 Alright, so I've been playing a bunch of games this month and even though my initial plan was to do Dying Light 2 and then Horizon Forbidden West, I'm going to start with Elden Ring because I've got pretty strong feelings about the game that are probably quite a bit different than the universal praise you've been hearing. There are many ways in which this is in fact From's best game yet, but there were also some real complaints I have with it. So let's talk about why Elden Ring isn't the best From software game, even though it's still pretty great most of the time. From its extremely terrible PC performance to its open world design to its gameplay, Elden Ring has some very real problems that no one's talking about. Elden Ring, after the logo. The most approachable Souls game, really? If you've watched my channel at all, you know that I like hard games and that From is my favorite developer. I've played these games a lot and as a result, I have almost all of them totally memorized. I know every enemy placement, every trap, every boss. Because of this, I can tell you for an absolute fact that each game has gotten more difficult than the last with the possible exception of demons because that game is kind of weird. But from Dark Souls onwards, each game has gotten harder than the last. That's a fact. Dark Souls 2 is harder than Dark Souls and Bloodborne is harder than Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 is harder than Bloodborne and Sekiro is harder than Dark Souls 3. This makes sense. As the games have released, players have gotten better and better at them. If you go back and play Dark Souls 1 now, you'll find it unbelievably easier than Sekiro. If the games had not gotten harder over time, they would now be far too easy. So knowing that the games have gotten harder and harder, with Sekiro being the hardest title yet, imagine my surprise when the marketing and media stories about this game kept repeating the same phrase. That phrase is that Elden Ring is, quote, the most approachable game yet. Seriously, Google that phrase and you will see. In fact, these articles all kept stressing that while it isn't the easiest game, it's the most approachable. Now, I didn't even know what the fuck that means, but when I kept reading this, I made a prediction. I predicted that hundreds of thousands of people were about to get tricked into buying the very hardest Souls game yet and after about a hundred hours with Elden Ring, I can objectively say that all those media stories and marketing were lies. Elden Ring is not the most approachable game yet. It's certainly not the easiest game yet. In fact, it's precisely the opposite. Elden Ring is, without a doubt, the least approachable game in the series. That's not a bad thing for people like me who've put hundreds and hundreds of hours into these games, but I'm pretty sure it is an issue for a whole bunch of people who saw George R. R. Martin's name and all the talk about the game being approachable and thought that this wasn't a Dark Souls game. Let me explain why this is a total lie. Elden Ring, unlike all the previous games, is fully open world with a tremendous map, but like all the previous games, it gives you very little idea of where to go next. Even Dark Souls or Sekiro or Bloodborne, this is no real problem because there aren't that many ways you can go. It's all pretty linear, and even Dark Souls 1 does a pretty good job at making the correct path obvious. You can only be killed by invulnerable ghosts so many times before you realize that this is the wrong way. Second, Elden Ring's story, despite the supposed input of George R. R. Martin, is easily the least clear and most opaque one yet. One might even say the least approachable one yet. Most of the games have very clear plots to let you know what you were doing. This made choosing and ending very easy. You either link the flame or you don't, and you know why you're doing that. In Bloodborne, you either end the dream or you become a space slug baby. But Elden Ring's world is so big, and its characters are so obtuse, it's extremely hard to tease out what's going on. I literally randomly chose an ending because I didn't even recall which was which, and even if I did recall, I have no idea what any of them meant. Finally, there's the most important thing that makes it the least approachable game yet. Elden Ring is absurdly hard in places, and I say that as someone who's played the shit out of this series, I want you to imagine what this game would be like for someone who is totally new to From Software games. So here's where I have some serious criticism of Elden Ring. As I've said, it is totally natural that Elden Ring is the hardest game yet. I still think it's kind of shitty that new players have been tricked into buying this game when they'd have been so much better off buying Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3 first or even better Dark Souls 1, but that's a whole other issue. It is totally natural that these games get harder as time goes on. When Sekiro released, I said I thought that game was a bit too hard as