It was recently brought to my attention by both myself and others that all of my complaints about Elden Ring are irrelevant nitpicks. Whether it’s because it’s a problem that doesn’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things or it’s something that most players won’t ever experience, I have already workshopped a lot of my problems with Elden Ring among other players and they’ve almost all been dismissive about my concerns. So, as always when I run into a brick wall while writing a review, I’m going to take a different approach with this one and play devil’s advocate where I’ll point out most (reasonable) problems with the game and the counter arguments against why they aren’t a problem. This way I can complain as much as I want while also admitting that most of my problems have no merit! Everyone wins.
Problem: Repetitive bosses/dungeons and the disappointing rewards
One of my biggest issues with Elden Ring is the repetition, a repetition that only tangentially existed in previous From Software games where early game bosses turned into regular enemies or repeated for lore reasons. Sekiro probably had the worst examples of this, with multiple optional mini-bosses repeating many times over the course of the game, but the big difference is that most every Sekiro mini-boss gave you a worthwhile reward. You see a big looking samurai in the distance and you may have fought two of him already with different names, but you also know you’re probably getting a health upgrade out of it. Meanwhile in Elden Ring you have no way of knowing if you’re getting a new weapon or some horrible Ash of War that is so much worse than everything you’ve picked up before. In a game that is about exploration and overcoming challenges it’s an unfortunate triple whammy when you find a new dungeon only for it to be another catacomb filled with the same imp or skeleton enemies you’ve fought in a dozen tombs already, ending with a boss you’ve fought four times before. Then you beat the boss, only for the reward to be complete garbage and just like that you’ve wasted twenty minutes while seeing nothing new and getting nothing of value.
The counter argument to the first problem, the repetition, is that not everyone is going to 100% complete the game. In fact, not everyone is going to even 50% complete the game thanks to how Elden Ring approaches what you need to do to progress the main questline, so the repetition is only a problem for those of us that are trying to see everything, and that’s always been a problem in open world games. You save two villages in Witcher 3 and it’s an interesting side activity, you save fifteen and you can see the villagers blank expressions as they wander back into town when you close your eyes. Same for Elden Ring, not everyone will fight the Briar King more than once, not everyone will go to every tomb with the death chariots, and not everyone will find every dragon, and for those people they’ll encounter lots of unique bosses one or twice and have a great time. It’s not their fault that I want to explore, so it’s not the game’s fault either that they had to let their art designers go home sometimes.
As for the bad rewards, I suppose that’s subjective. The thing about an open world game, especially one as hands-off as Elden Ring, is that each players experience is going to be different. A reward that’s horrible for me may be incredible for you because you found it well before or well after I did, so you were excited by the imp spirit ashes and inspired by the 40 DEX lightning spear you found while I already had twelve summons that were better than that imp and was too far invested in STR to invest that much in DEX eighty hours into the game. I might suggest that the worst offenders of weak Spirit Ashes or weapon arts could have been jammed in the first two primary areas of the game so that you won’t be disappointed in the later game, but then what are the “first areas” when Elden Ring has so much flexibility in where you can go and how you can finish the game?
Problem: Too many weapons are INT based compared to Faith
Similar to my previous paragraph, there have been memes and complaints to high heaven about INT weapons and spells being far more prominent and frankly much better than the Faith weapons and spells in the game. This is only a problem if you aren’t an INT player, but obviously you shouldn’t be shoved into a corner and denied the ability to play with fun toys just because you aren’t using one stat.
I’ve thought about this a lot, in fact all the jokes about how every time you open a box it’s “another INT weapon for the pile” almost made me not write this review at all because of how prevalent that specific point is. However, I think I’ve put together a reasonable explanation for it, and that’s From Software wanting things to be less versatile and more in their individual corners. Offensive magic in INT, defensive magic in Faith, and all that comes with it in both directions. So your INT weapons have high damage, crazy flashy moves that do magic damage while your Faith weapons have slower, relatively flashy moves that either buff you or deal holy damage. And holy damage might be great against the undead, which admittedly there are a lot of, but it’s also horrible against many bosses in the game that resist holy thanks to THE LORE. In most other games that haven’t accepted the glory of the Paladin into their hearts you wouldn’t expect a character investing in the “healing spells attribute” to also get cool flashy spells or good weapons, and that seems to be part of what’s going on here. At least that’s what I tell myself to try to think up a devil’s advocate argument for this gross imbalance. Now let’s move the hell on before I change my mind.
