A Brutally Honest Elden Ring Critique

that which commanded the Stars giving life its fullest Brilliance the Elden ring [Music] Alden ring is one of the biggest and most influential game releases in recent memory and possibly the most anticipated game of all time while it's not the highest selling game by a long shot as I was around during the launch of GTA 5 the sheer amount of online presence this game has still astonishes me even a while after release there's constant discourse around it online it's received unparalleled praise from reviewers and it has one of the top concurrent player counts in Steam history as well as selling more copies in a month than Dark Souls 3 did in four years it's a game that everyone is talking about no matter where you look online you'll find something related to Eldon ring and I have to admit that I've been part of this game's hype train since its first trailer I am a massive from software fan I've played through all of their games multiple times I've watched every vati video video on why the Crow from Dark Souls 1 has a more depressing backstory than Ellie in the last of us too I even named my YouTube channel after a boss from these games because I love them so much uh not this one of course I have a let's play Channel called ceaseless discharge gaming so when Eldon ring came out I dived head first into it on day one I've played this game for a while now and I have thoroughly enjoyed it but there are some things that I think are worth talking about and I think they're all the more interesting to talk about because of just how universally praised this game still is so while I do want to praise the game for what it does right I also want to genuinely critique it I want to accurately summarize my thoughts on the game and try to explain why I think some things work and others don't I want to take a brutally honest look at Eldon ring and see how it holds up but before I dive in I just want to mention a couple of things first of all I'll be splitting this review up into chapters in case it's a bit long and each chapter will have its own spoiler warning in case you haven't played the game yourself so feel free to skip around using the time codes in the description the second thing is that normally I use footage of whatever I'm talking about to use for my video but I don't actually have footage of my personal playthrough of Elden ring I have been the game so far and done quite a bit of content here are some screenshots of my statistics to prove that but I didn't record my playthrough because the game wasn't running very smoothly on my computer and I didn't want to slow it down even more by having OBS open also I just didn't think to record when I started playing sue me so all of the footage I'll be using is from other YouTube videos I'll link in the description and with that out of the way let's get into it [Music] so the way I want to break up this review is by breaking down Elden ring as a game and as a game Alden ring has two parts the parts that are dark souls and the parts that aren't because spoiler alert Elden ring is just Dark Souls again from software for as much as I love them seems to only be interested in making the same game over and over again and don't get me wrong Dark Souls demon souls bloodborne and Elden ring are all amazing games but they are all the same game with a different skin on them the core gameplay mechanics and design of Elden ring is the same thing that fromsoft has been doing since Demon Souls so much so that if you change the language and gave this game to me before Elden ring was announced I would 100 believe that this game was just Dark Souls 4. I mean open world and the added mechanics or The Logical conclusion for the Dark Souls series The look and feel of the game is identical to Dark Souls I might wonder why the bonfires look weird but that's about it even playing through the game normally I kept thinking that at some point I was going to walk through a door and get jumped by Ornstein or something and don't get me wrong this isn't a negative I love the Dark Souls formula it can be very Hit or Miss for people but when it hits it hits so hard that it becomes your favorite game of all time if you haven't ever played a fromsoft game before watching this video the best way I can describe the addiction that these games can become is simply by the idea that they take traditional action RPG mechanics strip them down rethink them and bake them into the difficulty that the games are known for to even deal damage to an enemy you have to actually swing your sword at them and hit them and to avoid damage you have to physically block or avoid the attack there's no menu or automation you want to level up kill enough enemies grab their experience and use it if you die it's all gone the game is stripped of everything that RPGs normally have that separate you from the game and because of that it makes everything you do rewarding based on the fact that you actually did it you killed that boss you didn't just navigate a menu and let your character do something it was all you and of course Alden ring Taps into this formula perfectly again it's just a Souls game but if you enjoy Souls games that's all you need it to be going forward with this review I just want you to keep in mind that I do love this game I think it's great in almost every single way I don't have too much more to say about how good it is though without just explaining why games are fun to me I will be focusing a lot on negatives or things I think could be improved but that's just because that's what's actually interesting for me to talk about the core of this game is solid so just keep that in mind that all being said I think I do have to mention that anyone who hates Souls games or really hasn't played them before is probably going to have a tough time with eldenrick because it expects that you've played a fromsoft game before just like all their games do that's part of the game it's part of the formula the game just expects you to grasp mechanics and learn what it wants you to and if you don't then it offers nothing to help you these games are purposefully obtuse they treat even the most basic mechanics is puzzles for the player to figure out it's very much treated as you versus the game which is what makes it so good when you're winning but also what can make it impossible to get into if learning to beat it just isn't fun for you I think my best personal example of this is sakuro I had an extremely difficult time playing the game because for whatever reason I didn't grasp how vital the pairing mechanic was for the first few hours and I struggled against basic bosses for hours until it clicked with me and then once I learned the mechanic and how it was used the rest of the game felt almost easy for the most part and it's not the game's responsibility to hand hold me into learning that mechanic but it's also not my fault if I didn't learn it it's just the conversation between the game and the player almost similar to many books or movies that are made purposefully hard to grasp if you don't like Brave New World because Aldous Huxley writes like a human thesaurus that's not his fault or yours it just didn't click this isn't a fault or advantage of these games that they treat the player this way though some some will say it is Elden ring is just a fromsoft game through and through it has all the benefits of being one of those games and it has all the drawbacks of them as well [Music] so moving on to the things that are different from Dark Souls I'll be going from the smallest to biggest changes just to ease Us in and cover everything this game adds because it's a lot what Eldon ring doesn't add to the Dark Souls formula however is a different story or more specifically a different storytelling method I suppose mild spoilers for the game but the plot progression is almost identical to Dark Souls demon souls and bloodborne some NPC tells you to go kill some Gods so you can become God and you do there's a bunch of NPCs to talk to or rather be monologued at and a bunch of intricate bosses and levels that you won't really understand unless you go looking for answers and things like item descriptions it all follows very closely to the Dark Souls formula which was something that ultimately left me wanting more because fromsoft have always focused more on lore than they do on story this idea that the plot progression of the game isn't really the focus but the characters in the world have lots of interesting details and stories that you can find and learn on your own and in the souls games this was always fine to me because the lore you'd find was so unique but after five games of this I think Elden ring is just starting to lose the Magic For the First Time besides Dark Souls 2 of course I couldn't give less of a [ __ ] about the story of that game I think with sakuro having been made I just wanted more because Sakura has a very nice although Simple Story with a voice protagonist and interesting characters and actual plot progression and seeing the trailer for Elden ring plus the big in collaboration with George R Martin plastered on the front really gave me a feeling that it would have more actual plot or any amount of character progression for any character in the game but no it's just Dark Souls again the