Elden Ring Review

It feels like it was just yesterday I was discovering Dark Souls for the first time – right around the time that many content creators were being made aware of its “hardest game ever” status. There was something very different about the game that other games just didn’t have, and it wasn’t just the unorthodox control scheme or nearly entirely hands-off storytelling methodology. It had that elusive X-factor, and while I’m sure a good portion of that could be said to have come from the allure of being able to say you beat it, that wouldn’t really do it complete justice. What was abundantly clear, of course, was that FromSoftware had something special on their hands and they’d go on to capitalize on it in a big way, garnering an ever-increasing fanbase that pulled them up from cult status to the mainstream, and also inadvertently creating an entirely new subgenre that has become one of the most popular across the industry. With so many successful titles under their belt, I certainly wondered how they would go about expanding and improving upon the formula. How do you outdo the likes of Bloodborne or Sekiro? Enter Elden Ring, a game that long before its release already had bordering on mythological status, and expectations to match.

Up front, for those interested, I started and completed this game in April of 2023, meaning I had a slightly different experience perhaps than those who played at launch, and while I’m aware of some of the changes that were made both in terms of gameplay and bug fixing, I won’t be talking about them in that context. I’ll just be reviewing the game in the state I played it. I was also, with great effort, able to miraculously not get spoiled on anything despite my delayed playthrough, and I knew nothing more than the odd character name as they were placed in advertising etc. I don’t know if that kind of luck will ever happen again but I’m happy it did for Elden Ring.

Well. Here we are again eating at the house of Miyazaki. As per usual, I had to fight an oversized beagle wielding an axe to enter the dining room, and the decorators really did a fantastic job setting the ambience, but what to wear…Well, we’ve got many of the usual options to choose from to start which have different base stats and starting equipment. We can be anything from a Samurai to a contestant from Naked and Afraid, which given the circumstances seems remarkably appropriate and so we’ll go with that one. Bad jokes and analogies aside, Elden Ring has the most in-depth character creator in the franchise we’ve seen to date and while you’re unlikely to be spending an enormous amount of time looking at your character from any position that isn’t face down in the mud, it’s always good to be dressed for any occasion – especially your funeral.

Once you’ve made your choices and pressed the go button, you’re treated to a shocking amount of exposition for a Souls game in the form of an opening cutscene. You, along with a few select others, are a resurrected Tarnished – presumably because you haven’t been taken out of the cabinet in a while for a good polishing. Unfortunately, the only thing worse than being a Tarnished in the Lands Between is being a maidenless Tarnished and guess what – you’re not just exhibiting fatherless behaviour. Your mission should you choose to accept it, is to overthrow the current status quo and become the new Elden Lord. In order to do so, you’re going to have to unsurprisingly run rampant upon the Lands Between and take out a series of very important people who each have a piece of the shattered Elden Ring. Theoretically, this would be in the best interest of…someone at least…and so ironically with the power of rebirth granted to you by the powers that be which you are to overthrow, off you go to stir the pot, get the locals talking, and maybe catch the attention of a maiden in the process.

Awaking in what appears to be a church you pull off one of two mini Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion moves as you walk outside to have a taste of the overworld revealed to you. As is tradition, you quickly come upon a would-be boss, and unless you’re that person who beats Dark Souls with a Guitar Hero guitar using only your teeth, you’re about to get tuned up. Luckily, this is intentional – like everyone’s favourite canned JRPG boss fight deaths – and serves as a way to bring you to the real starting area – you know, so you can maybe learn how to swing your weapon a bit.

I do seem to recall there being some discourse around how one could easily miss the tutorial area in Elden Ring, and without some of the changes they made to make it more obvious, I can’t say I’d blame someone for passing it by unknowingly. All the same, should you choose to jump down into the tutorial area, you’re given the closest thing to hand-holding you’re likely to get. You’ll have the absolute bare necessities given to you as you work through this area, and it culminates in a mini-boss of sorts for you to test out all that fancy knowledge you just acquired on the finer points of hitting something while trying not to be hit. I’ll commend FromSoft for having something like this at all, and it’s not the only tutorial-esque pop-ups you’ll get, nor is it the only way in which Elden Ring was made the most accessible in the franchise to date, but it’s still a bit easy to miss for first-time players and so perhaps in the future they’ll make it a bit less easy to accidentally go into the world blind – or in my character’s case: blind, naked, and afraid.

