 A couple weeks ago, I bought Elden Ring and Sekiro for my PS5. I was looking at games to play in my bedroom and thought, you know what, maybe if I play Elden Ring for a fourth time, I will finally love it as much as everyone else does. Then after getting to the mountaintops with Giants, I just kinda lost interest and decided to buy Sekiro and play that instead. This accomplished two things. First, it made me realize that I'd finally become middle class because of the plenty from 10 years ago saw the current plenty spending 120 bucks for the privilege of replaying a couple of games from his bed rather than 15 feet away at his desk, he'd have had a heart attack. In fact, I even have multiple options for streaming the games from my PC but what is money for if not to waste on minor conveniences and slightly better performance. But more importantly, replaying Elden Ring for the fourth time and Sekiro for at least the seventh has convinced me that Elden Ring is a fundamental shift in FromSoftware's design that is much larger than I'd initially thought. How you feel about that shift is down to individual taste but I think it's clear that something foundational has changed in the last two games. This time of year also happens to be the time I almost always end up replaying Doom Eternal and playing all three of these games at once not only made me even more down on Elden Ring, it gave me an epiphany. Sekiro is the Doom Eternal of Dark Souls. For someone like me, it is replayable in a way that no other FromSoft game is, just like Doom Eternal is the most replayable shooter ever made for someone like me. Conversely, Elden Ring, again for a player like me, is less replayable than any previous Soulsborne game. But first blush, this seems counter-intuitive. Let's start with Doom Eternal. There are tons of shooters that have huge open worlds, emergent gameplay systems, or even procedural encounters and levels. Meanwhile, Doom Eternal is as linear as a game can get. You find a couple of secrets but you're basically walking a rigidly designed and paced series of arenas with almost no freedom to deviate. They'll play the game in the same order every time enemies will spawn in the same places every time at the same time. And you will encounter them in the same way every single time. There are no large meta decisions to make. You can't decide you're going to play Superbornist first. In Far Cry 6, random encounters and enemy spawns means you can go many playthroughs without seeing everything the game has to offer. And yet that game is, for me, tremendously less interesting to replay. Elden Ring and Sekiro are made for different players who want different things. I'm not here to say one is better than the other, but today I'm going to explain how Sekiro's design, very much like Doom Eternal's design, is the best game from has ever developed for people like me. This is not a video about how Elden Ring is bad. It is a video about how Sekiro is probably the greatest thing humans have ever invented, but mainly it's about how different people look for different things. For the last 15 years, FromSoft has been able to make games that somehow managed to perfectly satisfy two different audiences. Sekiro was the first time they made a game that was clearly aimed at one of those groups. It turns out I am a member of that group. Then this time they made a game that is for that other group, the one I am not a part of. This is a video about how I came to realize that we might never get another game that works for all of us. Hopefully we can switch on and off, but it's my biggest fear that the ridiculous amount of praise and insane sales numbers will end up meaning that people like me might not get another game that does for us what Elden Ring seems to do for other people. So Sekiro is the Doom Eternal of Dark Souls. Better than sliced bread. A few years ago when Sekiro was announced as being an action game and not an RPG, I was nervous. In fact, I made a video about it. I don't like change. Monday through Friday at 6.55 am, I buy a quesadilla from Wawa for breakfast. I get just cheddar cheese and nothing else on it. On the very rare occasions that I cannot get that cheddar cheese quesadilla, I don't eat breakfast. I like the things I like and until I discover something else that I also like, I prefer to go with what I know. And when Sekiro was announced as being something different from the previous games, I worried a little. In a world without Doom Eternal and Sekiro, full of drab, lifeless action games, I clung to my love of Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Seeing as how those games were as good as humans he did achieved, it made me nervous to even attempt to deviate from them. Then Sekiro released. I played it and I loved it, but I had some complaints. I thought the game was too hard in many places. I wished there was more variety in weapons. I missed the RPG. This friends is why you really shouldn't make a video or write an article about an important game after only playing it once. I still have a few minor nitpicks about Sekiro, but it was only during a second playthrough that I fully mind melded with the game. Because I have parried so many enemies in Dark Souls, I approached Sekiro's deflect timing thinking it was the same thing. Before that entire first time through, I waited until the last possible moment to parry. And Sekiro's enemies attack very quickly, which meant I was constantly getting hit. But then, in the second playthrough, quite by accident, I discovered just how forgiving Sekiro's parry timing actually is, much more forgiving than the Souls series. This one discovery changed everything. I want to talk about how the solutions to the problems that the Souls games put in front of you work better in Sekiro than any other game because it works like Doom Eternal. And I'm going to talk about how the things that Elden Ring puts in front of you works worse than any other from game for players like me. To do this, we will have to look at a few parts of the games to understand what makes them work or not work for different groups of players. Sekiro and Elden Ring share a lot of design elements. After playing through Sekiro again, I was struck by just how much Elden Ring's enemy and boss design takes from the game. Now you'd think this would mean I would love the enemy and boss design in Eldering. After all, I'm about to say that Sekiro has the most well-designed and balanced bosses in video game history. But the Sekiro elements in Elden Ring massively hurt the game in my opinion. Not because they're bad elements, but because things that were designed for Sekiro's very specific combat system don't easily port over to the other games. I think Orphan of Kos and Lady Maria are two of the best bosses ever. But throw those two into Dark Souls 1 and we've got a serious problem. Let's start by addressing one of my biggest gripes with Elden Ring bosses. Delayed attacks. Delayed attacks have always been a part of the series, but it's been used pretty sparingly in most of the previous titles. Each boss might have one or two delayed attacks, or you get something like Nameless or Gale that have a much different delayed attack kind of rhythm, but these were exceptions, not the rule. But by the end of the game, Elden Ring's delayed attacks had me exhausted and annoyed. But after playing Sekiro again, a sneaking suspicion I had was totally confirmed. Elden Ring's bosses play like Sekiro's. Let's start by looking at the two versions of the Genichiro fight. First, the original fight, you'll see in Ashina Castle, and then the updated Inner Genichiro fight that you can get in the boss gauntlet DLC after beating the game. It's important to understand, I don't like Sekiro more because it's easy. Okay, if anyone's going to attack me with that, just stop. By the time of Sekiro's release, Genichiro was a significant roadblock to a ton of players. In fact, on PC right now, only 47.5% of players have beat that first Genichiro fight. This fight is one-third of the way through the game. Other hard things had been encountered to that point, but Genichiro is the first boss that you simply cannot beat if you don't at least have something of a grasp on the mechanics. You don't need to have mastered the game to beat him by any means. But you do have to have a basic grasp. The fact