well, but in reality I was probably wrong on that. What made Sekiro so hard for me was that it took an entire first playthrough to break the muscle memory I have from previous Soulsborne games. Sekiro really is a different kind of combat system and it demands you adapt to that new system. But Elden Ring is not Sekiro, Elden Ring is Dark Souls 4. It's hard because it's just got a mount in a bullshit in places, not everywhere, but enough places that entire sections feel cheap and many of the bosses feel ridiculously over-tuned. Let me give some examples of what I mean. Throughout the series there have been some bosses and enemies with one-hit kill abilities. As an example, we can just use Eshin's Sword Sage, who most agreed was one of the hardest bosses from had ever made. But Eshin had, I think, one instant kill attack and it comes out very slowly and is highly telegraphed. Not only that, but it has several counters a player can use. You can dodge it, you can perfect parry it, you can just run away. Most of all it's not a mystery what the player is supposed to do. Within the first couple of tries you will understand what you need to do to avoid the Ashen across. It'll just be kinda hard to do it for a while. Now let's take a look at Malinia's Sword of Bullshit over here. Malinia's Sword of Bullshit has, by my count, three one-hit kill abilities. She's the one where she crashes down from the sky, which is fair enough. It feels a little wonky because the camera kinda spins on ya, but it is what it is. But she also has a thrust combo that comes out extremely fast and kills you if you're hit by two of them. This feels pretty unfair because throughout the series fast attacks have been relatively low damage and slow attacks have been very high damage. Having fast attacks with incredibly quick telegraphs that are also instant kill attacks feels pretty unfair for the player. But even this attack I could deal with, it's not that big a deal. In my opinion it's kinda over the top and the game would be better if this attack had its damage reduced, but whatever. But there's one attack in particular that's a perfect example of how Elden Ring's balancing has gone too far. Malinia's Super Scion Slash attack is a perfect encapsulation of the problem with some of the enemies in Elden Ring's late game. It isn't clear what the player is supposed to do to dodge this attack. Despite like 15 attempts, 13 of them had ended with this attack. And even after that 15 attempts I still had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. You can't block it without getting stunned, you can't dodge it. A couple of times I was able to run away but usually it tracked me unless I was like halfway across the boss room when she launched it. While there's a decent telegraph for the attack, it has ridiculous tracking and seems almost impossible to dodge. This attack is so annoying that I actually googled it to see if anyone had figured out how to dodge it. This is already a serious problem, because a player shouldn't have to blindly grope around or take to the internet to figure out how to deal with an attack. Even though the Souls games can be complex, they're usually intuitive. It's extremely rare to not be able to instantly understand what you did wrong. After dozens of tries I finally used a specific Ash of War, the Barricade Shield, and I blocked it. But this has never been the case in any previous game. I can't think of any previous attack from a boss that was so unintuitive it required googling to try and dodge or an incredibly specific build to deal with. The people who did dodge this attack seem to run away from the first burst but if you're in melee range that is impossible. Which means you have to keep running in and away to bait out the first part or rely on a summons to tank it for you. Even worse, the Sword of Bullshit heals every time she hits you, fair enough, even if a bit much. But her being able to heal even if she hits your shield that blocks 100% of damage? Why? You know, why? How is that a good idea? Is it a bug? Or is that shit actually on purpose? And even more, shields or specific Ash of War abilities should not feel mandatory to deal with a boss. Nor should it feel mandatory to either have to use a summon or to absurdly sprint in and out trying to bait the attack. It sucks. I want to do so much detail on that one boss because it becomes kind of indicative of what you start to deal with about two thirds of the way through the game. It's pretty much perfect right up until you finish Lendell City, but it starts to tilt over into frustrating from there on out. While the first two thirds of the game feel like a very difficult version of Dark Souls 3, the final third starts to feel a lot like Dark Souls 2. Traps you have no way of seeing in advance. Enemies that aggro all at once. Gang squads and poise monsters galore. Several of the catacombs were just miserably annoying. Almost feeling like they're designed not to challenge but to frustrate. There's this one here where there's straight up no way to figure out what the hell you're supposed to do without dying a few