What Joseph Anderson Got Wrong About Elden Ring

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 system's 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 i do not understand [Music] hello my name is lupine and i am not proud of the footage in this video what you are about to bear witness to is my shame and stubbornness as a strength purist trying to beat melania for the first time i hadn't planned to record any of my first playthrough of elden ring but i lost a bet to my friend's sleep and i had to record my entire ordeal now originally this video was meant to be just a fun little death montage of my dozens if not hundreds of failed attempts at beating melania for the first time since i never streamed it for the boys what was mikala the prodigy of becoming a [ __ ] like endosperm for a tree however my jimmies have been thoroughly wrestled by joseph anderson's recent review of elden ring i'm going to be showing clips from his video as you can see so at the risk of taking him out of context please go watch his video for yourself you will see that we play with the exact same build pure two-hander action with no magic or summons and yet we have completely different opinions on the game jm has done a pretty good job responding to joseph's take on the game's combat and he's a lot more cool-headed than i am but i also don't want you babies who have their mind numb by two hour long video essays into absently nodding along using this video as fuel for the whole elden ring bosses are unfair unbalanced and unfun mentality if you want someone to pander to you because you think the game is too hard you're not gonna find that here i know the comments section is just gonna be full of melania whiners so instead today we're gonna talk about why elder rings bosses even melania are a massive improvement from previous titles and why joseph anderson is a scrub [Music] oh god what do i do no what the [ __ ] what do you even need to do there quick thing before we start this video i tend to get a little salty when i play hard video games what the [ __ ] okay a lot salty if you don't want that go watch bob ross i'm going to be showing my footage of me dying to melania to remind us about how i felt the first time i faced this boss when i tried to just brute force her i thought it would be a neat contrast between how [ __ ] stubborn i was then and the me now speaking to you having played 10 or more playthroughs since then also i don't get how rage gaming is a bad thing like obviously smashing your personal property is a spaz move but just because i'm yelling at a game doesn't mean i'm not having fun i'm not going to yell at my co-workers so when else do i get a chance to express my frustration in a healthy way it's the same reason a lot of people like hardcore and aggressive music it's a health event i know you've probably met that weird guy who finds death metal oddly soothing trust me when i say that no matter how frustrated i sound this is just how i enjoy challenging games no it's not an addiction i can stop playing whenever i want and lastly before we get into it i should clarify what i mean by the term scrub since a lot of people tend to misuse the word a scrub is not someone who is bad at a game it is about their mentality someone who is content in their ignorance of the game while blaming random mechanics they don't fully grasp and spinning any and every excuse they can think of to justify their trash gameplay rather than genuinely asking for advice and looking for ways to improve say jam the fighting game guru explains this a lot more eloquently than i can i do think a lot of new players just think scrubs are anybody who's new that is not the case difference between someone being a beginner or a new player and a scrub is attitude when you look at a scrabble quote does it say i don't understand how do i get past this move you have to jump oh thanks that's not what it is a scrub will say that the sun was in their eye your character's broken it's an unwinnable matchup they tech that lag you're a zoning cheater you don't play by the same rules as me they will come up with an excuse as to why you beat them that is not their own skill level that's a scrub being new does not make you a scrub and not only that being experienced doesn't not make you a scrub [Music] joseph points out good observations about elden ring but draws misplaced conclusions about the game's combat and my main point of contention is that he says the game's combat is boring because it is unfair and it forces him to play passive t wrongly laments bosses that have dice roll rng combos that can be extended forever and give no consistent windows to punish and claims that because of that and the boss's very fast attack startups you have no choice but to hit trade which is boring referring to dark souls 3 he was refreshingly surprised how often he could safely attack bosses even from neutral 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 joseph yearns for when boss design was turn based where a boss does a combo that you roll and then it stands still for three seconds and lets you swap them with r1s rinse repeat add nauseam for every single boss in the game you will see me die dozens maybe even hundreds of times melanie in this video but you will also see me gradually move from an ultra safe passive playstyle that makes phase 1 a 10 minute long grind into a hyper aggressive madman who posture breaks her every 15 seconds and burns her first phase in under two minutes with only an estus or two melania made me realize that i can't just treat the bosses in this game like a dark souls boss anymore alright you're dead [ __ ] you're dead [ __ ] oh no how much hp does he have look her heel to full [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] there wasn't even a [ __ ] single red pixel let me guess the follow-up now yep of course oh i'm rotted oh i'm dead god damn it shut the [ __ ] up shut the [ __ ] [Music] anderson's first playthrough for souls games and mine just happened to be the exact same a strength build with a two-handed colossal greatsword no magic no shields no summons i'm also limiting myself to rune level 125 because i want to make this character a pvp mule it is baffling to me that he thinks the combat in elden ring is boring when i had so much fun i realized upon watching his footage that anderson spends all his time playing ultra safe waiting for his guaranteed safe opening to appear and when it never happens he just complains instead the biggest difference in eldering to me is that bosses no longer let you take your turn and stand there after rolling their attacks so that you can hit them with r1s instead you now have to get creative and find punishes in the middle of attack strings since the boss is attacked so often and so relentlessly and rest assured there are plenty of safe combo enders for all the bosses that can be punished traditionally sometimes that window might be a bit shorter and the boss might not be in a t-posing neutral standstill animation but they're there nonetheless joseph talks about these late game bosses in his q a live stream and tries to reason why they are so relentless in their attack strings and don't ever just do a 100 safe resting animation to signal to the player okay you have permission to attack me now i really think that there's something really [ __ ] with the ai in in alden ring when it comes to the bosses especially and i feel like it's not just god skin duo it's also malacath and it can also be ratagon and elden beast and all the other ones i really feel that that whatever kind of rng glitched out [ __ ] behavior that you can get from from the bosses that can determine how much you struggled with it those those three seem to share this ai problem whereas sometimes they would just not stop attacking there like there were some attempts where they never went into this passive neutral state it was just non-stop until i died just it's like a switch was flipped in there in their ai script and that was it they're just i've just decided i'm going to kill you and it was just like yep he does this sometimes in his soulsborne videos where he blames gameplay mechanics that he doesn't understand on a glitch the jump attack is a beautiful addition to dodge and can allow you to attack and get a heavy blow but also you can use its low profile recovery animation to duck boss follow-ups and find even more windows to use it than you ever thought possible and i know that joseph knows this because in his video he does it to moog and more god you can also low profile with quick crouch attacks without having to commit to a role and you're positioning to the boss after a roll will affect what follow-up that boss actually does i'll show you guys some footage of me fighting several light game bosses in this way later on in the video all of these things melania taught me i knew that i was being a stubborn [ __ ] for wanting to beat her with a zyhander only because i'm a strength purist but i also knew that it would feel so [ __ ] sweet when i finally beat her my way it forced me to really experiment and push myself to find more opportunities to weave attacks in between her onslaught that to me is much more engaging and fun than anything dark souls has ever given me oh my god holy [ __ ] what is that damage i [ __ ] literally run [Music] the other problem that joseph has besides the never-ending boss attacks is that he would find a safe punish window and it would work nine times in a row and then on the tenth time the boss would do a move that he hadn't seen yet and hit him he would see this and then never go for that punish ever again normally i would do the same but he vastly understates one key addition that he actually could have utilized more on his super self-restrictive playstyle and that is the posture mechanic he acknowledges its presence but hand waves it because you can't see the meter the posture system is so critical to the colossal weapon playstyle in this game and yet he barely mentions it and it's kind of