that less than half of the players who bought Sekiro on PC made it one-third of the way through the game I think is proof that the game is not too easy. So, why was Genichiro so hard to people? Because he is basically an Elden Ring Boss. Almost all of his attacks have long delays. He has several heal punishes. He jumps back and hits you with ranged attacks. He dodges you. And he does quite a lot of damage if you get hit. The first time you fight Genichiro, most players will find this attack chain here the hardest thing to deal with. That is an 8 attack chain with a bunch of delays. It is extremely hard to get the timing right. Even now, after I've gotten pretty good at this fight, if I say so myself, I am almost never able to perfect deflect the entire chain. The delays are so difficult to time because it deliberately throws off your rhythm. It's very similar to many of the extremely long attack chains you will come across in Elden Ring. With one big difference. If you fail to properly deflect these attacks, you'll take postured damage instead of losing half of your health. An average player is likely to be killed by running out of Estus Flask over and over until every damn attack that Genichiro has is hardwired into your brain. The reason this fight, shock-full of delayed attacks, works in Sekiro is because while they're trying to trick you, they aren't here to roll catch you and the deflect system is simply more interactive and less punishing than the rolling system in the Souls games. Missing a deflect and blocking puts you on the back foot but it doesn't cause you any damage. You can make four, five, six mistakes in a row and still have all of your health. It works in Sekiro because the combat system was designed from the ground up for these kinds of attack chains. And yet, if Genichiro's moveset was ported directly over to a new banished knight variant and an Elden Ring DLC dungeon, nobody would think it was odd. Even though dodging delayed attacks is extremely more punishing than trying to deflect them, these kind of movesets are all over Elden Ring. Now, you could almost certainly be Genichiro with the basic Elden Ring moveset. You could definitely overpower him with ashes of war or magic but it would still be messy. The big difference is that if he was an Elden Ring, you would eventually be able to memorize his moves and beat him without taking much damage by keeping your distance and dodging backwards and only hitting him when he has a clear opening. You'd have people telling you just to bait out his slam and only attack them but is that fun? Would it be fun to fight Genichiro with the Elden Ring moveset? I mean, you can do it but should we do it? You can even do this in Sekiro itself actually. You can run around and bait out a couple of attacks and only hit them once every 10 seconds and eventually you will win but that's not how Sekiro actually works. When you fully understand and master Sekiro's combat, you don't just beat Genichiro, you totally dominate and humiliate him. The first time you're learning the fight, it feels like he doesn't even give you much room to breathe but once you understand how the game works, you don't give him a chance to breathe. You destroy him, deflect every attack, literally never stop putting pressure on him. Mastery in Sekiro doesn't just mean beating the boss without getting hit. It means totally changing how the game feels and plays. That same eight hit stupidly delayed attack chain goes from something that makes you take posture damage to something that can be turned right around back on Genichiro. Instead of something you have to manage, it's something you're doing to him. All of his hardest moves can be turned from something you fear until something you actively want to happen. You can pretty much make Genichiro feel how the player feels fighting Malinia. You can make Genichiro have to use the passive reactive gameplay style the player has to use when they're learning the fight. The fact that Mastery totally changes how fights play out is what makes Sekiro the game it is. Now, let's talk about how very small changes can make such a huge difference in a boss. After you beat the game, you can fight Inner Genichiro. You would think that this would not be a significantly harder fight but even a slight adjustment on the sliders and adding one or two new moves can take Genichiro from being unable to touch you to being a significant challenge again. In his upgraded version, Genichiro takes less health and posture damage and he does significantly more posture damage to you. But the biggest wrinkle is that each phase has a few new moves. He's got a chasing slice move like you and he has this move here and in the final phase, he can do a lightning reversal to your lightning reversal. And one of his biggest differences is he now heal punishes all the time. This can actually be quite frustrating the first time you fight him but on some reflection, it works well in this game in a way I feel it simply does not in Elden Ring. Why? Because you set the pace in Sekiro and you can heal by doing death blows. You can still end the Inner Genichiro fight insanely fast if you play well. In Elden Ring, no matter how well you play, you do not set the pace. You can dodge every attack and you are no closer to beating the boss. Heal punishing feels like an unnecessary punishment in Elden Ring where in Sekiro, it feels like an amazing way to ramp up the tension. And the fact that these tiny little balance changes can totally make this fight go from absurdly easy to actually quite challenging shows how careful Frum has been in their design in the past. They didn't just give Genichiro 7,000 times more health than all one hit kills. They added two or three new moves. They very slightly changed his posture damage and even those small changes make it a whole new fight. To me, Elden Ring feels like everything was changed without much thought. Bosses feel like they're all over the place in their difficulty or all of them feel like their movesets are just slightly too large. Elden Ring's harder bosses have gotten Sekiro movesets. Almost all of them would actually be pretty awesome to fight in Sekiro actually. But in Elden Ring, they end up feeling oppressive and frustrating simply by the nature of the Dark Souls combat system. What is the safest and most efficient way to deal with Malinia's waterfowl dance? It's to run away. It is to run away at first and then dodge the other two. That exact series of actions works perfectly in Sekiro. For several Sekiro bosses, sprinting around the arena is the most efficient play. The blazing bull requires sprinting around. First phase of Ape requires sprinting around. Demon of Hatred, who I now actually love after not liking on my first playthrough, also requires sprinting around. So why do I dislike having to sprint away from an Elden Ring boss? Because the stamina resource changes everything. Sprinting away or toward Guardian Ape has no downside because there's no stamina. And Sekiro is much, much faster and more responsive to control. And crucially, Sekiro lets you animation cancel. In Sekiro, you can start attacking and instantly animation cancel into a block. You can animation cancel into a dodge or sprint. You might not have even realized that when you were playing, but I promise you it saved your ass countless times. The game's enemies and bosses are punishing, but the game knows that and it has loosened many of the classic souls, rules and response. Now, it's not a stupid get out of jail free card. No one ever said Sekiro was too easy. It only works for a few frames, but those frames are everything. To be honest, it only working for a few frames proves how carefully designed it really is. Someone realize how punishing the combat can be for a new player and realize that some deviation from the classic rule set was needed. Not only is it just as carefully designed as all the other games, I think Sekiro is the most carefully designed of all the other games, probably because it's the smallest. But Elden Ring is playing with Dark Souls rules. Once you press that attack button, you are fucked and powerless until that animation finishes. If the animation is a dagger swipe, you might be okay. If the animation is a colossal sword swing, it is very frustrating. This strict animation commitment