times. I hate that. I hate trial and error shit in games. Getting to Malinia Sword of Bullshit is one of the most miserable experiences in gaming. With not a poison swamp, but a toxic swamp that is full of raised enemies is impossible to run through and causes you to fat roll. At the bottom there's another toxic swamp with a fucking boss in it. At the bottom you'll encounter four of the teleporting arm monsters until you finally figure out the one way you can go so you can aggro them one at a time. And if you don't do that, well you're basically fucked because fighting three of them at once is miserable. Then you'll climb up a ladder and fight two of the annoying knights. A tree avatar boss, now just an enemy because why not? And not one, not two, not three, but four enemies shooting one hit kill ballistas at you. I can only assume that you're meant to run away from this and then kill them from behind when they reset because that's what I did but I mean really why? I mean you know why? When you're in the lake of rot another toxic swamp, a boss spawns right in the middle forcing you to fight a boss while standing in a toxic swamp. Why? Further into the lake of rot you'll go down this tiny little hallway with no way to possibly know that there's a trap coming and a boss will spawn out of the poison and instantly kill you. Why? Then there's the fact that a huge number of Elden Ring enemies can best be described as annoying as shit. The bird enemies are horrendous. Entire weapon classes can't hit them, they spin your camera around. Using heavy weapons on them is an exercise in frustration. Tons of enemies have ridiculously long attack combos, many of them are incredibly inconsistent in getting staggered and will break out of stagger and trade hits with you. There are multiple teleporting enemies and bosses, enemies that dodge all over the place, enemies with phantom range or insane tracking or out of nowhere ranged attacks. At about halfway through the game you're met with tons of enemies with one hit kills on top of fast attacks and long attack chains and difficulty staggering and a ranged attack. It just starts to really drain the fun out of the game when every enemy requires you to only hit it once and then carefully wait for it to finish its 5 hit combo before you hit it again. This also ends up making heavy weapons feel pretty terrible near the end of the game. I always play Souls games with an ultra great sword or great hammer, but I played Elden Ring with a sword and shield before settling on an overpowered katana because half of the enemies are constantly dodging backwards or running away and hitting you with ranged attacks. Then there's the issue of bosses and enemies not feeling carefully placed or having a few things about them that make them extremely tedious to deal with. You'll come up against some fights that barely work in the spot they are. The bosses getting caught on the geometry or bosses spewing lava on the floor so there's nowhere to actually stand. Fighting one pumpkin head is fine, fun actually. Fighting two pumpkin heads is a bit annoying. Fighting two pumpkin heads in a tiny closet is awful. The main issue I have with Elden Ring is that they're just a ton of frustrating spots that feel like they're 31% too annoying. Like they were kinda done willy nilly and no one bothered going back and tuning them correctly. Fighting preceptor Mirian, the sorcerer and carrion study hall is miserable. And then fighting her again when you return to this area is positively toxic. Not only is every one of her attacks a one hit kill, they will literally kill you through walls or floors. Which you have no way of knowing until it happens. Is the game truly better because she can one hit kill you through a wall? Would it have been worse if the attack was a two hit kill? I argue the game would be improved by it not being a one hit kill because frustrating and challenging are not the same thing. I think it's telling that areas often feel better when you're over leveled than they do when you first deal with them. Tons of enemies have insane amounts of health on top of high damage and high speed and high tracking. It feels unbalanced in a way no other Souls game does except for Dark Souls 2. I find it really odd that so few reviewers mentioned this and I can only assume it means very few reviewers played all the way to the end until writing their pieces. Dark Souls 2, but bigger. I played Elden Ring for more than 90 hours and I don't want it to seem like I hated it, but it did frustrate me more than any previous Souls game. Still it does some things really well as to be expected. The open world is indeed beautiful and extremely fun to explore. It is a huge map and it has an excellent variety of enemies, areas and things to do. And even though repetition in open world games often really annoys the shit out of me, I found it way less egregious here. I'm willing to fight a boss a few times as long as I like the boss. I liked the ulcerated tree sentitals and the avatar bosses. I didn't mind fighting the big mummy thing a couple times or the big deer. Fighting