Problem: Weapon arts (Ashes of War) and summons (Spirit Ashes) are overpowered
This is a complaint commonly spat out by the tryhards in the community, those who think you need to beat a boss with your own two (possibly bare) hands to deserve the right to say you “beat” Elden Ring or Dark Souls or whatever else that From Software has put out recently. It’s a fact that some weapon arts (special attacks weapons can use) are far too strong for their own good, even after several of them were nerfed in the game’s first big patch. Basically any weapon art attached to a katana weapon probably shouldn’t exist, as I beat almost every difficult enemy in the game pre-the main city (but what does that even mean since everyone gets to the city at different times) by not even attacking regularly and just doing the katana’s ABSURD quickdraw weapon art every time I saw an opening. I can’t decide what’s crazier about it, the fact that it’s a starting weapon option or that the katana also causes bleed (which actually works in this game, god forbid, and is also very over tuned) but that weapon art and others like it make for a very different Souls-like experience. And that’s before you get into Spirit Ashes, where in certain areas for a very low price of entry you can summon an AI-controlled friend from your pocket. Nine times out of ten this friendly version of a generic foe will do a fine job of drawing the enemy’s aggro away from you and give you a moment to heal or hit them in the back with one of those aforementioned weapon arts… or both!
Of course the simple refute to this is that there’s no wrong way to play a Souls game as long as you win. Sekiro said it best: “A shinobi would know the difference between honor and victory,” and that’s something you should embrace to the fullest in From Software games. Cheese an enemy out of its aggro range and stab it when it backs off, summon two friends and beat the crap out of a boss, and use any other spell, ability, or tactic you can think of to see more of that lovely post-boss victory slogan and less “You Died.” Some things will always be better than others in any video game, and to From Software’s credit at least there’s an energy cost for using most of these strong abilities in Elden Ring. Probably was better balanced in the earlier games when it was an ability with a set number of uses between checkpoints but hey, anything that pushes other ways to play beyond just sword and board isn’t a negative.
Problem: The game is too hard
These are always difficult complaints to address if you’ve played games like this before. Your first experience with a Demon’s Souls-onwards From Software game will probably be a trial by fire, but after that every game not named Bloodborne or Sekiro will at least have enough recognizable elements to make you feel like you’re in familiar territory. With that in mind it’s impossible for me to say with certainty that Elden Ring is “too hard” compared to Dark Souls… but really, do you want a game like this to be easy? The combat is more varied than ever thanks to an absurd amount of weapon types and the customization that weapon arts provide, but it’s still a Souls game and with that comes a certain level of simplicity. Very few enemies do more than just rush at you, or spam annoying attacks from a certain distance, and there’s little depth to the combat despite the amount of weapons to choose from. A Souls game without the difficulty would quickly become boring as you mow down the mindless hordes without difficulty, and no one would actually want that if we had it.
That all being said, Elden Ring has made a lot of concessions (or arguably “quality of life improvements”) to be as accessible as possible while also being hard. These concessions include:
-Site of Grace checkpoints generally having large arrows directing you to nearby points of interest relevant to the main story.
-A whole second set of checkpoint statues that are usually conveniently placed right next to bosses.
-Crafting so you can make weapon buffs or projectile weapons on the fly rather than having to leave the area to go buy them from a shop.
-An actual map with shocking features like the ability to clearly see where you are on it at all times.
-No weapon durability so you don’t have to worry about your weapon losing its edge while exploring.
-Killing most mobs outside of dungeons giving you free recharges of your healing and magic potions.
-A very inconsistent reduction in fall damage, so falling down a tall ladder in most dungeons won’t kill you but dropping twenty feet while exploring a cliff face might because the developers didn’t want you going there.
-No stamina usage when running out of combat, plus a horse to make exploration even faster.
-Almost no weapons or spells require grinding out 30+ very hard to get items like previous games due to the lack Dark Souls-like covenant mechanics.
-The free summons as mentioned in the previous topic, which are essentially the summons from previous Souls games but without wasting limited use items or having to be in a vulnerable “lose it when you die” form. Also the summons for “story-important” NPCs in boss fights can be done for free as well.
However the biggest one of all is that there isn’t really any need to grind for levels if you feel stuck. Due to the size of Elden Ring there’s always somewhere new to go if you run into a brick wall; maybe a whole new area of the map you haven’t gotten to yet, or a dungeon hidden in the side of a mountain you might have seen a creepy statue point out. The first boss in the game feels like he’s there to teach you this specifically, as he and the area right after him are quite unpleasant compared to everything south of them, but unlike previous From Software games going elsewhere to get more levels doesn’t feel like a grindy chore because there’s so much to see and do. It is a little unfortunate that all of the “do” is just killing more people rather than the variety you might expect from something like Skyrim, but again there’s a certain… simplicity to Souls games.