combined with the equally strict input buffering works perfectly in all of the souls games because everything is moving at the pace of the player. If you could attack cancel and Dark Souls three, it would be a worse game. But the second you bring Eshin's attack speed and Ganechiro's delays into Elden Ring, things get very messy. If you are attacking Malinia and she goes into waterfowl, you are getting hit, period. This is fine in phase one kinda when you sorta know when she's gonna use it, but in phase two, she can use it at any time. You can be punished with death by being trapped in an animation. And Malinia herself is able to animation cancel. You can't, but she can. She can because she is a Sekiro boss. All of the bosses in Sekiro have to be able to animation cancel because they have to be able to deflect you or else you would just kill them by hitting them over and over. This works in Sekiro, but when the player has Dark Souls rules and the bosses have Sekiro rules, things feel very wonky. They don't feel carefully designed. They feel like they're meant to be overcome in a different way to the previous games. Elden Ring for the first time starts to feel like much less care was put into making sure boss and player actions were balanced against each other. For the first time, it does not feel like the bosses and the players are using the same rule set. And that extremely careful design is what I love about From Games and Doom Eternal. In fact, it is that attention to detail that made me fall in love with the series in the first place. This is gonna matter less to others because they care about other things more. But to me, this is a serious problem. You will be hit a lot in Elden Ring by being caught in animations. You will see enemies a lot be able to animation cancel when you cannot. Bosses attack Sekiro fast without the Sekiro rules. Let's get back to Genichiro. When you first fight Genichiro, it feels like you need to be pretty close to perfect. In fact, in my first video on the game all those years ago, I am almost positive I said that very thing. But it's only after you actually master the fight that you realize it's not true. Intergenichiro does, however, require you to be pretty close to perfect to win. Intergeni takes the difficulty up by making even small mistakes punished. But even here you don't deal with these harder mechanics by out leveling them or by using overpowered abilities. You can't RPG your way out of Sekiro. And you especially cannot deal with them by playing more passively. Sekiro raises the difficulty by making you have to fully commit to the ideal play style. The coolest looking play style is also the most efficient play style. And the hardest play style is the coolest looking play style. That's how Sekiro works and that's how Doom Eternal works. That is not how Elden Ring works. The easiest play style is the most efficient play style. And the hardest play style is the least efficient play style. It is objectively true that the most efficient way to beat the bosses is to spam ashes of war at them or to hit them with extremely powerful magic. So the most efficient way to play is the easiest way to play. It's exactly the opposite from Sekiro. And Sekiro, the most efficient way to play is the hardest way to play. How much that matters to you is gonna be personal preference, but it matters to me. The inner versions of the bosses require you to not play passively. You must keep the pressure up. One of the most disappointing things about many Elden Ring bosses to me is that there's nothing you can do to dictate the pace of the fight. No matter what you do, you'll need to wait for Malaketh to land so you can get your one hit in. On many bosses, I found that keeping distance from the boss was the most effective method of dealing with their attack chains. To me, that feels very different from previous Souls games. Getting better at the fights does not speed them up that much because they simply attack all the time. The game gives you bosses with Sekiro-style attack patterns without the risk-reward calculation of the Sekiro combat system. This is why I didn't say I thought that Elden Ring bosses were badly designed, aside from waterfowl dance on Malinia and everything about Elden Beast who was terrible. I said, I don't like the new focus of the design and they feel sloppier to deal with. Elden Ring is the most RPG of all the Souls games and Sekiro is the least. The difference in how you accomplish goals in the two titles is just massive, even more so because they came out one after another. The design of the worlds. Let's talk about Elden Ring's greatest achievement, its open world map. Right after Elden Ring released, Google kept suggesting a series of articles in me that said that Elden Ring had revolutionized open world design, revolutionized. Now listen, Elden Ring's open world is amazing. I have said and continue to say it is the most I've ever enjoyed in open world design by a good long spell, at least since Fallout 3. But a revolution in design, how? What do we associate with the open world genre? A bunch of evenly spread locations, check. Trying to space out the best stuff with a bunch of fairly mundane stuff, check. Reuse of assets, check. A bunch of repeating activities, check. If you could open the map after grabbing a map fragment and see an icon for every walking mausoleum and cave and a different one for every dungeon and another one for all the giants pulling wagons and another for every monster camp, Elden Ring would feel like a much more conventional open world to people. That's why people feel like it's such a revelation. It is not all that much different from Horizon Forbidden West in its design. It just doesn't have a map that looks like this. Just because there's no icon calling this here a bandit camp doesn't change the fact that this here is a bandit camp. The only difference between this bandit camp and a Far Cry 6 bandit camp is from's amazing art design and the fact that Elden Ring's combat is very good because it's sold combat. Elden Ring's open world isn't great because it revolutionizes anything at all. It doesn't. In fact, it has all of the issues that an open world has. You can easily get over-leveled or under-leveled. It is depressingly easy to end up face-rolling shit because you accidentally got too powerful and it is just as infuriatingly easy to end up infuriated because you are massively under-leveled for something. I know this because my first playthrough, I was tilted for the first third of the game because I was way, way under-leveled. The first time I beat Margaret at like level 15 with a plus one weapon and probably beat Stormvale at level 20 something. I mean, I finished the game at level 75 and my next playthrough, I was kind of bored because I was massively over-leveled. My third time, I had to be extremely careful to not clear the whole map while still getting all the estus upgrades and smithing stones. And then of course, there is the classic unavoidable open world design. Control C, Control V. Listen, there's simply no getting around it. If a studio is gonna make a big, massive map, they will be forced to reuse assets. I understand that, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. There is a titanic amount of boss reuse. Truly egregious, in fact, with like major story bosses found just like fucking wandering the map or stuffed into some random ass reskin of a dungeon. It's as good as it is because A, Souls Combat is a hell of a lot better than Assassin's Creed. B, Souls Art Direction is literally the best in the industry by a very substantial margin. And C, Souls Music and sound design is among the best in the industry at the moment. And actually D, there are like eight or nine classic Souls levels mixed in here. So you don't have to play an open world game for a hundred hours. There is a Dark Souls game split up and tucked into Elden Ring. That's why it's the best open world game. Not because of the open world, in spite of the open world. Now, someone's personal taste can prefer having their Dark Souls paced with an open world that is totally valid. But it's not the open world format. And it's not because the world is a revolution. There are precisely two differences between the map of Elden Ring and the map of Valhalla. One, there are no stupid icons all over the map. So