NPCs in this game do actually talk to you much more than they did in previous games but I think with Souls like NPCs I always get this strong feeling that they're just puppets that spout Exposition until you progress their quest line to the next stage and get more rinse and repeat until they usually die off screen or try to kill you because because Dark Souls logic and the NPC quest lines in this game feel very minimal for the great expansion this game has in terms of levels and gameplay mechanics the quest lines still feel just as linear as they did in all of the souls games meet this character here and give them this item then meet them here and kill this boss several NPC quest lines are tied into the ending of the game but even watching all of the ending cutscenes I'm gonna spoil you and say they're not all that different by Soul standards this game has more quests and in-depth side quests than some of the previous games but I think I've started wanting to break away from that Soul's formula here questing and story is the only core feature the game hasn't expanded on which makes it feel like a setback something more than fetch quests or just talking to people at different stages of your adventure would be a fantastic addition to the game having characters you can actually invest in and story moments that progress the plot in any way more than just killing a boss or finding an item I think a more in-depth narrative structure and more actual plot progression being added to Alden ring with the Obscure and deep lore would have been something amazing if it was done well especially with George RR Martin involved I still go through withdrawals from Game of Thrones and how amazing all six seasons of that show were especially in terms of character development in Eldon ring I have legitimately no idea what George added to this game I think he wrote the names and backstories to some characters and that's it because most of the lore feels eerily similar to Dark Souls even including specifics of like where dragons came from or why the world is the way that it is the only obvious Mark I've seen from George RR Martin are names like Godwin the golden and the shattering because let's face it he's got the best names in the game and this is probably the critique I have that's the most Up For Debate since I'm asking for something that these games have never really been known for if this style of story and questline are just ingrained in Souls like games then maybe that's something I'll just have to accept but clearly they're able to enter innovate in a lot of other ways so it would be a shame of this minimalist story and questing is something that fromsoft is going to stick to it feels almost dated to have finished the game and have the same depth of story I got in Demon Souls but moving on from story which is honestly probably one of the smallest reasons that people even play these games we finally get to gameplay Editions [Music] starting off with the small we have lots of tweaks and improvements to the game and there are a surprising amount of these this game really feels like a culmination of all of the souls games put together sort of taking the best from each one you've got weapon Arts from Dark Souls 3 but now you can mix and match with every weapon and even change their scaling you have power stancing from Dark Souls 2 plus all of the new editions you can change your character's appearance at any point in the game instead of rings you have talismans and you can get items that increase the amount of them you can equip there's an item pouch you can hot key items to item durability is gone there's lots of good stuff here all of these small tweaks and additions really feel like fromsoft was listening to people and adding in quality of life improvements from previous games plus a bunch of other stuff that's not really interesting to talk about but does add quite a bit to the game the two big additions to the core gameplay Loop though are jumping and stealth going first from soft seems to have finally learned after five games the that people like to jump in video games I mean technically they learned that when they made sakuro and technically you could jump in all of the games you just had to do this stupid running jump thing using the same Button as the Dodge roll but it has its own button now you can jump from a standstill and you can jump over certain attacks as well as use your own jumping attacks for the most part this is entirely positive jumping in the soul series before was pretty much always just used to do the worst [ __ ] platforming sections you've ever seen in your life but now it's only sometimes used for that sometimes it's also used for ok platforming and sometimes it's used in combat when I started the game I was actually using a heavy Greatsword and the jumping heavy is just the most powerful attack that you have period and against faster enemies and bosses it can be the only attack that's guaranteed to hit dominant strategy is to only ever use that attack until you can get a stun lock on an enemy what is the unfortunately bigger downside of jumping though is flying enemies because it seems like while we all hated dogs and the other Souls games from soft was just holding back this entire time because Miyazaki Unleashed Birds on the world and Jesus Christ some of the basic flying enemies in this game were harder to deal with than the nameless King also fall damage felt entirely arbitrary like the game itself was judging every jump and going yeah that one will kill you oh one centimeter less though zero damage but that's all I have to say about jumping let's move on to stealth [Music] oh boy does stealth feel weird in this game the added ability to crouch and sneak around enemies is a welcome addition to any game for me I love stealth games and any additional gameplay style is fine for me especially when every Souls game has had a thief type class that you can choose even though you could never actually sneak but just to run around smacking enemies like every other class in the game essentially all stealth does is decrease the distance that enemies notice you and make your footsteps silent as well as making it so that if you crouch in certain Tall Grass enemies just won't ever see you and all of this is nice because Souls games have always had lots of enemies available to backstab if you could sneak up behind them now there's just an actual mechanic in game two sneak up on them my biggest problem with this is just that it sells itself as stealth being its own mechanic and gameplay style but the actual use of stealth in this game feels way too limited and specific I mean with the open world there's lots of ability to sneak up to camps of enemies and there are some open areas to levels but a lot of the time I had this feeling that the game had stealth sections rather than just an additional stealth mechanic it was as if the game was telling me hey you can sneak through here if you want because they put some big boss type enemy just staring at a wall or out into space and then you'd have other areas where it's tight hallways with enemies looking right at you or a large group of them or the worst yet plenty of enemies who turn around when you get close like they're having a That's So Raven moment to invalidate your sneaking and this isn't too much of an issue since the stealth is entirely optional but it does feel limited and the lack of any stealth mechanics Beyond a Crouch certainly don't help this there's no way to tell detection not even an actual stealth kill you just do the normal backstab which usually alerts enemies nearby based on just how [ __ ] loud that thing is foreign ly again goes back to sakuro since that game's stealth wasn't the best but it had fleshed out mechanics and felt satisfying Elden Ring's stealth always seems like a substitute for running through the level or just to get a backstab on a tough enemy in the open world I never touched it once once I got a mount and the stealth and Elden ring doesn't have to be like sakuro I'm not expecting to be able to stealth kill bosses or have detection arrows on screen but then again Elden ring didn't need to have Stealth at all so if they're going to add the mechanic they should definitely add more features to flesh it out this might just come from my love of stealth games but I do wish that for Elden Ring 2 we got some actual Stealth gameplay since I think it could be amazing as it is the stealth is just kind of there it's off to the side and you can use it if you want but only when the game really wants you to and it doesn't really change much [Music] moving on to the next chunk of gameplay changes we now get into the open world which should obviously be the biggest innovation in terms of what Eldon ring brings to the soul series there is a lot that is added to this game just by making it truly open world and there's a lot that I could say about the open world design and how it suits the soul series because it is a match made in heaven it's genius to design a Souls game this way but I think that the best way to describe it is in terms of a story told by gameplay a story told by gameplay is something that the soul series have always thrived on these stories you can tell to your friends about how you beat this boss after trying for so long or