"Elden Ring" Review - Plump Sort Ahead

Available for: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

Elden Ring hardly needs any introduction, but in case you've been living under a rock, I'll make this opening statement moot. A cooperative effort between Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki and A Song of Ice and Fire (or Game of Thrones, if you're a pleb) series author George R.R. Martin, Elden Ring achieved universal hype from the moment it was announced years upon years ago on that pedigree alone. The game was reported to be developer From Software's first attempt at an open world game, so naturally everyone was excited to see what this legendary development team could accomplish within a new format...and it also proved that nobody learned anything from Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky. But unlike those titles, Elden Ring released to universal praise from all outlets as an endlessly fun, thoroughly well-realized (albeit a little buggy) experience. At the time of writing, I've achieved 100% completion according to the trophies over the course of 4 playthroughs: once as a mage, once as a colossal weapon-wielding warrior, and twice (base game plus NG+) as a dual dexterity/faith build. So I've experienced this game from a variety of different perspectives. In addition, to perhaps curtail the potential waves of unironic "git gud" maidenless neckbeards, I should also point out that the only Souls games I haven't completed are the classic and remade versions of Demon's Souls. In terms of my history with From Software's titles, my favorite of the pre-2022 titles is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, without question. So, now you have an idea of my experience with From Software titles, of my experience with Elden Ring specifically, and what, to me, makes a From Software experience best. With all of this context in mind, let's go ahead and get right to it. So saddle up your horse, reassure your friends that your maiden lives in Canada, and let me walk you through my thoughts about Elden Ring.

As always, I'm going to start this off with a couple notes about the story/characters/world, things like that. Early reports leading up to release seemed to imply that this game was going to be centered around norse mythology, but I'd say that's a liberal way of putting it. There are certainly concepts that will be familiar to anyone familiar with the subject matter (i.e giant trees tied to the world in important ways, monsters with human beards, etc), but most of it is decidedly unique to Elden Ring. Speaking of familiarity, if you're at all familiar with the typical story beats in Souls games, you'll likely feel right at home here, but with an important caveat. You play as a "tarnished," which is basically just this game's (as Yahtzee Croshaw said) fussy b****h approach to naming conventions for "chosen undead," "ashen one," etc. Your goal is to seek the Elden Ring to become the Elden Lord, whatever that means. As always, plot details are more-or-less drip-fed to you through item descriptions and the like, but I'll say that this story is one of the more accessible From Software stories. Perhaps it's just the few ties with norse mythology that do the trick: for example, we automatically recognize that Erdtrees are important because we recognize them as the in-game plural equivalent of the norse world tree, Yggdrasil, upon which the whole universe stands. Perhaps the dialogue is simply more informative in subtle ways I didn't pick up on. One way or the other, while a lot of the story is still vague, it's ultimately understandable from a high-level view. Earlier I mentioned a caveat for people familiar with From Software stories, so I'd like to touch on that. One of the criticisms of Dark Souls II was that the story centered too much on the player character rather than on the world itself like its predecessor. That was a fair criticism for its time, as (unless I'm remembering incorrectly), there was no reason why your character should've been eligible to seek a throne. In Elden Ring, however, the story centers on your player character in a way that works. There's a clear hierarchy for those seeking to become the Elden Lord: the maidenless tarnished (at the bottom) and literally everyone else (at the top). So, right from the get go, it's a clear underdog story: you're nothing but a (as multiple npcs put it) lowly tarnished, allowed and welcomed to take part in the quest for the Elden Ring, but looked down upon by everyone above you. Nobody believes in you, and you're constantly reminded of your place in the hierarchy. Therefore, there's not only a justification for why your character seeks this honor, but a motive as well. Without spoiling specifics, as you kill more and more figures of legend, those who once looked down on you seem to get more and more nervous, and I won't say any more than that. Every Souls title is all about earning your way to the credits by getting better at the game, but this is the first time that a title in this series has woven your getting better into the story itself. The result is that, by the time you reach the climax of the game, you feel far more accomplished and dangerous than in any prior From Software game since the original Dark Souls. Now, since George R.R. Martin's name is in the credits, people naturally might suspect the story to be even more front-and-center than it is (despite it being more front-and-center than most previous titles), but I suspect Martin's talents were used more in service of the world and the characters. First, let's talk about characters. I can say with certainty that this cast of characters is perhaps From Software's greatest roster yet, and I'll give one very vague example to prove that: There's a character who meets a typically bleak From Software fate by the end of the game, and their character development across the game paired with their final words to you before meeting this fate are enough to make a grown man seriously consider tearing up. All From Software character storylines are sad, but when was the last time one was that powerful? That's the kind of thing you can expect when the same man who thought up the Red Wedding and the sacrifice of Stannis Baratheon's daughter to the fire god has influence on your characters. But there are other reasons you can clearly identify the characters as a Martin affair. Setting aside the barely-disguised incestuous implications of one of the late-game bosses and the absolutely horrific things characters go through on camera (though none are as horrific as the many, many scenes where Theon Greyjoy has his fingers flayed or his genitals sliced off), you can clearly identify this as a Martin affair by the names alone. I'll explain: If you're a reader/watcher of Martin's main series, do you remember that Targaryan names? They were all pretty similar: Aegon, Aemon, Aeron, Aeyreon, Aegon again, I'm exaggerating a bit, but they were all names like that; easy to get confused. This is the case threefold with the character names in Elden Ring. In other words, it's not just one letter, it's three: R, G, and M. Starting off on the mild side, in the Gs, we have Gideon, Godrick, Gostock, Gowry, and Godfrey. In the Rs, we have Radahn, Radagon, Rykard, Roderika, Rogier, Ranni, Renni, and Rennala. And finally, in the Ms, we have Mellina, Melania, Miquella, Millicent, Miriel, Marika, Margitt, and Morgott. That accounts for most of the roster you'll talk to and/or fight across your playthrough. So, George R.R. Martin's influence on this project in terms of its characters is both a blessing and a curse, but mostly a blessing. But what about the world itself? Well, I don't actually know what kind of influence Martin had on this aspect, but setting things up this way served as a pretty good way to get from one topic to another. I mean, the world is easier to understand without going in-depth into item descriptions and the like, so that's undoubtedly the work of an admittedly low-brow author like this, but that's about the size of it. And I realize that what I'm about to say may get me crucified by some people, but I'll say it anyway: Nothing From Software has ever done (including the original Dark Souls) compares to the sheer intricacy and vision of Elden Ring's world. There's obviously the lore, which is as thick and impenetrable as always to the average player, but beyond that, the world itself is designed with as much environmental storytelling and implications as possible, and it feels like every single main area of the game was designed with far more attention to detail than perhaps any other open world to date. A part of the world that has been ultimately poisoned from within all the way to the very atmosphere, for example, was designed in such a way that everything from the look to the atmosphere to the design of the local fauna and flora to the noticeable spike in difficulty compared to its bordering areas got this point across. Compare that to the game's starting area, which one could easily mistake for the kind of completely un-f***ed world that you never see in From Software games, and it should be clear that every single area is milked for all its possible organic storytelling opportunities.