you actually have to kind of find stuff yourself. A massive, massive improvement. And one that all open world games should do, but hardly a revolution. This is literally what big open world games used to be like until everyone decided that all open world games now by federal law have to be Ubisoft games. The Bethesda Fallout games do the same thing. That's one of the biggest reasons Bethesda's open world games are so much better than Ubisoft games. If you took the horrendous Ubisoft icons that make you robotically trudge from one to another and drop that system into Fallout, it makes that game massively worse, that one thing. Elden Ring is using the Bethesda map system. It's hard to say it's a revolution when Bethesda was doing it in 2008. And the second difference between Elden Ring and Valhalla is that there's a Dark Souls game split up and plunked into each zone. That's not a revolution either. It's a return to a tried formula on one hand and a blending of genres on the other. It's great and it's now amongst the best open world games, but it comes at a cost. The cost is Sekiro. If you love Fromsoft, you've no doubt seen some of the 3D maps that people have made of the games. The Dark Souls map design is amazing. In fact, it is so awesome it broke games journalism. I held off on playing Dark Souls for almost a year after I got back into video games because I kept seeing it described as an open world game. And I mean, yeah, I guess it's an open world game in that all of the loading screens are hidden behind elevators and you never shimmy between two fucking rocks, but it doesn't really work as a description, does it? Because we have an idea what an open world means and Dark Souls isn't that. After a while, people stopped calling it an open world and the term interconnected became the agreed upon description. And that is an excellent and much better description. But the amazing thing about this anecdote isn't that game journalists got it wrong. It's that calling it an open world actually makes sense because the best way to describe Dark Souls 1 through Sekiro is to say that they are open world games shrunk down and condensed. They are open world but edited. You feel like you're on a big ass journey in Dark Souls 3. How? How does the game feel like a journey? Why does it feel like an open world game? It's because the game doesn't feel like levels, it feels like a place. Dark Souls 1 requires you to backtrack across the world like an open world game, but it's remarkably condensed in size and each actual area is highly linear. I mean, a huge portion of the map is like a series of corridors. It felt huge the first time because a fucking bone wheel skeleton killed you 11 times and you spent three hours traversing 40 yards over and over. That was its magic. The smaller size and constricted linear design was hidden by its density and its difficulty. By the time we get to Dark Souls 3, we have lost the backtracking but the core ideas are still there. Iritho of the Boreal Valley feels like you're exploring a city because your imagination fills in the gaps. It's almost like a scale model of an open world. You submit to the illusion because every step feels like a mile. It's so dense and has such absurd attention to detail. It's so novel. Every enemy feels like it tells a story. Every room feels like a house. Every house, a city block. Also, these assholes killed you six times and then this douchebag killed you twice and all of that time felt like a journey. You were trading the sheer size of an actual open world for your own imagination and the density and detail on offer. And now we have Elden Ring which is an actual open world game. Whereas Dark Souls was linear and constricted, traversing it was difficult. Elden Ring's open world is extremely easy to traverse. You are rarely going to die just traversing the open world but it's still need to be filled with enemies but those enemies don't do the same thing anymore. These things here are only in two spots of the game. They feel like they belong here and when you leave here, you don't see them again. That's how Dark Souls 3 feels like a journey and a real world. Because even if the actual areas are small, every single inch is visually distinct and has its own character. Every area has its own totally unique enemies that feel like they belong in that place and only that place. These guys are only here. The jailers are only in the jail. The Lothric Knights are only in Lothric Castle. The cathedral is the cathedral because the slug guys are only there. But Elden Ring is huge. It's impossible to have that level of uniqueness. So when you get to Calid and you see these crows, holy shit, it feels just like Dark Souls 3. It is very powerful. These enemies were so clearly meant for this area. They belong here and only here. Their very existence tells a powerful and unique story about this area of the zone. They themselves tell the story of the world. Oh, but they're also here and here. These birds only belong at Stormvale. They're up here in the clouds, clearly trained to be beasts of war. Oh, but here they are after being teleported to a whole other area forgotten by time. Firegecko clearly belongs here on the way to Volcano Manor. But oh, weird. Here he is now and he's in a snow field? That's kind of odd. Reeves isn't always bad. The tree avatars make sense to be everywhere. I like those guys. The normal mooks are everywhere as they should be. But seeing this crow, one of the game's coolest enemies in an entirely different zone and climate means you lose that condensed attention to detail. Instead, you trade it for sheer size. Now, again, if you like that sheer size instead of the scale model, that's perfectly reasonable preference, man. I can see why, I get it. Shit, people actually like cooking food and bathing and flipping through a fucking catalog to shop in Red Red Redemption 2. Somebody loves everything and many people love this. But I prefer density and detail to size and grandeur. Elden Ring does a different thing. It no longer does one or two things exceptionally well. It does a bunch of things and the thing it does best is size. And that's just not the reason I fell in love with these games. In fact, it is literally the exact opposite reason of why I fell in love with these games. So yes, Elden Ring does the open world thing better than anybody else is doing it at the moment, but that doesn't mean it's a revolution. It means it's a very specific change that at least one player doesn't like at all. Elden Ring has one of the best open worlds I've ever played in a game. It's beautiful, it's interesting, and at least the first time through, never boring. And yet, even with that almost perfect open world, it was my least favorite part of the game. Probably because in my opinion, the joy of exploration means it can only be special once. As soon as I know what's over the horizon, it is not a mystery anymore. It's a mental waypoint. I suppose this is the point where I should admit something. I can absolutely appreciate the qualities that make people love Breath of the Wild. But the thing is, I've never finished it. I've started it three different times and I've never gotten more than maybe 10 hours in each time. Breath of the Wild is obviously an amazingly designed world and it's open world traversal is probably the best that that has ever been gamified. But I don't like the game. And then there's the fact that I don't like anything about Red Dead Redemption 2 other than its story. Both games are just boring to me because I don't find walking around in a game to be all that interesting no matter how pretty it looks. Breath of the Wild is probably better than Red Dead in the gameplay department, but that's not saying much. But you know what I did really love? Immortal Phoenix Rising. I loved it. I liked Immortal Phoenix Rising's gameplay a hell of a lot more than both Red Dead 2 and Breath of the Wild for a few very important reasons. The maps were way, way, way smaller. The combat in my opinion is way, way, way better. And even though it has a very mediocre story, Breath of the Wild barely has a story at all and Red Dead 2's story takes like 50 hours to get to the point. Size isn't everything to me. In fact, I would almost always prefer something smaller and focused to something bigger and grand. Now to