Elden Ring Review- A convoluted masterpiece
Beautiful and frustrating. A game of extremes. One that can be humbling, amazing, grueling, awe-inspiring...
The world FromSoft have created is nothing short of outstanding. The pure creative vision on display is amazing, if occasionally outlandish. The combat is engaging in the open-world segments, and potentially infuriating in the dungeons. In the more closed-off sections, the game tries its best to make you fail as many times as possible, touting the ever-present "git gud" argument as a fun game experience that I cannot wrap my head around to like.
I'll elaborate on my thoughts in the following chapters, hoping that I can provide a balanced perspective on the game. I will try my best to start with the more negative parts of the game, with the goal that I won't ramble on and on about them, and actually move on to the things the game does well.
The Story
The narrative arcs laid forth by Hidetaka Miyazaki (the creative director over at FromSoft) are always best tackled with the mindset that not everything will make perfect sense on first inspection. These stories are often creatively brilliant but also incredibly convoluted, relying on excessive symbolism and obscure item descriptions to make sense of what is going on.
This is very much yet another one of those stories... for better or for worse. With the aid of the illustrious George R.R. Martin (who only laid the foundation for the world), this game attempts to tell a rather elaborate story of power and its nature to corrupt all that amass it.
Generally, the combined efforts of the two aforementioned individuals result in interesting lore, but only if you are lucky or wise enough to gather the correct puzzle pieces and slot them into the right place. On my playthrough, I had to count on a fair amount of Wikis and videos explaining what is going on, and how certain quests go.
Since we are already on the topic of quests, I think it's also fair to mention my disapproval of the way this game chooses to handle quests. I appreciate open-ended design as much as the next guy, but only as long as it does not hinder progress tracking and objective discovery.
More than once I had completely lost track of a quest simply because of the obscure nature in which the next objective was hinted at and how far along the path it was. It is an often occurrence when a quest has its next objective some 20 hours further down the line, in a completely new area of the game, and all you have as a guide is something akin to "I'll wait for you under the big bridge, shone by the glow of the Erdtree".
With no quest journal available, there is no way to keep track of these, unless you use the old-fashioned pen-and-paper (or the more fashionable Elden Ring Wiki). I think this specific design choice does not improve immersion in any way, and only serves to limit the quests you manage to complete.
Otherwise, the main story has a high production value and contains a diverse and interesting cast of characters. The only frustration I had with it was that everyone without exception is set on the kill-or-be-killed mentality, with many enemies not even engaging in a short sentence prior to the classic "Time to die" moment.
The world
The Lands Between (the official name of the world of Elden Ring) are massive in size, diverse in the types of environments you'll encounter, and visually stunning.
There are tall mountains and pitting gorges, swamps and marshes, deserts and plains and so much more! Seemingly around every corner, there's an important landmark you'll want to detour to.
The creativity the world and level designers have shown here is nothing short of a monumental achievement and is worth celebrating. This is, in my opinion, the most impressive and constantly engaging world I've ever explored in a video game.
One slight criticism loops back to the point early about the lack of player direction. This lack of direction extends to world exploration. Since you are not told what to do and where to go, you are free to go anywhere and get crushed often.
All areas are more or less level-gated. Liurnia is slightly more accessible than Caelid, and Leyndell is very tough to explore if you have moved straight from Liurnia without passing through Caelid first. There absolutely is a "best way" of moving through the areas, and with no guidance given you will have to find that out on your own, all the while being decisively crushed by the enemies you encounter.
The sheer amount of hidden locations is impressive too, along with the vastness of these locations. I often found underground cities I had no idea were there and after thoroughly exploring them, I found that they either looped back onto a previous location I had explored (which gave me a great sense of closure) or simply spilled into another gigantic area.
There is so much to see and admire, and the experience of doing that hinges decisively on the things you do while exploring.
Moment-to-moment gameplay
This is the moment I will probably alienate most of the readers, which is why I put it firmly as the last topic.
I am of two minds when I think back on my experience with the game. There are moments I enthusiastically enjoy the combat, when it is playing relatively fair. There are, however, moments that make me seriously question why I play this game.
The moments I enjoyed the most were the organic encounters that happen while exploring the world: dragons, sirens singing, giants hurling rocks and arrows at you, etc. I feel these moments offer a pretty fair and balanced experience, as they are not actually meant to kill you, just give you a bit of adrenaline and move you along.
When the game legitimately sets its mind to kill you is when things get frustrating rather fast. Things that come to mind are: ambushes by enemies hiding on walls or above your head, bosses inside dungeons that can either be extremely weak or godlike strong, and even a couple of full-blown boss fights. There were a few moments where I thought there's no way you don't die here on your first pass, regardless of skill.
I don't find value in these moments, besides providing a high when you do manage to survive more than 30 continuous minutes.
On the topic of boss fights, it feels like halfway through, the game decides it's time to ratchet up the difficulty to finish on a high. On the quest to do that, it sets a bar too high for the game mechanics to cope.
A few battles come to mind, all in the last third of the game: the Full-grown Fallingstar Beast, Malenia (of course), Mohg, and perhaps also Malekith. These bosses feel unbalanced in their difficulty and do not provide a fun battle.
They strike too often (with Malenia also being almost impossible to dodge without a specific strategy) and have too much HP- so you sit around dodging for 25 seconds for one hit equalling 2% of their total HP.
I find no satisfaction in beating a boss after my 22nd attempt, and I do not feel pride in my outstanding achievement. I only feel resentment over the time I wasted when I could have experienced something more meaningful, or something more beautiful. Instead, I learned the attack patterns of a boss who sometimes telegraphs their moves, sometimes not.
To close on a neutral note, these shortcomings can be overcome by farming levels to artificially prevail over this unfair disadvantage. While that's a welcome choice, it should not be required- as it hints at poor encounter design.
Closing thoughts (Grade A-)
What FromSoft have pulled off here is extraordinary, but unfortunately, it's not a game for casual people, and I think that's a problem. I wish I could share this game with my friends, but I know it will do nothing but cause frustration for those unprepared to suffer. I understand that not all games have to be for everyone, but this argument should be based on taste, not on setting an extremely high skill requirement.
Another minus is the performance. Unstable frame times, the game taking 90 seconds to boot into the starting screen, and a total of 15 or 20 crashes in my playtime are unacceptable issues for a game as popular as this, and for which I see nearly no backlash in the reviews. To say nothing of the fact that sometimes the game just does not want to work at 60fps, even at 480p on an RTX 3070 and 10th Gen i7. It did work a lot better on my 4070 laptop somehow so I am unsure what makes it tick.
The game is superb in its world and exploration and I wish it did more to stop actually exploring it from being such a chore.