And with that, we come to the first aspect of gameplay that I'm going to talk about: exploration, plus a little bit more about the world from a gameplay perspective. After this, we'll get to the meat and potatoes of gameplay, but bear with me for a while longer...after all, seeing as this is From Software's first attempt at an open-world game, it's only fair that I go into this effort in detail to tell you how they did! If I had to boil down the quality on display here, I'd have to say that this is the best, most intricately-designed, purposeful open world since 2018's God of War, and I'd say it's even better than that here because this intricacy and purpose is spread across a significantly larger world. I'll come back to this point a couple times, but just like Dunkey, I completed this game four times. Every single playthrough, I came across multiple new things that I didn't see on my first time around, which was approximately 150 hours of searching as many nooks and crannies as I could find. Hell, in my second playthrough, I found not one, but two entirely new areas with extremely important optional bosses that I didn't find the first time. Even in my third and fourth playthroughs, I found dungeons, bosses, and entire questlines that I hadn't yet seen. This game is so full of places to see and things to fight that someone could find something on night one of their playtime that you don't see until your second round! My dad, for instance, found a boss on his first day playing that I didn't remember. In the second playthrough, I found this boss. It was in a cave in the very first area of the game, located ever so slightly to the left of the exact path I walked when I was moving through this same area in my first round. To give another example, in the early days after the game was released, my brother and I were talking about how we had both been teleported somewhere entirely new when we opened up a certain treasure chest. As I talked about how weird the area I'd been teleported to was, my brother was giving me a look like he didn't know what I meant. It turned out we'd both opened separate teleporting treasure chests on entirely opposite sides of this general area of the map. To give yet another example, I had thoroughly explored the game's one sewer area, a part of the map that is understandably more confined than the rest of the game's locations, leaving far fewer directions to walk and far less areas to explore. Yet somehow, my dad, who was having a hard time with the enemies in this area, somehow found an easier version of one of those aforementioned important-but-optional bosses and beat it. Wanna know how deep that example goes? I did that thorough sewer investigation in my first playthrough, and I didn't find that boss. I didn't set foot in the sewers in playthrough #2 (no pun intended) because I hated that part, so I obviously didn't find the boss that time. But you know what I did find in that sophomore experience? The harder version of that boss, in the form where he's important-but-optional. I remember him texting me and my brother about it shortly after I gave up on fighting that harder version. So, you understand just how this example plays into my point, right? My dad, who was yet to beat the game, not only found a boss in his first playthrough that I didn't find in mine, he also found a boss whose name would've meant nothing to me until just a little bit before he brought it up, plus he found this boss in a section that I was convinced I'd seen every part of, all in one encounter. That's how massive, intricate, and completely vulnerable to the player's curiosity this game is. If I'd either liked the sewers more or been more stubborn about making 100% sure I'd seen everything, I might've found this boss. If I'd decided to head south in a certain area instead of north, I might've found the same treasure chest my brother did. If I'd decided just to turn my f***ing head, I might've fought that early game boss that my dad fought. This world is designed from the ground up to be as rewarding and full of secrets as you'll allow it to be. [Please forgive this next section: it was written towards the beginning of my third playthrough and it's just too much effort to edit to make it sound more up-to-date] Just tonight (at time of writing this exact sentence) I found a completely hidden, hard-to-reach cave in one of the game's early difficulty curve areas, an optional boss in a direction I never realized I hadn't gone from a certain landmark, and the last item needed to open the last portal in a collection or portals that I'd discovered in my first playthrough. That was one night, to say nothing of the many, many new discoveries I've made over the course of, say, the last couple days at the time of writing this sentence. And what's more, in preparation for this third playthrough (in which I'm roleplaying as Sigrun, Queen of the Valkyries), I realized that there were extremely cool optional bosses in places I might never have ended up in if I hadn't been looking up incantations on the internet. I thought I was making a concerted effort to see everything possible in my first playthrough, but if this most recent endeavor has taught me anything, it's that my standards for trying to see everything possible were woefully lacking. And you know what else? I had to insert this sentence in here a couple days after writing those last couple sentences to mention that I'd gone two playthroughs without noticing that you can summon an army of friendly npcs in the arena of a major story boss...so yeah, this well of discovery runs deep. [Alright, cease forgiveness] To paraphrase something my brother said of the game's world, "The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to take a page from this game's book, or it's gonna be disappointing." But at this point I've said basically the same thing over and over again, and I'm sure you get the point. So rather than gush about the world design from a gameplay perspective some more, I'll talk a little bit about the kinds of things you can expect to see in this world if you explore!

