Elden Ring Review (Draft)

After about 85 hours of playing Elden Ring (including the ~1 hour I spent in character creation), I finally 100%'ed it. I thought I'd feel some sort of catharsis the moment I saw that final achievement pop up, but it never really came. I know it's cliche to say, but I do think the journey was genuinely more rewarding than the ending for me.

As I've mentioned a million times before, this was my first FromSoftware Souls-like game. For those unfamiliar with the term, a "Souls-like" refers to a specific type of game that draws elements from games like Demon Souls and Dark Souls, which were developed by the company FromSoftware and the designer Hidetaka Miyazaki. Other FromSoftware Souls-like games include Bloodborne and Sekiro, and Elden Ring is the latest entry in this group. What all of these games share is a high level of difficulty and precision centered around combat, with some elements of role-playing games where you level up a character while deciding what stats to invest in. There's also a general understanding that when you play a Souls-like game, your character is going to die over and over and over again – which is part of the joy and frustration of the game.

As someone who typically plays casual games that are typically under 10 or 20 hours in length, jumping into my first Souls-like with Elden Ring seemed daunting. Souls players typically talk about the skill required to be proficient at these games, along with just how frustrating and difficult they can get, and I do think I encountered some of that in my playthrough of Elden Ring. But for the most part, I thought it was... fine?

In any case, I decided to write down some of my thoughts about the game in a brain-dump format. This isn't particularly edited or arranged in any sensible way, and I'm sure I'm missing out on a lot of details and notes that I made for myself while going through the game, but this review hopefully captures some of what comes immediately to mind for me while it's still fresh.

Open World

I think the open world setting of the game was where it really shined. If I ever got stuck on a boss, the game was designed in a way where I could leave and go somewhere else to level up and get better. Moreover, a friend and I agree that the game actually encourages this: you're not necessarily meant to rush to the boss of each region, and the game is designed in a way where progression is just difficult enough that you're meant to explore this huge world that they've created. And you never feel like you're overleveled from exploring the regions available to you before fighting the big boss of that region.

That's my first big compliment for the game: the thought put into the open world is incredible. The diversity in enemies, NPCs, landscapes, and interactions is breath-taking at times. As someone who loves exploration in games, this was exactly what I wanted and needed at this moment in time. When you start the game, you only see a small piece of The Lands Between (the setting of the game), and it's already pretty impressive. And then you see the second region of the game. And then the next. And the next. And you realize, holy shit, this world is tremendous. I've played other open-world games such as Breath of the Wild, Ghost of Tsushima, and even Forza Horizon 4. Out of all of these, Elden Ring is easily the one that has been the most impressive and enjoyable to explore.

Early vs Late Game

However, I do think that there's a notable difference between the early and later portions of the game in terms of (a) how interesting the open world is, (b) the pacing, and (c) the balancing when it comes to bosses. Some of the regions that you explore later in the game (such as the Mountaintops of the Giants and the Consecrated Snowfield) are a lot more boring, and I think they lose a bit of the organic discovery factor that made the beginning of the game so exciting. For example, before you even defeat Margit in Limgrave, you can find yourself in Caelid and Liurnia. You probably won't get too far in those regions because of your low level, but the game lets you stumble upon them and organically choose (not) to explore them. It gives you a true sense of openness, choice, and non-linearity. I think it's a good thing that so many people ask where to go after beating Margit – this shows that you have options, and you can make different choices in the game.

This changes towards the end of the game. In order to get to the Mountaintops of the Giants, you necessarily need to beat Morgott at the Capital. In order to get to Crumbling Farum Azula, you necessarily need to beat Fire Giant at the Mountaintops. And by this point in time, you'll have explored most of the other regions in the game, because they're all accessible to you before beating Morgott. But the game suddenly becomes a lot more linear, with the exception of the Consecrated Snowfield (which is really just a liminal space to get to the two following regions), Mohgwyn Palace, and Miquella's Haligtree. You're mostly just running from point A to point B in these regions, unlike Limgrave and Liurnia where there's so much side stuff to explore (that advances various quests and leads to various achievement bosses). Some of these late-game regions also just weren't as interesting for me to explore, unfortunately.

