Lightseed
1 review liked by Lightseed
Elden Ring
2022
Okay, here's my hot take... (I mean, I write these things for myself so I don't really care if anyone has a different opinion, everyone's entitled to one).
Elden Ring is not a good game. And it's not hard. In fact, none of FromSoftware's games are hard except for Demon's Souls and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I'll elaborate. TL;DR at the bottom :)
I think FromSoftware is a good studio. I think they make objectively decent games and that most importantly, their art direction is spotless. I legitimately can't think of a game in the past decade or even more that has had the breathtaking sights that Souls-like games have. And its lore is so deep that you could possibly write 8 encyclopedias for just one game. But as much as people love to praise and drool all over FromSoftware's masterful worldbuilding (which is pretty much just making it up and then letting the fanbase make it up alongside them?) and impeccable art direction, these are still fuckin' videogames and at their core they're bad, janky, unfair and poorly designed.
People are playing this up as the magnum opus of FromSoftware's, when the issues are even more glaring than when people were screeching about DS2's "faults". My complaints have nothing to do with the open-world, and although I wish there were less carbon-copy bosses, I think it was fine to reuse them a little every now and then to fill out the astounding size of the place. But I just can't stand the sheer amount of fucking bullshittery in this "game".
To start off, constant boss duos was miserable, please never do that again. Godskin duo, Magma Wyrm and the Falling Star Beast particularly were just awful bosses that I loathe to even remember. Nigh-undodgeable shockwaves that every large enemy constantly spams, long combos punctuated by the boss delaying for 13 college semesters, allowing you to write a dissertation and graduate summa cum laude with a doctorate in patience before he decides to hit you for all your HP 3 times over in the span of a millisecond with FromSoftware's patented "funny tracking™", bullshit hit detection. All of this just left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth.
The health and damage scaling in this game is unbelievable. Everyone is doing the same 4 cookie-cutter meta builds just to survive the game, let alone do PvP. There is NO room for build variety in this game, even with so many freakin' weapons and armor options. I had to ditch the mace partway through for the Sword of Night and Flame because ordinary, mundane weapons just don't survive into the late game, except for maybe the same greatswords that have been equally-busted ever since DS1. Even with all the weapon upgrades, ordinary one-handers just fall off in damage and the way bosses execute combos with either blinding speed or with stupidly-long delays, making windows to attack UNBELIEVABLY TINY, proves that it simply is not worth having a faster-swinging one-hander instead of a hard-hitting two-hander. I am sick of being buried as a sword-and-board build in every game.
On top of that, dying in one hit to one attack in a boss' combo if you aren't actively dumping a third of your total levels in an NG into vigor is unacceptable. If there is a previous game that had this issue, then correct me, but I have never seen it be so bad in a FromSoftware game before (I've sadly played all of them hoping for something to get better), especially with how this game packages bosses in a way that they fight like bosses from Sekiro while giving you Dark Souls III movement and controls. It is a recipe for disaster! And so it keeps the trend of Souls-like games where when I kill a boss, I think "Thank God that's over" instead of "That was a cool fight with neat atmosphere." It is a chore to fight bosses, especially when their health gets insurmountably high and one single mistake in a fight with them means instant death.
People saying to upgrade summons kinda proves my point, because the game is so unreasonable in terms of boss health and damage, unforgiving combos, punishing you for punishing enemies and so on, that you are forced to play a very specific way if you want to reasonably win. I don't like games that have only one way to be played, ESPECIALLY when one of their biggest consistent selling points is offering you a wide range of customization options. Also for God's sake please add a left-handed option, DS2 allowed me to beat the game left-handed and it drives me insane that a game touts customization but then refuses to have an option for people who make up 15% of the freaking population. That's gotta be enough to warrant a left-hand option if devs caved to the pressure of the 2 whole people banshee-wailing about replacing gender with body type. And just as a funny tidbit of information, I'M NOT EVEN LEFT-HANDED, IT'S JUST SOMETHING I FOUND NEAT!
I've got a bunch of time in all of FromSoftware's games. Demon's Souls, DS 1-3 and Sekiro. I REALLY wanted to love this game, it looked like a great (possibly co-op) adventure, and I was willing to overlook the design decisions inspired by George R. R. Martin (The kinds of stories he writes just don't fit with FromSoftware's history of design, in my opinion. George writes too much about sex and political intrigue, and the lore with Mohgwyn and the lover's spat between Radagon and whats-her-face just didn't feel like it belonged, in my opinion) but this game just really made me sad. I was excited for this game all the way up to release, but as part of me expected, this game felt like a reskin of Dark Souls III, with every single problem that has been plaguing this line of games since its inception.