the dragons and horseback was awesome. And I'm glad there were a bunch of them because fighting it once would have been kind of disappointing. Though I despised fighting the fire gecko thing and I hated it way more the second time. Still, even when it's reusing bosses it stays great because the boss fights themselves are usually pretty damn good. I still enjoyed many of the caves and dungeons even though most of them are kind of reskins of each other. But it works here because the core of the combat is as good as ever. Fighting the same outpost 23 times in Far Cry 6 really started grading on me. But clearing out the 20th dungeon here didn't because I knew I was working towards a boss and the combat of Elden Ring feels as good as anything they've ever done. It is pretty fucking smooth. The actual areas that feature the classic souls level design are as good as ever. All of them are spectacularly great. Enemy variety is excellent and each area had several great levels. They're also good actually that my only complaint is I would've preferred less open world and more classic levels. It's all good and I never found myself bored like I did in AC Valhalla. Elden Ring's open world is one of if not the very best open world ever. I just wish the balance was heavier towards legacy dungeons and less towards the open exploration stuff but it's fine the way it is. Even here though there are issues that pop up around intense difficulty spikes. This game made me realize how well done the difficulty is in the previous souls games. It's pretty rare to have a huge out of nowhere difficulty spike but it's fairly common here. Much like it is in Dark Souls 2. Still the open world is really amazing. The level design is great so let's talk about the other thing that makes most souls games excellent. Worldbuilding and story. I'm one of those people who says the souls games do not in fact have good stories because they barely have stories at all. Now Sekiro did have a good little story but for the most part souls games have a very simple plot that you follow in a world that is meticulously crafted to feel real and lived in. There's a ton of cool lore but lore is not story and story is not lore. They're different separate things. Still the previous games had simple stories that were easy to follow and made your choices feel easy to understand. In Dark Souls 1, one worm guy wants you to link the flame. The other worm guy wants you instead to bring about the age of darkness. You choose which to do. Ditto Dark Souls 3. In demons you put the tree thing to sleep or you steal its power. In Bloodborne you end the dream or turn into like a cosmic slug baby and become a big slug monster someday I guess a slug god. And Sekiro has a legitimately normal story told in a very traditional video game way. And for that reason it is easily the best soul story by a very large margin. But souls games don't just tell their story through NPC interactions in the minimal plot. They tell their stories through level design and environmental details like corpse and item placement, enemy locations, et cetera. With that out of the way I have to say that Elden Ring is the least coherent and most confusing of all the games when it comes to story. I'm sure someone is gonna tell me how amazing the lore is and that if I would have just read the item descriptions for the Buckler and the Cathedral Knight Helm it all would have fell into place. But you know I play games to play games and like I read to read. I don't play games to read or read to play games. Well, I mean. Elden Ring's open world is very cool. It truly does take exploration to a whole new level and it gives you a souls game that is insanely long which is objectively a good thing as long as the quality is high enough, which it mostly is. But this open world format comes with several drawbacks that are just inherent to the genre. One of the things that open world games suffer from is an inability to carefully curate what you will see and in what order. The story of open world games is often very difficult to pace unless they just stuff the world with story and lore like a fallout game. Think of the difference between narrative in Far Cry 6 and New Vegas. Elden Ring, like Far Cry, is more of a gameplay experience than a narrative experience. I don't think that's controversial. And as a result, it has the classic open world story problems. The story and world building of souls games has always been heavily tied up in just how much attention to detail is in every level and every area. Enemies feel like they're carefully placed to tell you a story and important items are placed in a way that makes them easily found even by a moderately careful player. But this just isn't the case in Elden Ring. I released not as much as in previous games. You can go anywhere, so it's very, very easy to miss important items or NPCs. And with so much of the world building, depending upon a few NPCs, it is easy to lose track of things. I finally had to look up a guide on how to find the weapon I usually use in these games. Usually I can just play and eventually I