I think the linearity of the late-game messes with the pacing of the game as well. Up through the Capital, I'd probably give the game a 9 out of 10. But the further I got into the game, the lower that rating fell. It felt more like I was just going from one region to the next, rushing boss fight to boss fight to boss fight (without as much a buffer in levels like the earlier regions). In particular, the final two bosses of the game weren't particularly interesting fights, and if you did all the side stuff, they wrap up a sequence of bosses that have near-inescapable one-hit-kill moves. To be fair, I feel like that's what you expect from a Souls-like game. You wouldn't want the final fights to be too easy now, would you? So I'm forgiving of these. If you learn the attack patterns of each of the bosses, you'll still come out on top. This being said, my favorite boss fight in this game was Malenia (who's completely optional), while my least favorite boss fight was Commander Niall (who's also optional, but required to access a few late-game regions and bosses), both of whom can only be reached after the Capital. Maybe it's just because I felt like I could wrap up the final 10 achievement bosses in the final 10 hours of the game, whereas the first 29 bosses were spread across nearly 70 hours of gameplay, but something about the pacing between the first half and second half of the game just felt so different, making the second half just not as robust and interesting as the first.

Story

While I give a lot of praise to the open world and exploration aspects of the game, I do think the story was a little bit lacking. Don't get me wrong: I thought the lore was decently interesting, and there's a lot of it to explore in Elden Ring. In terms of how much story the game reveals to the player, I think Elden Ring does a good job (much better than Breath of the Wild, which I thought was downright atrocious at how it progresses players through the story [spoiler: it doesn't]). But when sitting with the actual characters and plot of the game, a lot of it just felt... forgettable? But of course, this isn't a story-driven game that I'm more used to playing. This isn't like Final Fantasy, where you have a cast of characters who go on a journey together and grow and struggle and love and lose and all of that good stuff. You're simply one of the Tarnished: a voiceless avatar that fights boss after boss to become the Elden Lord. Your motivation for why you're doing this is somewhat up to you based on what questlines you follow, but the game doesn't really commit you to any sort of Hero's Journey or plot progression. It doesn't need to, because while the "training arc" in many games relies on the characters facing hardship and growing from them, the "training arc" in this game lies with you, the player, as you level up and get better at combat in the game. Unlike Ghost of Tsushima, which was very heavy-handed about the personality and motivations of the main character, Elden Ring doesn't want to distract you with character development. You get some emotionality from the actions of Melina, but even then I feel like we just didn't see enough characters interact with each other for there to be weight to their struggles. It's the same issue that Octopath Traveller runs into where you have all these different characters, interesting in their own right, but you don't actually see them overlap and interact during the course of the game. And because of this, the motivations of the characters feel more textbook than visceral. There's no Big Bad to be angry at, there's no emotional connection to the things that you're doing and the bosses that you're fighting in the game. The game does more to tell you about characters than show you.

All this to say, sure, I thought the lore was intriguing to an extent, but I think it could have been so much more. I didn't feel moved by it. Part of why the ending of the game was less interesting than the journey was that there's no real sense of catharsis in the story from defeating the final bosses. It's more of a technical feat – an on-paper achievement – than a feeling of being moved within the context of the story of the game. Don't get me wrong, not all games need to do this. But when a simple game like Unpacking can break your heart just by asking you to place your character's diploma in a closet, you gotta ask: if this is a 10/10 game, is the story actually of that caliber?

Technical Details

So far I've covered pacing, open world exploration, story, and a bit about boss fights. A lot of reviews stop there, but I want to cover some of the technical details about the game as well. Specifically, I want to talk about two things: combat and game performance.