I mean it. Lots of enemies are literally just reskins using same movesets but with higher numbers, hell some enemies are just copy-paste from Dark Souls III! Enemies just feel like they are non-stop pressing the attack button and never gas out. There are very few enemies that get staggered or that can have their endless combos interrupted while you can literally be staggered to death by anything. Even things like poison clouds make your character look like they're having a seizure.
The fact that a lot of enemies have delayed attacks to screw over players rolling too early doesn't help make fights any better. In fact, 90% of the time it looks very unnatural and downright goofy to the point where it's so obvious that they're programmed to catch you off guard. Frankly, some enemies just slowly winding up their attacks for a few seconds and holding a gigantic weapon over their head but then being able swing at blinding speed just looks funny. I get that they are trying to make the player pay attention to when the attack's going to connect, rather than roll when the enemy twitches... But in all honesty, making enemies wind up for a long ass time and then swing in an instant is a cheap way to go.
Its also painfully obvious that a lot of them have input-read scripts for when you attack or heal just to punish you for pressing a button. Again, this feels like a very cheap and degenerate design choice made to make it look like it's a "oh so hard" game. Perfect 360° tracking of attacks just adds to the feel of cheapness, too. I mean, massive enemies that can do a 180° mid swing and even mid air is just hilarious. It feels like I'm playing this slowpoke of a character with like two attacks while enemies can attack endlessly and jump around at the speed of sound. It's just a tedious and boring design.
Another problem is that when you get past certain points, it's just massively bloated health bars and damage numbers. Dying to 2 hits on 60 vigor sucks and not just from bosses but also regular enemies. Hell, I even got one-shot a few times by regular assassins in the Royal Capital. Massive enemy health bars just make you feel like you are a random weak ass nobody that can get wiped away in 5 seconds by the tiniest of inconveniences, and it seeps into normal "cannon fodder" enemies as well. The result? Died once to a boss, died 14 times to some random ass dogs.
And that's the point and what makes me hate almost every FromSoftware game ever. Every single enemy has one of these characteristics:
A. They have a huge range
B. They can do 1/3 of your health bar with one hit
C. They can combo you for all of your health bar.
To put it in perspective with a saga of games that I absolutely adore, it'd be like playing Guitar Hero with dodges and attacks instead of notes. Except, if you miss more than 2 to 3 notes, you have to start over, complete with a minute and a half of cutscene that you can't quit (which would be how much it takes to respawn and walk back to the boss).
When the game ended, because I pushed myself to end it to finally collect my thoughts even though I knew I had hated it from the start, I didn't sigh with satisfaction. I sighed with defeat, knowing that it wasn't even nearly worth it to go through so many hoops and spend so much time trying to end this piece of shit game that artificially enhances its difficulty with random bullshit that leaves you questioning if maybe, YOU are the dumb one here. But whenever you talk about it to people, it's always the same "git gud" shtick.
I mean it, the elitism surrounding FromSoftware's games is absolutely unprecedented. Oh what's that? You used summons to ACTUALLY try and have fun at the game and not just get angry after dying for the upteenth time? Then you're just a filthy casual! Videogames aren't meant to be fun and engaging, or to have a good story and good design, their only purpose is to show other people how badass you are at something that genuinely has no fucking meaning in real life! It's apalling and frankly embarrassing that literal nerds call other people losers for not spending 300 hours getting angry at a videogame. I swear, it feels like every single Souls-like player has to demonstrate something, as if it means anything. And I would excuse it if this game was some sort of "purely mechanical" videogame, but its mechanics are so inconsistent and lousy that you cannot even rely on them. This isn't Devil May Cry.
I will always mantain that Sekiro did it best. Even through all the classic FromSoftware bullshittery, it allowed you to counter most of them if you were good enough. The mechanics were tight and the game was extremely fluid and fun. You didn't feel like a nobody who could die at any moment, you felt like a badass underdog that could fight through anything with enough practice. But sadly, everyone is blinded by their bias towards a CORPORATION THAT ONLY WANTS YOUR MONEY, so all differing opinions will get drowned out. Not that I care, going against the current is pretty much a trademark of mine at this point.
TL;DR It's just like every other Souls-Like game. It recycles enemies, animations and weapons. It's frustratingly difficult because of how much you're handicapped all throughout the game and it never leaves you with a sense of accomplishment. Is it a terrible game? Probably not. Is it badly made? Yes, and on purpose. If you want a hard game, go play Donkey Kong Country 2!