be clear, Elden Ring is a huge open world but it doesn't bore me like Zelda or Red Dead 2. And that's because it at least has a soul's combat to fall back on and that is a good enough base most of the time. And it has those excellent RPG systems which is something else to fiddle around with. And its map was unique enough the first time through to actually feel like I'm always seeing something I've never seen before. And the art design may be the best I've ever seen in a video game. But while I admit Elden Ring has an amazing open world. I thought it was also important to reign in some of the over the top praise it gets. Elden Ring's world is not some totally new experience in soul's games to say nothing of being a revolution in games. Exploration has always been a major part of the soul's born games. And I love them for that. Dark Souls 1 is as much about its exploration as its combat. Even something like Dark Souls 3 with its mostly linear levels still feels like it's much much more open than just a series of combat encounters. It speaks to From's talent and skill that they can make a linear game like Dark Souls 3 feel like it has more interesting exploration than the last three big ass Assassin's Creed games combined. I love the exploration of the soul's games because they feel like open worlds but smaller. It takes the feeling of open world exploration and focuses it down to its most essential elements. My taste is always that less is more. Careful craft is more important than square footage. For sale, baby shoes never worn. This is taught in like every intro college creative writing course. Even a meat head construction worker like me knows that because it perfectly demonstrates that emotional impact isn't a result of being verbose. It is a result of careful craft. It's as much a result of self editing as it is of inspiration. Elden Ring started wearing on my patience because of its sheer size. It gives you the same feeling as Dark Souls but in a much bigger package. And yet, what are the most memorable moments of exploration in Elden Ring? I don't know about you, but for me? Stormville Castle, Lamedale City, FIL, Ray Lucaria, especially its rooftops, Siafra, Noxtella, Volcano Manor. These were, by a massive margin, the most memorable moments of exploration in the game. I cannot recall almost any of the scenery I rode by in the Weeping Peninsula but I do recall Castle Morn. And the feeling I got in Castle Morn was a feeling of exploration. While the feeling I got riding around on Torrent was the same feeling I got looking out the car window when my parents used to drive me to the beach as a kid. Yeah, very pretty, but it's over there and I'm over here. So if the most memorable bits of exploration are in the carefully crafted dungeons, what are all the other bits for? You can argue that they are for pacing. Sure, but there's just stuff, just a bunch of stuff in between every instance of for sale, baby shoes never worn. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Demons aren't a fundamentally different experience of exploration to me. I got the exact same experience my first time through Central Yarnham as I got my first time riding around Elden Ring. They're just a more condensed version of that very same experience. Sekiro, on the other hand, probably is a different experience. In fact, it's basically a Doom Eternal experience. Sometimes I'd prefer to just stab things. The early 3D Doom games weren't particularly linear. Maps required a significant amount of exploration the first time you played them. The whole game was to go from taking 10 minutes to wander around finding keys to be able to finish it in like a minute. So the two reboot games are a pretty big departure for the franchise when it comes to level design. Leaving aside the absolutely amazing Foundry level from 2016, both the first game and Eternal are very linear games. What makes the new Doom games pretty much perfect for me is that they are precision laser-guided rockets of games. Doom Eternal has wonderful level design because it's consistently fun to move about and they often loop back on themselves in fun ways. But there's no getting around that they are very linear in how you move through them. You have to keep your eyes open for secrets and there's a handful of traversal puzzles for finding hidden things, but Eternal knows what it does well and it spends all of its energy funneling you as quickly as possible from one thing it does amazingly well to another thing it does amazingly well. Doom Eternal is about solving increasingly nasty combat puzzles. All the jumping, grappling, wall grabbing, dashing, it's just palette cleansing in between. The game knows what it does well and it does that thing over and over and over in new and interesting ways. And while the map is very linear, the game is actually quite impressive at ramping difficulty in a non-linear way. The game boils down to a series of combat encounters punctuated by a few brutal wave-based rooms per level. In between those sections, it constantly has you fighting challenging but easier encounters. So while the game almost always has you engaging with the horde combat it does so well, it paces itself perfectly by bringing the intensity up and down. It is not just constantly increasing brutality. It gives you time to breathe without ever letting you relax. Sekiro is unlike all the other Soulsborne games and more like Doom Eternal in that it does two things, transcendentally well. Its levels aren't about exploration or a wide variety of experience. Instead, it is a linear series of amazing encounters paced out with easier sections and stealth sections. The Dark Souls games are so great because they do so many things well. Dark Souls 3 is easily the most linear of the five Souls games and even that one feels like you're on a journey exploring a world. That is not Sekiro. In Sekiro, you are on a beeline to the next boss, mini boss or elite enemy. And in between those things, the exploration aspect is almost exactly like Dooms. The corridor levels have a few alternate paths or a couple of tucked away secrets for you to find, but for the most part, those levels are funneling you to the next combat test. In between each of these highlight combat tests, you have a few easy combat encounters just to keep you on your toes. The best way I have thought to explain this subtle but very real difference in world and level design is this. In Elden Ring and the other Souls games, you are on a grand expansive quest. In Sekiro and Doom Eternal, you are not on a quest, you are on a mission. Sekiro's unfair is fairer than Dark Souls unfair. All of the Souls games have enemy placements that seem like the players expected to pull individual enemies out. Let's take the Jailers at the bottom of Erythal Dungeon in Dark Souls 3 as a perfect example. Clearly, the player is not meant to run and smash these dudes all at once, right? At least not the first time. I'm sure it can be done, but it's obviously stupid and needlessly dangerous, which means the intended play is either sneaking through the side rooms or thinning them out by pulling them one at a time with a bow. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of the player, but I don't know man, it's always felt bad to me. It feels like you're very transparently expected to exploit the game's AI or this part in Profane's capital. There's a gargoyle up on the roof waiting to ambush you, so after the first time, you are very frustratingly killed, it becomes obvious that the player is supposed to thin these dudes out one at a time. Of course, you can over level until the area's enemies no longer pose any threat and now the stealth stuff can be skipped by yoloing them all down, but that is obviously not the intended experience of the design your first time through. While it seems like this is what you are supposed to do, I have never liked it because it feels like you're breaking the game. It feels like cheating even though I know it isn't. It feels like Frum wanted a kind of careful puzzle solving aspect to the games, but couldn't really figure out how to implement a system that made it feel like it made sense in the game's world. Elden Ring adds the Sekiro crouch button, so when Elden Ring asks you to thin the herd, it feels less like you're breaking the AI, but it's still kind of just annoyed and bored me because all it's doing is slowing me down. I would rather just destroy all these mooks, but I can't yet because I don't have 30 vigor. These sections have always taken me right out of the game because they feel tacked on, just to me. I'm just letting you know how I feel. Also, let me just point out one more time, this is a bandit camp without the map icon. I just want to get that in there. This is a bandit camp. It is not a revolution, this is a bandit camp. But Sekiro is the doom eternal of Dark Souls. Everything the game will ask you to do feels like an essential aspect of that game. Sekiro's stealth areas do more than just act as palette cleansers. Many of these parts are nearly impossible to brute force your first time through the game. For instance, the mini boss Samurai you come to really early, surrounded by like five dudes in the Alarm Guy. There are tons of things like this in the Souls series, but in Sekiro it works mechanically and narratively. It's clear that you are required to use stealth here and that feels fine in a way pulling these idiots with a bow doesn't because you happen to be a ninja. The whole setup is almost exactly the same as this area in Limgrave. Like it's actually pretty much the exact same system you gotta do with a horn instead of a drum, but this is the same thing. Here you basically must stealth kill dudes because that early if you end up alerting the horn guy and fighting the great shield spear guy, you are dead. So why does the Elden Ring version annoy me more than the almost exactly same version in Sekiro? Because Sekiro has focused the whole design around these encounters. Again, it all feels very careful and deliberate. The grapple hook speeds everything up. Eventually there's a bunch of stealth focused skills and running away and resetting to get back into stealth is just less annoying because the combat arenas are smaller, the bonfire is closer and you are faster. In Sekiro you have no stamina. You can run the whole time. You can sprint and grapple away. For the first time these encounters felt like a core aspect of the design rather than some weirdly incongruous section that takes me out of what the game does best. Doom Eternal never takes me out of what the game does best, never. Sekiro does two things and it does them very, very well. Elden Ring does a ton of things like an insane amount of things. Most of them it does really, really well. Some of them it does just kind of okay and some it does not at all okay. This essay again is about personal taste. Many people like a lot of variety in their games but I prefer one or two things done perfectly to a ton of stuff done pretty good. For sale, baby shoes, never worn. And I wanna point out that Sekiro's lack of stamina and ability to sprint and grapple away means there's actually way more freedom to these sections than is immediately apparent because the ability to escape changes everything. When you first get to Ashina Castle there is a samurai mini-boss surrounded by like eight rifle dudes. The obvious approach is to get up on the roof, stealth kill one, take out another and then retreat and then do it again but once you start to fully appreciate how mobile Sekiro is and how much everything changes by getting rid of stamina you can just run around killing all the rifle dudes while the boss struggles to keep up with you. The coolest looking and most efficient way to deal with the encounter is also the hardest way to do the encounter. That's how it should be. At Hirata Estate you can do the stealth and reset thing before getting a death blow on the boss or you can run around like a madman killing all the little dudes before turning to focus on the boss. Both options are open, both of them work. One is hard but totally doable. The other is much easier but is balanced by being slow and tedious but both work because they fall into the two things that Sekiro does and both things fit perfectly, narratively and mechanically. Samurai, ninja, that's what Sekiro does. It's all Sekiro does, baby shoes. An Elden Ring, these sections tend to go much slower because the stamina meter is an always limiting factor. Also an Elden Ring, I am literally a God slaying hero. In about an hour and a half I'm gonna murk one of the most powerful beings in the world. It's just a little weird to have to sneak around and backstab this freak 15 seconds before I brutalize a literal giant. Sekiro's focused action game design only has two solutions. There's no using ashes of war, there's no pelting it with magic. For me, this is an example of less is more and the importance of careful design and gameplay being congruous with the fantasy of the narrative. Finally, let's wrap up by talking about the thing that makes Doom Eternal and Sekiro the two best games of the last 20 years. It never gets stale. When Doom Eternal released, a ton of people said it was too hard. While many others said they didn't like the rock, paper, scissors aspect of the combat. People thought it was too limiting. I didn't agree at all, but even in my review I said I thought that the Marauder felt too limiting although I had totally changed my mind on that by the third time through the game. And when Sekiro released, people had the exact same complaints. It was too limiting. You had to do things exactly how the game said. Sekiro's difficulty was like the big story surrounding the game. Strangely to me, very few reviews have said that about Elden Ring despite the fact that Elden Ring's main bosses have significantly harder movesets than Sekiro's. I'm pretty positive that people didn't comment on the difficulty of Elden Ring in reviews like they did with Doom or Sekiro because Elden Ring's massive amount of impactful RPG elements means that there is no typical experience. Fighting Godfree with a colossal sword is very different than fighting him with a katana which is very different than fighting him with magic or with any of those things plus spirit summons. Fighting him with 50 vigor and 30 vigor is so much different. It's barely the same boss anymore. My first time through I beat the game at level 75. I think I probably had like 30 vigor at the end. I cannot begin to describe how much different the game feels at 30 vigor. It is crazy. Elden Ring's stat scaling is bonkers by the way. Why doesn't health just like constantly increase in a linear way? That's a whole other can of worms though. Elden Ring is far less limiting and much more open-ended in all of its design than Sekiro in a turtle. Elden Ring is all about freedom and Doom Eternal and Sekiro are all about the lack of freedom. I've never played Eternal on anything less than Ultra Violence so I can't speak to what it's like on the lower settings but on Nightmare Eternal does straight up insist that you use the Rock, Paper, Scissors design. You need to stagger enemies with the tools designed to counter them. You need to use the grenades and the flame belch and the chainsaw. You need to be very careful about which enemies you kill first and which you keep alive as health bags. Even on Ultra Violence, the game is pretty unforgiving. It still requires you to use all those tools but getting caught on geometry isn't an instant death like it is on Nightmare. I'm sure that this was fairly off-putting to many players but I fell in love with it instantly. Even when it was tilting me in certain sections. Checkpoints always spawn you right at the arena you failed. And what went wrong is always very, very obvious. Because the game is pretty simple, it's never hard to understand why you failed. You stopped moving, you got greedy, you used your ice grenade and your blood punched carelessly and they're both on cooldown right at the moment a Cybermancubus spawns and kills you instantly. You stupidly allowed yourself to get trapped in a corner. Once you understand these systems, you can get very good at the game. So much so that it's extremely rare to die even as someone who's only an average video game player like me. But the game still feels amazing because the game play, even once you got it figured out, requires so many split second decisions that boredom is impossible. Even once you're good at the game, it requires not only total focus but constant action. You must press the dash button like 150 times per arena. You end up using that chainsaw, the