Review: Elden Ring

I loved Elden Ring. It's atmosphere, characters, story, weaponry, and everything else was basically perfect. I love video games. This is one of the video games of all time. If you like Fromsoft style games (ie: Dark Souls) this game is worth the price of admission and there's new DLC coming out 6/20/24 (3 or so months after the time of writing) so uhhh yeah. Great timing. Let's get into the review.

I had high expectations going in to Elden Ring as I'm a freaky little guy who loves Dark Souls. The opening sequence and introduction were weird and cryptic. I was confused instantly and I never unconfused even after completing the game. I'm kind of used to this and tend to focus entirely on the gameplay and the short side narratives that are easier to follow. Hewg and Roderika (I had to look up her name sorry) was my favorite narrative in the game. No spoilers but "UGHagougghhhghghghhgh" (this is the sound I make when taking psychic damage.) Focusing on gameplay for the most part I found myself plesantly surprised, midly frustrated, broken and crushed, elated, and severely frustrated.

While I appreciate the difficulty tuning Fromsoft titles I play with a couple house rules which really shapes my playthroughs. First I play blind-ish. I look up as little as possible but permit myself some peeks if I'm helplessly lost, want to do something very specific, or when I'm helplessly stuck. In Elden Ring I looked up where to find Gut's Greatsword, a quest line that I needed to complete for reasons I'll get into, and I only strategies for a fight which I'll explain also. Second house rule was NPC Summons only. I didn't utilize multiplayer to complete any of the content in the game. I did however tag along and assist others a few times and it was very fun and I learned some cool stuff that I brought back to my own game but that was it. Third and final house rule was go with the flow. This rule was more about not getting hung up on chasing down every single side quest or boss and definitely don't try to 100% the game. This tendency kills so many games for me that I need to keep it in mind. This absolutely screwed me by the way. Let's talk about getting fingered.

Getting fingered makes your friends reject you and your ending "bad." Before I start sounding like a puritan trying to sell abstinence this is an option in the game that's supposed to be clear and avoidable. I missed a prompt to talk with my maiden and followed the advice of some goofy messages on the floor and uhh I got got by some evil fingers. I had to look this up because I didn't want to do it and didn't know I was doing it when I did it. Some players might think that it's dumb to not notice all the signs or whatever but I have ADHD and when I see a big spooky door I'm not checking my menus for special dialogue options I'm refreshing my flasks so I can go kill the thing behind the door okay? Anyway there was an insanely complex side quest I needed to complete in order to "reverse" the fingering and it put a pretty big damper on my mood overall. Crucify me if you must but I think save scumming should be allowed in Fromsoft games since they're so damn cryptic. Maybe I'm wrong but I can live with that. There was one other sticking point that required me to Google something and that was strategies for Malenia.

Malenia walled me for literally 2 years. There were a multitude of issues that I had with this boss and most of them were my own fault. To be fair to myself I started a new job around this time and then my son was born so I was busy. I would boot up every so often and get slapped around but I wasn't making daily attempts for 2 years or anything like that. I do think the boss was pretty overtuned and was nerfed before I beat it. I still found it challenging so beating it pre-nerf with such limited gaming time was probably impossible for me. Likely the most impactful issue was my playstyle was not well suited for this fight. The other issue was I wanted to comprimise this playstyle as little as possible. That means I wasn't going to summon, reset, or change weapons. That stubborn decision really set me up to get dumped on.

I was playing with the aforementioned "Gut's Greatsword" which is a big slow hunk of metal. I was also using a Greatshield because unlike Guts I'm a coward and I was really enjoying the block-attack mechanic so I built my strategy around using it as much as possible. It was very successful and validated my choices to play by my house rules. If I'd been summoning for every fight I probably wouldn't have died very much at all. That all fell apart at Malenia though who chewed through me and my giant health pool like paper. This brings me to my second criticism of Elden Ring. Malenia doesn't just wall players she walls playstyles which kind of sucks. I think shes an awesome boss but blocking does nothing and I played for something like 90 hours and blocking basically worked flawlessly against every boss til then. I switched to a high immunity build to resist Malenia's status effects and I put on a dashing ability to give myself some breathing room instead of blocking. There were just a few more issues and then I'll be done complaining.

Next issue was I wasn't just stubborn about my weapon, I was stubborn about my spirit assistant. I'd been using this Jellyfish from the start and any time I'd swapped off it I'd be underwhelmed. I just loved my little jelly buddy and didn't want to change it out. I saw strategies using a bunch of cool spirits and I didn't have most of them and didn't want to go get them anyway. I decided my Jelly buddy would be my friend until the end. A promise I made good on by the way. I also had never used the buff potions before and I didn't know how to use great runes until AFTER I completed this fight but such is the challenge of playing Fromsoft games blind-ish. With everything in place I was met with the last hurdle. I'd played the game with one playstyle for 90+ hours. Now I needed to practice a whole new one without being entirely sure if that playstyle was even viable as a solution for this fight. It was greuling. I tweaked my build over and over unsure if it was me or my loadout that was causing the most issues (it was me.) When all was said and done I'd lost track of my attempts but it was probably over 100. The flip side of that coin was I had the fight down to a science and just needed a little bit of luck to pull it off. Here's the video of my final attempt if you want to check it out: Youtube.com/ThatLuckyBear (Please subscribe??)

After clearing Malenia it took me less than a week to explore and complete the "rest" of the game. That's in quotes because the game is more or less impossible to complete on the first try blind-ish. It's 100% impossible for me personally. That's just how it is. I didn't really understand what happened or who I was killing a lot of times but I did have a good time doing it. The last few bosses were delightfully challenging and I actually used the Malenia playstyle for most of the time I played after the fight. I only switched back to shield mode for one fight which was a good choice because I cleared it in one try after doing so. It's hard to say when you should complete a game as open and vast as Elden Ring but with my "go with the flow" attitude intact I found myself careening toward the end at breakneck pace. I went through at least 12 bosses my last 7 days with the game including Malenia. I may have killed a few that didn't have achivements. Since I had explored so much of the world before this point there wasn't much I felt like I was missing out on and I wouldn't be able to get through without Googling. I did Google one tower puzzle because I really wanted to know how to get two enemies to fight eachother since I'd never encountered that before and needed to know before completing the game.

Reaching the final cutscene of Elden Ring was bittersweet. It's so much easier to talk about what I didn't like about Elden Ring than what I liked since the list of what I liked is basically infinite. I loved the environments, then enemies were awesome, weapons were cool and varied (even though I only used one the entire time.) I was so cautious in some areas because the enemies were so strong and plentiful that I was super tense. I love what Elden Ring does so much and now that I'm on the other side of it I want to play it again. I'm going to take a step back and enjoy the Elden Ring media I've been avoiding since launch. I'll check out lore, speedruns, "lore explained" and build videos and make some choices about how I'd like to experience The Lands Between next time around. I'll also look into the modding community and see if anything there catches my eye. I might play on PC instead of PS5 next time, especially if mods are working smoothly on Steamdeck. Until then I'm gonna finish Dragon Quest Monsters and consider my options for another retro RPG before getting into another modern triple-A game.

The End. Thanks for reading! These are typed up in html with little to no editing. Feel free to point out errors of any kind or give your opinion by emailing me at ThatLuckyBear@gmail.com with the subject line "blog comment" or find me on social media basically everywhere! Okay bye!