I'm a very loud Dark Souls 3 hater. No matter how dogshit the second half of Dark Souls is, the former half manages to overcompensate fueled purely by its ambition for an interconnected world filled with secrets where world building trumped over gameplay without leaving the latter as an afterthought. Dark Souls 3 trying to come back to its predecessor thru various callbacks while sticking to such a microcosmic design via the teleport mechanic replacing organic links between areas signaled to me that it was most preoccupied with rekindling the original's flame. Sometimes, this works; Soul of Cinder is a great final boss and a perfect send-off for what I assume is gonna be the last Dark Souls (unless that Dark Souls IIII leak is real); other times we get bleached Anor Londo and Aldritch doing cosplay.

When Elden Ring trailer leaks came around and the first thing we saw was someone casting Homing Soulmass, I stared in disbelief knowing Miyazaki was washed. I don't particularly care for Sekiro but at least it was something different. The more info we got the more dissapointed I felt: I don't really have a desire for DS3 with horses and dungeons.

So now that I finished it, I can say I was really surprised. It's, ironically for me, much more akin to DS1 than DS3. They both have great starts and while DS1 immediately nosedives around the Lordvessel, Elden Ring features a more steady decline that shared its reason with Dark Souls: Elden Ring is too ambitious. Everything about Elden Ring is way over itself: lore, gameplay, design. Everything. Elden Ring's wings melt, and while I don't think it compensates wholistically enough to compensate like Dark Souls does, I do want more.

Do I find Elden Ring's story to be insufficient? Kind of. I'd love to learn more about the Outer Gods, about Miquella, about Marika. This is the first soulsborne game where I've been engaged enough in the worldbuilding to actually try to piece things for myself instead of letting Zullie the Witch do it for me. And still I had to rely on her because this game is both cryptic (series staple really) and vague. There's a lot more to say about this world that I'm dissapointed that it seems like its either gonna be relegated to DLC or just not be given more. I hate that the endings are mostly copy-pasted from eachother aside two exceptions. But I still can't deny that the dissapointment stems from actually caring enough to want a resolution, and considering it's never done that for me in like 4 games I consider that a huge achievement. God the Godwyn shit is so cool.

Is Elden Ring bloated? Yes. No point in most exploration around the last third as your build is probably already set in stone and your equipment is maxed out. Materials are worthless and crafting is the most useless mechanic in the whole game. Catacombs offer no reward after a certain point and will just shove an overworld enemy as a """boss""" or just reuse an earlier one actively bringing down the significance of the previous encounter (Astel, "Godefroy"???, Magma Wyrm). Everything after Leyndell is a linear eyesore that feels shoved into the back half due to creative drought.
...but man, those first thirds of the game are really something. Elden Ring is HUGE. This is both a good quality and a detriment; it is for sure bloated but man I find the souls gameplay so fun I'll eat this slop up and look back at you with a grin. Limgrave, Liurnia, and Caelid are great areas that are filled with little secrets to find and challenges to overcome no matter the order you go through them with. Elden Ring entrusts the player with a lot of freedom of progression and that is a huge strength. After finishing the game I rushed to a second playthrough to make a new build because I knew I'd had a different experience. The early scarceness really gives Elden Ring an organic heterogeneity where unless you're a min-maxing loser you'll have to make do with what you got and I love that.
But Elden Ring might be too big. Repetition is the name of the game with Elden Ring, be it repeated enemies that only change a move or color scheme, or just outright putting them as bosses. And I kinda get it, there's a decision to not have your game be 200 GBs but the scale of Elden Ring also necessitates diversity. There's an amount of guy with shield I can tolerate until I just start getting bored and omitting exploration when I've fought these guys before and I already have 15 smithing stones in my inventory.

I'm very mixed on bosses. Soulsborne is no stranger to frustration, I'd argue its part of the appeal, but Elden Ring feels like its taking it up to 11. Enemies in the late game easily two or three shot you even at moderate levels of vigor and this becomes specially apparent with late game bosses. There's bosses I really liked like Malenia who I think really tests you on learning the fight and then you have shit like Elden Beast which is probably the worst final boss they've ever made.
Elden Ring tries to have its cake and eat it too with its many ways to dwindle difficulty through summons, but that solutions winds up feeling very anticlimactic. Soulsborne bosses just aren't designed to be fought in ganks, so using any summoning method just makes the fight a complete cakewalk. If this is Elden Ring's response to an easy mode, it's bad.

There's a lot I like about Elden Ring, yet I always have to accompany it with a "but". It is too big for its own good, it cannot support itself under the weight of its own scale, yet I can't deny how happy I am that this is the closest to DS1 they've ever been so far.