Elden Ring - A Shattered Masterpiece

so in this game your geralt has the title of tarnished his roach is now named Torrance but you still kill monsters you're also made enlist because Jennifer sure as hell ain't no Maiden Elden ring is open world Dark Souls it's the latest game by from software and it's a Smash Hit everyone seems to love it including me it'll go down in history as one of the greatest games ever made every open world game from now on will be compared to this just like breath of the wild before it and the it's like Dark Souls comments have now entered an insane surprise Phase 2 of power level with the addition of Elden Ring's Triumph but the game also sucks and has gigantic issues and I don't have to worry about sugarcoating the introductions of these things anymore because YouTube removed the dislike button so all you can do is leave comments disagreeing which only makes this video get pushed to more people I'm like the final optional boss of the game over here if you try to block me you can only make me stronger you did get to that fight right because if not if you're only halfway through then perhaps you don't understand how I can say that a game this astoundingly impressive can suck believe me though it does I have more issues with this game than any other fromsoft has released in this spiritual series of theirs yes including Dark Souls 2. yet I can't lie and have to State equally plainly that Elden ring has some of the best moments I've ever had in the game Sakura is still my favorite over all of these but when it comes to exploration and uncovering the secrets of a world Elden ring is the king so pretty messy thoughts right kind of like the game itself it's an experience of extremes the highs are so high that I don't think from will ever top them and the lows are so low that I'm not even excited for the next game they make like this anymore the trouble that crops up in the last third of Elden ring is so jarring that I'm soured on the series going forward and yet the things the game does well were so good that they survived that descent this one is going to be spicy there are going to be spoilers don't watch until you've played the game yourself is Alden ring a masterpiece yeah probably but it's a shattered one tell me you don't see it [Music] Alden ring is similar to another Masterpiece outer Wilds in a tragically specific way you can only experience it properly one single time some of the best works of art are like that and leave you with a deep longing by the end they're the kind of things you wish you could wipe your memory of so you can go back again blind Dark Souls 1 is also like that for me the other games in this series surprisingly not so much but whereas outer Wilds is elevated by a deeply profound realization of how this one-time experience quality links to its themes and truly your own unique life that you are living right now Albin ring can only be played once because the impressiveness of its content doesn't survive after first Contact so I repeat again very soon into this video because it's so important don't watch this before playing the game yourself and also play outer Wilds you owe it to yourself I'm not saying you can't replay Elden ring and have fun I've done three playthroughs and had varying amounts of enjoyments but as you can see from the list on the screen the time plate is very different after the first one part of this is because of course I now know where to go in the like but it goes further than that into I now know which areas are a waste of time either for the build I'm playing or just outright the area is boring and not worth the visit your first time through you won't feel that as much the novelty of each location is pristine and even if you happen to encounter a few of the lackluster locations back to back there are enough attractive places with cool things in them that it's unlikely you'll get worn down to the point of having a bad enough time to not want to continue exploring my expectations for this game right up until the moment I ran it for the first time were that it would have a hub World about the scale of a modernized version of Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time the map you see on the screen right now of just Upper Limb grave was what I expected in size with several connecting zones and huge traditional Dark Souls style levels in orbit around them so like an open world Firelink Shrine Zone with lots of roots and links back that uncover more areas and options as you progress and come back I would still like to play a game like that because Elden ring isn't it Upper Limb grave on the screen right now is about 1 15 of the total play area not including the dungeons this is very much a traditional style open world in terms of size and how much it stretches over an area horizontally not all of it is as dense with stuff to find and delve into but if we're talking about explorable territory this is a small fraction of the game Elden ring is huge and that's one of the most impressive things about it enough to even impress Shania Twain largely because it maintains a high level of beauty and freshness throughout it all assuming you're not sick of the usual Dark Souls fair that is because while this may be a more glorious medieval fairy tale fantasy style than usual for from it has a lot of the same trimmings that we've seen in the past games I personally didn't mind that's not to say it isn't special among current open world titles there is a great placement of verticality as a boundary to pen areas into contained exploration zones but also as a way to beckon you to explore it's possible that something like Horizon zero Dawn or Assassin's Creed Valhalla may do this better I still haven't played them but for me this is the best construction of an open world I've seen whereas Witcher 3 still takes it for immersion things look good at a distance things also look good up close if you see something interesting then with very few exceptions I'm actually struggling to think of them right now you are able to get there even an elevated Plateau that you see early on and might give up on reaching because the method of getting there is near the end game points of interest will dominate The Horizon an academy like a man-made Mountain will Define the skyline of a Zone and when you pass it there will be something new that calls to you you'll climb higher and see something else right away in the way that Dark Souls kept surprising you by how far down you can go Elden ring shocked You by how high you'll keep going those points of interest aren't just beautiful and sunny in scale their size is also functional in obscuring the next areas from you although you can see hints of what's to come if you're persistent in exploring the edges of zones for four nights in a row while playing this game I ended my sessions with the thought I'm about halfway done I think and I still wasn't on any of those nights I thought this area up the grand lift of ductus was the final Zone after the trio that you can explore at the start Lim grave liernia and Khalid and depending on the order you do things in by the time you beat the boss at the Capitol in the Ulta Zone you might still not be halfway done with what Eldon ring has to offer the map plays a crucial role in misleading you here and was clearly set up to do just that whereas breath of the wild wants to immediately Dazzle you with its size Elden ring holds it back shower vs grower a large central part of the map is taken up by ocean that doesn't fill in until you get to one of the final areas making it easy to be diluted into to thinking this is an awkwardly shaped landmass and that you've seen most of what's in the game very early on then surprise there's all this extra territory waiting for you a tremendous amount of content isn't always a good thing in many ways it isn't a positive here either but we'll get to that in a moment I want to continue singing its Praises because this is by far the best part of the game exploring the open world in terms of traversal can definitely get dull but the thrill of Discovery and uncovering new things was a near bottomless bag of Thrills like a Christmas morning or a birthday party that keeps continuing from one room to another each with a new round of presents when you are only expecting one the best two parts about it for me were the surprises and how it feels like it belongs in this series Elden ring is the kind of game where you can enter a cave or a building and not know what you're going to get it could be a short 10 to 15 minute affair with a few hallways and battle rooms and a quick boss or you could hit an illusory wall and reveal an entire multi-hour length Zone that becomes a sprawling traditional Souls type dungeon with secrets and roots and checkpoints and bosses or it could be an elevator you ride down start to wonder what's taking so long and step out to a whole new world that has a second [ __ ] map screen that you toggle between because one open world wasn't enough apparently it needed a second one Elden ring isn't Dark Souls 4. it's dark souls 4 5 and 6 all at once at least it is in terms of the scope of the world continuing that thread it also feels like a Soul's World you've been let loose in mostly or it does when you're playing it but that feeling May diminish a bit when you go back to the previous games after finishing album ring I played Dark Souls 1 and 3 all the way through again I also played a few hours of Dark Souls 2 sakuro bloodborne and Demon Souls I needed some footage for this video anyway so I got to relive a bit of them whenever I've played these games I've always imagined what was out of bounds not in actuality with what the developer included that you could no clip to but in terms of fantasizing about what the rest of this unusual Grim world would be like if I could just wander it in any direction forever the constrained open worlds of these games give you the impression that you're cutting through only a thin dense slice of thumb on your adventure Demon Souls is more the odd one out and feels like scattered pockets of a world you are dumped into that could have a more plain open world connecting them if you were free when I first played Elden ring because of how brilliantly the dungeon areas were integrated into the open areas it felt like an uncompromising realization of that feeling I could vividly imagine starting off in something like Stormville Castle or the capital and then fighting my way out to freedom and marveling at the unfolding world before me as if I could do that for in deadburg as well as whatever is around it if the game was prepared for me to do so to repeat that's how it was when I was playing Elden ring then I went back to Dark Souls 1 and could see that it wasn't as uncompromising as I thought there are some areas that still maintain that quality but traveling through in deadburg to Dark Root Garden and Blighttown again made me understand that Elder ring is closer to the standard open world formula than the fantasy I have about breaking through a wall in Dark Souls Dark Souls 3 was also interesting in how it feels like a bunch of levels on platforms arranged like a series of awkwardly stacked plates on a tray rather than a tangle of roots you're cutting through in an otherwise full world I want to stress though that I don't hold this against Elden ring as a flaw since the illusion they created worked my first time through and that's something I'm going to have to say a few more times in this video the first run of this game is very different than any subsequent ones it's an amazing feat of world design that traveling from Zone to Zone truly does evoke the same feeling of arriving at a new place in Dark Souls and this is a quality that does endure after replaying the older games with the possible exception of going from Lim grave to Khalid I felt like I had achieved something or marked the new stage of my adventure when I arrived at a new place more than that most zones managed to have that same unveiling moment of wonder that new places in this series have like stepping out from the catacombs in Dark Souls 3 to gawk at irithal the greeting the DLC areas give you in Dark Souls 2. the palace near the end of sakuro and Orlando in Dark Souls 1 and if you've played these games you know I can keep going despite being open world and giving you tremendous freedom to go anywhere you want at the start to the extent that there are only a handful of regions that you can't get to within an hour if you know what you're doing the game still manages to make you stop and stare with these moments of grand reveal seeing Leonia for the first time via the hidden path around stormvale or after beating godric questing this hill with a strategically placed wall so you get to see more of Khaled all at once when you hop over it or the confusion and wonderful dread you may feel if you get teleported here via an alternative route which is something that could happen for a few more areas too these are also carefully planned moments that you could have instead the capital has the dragon corpse to wow you and still doesn't ruin your first time seeing the place from a distance the far away introduction you could have for crumbling pharah Missoula might actually be a better holy [ __ ] moment than the main quest way that you arrive here seeing the grand lift for the first time witnessing the capital and then finding another lift later and the game keeps going through a Mist that clears to even more gorgeous real-time landscape paintings dungeon areas can elicit that fundamental Souls feeling too of getting through one stage conquering a boss and then having that Victory Trot area of spindly skeletal connection that borders on nonsense but still Bridges the Gap to the next stage of the Zone all the while making sense in the context of the open world around it yes parts of the open world are empty and not always successful but within this world there is still a bigger Dark Souls game of traditional levels and overlapping interlinked connections than in the others this really is two or three games in one are you good and prepared young Chum the Festival begins the underground is largely responsible for