Genre: Action RPG
Release Date: Feb 25th, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4/PS5, Xbox One X/S
Summary
A superb open-world RPG from the makers of Dark Souls and Bloodborne. A bevy of great convenience features make this one of the most accessible Soulsborne games. Graphics utilizes next-gen tech quite well and show off the wonderful art style, though music leaves something to be desired at times. Enemies and bosses are generally remarkable in their variety and spectacle, though some repeat fights with gimmicky movesets hold it back from being Fromsoft’s absolute best. The massive amount of quality content wrapped in a setting oozing with richness and personality will keep players coming back for years to come.
Gameplay Positives and Negatives
+ There’s a plethora of in-depth stat information in menus and the level-up screen that tell you exactly what everything does.
+ Expanded online components like rated messages replenishing HP, gesture attachments, complete message log, that add up to a more complete online component than previous Fromsoft games.
+ The open-world level design is dense and feels natural with lots of unique locations and interests scattered about. There’s a good density of points of interest on the map, as such, exploration is rewarded through useful crafting items, weapons, and interesting caves and locales.
+ Traversal around the open world is fun and convenient. The horse is fast and easy to navigate through terrain and the ability to jump in general is a game-changer.
+ Teleporting to discovered locations is instant anywhere above ground with fast loading times.
+ Margit, The Fell Omen boss fight is one of the greats … as long as you’re the right level and explored a ton already by the time you fight him. If you try to fight just blocking every attack, he has magical swords at close range and distance that hit through shields. He usually does the magic hits when his left hand is raised or when you back up too far away and begin to heal. It’s a substantial and challenging fight where every cheese strat is countered and one is left to fight him on his terms.
+ Numerous convenience features and improvements on the Souls formula. Lengthy runs up to bosses are mostly a thing of the past here with the stakes of Marika checkpoints. Caves and dungeons have teleports to the entrance. You can now summon cool monsters in boss fights and even level them up, which is a good difficulty down modifier, and it’s optional. Open world in general allows for more freedom in progression and more ways to overcome specific challenges, though there’s also bad design in terms of the progression, which we’ll get into later. Stamina doesn’t drain outside of combat, traversal across the map flows well and is fun, etc.
+ Recovery of ‘souls’ upon death returns in Elden Ring and is well done. Grab corpse, get stuff back’ penalty for failure remains good as it usually is.
+ Recoup mechanics that help you when you continue playing are good here and better than other From games. Flasks replenish if you defeat all enemy types in an area and when you defeat teardrop scarabs, which again, negates the need to retreat to a site of grace (bonfire) when you explore to a certain point; it encourages you to keep going and not lose momentum.
++ Weapon skills and affinities allow a wide range of playstyles and also encourage a kind of soft transmog system. The game gives you a freedom to mix and match as you please across almost all weapons, except legendary/special weapons and elemental, which goes a long way toward getting players to actually try them all out. The modular transmog nature of the weapon skills earns it a second positive.
+ The game has extensive builds gameplay, with many viable builds and playstyles.
+ Maliketh boss fight is really fun. The first phase is one of the more approachable and easy-to-learn/hard-to-master fights I’ve yet encountered in a Soulsborne game.
+ The replayability is simply amazing here, owing in part to how massive and open the game is, but mostly because the Soulsborne formula is replayable by nature. The sheer length of the game and lopsided difficulty curve with bosses like Margit being frontloaded at the start keep replayability from getting two positives.
+ Combat in general can be very viscerally satisfying depending on your weapon or playstyle, partly due to the diversity in animations and types. I find the jumping attacks incredibly satisfying, others love using spells. There’s a whole greater than its individual parts with the vast combat available in this game. Like Monster Hunter, if you’re not feeling a certain weapon, there’s usually always a couple other weapon types that will make you excited.
+ Co-op for boss fights and dungeons is very welcome and enjoyable as it usually is, though lack of full co-op and gripes like forced invasions keep it from getting more positives.
+ Side bosses in the numerous caves and tombs, in particular the Murkwater Catacombs boss, are fun and enjoyable. Makes you feel like you’re good at the game while also putting up a good challenge. The attack patterns are in sync with intuitive rolling timings to make for a fair one-on-one duel.
+ Stormviel Castle has the classic Demons’ Souls first area dungeon feel with tightly crafted branching paths and shortcuts that loop in on themselves. There’s also a verticality that is amazing; you’ll be storming the castle gates one moment and then way up on the spires fighting deadly eagles, and then in the cellars where the abominations lay the next.
+ Stormviel Castle has multiple methods to getting the liftside chamber point of grace. You could sneak around the garrison of troops completely by using grass and other cover, or lure them one by one.
+ Godrick boss fight is just really good across the board.