will come across as we handle. Not this time. I had to go to Google, find out which tiny corner of this massive world it was tucked away in. And this carries over into more important things like NPC dialogue, quests, and endings. Because you spend so many hours just wandering a map exploring, you easily lose track of things like NPCs. By the time I met back up with some of them, I literally had no fucking idea who they were, what they wanted me to do, where I met them, or where they wanted me to go. This all means I actually, for the first time ever in a Souls game, used a guide in my first playthrough. Frankly, this game just desperately needed at least a simple quest and journals tab. Like, how on earth am I supposed to remember what this one lady told me six hours ago in an entirely different zone of the map? Or where this one told me to go next? Having the map be a bit more filled out so you can make out points of interest and having a very simple quest log would have gone a long way to making the player feel less lost. I'm not saying the game should have a shitload of Ubisoft-style icons and question marks on it, but something more than nothing would have been helpful. Tagging points of interest by using the looking glass, a la Metro Exodus, would have been such an obvious way to make things a bit easier. It's one thing to have no hand holding in a typical Souls game. They're all very linear and obvious with a little thought. Even all of the quests in those games are relatively simple. You will stumble upon them in order. Finding Cainhurst Castle was tricky, but reasonable and I found it on my first playthrough all on my own. But here it feels far too difficult to keep track of in an open world environment. Having a journal that said things like, Ronnie wants you to find the McGuffin or Fia needs the curse mark would have helped me quite a bit. And it's this aimless feeling and lack of any direction that really kind of hurts the story as well. It just feels really non-existent in a way that previous Souls games did not. I literally had no idea what I was doing or why. While it is similar to Dark Souls in that way, you actually get way less direction in this game. And you go much longer in between talking to people. By the time I got to the end, I had a few choices to use and I literally had no idea what any of them even fucking meant. So I just used any meaning my nemo. That's a failure in my opinion. If you're gonna have players choose an ending, they should at least know what those endings are going to mean. I don't need it spelled out for me in some big ass paragraph, but I do need to know which is which and to have some idea of what choosing Fia or Ronnie's ending means. And to know which of these ones is Fia or Ronnie. I fully understand what choosing to link the flame meant and I totally understand what choosing to become the Dark Lord meant. I understood what I was doing when I helped Kuro or helped Owl and Sekiro. It was clear what those endings meant and what I was doing. I had no idea what anything meant here and to me, that feels like a problem. In conclusion, to me, a 10-10 means a perfect game. Those are very rare indeed. Doom Eternal was a perfect game. It did everything it wanted to do perfectly. It ran at 1440p, 144 FPS in beautiful levels with amazing combat. It was a flawless first-person shooter campaign. One of the very best ever, if at least the top three ever. Elden Ring is not, in my opinion, a perfect game. Its PC performance is downright embarrassing, atrocious. It is so bad the game's stutters kill you on a regular basis. Strangely, for some reason, it seems terrible when you first get to an area and then it slowly improves over time so you kind of forget how terrible it was. But the first time through an area, it is just terrible and runs like garbage. Inexcusable. And even once it stops chugging along, it almost never runs at 60 frames a second. And I have a 2070 Super and an 8700K and 32 gigabytes of RAM. I mean, I got a pretty decent PC, man. Not a great PC, but pretty decent. Then it has a bunch of frustrating sections that feel poorly balanced. Like two bosses in a tiny room or a huge worm in a small room that can push you into a corner and then use an attack that's impossible to dodge unless you run away. Or bosses with fast one-hit-kill attacks or hyper armor attacks that come out while you're still in a recovery animation. And of course, for me, its story is totally incomprehensible. I have no idea what happened or why. Why was this guy one of the major bosses? Dunno. So I simply don't see how this can be called a perfect game. It's a very good game because in its best moments, it's awesome, but it runs like shit and has a ton of stuff that isn't its best moments. When you fight Crucible Knights that feel properly balanced, they are a really cool enemy. When you fight two of them at once and they both have one-hit-kill attacks, it feels terrible. Much of the game feels balanced around using the Spirit Summons thing, but I don't like summoning in these games because it makes them feel very sloppy. When you