that for me this was the best part of the game it's also the most creative and is the first time that Fromm has returned to the high World design standard they set in the first half of Dark Souls 1. I can't believe that I can say that every single time I went to the underground I was floored either by the unexpected cavernous night sky or the size of the place or how it linked together with other areas or the method at which I arrived two surprise elevator rides can get you there or breaking through a wall after descending through the sewers in the capital or hell even the modest and on paper kind of boring teleport Stone in the consecrated grounds had me happy because I had no idea there was more underground to even find never mind that I was going to suddenly be plopped into it the best of these was the change that happens to the world after beating star Scourge radon you're shown this odd cinematic of a meteor crashing somewhere and at some point later as you're riding around you'll see the results of that impact let me set the stage here at this point in my playthrough I had already been to the underground twice and both times through the elevator entrances in Lim grave and liernia I knew from what I had seen in this location that I would find a way back down there eventually but I wasn't sure if I would be able to reach some of the high places I had seen during my co for River exploration this newly formed path took me down there with three separate sections to explore with three bosses and a creative link back down to the lower section of the Zone then I found a coffin transport system that I knew was going to take me to that section I had seen earlier when I was underneath the hernia rodon's meteor was the key for unlocking what I had seen before and then the coffin took me to a brand new Third location of the underground instead this kept going there were two more coffins and transitions on this journey that all ended with one of the coolest looking bosses in the game and a mysterious block path that I couldn't get through for dozens of more hours and then solved another separate long-standing mystery I had when I finally did for this entire stretch Elden ring was a 12 out of 10 for me for a few hours I felt like I was playing the best parts of Dark Souls 1 again I never expected that from would ever pull that off and do something that could get me back to that feeling there was a toxic swamp in this part or Scarlet wrought as it's called an album ring and I enjoyed it it was super poison and I didn't care Elden ring is so good it made me like poison swamps again was almost the title of this video 40 hours later I would find another underground location through that teleport and another entrance to a part that I had already explored my only disappointment with the size of this game is that the underground map doesn't fill in the gaps of the spaces it has with the world above even if it was with just small pocket zones that are self-contained it's a selfish unreasonable disappointment though because the amount of stuff to do here is on par with Hollow Knight in terms of being a bargain Elden ring is a full price Triple A game and it's still somehow launched permanently on sale the majority of these underground sections felt like the equivalent of the looser more free-form levels found in from Souls games so for me their legacy zones Legacy in this case being the word that's been settled on for labeling areas in Elden ring that are traditional Soul stuff and not a part of the open world there are small side dungeons in this game in the form of catacombs and caves but those aren't Legacy dungeons like Stormville castle and the Academy of real lucaria let's complain about Nintendo for a bit because what would a Joseph Anderson video be without that I hope Elden ring will be the game that redeems My Breath of the wild criticism for most of the people that didn't agree with it because nothing proves it more than thinking about how much lesser an experience Elden ring would be if these Legacy dungeons were removed the side shrine-like mini dungeons you can find would be all there is for a quick flash of a souls-like experience sometimes it's hard to imagine the addition of something and how it would work but it's usually easier to imagine if something was taken away do this to Alden ring and maybe you can understand why breath of the wild was such a letdown in this way if this happened this video would be entitled Elden ring not enough Dark Souls time will tell how good these Legacy dungeons hold up compared to the greatest hits of the series I know already however that Stormville Castle crumbling Farm Missoula Lindell and its sewers will be contenders for the top these dungeons are huge sprawling and complicated to navigate with secrets and shortcuts and multiple overlapping links that reward experimentation and studying how the geometry of the areas you can reach fits together there are secrets I know I still haven't found in these places because I can see items I haven't been able to loot yet pharah Missoula may be more impressive visually but its placement in the world means it doesn't have the same achievement that Stormville and lindel do by fitting naturally into the open world around them and still feeling like expansive Dark Souls levels both with entrances and exits that make sense and Bridge the player between two open world zones and you can see it all from the outside as you ride around too simply a stunning achievement in game design in summary the open world successes are in how it captures that feeling of seeing something so Majestic in scale in the distance and then actually being able to to go there in my ring City Review I lamented that the game showed me a gorgeous City in the distance and then kept me from it kept me isolated in One path and used that city as a background to it all if Elden ring shows you something it lets you go there and with only a few compromises and empty sections in its world still feels true to its Soul's Roots I don't know how they pulled this off and made it look so good when Dark Souls 3 still suffers from horrible LOD issues today after receiving several patches trying to fix it too you'd also be reasonable in thinking that another part of from's magic wouldn't survive the transfer to this new format specially designed and focused guaranteed experiences these aren't always flashy and that just goes to prove how purposeful they are and how hard they hit remember this is a series in which one of the most famous and riveting moments that virtually everyone has when they play is kicking down a ladder after crossing a bridge there's a dragon involved in this scenario and yet the latter stands out more how can an open world facilitate that kind of thing well this is why the game can't be played more than once to full effect Elden ring expertly uses funneling systems with connections between zones and boss fights and returning to dungeons having one main entrance to still provide these singular experiences and in the case that there is an alternative path or root that also has been made to be an equally powerful moment just like Hollow Knight could use its many entrances and exits to some areas effectively but still differently depending on the path you ended up taking whether you climb the cave route between leernia and Altus or gather the two halves of the grand lift Medallion and have that as your welcome you are having a memorable part of your journey that will sit as a milestone there's even a third weirder way to get here too a game about Revelations and information like this how the world works and looks and fits together cannot be done twice Dark Souls is like this with its clicking together of the world and how you make a map of it in your head as you're on your adventure bloodborne has this a bit too but also has a point where the curtain is peeled back and you're shown things that were there all along and just couldn't see I'm a Witcher consider that for Elden ring some of your favorite moments on your first playthrough may end up being tedious your second or third time the wonderment you felt while the elevator ride took five times longer than you expected may turn to impatience and boredom when you return to co for River replay value isn't the most important metric to judge a game for me I don't know how most people feel about it but I think there's some consensus that the first playthrough of a game is the most important one in from other games replayability came from doing different builds and the fun of fighting the bosses again which could be a test of skill that you can repeat or enjoy the expression of Mastery even in Sakura which is arguably the least replayable of the set of games due to it only having one weapon type you can enjoy struggling on boss fights multiple times and then enjoy feeling like a god when they become effortless not that I've ever had that because I'm not very good at sakuro some of this applies to Elden ring but because of how the content is distributed I'd argue that in many ways this game is the least replayable in the series despite having the most possible build diversity it's like the opposite direction of sakuro there they Double Down On Combat complexity with one honed move set with additional complementary choices and a guided difficulty curve whereas an Elden ring you can do dozens of things for fights and Tackle so much of it in any order in that respect the game is very undeniably replayable in every other respect it's time to get Negative my five big shibiri gripes with Elden ring in ascending order of importance are poor exploration rewards boring Shrine dungeons recycled content level balancing and fromm's new boss design philosophy AKA combat changes as always with the big game critiques this is going to be difficult to clearly go through as many of these issues are connected sometimes in surprising unexpected ways that's Elden ring for you each of the five things on this list is a problem that is much worse when you play the game again when you don't know what you're going to get from a side dungeon both from the content you fight through and the reward at the end it's easy to happily cycle through it and not mind as much there's also the fun of discovering one of these places which aren't usually broadcast to you there are some markers and hints to help you find catacombs in caves but many of them are found by ramming yourself into the crevices of the map and seeing a doorway while the content and combat is fresh you may also not mind as much that these are on the simple side or you may not have the knowledge that the rooms enemies and bosses you find in these are elements of the game you are going to be seeing again and again and again the first ulcerated tree Spirit you fight whether as a secret in Stormville Castle or in the stone sword dungeon off the tutorial area can be an enjoyable boss encounter especially if it's acting as the conclusion of a dungeon you just struggled through but there are at least 10 more of these in the game to fight just like the initially mysterious tree Guardians in the world outside you're going to be fighting this boss a lot until it's not a boss anymore so the scriptwriting gods have decided this is the first to five we're sinking into then recycled content is present in all of fromm's games in fact they usually use it quite well especially in the finale areas where you return to another piece of one of the early zones to explore it with newly powered up versions of early enemies showing you that while stats and power levels can matter move sets and dealing with them are the true test of dominating opponents it's also common that early bosses will return later in the game as regular encounters both to show you how far you've come in capability as a player but also because late game enemies with their more complex fight mechanics fit quite well as an easy to Implement early boss this issue is specific to Eldon ring in that not every choice for an early boss was a good one and that some of the bigger fights also come back in a way that ruins the event level status of the first time the Taurus and capper demons don't have this issue for a few reasons they're more understated unexpected boss fights in that game aren't the most bombastic enemies in Dark Souls 1 and also feel like monsters that wandered up through the world from late game areas imagine if you fought multiple gaping dragons or multiple Quail lags and I think the point is made there's a difference here between the big wow this sure is an event bosses and the others consider that of the first three zones Lim grave including the Weeping Peninsula Leonia and Caleb that there are only two unique boss fights ranella in the academy and radon on the coast of Khalid Margaret comes back twice later and even godric which is my favorite boss in the game is repeated casually in an Ever jail somewhere in the Altus Plateau there are about 80 bosses spread over these three zones and only two remain unique for the total game that number comes in over 150 and maybe close to 200 if you consider that some encounters with enemies without tidal health bars could still be a boss the total unique fights among these is around 10. depending on if you think stuff like the Grail mercy kill is a unique encounter not all reuse is bad of course and some bosses also come back later with an enhanced move set or a different soft phase change so the amount of unique boss content is a little tricky to gauge but still on the low side considering the size of the game in my opinion this doesn't bother me that much and in some cases I even like it because enemies like The Crucible Knights are fun to duel against but there is a distinct lack of event level Encounters in the game as a whole and the recycling doesn't stop there in fact it transcends both the enemies and the limits of this game an odd thing I love about Elden ring is how artificial the world feels in a deliberate way not in a it's obvious this is a game way the lens between feel like a ring world like the type from Halo at the edges of many Cliffs you can see that the Natural Stone is being worn away to reveal ruins underneath couple this with the revelation of the Eternal cities and deeper ruins in the Underworld and you get the impression that these constructs are the actual real base of this place and all of the natural land is like a growth on top of it that can be worn away in Parts I don't know if that's the intent but that's how it felt to me the Contemporary settlements we visit in this game are built on artificial land over the top of older ruins that are stacked on even older ruins as if there's a constructed engine and support palaces with stonework struts through the entire world its ruins all the way down this actually fits quite well with the other impression I get from Elden ring and how it relates to other from games this is like Dark Souls afterlife whereas Dark Souls 3 ended with an entropic Big Crunch and grinding to Ash Elden ring is like another big bang version of this universe and is where all the entities you have slain ended up after you played those games and some of them have gone through some sort of corrupted Evolution I'm sorry if any of you have been annoyed that I keep calling this back to Dark Souls when it's not in the name of the game but the identity of that series runs deep in Elden ring not just in tone and themes but also in actual content many weapons and animations and enemies are reused and some weren't even reskinned from those games for some that were it took me too long to realize the tree Guardians are Asylum demons and that the little gargoyles and the catacombs are the small hat ambushers from Dark Souls 3. