Finished it the other day.
Pretty good game overall, very long game too, so long that, especially in later parts, the cracks were starting to show. Which might be an overly negative note to start off on, because really, there is a lot there to like. For a studio that has never made an open world game before, they got a lot right the first time. Whenever you enter a new region, you can head off in practically any direction and you're likely to find something worthwhile. The mainquest serves as a sort of red string to guide the player through the games various major regions, which then offer a plethora of optional content, which, in many cases, might very well turn into larger questlines with their own designated large regions all on their own. It's arguably one of the best structured open world rpg's I've seen in a pretty long while, its world keeps expanding outward, inward and downward near endlessly. You can tell that the people making it actually put a lot of thought in how to build an open world around the base gameplay of the Dark Souls series. It's all pretty sweet, the places you go to are visually varied, reward exploration and convey that hard to define adventurous feel that so many big open world RPGs are chasing and not nearly enough of them actually manage to catch. In my first impressions I wrote that if the game managed to maintain the overall quality of its starting area Limgrave it might be one of the all time greats. It doesn't quite, but it never fell of the way I was afraid it would. There are one or two later zones that feel a bit like an afterthought and notable mini- and medium sized dungeons become rarer and rarer but there's not really a sharp decline or anything. Overall it strikes a remarkably succesful balance between exploration that's feels both vast and open ended and yet very well curated.
I suppose where Elden Ring shows its weaknesses is, oddly enough, in what has been carried over from the Dark Souls series. I'm not sure if this is a controversial thing to say, but I don't think I'd count any of Elden Rings bossfights anywhere near the best among From Soft's titles. They range from perfectly fine, to forgettable, to rather sloppy. This might be a minor spoiler for a lategame boss, but a certain red haired valkyrie who, otherwise, might have been one of the games best bosses, just had to have an attack that's exceedingly likely to kill you in one hit and is borderline impossible to dodge. The whole fight felt like not a single soul ever playtested it. It's probably the most egregious example in the game but not really the only one. There's so many fights that seem like they just have that one cheap move that makes them annoying when they could be fun. I'll be the first to admit that I was never great at Souls combat but bear with me, I never resorted to using summons in any previous From games. And that's not because I've had an easy time with them, mind you, but simply because even fights that took me a long time to beat felt fair enough that I stuck with them. In Elden Ring I just couldn't be arsed to commit to a fair one on one encounter quite frequently. Especially with how many bosses were more or less just some big guy who flails around a lot. In the games actual final bossfight I felt like I was fighting the camera much more than the actual creature.
Now, to be fair, as much as I always liked Souls combat fine, I also always had more fun with Bloodborne and, especially, Sekiro. The latter being the only one of those game where, by the end, I actually felt I had gotten pretty good at. This is purely personal but I really would have enjoyed if there had been more of them in Elden Ring. As it is, it's mainly Dark Souls with a jump button (That's hardly utilized in actual combat, at the very least when it comes to dodging) and a horse. Truth be told, I actually liked the mounted combat pretty well. There is a certain irony to how the game cheapens some of its better boss encounter by reusing them. It didn't exactly bother me, or rather, while it made me roll my eyes I begrudgingly accepted it as a popular trope of JRPG game design, but there were a few that had me like "dude, come on."
Elden Ring's writing and worldbuilding is a strange beast. Where the Dark Souls series, while certainly a lot larger than life in its presentation and storytelling, was very commited to a gritty, deterministic, bleak tone, Elden Ring is high fantasy at it's highest. There's still plenty of disturbing subtext in the specifics of its storytelling, but it's much closer to bombastic, tolkienian, power metal cover looking, sword and sorcery cheese than anything else From has made. The vistas invoke the old masters of pulp fantasy illustrations, the likes of Frank Frazetta, Roger Dean or Alan Lee's Lord of the Rings illustrations, which even Peter Jackson's lavishly produced film adaptations could only approximate. Elden Ring's art design never crosses the line seperating it from kitsch as gleefully as something like Final Fantasy does, but it definitely has one foot over there.
Of course From's long standing mastermind Hidetaka Miyazaki shares his writing credit for Elden Ring with the popular american fantasy novelist George R.R. Martin, which is a curiosity all by itself. You can tell exactly where their personal writing quirks mix, clash and compete. It seems like a constant tug of war between Miyazaki's broadness and Martin's specificity. Elden Ring's greater cosmology is as opaque and as abstract as ever, showing a world governed by nebulous cosmic entities with names like "The Golden Order", "Destined Death" and "The Crucible of Life" while the concrete historical and political landscape of the Lands Between is fleshed out in greater detail than that of any other FromSoft production. Elden Ring provides plenty of warring heirs, major and minor noble houses with their own beautifully designed crests, knightly orders, tangled family relations with occasional incestuous undertones, political marriages, illegitimate children all supporting a story that effectively boils down to a kind of religious war. One supposes Elden Ring's increased scale and sheer vastness of its setting is exactly why From called on Martin as a consultant when it comes to colouring in the specifics. However, the increased presence of these specifics also pushes From's signature vague, exposition averse method of storytelling to its limits.
When your primary interaction with most historically significant personalities you meet is a short monologue and a fight to the death, you feel like you're in a game of DnD where you're railroaded into playing a murder hobo. Mind you, I'm not proposing that a soulslike game should start implementing speech checks but with its characters personalities and relationships being more fleshed out, and more relevant to the story, at least slightly more interaction should be possible.
Overall the game is bound to end up on plenty of "Best of all time" lists, and who am I to argue with that. It has an overall unusually good quality to quantity ratio. It's also a game that has some definite shortcomings that I can't look past for long enough to join in on all the rave reviews. It's not that I don't see where they're coming from, it's one of the best open world games of recent memory which is all the mory impressive considering it's the studios first one. But when its issues come to the foreground, they are hard to ignore. While the presentation of its climactic fights is as good as its ever been, the actual fights simply don't measure up to the likes of Artorias, Gherman or Genichiro and in a game where combat is your primary interaction with the world, I'm not really ready to give it a pass for them, no matter how much I actually love the exploration. Elden Ring certainly creates a very compelling world, one that I'd actually like to see more of. I'd totally read a book or watch an animated series set there. The collaboration between Martin and Miyazaki managed to create something pretty odd, but compelling. Elden Ring is good. Quite good, even. But there's room for improvement in plenty of places.
