My Big Gripe With Elden Ring

You could call me a pretty big fan of Dark Souls, a "souls-head" some may say. I played and loved Dark Souls 1 and 3 (ill talk about 2 someday in a much more thought out piece than this), adored Sekiro, and Bloodborne is in my top 5 games of all time. So, of course, when Elden Ring started making the rounds I was so fucking pumped for it. Dude, it's like Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild at the same time, WOW!! This game is gonna be awesome! So I waited with baited breath until the fateful day it finally released, and I obviously loved it. Like, it is incredible, and it is absolutely a new benchmark for games. Elden Ring is the kinda game that people are going to talk about in the same way people now talk about games like Half-Life, or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. So anyways, with all my glowing praise on the game known, I have to be brutally honest and say this is like, my 4th favourite FromSoftware game below Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, and Sekiro respectively.

Hold on, this isn't an indictment against Elden Ring! Like I said before, I think the game is an incredible achievement, yet it's such stiff competition, and Elden Ring has enough flaws that started to wear and nibble away at me as I kept playing that I have to say with a heavy heart that it's only a 9/10 amongst 10/10's. It's such a shame. What I say going forward are very overblown nitpicks, and not serious problems with the game I feel, its just some thoughts I've had coming out of the game that I'd like to share.

I've played every Dark Souls game and Bloodborne using a strength build primarily. The feeling of a giant weapon's heavy swings bludgeoning and digging into your foe when you hit them, the massive damage you immediately deal, the way you have to slowly and methodically plan your openings of attack, it's simply what I love playing most in these games. So, obviously, I went with a strength build in Elden Ring as well, using a little intelligence on the side. I was having a great time bashing dudes skulls in with my increasingly huge greatswords I found, until I came across Margit, the Fell Omen. Obviously, this guy was a wall for most people playing the game, a big signal telling you "Fuck off! Go somewhere else and explore and get stronger!". So with that in mind, I scampered off beyond central Limgrave to find ways to get more powerful in preparation to throw myself at Margit again.

This was probably the best time I had playing the entire game. So many expansive caves and forts and an entire castle were hidden just off the beaten path for me to explore, with unique bosses and NPC's and pieces of the environment that both acted as environmental storytelling and as ways to hint me towards a cool new area. It was incredible! This was all I could've ever wanted from an open-world game in general. I felt like I was discovering so much about this world and it's people and getting meaningfully stronger along the way. After hours and hours of exploring the larger Limgrave area, I finally went back to face Margit, and was immediately shown one of the biggest problems I have with this game. It's boss design, and how it constricts what you feel you can do.

This probably comes off as sounding like "this game is too hard!!" but it really isn't. I did beat all the Dark Souls, and Bloodborne, and Sekiro, and I can pretty confidently say on the whole Elden Ring isn't harder than these games. At least, it isn't once you start playing the way FromSoftware feels like they want you to. Every even slightly savvy game journalist has said time and time before that Souls games do have a way to scale the difficulty, and it's through the build you use. Someone playing Dark Souls as a spellcaster staying out of the action will usually have an easier time in the game than someone using a bulky slow melee weapon, not to mention summons, items, gear upgrades, and so on. This is something most people see as a great strength for the series, as it not just lets you adjust how you play to what's easiest for you, and you can replay the game so many times with so many different kinds of builds that alter the way you progress through and approach the games. In Elden Ring, this feels like something FromSoftware saw not as a strength, but as a flaw. Most major boss encounters are against humanoid enemies of middling to large stature who can jump and weave around the arena with ease, and can string ridiculous combos into weird tells and attacks that you just got to react quick enough to. As someone who was playing strength, I was struggling by such an inordinate amount to just get one hit in within the tiny frames Margit and bosses after him would leave open that it almost felt impossible to best them. Despite that, I threw myself again and again at bosses, trying to almost brute force myself through with a playstyle that it felt the game actively discouraged and it resulted in hours of frustratingly being beaten down again and again for things I felt like I couldn't reasonably find a way around.

Eventually, I swallowed the pride I had in my strength build and now especially gigantic fuckoff sword that was essentially a hunk of sheer rock in exchange for dual katanas. I had a much easier time with this build, as it allowed so much wider windows to strings two or even three hits compared to maybe being able to eek out one with my last build if I was really attentive and careful. I felt like I was being drawn and pulled into using a build like this by the game, and once I finished it and started looking into other people playing the game, I could see I wasn't alone in that. So many people I watched also used dual katanas, which ended up not being very shocking to me. I felt like I was pigeonholed into using a specific build, one that did good damage and quick hits, because its what the game wanted from me. Because it was "the best one". Previous Souls games always had builds that were the cream of the crop, but it never really affected me or many other people playing because it still felt like what I wanted to use was worthwhile. It was a slider from easy to hard. In Elden Ring, so many people finished the game with the exact same build as me because it was the one that let you reach what should be the "hard" baseline, although this time it was the floor from hard to unfair.