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing in every case or that these games are chronologically linked and actually exists in the same universe although that could possibly be the case I guess only that they share much of the same DNA the unceremonious placement of the shrine dungeons feeds off this artificial feeling of the world then you get inside and that all melts away the same enemies over and over the same rooms over and over the same elevator shafts to the point that they have the same pattern of Ledges to awkwardly jump down and a huge variance on what kind of boss you're going to get I don't think this feature is finished and I suspect they were meant to be randomized like chalice dungeons which is what they feel like right now only worse chalice dungeons are a feature in bloodborne that allowed you to use materials to spawn a procedurally generated dungeon with a boss a locked door a switch somewhere that opens it a neat little bundle of rooms sometimes even with shortcuts and a helping of different enemy types I liked this feature but I didn't love it because it wasn't developed enough it would have still been better to do this again for Elden ring than what we got since there is somehow more repetition in most of these caves in catacombs than what a generator could do and that is so very true when it comes to the enemies found in these things and the layout for most caves there are some of these that are fun the tricky fake Loop catacombs and some of the more open cave systems especially these feel like what they were all meant to be but they didn't have time to flesh it out or most tragically maybe most of these were randomly generated and they set these in stone because of loading issues or due to time constraints and they just didn't randomize the enemy types enough this hurts replayability more than anything because now you know which ones are boring which is most of them and so a huge swath of content that you choose somewhat contentedly through your first time is now gone forever randomizing this especially with enemy types and traps would have gone a long way here I hope this demonstrates well the different types of recycling and how it can be used it's a bit difficult to wrap your mind around that not all good content makes good recycled content and not all bad content is bad when reused a game full of randomized dungeons would likely be disappointing but as a side distraction that you can literally roll the dice on what you get while also providing a fun and always guaranteed to be new dungeon with the great combat base of the game is something that appeals to me because that's why I liked the Chalice dungeons meanwhile the best bosses in the series would be greatly diminished by coming back later because it dilutes the first experience a rematch in a menu is great and should always be included in these games but when it's the same fight serving as the climax of another area again it makes both the current rematch and the first round take a hit in quality the ulcerated tree Beast is no longer a cool encounter that topped the place off with a memorable fight it's now a routine and the absolute best example of this which I hope will resonate with most of you watching are the open world Dragon fights this encounter with the dragon in the swamp was one of the most amazing moments I had in the first few hours with the game this felt like something out of a movie I was a knight on a steed Galloping through the fire in the Flames together the huge monster and stab it in the face there was a great back and forth of taking a hit returning a hit getting knocked off my horse then calling it again to ride back into battle in a way that made a dragon flying away feel awesome instead of tedious from has always had this issue with dragon fights their aerial attacks become boring because of how limited your Mobility is in comparison to them and here's Eldon ring telling you nope go get him tiger the boss was amazing and is in my top five bosses of all time for the experience it provided is what I would like to be able to say because the game ruined this by making me fight what feels like dozens of these just over and over with the same dragon fight that was always identical except for the element of its breath attack which meant I understandably gained familiarity with how it worked to learn the exploits of its AI like you have to do with all of the giant enemies that don't fit on the screen in these games and just like that these were boring and so the first fight retroactively became boring as well the later larger dragons they introduce and then spam you with in crumbling Farm Missoula were even worse it feels like you're meant to attack their heads because their body takes less damage but they move so erratically that I couldn't do that reliably like I could with midir so this became an awkward foot stomping contest while I rolled when I thought I needed to because of attacks I couldn't see this is a trend with the Giants as well and most annoyingly the fights against Rodan and the final boss of Elton ring it's amazing how the game would be improved by removing a bunch of dragons they wouldn't even have to be replaced with anything either take something out and it's a better experience cool thought how long are my with your videos again outside of bosses there are also repeating patterns found in the world while encampments are remarkably similar to each other they are passable to me for the enemy variety they have as do the roaming giant pulled carriages that I was so certain would have one become a huge mimic at some point but it sadly never happens the ruins are the worst offenders here with the same type of buildings Arrangement hidden chests and descending stairs to a treasure chest or fight and then a treasure chest you can easily see how much of the world is devoted to these same repeating pockets of content like the ever jails and churches and while it's not offensively bad or anything it does show signs that the world outgrew the Ambitions that formed it the ghost Mariners and death birds are also good examples of encounters that are awesome surprises you can stumble on your first time that don't feel special anymore after you find more of them over and over and over but that's not to say that the world is devoid of special moments it's just that much of these stick out because of repeated exposure and Altus you can hear someone crying follow the sound to a monster type you've likely never seen before and there's no acknowledgment or reward or anything just a memorable encounter that works wonderfully because of how weird it is you can find a hidden village in the south of leernia wonder about what happened here then hit a suspicious pot and get half a medallion piece for some purpose you won't understand for 50 plus hours if you're taking your time you can see a group of zombies on the coast of the Weeping Peninsula moving as a herd toward the tide and spot the shipwrecks on the horizon that they are being called back to the world has many moments like this but that doesn't mean it's untarnished by the typical open world copy and paste technique of filling in an otherwise empty landscape this reuse and recycling is also why many players who finish the game are saying it's too big you can happily go through all the games in the series and not feel that way and yet this one on its own can start to drag toward the end personally I felt that in the final two areas but not in the final Legacy dungeons which illustrates pretty clearly that it's a problem born out of repetition the side dungeons became fewer and farther between but also weren't evolving enough and doing new things and the enemy variety tanks after the capital section with only two brand new enemies I think that are also similar to others you've seen already the snowy mountains before the fire Giants show this best with enemies from Caleb being spammed all over it which is another reuse that cheapens both instances of them especially from a series that is known for its excellent enemy variety these felt unique to caled for a reason that I think is really clear because they match the desolation of that area but here they are again in a Zone an arrangement just to fill it up that I suspect most players will feel and just ride on through like removing the dragons I genuinely think this stretch of mountain would have been better with no enemies at all one repeated idea I did like however which I think many will disagree with were the Chariot dungeons I don't know why but I kind of like these run and fight gauntlets they weren't perfect but they were different enough from the rest of the game spread out quite well through the world and still firmly on the optional side of things that I enjoyed them for some reason this isn't just about novelty however since the hide and seek puzzles with the Mage Towers were awful and I do not understand how a developer as experienced this from thought these were good enough for their most anticipated game of all time it's perhaps the stupidest and most blatant filler in the game that just wastes all the space on the map and for many builds offers a useless upgrade on top of it which brings us nicely to another point on the list disappointing Rewards foreign with great build diversity comes great build possibilities in its world to find Elden ring has a staggering amount of spells weapons healing upgrades spells Shields spells talismans spells armor consumables upgrade materials spells and spells there are weapon Arts too also known as spells in theory placing the majority of these around the world to find should be a good thing since they're practical tangible rewards but in practice it means that every player is going to get sweep [ __ ] nothing from most Shrine dungeons stone sword rooms and even some of the Legacy loot chests the most disheartening moment for me was in my beloved underground stretch when I fought through a quick Gauntlet in Knox Stella for the big prize to be a Talisman that increases spell slots from my guy who never used a single Speck of magic ever like investing into crypto this is simply a numbers game in which everyone loses the Scarlet brain rot that some people have contracted about build mandates in this game is something we'll speak about in the combat section but for now I just want to make it clear that even a theoretical perfect player who is somehow using both a slow weapon and a fast weapon with a shield and a seal or staff like some psychopath who loves Randy so much they want to fill up every hand slot is still going to find the overwhelming majority of these rewards to not apply to what they're doing you can't upgrade that many weapons or Shields most talismans simply aren't that broadly applicable and the different schools of casting require different loadouts and Stat Investments and this is all before you get into the idea of committing to a type of build that appeals to you which is what almost everyone does when they play these games most of this [ __ ] is a waste of time this really diminishes the excitement of completing a dungeon after you knock out your first few especially with the Relentless stuffing of the new Ash catch em all Spirit Pokemon summons down your throat it's even worse on your later playthroughs when you will now plan which dungeons are worth hitting up like a formal strategy of which aisles you're walking down in the grocery store to get the good stuff and skip the bad as quickly as possible this compounds with the poor nature of the shrine Dungeons and most unfortunately Elden Ring's introduction of a horse see it's not just more formal loot chests inside areas that suffer here it's also pretty much every single enemy in the open world too while the sanctity of the Dark Souls experience May persevere in the Legacy areas the same is not true for the open world you are flush with checkpoint gray spawn fires everywhere and pump full of fresh Crimson Estes charges from Quark beetles and refills for full clearing groups the intent here is wonderful forcing players to go back to a checkpoint for more sustain would be clunky and boring when you're allowed to wander so freely and so the usual check of mistakes versus Improvement isn't necessary from the healing system here you can also blissfully loot things while on Horseback and I hope whoever pushed for that at from gets a statue in the lobby of themselves on Horseback picking up their Crown but the most crucial things to find in the open world are almost always in churches and urge tree saplings healing charges and healing power upgrades from the tears the amount of runes you get from normal enemies throughout most