A lot of fuss has been made about recurring location types when it comes to open world games in recent years. Made popular by Ubisoft, the typical open world formula contains several repeated types of places to go to (namely towers that unlock portions of the map and bandit camps that you're more or less commanded to clear out). Well, Elden Ring is not that, and allow me to go into extreme detail as to why. For starters, you unlock pieces of the map by finding them on the ground at a clearly marked spot on the main roads of a given area. With this in mind, you'll start out your exploration of an area completely blind, but with the location of the relevant map piece clearly marked in the currently-greyed out section of your map. This means that the power is ultimately in your hands: do you want to explore the area at your leisure without pictures to suggest what kind of thing may be where, or do you want to get that picture as soon as possible so that you can start interpreting the map and plan your exploration accordingly? The choice is yours! None of these map pieces are locked behind bosses or anything even remotely as challenging as that, so they're not just imminently accessible in terms of location transparency, they're also accessible from a skill standpoint as well. I mean, even if you're really, really having a hard time and can't beat the enemies around the map piece, you can still run through all the enemies and grab the map that way, then go and explore somewhere else and come back when you're more leveled up and have more practical experience. All of this is to say that unlike your standard Ubisoft open-world affair, this game doesn't force you to complete the same more-or-less copy-pasted puzzles over and over again to be able to view the current portion of the map. Rather, From Software simply throws the map on the ground and says "it's there if/when you want it, have fun!" Arguably you could take or leave the radio towers in the Far Cry games as well, but oftentimes those point you in the way of places you have to go or directly points out nearby points of interest. In contrast, the Elden Ring approach simply shows you an aerial depiction of the map, and from there, it's up to you to ascertain what aerial view might constitute a ruin or what aerial view looks like the kind of thing you're trying to reach. Circles might be an optional Evergaol that you can take on for extra experience, for instance, or a set of rectangles might be a fort that holds a secret cool weapon in its core. In any case, this particular "take it or leave it" approach still leaves more than enough room for actual exploration and discovery. To continue with the direct comparisons to Ubisoft titles for just a bit longer, it's also worth noting that most of the locations that could be called "bandit camps" aren't even marked on your map when you find them. Major forts and things like that are a different story, but one thing they both have in common is that you aren't liberating the world by clearing them out. Just like anywhere else in this game, your reward for engaging with any given camp/fort is a combination of experience (called "runes" in this game) and treasures. In certain locations like this there's also the gift of added worldbuilding or added visual context (such as a tower that oversees a horrific swamp, implying a line of defense against what might come out of that swamp). With all that in mind, it's basically the same concept as the map pieces: From Software places these interesting locations all around with promises of experience to build your character and items/weapons that you might love, and it's up to your curiosity and willingness to go off the beaten path to claim them. But just like with the map pieces, you can take it or leave it. And this same principle applies to all of the other varied places you can find and explore in the Lands Between!