Here we are with our aforementioned second Oblivion world reveal, and oh what a world it is. I’ve always been most impressed with the art team at FromSoft, and Elden Ring hasn’t changed that in the slightest. Their character and enemy designs are all but unmatched in the industry as far as I’m concerned, and while some of that is likely thanks to the artistic roominess the vague lore delivery allows the team, it still impresses me a great deal and does a lot of the heavy lifting where the technical side of the presentation falls short. If you’re coming from previous Dark Souls games and the like, you’ll be immediately struck with the openness of it all. They really don’t waste time letting you appreciate that this isn’t quite the limited system of the previous titles, and you’ll get hit with that more than once as you explore the Lands Between.

“So, what now?” you may ask, as you gaze upon an open field of what is assuredly filled with things capable of ending you before you draw your weapon. Well, there is thankfully a relatively hard-to-miss NPC not far from where you stand, and if you speak with them, you’ll get a bit of information on what you might want to start working on. Once you’ve got that jotted in your notebook, you can do one of two things: listen to what you’ve been told and head northish or be like me and completely miss the point while going somewhere else entirely and not engaging with the intended first major boss battle until you’re 50 hours in and unintentionally capable of clapping them mercilessly. The choice is yours. Honestly, that’s one of the big things about Elden Ring – choice.

For those perhaps unacquainted with the franchise before Elden Ring and this is your first dipped toe so to speak, it wasn’t always like this. While you could certainly do some things in a less than-intended or optimal order, previous Souls games were relatively linear in nature and as such you were railroaded far more than you are here. Elden Ring flirts with the boundaries of the Elder Scrolls and is one “you’re on your own, good luck” message away from stranding you in Seyda Neen (for the younger folks – that’s the opening zone in Morrowind). This is both amazing as it is terrifying because these games are usually hard enough as it is when you are less capable of going where you’re not supposed to yet, but now you’re nearly completely off leash with few exceptions and it’s a very different paradigm indeed. Thankfully, FromSoft has mostly handled this deftly, and aside from getting turned into shrimp paste, there’s no real downside to accidentally meandering into areas you are nowhere near prepared for. This also means if you’re adventurous enough you can simply take on the challenge or attempt to run through for loot ahead of schedule which is certainly not absolutely what I did on more than one occasion without note of my success or failure rate needed.

The open world mixed with traditional Dark Souls storytelling doesn’t always pan out, however, in that you’re still getting mostly vague information from NPCs and item descriptions in often hard-to-find locations, with questlines that can be hard to follow even with a guide. This isn’t a change from previous games, but the open-world nature of Elden Ring exacerbates the downside of this storytelling choice. It’s particularly a sore spot for me because the world is full of such interesting details in its characters and locations which if you’re lucky are sparsely explained should you put in the work to dredge up the details and stitch it all together. This creates an environment where when you do come across an NPC that looks to be part of a quest you want to figure it out because you often want that extra sliver of world and character lore you’d miss out on otherwise.

This wanting for more but being left out in the cold is further highlighted by quests that can be failed at certain times, often without much knowledge of when or why that would be the case. Furthermore, and perhaps most unfortunate of all, is that some quests present as still being viable to start or complete when they in fact are not, leading to the player possibly canvasing the world for ways to advance a quest that’s no longer possible to complete. Where there would ideally be one or more ways in which a player could discover such quests are in a failed state, there is nothing, and so it would be nice if in future games these things were taken into consideration. I get the sense that FromSoft are seemingly walking some self-imposed line of not hand-holding for the sake of maintaining some sort of mystique and challenge, but stuff like this isn’t really diminishing that goal and would help players navigate an already vague enough world.

What exposition and lore you do get, however, is a mixture of typical FromSoft dark fantasy, and a noticeable dash of one mister George R. R. Martin who famously was attached to the project publicly early on, and whose involvement drove anticipation up even further. It’s grotesque, rough, and ragged while all the while mesmerizing. It’s a wonderful blend of Eldritch horror and high fantasy that FromSoft has mastered both visually and otherwise, though it does sometimes seem to ask a little too much of the player regarding making sense of certain things for the sake of being so obscure and edgy. You’ll also find moments of humour, however brief, and some endearing characters that can steal the show and bring a measure of levity to a world otherwise devoid of much hope. That being said, while a fan of Martin may be able to pick out with more precision all that he likely touched, the net result being anything more than a famous name attached to the project is likely lost on most people. I certainly didn’t feel like it was a dramatic improvement or departure from previous games, at least. It’s there, but much like the exposition, it’s light on the sauce.