of the game is a pittance and simply not worth the effort rare drops from these enemies really are rare and also require you to break some sort of rule and look up loot tables if you want something in particular which I did for a shield test I wanted to perform after my three runs and spent over an hour killing the same guys until it dropped the end result is that you start to ride past a lot of enemies in the world which can bleed into a habit for running past enemies in the dungeons as well you stop respecting the contents you could also start doing this in the previous games but while this may just be an odd moment of hypocritical gameplay on my part I find it a lot easier to justify exploring most of the levels in the past games because much of it is usually on the way already and if you are intent on sprinting through content there's a hell of a lot less you need to rush through for some instances where I do skip like the loop background and then deadburg for the crossbow or something like the three tree demon monster things in the Dark Souls 3 swamp I'm not cutting much content out and in the inverse event that these are something that I need they're also not that far out of the way either from the path I need to take anyway in my opinion the game needed more Universal rewards to populate the world that could have been bundled in with the ones already in the game especially for the shrine dungeons these are fairly easy to suggest so I'll just list them off permanent passive stat increases which also help promote players trying some complementary build stuff like adding a spell or trialing a weapon they may otherwise not have been able to use this would require a few balanced tweaks for power in the world progression of course but that's already a huge issue that we'll be getting to momentarily clothing sets and cosmetics players like getting these and I don't understand why the game is so stingy with armor in particular and then dumps an entire set on you all at once here and there add a room in the Roundtable hold with a bunch of mannequins that are automatically set to wear each set of armor you find and you have yourself a hook baited for completionist to be excited about people show off collections can have more options to wear them too and it's relatively easy to implement Talisman and armor upgrade materials this is another no-brainer although if for some reason from doesn't want players of grading armor anymore they can just stick to talismans the game kinda has this already with finding better versions of some talismans but they're few and far between finding a Talisman that your build doesn't want could be made exciting if every Talisman came with some upgrade materials so you still get to increase the power incrementally of course of one you are using horse upgrades torrent is a core part of the game and sorely neglected not only does his Dash desperately need some iframes to smooth out Mountain combat he could also have some armor to increase some health or passive regen from a separate Talisman type system for the horse and some stamina stuff too some bloodborne style weapon Gems or a new enchant system for armor would also work this one is pretty self-explanatory so I won't waste our time getting into it and just to be clear doing all of these would be Overkill but just like when I play hunt Showdown I'm just shotgunning to make a point these suggestions also only work for improving your first playthrough and would actually make the game worse on later ones if it means that much of the shrine content becomes mandatory for progression power so this would have to be coupled with some improvements and or randomization to that content a built-in randomizer would be wonderful actually is another way to keep things fresh remember that rewards in these games are kind of like the activity you're doing on an outing with friends hanging out with the people you like the most in the world is the real fun you're having but the thing you are doing whether that's a good movie or a great restaurant can only add to the experience the combat and gameplay is the main part and the reward elevates it it's still important also I realize that Rune souls are already the universal reward but they're an ever-present part of the game and don't feel special enough for a Dungeons ending and you can also level yourself out of range of the quantities that drop from zones and the side bosses within them whereas these alternative ideas would always be worthwhile there's the danger here in making side content to appealing however and prompting the player to do so much of it that they overpower themselves for the rest of the game unfortunately or perhaps fortunately for the sake of these proposed editions this problem has already infected the game and I contracted this hard and for once I don't think it was my fault From the Inside by melania's Scarlet wrought his wits are long gone Alden ring is open world and therefore should allow you the freedom to go anywhere you want but in reality it naturally keeps you in earlier zones without feeling like it's restraining you these areas are large enough that you can explore and follow your Wanderlust drawn to whatever tickles your fancy I did some poking around in Lim grave beat some side bosses and then found the mountain root around Stormville Castle to liernia before beating Margate I did a small survey of the Zone found a new sword and then went back to kill him I also saw a bit of caled before this as well but I didn't engage with the contents by the time I was finished with Stormville castle and killed godric I was level 32 and had a plus 2 somber weapon I felt about right on in terms of power level after this considering where this led I did what felt natural which was committing to a proper exploration of liernia I finished the academy dungeon there and some but far from all of the side content in the zone I stumbled upon Co for River necks when I returned to Lim grave and only after finishing that did I realize that what you're actually meant to do at the beginning of the game was book itself to the Weeping peninsula when I went there on this run I was an Unstoppable God that never died and killed bosses in only a few hits I had ruined the feeling of progressing properly through this Zone which made finding all of the plentiful healing upgrades here feel very odd and while I wish I could say that's where this sad story of poor level balancing ended it kept going for the next 20 hours or so it was so bizarre that after all of this that Khalid was a walk in the park too aside from Dragon Barrow of course where I still went and killed blackblade Kindred because I found him to be a fun fight godskin apostle was another great fight here that I thought was meant to be the introduction of the Legacy dungeon in the zone when Castle red main ended up being a dead end after this I went back to mop up what parts of liernia had missed found the next part of the underground climbed up to Altus and kept explosively tearing my way through content like Superman trying to open a bag of chips if it wasn't for the dramatic spike in difficulty that occurs after finishing the capital this would be my number one problem with the game I deliberately tried to go where I think the game wants you to on my second and third runs and I can confidently say that while the balance still needs tweaking it's a lot more fun when you don't feel like you've accidentally turned on cheat mode but I also have to add that I skipped a lot of content in those runs so the balance still needs a lot of work clearly I was still feeling pretty powerful before I got into the last third of the game my suggestions for this problem are extreme but honestly I don't know what else I can say it's a fundamental problem with open world progression that no one has done properly yet I think Skyrim is a big culprit here because it did level scaling so poorly that now other devs seem afraid to do it out of Association maybe but an optional toggle in the menu or in Roundtable hold to make area scale up a little to around a few levels below you so you can still feel stronger while having some friction in fights isn't the worst idea scaling things down isn't necessary I think so you can still find areas that you're not supposed to go to yet and can challenge yourself or come back later but when I'm incentivized and more importantly excited to explore so much and then punished for it by outpacing so much content I can't help but think that something has gone horribly wrong this issue is so bad that I also wouldn't refuse a recommended level marker on the map or Grace points or even boss fog doors the game is clearly meant to be hard and that cuts both ways sometimes you can throw yourself at something thinking this is the intended experience since it's difficult that's what these games are right and other times you don't know that you're overpowering yourself above areas you found but haven't pushed into exploring yet the strength of the combat in the series kind of works against the format here in a way that I otherwise love you are capable of killing pretty much anything at the beginning of the game and aren't blocked from zones until you level up enough it does help and you can hit some walls if you don't feel like bashing your head against it but it's not outright impossible like it is in some other open World Games except for maybe a couple of fights that require some very specific strategies most open World Games don't have good combat and maybe it's for this reason the level limitation is so important that it grows to define the combat so much that it naturally erodes any skill based intentions that the developers may have had when they originally started making the game Elden ring may have opened Pandora's Box here by breaking this trend since now every open World Games combat is going to be compared to it if they could do good combat in an open world why can't you literally any other developer out there it's not fair but that's an issue for future Joe anyway this Freedom also means that you can destroy level progression through the areas because the game allows you to which I say is a failing on from support to account for this possibility with either sign posting level ranges or enemy scaling or a better idea that exists that I can't think of because I'm not a genius game designer working at from software and I never will be which brings us to the final topic of this video and the biggest issue on my list that I don't work for from software no combat changes that were made I saved the worst for last just like the game does let's open this up with a question there is obviously a right way to play games like this in terms of build decisions play Styles and fighting strategies these games are always built around this singular intended experience and if you deviate from that type then you are playing the game wrong and your time with it is invalidated my question to you is what play style is that your answer will say a lot about how you approach these games you may also be wrong because there is an objectively correct take here if you've been watching how I play in the majority of my footage then you may already know what that answer is and yes this paragraph of the script I'm reading aloud right now is here just so the question has time to simmer before I reveal that answer you're looking great by the way been a while I know say hi to your mother for me the answer is a melee build with no spells no it's whatever you have fun with whatever that means to you can change the game drastically and how you kill the boss may feel like an entirely different game than the one someone else played but as long as you're having fun who cares this also extends to pretty much every single game out there by the way if you play with cheats and you have fun then you had fun you're playing the game you're having fun who gives a [ __ ] I don't understand why everyone is so [ __ ] wrapped up in this debate and [ __ ] when it has such an obvious answer if you're having fun you're playing the game right that doesn't mean we have all comparative experiences but like holy [ __ ] guys can we just move past this anyway my approach to these games is from three simple rules I must kill the boss myself if I am dealing damage I must also be risking receiving damage although I fudge that a little bit here and there and I don't use anything non-renewable during fights unless strictly necessary I may do other runs later that don't abide by these but this is how I like to do my first playthrough so I can dig into fights and have a pleasant struggle learning mechanics and then overcoming them if you are on the opposite end of my method and enjoy destroying bosses by using every trick and ability available to you safely casting magic tailoring your gear to maximize defenses and exploit the boss's weaknesses and summoning a friend or using an ash Spirit then if that's fun to you then that's great your play style is valid and your boss kill is valid it's just that we're playing entirely different games at that point and don't share much in common to compare experiences we're like two people that went to the gym and did different workouts we can tell each other how we feel as we leave but because we did totally different things we can't compare them fairly but we don't have to the open world and these build and play style choices are Elden Ring's way of providing difficulty options accessibility methods and also more fun ways to play for different people and there's some beauty here and that some builds that some people find easy are ones that other people find difficult so it's not always the same thing although in general there are some easier methods than others the Dark Souls games have always had this to some extent with kindling bonfires and Dark Souls 1 being one of the best difficulty selection methods of all time because it's so easy to understand so easy to use and the base level is still a good amount of difficulty and at the top level it's not exactly a pushover either with that much healing it's a great way of doing things and for that reason I don't understand why these games are the ones that the difficulty