As I literally just finished saying, another key thing that separates Elden Ring from your average open world game is the sheer variety of types of places you can go to and explore. The first and simplest type of location you're likely to find are the churches. 99% of the time, these churches are essentially just a free site of grace (this game's iteration of the Dark Souls bonfires), but as you move past the opening area, you'll find yourself feeling glad to see a church because they also come with sacred tears, which allow you to increase the amount of hp/fp that your flasks give back...but that's a topic for later! For now, let's just say that the purpose of this world's churches are as simple and useful as they come. Next to churches, you're also likely to find a cave or two pretty early on. Caves are one of the types of locations that feel more like a traditional From Software area. In areas like these, you're on a mostly-linear track with some secrets stashed away for those with the curiosity, you only get a midway or near-end checkpoint in certain specific caves/etc, and while in these areas, you're unable to fast travel out. In terms of what these caves are, I feel like it's pretty self-explanatory. No two caves are alike in their architecture, but they're all unmistakably...caves....either way, no matter how they're designed, in any given cave your experience will consist of making your way through enemies until you reach the end and defeat a boss, at which point you can choose to teleport back to the cave entrance. Why not discuss the other traditional From Software area types now? I don't have an exact count, but I would guess that the most numerous of these areas are the catacombs. That would certainly make sense, as unlike the caves, the various catacombs are largely the exact same design with a room or two moved around here or there...so it would make sense from a budget standpoint if that was the predominant dungeon type. All catacombs start the same, end the same, and have the same overall objective, but how you get from A to B is what tends to differ. At the start, you'll come across a giant door that you can't currently open, and your objective from there is to find the lever that opens this door so you can enter and slay the boss that resides therein. In earlier catacombs, this can be achieved as simply as walking into the next room, fighting a handful of the stone imps that occupy every catacomb (and the 9th circle of hell), and pulling the lever at the end of the hall. But as the game progresses, you'll likely find this lever at the end of several branching paths filled with traps, stone imps, dead ends, and in some cases, it'll be behind hidden paths not visible to the naked eye. But one thing all of these catacombs have in common is the complete lack of mid-way checkpoints. The only checkpoints aside from the site of grace at the beginning that you're going to find are the stakes of Marika that serve as an alternate place to revive if you die near them, and they're always right outside of the boss area. This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, if you're having a hard time with a catacomb, you literally have to start from the very beginning no matter where you die. But on the other hand, if you're in one of the few catacombs whose boss gate is actually at the very end of the dungeon, you can go into the boss with what little flasks and health/magic you have with the confidence that you can revive yourself right outside the gate with full health/magic and all your flasks if/when you die fighting the boss the first time. Really, that positive side of the coin alongside almost everything else I've said about the catacombs applies to another, far rarer kind of area: chariot tombs. So far, I've counted only two or three of these, but I'm probably missing several. These dungeons are basically extended puzzles where you try to get to the end of a long hallway patrolled by fast, almost insta-killing chariots by hiding in grooves in the sides of the hallway at exactly the right second. Then there's a little break that feels more like your standard catacomb before one final chariot sequence before the final boss. These bosses aren't locked behind lever-controlled gates, thankfully, since the struggle of getting to the boss kinda serves as the proverbial lever...this is what happens when I work on reviews late at night, but I think you get what I'm saying. At this point, I've covered almost all of the larger location types, so I'll talk about the last one before I tackle everything else in my list of things to talk about in this particular section: tunnels. Thankfully, this kind of location can be described a lot simpler than the last two types. Combine the recyclable nature and lack of checkpoints of the catacombs with the easy-to-understand base concept of the caves, and you have the tunnels...well, that second thing mainly applies if you understand that "tunnels" means "mines." But in any case, if you haven't figured it out from context, these are probably the least remarkable locations in the game...but still, you can get some good runes and treasures from these tunnels, so they're still more than worth your time! What locations remain are all incredibly simple, so I'll go through them quickly. There are rises, which are towers that are opened by completing a puzzle. The rewards for these rises are most often magic-based, such as niche spells or memory stones that give you another spell slot. There are evergaols, which are little arenas surrounded by caterpillar-like rock creatures. Go to the center of an evergaol and "enter" it, and you'll find yourself up against a unique boss that will reward you with runes and a treasure of some kind if you prove victorious. There are ruins, which are like any bandit camp or fort, except they each have a stairway into an underground dungeon somewhere within the area where a boss, a treasure, an npc, or some combination of the three awaits. Then there are the minor erdtrees, which are essentially, as the name suggests, smaller versions of the main erdtree that remains in the distance through most of the game. All but one or two of these minor erdtrees are home to one attraction and one attraction only: avatars. These come in two varieties: erdtress avatars and putrid avatars. Both of them have roughly the same moveset, grant a decent amount of runes upon defeat, and are the Asylum Demon from Dark Souls copied-and-pasted into this context. But despite how bare bones that probably makes the minor erdtrees sound, it's downright mandatory for you to visit as many as you can. This is because in addition to the runes you gain for beating these avatars, you also gain one or two specific "tears." Even in minor erdtrees that don't feature these avatars, you're going to find tears somewhere. These tears are different from the sacred tears you find in churches in that they are used to concoct Flasks of Wondrous Physik (which we'll get to later), and the more of these tears you assemble, the more potential effect combinations you have access to. Finally, we have something that's a bit more of a landmark or point of interest than an area: the sending gates. Sending gates are little purple portals that teleport you to an unspecified location if you interact with them, and the reason I include them in this list is because of how important they are. There are full locations and important bosses that are impossible to reach without going through a sending gate, but beyond that, your entire experience can change depending on what gates you find and when you find them. For instance, there's an early sending gate that will take you to an incredibly hard part of the map. But the tradeoff for how quickly the basic enemies in this area will kill you if you aren't careful is the amount of runes even one of them gives you. In my first playthrough, I found this particular sending gate pretty early (hint: it's around where you get that aforementioned flask of wondrous physik in the first place), and the enemies in this new area would kill me in one hit, sure, but if I made it from the site of grace I was warped to to the next one (which isn't too far away), at the level I was at, I could easily level up a good 3-4 times. And you know what? That's actually a good way to describe how to survive this game. See, the last aspect of the open world I'd like to talk about is how it uses its difficulty to train you. In any given Souls game, that's the case to some degree. After all, usually when you come up against a Souls boss and you get your head caved in, the game uses the difficulty of the boss in question to train you to learn its movesets and whatnot. But this is a little different. In Elden Ring, just about any time a boss wipes the floor with you more than a handful of times, it's an indication that you should leave this boss for the time being and go explore. This is made abundantly clear from the first boss available outside the tutorial area: a boss that I'd be willing to bet most people made a beeline for: The Tree Sentinel. This horseback-mounted behemoth likely trods upon the cleanest soil in the lands between for the sheer amount of players he probably mops the floor with at first, despite being literally outside of the first church you're going to reach. But as such, he serves as a way for From Software to say "hey, see this boss who's right there beside this site of grace? Don't mind him for now. When you're ready, you can come right back here." This same principle applies across the board. For instance, remember that sending gate I mentioned a couple of sentences ago? I came across that because I was having an immense amount of trouble with the game's first story boss. Having had enough of losing to this guy, I decided it was time to take a bit of time to explore all the other areas available to me at the time. Before this point, I had been to every available area (as far as I knew before the second playthrough) except one, so I headed to that one remaining area. Lo and behold, this area contained the flask of wondrous physik and that sending gate. So not only did I come across a downright mandatory item, I also came across a phenomenal grinding spot. After this, I went to investigate some other areas in a bit more detail, including one of the earliest minor erdtrees, where I found the tears that I needed to make the aforementioned flask work best for me. I accomplished all of this because the game was telling me that I just wasn't ready and that I needed to go and engage with the world some more. Dear reader, as you've likely already realized, I could talk for days about how the open world in Elden Ring is great because From Software thought through the visual design, the level of content, and the variety of content to apply to the square footage. But none of that would matter if the world weren't expertly-designed from a gameplay standpoint, and as I've just finished arguing, the gameplay experience of this world is built from the ground up to organically guide the player down the path to success!