+ Separate positive to Godrick’s music/boss music in general.
+ Enemy variety is wonderful like past FromSoft games.
+ Weapon skills continue to be interesting and unique. Finding new weapons is a joy due to the plethora of cool skills they might have.
+ Summon variety, usefulness, and general fun/cool factor. This is an aggregate plus for summons functioning as a difficulty modifier. I love watching my wolfs tear up the enemies, or the legendary summon animations as they follow you. The only thing keeping summons from getting 2 pluses is how unbalanced and stupidly powerful mimic tear is. Mimic tear carries you through the endgame and renders other summon options pointless.
+ Raya Lucaria level design is so fun, in part due to the great rooftop section, of which I’m a sucker for in Fromsoft games.
+ Rennala boss fight.
+ The scope of the world map and how it feels inexhaustible due to having no boundaries. As you obtain new map fragments, the world map expands and you’re left excited about the possibilities. The map is easy to understand with its convenient topographic indicators.
+ Destructible terrain being dynamically triggered depending on the enemy or weapon. Seeing trees falling over en masse due to a giant ice dragon swooping in on you is quite the spectacle. Giants and bears love knocking over ruins and other structures as they run after you, and a great example of this, in general, is the Tree Sentinel knocking over the church of Ellah at the beginning of Limgrave. The especially cool thing about this the terrain can’t be destroyed with just anything, it takes a colossal weapon or large enemy to destroy certain structures. The fact they independently coded certain assets in this huge open world to trigger destruction depending on a certain action hitting it versus others is admirable.
+ Multiple routes to complete your objectives. Multiple methods getting to Altus Plateau
+ Carion Manor is a great level. The ghost knights on top of the walls are specifically laid out in a pattern where the player either falls into traps, or uses the traps against the knights. The hand enemies are incredibly creepy, and going through the lower levels infested with them hiding on walls and popping up was brilliant horror.
+ Full respec is available at a certain point in the game and without much repercussion. This respec also ties into other areas like freely swapping and experimenting with weapon arts without consequence, and the opportunity to use boss remembrances multiple times thanks to the giant turtle towers.
++ Leyndell the Capital City is not only gorgeous aesthetically, it’s also one of the largest and most interesting levels FromSoft has ever made. There are wonderful shortcuts that properly loop in on themselves, tons of little nooks and crannies to explore for hidden items, and unique enemy encounters that are well thought out. The layout is vast while simultaneously being tight and dense; there are a multitude of different paths to take through each with entirely skippable encounters. Want to take a pure stealth approach and sneak your way to the top of the city? You can do that. Want to defeat each and every single encounter with a head-on approach? You can do that too!
++ Volcano Manor level is multifaceted with wonderful compactness and density filled with shortcuts and good enemy placement.
+ Fallingstar Beast fight is unique in the way it acts like the classic matador routine. Anticipating the beast’s charges is exciting.
+ Sewer level has phenomenal level design that loops in on itself with classic DS1 feel. Out of all the legacy dungeons, this one is most reminiscent of the mazelike sewers found in Dark Souls 1.
+ Haligtree level is a joy to traverse. Descending the treetops to a Lothlorian-looking city in the sky was majestic; great level design in general.
+ Haligtree Brace legacy dungeon has wonderful corridor gameplay with multiple routes and interesting design in general.
++ Crumbling Farum Azula is a remarkable level brimming with brilliant density and pacing. It is probably the most well-designed dungeon in the entire game from a level design perspective.
+ Final Godfrey fight
+ Final Radogan Fight
+ New Game+ and freedom to continue your completed save
– Bad PC launch with numerous bugs such as: broken quests, map without NPC indicators, and unoptimized in general.
– Limgrave west has one musical track that has a persistent drone note with tension chords that gets way too repetitive and annoying for such a large area. The track on its own isn’t bad since it’s got nice ambient ambiguity that sets up the journey appropriately; however, it being the only track outside combat gets old and irritating. This is the first time in my FromSoft career that I’ve resorted to turning off the music completely on a first playthrough, at least until leaving Limgrave. The soundtrack in general has a couple other unremarkable tracks, hence the negative to music.
– – Difficulty curve at the endgame is simply an unforgivable cliff out of nowhere. This makes sense since it’s an all-roads-lead-to-Rome open-world game that funnels everyone to the same final bosses, but it’s not particularly good in Elden Ring. For example, the game really expects players to at least be level 110 for the Haligtree and then Ashen Capitol bosses, which means forced side exploration. The whole point of side content is that it’s not mandatory, and here clearly plenty of it is in order to be strong enough for the end bosses. It’s cool that the game doesn’t tell you which side content to engage in, but the fact a lot of it is still mandatory is not telegraphed at all and poor difficulty design.