in gaming discussion orbits around when they do have easy modes already they do I don't get it sorry I'm going off script my play style is not the best one but it is the best for me Elden ring is simultaneously the most difficult and the easiest game romsoft has made because of this it is easier to collect fighting options than ever easier to get a summon to help than ever easier to grind out levels for power than ever and even not feel like you're grinding that much at all while doing so because there's just so much side content to do you can still fight bosses at level 1 naked with your bare fists if you like and the range of difficulty that starts around there all the way up to using everything you can possibly cram onto your character is a great thing not perfect of course but great pretty much everyone does this naturally as they play these games either they understand them enough to go for a type of challenge mode or easy mode or they like the idea of role-playing a type of character and stick within the bounds of what that character would be capable of the starting classes are proof of this and also a great way to get into this mindset there can still be some problems here with difficulty on your first time through not being set right for some playstyles either too easy or too hard but that's another problem made worse from open World level balancing and might actually be outright impossible to solve effectively in a game with this much Freedom some responsibility is always going to be on the player to do this right and not always on the game developer but hey from's guilty here too so then Y is my biggest issue with the game related to this well simply put Elden ring made me feel like I was playing the game wrong and that my playstyle and choices that I use for all the other games in this series were no longer valid let's do a big rewind back through the whole series firstly though I want to quickly justify lumping these games together because sakuro is obviously quite different from the others and Elden ring is two Souls like is a weird word and it isn't exactly what I'm fond of because it's semantically awkward but it's stuck and become a standardized term some people argue against it because they don't realize that it's made up of two equally important parts they just see the souls and not the like like doesn't mean identical it's also not clone either it means just that the games are alike they share enough similarities that they can be comfortably grouped in proximity with each other as a sub-genre the use of difficulty bonfire type checkpoints High commitment attacks some sort of Estus flask that refreshes on death blood stains stamina systems atmosphere fog doors themes even the scale of the world and how the camera feels to operate while playing there are so many other elements too that could be thrown in here but the basic gist is that if you have enough of these but not all then you can say the game is a Soul's like just in the same way that you can say Fallout 4 and do maternal or both both first-person shooters obviously but they are incredibly different games if these games were in a genre that were just emerging right now like if we were in an alternative timeline where first person Intruders were only just being made then I guarantee you that these two would be having the same kind of discussions that we have right now about souls like these aren't comparable we can't put these in the same thing and yeah I get it but you know genres are dumb and they're just there for classifications we just need to move on so many Off Script moments on this one streamer Joe's coming through again sakuro is the clear outlier here and the closest of these from breaking away from the realm of souls likes but it's easy to forget that Dark Souls 2 bloodborne and Demon Souls are also very different because of their healing systems the way that healing Works in games is one of the most important things for dictating how the game can function in terms of not just difficulty but also constructing gameplay I've said this a few times in past videos already so I'll be quick well you know for me your health bar in any game is the amount of mistakes you are allowed to make before you have to retry if the game is generous with checkpoints and has very short challenges then those mistakes might be limited to one like in Celeste if your game has a healing system then this changes the health bar to being short-term mistakes and your healing is the system that refills them long-term mistakes so if you have virtually unlimited healing that can be applied instantly with no downside like in breath of the wild then the only way to lose is by making too many short-term mistakes without realizing that you need to heal or choosing to not engage with the healing system other games that have automatically regenerating Health encourage switching between different modes go offensive and risk taking damage and then play evasively and defensively for a bit until your short-term mistakes meter fills up again and you can jump back into The Fray this can actually be a very thrilling system if done properly but it isn't in Call of Duty and that both states of play are developed enough to feel like you're having fun whether you are attacking or evading games like Hollow Knight combine both and that you need to be successful while offensive to earn the capability to try to pick a moment to heal then there are games like Dark Souls which instead drain the potential mistakes you can make from your health bar and bottle them instead if your HP is four or five mistakes then your flask may have 2230 depending on the balancing the trick is that you have to keep track of this and similar to hollow Knight pick the correct moment to heal so it's not completely mindless it's easy to understand how important this is if you imagine all of these allowed mistakes were given to you all at once you wouldn't need to keep track of your health anymore because you could easily go into a frenzy on bosses and kill them before they could kill you bosses usually don't have a healing system because they are already in this mode you have to exploit all the mistakes they are allowed to make through their big health bars this system is fantastic for difficult boss encounters and enemy gauntlets through levels since it means you can die very quickly if you're not playing well enough in a short window but also isn't crushingly difficult if you do make a mistake here and there in a longer window of time however the healing found in this system is finite under most conditions if you get a message rated up or get lucky after killing a monster you have a chance to get some healing back but it's so rare that I'm going to dismiss it the finite nature of the healing coupled with the game's intent for high difficulty so you feel like you've accomplished something by beating it means that damage has to be avoidable for the game to function fairly or at all in my opinion all damage has to be predictable and preventable none of this has changed since my first video and the challenge of the game is learning the ways you can predict enemy attacks and then get yourself out of Harm's Way while dealing damage back when you can Dark Souls 2 bloodborne and Demon Souls aren't like this they have effectively unlimited sources of healing through life gems healing grass and blood vials which drop from enemies as you kill them bloodborne is technically the closest here because healing is more restricted in boss fights since you can't get more blood vials to drop while you're in them but the regain recovery option to hit the boss back after taking damage in a vampiric vengeance is quite a potent way to stay alive on many fights so it's Dark Souls 1 3 and Elden ring that stay the closest to this limited system through flask killing yes there are some other ways to heal with Humanity Embers equipment and spells but these either also use limited resources or are unreasonably time consuming to gather or are so slow like the life regen rings that I find it easy to ignore them if you disagree then you can disregard this whole bit on healing if you like Elden Ring's biggest problem is that it has this healing system but has many fights with attacks that are unreactable and sources of damage that are unavoidable for most of these you still can prevent and predict damage but they require such tedious drawn out tactics that I do not consider it reasonable or they require specific build choices or even changing your build entirely for a part of the fight to be something you can safely deal with even still with all of this build changing in mind there are a couple instances of attacks in this game being unavoidable damage and guilty of unfairly sapping some of your healing power and the reason I think Eldon ring does this the culprit here that is guilty of This truly heinous crime is my favorite game in this list sakuro this is all Sakura's fault let's rewind again attacks in these games come in two types melee and ranged spells that create damage zones on the floor I am including in the range category although they're fairly rare these categories can be combined because they follow the same two potential flavors in how they can be constructed the first is a straightforward attack that you can sight read these are the bread and butter of souls like attacks sight reading means that you can see the enemy is preparing for a swing and then Dodge it when the attack starts to come at you think the most simple type of Sword swings and projectiles that slowly come toward you and you can time your response to when they get to you with a roll or a block or just moving out of the way whatever you need to do the second type are delayed snap attacks that you have to feel out the timing on these are trickier to explain but you know what these are if you've played the game the boss charges up a laser beam and if you dodge it when the beam appears you're too late you just got hit you need to dodge right before it by learning the timing for when you saw this attack a few times before this and then repeat that test melee attacks can also be like this with the Enemy entering a stance which after a set amount of time releases like a loaded spring into an attack so fast that it's not reactable you have to know the timing and Dodge preemptively the Watchdogs are a perfect example of this with no exceptions that I can think of right now every attack in these games is one of these two types and an absurd amount of variety and different timings and twists are added on top of them even ground-based AOE attacks can either show up with a telegraph that you respond to or have a visual or audio Telegraph that you learn the timing on and then Dodge even Dark Souls 1 had this stuff with the Scythe Spike on Neato that you can sometimes run Dodge but it's better to roll it at a certain point in the screen Telegraph that you learn is the best time to press Dodge added on top of these two flavors are things like tracking attacks to ensure that you learn the timing instead of just strafe around the boss short and long combos with a mixture of straightforward and delayed attacks so you can never be sure what you're gonna get and have to learn the whole combo things like breath attacks which you can't roll or block and have to run around but can still either be sight readable or require a timing test from when you see the beginning of the animation grab attacks which are some of the worst in these games that still obey these rules kind of but the error in front of the enemy model becomes the attack instead of their arms or a weapon please stop making these from attacks that end in an explosion or a quick follow-up after Trail meaning that your Dodge has to be precisely time to avoid both stages of the attack or you need to dodge immediately again afterward and while this list isn't exactly exhaustive lastly we have a long assortment of very flashy moves involving charging up weapons and jumping in the air and the like which are focusing on being visually impressive this is the type Dark Souls 3 went hard into with teleport spell effects long jumps and so on all to Dazzle you into thinking it's a different type of attack which works for the most part I think back in 2015 I said in my very first video on Dark Souls 1 that the combat in that game is deeply engaging and complex enough to feel rewarding I still stand by that statement but playing more games like this as they've come out has made me realize I didn't understand what I was truly enjoying in that game the move set on the player is quite limited and it was the game's enemy and encounter variety that I was appreciating more in terms of depth in terms of game feel however Dark Souls 1 is still excellent from has done it better since but it's easy to forget that the grounded melee combat with the cool stamina system in that game was unusual because it felt good most melee combat before that didn't and many games still don't feel as good today playing bloodborne and Neo made me understand that Dark Souls 1 success was mostly in its complexity on the enemy side the problem that stems from this then as can be seen in the types of attacks we just went through is that this is quite a limited source for that complexity to continue with fresh variety over the course of many games in a whole new series and so quite naturally fromsoft entered an arms race against itself a literal arms race really because it's mostly been about how fast it can make the arms move for these enemy attacks Dark Souls 1 and 2 allow you to dodge roll block and physically move out of the way of some effects that's all you can do and in general players who choose to block won't be doing much dodging and those who typically choose to dodge won't be doing any blocking period this lack of response variety isn't exactly for a tall ground for creating varied enemy encounters but the gameplay was fresh enough that it worked for Dark Souls 1. in the sequel we're already seeing some issues although that's far from the only problem in Dark Souls 2 but let's leave the poor kid alone had suffered enough bloodborne is interesting because it commits to just one reaction dodging because