got through an area a certain way even something as small as accidentally smacking a hidden wall it's the unique little stories we make while playing the game and this is why these games don't tell you anything when you encounter the graveyard skeletons in Dark Souls 1 the game could flash up a tutorial saying skeletons will keep Reviving unless you kill their Necromancer or you use holy damage but no they don't tell you [ __ ] so a lot of people playing Dark Souls 1 will have a story of going to the graveyard too early getting [ __ ] Dunked On by those skeletons and then permanently have that story burned into their brains and that story is what makes these games so memorable and so making the game open world is just genius because it allows for those stories infinitely more than a linear game ever could finding dungeons or secret bosses or enemy encounters is just expanding on the way that you could find secrets in the souls games and now instead of doing levels out of order you can do most of the game out of order and the map of Elden ring is extraordinarily big and full of things to find it's actually incredible how thoroughly you can search an area without finding everything and this only makes the online experience that much greater seeing Cliffs with blood stains on them or a random turtle with 15 messages around it all saying dog is just that well-built community that these games have created all being used perfectly I think that the Dark Souls games have all been different degrees of open world with their interconnected levels but I think that true open world like this is what these games were made for so much so that when bloodborne 2 comes out if it's not open world it might feel like a step back at that point however I have quite a few things I want to mention that I believe are detriments to this game because of the open world [Music] the first thing that I want to talk about is torrent because with the sudden massive increase in world comes with a new way to Traverse it in the form of a spirit goat thing that you can ride on that I'm sure has more lore than my entire family lineage overall I love torrent adding a mountain to the open world is a no-brainer and I think that not only is it good because it's necessary but from soft went above and beyond and thought ahead to make torrent pretty much perfect for this game not only do you get mounted combat with a variety of options but you get much faster movement and a double jump that really lets you platform around the open world well also torrent has their own health that can get you knocked off of them but can be revived and healed with your own flasks which is genius and my favorite thing by far is that torrent is completely immune to any form of poison which makes the vast amount of swamps that Miyazaki couldn't help but cram into the game almost completely bearable almost my biggest problem with torrent I think is just that the mounted combat feels like it wasn't fully integrated with the game because it can either turn a fight into a joke or make it a hundred times harder against regular mobs of enemies and many bosses the hit and run tactic is just overpowered and devoid of downsides you can just run circles around enemies and keep smacking them without really much of a response which feels weird because certainly this is the way that mounted combat was designed to be used and yet nothing shows off how little this game reacts to it in these several times that you'll fight an incredibly hard boss on foot and fight the same boss on torrent and seemingly now the boss can't even hit you but then when bosses do have moves that can hit torrent they seem to be really hard to avoid things like tracking ranged attacks or 360 spins with very small Telegraph Windows lunging attacks where the entire enemy turns into a hit box lots of moves that seem to require iframe Dodges that torrent doesn't have even when the boss seems clearly meant to be fought on Horseback and looking online I saw lots of suggestions for these bosses and enemies to Dismount and mount during the fight to roll these attacks and attack them more and then jump back onto torrent to close distance but I can't think that that's the intended battle strategy to get on and off over and over again in one fight it just feels really awkward to do but they do give you iframes for doing this so clearly it's intended for you to use them even though there's iframes for dismounting at a standstill but none for getting off while moving which means you have to do this weird stop get off get back on move again dance if you want to iframe and keep running so just the same with stealth I really hope that fromsoft can somehow improve this and add some mechanics to give the mounted fights depth or more challenge either having it so bosses can change to an entirely Mount oriented move set or giving tauren some less awkward options of dealing with the really hard moves and then also generally just doing something to make the mounted combat somewhat challenging the rest of the time because a lot of the times I was fighting larger enemies it was this weird dance of running up on torrent hopping off to fight then hopping on Torin to avoid some attack or catch up because the enemy ran away and this might be the worst of it and definitely the most nitpicky but some bosses can kill torrent and knock you off in one hit which is frustrating because there's no way to upgrade Torrance Health but then also there's a menu prompt that opens when you want to resurrect torrent and the default selection is no for some reason meaning that in the middle of the fight I have to do some quick menuing like I'm a [ __ ] Final Fantasy speedrunner just to get back on my horse I mean the least they could do is make the default yes so I can Mash through it quicker but anyway moving on [Music] there are just way too many sites of Grace in this game this has started to become a thing for a bit now and from soft games I think it was previously most obvious in Dark Souls 3 where several times you would get a bonfire walk down a hallway and then immediately get another one in Eldon ring though the amount of sights of Grace is absurd it is ridiculous how many this game gives you in just about every area of the game in the open world I found myself getting a sight riding across an open field with no enemies in it and then getting another one and I could maybe understand the problem in the open world since its additional fast travel points which are helpful but the problem persists in the more linear levels because I always thought Dark Souls was fantastic when it gave you too few bonfires and the clever part of the level design was unlocking shortcuts and New Paths there were so many clever uses of ladders and elevators and doors to wrap things back around round on each other and you felt both rewarded for discovering them and like you had carved your way through the game's enemies to progress but in Alden ring there is a clear design choice to remove backtracking while there was debate between all the souls games as to how much there should be it's very clear from frumpsoft that their stance is on little backtracking and lots of checkpoints I know it was a divisive issue and not everyone liked the design Choice like I did I also think it's very smart for a game as large as Eldon ring since the backtrack could be much larger and much more punishing and I think for this reason that the stakes of Maraca across the open world are very smart and I do enjoy their inclusion in the game it feels very natural you died without a sight of Grace here's an automatic checkpoint nearby that you can respond at instead but in the Legacy Dungeons and more linear levels I do think that it is still too much sometimes you'd clear less than half a dozen enemies before getting another checkpoint and the strangest of all was that sometimes I would get a checkpoint why walk down a hallway and get another no enemies in between no boss room just two checkpoints on opposite ends of a hallway there is an area in the open world where there are two sites on opposite ends of a curved waterfall that you can just run across with nothing in between and you can see one of the sights from the other one it's just kind of baffling to me I think there is a way to add more checkpoints to reduce backtracking without these weirdly overlapping sites all over the place because some of them do feel truly useless even if you 100 agree with the design philosophy that fromsoft had there's so many that I can't think that most players will use any of the Redundant ones and a ton of sights could just be replaced with Stakes of Maraca if the purpose was just respawn points but moving on from the more minor changes and minor issues that I have we finally get to my main complaint my biggest issue with Elden ring and the big reason I don't think it's perfect you cannot in any way pet the turtles [Music] well while this is an issue and I suggest a mass boycott from from soft games until it's fixed it's not actually my issue my issue is a little more serious than that [Music] so Elden ring is Big the map is incredibly large and filled with content I haven't measured but I'm sure the game is bigger than the entire Dark Souls Trilogy combined and has more bosses than every game from software has