fight a boss one-on-one, it's all about learning each attack and figuring it out until it becomes a dance. When you fight a boss with a summons, it turns into a battle of RNG. You hit the boss in the back and hope it doesn't randomly spin and aggro you while you're in the middle of an attack. And some of the later bosses in areas feel like the stupid Mimic summons is mandatory. And I don't like that. It almost feels like they made the Spirit Summons mechanic and liked it, but then thought it made the bosses too easy so they went back and made bosses each have several one-hit-kill attacks. I would have preferred if bosses felt balanced for fighting alone and the Mimic summons was an easy mode for people. And speaking of which, why do all of the main bosses have absurd delays in their attacks? Those delayed attacks look so silly and they make it almost impossible to react to a boss in instinct. Instead, you have to fight them enough times to develop an internal clock. Some of them, I'm not kidding, literally hold attacks for like three seconds and spin around to target you, which means you have to fight them until you can be like, ah, that's the attack I need to count to 2-1,000 and then dodge. It all feels very Dark Souls II, man. A significant part of the end game feels like the tunnel leading to the gang squad boss. Hell, they literally have a section recreating the frigid outskirts here. A section of Dark Souls II that is objectively horrendously terrible. There are parts of this game that made me so annoyed I seriously considered stopping. Malinia, the sort of bullshit, almost ended the game for me because if it was gonna be such bullshit, I had no interest in seeing it to the end. I'm glad I did, but the last boss also felt extremely annoying combining a bunch of the stuff that I liked the least. Boss that has extreme tracking and heal punishing, check. Huge AOE attacks, check. Crazy, totally unnatural delays in almost every attack, check. Annoying ranged attack that punishes rolling out and requires counting so you can do the pixel perfect dodge to game demands, check. And then a second phase that requires you to chase a worm all over a massive arena so you can hit him once and then watch him fuck off to the other side of the arena again. With a bunch of visual noise and several attacks that take multiple attempts to even figure out what the hell's going on. I swear, I never figured out what you was supposed to do with his turret ball of magic death that follows you around and stuns and kills you if you stop sprinting. In the end, I can't give a game that feels so sloppy at times a 10. I don't think this game is better than Sekiro or Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne. It's bigger than those games, but I don't think there's any way to actually say it's better. How is it better than Bloodborne? There's no way this game is better than Sekiro. Ancient Sword Saint puts coward slug monster to shame as a final boss. It feels more like Dark Souls 1 and 2 combined but bigger and prettier. It has amazing moments and moments that feel kind of lazy. It has tons of bosses but some that feel pretty phoned in. At times it feels absolutely perfectly balanced and then there's a bunch of gang squad monsters or asshole sniper Vikings that fucking shoot undodgeable arrows from 10 miles off screen or boss run to Sir Alon moments where you must slog through poise monster after poise monster. Carefully chipping away one hit at a time. Elden Ring has a ton of 10-10 areas and then a fair few 3-10 areas. Now the 10-10s greatly outnumber the bad but that bad shit is so titanically frustrating it seriously negatively impacts the overall quality. Melania Sword of Bullshit alone pulls a full point off of this game. If I must score it, and I think I do, I guess it would be like an 85. It's well above average. Destined to be one of the best games of the year but the terrible performance, the wild swings in quality and balance mean it is far less titan focused and way less fair than the previous games. I liked Elden Ring a lot but there is no way I am gonna play this 10 times like I have all the other games. There's no way I will finish this up to NG plus 7 like I did Dark Souls 3 or NG plus 5 like I did Bloodborne and I will never attempt a Soul Level 1 run like I have with Dark Souls 1. It just doesn't feel fair enough to bother. It feels weird to me that this is destined to be the highest rated Souls game when to me it is clearly not as good as the last three but to each their own I guess. But if you've never played one of these games let me do you a favor. Those articles are lies. This is not the most accessible Souls game ever. It is in fact the least accessible Souls game ever. Do yourself a favor and start with Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne then play Sekiro. You'll thank me later. All right, I've got a few things to write about but I'll probably do a very short video about how stunningly terrible Strangers of Paradise is. It's like Neo but several million times shittier. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.