telling since he probably did not use the system very much at all given how passive he played the posture system rewards aggression once you realize this and you go for those 9 out of 10 punishes anyways you start posture breaking bosses every 15 seconds and then waking them up with a fully charged r2 as well by the way this is only relevant in the discussion for a player just learning a new boss because you can totally get guaranteed 10 out of 10 safe punishes on every boss while fighting actively anyways fights that were once tedious become an action-packed face melter and honestly i still rarely even get hit he will say that sure the game isn't necessarily forcing him to play passive but he dislikes the idea of hitch rating okay why do you not like poise either isn't that kind of the point of a colossal weapon anyways reaction trading light attacks he knows you can hit list these bosses but if he doesn't care to do that then why be so against hit trading he mentions in this video and also his previous souls critiques that he views hp flasks as a measure of how many mistakes you're allowed to make rather than how aggressive and risky you are allowed to play he also says that when it's the boss's turn he isn't having fun because they just do attacks for 20 to 30 seconds straight even without learning to attack in between these combos isn't rolling complex attack strings part of the fun i hate to break it to him but rolling is like 70 of what you do in these games here's the real kicker though joseph says this if you play with cheats and you have fun then you had fun 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 if you are having fun then you are playing the game right if joseph is not having fun with this game then by his own definition he is playing the game wrong if i bought the collector's edition of this game i would take my statue out and take a [ __ ] [ __ ] on it i would throw it in the [ __ ] toilet and take a [ __ ] [ __ ] [Music] a concept that joseph coins in his video is combo extensions where a boss will be done attacking and make you think it is your turn but when you approach them they continue the combo lightning fast and thus make it so that you can never truly punish them this is a misnomer combo extensions aren't real they are just combos if you run away the boss won't finish the whole thing stay in range and put in the minimum effort and bait out the full combo bosses will reach a point in a combo where they will either stop attacking or they will continue with a combo branch depending on your positioning relative to them there are plenty of opportunities to return damage on all the bosses if you actually try to look for them and not have your dick in your hand waiting for them to revert to some sort of neutral state animation the boss attacks are based on proximity and positioning for example if you roll to the right they can do an attack that can catch you but if you roll to the left you can actually swing because they either won't start a new attack or the attack they do will always whiff also if you look at margaret's double knife attack as an example it's not a question of will he do this attack after he's done his combo i don't know let's just roll the dice it's a question of will margaret do the double knife combo branch that he is 95 likely to do if i am standing in front of him after dodging the initial part of the combo the combos by the way where he can do fast knife are after a thrust attack or the one-handed overhead he can also double knife from neutral but this is a slightly different attack as you can just reaction roll it or you can roll backwards from the club and hammer spin attack to make him jump at you which if you are still in front of him he will then go into the slow thrust which you can now roll behind and get a big punish if you had stayed in front and punished the slow thrust he would have been able to fast knife you on the other hand if you had rolled through the spin attack instead you can sneak a hidden but then you will have to dodge his 4 hit combo which also ends in a safe punish i am legitimately concerned at how many people i have to spell this out for there is no coin flip with the bosses you are going in for a punish and taking a chance that they will hit you because you are not attacking them during a free punish window you are attacking them at a combo branch point where the boss will check your positioning positioning not just proximity is extremely important in order to bait out favorable attacks in elden rain this is not a new concept at all and has been around since at least bloodborne if you're not familiar with flawless or no role sprint runners these people beat boss as hitless and sometimes at base level without ever rolling or sprinting once the only thing they have to rely on is baiting out attacks they can walk through and punish using their positioning so it's odd to me that joseph thinks this isn't a reliable method of fighting here's an entire library of moves you can bait out to backstab orphan of costs simply by walking joseph would instead back off and reset into neutral and complain that boss fights are just non-stop waiting around and that it's too unsafe to swing first at bosses so now you just have to sit there when dangit jm pointed out that if you don't want to risk rolling these long combos and you back off you can reset neutral on market by throwing bombs or knives to get them to run after you again and stop posture healing his response in a comment was basically nope you threw a bomb so it doesn't count i don't want to do that either because my build is bad it's actually kind of incredible how hard you have to try to make the game boring huh i am still finding crazy new ways to fight bosses new attacks i can jump over and new ways to fight on my own terms in a way that i find fun and satisfying even after 10 playthroughs like did you know that you can interrupt scarlet aeonia with a bomb or stop a falling star beast charge by hitting it in the head matador style or jump margaret's tail swipe it might be hard to imagine watching this footage but i would soon be melania again in new game plus 3 with the same pure two-handed zyhander build still at roon level 125 on the first try [Music] [Music] oh another thing that joseph talks about ruining the combat is undodgeable or borderline undodgeable attacks spoiler alert there are no unavoidable attacks in this game there are only two that force you to play around the move in ways that some might consider tedious if your goal is to take zero damage unfortunately for you i really have no choice but to talk about these attacks individually and unfortunately for me it is much harder to debunk and i can't teach you how to dodge every [ __ ] attack in the game but here are the ones i know that first come to mind for most people waterfowl dance is probably the best example of this but it is a problem that is somewhat overblown in my opinion anderson admits that he knows there is a way to technically list every boss but it requires very specific strats and in the case of waterfowl dance it involves being as far from her as possible so that you can space the first hits which contributes to more passive play he gives some weird examples so we'll go over them because as far as i know there's maybe two attacks that are even problematic from a hitler standpoint by the way this is all assuming that you were trying to medium roll and perfectly i-frame all these attacks instead of using the plethora of other tools like shields spells an ash of war physic tears etc let's take a quick break from all the mauld what is that what is what the [ __ ] dude godric storm assault remember when we talked about positioning mattering for which attack you bait out the storm assault is fast yes but it is meant to get you off of him and get you back into mid-range where his kit really shines he only does this if you stay glued to him and it's his don't tread on me bro attack it's okay to design certain bosses to subtly force you into playing into a certain range if the boss is entirely based on fighting you at that range and you have to figure out how to get back in if he didn't do this you could literally just stand behind him the entire fight and dumpster him this kind of boss has been around for a while in soulsborne ludwig and bloodborne has three to four of these exact same get off me bro attacks sure they could have made it more reactable but the point of it is to catch you off guard and make you panic roll you have plenty of time to punish just don't get greedy and give him some space after you attack and be ready for it moog's undodgeable and infamous in the heel is a weird attack to support this idea too i actually like the idea of a boss reducing your estus in an over-the-top ways that you have to fight a hard late game boss with less help than you're typically used to on already maxed out flasks this is a gimmick done way better than the cursed chalice dungeons just having your max hp and it's more fair joseph already mentioned how he feels like the game gives you too much estus you can even entirely avoid this if you want with the moog tier although anderson says if you're lucky enough to find it i'll get into why i think it's okay to use the internet as a strategy guide later on in my nitpick section but for now i am officially giving you watching this video the google gamer pass even without the tier like i did first time i still love this mechanic oh no no no no no no no no no no oh no no no no this boss is [ __ ] crazy no no no oh my god what the [ __ ] now before we talk about malekith i will say that joseph hates him which is fine i for the record love this boss and i think he is one of the best examples of your positioning relative to the boss dictating which attacks he will do he is very consistent and has very good telegraphs but i know others that dislike him as well just on a preference level it is funny to me that he shows malaka's punish window but he misses it because he gets hit and says