– Forced invasion pvp for all co-op.
– Co-op issues such as delays, sometimes huge, in summoning, limited in and out summoning, and network issues in general.
– Reused environments/enemies and formulaic caves/tombs. Could be worse, and it’s certainly nice for an open-world game, but it is less tightly designed and detailed than the other Fromsoft games and was noticeable enough to hinder the experience for me. It was bad enough to warrant two negatives but taken objectively, it’s not that bad for the genre.
– – Unbalanced boss order. Margit being the first major boss is an unnecessary difficulty cliff, especially since everything is pointing you to go in his direction as soon as you hit the open world. Radahn actually had to get nerfed in a patch because players were accessing him way earlier than intended. Radahn is clearly balanced for high-level characters and would be more appropriate on the Altus Plateau or something.
– Huntsmen spirit enemies in the river level are absolutely obnoxious. They pop into being out of nothing as soon as you get within 10 feet of their spawn area. Because they’re invisible, you’re going to be running into groups again and again, usually getting one-shot by an archer while trying to merely get to any area on horseback. Not only are they initially invisible, but they are also littered all across this level, usually in groups of 3. Enemy placement isn’t that well designed or thought up, striking a resemblance to the irritating and copy/paste encounter placement of enemies in Dark Souls 2.
– The pervasiveness of dragons around the open world should be cool and exciting, but instead, it’s a chore. Pretty much all dragon fights are the same, just with different elementals. They take too long and require proper management of Torrent. Running away from fire breath and slashing at ankles only excites me so many times, but it’s just too often, especially in places like Dragonbarrow where they’re everywhere and almost unavoidable. Every time I encounter another dragon, I can’t help but sigh and want to stop playing; that pretty much says all it needs to.
– Draconic Tree Sentinel boss fight has multiple issues with it that bring it down as a negative. First, it’s a reskin of the numerous tree sentinel bosses, which is anticlimactic for the guardian of the capital city. Second , it loves to get stuck in the tight corners of the staircase and even trees behind. Third, the boss has a very funny and exploitable bug in its dodge pattern that lets you wail on it as it perpetually side-dodges. Also, the iframes required are way too tight for the lightning-infused attacks. Worst fight so far.
– – Forced ironman mode (no control over save file. Have to live with your consequences) Easy to lock yourself out of key story content due to forced ironman and the swath of character quests and key items that are missable and time-gated. The sheer ambiguity of a lot of quests and content in the game leads to an over-reliance on a walkthrough to enjoy. You could theoretically find it out yourself, but you’d have to spend hours upon hours tediously searching across the map and experiment finding and talking to different NPCs at different times in the game, requiring multiple playthroughs. Not fun, not feasible without a guide.
– Quest progression is often vague to the point of trial and error. For example, who would think talking to the church of Ellah merchant would be the only way to get the finger snap to get Blaidd’s attention? Or Ranni disappearing leaving you no indication of what to do next. Most of the time, scouting the entire world map for info from NPCs is the only way forward, and this gets more frustrating when you haven’t met the key character yet and don’t even know of their existence.
– The way the story is told through items means the fragments of the story are locked through optional gameplay, some of the optional bits are key story elements that should be more obvious to the player. Also, from a purely gameplay perspective, shuffling through all your items and reading all the descriptions and putting together a complex mind map of all the lore isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and the vast majority of people just watch lore videos breaking down others’ work, meaning most people won’t even discover the story in-game anyway, which is a negative, for external story requirement and/or cumbersome method to get story. (this doesn’t negate the item descriptions getting a story positive for being there in general as a thing. Required to understand story or not, there’s cool lore tidbits in there worthy of a plus.)
– Input reading by most enemies is broken. It’s broken in that the enemy reacts immediately to your button press before your character’s animation even gets a chance to start an attack. Not only is this bad for gameplay, it also isn’t accounted for in lore. Is everything in the Lands Between telepathic? It’s very unrealistic and ruins gameplay a bit.
– Input delay from moment of hitting button to landing a hit is too much for a fast-paced action game like this. The input delay problem is further compounded by instantaneous enemy input reads. The fact that the combat is still as good as it is despite, this speaks to the otherwise great game design, but tiny input delay is a problem nonetheless.
– Reuse of horserider boss fights, in particular Loretta, which has easy patterns but immense defense and one-shot magic arrows. These fights are repetitive and do the same exact patterns, and are not fun to begin with.
– – Malenia boss fight is THE definition of a troll boss meant to anger players. I won’t even mention the specific gimmick the boss has to earn these negatives because it’s become its own internet meme at this point.