grenades, the flame belts, the second they come off cooldown, the combat is designed in such a way that it requires decisions and actions every single second in combat. At no point are you just waiting. In fact, waiting means death every single time. And the game's so replayable because if you take a few months off, you will lose enough edge that the game will be challenging again. You can figure the game out but execution is still difficult. Playing again this year for the first time in about 10 months, I died a couple of times and I lost like three or four extra lives because my brain could not keep up with the action. Years ago when that first DLC released, it was ridiculously hard. The very first arena of the very first level is like over the top difficulty if you've taken a few months off. Sekiro shares a ton of these design elements and how its combat works and what happens once you get good at the game. The most amazing thing isn't how hard it is. Just like Doom Eternal, the amazing thing is just how engaging it remains even after that difficulty has lessened for you. I don't know how many of you have played Beat Saber but Doom and Sekiro play an awful lot like Beat Saber. It's easy to know what you need to do but it's very hard to actually do it. There's very little tactics or thinking about strategy involved. You just need to do it over and over until you get better. I have played guitar since I was a teenager. I'm pretty good. And as a young man, I decided I ought to teach myself drums. I am decent but not good and there's no way to get good but to keep doing it over and over. There's no strategy. There's no like leveling up. I know how to do what I want to do. I just can't yet. And playing Sekiro and Doom Eternal gives me that same experience. I love these games more than any others because it gives me the same feeling I get from getting better at drums. I love Dark Souls as well but getting better at those games and especially at Elden Ring is a fundamentally different experience. With Sekiro, getting better has one solution, repetition. Let's demonstrate this by looking at the final boss of the game, Aetian Sword Saint. Gaming's greatest boss. Dude, the first time I played this game, this boss fight tilted me like nothing else. Seriously, more than even Malinia but it tilted me for an entirely different reason. I found it impossible but unlike fighting Malinia, I never felt like I didn't understand what I needed to do. I did not go to Google. It wasn't a matter of trying different strategies or builds. I knew exactly what I had to do and I physically could not actually do it. I just could not do it well enough. Malinia pissed me off at the game. Aetian pissed me off at me. Once I got better, I actually realized the issue. I was playing way too passively. I hadn't fully committed. I was practicing wrong. If you drag this fight out, you will screw up and every hit from Aetian requires a heal because all of his moves take at least half of your health. Still, even though the fight feels very restrictive at first, it actually isn't. There are a couple of different ways to deal with him. What makes this the greatest final boss ever is that he has a relatively limited move set but actually dealing with that move set is challenging. If you block instead of deflect his combos, you're gonna have a problem. If you miss the Mukiri counters, you are going to have a problem. If you don't deal with his combat arts somehow, you will have a real problem. But you can deal with every one of those attacks multiple ways. And those multiple ways let you climb up the mastery ladder. Two of the most dangerous attacks Aetian has are his Ashen Across and his Ichimanji. The Ashen Across will do massive posture damage and significant chip damage if you block it. And if you miss the block, it is very likely to kill you. But the move can easily be outrun and still leave you time to get a hit in. Or you can just learn to perfect parry it. It doesn't actually leave you in a much better position but it feels pretty damn good. The exact same is true of the Ichimanji. It will crush your posture if you block it or probably kill you if you get hit. But you can also perfect parry it which does leave you in a better position. Outrunning these moves feels good but staying and parrying them starts to build up his posture much quicker. I have gotten pretty good at this fight now. In fact, if I do the outrunning these moves strategy I let myself have one heal before I let him kill me on purpose because if I need to heal twice I feel like I've lost. But deflecting these moves is still pretty challenging because the smallest screw up leaves you in a really bad position. And so even getting good enough that I can pretty consistently beat him without getting hit there's still quite a lot better I can get at it. Sekiro lets you set the pace without taking boss moves sets to crazy town. Just like Doom Eternal, the game is simple and easy to figure out but very difficult to master because the coordination required is high. I know exactly what I'm supposed to do to deflect that damn Ashen across every time and yet it is still very tough. Just like I know how to do every drum fill I want but I can't. But the key again is a high level of difficulty without being overly complex. Those similarities aren't the most important thing though. This most recent time playing the game I had a bunch of sake to go give to the sculptor. I was at the point where I was about to trigger the invasion of Ash in a castle. I killed Guardian Ape and I was about to kill the corrupted monk. So coming up on my two thirds way through the game I guess and I figured it was a good time to go have some drinks with my boy but I couldn't give it to him. And then I realized that I'd only died twice so far and therefore had no way to cure his dragon rot. And I didn't even realize that. I'm pretty much always certain to die at least once to the stupid chained ogre for whatever reason but other than that I can go most of the game without dying if I'm relatively careful at this point. I had made it all that way dying only twice and at no point did the game feel too easy for me to enjoy in the way that Dark Souls is kinda too easy for me to enjoy now. This is strikingly similar to how I feel about Doom Eternal. In fact, it was this very moment that got me thinking about how these two games are similar in how they're designed. I'm good enough at Dark Souls 3 after so many runs that I don't die very often in it and I still replay that game but the feeling I get replaying Dark Souls 3 is different than I get in Doom Eternal or Sekiro. The Souls games are still great to play because the way it makes you feel like you're on a journey it's the progression, the level design, the art. There are still great fights in there. I mean, I love fighting Nameless and Gale every single time. I love fighting Medea every single time but that's not what keeps me coming back to Dark Souls 3 after I've gotten good at the game. Doom Eternal stays interesting even after I've mastered the game because it feels good to be good. It is immediately and viscerally satisfying to move to shoot to light demons on fire and the game remains engaging because it is designed in a way that even after mastery you must still be fully focused and you can always get better. You can't play Doom Eternal without taking damage. The simple nature of the game is that you will constantly be low on health and armor because there's just no way to avoid it. This means that even after getting very good you're always close to death and the way you survive is giving into a rhythm. Doom Eternal's music is a massive part of the game not just because it's so amazing but also because more than the music in any other game it influences how you play. Doom Eternal's rhythm of managing cooldowns and hunting resources by fighting melds with that music to create a dance. There's just no other word to better describe how the combat feels. It feels like you're dancing and losing focus means losing rhythm and losing that rhythm means death. Sekiro as a game behaves exactly the same and that's why it's still amazing to play even after it becomes easier. Now of course the combat music and boss music in Sekiro is amazing but that's no surprise. All of the modern FromSoft games have