that there's never a chance to swing back look you can even jump this explosion for a jump attack before he jumps again however anderson hilariously says that as beastial clergyman he has an unreactable swipe attack when it is clearly telegraphed by the boss's stance here is footage of me flawlessing bcl clergyman at 70 plus 15 with his y-hander this attack is part of a really narrow branch so i'll just go through it as i understand it after the double swipe which is jumpable by the way he will do one of three things either crook up his right arm awkwardly to telegraph another two swipes to restart the combo a b steel sling which is reactable and a guaranteed combo finisher and if he does neither of these things you should roll because the quick swipe is coming here is an entire hit list guide on malekith if you'd like to get better at him i'll leave it in the description by the way do you know how i learned that the clergyman swipes were jumpable it's because i saw joseph get this sick [ __ ] jump dodge where he hits the jump attack and would have likely low profiled most of the beastial sling if that came out here's also a quick bonus for how to dodge the anime blade attack also malaketh has an item to make him easier and gives you a cool new way to fight him head on it's at the end of a long quest line but again i don't think it's unreasonable to look that up if you want reichard's skull storm he is a cinematic gimmick boss learn to fight unlocked just run don't get cornered and keep an eye on him ratagon is just such a good fight straight up and the teleporting is very fair not an unreactable dice roll [ __ ] attack that anderson claims it is i never had a problem with him and i always had time to roll even when he would teleport to dodge my zweihander straight at me on all previous patches there were new game plus seven rune level one plus zero weapon solo hitless runs of this boss before anderson's video was even out so i don't really feel like i have to explain myself much further check out nathan savage damage if you want to see a 15 minute long perfect hit list radagon fight using nothing but a club [Music] eldon stars is super annoying but the boss only does it once at a certain hp and challenge runners can skip it by staggering the boss during the long cast animation i know none of you want to do that so once you know what the long cast animation looks like run away and when the stars are at about chest height just turn around and roll straight through it joseph also hates this boss like a lot of people but i don't think this boss was untested or anything if i had to guess elden beast is meant to be a bit of a victory lap of sorts hence why it's after ratagon but i have to agree that the fight itself kinda sucks but the game is still testing your ability to maximize the damage your build can do in a narrow window posture breaking is particularly good here on top of that the fight is an audio and visual spectacle i also agree torrent was likely at some point in development meant to be used here but it's not like joseph would have used him anyway because he doesn't like the mounted combat i do wish they lean harder into the cosmic horror look of the beast but i'm not too pissed about it though because in my opinion usually the true final boss of these games have always been an optional or a dlc boss now down to the final two that i can say are the only two real attacks that you cannot avoid 100 of the time with just medium rolling on a melee build that has high recovery weapons the god skin noble black flame belly [ __ ] this attack comes out and burger flips you faster than you can say [ __ ] and it's not like malakath where it lives in a narrow combat string i just cannot get a read of when he can or can't use it if you punish with a slow weapon you will probably get smoked by this attack a few times and it definitely feels unfair it doesn't combo into anything however so you will rarely die for it unless you are fighting him with low hp i think people get frustrated by godskin noble's insane stock mixups his rolling roller attack that's not intuitive to know you should roll directly through it and then they see this attack and throw their hands up and say this boss is [ __ ] [ __ ] i know i did while learning him the bellywog is definitely a stupid attack but because it will rarely mean your death it kind of thematically fits since it's such a goofy looking attack in a fight to the death with a morbidly obese scaly in filthy bathrobes you don't want to die you fat [ __ ] now here's the thing about this move you cannot dodge the first part of the combo if you are intent on playing aggressively and you use an attack with a very long recovery to punish the wrong attack and you are not close enough to run around her and not far enough to run away from her and you are trying to medium roll the entire combo even then it doesn't combo into itself so if you just mash roll fast enough you will only get hit like two or three times i think most of you have figured out by now to get far away from her in the first part and then do back to back precise and some might say sick as [ __ ] rolls the other way to dodge it point blank is a little bit harder but joseph calls it a speed run strat if your goal is to beat melania with melee only like mine was in a game where you can summon pokemon as meat shields then it is not a speedrun strat it is a survival strat it's not even hard most people i've seen get it like the third try i feel that it would be very obvious if you could just lab her just start sprinting around her and then dodge out at the right time it's just about initiating the sprint fast enough and then knowing the timing here's zero lenny doing it with the dk bongo controller [Music] by the way remember when joseph mentioned that he knows there's a way to hitless this boss but doesn't care for it because it's too hard and it requires too much passive waiting well then what about base level no upgrade hitless runners who don't use consumables magic projectiles statuses buffs ashes of war spirit ashes or talismans these god gamers have to maximize the amount of damage they do or else the fight would literally last hours mr bork d as you can see here is going [ __ ] apeshit on melania and it still takes him nearly 20 minutes of perfect play to kill her how many waterfall dances do you think he dodges in that time do you think he just gets lucky i'll leave you guys to watch it and see gino meschino did the same restrictions and just by using slightly safer strats it made the fight last 35 minutes but wait lupine i'm not a god gamer i'm a casual gamer well good news because all of this is of course ignoring the use of bloodhound step or blocking with the unfortunately many 100 physical block shields that you could also use on a melee only build and casters will always be far enough away to be able to easily dodge it by the way shield poking is way funner in this game than i thought you can shield poke to interrupt boss combos and get counter damage along with the new guard counter attack it's just so fun and that's coming from me lupine no son of mine is going to use [ __ ] shields in a souls game under my roof ossuary joseph complains that melania's heal invalidates shield builds but melania doesn't even heal that much from a waterfowl just don't crutch on blocking for all of her attacks it's a necessary evil regardless to make her hard because shields are [ __ ] broken in this game in fact it doesn't even truly prevent that either since you can just grab a thrusting sword run barricade shield and just shield poke the [ __ ] out of her all day and oh damage her heels while taking zero damage in return my boy knapp beat this [ __ ] and the entire game without even rolling or using iframes anyways come on come on right here right here what the mark it's kind of like moog's mechanic where it's a cool way to erase three estus of someone who has been enjoying max estes for a while in melania's case your estus becomes our estus [Music] light rolling also makes this like five times easier but still yes maybe this attack is unfair even with a handful of ways to totally negate it and a bunch of creative ways you can deal with it such as using endure to not get hits done by the very first attack and then rolling or hit trading it with a stomp uppercut but because it is unfair does that mean it makes the entire fight bad or god forbid boring [Music] [Music] is [Music] aurora when did i oh oh my god the glitch oh my god the glitch are you cleaning me what [Music] joseph brings up the royal revenants in eldering and how it's kind of funny that they have total [ __ ] attacks and are just generally cracked out but says it's soured because of how much of this problem bleeds over into the bosses i've just explained why this is an over-exaggerated problem because there are only two attacks the entire game that i believe are unreasonable to dodge on a melee only no quick step no blocking build but apart from that joseph is actually onto something here the royal revenants are purposely designed to be unfair that's what makes them so terrifying and so frustrating by the way he shows himself dodging backwards into this very telegraphed attack that has a [ __ ] ton of forward momentum and not the actual [ __ ] of them teleporting onto you and instantly attacking you are meant to see this enemy and [ __ ] yourself this is not a new concept think back to the headless from sakura or even the shark giants from bloodborne when done in tasteful amounts a dash of [ __ ] can actually spice up a combat encounter and make it feel like a truly daunting challenge without it feeling like just an rng [ __ ] show this is obviously a dangerous thing to try and balance but it doesn't necessarily mean fromm can't try and i think with these three enemies the effect was achieved speaking of bloodborne lady maria is one of my favorite fights of all time because of how cinematic it is how narrative driven it is the astral clock tower building up her