Problem: Lack of a “quest tracker” and very poor clarity for NPC quests
I already mentioned the giant arrows generated by many Site of Graces that point you toward your next objective throughout Elden Ring, but there is something to be said for the game continuing From Software’s tradition of poorly done NPC quests. They alleviated this problem somewhat in the game’s first patch by adding map markers that showed you where all the characters and merchants you’ve met are, but the important part of this is where I said “met.” This means that every time an NPC moves they disappear from the map and you have to find them again before they’ll show up on the map for you in their new location. This is fair enough from a gameplay perspective but does very little to actually benefit the player other than saving them from having to manually place more markers on the map or remember character names. People playing after this patch will still be just as lost as those before it when they’re told to go give a potion to a lady they met maybe twice before, if they’re lucky, and will have no idea what bush she’s hiding next to.
Now by this point if you’ve played a Souls game before you’re probably saying that I’m complaining about yet another staple of the From Software formula. It’s a tradition in these games that you’ll encounter colorful NPCs with hidden quest lines that inevitably end badly, assuming you didn’t miss them entirely and get really confused when people talk about their favorite characters. And fair enough, that’s as much of a part of the “Souls experience” as the high difficulty and losing your experience points when you die, but it’s definitely something they could do better at, especially in an open world game where the difference between seeing an NPC in the wild and riding past them on your horse is completely determined by your approach angle to a given area. Then there’s the NPCs whose quests can be broken by bugs and glitches because you explored the area a little too well before the NPC in question arrived there, which is a little stupid but uhhhh… “git gud”? I guess? I find the Dark Souls-style NPC quests to be compelling in terms of their uniqueness, especially the knife edge of “hopelessness plus insanity” that every character walks in these games, but if any other game had this sort of quest design we’d all be complaining and there’s very little excuse for it beyond the usual Dark Souls arguments. “Oh it’s so great how these games don’t hold your hand” etc. and sure, that is refreshing, but would it kill the characters to say “well I’m headed to X next” at the end of a conversation?
On the topic of glitches I do have to briefly mention some of the very frustrating glitches I’ve encountered, if only because I always banged on Skyrim and others for these things so it’s only fair. For starters there’s several interesting things that happen with your horse, such getting stuck in a falling loop where you die from trying to mount the horse or the horse just not summoning at all. What actually made me angry, however, were glitches that impacted fights against bosses or just difficult enemies. The game is trying its best to be an open world game but sometimes the game punishes you inadvertently when fighting things due to the size of the playground you have to work with.
For example, one time I was trying to cheese a mini-boss in an open field by dancing on the edge of his aggro range, and eventually his AI just completely broke and he ran off into the distance. I chased him all the way to the side of a hill, at which point he got stuck in a running animation against the side of it, disappeared off his horse, and the horse wouldn’t die no matter how many times I hit it. Then later a dragon fell off a cliff and into a ravine, and I expected it to teleport (or even fly) back up to me so I waited a few minutes but it stayed down there. Fine. So I ran down to where it had fallen, at which point it had teleported back up to where I had originally been. Fine. So I ran all the way back to it and discovered that it had REGAINED ALL ITS HEALTH. Hilariously the opposite happened during a boss fight, which I had killed during its second phase but died at the same instant so it obviously didn’t count as a kill. Or so I thought. Upon getting to the second phase again a few tries later the boss had almost no health remaining from their new health bar and I was able to kill them in three hits. For only the third time in my life I actually tried to report that bug, as it was an easily explainable glitch that I’m sure they could figure out without much input from me, but their website is more irritating than some Elden Ring bosses so I just gave up trying to help.
Elden Ring seems to be everywhere in gaming right now, so you probably don’t need me to tell you to play it. If you have any reservations at all about whether or not you’ll like it I’d highly recommend trying one of the Dark Souls games first, preferably the first one because it’s twenty dollars cheaper than Dark Souls 3 and isn’t named Dark Souls 2. Or just go straight into Elden Ring, as it’s a good Souls experience with a big, pretty map that you can explore if the game gets too hard as an alternative to feeling like you have to grind to get stronger. And while some of us may have wanted Elden Ring to be more of its own thing rather than just “Dark Souls on a huge map,” it’s hard to argue with the results, as I hope I’ve demonstrated above. Good luck, Tarnished.
