People keep telling me FromSoft’s games are good, and for some reason I keep believing them.

Full disclosure: I didn’t actually finish this one. After beating Morgott and discovering I had only completed about 2/3rds of the game, I looked at my playtime of 114 hours and decided I had given this game enough of my life. From what I’ve read of the cliff notes, I’m not missing much.

Elden Ring is open-world Dark Souls. I was initially very dubious about this combo, but I actually found it to work well. The open environments give you a lot of choice in how to engage with enemies; it is almost always possible to simply run past or around them, or to sneak up and start the battle with a stealth backstab. Open environments also play much nicer with the dynamic camera, reducing (though not completely eliminating) the number of deaths from being blinded by an uncooperative camera. (Giant enemies still mess it up, though. Stop using giant enemies, FromSoft, it’s not fun to poke a monster’s toes while getting oneshot from attacks you can’t see.) The bite-sized encounters just felt better, emotionally; I’d have a tense fight, and then have a moment to breathe and take in the scenery for a while before going to the next one. The flask refills from winning encounters also provide the benefits of Bloodborne’s healing system (maintaining forward momentum and making you feel less tethered to checkpoints) while removing the downsides. Even the crafting system, which I normally dislike, works really well to alleviate consumable attrition, as you can quickly make more arrows/bombs/whatever whenever you need them instead of having to trek back to a shop. The game even avoids checkpoint starvation, which was my biggest concern about the open-world format: Not only are there tons of rest sites, there are also special checkpoint locations that don’t act as rest sites but allow you to respawn there on death. Nearly every boss fight and difficult overworld encounter has one of these before it, so boss runbacks are a thing of the past. I was, to my surprise, actually enjoying the game.

And then I got to the first “legacy dungeon” that was designed like a Dark Souls area and realized, ah, I didn’t miss this. Linear series of encounters that can’t be avoided even if you’re fighting them for the hundredth time, check. Checkpoint starvation that ensures you will be fighting the same encounters a hundred times, check. Fights over narrow passages with instant death pits on either side, check. (Oh and yes, falls are instant death again.) I’m sure the sadomasochists who somehow enjoyed Dark Souls appreciated the return to form, but to me it just felt like they threw out all the improvements they had made since 2011 to feed me old crap again.

All the things I disliked about Dark Souls are even worse here. As I keep saying, corpse running and exploration gameplay pull in diametrically opposite directions. The game is designed so that you can run into areas or encounters that are way too strong for you, and you are supposed to recognize this and leave them to explore somewhere else, but you can’t do that unless you want to give up all your money. (Making your corpse spawn inside the boss arena is also even more asinine than usual because there’s no longer any Homeward Bone equivalent, meaning you can’t just grab your corpse and leave.)

The RPG elements are also worse than they’ve ever been; after Bloodborne managed to ever-so-slightly streamline them they decided to walk that all back by once again letting you use every single weapon and armor used by enemies, cluttering the roster with hundreds of pieces of useless garbage and hundreds more that are virtually identical, most of which you won’t ever use because they’re locked behind high stat requirements. (Oh, and equip load is back, so once again heavy armor is effectively locked behind dumping all your points into endurance.) As an open world game, Elden Ring has to dole out even more rewards for exploration, but 90% of them just collect dust since they’re incompatible with your build. There’s literally dozens of spells that you will simply never use if you don’t specialize in one of the three magic stats. I barely used any Ashes of War since I liked the default skills my weapons had, and I only ever used, like, 2 out of the 50 spirit ashes. I consistently felt disappointed and underwhelmed rather than rewarded for exploration.

This is all made worse by the weapon upgrade system, which as usual incurs a prohibitive cost in bringing any new weapon up to par, a cost which you will never know is worth it because you can’t fairly compare it to your upgraded weapon. Why would I take that gamble when I can just keep using the weapon that already brought me this far?

All of these things were already bad game design in Dark Souls, but they become absolutely terrible in an open world setting. It doesn’t help that an open world necessarily means tons of recycled content. Everyone hated the reused and glorified mob bosses in Bloodborne’s chalice dungeons, and for some reason they looked at that and said, “Let’s make a whole game out of that!” With few exceptions, the mini-dungeons are repetitive and samey, and often end with bosses that are literally just regular enemies the game pretends are bosses now. This means that the one thing I actually liked about these games, the boss fights, are now ruined too. It’s not exciting to enter a boss arena only to find a dude you’ve fought five times already. When they do decide to remix the fight, it’s often just making you fight two of the same dudes, which is even worse — FromSoft really shouldn’t need to be told this 7 games in, but their combat system does not work with multiple enemies. The game would genuinely have been improved if they cut about 3/4 of the mini-dungeons and bosses. (The exception is the Black Knife Assassins, who added something new in each encounter that made each one feel genuinely different and interesting; I particularly liked the one that was invisible. If only they brought that creativity to all the refights.)

Also, the game is… weirdly easy? The beginning is a brick wall, and I actually enjoyed taking down the Tree Sentinel right after the tutorial, which felt tough but fair. But by the time I finished Liurnia, I found myself beating most bosses on my first try, including the major ones. My attacks just tore through them so quickly I never even saw their full moveset. Honestly, if anything the combat started to feel boring, because most regular enemies could be defeated with a single backstab or combo; the only times they managed to threaten me were with unfair gank swarms. I initially worried I was overleveled, but that’s not really possible given how useless offensive stats are; your real power level is tied to smithing stones, which are gated by the areas you’ve explored, so every player who’s reasonably good at exploring should be at the same power level. It’s possible the weapon type I was using (claws) were what was overpowered? I really have no idea.

As for the plot… you know the drill by now, they only ever write one story. It’s more misery porn death cult garbage. Nearly every time you try to help an NPC they end up dead, when you’re not given the option to screw them over yourself, but leaving them alone also kills them. (Boc’s quest felt particularly cruel; giving him what he wants kills him for no reason, even though rebirthing works fine on everyone else. Why???) Additionally, so many of the enemy placements seem cruel and sadistic; you often fight enemies who appear to be civilians doing mundane tasks, who don’t react even as you backstab their comrades right next to them. There are even a few enemies that will actually run away and cower from you. Oh, and we also have racism, with “demi-humans” who are apparently intelligent and capable of being reasoned with, not that you ever try. Just… why this? Most violent games will at least provide you with some sort of fig leaf by telling or showing you that your enemies are evil. Here, you’re just killing everything simply because they’re in your way. Especially given how brutal and bloody the attack animations are, the desensitization and normalization of violence here genuinely makes me a little disturbed.

Also, there’s incest and a 1000-year-old shota. Because.

As much as I enjoyed Sekiro’s gameplay, I can understand why they didn’t want to incorporate it here since it’s so different from their usual fare… but goddamn, it’s like they forgot every single lesson they learned. (They dropped the visual indicator for backstabs, also, so it’s back to guessing on that, which screwed me over more than once.) I’m just left thinking that Breath of the Wild did an open-world action RPG so much better four years earlier.

At least there’s finally a pause feature, even if it’s buried four button presses deep.