of that and the addition of the regain system fights were much faster and more aggressive dodging now took less stamina and had less commitment allowing you to attack faster and more often the game also doubled down on offensive options with trick weapons having two modes with most providing large sweeps or the capability to Zone enemies away from you and equipment's weight is now irrelevant so you can move more freely than ever so instead of blocking or rolling you were Dash stepping weaving hits healing quickly and controlling how close enemies could get to you with sweeping attacks knowing that every player had most of the power in this kind of Loadout unless they were specifically bucking the system for added challenge meant that encounters could be comfortably designed with it in mind parrying is also always present as a more risk reward version of countering some attacks instead of dodging them and it works bloodborne is fantastic Dark Souls 3 was a return to more build variety but the influence of bloodborne never went away some players like to say that Dark Souls 3 has bloodborne bosses but with a Dark Souls moveset for the player there is some truth to this but if you agree with that wholeheartedly I encourage you to go back and play Dark Souls 1 for a bit and then jump over to Dark Souls 3 right after I think you'll be surprised how much faster you can move and how much better it is to dodge roll and how much better movement feels in general enemies have been powered up in Dark Souls 3 but so have you even saying that by the end of the game you are being pressed up against the weight of fromm's design limitations with a system that is either roll or block for defense again the game receives some love with weapon Arts sort of like another trick weapon system for alternative movesets which increases offensive options but these are quite varied and hard to balance around so on the reaction side of things we're still at the Dark Souls 1 level I don't want to come across as hating on Dark Souls 3 here because I like it a lot and think it particularly has a great spread of boss fights if you include the DLC despite the harsh limitations on what kind of responses they could build encounters around they did a pretty good job while maintaining a high level of spectacle mostly Fair difficulty and two fights against Duos which are the Pinnacle of the series double demons and sister phase 2. learning how to roll and punish these attack patterns is an enjoyable time and remember blocking has that same kind of learning process too since you need to learn when you can safely release your guard state to regain stamina between hits nameless King especially stands out as a fight that isn't crushingly challenging to me anymore but isn't too easy either all the while having entirely Fair Combos and a mix of sight readable and delayed attacks looks cool too that's the progression we've had from Demon Souls Dark Souls 1 2 3 and bloodborne but then my boy Sakura shows up and ruins everything on the offense side you only have one weapon but that moveset has a whole tree of different weapon Arts to learn charge moves that you can use out of dodging and running and the Shinobi prosthetic options that you always have available as complementary moves which many bosses have specific weaknesses to that you can learn and exploit if necessary kind of like spells in the previous games this is still weaker compared to the variety of different builds in the other games but the true Master stroke of Sakura's combat is that the defensive play is also part of your offensive capabilities in a fight you will be asked not to just Dodge or block but both and getting better at timing each of these means you deal more damage to the boss you will also be tested on the directions of your Dodges for counter-attacking and responding to forward thrusts and many fights also ask for you to do jumping responses and the occasional grapple move compare this all to Dark Souls where when a dragon fight asks me to run around the breath attack to hit its head instead of just some more Dodge rolls and I think wow feeling spicy tonight half from software and unironically enjoy the switch up I think the Improvement is clear however this keeps going nine times out of ten you are also rewarded for aggressive play attacking the boss instead of staying in neutral either to deal damage or force them to deflect you and interrupt their move is not just entirely valid it's sometimes the best play dodging and then attacking is also better early in fights to get enemy Health down so their posture bar damage builds up faster so you're not always in the same mode and doing the same thing remember that sakuro doesn't have stamina in a traditional sense so you can do all of these moves and even run around as much as you like and it's only when your posture bar is nearing full that you need to slow down and hold the guard state to recover it this means it's easy to Sprint around lots of attacks that enemies have but you won't want to because of the most important change Sakura brings to the table dealing with enemy attacks head on is a way of dealing damage to them if you deflect every attack in an enemy combo then you are filling up their posture bar and are inching closer to exposing them for a death blow there is a huge difference in the type of playstyle you can start with if you want to play cautiously while learning and then confidently as you're approaching Mastery the result is entering a flow state of gameplay that's up there with the likes of the best Platformers like Celeste in the Mario games and do maternals combat for how enjoyable it is which is easily my favorite first person shooter of all time for exactly this kind of play you can always either be in a hyper aggressive state or a Neo one with the Matrix responsive State while fighting and at the best moments you will be flipping between them seamlessly in Dark Souls you can find yourself approaching combos in a memorization game of when the boss does X move I need to dodge instantly then delay Dodge then Dodge instantly again then two delay Dodges and then I can attack and while you certainly can play Sakura like that too for memorizing attack patterns you can also just respond to everything that's coming at you on the Fly and feel like you're dueling instead of acting as an algorithm that knows the perfect way to deal with each attack as the boss queues them up Sakura isn't perfect about this I have criticism for that game too and an unreleased video that's been lost to The Witcher hell but it is far better about making its boss fights fun ordeals and both how you can enter the slow state of play and for it being balanced around carefully measured increases in power from attack and health upgrades in a semi-linear world so why has all this done damage to Eldon ring well many of the final fights in the game feel like Sakura fights without understanding why Sakura fights work so well and without updating the player tools enough to reasonably deal with them it's like the Dark Souls 3 and bloodborne thing all over again although this time it's really really applicable if a boss can enter incredibly long combo chains before you get a chance to hit them then it's important to make dealing with those combos a worthwhile experience and a fun experience as we just went over in sakuro that works because every time a boss attacks you in that game it's an opportunity to reverse the damage dealt back at them in Elden ring if you dodge an attack it just means you don't take damage and also costs you stamina so the longer the chains get between chances to counter-attack the more it makes sense to just stay away from the boss while it's doing them and hit them at the end here's an enemy type that shows this beautifully because sakro has one just like it in that game this isn't initially daunting but then surprisingly easy test for you to chain deflections and then counter in Elden ring you just stay away and watch until it's done and hopefully get a punish if it's done maybe if this was a one-off then I'd be happy about it because it looks cool and it's kind of funny but this spills over so hard into the boss design philosophy that I'm wondering what the hell happened to the team that designed sakuro How could a group that understood what makes a good combat system so well there not see the issues with Eldon ring if a boss attacks a hundred times in a row and you're expected to dodge every swing and only then after all 100 get a chance to hit them then I think we can all agree that's a problem so how low does that number have to be before it's now a reasonable challenge because some of these bosses often enter States in this game of not being able to be safely attacked for well over 20 seconds and in the case of the last boss jumping around so much we can measure it in literal minutes if the game wants long combos like this then it needs a system that deals damage to the boss in some way as an incentive for me to risk dealing with it all head-on especially so if the act of rolling at all means it's actually hurting my damage potential if I'm out of stamina by the end which actually happened to me with an investment of over 40 endurance when it came to responding to some of these long attack chains if iframing through an attackment the boss took stagger damage or something then now we're cooking but I also realized at this point I am literally just describing sakuro not only did the last set of bosses in this game attack for so long that it makes my videos look short they also don't have clear and consistent punish Windows afterward going back to Dark Souls 3 I was shocked to see how often I could safely be aggressive from neutral on bosses and between many of their combo swings even with a big slow ass weapon that you can see on the screen right now bosses and Elden ring will do anime acrobatics for a whole episode including chains that involve them taking off into the air Landing into an attack that explodes and then taking off again into the air because they're still not done like a plane coming into the runway and taking off again when they realize their landing gear is broken look there are tons of other problems like this in the game that could be fixed along with some grab boxes and hitboxes and all that usual [ __ ] but the fundamental issue here is this it is too often a dice roll guessing game of whether or not I can safely attack these bosses as a melee build the first problem is that many of these long combos don't indicate clearly enough that they're done either because they go on for much longer than you think or combos can now bleed from one to another without much warning and you're just meant to watch I guess this is not only fine but great in Sakura because it adds to the Flow State you can enter between you and the boss but in an Elden ring you don't have those tools my second part of this problem is my biggest issue with the game period which is that some bosses have optional extensions on combos that they sometimes only do if you attack them picture this you've worked out which attacks are punishable on a boss and you're finally feeling confident about taking them down you've hit the boss after a specific combo ends a few times now and that's the one you're sinking your sword into while you're learning how to exploit the rest of them it's the sixth time in the fight that you've successfully dodged a string you position yourself to attack and then as you hit the button the boss reads your Gamepad input and then randomly decides that this time their combo isn't over and leaps into the air to punish your attempt to punish them do you know what this means as a player from soft this means how angry did I sound there I'm sorry this means the attack is no longer safely punishable this means that whenever the boss does this combo you either have to hope they also do the extension on their own so you can punish that or you just watch impotently if they don't because if you had attacked them there was a risk that they would have done damage to you instead I haven't even gotten to the [ __ ] that is the unavoidable hits yet and I'm already furious with these bosses there's so much about this combat systems design that is based around forcing you to wait around while the boss has fun and it's not even another person it's an AI I do not understand it the end result is encouraging builds that can deal damage to the boss while staying away from them or just hit trading in Dark Souls 1 through 3 I could learn almost every pattern and even though I'd still mess up now and then I knew it was my mistake and if I tried hard enough I could actively engage the boss and deal damage without ever getting hit myself in secro you can respond to everything while doing that damage in Elden ring my patience is being tested to wait and wait and wait and then hopefully The Witcher 3 video comes out and there isn't some Secret Extension to this combo I'm punishing that I don't know about hopefully the boss doesn't die swirl on resisting a stagger or randomly decide to dodge away from this hit denying the opportunity I had to wait so long for I know there is a way to do these fights hitless if you're patient enough or build yourself to burst them down quickly but like I said at the start of this section that makes me feel like I'm playing the game wrong because it's not about it being too hard it's that it's not fun it's boring and I'm not trying to weasel out of saying it's not too hard it is too hard that is the problem but it's that it's so hard in a way that makes it not fun I would love this level of difficulty if it was engaging but it's not because it involves so much waiting what about these other issues I keep talking about then for some of you these will be worse than what I just went into above but while they are annoying to me they pale in comparison to the complete erosion of predictable and preventable from this series and what frankly feels like an unintended side effect of trying to make the game hard to keep up the series's reputation for being difficult rather than for compelling gameplay the jump button it's a good addition for exploration not so much for combat