Elden Ring is not a good game. And it's not hard. In fact, none of FromSoftware's games are hard except for Demon's Souls and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I'll elaborate. TL;DR at the bottom :)
I think FromSoftware is a good studio. I think they make objectively decent games and that most importantly, their art direction is spotless. I legitimately can't think of a game in the past decade or even more that has had the breathtaking sights that Souls-like games have. And its lore is so deep that you could possibly write 8 encyclopedias for just one game. But as much as people love to praise and drool all over FromSoftware's masterful worldbuilding (which is pretty much just making it up and then letting the fanbase make it up alongside them?) and impeccable art direction, these are still fuckin' videogames and at their core they're bad, janky, unfair and poorly designed.
People are playing this up as the magnum opus of FromSoftware's, when the issues are even more glaring than when people were screeching about DS2's "faults". My complaints have nothing to do with the open-world, and although I wish there were less carbon-copy bosses, I think it was fine to reuse them a little every now and then to fill out the astounding size of the place. But I just can't stand the sheer amount of fucking bullshittery in this "game".
To start off, constant boss duos was miserable, please never do that again. Godskin duo, Magma Wyrm and the Falling Star Beast particularly were just awful bosses that I loathe to even remember. Nigh-undodgeable shockwaves that every large enemy constantly spams, long combos punctuated by the boss delaying for 13 college semesters, allowing you to write a dissertation and graduate summa cum laude with a doctorate in patience before he decides to hit you for all your HP 3 times over in the span of a millisecond with FromSoftware's patented "funny tracking™", bullshit hit detection. All of this just left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth.
The health and damage scaling in this game is unbelievable. Everyone is doing the same 4 cookie-cutter meta builds just to survive the game, let alone do PvP. There is NO room for build variety in this game, even with so many freakin' weapons and armor options. I had to ditch the mace partway through for the Sword of Night and Flame because ordinary, mundane weapons just don't survive into the late game, except for maybe the same greatswords that have been equally-busted ever since DS1. Even with all the weapon upgrades, ordinary one-handers just fall off in damage and the way bosses execute combos with either blinding speed or with stupidly-long delays, making windows to attack UNBELIEVABLY TINY, proves that it simply is not worth having a faster-swinging one-hander instead of a hard-hitting two-hander. I am sick of being buried as a sword-and-board build in every game.
On top of that, dying in one hit to one attack in a boss' combo if you aren't actively dumping a third of your total levels in an NG into vigor is unacceptable. If there is a previous game that had this issue, then correct me, but I have never seen it be so bad in a FromSoftware game before (I've sadly played all of them hoping for something to get better), especially with how this game packages bosses in a way that they fight like bosses from Sekiro while giving you Dark Souls III movement and controls. It is a recipe for disaster! And so it keeps the trend of Souls-like games where when I kill a boss, I think "Thank God that's over" instead of "That was a cool fight with neat atmosphere." It is a chore to fight bosses, especially when their health gets insurmountably high and one single mistake in a fight with them means instant death.
People saying to upgrade summons kinda proves my point, because the game is so unreasonable in terms of boss health and damage, unforgiving combos, punishing you for punishing enemies and so on, that you are forced to play a very specific way if you want to reasonably win. I don't like games that have only one way to be played, ESPECIALLY when one of their biggest consistent selling points is offering you a wide range of customization options. Also for God's sake please add a left-handed option, DS2 allowed me to beat the game left-handed and it drives me insane that a game touts customization but then refuses to have an option for people who make up 15% of the freaking population. That's gotta be enough to warrant a left-hand option if devs caved to the pressure of the 2 whole people banshee-wailing about replacing gender with body type. And just as a funny tidbit of information, I'M NOT EVEN LEFT-HANDED, IT'S JUST SOMETHING I FOUND NEAT!
I've got a bunch of time in all of FromSoftware's games. Demon's Souls, DS 1-3 and Sekiro. I REALLY wanted to love this game, it looked like a great (possibly co-op) adventure, and I was willing to overlook the design decisions inspired by George R. R. Martin (The kinds of stories he writes just don't fit with FromSoftware's history of design, in my opinion. George writes too much about sex and political intrigue, and the lore with Mohgwyn and the lover's spat between Radagon and whats-her-face just didn't feel like it belonged, in my opinion) but this game just really made me sad. I was excited for this game all the way up to release, but as part of me expected, this game felt like a reskin of Dark Souls III, with every single problem that has been plaguing this line of games since its inception.