ever made put together but that's also the problem because this game has an incredible amount of things in it and not all of them are unique bosses Dungeons and assets are reused all over the place which is a problem that I think needs to be addressed now I don't know if there's a complete set of confirmed numbers out there so I'll just be using what I found so far but from just the Wiki page and information we've gotten from data miners there are over 150 bosses in this game 150 plus enemies with health bars at the bottom of the screen that is ridiculous an actual absurd number to put that into perspective Dark Souls 3 has 19 bosses according to its Wiki page 19 that is one tenth the size of this game and now if all of these bosses were unique this would be a shining achievement I would have nothing but praise for the amount of work that it must have taken to put those many bosses in this game but sadly that isn't the case because of these 150 bosses you can beat the game in less than 12 which is smaller than the 13 mandatory bosses in Dark Souls 3. the amount of actually unique bosses in this game seems to be around 70 at least going by unique names less than half of the bosses in this game are unique and mind you that is a generous number as it includes different Dragons and Knights that all share similar or the same move sets I'd suspect the number of truly unique and different fights in this game could be around 50 but that's just an estimate but what this does mean is that every boss in this game aside from some main story bosses are reused at least once and I won't spoil anything but a good amount of the main story bosses are also reused in this massive game with Dungeons and caves and levels everywhere over half to two-thirds of the bosses that you will be fighting will be bosses you've already seen before as just a personal example of this there's an early game boss called the knights Cavalry it's a boss in the open world that only spawns at night in the starting area of the game it's a fun fight a mounted cavalrymen that looks like if the tree Sentinel boss started listening to My Chemical Romance I overall had a really good time with it when I was first playing this game I have fought the knights Cavalry four times so far in one playthrough four times and there are at least five more in this game which means you can fight the knights Cavalry nine times if you want to why what is the reason to have the same boss so many times because in each of the four fights against him he had this same move set very little changed besides giving him more health and more damage so I'm not learning anything or getting a new experience each time and he's just a Wandering boss in the open world that only spawns at night so he's not exactly important to anything but you can fight the knights Cavalry more times than the pursuer from Dark Souls 2. you know the boss designed around fighting you multiple times and this is the treatment that many of the bosses get in this game you will find a unique boss out in the open world or at the end of a dungeon sometimes a very important looking and intricate one and have a good fight against them sometimes these bosses will have deep lore explaining the importance of why they're in that spot and how they got there and then you'll find them in another cave halfway across the map it makes no sense sometimes and don't get me wrong the bosses in this game can be great but very few of them have interesting enough fights to Warrant a rematch in the same playthrough even the main StoryBots losses don't really have enough moves or mechanics to make a second fight against them interesting without adding something else let alone the smaller bosses like Knight's Cavalry Souls games thrive on fun boss fights and fighting the same boss again rarely if ever feels all that satisfied [Music] and not only are bosses reused in this game but levels and dungeons are all reused as well because this game has about six Legacy dungeons being the main levels of the game it also has about 10 or so additional Legacy dungeon type areas with planned Pathways and a boss at the end but like the main bosses this is only a small portion of the game the main bulk of Elden rink's content is in its smaller Dungeons and open World areas there are over 30 ruins 20 catacombs 20 caves 10 tunnels and over 30 additional various smaller levels in the game for a total of well over 100 areas to find many of these are reused just as an example with the 30 ruins in the game every single one of them is a very similar looking ruin model somewhere out in the open world with a couple enemies guarding a staircase to an item or boss room you can clear one of these out in less than three minutes 30 different areas to find can be boiled down to a single staircase and and a chest at the end most of the Catacombs are two or three hallway dungeons with the same imp enemy types in them just like most caves are of a similar layout with miners inside all leading to a boss and since many of the bosses at the end of these aren't unique it makes a lot of these areas feel like they were copy and pasted the catacombs specifically actually felt eerily similar to The Chalice dungeons in bloodborne to me and being reminded of randomly generated filler content is not a good thing again small dungeons are typical of an open world game but when you know that every catacomb you're finding is the same level again it can get pretty tedious and there are some of these smaller dungeons that are surprisingly good there are good level designs and bosses in some of them some of these levels even actually surprised me at how big they are for being given the catacombs or cave name like the other dungeons in the open world but with how many total dungeons there are in the game the unique ones were definitely in the minority as well the open world has a lot of similar areas in it lots of churches and buildings and area bosses that are the same thing just in a different area as just a funny example it's hilarious to me that there are about 20 different areas in this game with the name Shaq like 20 different sites of Grace and it's just a shack usually the same Shack model too my favorite of these being the Revenger Shack because it reminded me of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance [Music] you're trying to [Music] and I think that the sad answer to why these bosses dungeons areas and enemies are reused so much is just that the game needed filler for its massive open world because while even 50 unique boss fights is still incredible and much more than any previous game those previous games have all been linear so bosses were at the end of levels and spaced out enough that the game felt full in an open world game like Elden ring you can't just have levels in open space in between so fromsoft filled the world with Dungeons and smaller levels and area bosses to give it that same sense of fullness and while this is a good idea in practice it's also incredibly costly from software is actually a surprisingly small company for just how big their games are and they're actually pretty notorious for reusing assets but lots of these reuses have been smart cost saving measures I think the most obvious example of this are the reused weapon attack animations in all of their games in some games this might be a detriment that the sword swinging animation is the same but from soft has always used this to their advantage it's not a reused asset it's your trusty straight sword you know if you find a claymore an Elden ring that it's going to have the same attack pattern as the one in all of the Dark Souls games and that's both reliable to the player and saves cost for the dev but I think that Elden Ring's massive increase in size was biting off way more than they could chew I think that the general map and the size of the game was probably decided on without certainty as to how they would fill it and I do still applaud fromsoft for being smart in how they filled in and fleshed out the key bosses and areas before filling in the Lesser content but it is ultimately still filled in with reused assets it's not as bad as Dark Souls 1 where they obviously ran out of time at the end of development and copy pasted 150 000 demons everywhere but it's still not good here and mind you I don't expect that every boss in the game in every area be entirely unique and elaborate 150 unique bosses and 100 plus fulfilling dungeons would be a ridiculous ask of a game and as it stands the amount of unique bosses in areas is still something that I commend but the ReUse is apparent and started to actively hinder some of my enjoyment of the game about halfway through my first playthrough this feeling of monotony set in that usually doesn't happen when I play Souls games and so I think the natural defense this game has and one I've seen used by multiple people quite a lot is that all of this is optional content that there is only the 12 or so main bosses and areas in the game to complete and all the rest is extra with the design of the game it doesn't even seem like fromsoft expects you to find and clear out every dungeon and area so it can make more sense to reuse areas and bosses when most players won't be doing every single one some people might not even see nice Cavalry let alone