character and mystery prior to fighting her bloodborne actually being able to have a fun hunter encounter and just how [ __ ] cool she is however this is to the chagrin of my fellow challenge runner friends because as it turns out lady maria has some very broken attacks in particular her charge attacks coming out in just a few frames and having extremely disjointed hitboxes with after trails in phase 3 plus the bug that causes her attacks to still come out invisibly even if she is interrupted essentially making her in joseph's terms an rng dice roll boss you could even say that at a certain range these attacks are unreasonable to dodge forcing you to position yourself to mitigate the threat of this attack sound familiar this is not to mention her third phase trying to dodge her flame trail mega range and speed attacks on 30 fps that is not at all stable with more blood flying around than one of moog's wet dreams actually one of my favorite things in bloodborne is to look at the boss room after beating lady maria and just be amazed every time to see how much of it you painted with blood in the fight [ __ ] i love it so much the weird thing is anderson actually likes lady maria even after being hyper critical on ludwig he even weirdly acknowledges that lady maria has broken hitboxes but waves it off and claims that it's just an unattended glitch while in the next breath saying she is difficult without being broken as i showed in the first video she occasionally shows the same hitbox issues that really shouldn't be happening in the fourth game in a series but this is a glitch not an intended part of the fight and it's worth acknowledging that maria can be difficult without having to be broken like so many of the other hunter fights in the game it's a shame then that she's so vulnerable to parrying and stagger an added mechanic that made her build up some sort of immunity to it might have worked wonderfully in making it a fight that you really had to master joseph was able to look past the small amount of [ __ ] of a couple bad hitboxes performance issues inconsistent attacks to dodge and still thoroughly enjoyed the fight why can he not afford that same rationale to eldering's bosses maybe it's because ellen ring is too hard and that extra layer of difficulty was actually the straw that broke the camel's back who can really say for sure but for many i suspect that deep down this has a ring of truth much like the phrase get good itself people who can't beat the bosses on their own terms but also don't want to use the easier rpg aspects no matter how fun or convenient and so they just make themselves frustrated and bored with the game elden rings bosses are much harder and require a lot more nuance in how you fight them than previous games which gives the combat a lot more depth than souls even accounting for the increase in new mechanics and build variety if the game was only as hard as dark souls 3 or any of their other previous games then we would all be here complaining that it's too easy we're already used to that i don't know who has to hear this but maybe you are doing it to yourself i had to face this realization myself when fighting melania even with the literal thousands of hours in multiple different from titles i wasn't trying to adapt to this new combat philosophy instead i was resentful and i wanted it to cater to my outdated and nostalgic view of souls combat but when his souls games ever cater to the player in the first place the entire appeal is that the game and the world don't give a [ __ ] about you i realized that i was mad cuz bad melania helped me to have that frame of mind ship and i think that honestly i needed it like a kick in the ass and for that she will always have a special place in my heart now just strangle her just cut her arms off [Music] i don't understand it's like immortal warfare 101 cut them to pieces cut their arms off cut her legs off like just [ __ ] cut her eyes out do it like what are you doing why are you staring at a [ __ ] stump oh my [ __ ] god pause the video pause the [ __ ] video no not actually keep watching i just watched what he said about orphan of cost out of curiosity and he says this i think this is the most aggressive enemy in the game i haven't timed them all out or anything but i guess that he's also the fastest to discuss it we need to jump back to something that was brought up in the first video about the healing system in dark souls and how all damage needs to be predictable and preventable for that system to work to me the orphan clearly breaks those rules and it's surprisingly okay and it's for that reason that i think he's the perfect way to show how combat is handled differently in bloodborne and how a seemingly little change like rallying can affect so much i don't think this boss is one that you're meant to carefully plan on every move and avoid every single one of his attacks in fact to do that you end up playing it quite cheesily and stay away from him for much of it or have to overuse backstabs because you're meant to be able to take some hits there's meant to be this back and forth at least the way i see it the orphan's second phase is more frantic but in many ways it's easier you have more aoe attacks to avoid as well as contending with him leaping about but i found these moves to be easier to dodge and he has longer openings for free attacks between some of them i don't think there's a better example than this boss fight to show how much of a different game bloodborne is to dark souls and that approaching them with the same mindset is a mistake but i also think that it shows just how much better dark souls could be because bloodborne doesn't make the same demands of mastery from you in order to be at times more fun and satisfying to play while dark souls 1 does and feels very limited in combat options now that i've played bloodborne i think there's something even better than these games waiting to be made by combining the two and i really hope that that game is made someday like this this wasn't even supposed to be in the script i just thought bloodborne would be a fun tangent because i remembered lady maria having jank but so many people liked her anyways sure he attributes this to only working because of the rally system which by the way is in elden ring 2 you can literally just play like this if you want but i disagree often the damage you get back from a boss is negligible compared to how much you are taking and it's not like the absence of a rally system in elden ring or dark souls makes this playstyle completely invalid all of a sudden and the funny thing is i don't even agree with them like you could totally no hit orphan of costs in a fun fair pedal to the metal style joseph i could not have said it better myself yo that's spacey you're so [ __ ] cracked though do you understand how [ __ ] good i am at this fight and i've never beaten it bro you're stuck up fighting velena for eight hours what do you mean [Music] thank you for watching this far into the video before taking to the comments to call me a [ __ ] we are now done with the meat and potatoes portion of the video sorry if you see this anderson and i come across as an [ __ ] i don't really care too much about sounding polite and honestly no hard feelings feel free to insult me if you want i can take it i've watched his videos since the bloodborne one six years ago and like i've said before i feel like he always brings up a lot of good but albeit more obvious observations and has some good things to say about the game's more glaring flaws with a handful of interesting ideas but i can just never see eye to eye with him on soulsborne game combat systems it also kind of irks me that he always pretends like the integrated multiplayer doesn't exist and never even mentions it but it's whatever i get for most people playing these games they barely have any interaction with the multiplayer aspect it just seems weird when you're doing an in-depth review critique doing pvp in these games will inform your opinion of the game's balance real [ __ ] quick let me tell you i just get the impression that he wants to be a critic and focus something critical about the game because he just wants it to be better you know like it's not perfect it can always be better i get that and i respect that but much like joseph thinks the combat is unfair i think the way he handled his criticism of it was unfair and at times misleading and false it poisons the discussion about these games since with a lot of them most info that you can find about them online is misinformation seriously if you try and find any technical info on things like fetch your life like parry frames there is a 99 chance that it is just straight up [ __ ] wrong maybe i'm just being unfair to joseph sorry for getting into this cringy personal opinion about his content but seriously his opinion was totally valid it's just weird that instead of acknowledging that his super restrictive self-imposed playstyle was actively hindering his own enjoyment of the game and making it too hard for himself he says that elden ring is a boring game that has a build diversity problem and complains that his first playthrough is forever ruined and you can only play your first playthrough once like yeah dude you can only lose your virginity once it doesn't mean it's not going to get better after the first time just because it's special suck it up and take the lessons you learned into new game plus these were the takes that had me so bent out of shape that i had to make this video so with that out of the way i will give my smaller nitpicks about his other remarks on game design a bit later on in the video but for now i think we should get back to the original purpose of this footage watching me die to melania now let's see here we should be close to the part right killer alright let's just see oh oh no these were only the deaths from day one i still have two entire more days of footage of me trying to beat millennia at room level 125 with nothing but is why [Music] all