And with that brief description of how world design steers gameplay, what of the gameplay itself, divorced from the world design? Well, that's what this section is going to cover. As I've already stated, I've played this game as a mage, a colossal weapon-wielding warrior, and a dual dexterity/faith build. So with those bits of context in mind, you know the many ways I've approached gameplay, so you'll know where my strengths and my blindspots are, should you disagree with me on any points! So let me start this section with an unpopular opinion: If you're one of those people who says magic is overpowered, you don't know what you're talking about. I'll die on this hill! As you've already read, my original playthrough was as a mage. And you know what? That was the single hardest playthrough, and I did the least amount of damage in that one. I did only passable damage, got killed in one hit, and only survived boss battles by summoning help. Compared to that, the warrior and faith/dex builds were cakewalks. Now, does second-and-third-and-fourth round knowledge help? Probably so! But let's break down the math, savvy? I beat the mage playthrough at around 120 hours at probably level 140something. Then, I beat the warrior playthrough at under 100 hours at a definitely over 100 level. Finally, my third and fourth playthroughs put me at around 90 or so hours at level 222 when all was said and done. So knowledge definitely helps, but there's clearly something else to it, and that something else is not just playing as a mage. But I digress. If you've ever played a From Software title before, you already know what to expect...but seeing as how Elden Ring is bringing in a lot of fresh, curious new players, there's a decent chance you might not already know. 