fight all nine versions of him in fact here is miyazaki's own words on the matter to confirm this the full game is more than around 10 times the size of the network test but this doesn't mean that you'll need to explore every single corner of the map the vast size of the game serves to make the player feel like they are on an adventure aspects of exploration and Discovery are designed more Loosely and this is because we don't want players to feel pressured by the vast world and I do agree with this to an extent designing the game around exploring on your own and not having to do all of the side content in between main levels does alleviate the problem a bit if a side dungeon or boss doesn't interest you you can just move on and ignore it but Souls games and especially Elden ring have all shared a design philosophy that rewards player exploration this idea that a player with a Keen Eye will succeed more is something pushed by this game and all of their games since Demon Souls it's why illusory walls exist to reward careful exploration or why mimics exist to punish you for not checking chest thoroughly enough some of the best levels and bosses in the soul series were locked behind obtuse barriers like performing an emote in the right spot because part of the reward of the game is figuring these things out and that philosophy fee is not only apparent in Elden ring but has now become a main selling point of the game that you should explore the open world and find hidden caves and ruins and bosses this is a part of the main gameplay Loop now and part of the reward of playing the game the soul series up to this point and now including Eldon ring have been training the player to explore and investigate as much as they can and yet the philosophy that Miyazaki shares seems to indicate the opposite that the player shouldn't explore everything this conflict creates an almost active punishment for exploration because the game will push the player to explore a new dungeon or cave that they just found due to his Core Design but then have them fight the same boss or clear a very familiar dungeon it's now as if the more astute you are and the more Dungeons and bosses you discover the more you redo the same content your reward for being a more observant player is to do the same thing over again the souls games have also always put the priority on the bosses and enemies in levels that's why you play the game that's why even with exploration it's all to prepare you for these bosses and levels and the reward for exploration usually is a boss or level if not an item to help you face one there aren't other gameplay mechanics or a story to keep you going if the bosses and dungeons aren't fun so when the priority is all on them they should not be reused nearly as much as they are and all of this then just begs the question why is this game so big the game is clearly not meant to be 100 completed Miyazaki says so directly so why did they make the game bigger than the player is meant to explore causing them to have to reuse so much even using just the 100 original bosses and dungeons this game is four times bigger than Dark Souls 3. was that not enough did they have some quota they needed to fill Miyazaki says the vast size of the game serves to make the player feel like they're on an adventure but surely the player would have that feeling at even half the game size as it was I had only discovered like two areas when I thought that that was the entire map of the game and the game still felt huge to me so adding in all of this extra stuff just feels unnecessary it honestly just feels like they set in stone how big the game was going to be before spending the time to fill it I think that if they cut down the size of the game to at most 70 percent of the original size and axed all of the most egregious copy pastes it would have honestly improved a lot Not only would it improve the overall quality of the bosses and dungeons of the game by not having them be dragged down so much but it would remove the feeling of monotony I had and have the player feel much more fulfilled by searching for and exploring all the game has to offer so that's problem number one with the game's transition to open world yes I have another one and yes it's also just as complicated so let's talk about balance [Music] the balance and difficulty in Eldon ring can feel all over the place sometimes and there are aspects of this game that makes a fair bit of the gameplay either trivial and uninteresting or needlessly frustrating in a way that the soul series typically avoids now there are obvious cases in pretty much every fromsoft game where the game does something people would consider unfair or using more clinical terminology utter [ __ ] [ __ ] dude how did that move [ __ ] hit me he spun around like 50 000 goddamn times it hit me from four miles away [ __ ] this shitty ass boss dude but in most cases I think from soft games are fairly balanced bosses and levels get harder as you play but you also increase in skill and get new tools to deal with them overall I'm a fan of the difficulty in these games and how it's handled what I think Elden ring suffers from the most again comes from its open world and less linear structure in that a lot of the encounters have a very specific balancing around where they think the player will be at in terms of level and skill when they face the boss and because the player can do most bosses and Encounters in different orders it very rarely lines up with the game's expectation and leads to this roller coaster of difficulty that can negatively affect your experience with the game as an example let's look at markets the first real main story boss is at the end of the pretty linear path that the game has been going down since the tutorial and blocks the way forward to the rest of the game or at least most players will think he does he's a difficult boss with a wide array of moves lots of health and lots of damage when I first encountered him I had done the tutorial the open World areas leading up to him and maybe one dungeon and the fight against him was brutal it would kill me in two hits while my attacks did nothing to him he absolutely dunked on me for a day straight until I eventually learned his whole attack pattern and took him down however I could have leveled up I could have gotten better gear I could have found the item in the open world that specifically binds him in his first phase and makes the fight much easier there are many things I could have done but didn't and I made the fight harder for myself because of it however on the way to the market boss fight is a tree Sentinel boss in the open world he's even closer to the tutorial area so you're certain to encounter him first I however snuck past him and pretty much ignored him my first playthrough because he looked too difficult and as a lot of people who fought him when they first encountered him will point out he is so I beat marget beat several other bosses explored much more of lim grave and then came back to him and I killed the tree Sentinel so fast he didn't even have time to respond he hit me once for barely 10 of my health and the fight was pretty much a joke it was over before it began this was the same for The Crucible night fight in Lim grave close to the same area I decimated him and Margaret was certainly my fault for making the fight difficult you could even say that tree Sentinel and Crucible night were my fault since I over leveled for them when they were pretty clearly marked as bosses to fight early on but I ain't counter this leveling issue for far too many bosses and areas in the game for it to be a player issue for all of them the ability to over level and make a fight easy or to do a fight early and make it more difficult has been in every Soul's game it has been a clear design Choice since Demon Souls had level select options but Elden ring was one of the first games that I felt this was an unavoidable consequence of playing the game it becomes difficult to play through parts of the game without being the wrong level looking at dark souls and the other from soft games for examples of this you can see the clear difference those games were almost entirely linear so the player had a pretty obvious Pathway to follow the skeletons in the graveyard in Dark Souls 1 fortnite dance on your corpse to say Hey you shouldn't be here yet so you go down the main pathway that's balanced accordingly and to over level yourself was pretty hard to do since it almost always required farming out one area over and over again the game would always guide the player down the right path and the player would have to specifically try to go against this to throw the balance off in Eldon ring not only is the game much too open to expect the player to follow one pathway the entire time but even with markers and arrows guiding you from Main level to main level the game rewards Discovery far more than previous games to find a new area or dungeon or Boss off the beaten path and Conquer it but by following this gameplay Loop to its natural conclusion that being to complete side content in areas as much as possible before moving forward with the main quest or to even do areas out of order because they're accessible the game doesn't then handle how powerful you can become follow the main