right [ __ ] day two i'm kind of half cut on wine and this beer i bought for 33 dollars tastes like [ __ ] [ __ ] tastes like pickled watermelon ah first try let's go all right [ __ ] me you're [ __ ] hope that's who you are no no oh my god she heals so [ __ ] much into that oh you're such a [ __ ] we're post spit on our corpse oh i'm dead [Music] what a [ __ ] battle of attrition holy [ __ ] oh my god what what where the [ __ ] are you going oh i can't control my guy oh my god oh bro bro she's mimicked here bro bro i beat every boss using mimic to your first try bro mimic you're so good bro i got a plus 10 mimic tear i beat every boss first try it's so good man have you heard about the mimic tier bro have you tried mimic tier do you know where the mimic tier is bro holy [ __ ] where's the [ __ ] mimic here tell me tell me where the mimic tier is quick quick quick what no fringe cringe [Music] what what no just kill me [Music] kill me that's cringe oh [Music] oh my god woof [Music] this video is already too damn long and i'm really hoping that edit lupine can keep this video under an hour that ship is [ __ ] sail bud so i'm not gonna go over a section of stuff that i agree with joseph and honestly because all that [ __ ] is so obvious you don't really need a critic to tell you reused bosses get old camera bosses and small rooms stuck open world looks pretty moonville with mimicked here broken etc etc quick side note about the reused bosses joseph specifically mentions how the repeats of the falling star beast fights and the estelle fight ruin your enjoyment of the first fight in retrospect which is an odd concept in and of itself i really like both these fights and i don't mind the reuse since i get to fight them multiple times if i want to in a single play through and given that the multiple falling star beasts we see set up the idea of multiple as stella like beings given how this follows the life cycle of an ant lion as pointed out in xevox video having a green haired melania in a cave would be ridiculous but this is just a bit of hyperbole on joseph's part and i don't think these exact bosses are comparable for how appropriate they are to be recycled but hey according to him if we just delete all the reused bosses and remove all the dungeons that they occupy that'll definitely improve the game anyways let's just jump straight to the nitpicks i had while watching the rest of his video a lot of these will be more on the subjective side so i don't necessarily feel as strongly about them since they aren't the main point of this video i'll try to keep it quick but let's just say there's a few of them to kick things off let's get back to the point where i mentioned that joseph says the line if you are lucky enough to find it in reference to the moog tier that allows you to block his undodgeable gimmick even though it is in a ruins that is clearly visible on your map in an open world game about exploration he also mentions earlier that you are breaking some sort of rule if you look up drops for enemies online i think a lot of people have this notion that you shouldn't look up things about a game because it spoils your own experience however when it comes to souls games they have always been cryptic in order to encourage discussion about the game and push the community aspect at least in my opinion this idea of the community helping each other is baked into various aspects of the game's core design such as the integrated multiplayer and the message system and even in interviews about the game's set difficulty and wanting to encourage players to be on the same level of discussion and have a similar experience it's frankly too much honestly as it requires years of independent testing by the community to even figure out [ __ ] poise modifiers and every other backroom mechanic you can imagine but it is what it is demon souls was meant to be an homage to the previous age of brutally difficult games and boy you can bet i used to play them growing up i played so many sega genesis and nes games that were so intentionally cryptic and impossibly hard to stretch out the game length and soak me for strategy guides many of them i would even see again on angry video game nerd videos and it was so gratifying to see that even a grown adult could not beat these games that i had struggled so much with that's why in my mind it just makes sense to me that if you want a game that is still designed in that way it seems only natural with the internet now to have players share their knowledge and provide that resource to fellow players it creates a community people are always so quick to say oh those dark souls fans are so toxic and yeah i would agree a majority are total [ __ ] but we're not all bad i can immediately tell that people don't play multiplayer games when they say things like dark souls has the worst community spend a little time playing league of legends or cod and you'll find out quick the invader community on twitch is especially very tight-knit and chill tangent aside my point is that it's not the end of the world if you look up where to find the moog tier because in my opinion it is unrealistic for most players to discover all of the secrets and obtuse quest lines in the game on their own and even if you don't get the tier i still enjoy this mechanic while chugging estes oh and then he says blood flame talon is unreactable on slow weapons [ __ ] lamao 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 don't choke oh my god no no oh no oh my god did you i did not notice his health was that low i'm so sorry lupine [Music] another thing that really got my piss to a boil and is a big part of why i'm talking about this in the first place is how joseph can say the game is boring when he goes out of his way to ignore all of the new mechanics and rpg elements he doesn't use the more robust magic system that also gives plenty of options for physical builds he doesn't use the new crafting system and all the new consumables he doesn't use status effects or poise trading he treats posture breaks like a neat bonus the mixed physic tiers that can give you unique properties the spruced up bow play guard countering or blocking at all the customizable ashes of war great runes parrying spirit summons light rolling and even when he power stances it's only to make his jumping l1's hit as hard as possible you can't [ __ ] ignore all of that and then say wow this game is boring it restricts builds he even said that in sacro he never used prosthetics at all and only parried the entire game like gee ever wonder why you're so [ __ ] bored with the combat you only never experiment and ignore all the combat mechanics outside of the core role and have played the exact same bare bones vanilla wave for all games since dark souls won the game isn't making you play passive you are playing passive because of your mental hang ups and your outdated expectations of a dark souls combat system [Music] speaking of sakura joseph claims that it is the least replayable of from's previous games because it only has one weapon type 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 this set of games due to it only having one weapon type um but even in sakura like my biggest criticism for sakura is that a lot of the fights feel start to feel samey um even though i love it it is kind of like ah you know i wish there was some more variety and they they asked you to do more perilous moves and and and more um more create creative uses of training them together and everything he even compares prosthetics to spells which no no no no no no no you cannot compare the versatility of prosthetics and how they can dynamically change the entire flow of a fight to the dozens of different pew flavors in souls games i already have an entire video dedicated to this exact bad take so i'm not going to get into it right now seriously go watch that for this it's like my best video but basically that game's combat was so deep that it had the most replayability i will say that i value replayability in the game's combat mastery and i think anderson is more valuing exploration aspects and that kind of stuff but you can't explore something you've already [ __ ] explored the replay value comes from the gameplay it's little remarks like this that really makes me wonder how good his grasp of the game's fundamental mechanics he really has just watch him try to explain dark souls 3 backstabs or show attacks with different telegraphs on pontiff and ludwig and claim there's no way to distinguish between them and that somehow animations must be getting crushed and the whole game must be bugged his jumping attack is the same problem as so many others in the game it unlocks your camera so good luck seeing where he's coming from this could have been okay since you would eventually learn the timing of winner rolled away but he has a second version of this attack that keeps him in the air for about three to four times as long how how far away does that guy in the bridge shoot you from the [ __ ] map an attempt was made in dark souls 3 to have a very smooth transition from what appears like a normal attack into a backstab instead at first i really like this change but now i don't because it is the same issue as before first off sometimes it just flat out doesn't work the enemy is meant to be locked into the animation if you get it right which you can see on some of the examples here the enemy goes rigid for the hit to complete sometimes the enemy gets priority or immunity to the stun however and you're still locked into the attack because the game can't decide what to do either way something is wrong here either the game shouldn't be stunning any enemies when this starts or it should be stunning all of them secondly there's another attack that has him raising his other sword and then swiping it at the player again shown here you can see that it's fast even at normal speed this one is also hard to pinpoint the start of since he'll naturally stand up straight between attacks when his sword is raised