If that's the case, then I'll give you a high-level overview: This game is a build-centric role playing game, meaning there are many ways to play and it's up to you to make it happen. As you gain experience points (in this case referred to as "runes") from killing enemies, you can level up your character and put points into one of several stats. Depending on the stat you choose to level up, you'll end up getting some associated benefit. For instance, putting a point into vigor will increase your maximum health, while putting a point into strength will make certain kinds of weapons do more damage. So what stats you increase when you level up will depend on the build you want to go for. For example, if you're wanting to play as just a mage, plain and simple, you'll likely spend most of your time leveling up your intelligence (which impacts the damage of spells) and mind (which determines how much fp, or magic points, you have), alongside the occasional points into health and stamina as you see fit for survival. If you're wanting to be a Final Fantasy-style warrior carrying a comically large greatsword, on the other hand, you'll probably end up spending your points exclusively on strength, vigor, and stamina to become a hardy tank who doesn't have to take rest breaks in battle. Regardless of your build, gameplay in From Software titles is mostly the same here in Elden Ring. You have a light attack, a heavy attack, and a dodge roll that make up the majority of what you do in combat (unless you're using magic or bows, in which case you just have one type of attack). The light attacks are faster but do less damage, the heavy attack is slower but does more damage, and the dodge roll gives you valuably invincibility frames to dodge enemy attacks. The game contains hundreds upon hundreds of weapons to use, and the exact timing of any given weapon's light and heavy attacks is different from every other weapon. So, surviving combat is all about finding a weapon that works for your build, learning its timing, and using that knowledge to use the weapon efficiently to circumvent the game's difficulty. The example I always give is my experience in the original Dark Souls back in the day. I used the reinforced club that I picked up in the early hours of the game throughout about 85ish% of that initial playthrough. It wasn't a very strong weapon, but because I knew exactly how fast each swing was going to be and how fast I could dodge away, I was able to conquer most of that infamously difficult game just because I knew how to use what I had. It's in this way that all From Software games are different from your usual RPGs: the numbers behind your stats and level do make a difference, but you still have to practice and learn how to play better if you want to survive. This fact has unfortunately given rise to sort of a vocal subculture in the From Software fan community revolving around a simple phrase: "git gud." Hell, if you're the theoretical new fan who came to Elden Ring with no prior knowledge and went searching for help with a boss on internet forums, chances are good you've seen that phrase once or twice already! The phrase, unfortunately, is somewhat based on truth. The answer to literally any challenge in any of these games is to be mindful, learn enemy attack patterns, learn your own attack patterns, try over and over again, and overcome through hard work. But sadly, the cabal of 5'2 men who can't grow a mustache, never worked out in their lives, say "daddy government" unironically, think women fear their intelligence, and think people care how good they are at videogames have appropriated that phrase as a gatekeeping mechanism to laugh off people with legitimate concerns about a game's difficulty. As we'll get to later, there are legitimate concerns to be voiced about Elden Ring's difficulty. But dear theoretical fresh new player, the point of spending the last piece of this section meant for you on this topic is this: you're likely going to have a hard time with certain parts of this game. The way to get better is to keep practicing, learning, and aiming for the sweet reward of finally overcoming a challenge that you would've thought impossible before! And if anyone tells you you're doing it wrong or anything like that, at least take pride that your fingers aren't covered in cheeto dust! But again, I digress. That's an extremely high level overview of gameplay. It's a lot more deep and complicated that that, but it should serve to get you on the right track!