path as directly as possible and the game certainly doesn't accommodate how weak you can be either and because of this the difficulty will be wildly different to the developers intentions some bosses that are meant to be fair fights will be nion impossible and some that are meant to be hard will be a joke and bosses being too difficult is easier to defend especially with a lot of the communities get good response to difficulty in these games but certainly stomping a boss because you had no idea they were meant to be done at an earlier level is a problem especially when it could be a main story boss with lots of effort and planning on the developer's part and even more so because there's very few options to make the fight harder you can equip a worse weapon or take off your armor but you can't undo a level the player being given the responsibility to either know the correct order of bosses and levels or purposefully neuter themselves if they want to have a well-balanced experience is not something that should be part of a game like this if they're given the ability and incentive to explore they should be able to without fear of accidentally ruining some content just look at breath of the wild you fight enemies until they become easy then the game upgrades all of them so they can keep up with the player again and more traditional RPGs like The Witcher 3 put a numbered level on enemies and areas so the player knows what order they're intended to be done in and can scale up the lower level enemies to the player so they're all always at least somewhat challenging this issue of balance is a core problem introduced by making a game open world every open world game has this issue and most introduce Solutions like scaling enemies to solve it eldenring doesn't even attempt to address the issue and I don't expect it to use the solutions that those games did because those ideas are for their respective type of game and the Soul Series has famously not done traditional RPG tropes like this there's no explicit enemy levels for the same reason there's no mini-map but there are enemy levels they do increase in difficulty depending on the area this information just isn't explicitly shared with the player as a design Choice which in part amplifies this problem Elden ring has already taken a dramatic turn closer to a traditional open world RPG and I think it needs to accept that it will have problems that those games have and that means taking measures to prevent it as well if they don't want to add levels or scaling or traditional RPG mechanics as a design choice they still need to come up with something which I think is entirely and easily within their wheelhouse to do they reinvent RPG mechanics left and right checkpoints are built into the lore of the World experience is reinvented as souls and now runes they have the ability to introduce introduce something that could fix this issue if they wanted to and I do think they should want to [Music] and this problem of balance does eventually at some point alleviate itself that point of the game being the last third or so because while everything up until the last few levels of the game is much more open all of the levels past Landell have a lot less side content to do and become a lot more linear in their progression and along with becoming more linear something the game does to correct the player's mismatched levels near the end is just make everything ramp up exponentially in difficulty so unless you're farming millions of runes with one of the many YouTube guides you're probably going to be quickly surpassed and level the further you get ironically making the solution to this issue of balancing to just make the last few levels nearly impossible to out level now the game having incredible difficulty especially at the end is typical of the souls archetype so it's harder to comment on balance here since you can't really separate the difficulty from a Souls game the final few bosses and areas are frustratingly hard for most players but this seems to be more intentionally balanced around just be being difficult unlike the huge unintended variants in the game up to this point that being said the damage in health Buffs to enemies past Lane Dell seems insane to me at less than 40 Vigor you can die in one hit to a surprising amount of enemies and bosses which makes you feel the weakest you've been in the entire game and I know that the health stat being the most important has been a feature of every fromsoft game that being since people poised through the Four Kings in Dark Souls 1 and Miyazaki made it his personal mission to make armor less and less useful in every game which starts to feel the most apparent here in that there feels like a Vigor requirement that even when met at the soft cap of 60 will still leave you feeling like you don't have enough health I generally dislike requiring a certain play style or investment from the character in order to enjoy the game and I think Eldon ring has this nasty habit of making the player level Vigor or become a God who never gets hit the only alternative being dying to every normal enemy in the end game and this damage inflation in the end game started to give me some thoughts on the game's damage negation as a whole because while there are vastly different play Styles around weapons and how the player deals damage the way the player reacts to potential damage has always been severely limited the Dodge roll is pretty much the only reliable way to not die and as I mentioned this has been the case for a while but I do wish that heavy armor could retain some relevance from Dark Souls 1 or even including some faster bloodborne play style where you can rush around and trade damage with enemies the stealth mechanic would even be well appreciated here because now more than ever is there an incentive to sneak past tough enemies but none of this is in the game even the stealth is nearly taken away completely in the last few levels something to increase the variety and not just the offensive options but your defense as well would help this problem of damage inflation fromsoft has made tools to combat it in their previous games so it would be an amazing fix if they could Implement some of them here as it is the end game feels like it's just pushing the limit on how much damage the player can take without giving adequate avenues for response level your vicar or Dodge every attack those are your options and the Beast of reused enemies also starts to rear its ugly head here Castle Soul the hallig tree pharah Missoula there are mostly enemies that have been present in the game up to this point in these areas the final Victory lap of the game has a lot of familiar faces and Worn out Places and with how large the game is and how much the player might have done I can certainly see this compounding into a sense of burnout though I've already gone in depth on how I think the ReUse negatively affects the game the main problem and reason I bring it back up is because this damage inflation feels a lot more artificial when you're facing the same enemies from the start of the game the base Knights and rats are now doing more damage than entire are bosses from the first few hours of the game in games like bloodborne the damage enemies did would increase but the enemies themselves also transformed and upgraded to accommodate this here the enemies stay the same but one of them could clear an entire Army of early game counterparts this compounds into a feeling of total non-progression that you've leveled up and upgraded your gear so much just to keep up with the same Shield Knight or beast man the feeling of burnout I got from the length and reuse content was made so much worse by this it just goes against the core design of RPGs to me enemies are tougher less rewarding and still look the same so why even fight them again most likely you've already gotten your enjoyment out of fighting them earlier when they were more manageable the game almost feels subtly guiding you to run past them since you'll get nothing from engaging otherwise and this places the burden of engaging the player solely on the bosses [Music] and so let's talk about the boss's four events they're arguably the biggest part of any Souls game they're what fromsoft has been leading the industry in since demon souls and especially as the games went on I feel like fromsoft has increased their quality of bosses a lot and made them feel much more naturally difficult and complex Dark Souls 3 bloodborne and sakuro have some of the best bosses and most difficult fights in gaming and the good fights in fromsoft games make you feel like the entire difficulty of the fight is tied to your ability to beat it all of the control is in the player's hands and feedback is well communicated you can look at some of my favorite bosses like ishin lady Maria or soul of Cinder to see bosses that are incredibly difficult but not unfair you get hit by one of their attacks you know what to do next time you dodge the combo you get an immediate chance to attack them back you have all of the tools to beat them you just need to train to use them and the bosses are complex and interesting enough to give you enjoyment in learning the fight and improving and there are fun or interesting mechanics to switch things up on the other side