as the clearest moment to start and from that frame to damage is only 12 frames hey guys i was just playing sakura here and i really liked the game but i did find this one boss here who has this crazy attack where it comes out faster than i can even blink at first i really liked it cause i'm like wow that's cool it's really cool these attacks happen faster than i can actually see like faster than the speed of light i really like that but actually now i don't because it just hits me and it kills me instantly like look at this [ __ ] look it's like three frames look like how are you supposed to react to that it's just it's impossible i can't believe they do this about these two attacks in particular is that these warning animations are used for other attacks that give you more time to react and they are exactly the same which sort of compounds the issue doesn't it here's another instance of him doing it quickly again and it's the same timing as before it's like when the game chains attacks together into a combo it munches half of the animation so you just have to automatically assume that these attacks are coming and dodge preemptively for that first stab example i showed it looks like he skips right over the part where he's meant to draw his arm back in warning this actually wouldn't be so bad if there was some consistency to it like the boss enters this rage slashing phase that you need to avoid unfortunately it's random at least it is as far as i can tell sometimes he won't do the full combo sometimes he'll pause if you go out of range during it and then resume it when you're close again without any warning so you have no idea if the combo's done or not this is also troublesome if you're trying to weave in a counter attack and you just have to play the guessing game of is he actually done attacking yet since he has infinite stamina to chain these together i do not think this type of thing is intentional if it is then i can't say that it's good on the point of replay value and exploration joseph does recommend randomizing the dungeons and he basically just says i want chalice dungeons or at least an optional built-in randomizer mod in the start menu maybe a few people would like that but generally people [ __ ] hated the chalice dungeons in bloodborne they were a long repetitive grind for rewards that were rng also they were very ill-explained i've done all the story chalices maybe four times out of at least a hundred playthroughs it made actually optimizing a build with blood gems such a [ __ ] waste of time joseph says that the side dungeons and elden ring are more repetitive with its build block-like structure than the chalice dungeons and i could not disagree enough and those are just the chalices that aren't randomized could you imagine the hidden quality of all the side dungeons and eldering were totally randomized and not these intentionally designed trap riddled death gauntlets what makes you think you would want randomized dungeon content if you are already sick of seeing it in intentionally designed layouts how would they even generate dungeons and keep that seamless with the open world without a loading screen this also makes invading dungeons way harder because you have to generate the entire dungeon on your end first which took minutes in bloodborne and by the time you get into the world the host is already in the boss room and you get booted straight back into another loading screen i know an actually good randomly generated ai dungeon that the game explains would be the tits but i feel like that's a tall ask to implement a system of this magnitude on top of a game already as big as elden ring plus the rewards are now either also random and we have to grind for rng or it's reward that you get every time like upgrade materials and become samey sure it sounds nice in theory but i suspect that even if we had good ai generated dungeons with half decent rewards people would still just be like why the [ __ ] would i waste my time doing infinite dungeons i could just play a roguelike instead if you want to explore forever because 100 hours wasn't enough for you go play no man's sky by the way the game already has a replayability incentive and it's called multiplayer for example replaying the game at a super low level to make a stormville castle invader build is a great challenge and invading is insanely fun there not to mention ganking and dueling zully made a video while i was editing this where she made a good point about the repeated areas teaching you what to expect without the need for tutorials and why clever game design and gameplay loops should not immediately be accused of lazy game development [Music] in its world to find eldon 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 ah yes my favorite spells shield bash and no skill 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 drawing dungeons stone sword rooms and even some of the legacy loot chests i'm not sure why but i feel somehow this is going to be my most controversial segment i don't know [ __ ] about open world games i just know souls regardless this argument makes no [ __ ] sense to me because he just goes around in circles with himself and it's just odd considering he acknowledges you are playing an rpg about build diversity most [ __ ] [ __ ] you won't be able to use that's how builds work not to mention he doesn't even bother with ashes of war let alone spells because he just hates cool [ __ ] i guess by the way there are a total of 171 spells and incantations combined in elden ring while there are 309 weapons nearly double that he also says that most of the talismans aren't broadly applicable but then he doesn't realize that yes because they are supposed to be situational which is why you keep most of them on you to hard swap in any given situation instead he just writes off talismans as bad dungeon rewards the whole incentive to explore is because you don't know what you're gonna get he stresses this a lot in his q a video but what he's actually getting at here is he thinks that there should be extra rewards on top of the existing ones that are universal for all builds this is of course ignoring the fact that spirit ashes are universal and also pretending that weapon upgrade materials don't exist but i digress let's examine that permanent passive stat increases passive permanent stat increases a numbers boost woohoo so fun and rewarding now i love the side dungeons because it's forcing me to find and do all of them [ __ ] me if i just want to make pvp builds add that [ __ ] to the list of memory stones golden seeds sacred tears crack pots ritual pots perfume bottles bell bearings prayer books spell books and the 50 cookbooks that i need not to mention what's the point in making a build if everyone can get these permanent stat increases that would just become the mandatory baseline for all characters and would make twinking way worse by the way do you guys know how many free levels you can already get on a single character 140 free [ __ ] levels we don't need more stats what we do need is more [ __ ] with unique rpg properties like the cloak on the black knife set muting your footsteps even if it's some sort of health container system are we now just making all the health upgrades tied to the dungeons this is already how spell slots work with the wizard towers and anderson [ __ ] hated those besides this just introduces yet even more systems that have to be accounted for in matchmaking and removing stats from the level system and tying it to exploration would make everything way harder to properly balance he also says that he knows runes are the universal reward but since they aren't unique to dungeons they don't really feel significant as a reward as if getting a pop-up saying that you get a flat hb upgrade now is somehow more worthwhile than taking your runes and consciously leveling your health 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 oh boy can't wait to make my hornet ring plus three the suggestions for talisman and armor upgrades is just another boring numbers boost and how would that even work in the case of the talismans anyway how can my crepus vial make me more quiet this would also make the staff boost talismans like the star scourge heirlooms start with a [ __ ] worthless bass amount that you would need to upgrade in order to make it worth the talisman slot now instead of just getting the talismans that i want i now have to do triple the amount of side dungeons so i can upgrade them all and oh my god i have always hated armor upgrades because when i play with a colossal build i don't have the vitality to use the heavy armor that i want until i am done with my build at the end of the game because i need to level health and strength first this may be alleviated a little now with equip load being tied to endurance however the bar for minimum poise is now so much higher that i highly doubt it you need nearly 100 poise just to tank a halberd he also asks for more armor sets which i would also like but that doesn't really fix his personal problem with unique rewards and the horse upgrades are fine but we might be getting into cosmetic territory which would be nice but it's not exactly enhancing the game experience by a whole lot oh by the way after all that he says that this would actually make the game worse because it makes the side content mandatory and we would casually have to rebalance the entire game and randomize dungeons but not on the first playthrough so yeah he makes a problem where one doesn't exist proposes some half-baked fixes and then says they wouldn't work anyways and that we need to redesign the entire game and then ends the segment by saying he explored too much side content anyways great stuff i know he's just spitballing ideas but if i'm going to get on board with rebalancing the entire game and redesigning the dungeons then i need at least one concrete idea the only halfway decent suggestion that i heard when trying to ask around for other ideas on how rewards and side dungeons could