So now that the basics are out of the way, let's talk about what exactly Elden Ring does different from its predecessors! For starters, in lieu of the mostly contextual and sometime buggy plunging attack from past titles, Elden Ring boasts a jumping attack that it explains to you in the tutorial section. Essentially, if you can manage to jump and start an attack while in the air, this attack will do slightly more damage than normal and do some more damage to an enemy's posture. This posture system for enemies is lifted from 2019's excellent Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and it ensures that in addition to backstabs, you can gain opportunities for critical hits by dealing enough heavy-hitting damage in a short amount of time. In practice, this means you actually have more than just the standard two attack types. You still have the slower-but-harder-hitting heavy attacks and the faster-but-less-damaging light attacks, but in addition to these, you also have the slowest-but-hardest-hitting jump attacks. Depending on your weapon of choice, how aggressive you are, what other buffs you might have, etc, you can turn the tide of battle in your favor by chaining a variety of attack types together in quick succession. I don't know what the math behind it is, so I can't really talk in-depth about this system, but I can give a personal example. There's an internet-famous soul-crushingly difficult boss in this game that I beat three times: once in playthrough #2 with co-op involved, and once in both the third and fourth playthroughs with no co-op involved. This boss has an infamous attack where she leaps up into the air, lingers for a moment, and dashes towards you for about half a minute while simultaneously launching thousands of sword slashes in an elegant dance that's borderline impossible to withstand...so if you see her start the attack, you're basically screwed. Well, in several attempts, a single fireball spell from me paired with the constant melee barrages of the mimic tear ash that I summoned actually interrupted this attack and broke the boss' posture, giving me free reign to start wailing on her. So, unless you know how the system works on an under-the-hood level, you aren't going to know when the posture system combined with your use of jump attacks or whatnot will pay off. But I guarantee you, it will. Now, I can already hear you saying, "wait, you said co-op wasn't involved in those last two playthroughs, but you still summoned? What gives?" Well, that provides an easy segue to the next new thing that Elden Ring does: the ash summons. If you don't play online or just can't find anybody online, From Software give you a hail mary to get some help in a fight in the form of various companions who are summonable for a certain amount of fp or hp. These companions range from a pack of three wolves, a snake man, a handful of soldiers, or even an exact duplicate of you, but unlike online companions, these companions can only be summoned within certain areas denoted by an icon at the bottom left of the screen. So, just think of them as summonable npcs (the likes of which have been in almost every From Software title) that you can select from as you see fit when you have the ability to summon them. But these aren't the only new additions to the gameplay formula with ash in the name. Most weapons come with an "ash of war" equipped: that is to say, a skill that is triggered by pressing L2. To give one example, most shields come pre-equipped with the "parry" ash of war, making them exactly the same as any shield you'd find in Dark Souls. On the other side of the spectrum, a weapon like the bloodhound fang has an ash of war that has you do a backflip slash with the weapon to both deal some broadly-spread damage and gain some distance from your foes. In addition to these kinds of things, some ashes of war simply cast a spell without worrying about your intelligence or faith stats, while some of the rarer ashes directly mimic a boss's signature attack. The possibilities are endless, and through special items brought to the blacksmith, you can mix and match different ashes of war to different weapons with varying stat changes to the weapon in question. It's a deep, deep, deep system that is sure to reward the players that actively engage with it. But to be honest, I only even started using ashes of war in the third and final playthroughs, so I simply don't have the experience to talk about this system beyond the surface level. The final thing to discuss is the flask of wondrous physik. This flask has only one charge between sites of grace, and the effect is entirely dependent on the ingredients you use to brew it. You may recall I mentioned that you can get "tears" from the minor Erdtrees around the world? Well, each of those tears contains one effect (i.e. significantly reduces the damage you take from the first attack you take after drinking, temporarily negates fp cost for spells, etc), and you create a flask of wondrous physik by combining two of these tears. So you can combine two effects that work for your build and use that one charge of the flask when it really counts to turn the tide of battle. In every playthrough I did, for example, I just used two of the earliest effects you can get: that parenthetical damage negation one I mentioned and one that temporarily heals you consistently over time. But the more options you have, the more potential crazy things you can come up with, which makes every Erdtree you can find worth visiting. 

Now, I've talked at great length about the objective side of gameplay, but what about the fun factor? Well, part of the reason I haven't talked that much about the subjective side is that it's a From Software game. Therefore, it's a rip-roarin' good time, and having just recently started a fifth playthrough with a brand new fourth character, I believe that fact speaks volumes. But I do bring this topic up for a reason, and that reason is an unfortunate one. As a brief reminder, I've beaten this game four times and am currently working on a fifth. Across those playthroughs, I've beaten the game's hardest optional bosses three times, and the only reason I didn't fight them in the first playthrough is......well......I simply didn't find the areas they were in..........................so, yeah, it's safe to say that I've "g[otten] g[oo]d" and then some, definitely enough to be able to routinely face off against the game's most infamous challenges. That being said, the unfortunate thing about Elden Ring is this: while every other From Software title bears the label of "tough but fair," the second half of this particular offering is anything but fair. Until you reach what I'd like to call "phase 2" of the game, that tough-but-fair label is intact. But once you cross over into phase 2, there's an enormous difficulty spike. Does it make progression impossible? Of course not. It's a From Software game, literally nothing makes progression impossible so long as you practice and practice and practice. But let me explain this by juxtaposing my first and third playthroughs. When I reached this difficulty spike at first, I was maybe at level 100 at most, but I'd bet I was below that by a little bit. In contrast, when I went into this spike in my third playthrough, I had reached level 200. So, the third playthrough came with three times the game knowledge and two times the stats of the first one. Literally the only reason I had even remotely an easier time with this part of the game the latter time was because I had a better understanding of enemy attack timings. I'd still get killed in 2-3 hits by even the frailest of little old lady enemies, but I happened to be better at avoiding said hits. When facing off against the game's hardest boss in what I considered my "ultimate" playthrough, I did a little experiment and faced off against her a couple of times, re-specing my character  to see how things went with different stats turned up to the maximum level of 99. I tried this with vigor (health), and the two stats that governed my damage types (strength and faith). The differences were minimal, and I could still be killed in a minimal amount of hits and didn't quite do as much damage as I was expecting. Now, was I continuing to fail because I was making mistakes and not playing as well as I needed to? Of course. But the point remains that this difficulty spike ultimately makes your stats an afterthought. This game has attracted many new players who haven't experienced a From Software title before, and up to this point, I believe the game does an excellent job of helping new players to understand why we all love this tough-but-fair formula. But just as they're starting to get close to finishing the game, its balance gets turned upside down, and I wouldn't be surprised if new players suddenly become too frustrated to continue. So while my advice to new players would definitely be to continue, because honestly, you can do it...but to the caveman screeches of the gatekeepers in this community, I am going to have to take off from the final score for this difficulty spike, and I'm going to ask you to keep this in mind when considering making a purchase. 