Bad Bosses and from soft games feel difficult for things outside of your control you feel like you aren't learning anything or the game isn't communicating something important to you so the fight can be an absolute Breeze and you have no idea why or you'll die and wonder what even happened this can be from poorly telegraphed moves instant kills bad boss AI or any number of small things there's something halting your ability to learn the fightfully and of course some bad bosses are just too easy or simple and the fight isn't engaging because of it or mechanics just aren't fun to learn or it's the Bed of Chaos Margaret godric furry Artorias big deer furry guts Sif but a redhead there's lots of bosses in Elden ring I enjoyed a lot and felt they followed the example of fromsoft's best bosses but there were lots of bosses that had varying amounts of frustration due to different moves mechanics or design some bosses made me feel like the difficulty of the fight wasn't directly correlated to my understanding and ability some bosses didn't give me proper feedback to make learning the boss fun and some bosses just weren't complex enough to be engaging and so I just want to go through some of the main bosses of the game and highlight issues I think they have starting off with Commander Nile he's honestly a really simple boss if it were just him he has pretty simple moves and would be a more forgettable boss for how important he is but he summons two Minions that artificially make the fight feel more difficult because any fight would be more difficult with enemies in it put two pinwheel skeletons next to source insane Mission boom hardest fight in gaming it's difficulty added in compensation for lack of complexity which I don't enjoy the boss isn't interesting enough on his own so they add in artificial difficulty through more enemies the difficulty comes from the game's own limitation and how the player is able to respond to multiple enemies at once as opposed to playing to their strengths and speaking of godskin Duo is probably the biggest example of this idea since I can think a few Duo bosses besides Ornstein and Smo that feel like they have some intended strategy good Duo bosses have always had some way of splitting the bosses up or focusing on just one differing move speeds like Ornstein and Smo the demon princes having different move sets depending on which you engage you even get a wild card enemy in the abyss Watchers fight to lighten the load but most Duo bosses in Elden ring like godskin Duo have the same move speed so they stick together and attack together and of course you're unable to keep up with both of their attacks at one and up to the mercy of the AI to give you any leeway to actually survive there's no Synergy to the bosses in the fight and it feels like two individual bosses shove together also specific to God's skin Duo they have this really strange resurrect mechanic where it doesn't actually matter how much damage you do to them individually and I know this because at one point I killed both of them at the same time so the last one to die just randomly resurrected himself because the collective health bar wasn't empty yet I have no idea why this was the design decision here there was a great opportunity to use the Ornstein and smoke mechanic and have one gain moves from the other one in a second phase but I don't actually remember a single boss in Elden ring that does this even though it's done in some of my favorite fights in the soul series moving on fire giant commits the cardinal sin of being a boring fight he only has maybe six moves that he does but they do such high damage in an AOE that a Sim simple mistake will end the fight instantly since they can kill torrent knock you off or just kill you outright I just never felt like I learned more about him than my first or second attempt and there was a lot of down time where I wasn't actively engaging with the boss because attacking him proactively left him too many opportunities to do damage in an area you can't escape from and he likes to combat roll away after each attack fire giant seems to have difficulty in just where he's placed in the game since he's the first mandatory boss past Lane Dell where the damage buff comes into full effect he has massive health and damage compared to more God before him without much content in between to level the player up if the player is able to survive his attacks he becomes a pushover but he's placed in an area where the player will most likely not have the health and will die from any direct hit his difficulty isn't built with any complexity just damage and health inflation fire giant also has a problem that most any of the larger bosses and from soft games have which is that the camera is working against them with large bosses like fire giant locking onto them means when you get close enough to be able to actually hit them the camera is going to whip around and be unable to adjust properly becoming basically unusable going through the fight without lock-on is fine though you can still end up with the boss obscuring your character and being able to do attacks that you can't see the telegraph for because you're hitting their ankle while they're doing something off screen with their hands and continuing with large bosses we have the final boss of the game or rather the second half of the final boss of the game because you fight radagon and eldenbeast back to back so I guess I'll actually talk about radagon first since he's technically part of the fight I loved radagon's boss fight he has very well designed moves that obliterated me until I learned their timings and patterns there's this good sense of feedback where every combo you can learn to dodge gives a big moment to do damage to him his moveset even rewards the player jumping over some attacks to get a bigger Advantage compared to Rolling there wasn't really any part of radagon's fight that I disliked until I faced his second half I am incredibly disappointed that eldenbeast is the boss that from decided to end the game with the game leading up to this point has been a Victory lap with malacath Godfrey and radagon being some of the best fights in the game and Gideon being there too it's just a Boss Rush until the end but the final fight being eldenbeast lets a lot of the momentum that's been built up just fall away completely radagon's fight is very aggressive going into his teleport phase he's constantly closing distance and forcing the player to keep up with him the fight barely has any downtime and it builds up momentum and speed until the end but when the eldenbeast fight starts it's almost all down time the boss is designed around creating distance they'll run away and use AOE explosions or tracking spell attacks you'll run to catch up to them you might get a single combo in and then Eldon Beast runs away again the move set is something that doesn't feel rewarding I can dodge melee attacks all day if it means a successful counter-attack afterwards that's a good immediate feedback for learning the fight but avoiding large aoes and running away from Fire doesn't have this feedback or even a strong learning curve unless you're out of stamina you can always just run away it eats up time in the fight to run away and feels disconnected and some of the moves like the Eldon star Sparkle ball don't feel intuitive at all the best method I found to avoid it was running back and forth and dodging through the ball because it had a bad turning radius but it can still tag you a ton so I don't know if there's any obvious way to actually not get hit the lock-on camera problem is also very apparent here because there's only one lock-on point for the boss in its stomach which can change to the head when it does certain moves meaning the camera can whip around and change direction without your input this makes the actual Act of attacking the boss frustrating because whether locked on or not the camera can't capture the parts of the boss that Telegraph moves so you can get hit from moves that you didn't even see because you're doing damage before eldenbeast runs away again again lock-on has been an issue in most from soft games but the final boss in Elden ring should have had some thought put in to make it more bearable eldenbeast is a visually appealing boss but the mechanics of the fight aren't engaging with how much downtime and running away there is the moves you will be actively engaged for can be very messy and the flow of the fight is entirely determined by the AI letting you get near them without running away radagon's fight before them is a much better fight and I would have preferred him to have a second phase instead of the eldenbeast because as it is a good fight against radagon has a great flow and speed to it a perfect fight against eldenbeast still involves running for over half of it the fight is a letdown to an otherwise great series of battles to close out the game and so to close out the bosses I want to talk about I think radon is by far the most interesting because he's one of the major bosses in the game to get a noticeable patch when I and many other players fought redone in patch 1.02 the boss was very frustrating he had very quick attacks in a large area that did tons of damage for how little Telegraph there was for some of them he had