be improved was making a second category of side dungeons like the mines that are randomly generated or change after world triggers like defeating a shard bearer or something that you could do infinitely in one playthrough and have them drop more weapon upgrade materials so that you could grind out more weapons to try and experiment with i personally do not see the issue with dungeon rewards anyways since it's not about the destination it's about the journey i am going to do all the sci content on my first playthrough because i don't know the reward beforehand and i'm glad i can just choose to skip certain side content on my second playthrough if i want to i am going beyond the benefit of a doubt and just doing joseph's job at this point so let's just move on [Music] [Music] another thing joseph hates is the great runes because the tutorial lies and promises a passive effect but in fact you do have to use a rune arc to reap its benefits 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 runark 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 god he's so dramatic i imagine the tutorial being misleading could be due to a translation issue as japanese to english is not exactly the most straightforward thing to translate but regardless he basically just says this whole system is [ __ ] because it requires a consumable and it somehow ruins the fun of finding and ascending the divine towers like whoopty [ __ ] do you need to use a rune arc it's like ambering but even better because you have options beyond just an hp bump it also acts as a real incentive to get people to participate in the pvp ecosystem which is a big if not essential part of these games longevity there are still people playing on private dark souls 3 servers at this very moment a game that they have played nearly every day since 2016. i will say though that i wish all players could use great runes in pvp as well as maybe more playstyle altering runes such as the melania rune rather than just stat buffs although the edge it gives you can be nice for specific builds it once again gives players a real incentive to participate in the pvp that is seamless with the game's single player experience getting back to the great runes though you can even give yourself the hp regained mechanic from bloodborne that joseph enjoyed so much so this being all he had to say about great runes was quite odd i like this method a lot more compared to bonfire kindling because it's more dynamic and it gives you more options the way an rpg should [Music] 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 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 he perspective this weird ass shinobi hunter attack that i have literally never seen in 500 hours of challenge running sacro as an example of enemies having mega cheap attacks i guess it's some sort of anti-air to force you into his ground game but with him cancelling sweeps into it i'm sure joseph just isn't hitting jump again fast enough which would goomba stomp him and cancel this attack entirely regardless this cannot be broadly applied to the late game bosses in elden ring as the only real [ __ ] unreactable attack is the black flame bellywog and that attack isn't an input read at all [Music] enemies in this series usually had 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 what he just kind of says this out of nowhere and i don't know what he meant by this seriously there's not like a bunch of context around this like i genuinely don't know what he meant by this i've seen this complaint on several other videos already people crying that the bosses are somehow no longer on the same field or bound by the same restrictions as the player this is [ __ ] stupid because you are a random undead and you are fighting [ __ ] gods why the [ __ ] would they be bound by the same rules as you are all bosses supposed to just be mimicked here now tell me how [ __ ] bed of chaos or midear played by the same rules as me since we are talking about enemies breaking the rules though i'm just gonna mention something that i left out of the melania section to my knowledge melania has a mechanic that is unique to her from all the other bosses her moves where she takes no poise stagger also do not apply posture damage to her if you hit her during that attack she can also cancel her stagger animation she can not cancel a stagger into a waterfowl dance or an attack however she can only cancel into a dodge or a block or her slow kick in phase 2. also she cannot cancel a heavy stagger animation only a light stagger i imagine this was implemented to prevent her from being stun locked to kingdom [ __ ] like looping her with stomp uppercut infinites which you can kinda do anyways but it can lead to some weird interactions i think it still falls under my unfair doesn't necessarily mean bad or boring point and it's pretty easy to play around even without knowing it exists and you get a feel for how she behaves anyways this actually makes colossal weapons arguably better against her compared to other weapon classes since she can't cancel this type of stagger doing 2l1s with curved swords is riskier with her potentially cancelling into a dodge behind you swinging twice against a boss this hard like orphan of coss has always been greedy anyways though this strapping lad here made a few videos about it if you want to learn more links as always are in the description down below [Music] 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 he also complains that the game is pigeonholing him somehow into either power stancing or using a shield or a staff or a talisman or a fast offhand weapon or a torch or a crossbow etc when he fails to mention the 50 strength bonus you get from two handing which gives you a [ __ ] ton more ar at high level and at low level it lets you use weapons that you don't have enough strength to one hand if you power stance colossals like yeah your jump attacks will hurt but that's such a [ __ ] heavy stat investment just so that you have a nuke attack that has a super long recovery joseph instead relies on hit trading with the jumping l1 and neglects the other faster attacks like the crouch and running attack to use the entire moveset situationally [Music] radon 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 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 now i know you ain't talking [ __ ] about my boy radon he comes so close to realizing you can just get on and off the horse to dodge certain attacks much like you do when fighting dragons when they start a breath attack you have time to jump on your horse and ride away the standing horse mount and dismount even has good iframes and it's seamless regardless radon is my personal favorite fight solo he's so [ __ ] good his camera problems are not bad at all in my opinion speaking of which you guys would be surprised how much you can see a fire giant if you just unlock and just point the camera up seriously don't always play locked on plus his phase 2 isn't even half bad with the camera the radon nerf he refers to is also reverted to my knowledge and the only change that was left was some cleaned up hitboxes which were great [Music] [Music] i keep hearing this sentiment over and over and not just from anderson i am worried about the direction these games are going in the game is unfair and it makes the player unfair i don't want to be forced into using ash summons you need to be able to hit list these games in melee and have it still be fun even though i've never [ __ ] done that let's get this out of the way you can hit list all of elden rings bosses in a fun fast-paced way on melee i honestly think a lot of people are frustrated at ash summons because it proves to them in their mind that bosses are unfair just because there are also a handful of attacks in the game that require specific dodges they recognize it as an easy mode and then die endlessly to the hard bosses and in the back of their mind they just know that they could have used mimik tier or tish or great shield soldiers and absolutely annihilate the boss so they convince themselves that from wants you to use them and have made some aspects of bosses impossible to out skill for the reasonable player in exchange for those mechanics the same could also be said for any form of boss cheese whatever you perceive that to be such a sleeping god skin duo i've shown why this is wrong the game only really gets iffy on a melee midroll build having to play around bellywog timing eldon's stars once if at all and being careful about waterfowl and maybe godric forcing you back into mid-range if you don't like that style of boss and you don't have the best reaction time by the way i have seen him bug out and not do the storm assault and this guy literally just stood behind him and r-1 him to death without moving and godric could do nothing to hit him they don't understand this game's combat the combo branching evolution and just think that margaret's knives are straight [ __ ] rng and then point a finger to broken spells and ash summons and claim that from is now trying to force players into using cheap [ __ ] another way i've heard this put is that from made the bosses slightly unfair and in return they made the player character super unfair this i think speaks to why we never should have an easy mode in dark souls the temptation is too strong for us mortals it drives us mad and in the end it would detract from the intended sense of accomplishment that is the core design philosophy how many of you died to waterfowl for the 30th time said [ __ ] it committed the cardinal sin and popped mimicked here how does he get more staggers than i do you like [ __ ] eat that firebomb you [ __ ] dumb [ __ ] look at him he's [ __ ] beating the [ __ ] out of her bro [ __ ] smack this [ __ ] oh my god oh my god he's slapping the [ __ ] out of her holy [ __ ] dude i understand the game needs to be accessible which is probably why elden ring has been such a commercial success but i do agree that ash spirits aren't the way to go as