Forget all that for now, though. Clearly, we should be talking about the nearly infinite ways in which you can dispatch of enemies and be dispatched by enemies. After all, what’s a Souls game without a little questionably consensual fatalistic BDSM? If you’re familiar with Souls combat, then you’re good to go without any further explanation but to perhaps say that they’ve tweaked the ratios of some things like that of armour weight affecting your movement in the direction of being more lenient. If you’re entirely new, then you may need a primer.

Essentially Elden Ring combat, like much of the Souls games, is a challenging combination of rewarding patience and pattern recognition while punishing button mashing and greed. What attack you choose and when you choose to use it matters more here than in many games in the genre you may have played before. What build you choose to go with will, at least during the early game, largely determine the degree of difficulty above baseline, but you’d have to be making some pretty unorthodox choices to truly get yourself stuck for very long just based on build alone. Elden Ring is more even-handed in many regards than its predecessors, and so for that and other reasons it’s also the most accessible game in the franchise yet – serving as the best starting point for anyone uninitiated in the worlds of FromSoftware’s Souls games.

Hitboxes remain pretty tight which means you’re usually able to avoid damage in varying ways beyond just dodge-rolling, enemies are varied and combat situations can change wildly just based on number of enemies and enemy types any group may have. Bosses are also varied both in style and difficulty, though there is some repetition which I’ll get to shortly. Some of the more combat tangential changes include a crafting system for a plethora of items that you may or may not ever use unless you’re particularly curious or feeling adventurous, talismans which provide certain benefits to suit your playstyle, and spirits which are essentially NPC summons that you can choose to bring into battle when permitted to help you turn the tide. Spirits in particular are a potent addition that both makes life easier in nearly all areas you choose to use them in – much like the still present player character summoning options for those in online mode –  but also clearly presented a bit of a balancing problem for FromSoftware.

Video games are really damn hard to make, and when your series is as successful as FromSoft’s Souls games, it can be even harder to keep the train going and in the right direction. These games are known primarily for their difficulty, and so when you’re half a dozen games deep it gets more challenging to keep that expected level of challenge – specifically for players who have played all that came before. For me, Elden Ring is the first of the franchise to start to show the battle scars of this balancing act.

Perhaps the most universally acknowledged design nitpick is that after years of a certain battle cadence, the solution was to alter the cadence of attacks such that it subverted the muscle memory fans had acquired from games previous. What that ends up looking like is a lot of enemy attacks where they animate awkwardly and hold the attack for often silly lengths of time in order to catch the player post-dodge-roll. This is more of a “fix” for returning players, and for new players that haven’t known differently, it isn’t a particularly nagging design choice unless the sometimes goofy animations are off-putting.

What would likely be a more universally experienced design issue is what I’d call FromSoftware’s jumping the difficulty shark. There are numerous moments in which enemy encounters are designed in such a way that, depending on how the AI decides to respond, can lead to essentially no-win situations for the player. It’s absolutely a result of trying to find ways to turn up the difficulty without fundamentally changing the underpinnings of the combat system, and while it’s mostly been unnoticeable until now, I think Elden Ring is a good example showing that they may need to consider altering course a bit to help find less irritating ways to increase the difficulty.

They definitely looked at their options and decided that placing bosses in rooms they were physically too big for was a pretty easy way to add some difficulty given their attacks nearly fill the entire space and the camera doesn’t know what universe it’s in half the time while trying to accommodate the bull in a china shop. They also checked off the box that says if one of an enemy type was a rough go, surely two or three of them in a room would be the answer to their difficulty woes. I’d just love to see them perhaps go in the direction of using their tight hitboxes with less reliance on players having a varying number of invincibility frames to increase difficulty instead of using these tactics which likely comes across as cheesier to the player. I certainly noted more bosses or general encounters than in games previous in which because of the nature of the fight’s difficulty, I didn’t feel particularly proud or accomplished upon achieving victory – a major selling point for this genre. You may find yourself more happy to have a fight behind you than you are that you were successful in the first place and I don’t think that’s necessarily what FromSoft is going for.

Generally speaking, these are arguably nitpicky in nature and newcomers to the franchise likely won’t think twice about much of it because the reality is that combat is varied, engaging, and when it all comes together it’s a rewarding experience that most other games never accomplish. There is an absolute ocean of boss fights to be had in Elden Ring, and while not all of them are noteworthy, there are some real standouts that will have you struggling to focus more on not dying and less on being enamoured with just how absolutely badass the fight is. The sheer volume of possible encounters is something to talk about, however, so let’s do that.