jumping attacks are powerful and pushed on you as a reliable way to stagger enemies but there's no stagger bar and I suspect that during some moves bosses take zero stagger damage so it's a complete shot in the dark for how you can learn to stagger these enemies jumping attacks are also a godsend for slow heavy weapon users because they normalize attack times but have such long recoveries that you're once again incentivized into trading if the boss has such a high chance of hitting you anyway when you hit them then you may as well do it on your own terms hell it'll even end the fight faster War still is the lack of the communication about which attacks you can jump over this should be a celebrated inclusion in the defensive options of the series and brings it closer to parody with sakuro instead there are no symbols telling you that some moves can be jumped and you just have to figure it out which would be fine except there's little Rhyme or Reason to what you can jump you'd think that all ground-based attacks and low sweeps would be jumpable but they aren't at least not always you'd think attacks that come at you so high they're between your nipples and shoulders wouldn't be jumpable but some of them are and so from a lack of communication and piss-poor consistency what should have been my favorite addition to combat is a disappointment unavoidable attacks these come in three types that are equally Troublesome the first are directly unavoidable MOG Lord of blood has a phase change that hits you with three highly damaging entirely unavoidable blasts that also heal him if you're lucky enough to find the wondrous physic flask thingy that allows you to resist this damage and it does significantly less but is still unavoidable damage if the boss didn't also have a nigh unreactable flaming claw response that can punish slow weapon strikes then I'd be on board with considering this a cool gimmick for the fight the last boss elvenbeast can summon a homing orb that I've shown a few times in the video by now that I believe can only be avoided if you are rocking the Bloodhound step weapon art if you don't then you're going to be taking a chaotic amount of light show damage that can also overlap with other attacks the Beast can use I can't believe this fight made it into the final release of the game it's so awful the second type are moves that you can avoid under some conditions but they then dictate how you can interact with the boss these are the most Insidious to me and were one of the top sources of boredom and frustration I had with the game here are three examples but these aren't the only ones godric may be my favorite fight but he has a whirlwind move he starts so quickly that the only way you could possibly hope to avoid it is if you hit Dodge roll the instant you ever see his model move and even then you still may not be quick enough this is below 20 frames of Animation from start to damage and that's my criteria for something being unreactable anything a few frames above that would still be a demanding challenge of your reaction speed but possible remember that this isn't like a click test reaction that you can find online you also have to know the appropriate response from the tell which takes up more of your reaction bandwidth so to speak the existence of this move means you can never stay in melee range with godric while he's in neutral so as soon as you punish one of his moves get the hell away from him and joust his next one which once again encourages you staying away from enemies during Combos and not dealing with their movesets head on I still love this boss because he looks so cool though and his Gap closers were fun for me to react to in general this game is actually pretty great for the visual variety of bosses it's just the mechanics to let them down Elder ring might be the best for that actually for visual variety it's better than Sakura for sure maybe Dark Souls 1 is up there Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 yeah I would give it to Elder ring for sure this has been another Off Script moment I hope you like them godskin Noble has a similar attack in which he can do a belly flop explosion this one is even harder to roll because it projects an AOE by sheer luck I managed to be rolling once when he did it and I still took damage so this is again a move that forces you away from him if he's in a neutral state Millennia who is the blade of mikola by the way will go down in history in this series for her version of this problem if she's not patched in even if she is the infamy she's already garnered at this point May last forever waterfowl blade is the most oppressive move from has ever put into one of these games but even if we ignore how difficult it is to learn how to dodge it defines the fight in a way that makes it boring this is the most important part of why this move is troublesome A good rule to follow if you want to avoid damage on this fight is this if Millennia has not done this move in the past 20 seconds you cannot be within 10 feet of her if you are then you are risking her starting this up and not having enough time to get away from her first set you don't even need to be within Striking Distance to be too close outside of some speed boost using like Bloodhound step again the first wave of this attack is outright unable to be rolled and at the time of writing this only has one speedrunner tier level manipulation trick in making her miss you which is Out Of Reach of practically all players I don't want to show any anyone else's footage in this video because of copyright concerns but basically you run a circle around her as she's in the air for the first part and at a specific point you dash away and then she goes in the opposite direction and doesn't hit you for the first set she can do this move after you knock her below 70 health or so and she continues to be able to use it whenever she wants after this with a cool down of what feels like 20 seconds this means you cannot stay close to her cannot hit her and cannot punish any of her other moves if she has not done this recently without risking taking damage it would actually be better if this move was on a timer instead of a cooldown because then at least you could reliably play around it because while she can do it doesn't mean she will she can go ages without using it I've seen people kill this boss with an entire Phase 2 where she doesn't do it once and yet the potential for her being able to means you're playing into the risk by not waiting this issue is so blatant that she can instantly rev up waterfowl blade in response to being knocked down below 70 life as you can see here if you want to play this like a typical boss of learning how to avoid patterns and punish then strap yourself in for a boring time because it's not like every single one of her other moves is safely punishable either that's why she's called Millennia because it takes a millennia to be able to safely hit her I think this goes to show you how much the game encourages trading if you have the patience for this then more power to you I do not after hitting so many bosses in a row with issues like this I put on the biggest weapon I had and turned to the grug because if I'm going to trade it'll be on my terms and with dealing the most damage I guess I laid about three examples for this one because here's a bonus fourth one Beast clergyman has a similarly unreactable move in which he sweeps his weapon in a backwards motion from neutral like the others the only hope you ever have of rolling this is to instinctively hit the button if the boss ever does any motion at all if you are close to him and therefore just like that staying in melee range of this enemy is risking damage the third and final type of unavoidable attack requires another return to sakuro this guy is Spearman Steve he's a pretty fun enemy because he requires using the awesome looking makiri counter he also has a quirk that is so odd and I think unique in the game that I don't know if it's a bug or not seen here if you jump when you're close to Steve then there's a random chance he will instantly thrust his spear into your face and this attack comes so quickly that the perilous warning sound and symbol is like a joke it is possible to deflect this if you just make deflecting a part of your jump in fact it's so reliable that you can kill him quite easily by baiting out this move but most vitally for our discussion here he doesn't always do it and yet Steve will sometimes do it after you respond to his attack that requires you to jump you can get the warning of a sweep jump and eat a spearhead to the face when Steve cancels out of his sweep halfway because you triggered his dice roll thrust on your shift to being in the air this reminds me very much of the issues I had with pontiff Sullivan in Dark Souls 3 where States and animations are being skipped or munched and it's unclear what's intended from a gameplay perspective I like that Steve can do this because I'm clearly biased for Sakura because it's a dynamic way of mixing moves and responses but the fact that the only way I can respond to this is just to assume he's going to do it and preemptively block and if he doesn't do it then I just wasted my jump opportunity leaves me unsatisfied with how this works even though I like it in theory this links to the issue I have with optional extensions on combos that we just spoke about but for an example specific to Elven ring of this we need look no further than radagon another visually stunning boss with a big problem that made me turn to the grug in general this is how I approached many of the game's bosses near the ends I would respect them and try to avoid and punish but the second I got a whiff of unreactable [ __ ] I just traded them down toward the end of the fight radagon gains the ability to teleport nothing personal kid away from any attack you make on him and there's flat out no way I saw to predict when he will do this and no time to react to it if he did so in response to me trying to punish one of his combos I would attack he would dice roll into a Teleport and then re-emerge on top of me to do damage now if the game was built around this type of thing I would be quite happy with this kind of interaction just like enemies having input reading powers to always throw a projectile when you heal it would be fun to have a battle of wits where you can react to their reaction and they could cycle it forward with another reaction until eventually one of you loses and damages dealt that could be fun being helpless because the enemy randomly lucked out is not I'll end the section with this we're at the point with this boss design now that player attacks need much faster recoveries and possibly the ability to cancel again like Sakura allows for the first tenth of the swing or so the move buffer also has to be changed to avoid times where you can hit roll get hit before it goes through because you mistimed it and then roll after recovering from the stagger into another hit that you weren't allowed to react to because it kept your first roll inputs you should only eat one hit for messing up a timing not two because of the input buffer enemies in this series usually have to abide by the same rules as the player and that's not true anymore unfortunately it's hard to know what's intended here though are these issues the result of from deciding they want the game to be this punishing and a bit unfair or were these the last string of bosses which are all coincidentally at the end of the game in areas that don't have the enemy variety that we're used to and also feel a little rushed in other ways not tested enough to work out these Kinks or is this type of punishment a kink for from in another way on my second playthrough I used magic and Ash Spirit summons I also picked up a moon Veil thinking it would work well with my spells as a side piece and that ended up being more powerful than my magic that sword is so busted that it overtook it my side piece was stronger than my main which is the only time in my life I'll ever have something in common with Drake playing this way the game was a breeze and I began to wonder if this was the intended experience for difficulty and anything harder is a challenge mode akin to going fists only and the like but the way someone's work still breaks the AI on fights to such an extent that I can't accept it why would Fromm put all the work into the game just to have you use a summon and not even have a fight just a boss pinata that ignores you while you're summon holds aggro the footage you're seeing now is after this ability and the moon Veil were nerfed in a patch too they're still that powerful if this is the kind of game they want their souls line to be now then that's fine stuff like Sakura and bloodborne can be the more focused ones built around more narrow gameplay options but that change needs to be communicated better and honestly they're also wasting so much time and money making all these extravagant moves if that's the case because you barely see them when playing like this that problem is here too for me the move set of the Moon Veil and Magic when fighting through levels was quite a lot of fun but it had the opposite problem of Dark Souls 1. things on the player end were varied enough but the enemies were not because they don't know how to react to this kind of Loadout it was like I was Sakura in a Dark Souls game and they didn't know what to do they still Dodge on spellcast instead of incoming damage boss AI doesn't know how to handle more than one Target and enemies will just stand there and let you shoot them or even bosses will let you weapon art them down if you stay at a mid-range distance it's the same problem that was in Dark Souls 1 playing like this makes you feel like you're the only one in the world with a gun the game practically screams at you to use range Magic on some fights but then when you do it's boring and also so safe that you now need a good reason to do anything else which the game doesn't provide the world of Elden ring is stunning The Journey I had through it was amazing the dungeon design was a work of genius and the combat that filled it as the game near the end bored me to