad to have platinumed it.

There’s so much to do and see that you could do many playthroughs without even seeing certain areas that other players ended up seeing at the beginning or other stuff like that. That gives the game a lot of replay-ability along with the amount of build variety you can have, you can just play the game for thousands of hours casually and still not get bored.

There are like over 130 bosses in the base game which is insane—and most of them are good bosses too, fun fights.

The Open World

The Elden Ring open world is absolutely massive, I don’t believe the 79 square kilometer estimate is accurate but it works see: this video. But compared to other games the map is absolutely massive and the amount of stuff there is to do in the open world is insane. There’s still so many areas in the open world that I haven’t seen probably which is crazy.

The main way you traverse this massive open world is obviously, with your trusty steed, Torrent. Torrent moves way faster than your character does but to be honest he does feel a bit slow at times, the travel time between graces and certain close areas feels kind of annoying.

An example of that is the way to the Academy Glintstone Key from South Raya Lucaria Gate is deceptively long.

Though travel times aren’t really that big of a deal the main thing that sucks when exploring the open world is

THAT YOU CAN NEVER OPEN YOUR MAP WHEN YOU NEED TO

It is so infuriating when you’re looking for an item or a dungeon or something and you just cannot open your map to check where the fuck you are because some random enemy 3000 meters away is still aggroed onto you, it is so bad. I don’t know what FromSoft was thinking when they made you unable to open the map in combat. Worse decision they’ve ever made. You could argue that it’s to prevent you from fast traveling when in combat but they could’ve just disabled fast travel in combat and that would’ve been a better way to deal with it.

Gameplay

The gameplay loop in Elden Ring is a lot different than the other games FromSoft has made. The core of it is still the same, explore, kill bosses, find key items, get an ending.

But the gameplay loop in Elden Ring focuses a lot more on exploration than the other games, obviously with such a massive open world it’s not a surprise that the game is focused on exploration—but it’s not just the fact that the game has an open world, the game also has A LOT of dungeons to explore. Not just legacy dungeons but optional dungeons which you will spend a lot of time exploring.

This is also where the Metroidvania aspect of the game comes in, with so much to explore, on subsequent play-throughs the most fun part of the game is coming up with a build, going to the places, getting the weapons and the items and all of that. Upgrading your weapons and trying to optimize your build is fun. I am a big fan of routing so it’s pretty cool.

The NPC Quests

So, I wanna talk about the NPC quests a bit since I think Elden Ring improves a lot on them, compared to the other games completing the NPC quests is a lot easier without any sort of guide.

There’s not a lot that will lock you out of certain NPC quests and it is a lot more obvious what you’re supposed to do in them. In general you’d ignore quests in these games but in this game specifically I think they’re worth at least trying to do as they’re not too complicated.

Ranni’s Quest

Ranni’s quest is one of the most important quests in the game as certain areas are locked behind it essentially so doing it is imperative, plus you get a cool ending if you do it. The game does an ok job of making it obvious that Ranni is an important character for the most part since you see her right at the start of the game.

Varre’s Quest

Varre’s quest is also up there as it offers easy access to Mohgwyn palace. Same applies to Rya’s quest though you don’t need to finish it fully to get access to Volcano Manor and Mt. Gelmir.

There is one thing about Varre’s quest that I dislike—that is the fact that there’s zero indication that his quest can be done offline. You just literally have to look it up on Google as you’re not told what to do in order to complete the quest offline. Which to be fair isn’t uncommon for these games but Elden Ring set a precedent that you do get enough info from dialogue USUALLY. I don’t play these games online because of the lack of a PS Plus subscription so for the longest time I thought that Varre’s quest was inaccessible to me.

Fia’s Quest

Fia’s quest is also important as it’s locking a remembrance boss behind it which is quite interesting as it’s super out of the way… though her quest is not super difficult to do, I in fact stumbled upon it on my first playthrough where I actually ended up getting most of the endings set up besides the frenzied flame ending.

Combat

Finally onto the most important part of the game—the best one too. I think Elden Ring has improved on the souls combat formula so drastically and it feels amazing. In part because of the added jump and crouch buttons but also due to the fact that the variety in viable builds and play-styles has increased so much that it feels like you can make anything work in this game and have a lot of fun doing it.

You can choose any weapon and build on it and it will destroy bosses if you know what you’re doing.

The added abilities to your kit are also super awesome and make combat feel so dynamic—it’s less about learning timings now as learning spacing different ways to dodge enemy attacks becomes way more useful than in the other games where you can roll spam lol. I especially like the jump and crouch mechanics it feels incredibly cool to jump over attacks or even crouch under them, which you can do for a surprising amount of attacks.

Guard counters are also incredibly cool and I really love that they gave shields their time to shine as they’ve been ignoring them heavily for the other games in my opinion. I didn’t get to use shields on most of the bosses as I don’t like that play-style but I do plan on doing a tank run where I just play with shields and a lance or something and level END and VIG.

Though the combat wouldn’t matter if the bosses weren’t good as well. And I do think that Elden Ring does REALLY REALLY well in this aspect. There’s not one boss I don’t look forward to fighting in this game. Maybe fire giant but he can be fun as he’s a real test of how much damage you can do.

Basically all of the bosses have some delay to most if not all of their attacks, along with one or two attacks that are INCREDIBLY delayed. It really caught me off guard and I still am not used to it, as in the games I’ve played, this was a rare occurrence—in DS3 I can only think of one boss with delayed attacks and that’s The Nameless King. 

Though all that isn’t to say I dislike the delayed attacks, I think they promote more skill expression as you can’t just roll spam to dodge them, you actually have to learn the timings and positioning in order to successfully dodge them which I think is rewarding. In DS3 you can get away with roll spamming on most bosses but Elden Ring will heavily punish you for it, panic dodging means getting hit for most of your health or even just straight up dying. I do enjoy it.

A note on difficulty

I keep hearing people say this game is easy, but I don’t think it’s that much easier than the other games. Yes you can get really broken and destroy every boss but I personally had a much easier time with DS3 than I did with this game. Some of the bosses in this game just absolutely destroy me still.

Respec mechanics

I love the respec system in this game. It’s pretty fair with the amount of respecs you’re given per NG cycle (17) and larval tears are easy to come by so you can try out so so many builds, it’s awesome!

Music

The music in this game is top notch, same as in any other fromsoft game. I love ambiance and it really makes you feel things, it can actually get overwhelming during a hard boss fight. Really gets your heart pumping when the orchestra hits.

I especially like the singing enemies on the game like the ones in Nokstella and the bird women that sing.

Yeah I think that’s it for now. Bye!