a tracking meteor attack that instantly killed me and had no reliable way to dodge it his fight starts with a very slow section of dodging arrows and approaching him that slows the pacing down considerably and comes across as tedious the fight did not seem to have a lot of tuning to make it responsive and fair to the player the Elden ring Community as a whole seemed to unanimously hate it and I had this entire carefully written out section about each move and how I thought they were unfair and then as I'm writing this video Elden ring gets a patch for version 1.03 and along with a massive amount of changes radon's fight has been overhauled he does less damage the hitbox on his attacks were reduced in size his meteor attack was reworked a lot of what made him a pain to fight was fixed and this is great for obvious reasons but I think from soft reworking bosses like this does confirm at least in my mind that some final stage tuning was missing they agreed with me and the player base that radon was unfair so bosses can be reworked and they're not these perfectly balanced specimens that the player should just get good at or acquire overly powerful mechanics like the mimic tier to beat which I think is just important to note because I think there are more bosses than radon that need to have some tweaks to make them better I've highlighted main bosses because they obviously have the most care and attention given to them but all of the elements I've picked apart in their fights are shared across many other smaller fights in the game messily telegraphed moves like pre-patch radons or eldenbeast's twinkle sphere are present in many boss fights there are tons of unsynergized multi-boss fights in the game besides godskin Duo and Nile there are plenty of large bosses that give camera issues like fire Giant and there are a variety of bosses that just aren't engaging or interesting to me mind you the only main bosses I actively dislike are godskin Duo fire Giant and eldenbeast their mandatory nature warrants more attention I think since while I disliked similar bosses like Valley and gargoyles or some of the Dragon fights they aren't necessary to beat the game but lots of bosses that have less than perfect fights aren't flawed at their core most would be fine with small tweaks even if just to damage or a single move and as is they have plenty of fun parts to them that can make the fights a good experience if the game is in your favor and I think that changes can be made to even my least favorite bosses giving godskin Duo different moves in a larger Arena would make the fight immensely more enjoyable to me though I guess it would just be Ornstein and Smo but hey if they're going to copy the homework they may as well get the answers right out of over 150 bosses in Elden ring there are a good chunk that have some issues depending on which ones you fight your experience with boss design in this game can greatly vary several bosses can be more tedious and tiresome than they are fun which is a shame because I think that there are also amazing bosses like malacath Margaret and radagon that felt like contenders for some of fromsoft's best work but the attention and Care is clearly not evenly distributed here I would have loved to see more tuning and Care put into especially the main unique bosses to make them great before investing the resources in making the other 130 or so [Music] overall Elden ring is an amazing game it is what I would consider to be a benchmark of modern gaming a game is so expansive and refreshing and genuinely fun that it's going to be imitated for Generations it really made me feel like Batman all jokes aside though this critique has been pretty negative of the game I focused a lot on things I don't like and elements of the game I think aren't great but these elements I've critiqued are elements of a game that I still very much enjoyed the core gameplay is a fantastic culmination of all of the games fromsoft has made leading up to it a good amount of bosses tap into that Prime difficulty and flow they've built up the open world is a blast to explore and besides breath of the wild I can think of few games where I felt as genuinely rewarded for exploration as well as Blown Away by the sheer amount of things to explore but this transition to open world has come with a few snags that I believe drag the game down a bit I dislike the amount of reused content as it makes the game feel bloated and fatigues the player I think the Core Balance of the game is thrown off for a large portion which can incidentally ruin some encounters that would be otherwise fun and properly difficult some areas can feel improperly tuned mostly getting into the latter half of the game there are are some bosses that don't live up to the standard of quality that I think fromsoft has sent and I feel there was a lot of missed potential there was also massive performance issues throughout the whole game that I feel should at least be mentioned even if I'm not creating a whole section for them even on the latest patch 1.03 there is stuttering and low frame rates in some areas the final boss of the game has a several second lag for the first few seconds of the fight every time I started it mind you I don't have the greatest PC but I'm also not the only person with reported issues from soft games just usually run terrible at launch you can look at the slideshow that was old yardum and bloodborne for proof of that the performance doesn't affect my judgment of the game but it is something I hope can eventually be fixed completely because it would seriously be a problem if fromsoft just continues to release games without optimization but even the larger problems I have don't ruin the game I still very much enjoyed Elden ring I found it to be almost a wholesale replacement for the entire Dark Souls Series in terms of gameplay it's the next step forward in what a souls-like genre can look like I do still think that Securo and bloodborne are my favorites for their unique attributes in additions to the formula but for just that formula I think Elden ring is the best we've gotten so far the flaws don't weigh it down nearly enough for me to say it's a bad game by any means or even less than a great game for the most part speaking about how the game has gotten 10 out of 10 review scores I think those are definitely more reflecting the hype and Innovation behind this game it's praised for pushing the gaming industry forward not for being Flawless the game is great but flawed and that's infinitely better to me than a well-polished but bland game if from software nailed an open world game on their first try it would have been an impossibly impressive feat and the feat of making one that works as well as Eldon ring does is still massively impressive I love from soft games and I think so many are near perfect but there's always something in the way an Elden ring felt like that a perfect game to me that they have that potential to make until some cracks started to show with 12 million copies sold so far we know there's going to be an Elden ring too if not that then at least another from soft game that builds on Elden ring 1. and if that game can fix all of the problems I've brought up I think it might just be the perfect game for me clean up the open world and shrink it down to remove the bloated copy paste do something to make the difficulty of the game more consistent and fulfilling in the first half and less frustrating in the second refine and add to the mechanics like stealth and torrent that you've implemented only in part put more care into the boss's quality over their quantity and give me a story quests and characters that I can engage with perfect game right there also delete preceptor Miriam like [ __ ] preceptor Miriam skanky ass no drip having the spell spammer sitting in our little [ __ ] Tower one-shotting me and teleporting away like a GTA hacker I didn't know the NPCs could just cheat who coded her who didn't I just want to talk from soft I just want to talk to them okay you know what I'm glad they added crouching to this game just so I can teabag her crusty ass make that Canon and Eldon ring too but anyways that's my critique of Elden ring this video took a long time to make playing the game writing and rewriting scripts all day it was a lot the overall script for this video turned out to be around 15 000 words long so I hope that it was worth your time to watch but yeah if you like this video make sure to subscribe and comment fortnite down below or offer seed or keep going skeleton there's a lot of options to choose from basically I want all of the comments written in the form of Dark Souls messages for example if you didn't like this video or something I talked about please comment magic butthole I don't know I'll see you next time [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Lextorias

Views: 572,925

Keywords: Lextorias, a brutally honest elden ring critique, brutally honest critique, elden ring critique, elden ring review, elden ring game, elden ring game review, brutally honest elden ring review, brutally honest review, honest elden ring critique, honest elden ring review, brutal elden ring review, brutal elden ring critique

Id: KdVsO9nBS6Q

Length: 72min 23sec (4343 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022