Unfortunately, we're not quite done with negatives just yet. However, I don't think this point-remover will be quite as controversial as the previous one. The fact of the matter is that, while absolutely content-rich and well-realized, Elden Ring isn't quite complete from a technical perspective. This was true when the game came out months ago and it remains true to this day. The big thing is performance: while not as frequent across the game world as it was day 1, there are still several specific transitions between places that cause the framerate to drop significantly, which is a bit odd considering that there's no such delay when it comes to texture loading. Beyond this, I also experienced several hard crashes over the course of my time with this game, usually upon engaging with the game's online components. Sadly that's a great segue to another technical flaw here: I have excellent internet in my house, so the fact that I and so many other people seem to have network connection issues that kick us out of co-op so frequently seems to indicate the the online structure is held together with hopes and dreams. It's worth noting that this hasn't been an issue lately, but for the longest time it was a 50-50 shot for me to be able to finish helping somebody out without getting booted. What's more, this network problem seems to extend even to single-player situations in rare cases. As I was fighting against one of the game's pre-programmed invader npcs, the anti-cheat said it detected inappropriate behavior from me and I got kicked to the title screen. This didn't happen the next time I tried fighting this npc, but I was stunned that the anti-cheat could "detect" inappropriate behavior without a connection to somebody else being established, much less in the middle of a play session. And this anti-cheat seems to be responsible for a bit more of Elden Ring's technical woes. There have been nights where as I tried to boot the game up, it would take upwards of 2 minutes to get to the title screen, then another couple of minutes to load the game, and then the game's framerate would basically be a slideshow. Restarting or turning my computer off and on never did anything to rectify this problem, and I'd only be able to actually play the game when the stars aligned. Recently I've seen that this is likely the handiwork of the game's anti-cheat: "Easy Anti-Cheat," as this same software appears to cause the same problem in the new Sniper Elite game. With that in mind, this might not be the fault of From Software directly, but they're the ones who made the call to use this software, so it's still on them. Beyond all this, there are also a myriad of other bugs: getting caught in a falling animation on top of a rock and dying after being stuck for a couple seconds, summoning your horse only to automatically get off of it the second you get on, certain stakes of Marika not working, certain sites of grace having their interaction area (the place you walk up to and press the button to interact) off to the side so you think you can't activate the site, that infamous dog enemy who did like 500 million damage or something like that, things like that. But what about the positives? Well, as I already said, despite the insane detail in the world, I never noticed any texture pop-in of any kind. In fact, the framerate is really the only visual component that isn't up to snuff. Graphically, this game is beautifully and intentionally designed, and the attack animations are as fluid as they've always been in games from this developer. On the audio side of things, a great deal of the effects are lifted directly from the From Software effect library that they always use, and pretty much all the other effects are lifted directly from Sekiro, so just think of that and you'll have a clear picture of what the sound samples are like. As for the soundtrack, there are some bangers on it (mostly late-game boss themes), but overall it's just kinda there. Not bad, but not quite Dark Souls III either. Elden Ring is in a much better state now than it was on day 1, but I seriously shudder to think what it would've been like without the delayed release.

Folks, I reserve the word "Masterpiece" for games that do very, very little to nothing wrong. Elden Ring is not a masterpiece. It is, however, an exceptionally good, exceptionally well-made, downright revolutionary standout in the open world game genre that I've put basically the whole last four months of my life into. The jury is still out on whether or not this or Sekiro is my favorite From Software title, and I don't know if that'll ever get decided. As you'll see, Elden Ring scores lower, but that's just because Sekiro was far more polished. But here's my final note before we conclude here, dear reader. Elden Ring has understandably piqued the interest of many people who haven't ever played a Souls game, so while it's tempting to say that anybody who was going to buy this game has already bought it, I wouldn't be surprised if some people are still on the fence after seeing one or two rage compilations from twitch streamers or something like that. If you're one of those people and you only take one thing away from this review, let it be this: Elden Ring does so much so right that I think you'll get your moneys worth even if you never end up finishing it. And that, my friends, is high praise indeed.

Let us review:

-difficulty spike (frustrating for me, insanely frustrating for new players) - 0.5

-technical issues - 0.8

The final score for Elden Ring is...

8.7/10 - Fantastic

Great work, From Software, great work!