Excuse my French but Elden Ring is @#%^& huge. This is the type of game where just when you thought you were rounding the corner, the track opens up and you discover you’ve barely left the starting block. The scope of this game compared to its predecessors is almost comedic, and while other games in the genre scope up without scaling density with it, Elden Ring doesn’t skimp on the meat. This game is beefy. Perhaps…too beefy for its own good sometimes. While Elden Ring is undoubtedly a staggering accomplishment, it doesn’t completely get away with all this ballooning. You will find yourself fighting bosses or high-level mobs sometimes several times over in different zones. Much use of the “this is a boss now but a regular encounter later” was put to use here. There are even (though loosely covered by lore) major bosses you can end up going toe to toe with more than once. For all the amazing work they did to keep variety high, these instances do take away from some of what made bosses in this franchise special in that typically they were just that – special and more or less one of a kind. Pulling back on the scale of their next title by twenty percent to increase the quality of the other eighty may eliminate the need for such repetitious situations. I want to feel uniquely decimated by these monstrous machinations of Miyazaki, not pestered with repeated kicks to the groin. Make me feel loved, damnit.

At least make me feel as loved as the overworld was clearly loved by the art team because that’s the kind of love only Shakespeare could wax poetic about, or at least make some words up to try and properly describe it to middle schoolers of the future who are forced to recite it in English class. What a world the Lands Between is. What an absolute beauty, really. Sure, Miyazaki found a way to put a stupid poison swamp in there, and a mind-numbingly convoluted sewer segment in there, but ignoring those, Elden Ring is an all-time achievement in environmental design. As incredible as the character, enemy, and weapon designs are – and they are incredible – the environments you’ll traverse and do mortal combat upon are beautiful, sweeping, all-encompassing, and sometimes awe-inspiring. Elden Ring might not be the prettiest game from a technical perspective, but art direction always trumps raw graphical fidelity and art direction is what Elden Ring has in spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds, or other card types you may or may not subscribe to.

You don’t have to do it all on foot, either! You are thankfully entrusted with the one true totally not a horse but also horse named Torrent – or as I liked to call them, Steve. Steve has some overworld-specific interactions to help get around, can obviously traverse some places you couldn’t on foot yourself, and most importantly can inadvertently send you to an early grave over a cliff face at will. Great horse, Steve is. Can’t emphasize just how much of a horse Steve is. Definitely one of the horses of all time. What a pistol. You can also technically do combat whilst riding Steve, though I wouldn’t recommend it the vast majority of the time. Nice that it’s there, and I’m sure there are some of you out there who would find ways to make it work wonders, but generally speaking Steve is better at helping kill you than he is helping kill most enemies, bless their soul.

And what good would all this glorious overworld, underworld, and every death and victory in between be without the sweet sounds of a large axe cleaving into the skull of a demi-human as you climb a flower-laden ridge to look down upon a field of death and dismemberment, or a gritty, sweeping score to be the backtrack to your morning commute through a forest full of Cthulhu-headed monsters? Elden Ring certainly brings the familiar visceral sounds of its predecessors, and while the soundtrack isn’t a complete grand slam it’s awfully close. Sometimes musical scores need to stand out, but other times it’s more important they play a supporting role in a more collaborative effort to make something that much more impactful. Most of the music falls into the latter, but make no mistake there are tracks in here that refuse to take a backseat to the action and are as memorable as the fights or scenes they accompany. If you’ve played FromSoft Souls games in the past, you’ll definitely hear familiar sounds – much like you’ll see some familiar things – but this isn’t an issue and is without question a necessity when trying to produce a game this size in a series this storied.

As mentioned already, Elden Ring really is an accomplishment in every sense of the word. It’s a shocking leap in both scope and density of content compared to the games that FromSoftware has made in the past that it poses the question of where can they go from here. Assuredly it would be difficult to go backward very far in either respect, and that poses its own challenges. New expectations are set, and not everything has been ironed out from the core formula previous to this monster. That’s a thought for another day, however, as the reality is that Elden Ring is one of the greatest achievements in gaming we’ve had in a very long time. It’s the work of a studio who is firing on all cylinders and in their lane – a lane that they largely created for themselves and now others. It’s not perfect, but it’s the level of quality across a game of this magnitude cannot go without appropriate praise. Other developers were already chasing the FromSoftware dragon, and with the release of Elden Ring the dragon waiting to be slain is undeniably bigger than ever. If you’ve been waiting to get into this whole Dark Souls-type experience and have been uncertain where your entry point should be, then good news – Elden Ring is the answer. If you’re a returning fan, you are likely to be elated with the immense amount of content you love on display here. Don’t be maidenless any longer than you have to be – Elden Ring is a generational milestone, not many seasoned gamers will want to miss out on.