– – HUD hotkey navigation is cumbersome and actively gets the player killed fumbling to find the item or weapons you need in a fight. Perhaps the most egregious example of poor HUD navigation is a prompt pop-up every time you try summoning Torrent back to life asking if you want to use the flask to revive Torrent. This pop-up impedes all action in-game and requires you to click ‘yes’ before summoning Torrent. This resulted in many, many deaths due to bosses stomping me as I attempt to desperately re-summon Torrent and get pop-up locked out. Lack of a pause, vast length of the game, and late game difficulty cliff compound this issue, even though the same has been in Souls games from the beginning.
– Aggregate for multiple boss phases without checkpoints or pauses in between, and for occasionally long run-ups to bosses.
+44 -24
Total Gameplay Score: +20
Story Positives and Negatives
+ Doodad design is remarkable, like typical Fromsoft games, but especially impressive given it’s a full open world this time.
+ Art design has incredible richness and painstaking detail. Plus to detail and art of the armor, weapons, and items.
+ Art design plus to enemy design.
++ Two art design pluses to the absolutely stunning architecture.
+ Art design to overworld and lighting. Overworld aesthetic with the golden tree motif has some remarkable color combinations, aided beautifully by the dynamic day/system. The skybox looks majestic and organic with its moving clouds and volumetric lighting from golden erdtrees and blue moon hues.
+ Localization is so well done that it often fools one into thinking English was the native language the game was made for. All the various items and references, oftentimes esoteric, have rich significance and are not noticeably lost in translation in a way many Japanese localization games are.
+ Character stories in general are well thought-out and often very interesting. Ranni and her wolf guardian Blaidd, Alexander and the other Jars, Fia, etc., are memorable even after playing.
+ Castle Morne is a really fun level, but what really stands out is the visual storytelling of the demi-humans revolting against the soldiers. There are all kinds of set pieces and encounters such as the two sides fighting each other that set this apart.
+ Visual continuity between areas is simply astounding, owing in part to the impressive draw distance. “If you see it, you can go there” is in full effect and has, perhaps, never before been done in such a fantastic way.
+ Visual storytelling is good in Caelid where lore and history of the world meet gameplay with its blighted toxic land. Caelid is a strikingly unique location with some of the best atmosphere in the whole game. The rotted wilds are filled with terrifying enemies and hostile fauna, and it’s the closest a game has gotten to the alien atmosphere of the original Morrowind
+ Plus to summon descriptions, which function basically as a bestiary for the various enemies of the world.
+ Raya Lucaria. I love the academy theme, personally, and it’s done well here. The visual storytelling is also really good here with the mages and the Radogan wolf mid-boss and Rennala’s children especially.
+ Leyndell has a wealth of lore and story significance that is wonderful to discover. Of course, the visual storytelling is strong throughout, as the various stewards of the capital city inform the player of its history and purpose through item descriptions and their inherent enemy design.
+ Mountaintop of the Giants has such a wonderful aesthetic with its snowy wastes. It’s really fitting, yet ironic for these isolated snowy mountains to be the final leg in the journey and the location of the flame of frenzy. The landmasses tied together by giant chains remind me of the landmass below Zeal in Chrono Trigger.
+ Volcano Manor story.
+ Crumbling Farum Azula is a late-game dungeon with a lot of good visual storytelling.
+ Final Radogan and Elden Beast fight demonstrate the shattering of the elden ring so poignantly with the moveset of Radogan being the hammer. Other visual storytelling details set this as one of the more visually impressive boss fights in the series. (Ambiguity if Marika and Radogan merged into one?)
+ Story/lore in general is intriguing and well-thought-out. The story involves more characters and threads than other Souls games and is perhaps the most well-told between it and Dark Souls 1-3.
+ Item descriptions and the lore/story they weave. Not only do item descriptions account as a kind of bestiary, (especially with the spirit summon descriptions!), they also give flavor lore tidbits about various fauna and wildlife in Elden Ring’s world; as well as piecing together the story and lore in general.
+ Voice acting. Rykard’s crazy snake-like voice, Godfrey, Finger Readers, Ranni. Consistently great voices throughout, even for minor roles. Honestly one of the best-voiced FromSoft games
+ Internal continuity of the game is consistent throughout, which is no small feat considering how large the scope is.
– Gross factor is the most heightened here in series history. This is purely a subjective gripe, but the body horror and prevalence of dung and blood actively disinterest me and put replayability down a bit for me.
– This is another, admittedly, subjective negative. The way the story is told is limiting and vague, which admittedly is a positive to some people, but cumbersome and commonly leads to completely ignoring the story and lore for many others, sadly. These are general walkthruitus and google-it problems the game has throughout, for better and worse depending on the player.
+22 -2
Total Story Score: +20
Overall Score: +40
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