absurdly great music but Sekiro's actual combat itself is musical. Many people compared Sekiro to a rhythm game when it released and there's no denying it. The gameplay boils down to just being insanely brutal QTEs. Sekiro doesn't give you a ton of room for error so careless play even once you're good will get you killed. There's no out leveling it. There's no cheesing it with a bow. There's no overpowered magic. There's no ashes of war. There's no spirit summons. The game cannot be made easier and it cannot be made less fast paced. You can't just hang back and wait for that one move and then you punish it with a double great sword jumping attack over and over. Sekiro's combat design. A design where offense and defense are the same thing and combat is fast and fluid means that even after you've gotten good it feels great to play because it feels like playing music. It's inherent rhythm and pace and speed means that it just feels great to do it well. This is the result of FromSoft simply being as great at what they do as it is at what it do. The best combat encounters in Eternal makes visuals, mechanics, music and sound effects to create a symphony of violence like this. Sekiro, once the swords come out gives precisely the same feeling. I mean, dude, just watch and listen. And because Sekiro knows what it is and is maniacally focused on being that thing the swords come out all the time. Sekiro, like Doom Eternal requires constant focus on its combat. It feels good because the decisions you make are made on an almost subconscious level. Playing Eternal or Sekiro well means being in a trance. If you're thinking you're almost certainly about to fuck up. If you're working out a strategy you're probably about to get killed. Eternal and Sekiro are games about getting into a rhythm and staying there as long as possible even though enemies and encounters are designed to mess up your rhythm. And the fact is, that trance-like state works insanely well in a game that story and world is about Buddhism and focus. Near the end of the game Ishin tells you that hesitation is death. And that's probably the best description of the game's combat one could come up with. This is what I love in games. Elden Ring is a very different beast and it has very little to do with the boss and enemy movesets. Malania would be an amazing boss in Sekiro. Seriously, she could be ported directly over, have her posture bar added to the UI, give her three death blows, and suddenly she's one of the greatest bosses in the game with literally not one other change to her design. She'd be a hard boss but every move she has works perfectly in Sekiro. Waterfowl, you can sprint away because you have no stamina. You can use the umbrella. You can eventually learn to parry and block all of them just like you can do to this move here. Her habit of instantly getting out of stagger and attacking, no problem at all. Sekiro can cancel his animations. He can go from attacking to blocking. Her phantoms, you can block them or run from them or deflect them or use the shuriken on them. She's a top notch Sekiro boss but she's not in Sekiro. And in Elden Ring, she, like Malaketh, like Godfrey, like Radegon, like others, interacts with the soul's combat system in a way that makes the game less proactive and more reactive. It's less a rhythm game and more a thinking game. The optimal gameplay for many of the harder bosses is often passive in Elden Ring. You could dodge through all six attacks from target but in reality, the safest play is also just as optimal as the most dangerous play. You can learn to actually dodge all of Waterfowl Dance, apparently, but like why would you? What benefit do you get? You still can't hit her. You still have to wait it out. Deflecting all of Interganichiro's attacks doesn't just look cool, it damages his posture. The optimal and rhythm game way to play is also the coolest looking way to play and the hardest way to play. In Elden Ring, the least cool looking and easiest way to play is the optimal way to play. Sitting back and waiting for the attack string to end before doing a jumping attack is just as, if not more, optimal than dodging all of the attacks. And sitting back, pelting a boss with magic while you wait for him to stop before doing a jump attack is very clearly the most optimal way to play the game. It is the easiest and the most optimal. Elden Ring's bosses are solved by problem solving. Sikiro bosses are solved the same way you solve learning the drums by playing the drums until you're better at playing the drums. For the first time in the series, dodging backwards is almost always a smarter move than dodging into the attacks. It took my first time through the whole game to realize that the expanded boss move sets meant that the classic soul style of dodging towards all attacks suddenly works badly because almost all of the main bosses have moves that come out faster than you can roll. Positioning is suddenly the crucial skill. There's never any reason to do anything but dodge backwards. Many of the later bosses only really let you attack once anyway so why risk it? Sikiro doesn't let you do that. Neither does Doom. You can beat Ishin by being very careful and running away from all of his attacks and just running in to get one hidden here or there. It's possible. In fact, that's how many people ended up beating him the first time. It's awesome that that works and it's still pretty hard I'm sure but it's a hell of a lot quicker to take the fight to him, to deflect as many of his attacks as you are physically capable of. If you take the fight to him, you can end each phase in like 45 seconds dude. The optimal way to play is the physical way to play. In many ways, Sikiro is all about that physicality and Elden Ring is a more cerebral game. One is a puzzle, the other is a tightrope walk. One isn't better than the other. Elden Ring is extremely reliant on positioning in a way the other games really aren't, in a way that feels a bit more tactical and the RPG elements are far more important than ever. Elden Ring does a whole lot of things well. Even though I think the balance is all over the place in Elden Ring, it's a miracle that it's as balanced as it is, considering how huge it is. Elden Ring gives you a massive world, an absurd amount of armor, weapons, shields, spells, ashes of war, summons and stat leveling and then it puts stuff in front of you and says, figure this out. It could be almost impossible or surprisingly easy depending on how stubborn you are or how willing to experiment you are. This is why, unlike Sekiro, there was a vast, vast divergence of opinion on Elden Ring's difficulty. Because Elden Ring is huge and does a bunch of different things well. Sekiro is small and does exactly two things and it does those two things perfectly. For sale, baby shoes, never worn. Sekiro is the doom eternal of FromSoft games. It's like a game almost exactly designed for me. I didn't even realize it's the game I wanted until after I played it. It wormed its way into my mind. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there for whom any new RPG was gonna be a little disappointing. But the sheer departure that Elden Ring is from everything else as a result of the compromises and triumphs of its scale means it ends up being as far from Sekiro in its design as a FromSoft game can possibly be. And that's why it was almost certain that Elden Ring would disappoint me coming right after Sekiro. I'm afraid that there won't be another Sekiro style game for a long time. I'm happy to see so many people love Elden Ring as much as I love Sekiro. But I'd be even happier if I loved Elden Ring as much as I love Sekiro. This is all about taste and my taste just isn't served by Elden Ring or at least nowhere near as much as it is by Sekiro. I just hope FromSoft knows where they've taken the series and keeps in mind that there are many of us who would be very, very happy if this was a one-off thing. I hope they know there's an awful lot of us who love that their games made us feel like we were in the big open world but without the actual big-ass open world. In reality, Elden Ring 2 is almost assured and one day I'll look back and see that Sekiro was the one-off and Elden Ring is the future. And you know what? That's kinda sad. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.