In terms of combat, I can understand why Souls-like games have such a large following. I don't think any other type of game does it quite like this. I felt so much thrill from the precision of the combat system. You really can't just button mash; you have to be intentional about when you roll, when you strike, when you heal, when you use a skill, etc.. Hitboxes are very well respected. I played on PC, and there was very little input lag. I felt like the game respected my button presses and combat choices for the most part, and this shouldn't be surprising. In my opinion, the combat is the highlight of Souls-games, and I whole-heartedly say this is some of the best combat I've experienced in any game ever. (And I do play fighting games and other action games.)

What I do need to deduct points from Elden Ring for, though, is its actual game performance. I have a pretty solid gaming computer with top-of-the-line parts (including a GeForce RTX 3070), and the game lagged a good amount of times. Enough that sometimes I'd enter combat and suddenly I'd get a ton of dropped frames – which is horrific in a game where every moment is important and the combat is so precise. Many of my friends with gaming computers simply couldn't play the game on PC and had to opt for the PS5 version instead. A lot of people across the internet reported similar experiences with the PC version of the game, and I do think that's something of substance to note. Optimizing the performance of your game and making sure it runs smoothly (again, especially because precision in the game matters so much) is a factor that I do think matters when rating and reviewing a game.

Some UI Stuff

This is a bit more pedantic, but as a final note, I wanted to be sure to mention some curious things with the UI that I feel like could have been improved upon in this game. By no means is the UI bad. I think a lot of folks new to the game and new to Souls-likes in general might be overwhelmed by all the detail in the menu, particularly when it comes to stats. But I don't think this was particularly worse than other RPGs, and I think it just takes time to get used to what you're looking at, just like any other game. I don't think the difficulty curve of looking through the UI was too steep, even for a first-time player like myself.

However, I do think there were some curious choices with the UI design that I personally would have designed differently. These are all very small things: for example, why give us a button to add charges to our flasks when we... simply didn't have enough materials do that? A little bit of conditional logic could just grey that option out. This is true for a small set of things in the game, where they could have spent just a little more time to make quality-of-life changes. If the game is willing to mark where NPCs are with the new patch, why not mark which dungeons' bosses we've beaten and which we still have remaining? Why do we use three different buttons to say "Yes" in the game, and still, it's possible to accidentally hit the exit menu button twice (which is the same as the dodge button) and fall from where you are. For a game that cares so much about precision with every controller input, why is movement the same as changing a target when you do target-lock? How come assigning slots in the menu sometimes uses X, but other times uses △? These aren't game-breaking, and they're by all means minor as hell, but I just feel like for a game that has 10/10 across the board, we should be holding these elements to the highest standard as well.

Overall

Ok, so this was a long review of the game, but I feel like there's so much more for me to say. I also think there's a whole different sort of post I could make about my experiences and impressions as a first-time Souls-like player beyond this review. But overall, I loved this game. The combat is incredible. The bosses are fun and rewarding to beat. The open world is so damn expansive and exciting to explore. The pacing and leveling for the first half of the game is damn solid, and exploration and growth feel so organic.

I didn't think this game was impossibly difficult, and with the exception of a few late-game bosses, I thought the combat and difficulty was very fair throughout the game. I was able to get through the game just fine, while thoroughly enjoying all the little details along the way. For fans of exploring a broad open world, who aren't easily frustrated by repetition, who appreciate real-time combat in games: I absolutely, absolutely recommend this game.

But there's room for improvement with the plot (such as with character development), and especially for the late-game pacing, story progression, linear areas, and leveling. Up through the Capital, I'd give the game a 9/10, but with a (in my opinion) lackluster ending, and some less-than-exciting boss fights and much weaker final 10 hours of the game, and realization that the plot just isn't at all strong enough, I'd give it closer to a 8/10.

It was still worth 100%-ing, though, and even though I've explored everything in the game (truly, I cleared out every dungeon and did every quest), I still kind of want to go back and do a Journey 2 (their version of NG+) just to experience it all again. That's how good the exploration in this game is.