tears even if the visual Feast continues if these issues are fixed in post-launch support then I'll be happy for that but my first playthrough of this game is tarnished forever because of them and for that I will always remember Elden ring as an experience shattered into two sets of pieces the amazing exploratory parts that will Define all open World Games going forward and the fights that were so bad that they marked the end of my interest in this series foreign here are a few loose points I couldn't fit into the script naturally and as you could probably tell it was already getting messy toward the end and sorry for all the improvised bets this bit improvised sentence for this wasn't but this was I'm apologizing for improvising with an improvisation go me the new guard counter ability is really cool at first I thought it was Overkill because Shields tend to be easier to use than rolling because of how safe they are in terms of timings and the like but figuring out when to use your counter respective to your stamina and the enemy combo is good I'd like to do a full shield run because of this it might be more fun than rolling or a hybrid of both could be ideal the barricade Art of War is another neat addition for this loadout you're clearly meant to play with something in each hand I'm showing some timings for swings in recovery here with different loadouts and when you consider how much more damage power stancing 2 weapons is compared to two-handing just one it's an easy conclusion that something isn't balanced right I don't think dual wielding should be the only way to play a melee only guy without a shield this is even worse when you realize that all dual wielders can still two-hand a weapon for that move set with one command meaning the one and only drawback is the added equipment load stress which is practically meaningless as the game goes on if you're not playing with two weapons even if they are colossals or a weapon plus a shield or caster thing then you are making things much harder for yourself than you might think compared to choosing to do the same in the previous games with going two-handed on one weapon getting your first great Rune is an amazing moment you're given what feels like an organic quest to unlock the power of this huge legendary thing and it makes the world feel massive you have to figure out how to get to the appropriate Divine Tower overcome some Challenge on the way and then have this mystical conclusion at the top like a great epilogue for the Legacy dungeon you just did and then the tutorial message lies to you and says you'll get some benefit from equipping it that can be improved further by using a rune Arc but nope you need the Rune arc on for anything to happen at all this sucks and made doing these Journeys a hell of a lot less exciting if these were fun passives even at low levels without the Rune Arc then this would have been a very rewarding system and made these quests much more memorable I hope this is glitched and fixed later but like I just said even if so my first run for these is ruined forever the camera is much better in Sakura for giant enemies it moves and changes so you can always see what they're doing and I don't understand why there's such a big regression from that game to this one dragonlord in this game also has an AOE indicator for a big explosion he can do why isn't that a standard for communication on difficult to judge moves likewise the double demon fight in ring city has a trail that appears before a fire attack goes along the floor and you have a similar fight in this game where you're fighting two gargoyles that can do a poison attack from off screen in the same way and it just shows up dealing damage to you it's like they forgot all the lessons they learned from the previous games malacath sucks so bad that I don't even want to talk about him because I'll have to fight him more to demonstrate my points and I don't want to put myself through it meanwhile this Godfrey fight felt cool but I beat him so quickly on all of my runs that I can't say much he's a fair boss with too little HP so he's poorly designed in another way would have been better if he was a longer fight to match his fairness like Elden Ring's version of nameless King here are some more examples of bad boss placements the falling star beast in the mines is terrible it can roll into the wall for ages because it's not meant to be fought in an enclosed space and yet here it is most of its moves are actually fun but this isn't set up right at all the one in the volcano zone is much better and also acts as an awesome surprising moment of tense escalation when you jump up with torrents the other two falling star beasts in the game Rob this fight of being a special unique memory the game would have been better off without the others even if nothing replaced them similarly the magma worm Dragon things are all over the place the climb up from Leonia to Altus could have been made more epic if it was like the reverse of what you do in Blighttown for reaching a new area this could have been expanded to a mini Legacy dungeon and if a unique boss was too much work making this the only place you see this magma worm would have been great it kind of matches gaping dragon in terms of How It's structured here doesn't it huh that's weird to realize especially since this fight is also crammed into another small mine room in caled where it's also not tuned properly the amount of stomping and lava you have to deal with in a small room is just dumb but hey I'm happy that the moonvale users have to suffer to get their weapon radon and Reichert and some of the other gimmick bosses in this game are also hard to judge visually they're very cool thematically they're very cool too they're some of the most successful gimmick bosses that the series has ever had but in terms of gameplay radon you can fight one of three ways solo on foot solo on your horse or a mix of those while summoning the Army around the area that's probably the best way to do it but it still is kind of boring on horse it has the problem that you can just get knocked off and then killed in general the horse is kind of lame and I really hate that you can be out in the world and suddenly one little guy can hit you once and that staggers you into being hit a million times and then knocked off your horse but it also doesn't work here even though it kind of feels intended Verdon is on a horse you can be on a horse too you're allowed to do it so you can close the gap between you and him and also you can jump over some of his Shockwave moves but yet it's still not good because because you don't have the iframes needed to dodge all the rest of his moves you can joust him but he also has some quick attacks that can just knock you off so it's not really ever safe on foot the issue is that you can't see him all that clearly but it's still probably the best way to fight him I guess I don't know I really don't like this fight and it's also received changes in a patch so I guess that shows you that other people aren't too happy about it either right card fares better and just feels like a better version of the yorm fight from Dark Souls 3. the weapon you get here is really cool to use it feels satisfying to hit him with the head with it and while my first time I just ran into the lava to see if I could kill him with my regular sword I think this way is actually kind of fun but when I did do it this way he just fell over and the fight was more of a spectacle which is fine some fights can be spectacles another issue with the bosses especially the multi-phase ones is that you can't really design the first part of the fight as well as you could because it has to be a Prelude to the second one now this can work if it's the same entity that you're fighting or there's a phase change halfway through their health bar and it's balanced accordingly but when it's two fights that are put together I can't help but think that this is just a bad idea unless it's done for a really really good reason on the one hand we have things like the Ronaldo fight where it feels like the first part is kind of a fun gimmick kind of like a better version of deacons of the deep from Dark Souls 3 again you know it's okay but once you see phase two this just becomes part of the run back which is already kind of long so I don't know if this was a good idea it kind of limits the design space that they have for the second part of this fight which is kind of lame and could have been much better to match How Majestic it looks like this is a really cool fight kind of feels like Ron the vacuous spider from bloodborne and yet it just Falls over it's kind of a shame radagon is worse this is one of the most epic moments in the game and even though I complained about this fight earlier I really did enjoy the link back to the first reveal trailer of the game and the music kicking in and the way that the boss's attacks link back to that trailer and the shattering of the Elden ring it's a really cool concept and yet because this has to serve as the first part or introduction of a totally new fight that comes right after that you have to do again to see that fight it really limits how far they could have gone with it admittedly it does feel like a full fight so I don't feel like they missed out on too much but this might come back to some balance issues or it wasn't tested properly I'll get my final dig on eldenbees here by saying that it just flat out feels like this wasn't tested at all to the point that I suspect that you were meant to be able to use your horse for this fight and they just forgot to flag the room for horse combat and now that the game has been out for so long they're too embarrassed to you know admit that and flip it back on like Miyazaki could come to my house and tell me to my face that you weren't meant to have the horse here for real and I wouldn't believe him because it just it just feels like you're meant to have the horse with how this monster can just jump around the place and when you're chasing him on foot it just feels absolutely awful there's all this dead time that I just don't understand like it also thematically fits with torrent choosing you at the beginning and then just becoming this like non-entity that you just ride around on it would have been nice if torrent came back for the final fight as a link back to this new thing that was introduced in this game but no instead the fight just doesn't feel tested doesn't feel finished and is just miserable this is possibly the worst final fight in any of these games including Dark Souls 2 which oh God can I say that like both these bosses kind of look cool I won't show the Dark Souls 2 boss but like uh maybe eldenbeast isn't that bad it's pretty bad though I don't know oh man I hate the fight so much I hate it I do not understand who thought it was a good idea to reuse the ancestor spirit and asked all boss encounters I can almost accept the spirit as being one of a few of these altars in the underground but the whole thing copy and pasted including lighting the altars to activate it leaves me dumbfounded Estella is worse because it's the climax of one of the best sequences the game sends you on and then the boss is duplicated as if from a casual hand wave in a cave mine dungeon in the snow fields why would you do that why like imagine if there was another Millennia somewhere just with with green hair and no explanation like what speaking of let's also complain about Millennia some more the fact that her healing ability still works when you block her attacks is ludicrous if it was for a greatly reduced amount then that would be fine but her full healing on blocked hits like she's wielding my glitched out vampiric super Sledge from Fallout 76 invalidates this play style why doesn't she attack the air in front of her to heal as well you should not demand players have to change over to something else at the end of the game or deal with an unbelievably more difficult fight than what it should be compared to how it functions for other builds I want to stress I'm perfectly fine with some builds being better or worse for some fights the issue here is how extremely punishing this is for a core part of some block builds I really wish Caleb had a proper Legacy dungeon an expanded version of the surprisingly good poison Castle in Altus could have worked here I was expecting some sunken insectoid Hive type place under the Central Lake but there's nothing I guess the underground stretch could count as Kayla's dungeon but it doesn't feel like that to me meanwhile Mount gilmir feels like two Legacy zones and one with the outdoor stretch leading into the manor it's a really good double area and before I start going off on some other things and some of the bad hitboxes I found I'm going to end it here properly this time Albin ring is a great game if it gets some DLC I'll probably do a video on that too maybe one day I'll do a commentary style thing for the zones and bosses also on the second Channel some of them I didn't see much because they either died too fast or made me hit trade if hit trading is the future for this series they need to do some big changes for it to be fun bosses need to do less damage but also have way more Health players need fewer healing charges but also need to use them less often lots of balancing like that in my opinion I'm hoping they find a way to make it work but I'm doubtful at the moment my more enthusiastic interest performs games will be whatever they make next that's like sakuro or bloodborne the latter of which seems to be the best way to proceed now it has the best of everything they do and with a few more defensive options or a jump button could rival sakuro for combat complexity while still having build variety from all of the trick weapons somehow I'm still talking I need to stop it's amazing and a little sad how much of Elden Ring's world I could praise in this video and yet for gameplay I ended up showering praise onto other games instead see you next time

Channel: Joseph Anderson

Views: 3,158,937

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Id: nEyjdc-DIb8

Length: 99min 23sec (5963 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022