joseph aptly put it it turns the bosses into pinatas this is an easy mode that does add depth from an rpg standpoint and are easy dungeon rewards and maybe would grow on me if they were nerfed but it allows you to entirely circumvent the game mechanics in much the same way that magic always has maybe a better way would be to give revives like sakura did as an easy mode that way you still must overcome the boss by fighting them head on by the way these things would completely [ __ ] pvp so you would have to integrate it such that you could tear it away the second you connect to another player's world of course without the summons the gang fights are pretty much aids and no i'm not talking about the commander fights those fat [ __ ] don't even engage you and just edge walk when their summons are active get over it so the summon system has some merit i understand that double crucible knight and every other duo boss including godskin duo holy [ __ ] definitely them [ __ ] blow and even when using ash spirits some may not enjoy that but can we please give these developers a [ __ ] break everyone keeps complaining that there aren't enough shard bearer bosses or npc quest lines after saying that their first playthrough lasted from 70 to 100 hours in one of the most mechanically intricate games that they have ever played in one of the nicest looking open worlds seriously breath of the wild and skyrim have the same problem of semi-repetitive dungeons but also have toddler level combat systems in comparison to eldon ring you just know these funko pop reddit dads would lose their [ __ ] over any article saying that a game developer worked its staff half to death except i guess in japan where that business practice is just common there are a hundred and seventy seven or so bosses in elden ring with many being reused i'm sure at some point they said [ __ ] it we gotta reuse some bosses to fill all these goddamn dungeons we design like [ __ ] chill guys i don't think the gang fights prove elden ring is specifically trying to force you to rely on easier mechanics so much as hey we need to fill up some boss rooms because the fans are becoming alarmingly suicidal after two years without a crumb of news maybe i'm used to there always being unfinished and large swaths of cut content souls games because [ __ ] like reused assets didn't even make me [ __ ] blink when art is this good it just becomes self-referential rather than recycled regardless though this is completely pretending that we live in an alternate timeline in which co-op npc summons and magic that allow you to do extremely high damage from far away has never existed in the soul series to begin with this is why i think it is wrong to attribute the design changes to the new ease of access mechanics i just think that fromm has big expectations of us now after more than a decade sure a couple attacks in the entire game could be tweaked a little but i am generally optimistic about adding combo branching that being much more dynamic and interesting and from wanting us to think about alternative ways to dodge an attack than simply timing a role for every single attack in the game this is a concept i touched upon in my sakura video and i am sure that a studio that can make a game like that has far grander ideas percolating than just more dark souls clones i'm pretty sure miyazaki never even wanted to make a sequel to dark souls in the first place so i imagine eldon ring is just the game that he always did want to make back then without limitations and now they're gonna try different things in the future [Music] i also want to address the fact that you will see me with bloodhound step equipped in a lot of my first playthrough footage despite using giant hunt for a majority of it seeing it there honestly disgusts me a bit given how stupid [ __ ] broken it is and how perfectly it ruins pve and pvp but the matter of the fact is this playing with a quick hander setup is really fun for mix-ups and they clearly put this in here and refuse to delete it for [ __ ] like me who have this incessant need to iframe every attack in the game and play melee only i really tried to only use it if absolutely necessary and i reserved it for dealing with the most oppressive of attacks and guess what it genuinely helped me enjoy the late game fights so i could get over them and then be pumped to jump into new game plus to continue to learn the bosses even more intimately eventually being able to flawless some it actually sped up the process of learning which direction and when to dodge things like waterfowl dance i took the [ __ ] black pill ads i used the rpg elements that the game gave me to make the game just slightly easier and it made it so much more fun on my first time through and i rest assured knowing that if i really wanted to i could flawless these bosses just with the mid-roll finally i'll just reiterate that these points are definitely more subjective in nature and if you disagree i'd love to hear why in the comments i have no problem with people hating things that i love from a personal preference standpoint but if you're just going to ignorantly [ __ ] on it i'm not going to let it slide sorry if i got more pissy towards the end but watching a 1 hour and 40 minute video 4 times will do that to you not to mention the 4 hour q a live stream and the earlier souls videos i know i probably came across like a giant elden ring dick sucker but i actually do have a metric [ __ ] ton of complaints about the game's weapons and magic balance back stabs and the way invasions work currently but it wasn't really relevant for this video i also know how often i brought up pvp but guess what it's part of the [ __ ] game some might even say integral if you take anything away from this video it's think critically for yourself and don't be afraid to find your own fun in these games whether that's using the more rpg elements or persevering with your challenge run purist playstyle learn to adapt and know that from games have always asked the player to meet them on its terms so that you can learn to enjoy the game the way that it was designed to be i'm risking this video becoming a long-form video essay if this goes on so without further ado i will be doing a challenge run of elden ring at twitch.tv lupine os where i will be doing all remembrances naked rune level 1 no magic ashes or summons zweihander only if you know me then you know i stream on weekends and that i also nickname runs so that they aren't such a mouthful this run shall be dubbed the suckit anderson run another one come on okay i'll take it this is gonna be it's gonna be it oh [Music] what the [ __ ] did she say [ __ ] you i don't give a [ __ ] i don't give a [ __ ] dude shove it up your ass you [ __ ] [ __ ] my brother oh you're such a [ __ ] i'm sorry shut up you're dead [ __ ] off gg easy uh first try uh no that's a [ __ ] dummy shut the [ __ ] up shut the [ __ ] up me thank you so much for watching i would be really pumped to see you over on twitch and be happy to chat there or down below in the comments and folks remember to leave a like if you like please subscribe wow that is delicious finally some good [ __ ] food before we get into why morgot has the best feet in the series first let's take a quick 20 minutes to talk about how healing has worked in previous titles starting with kingsfield the line anderson 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 [Applause] keep it amicable in the comments i'm not trying to start any beef here i only want to wrestle with ideas not people unless it's pro wrestling then hell yeah the rock is extreme because there's nowhere to go nowhere to go not the cage oh yeah how you doing everybody [Applause] my wife [Music] oh yeah i'm calling you out anderson you have the audacity to challenge me in the ring after my track record come at me video game critics i remember when i used to play with power stance blades of ruin when i was still in the cradle radagon what are you doing taking your shirt off what do you think this is a high school fight you look like a clown this is how you play loretta oh geez she just keeps running away from me this game is so passive and boring she just keeps running away this is how i fight loretta come here [ __ ] horse girls are [ __ ] weird bro you think you got what it takes to last 60 seconds in the cage with a genetic freak like me [ __ ] hop right over that horse chris hanson called me asking if i knew the whereabouts of mo lord of blood i told him i put that ugly freak back in the sewers where he belongs and that's where i'm gonna put anderson this sunday sunday sunday sunday chris hanson then applauded me over the phone obama was there you know that wrestler that says you can't see me well my motto is i can't see you because my weapon is so big it blocks half my [ __ ] screen doesn't matter though cause i'm [ __ ] adonis you hand me a [ __ ] tuba and tell me to kill god and i'll say you want me to kill him in c or e minor yeah i don't know [ __ ] about music theory but what i do know is that a brass instrument can be a pretty decent murder weapon tell them what i told you to say mr mean gene oakland you told me to tell you anderson not to buy any winter clothes oh yeah the future does not look bright for mr anderson all i'm saying is don't buy any unripe bananas because you won't live to eat them oh yeah i beat this game at room level 70 plus 15 with nothing but my grandfather's zyhander your nippon steel might be a thousand times folded but i nicknamed my pure germanic two-hander the shattering you know why because it shattered a thousand katanas eat your heart out weeaboos oh yeah i was born into the ultra mindset molded by it and i'll see you anderson in the ring this sunday and you disagreed with me about a video game mania the a mug lord you're god damn right [Music] you

Channel: Loopine

Views: 381,427

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Id: EZ_9F73R1tE

Length: 90min 10sec (5410 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022