I mean it. Lots of enemies are literally just reskins using same movesets but with higher numbers, hell some enemies are just copy-paste from Dark Souls III! Enemies just feel like they are non-stop pressing the attack button and never gas out. There are very few enemies that get staggered or that can have their endless combos interrupted while you can literally be staggered to death by anything. Even things like poison clouds make your character look like they're having a seizure.
The fact that a lot of enemies have delayed attacks to screw over players rolling too early doesn't help make fights any better. In fact, 90% of the time it looks very unnatural and downright goofy to the point where it's so obvious that they're programmed to catch you off guard. Frankly, some enemies just slowly winding up their attacks for a few seconds and holding a gigantic weapon over their head but then being able swing at blinding speed just looks funny. I get that they are trying to make the player pay attention to when the attack's going to connect, rather than roll when the enemy twitches... But in all honesty, making enemies wind up for a long ass time and then swing in an instant is a cheap way to go.
Its also painfully obvious that a lot of them have input-read scripts for when you attack or heal just to punish you for pressing a button. Again, this feels like a very cheap and degenerate design choice made to make it look like it's a "oh so hard" game. Perfect 360° tracking of attacks just adds to the feel of cheapness, too. I mean, massive enemies that can do a 180° mid swing and even mid air is just hilarious. It feels like I'm playing this slowpoke of a character with like two attacks while enemies can attack endlessly and jump around at the speed of sound. It's just a tedious and boring design.
Another problem is that when you get past certain points, it's just massively bloated health bars and damage numbers. Dying to 2 hits on 60 vigor sucks and not just from bosses but also regular enemies. Hell, I even got one-shot a few times by regular assassins in the Royal Capital. Massive enemy health bars just make you feel like you are a random weak ass nobody that can get wiped away in 5 seconds by the tiniest of inconveniences, and it seeps into normal "cannon fodder" enemies as well. The result? Died once to a boss, died 14 times to some random ass dogs.
And that's the point and what makes me hate almost every FromSoftware game ever. Every single enemy has one of these characteristics:
A. They have a huge range
B. They can do 1/3 of your health bar with one hit
C. They can combo you for all of your health bar.
To put it in perspective with a saga of games that I absolutely adore, it'd be like playing Guitar Hero with dodges and attacks instead of notes. Except, if you miss more than 2 to 3 notes, you have to start over, complete with a minute and a half of cutscene that you can't quit (which would be how much it takes to respawn and walk back to the boss).
When the game ended, because I pushed myself to end it to finally collect my thoughts even though I knew I had hated it from the start, I didn't sigh with satisfaction. I sighed with defeat, knowing that it wasn't even nearly worth it to go through so many hoops and spend so much time trying to end this piece of shit game that artificially enhances its difficulty with random bullshit that leaves you questioning if maybe, YOU are the dumb one here. But whenever you talk about it to people, it's always the same "git gud" shtick.
I mean it, the elitism surrounding FromSoftware's games is absolutely unprecedented. Oh what's that? You used summons to ACTUALLY try and have fun at the game and not just get angry after dying for the upteenth time? Then you're just a filthy casual! Videogames aren't meant to be fun and engaging, or to have a good story and good design, their only purpose is to show other people how badass you are at something that genuinely has no fucking meaning in real life! It's apalling and frankly embarrassing that literal nerds call other people losers for not spending 300 hours getting angry at a videogame. I swear, it feels like every single Souls-like player has to demonstrate something, as if it means anything. And I would excuse it if this game was some sort of "purely mechanical" videogame, but its mechanics are so inconsistent and lousy that you cannot even rely on them. This isn't Devil May Cry.
I will always mantain that Sekiro did it best. Even through all the classic FromSoftware bullshittery, it allowed you to counter most of them if you were good enough. The mechanics were tight and the game was extremely fluid and fun. You didn't feel like a nobody who could die at any moment, you felt like a badass underdog that could fight through anything with enough practice. But sadly, everyone is blinded by their bias towards a CORPORATION THAT ONLY WANTS YOUR MONEY, so all differing opinions will get drowned out. Not that I care, going against the current is pretty much a trademark of mine at this point.
TL;DR It's just like every other Souls-Like game. It recycles enemies, animations and weapons. It's frustratingly difficult because of how much you're handicapped all throughout the game and it never leaves you with a sense of accomplishment. Is it a terrible game? Probably not. Is it badly made? Yes, and on purpose. If you want a hard game, go play Donkey Kong Country 2!