This game would probably be 5 stars if not for the archaic mistakes that get corrected in future games, mostly, like the grinding for items and the ridiculous amount of types of stones. Luckily the game has a duping glitch to circumvent all that. Aside from one area it has really good level design, a cool art style, decent combat, and one of the more engaging narratives in the souls games, at least by the standards of the series, and some of my favorite NPCs. The poison swamp straight sucks and is possibly the worst mandatory area in the whole series.

I want to give this game a higher rating, sincerely so, but there are just so many problems tied to this game that exist in previous FromSoft games that are only doubled down on here. On top of this there are numerous issues with the combat that make it a frustrating experience, particularly with many boss fights.

To start with my single player concerns, you start with incredibly low vigor regardless of the character, but luckily you're able to mend that fairly quickly if you just level up vigor for basically all of the early game. Now, for my major combat gripe, there is not a single boss in Elden Ring with maybe the smallest of exceptions that I would genuinely call fun or good; as for what my big problem is with most of them, they suffer from one of if not all of the following frustrations that make them a pain to fight against. Note that my issues are compounded by the bosses sharing these characteristics rather than being isolated to certain encounters.
1. Obnoxious roll catching moves. Its fine to have a few roll catches here and there, but my issue here is that almost all the fights in this game have some. This game especially has some very frustrating ones that look incredibly stupid, like when Godfrey holds up his hammer for god knows how long, shouting "I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it!" in his head. (No, he doesn't actually say that). By the end of the game you're gonna get sick of this gimmick.
2. Bosses don't give you clear openings or reasonable room to breathe. This applies to some bosses much more than others (basically stuff like beasts and what have you). It kinda ruins the pace of the combat for me and adds a lot more waiting or forces trades.
3. Bosses that just leap and zoom around the place. I don't mind this when its a horse boss, but this happens a fair few times when you're not on a horse. I don't think running across the arena to maybe get one swing in before it attacks you and runs away again is engaging gameplay.
4. This is kind of blend of everything described here, but I don't think the speed of this game works with the game's mechanics. The methodical foundation from essentially Demon's Souls just doesn't support the fast anime fights of bloodborne, especially with how often they happen. If this game had stuff like that game's life recovery mechanic maybe my feelings would be different but as is I think the enemy's are too fast for what the game provides to be satisfying combat.

Okay, that's enough shitting on the game for now, what praises can I give it?
For starters, the game's just drop dead gorgeous; it might have some of if not the best art direction from games I've played as of late, and this is not an overstatement. Just about every area in this game is beautiful, each one trying to outdo the last. The character models and character creator themselves are fine, but the armor sets (AKA, the Souls Drip) leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. All the effects and weapon arts look pretty cool as well. All this does come at a small cost of performance in my experience, not so much in average frame rate, but for me on my RX 5600 XT and Ryzen 5 3600 in the form of what I dub Elden Buffers, short windows that generally last a second of the game's sound continuing but the image on the screen being frozen, till the Elden Buffer ends, playing out the missed time quickly before resuming the action. Your experiences may be different.

Another point I have to give is just how fun it is to explore the worlds Elden Ring provides. The vibes I get from riding my horse and visiting areas for the first time and just hopping about is unique to this series and honestly a welcome change. Its also nice to have a game where walking away from an encounter and coming back to it later and checking out other areas is reasonable. You don't really have to grind since "grinding" is just playing the game normally in different areas. The dungeons and catacombs do reuse bosses a fair amount, but I don't really mind this at all, even if I don't like the bosses in this game; if anything there's a certain charm to gaining some familiarity with foes.

The combat itself outside bosses is usually on the positive side, albeit with some caveats. When you're fighting certain fuck you enemies, like the giant hands or that one enemy that I swear belongs in bloodborne that just pounces on you relentlessly and screeches endlessly, the combat does kinda suck a little and makes me wanna close my game, but most enemies in this game I do enjoy fighting to some degree. It's also fun testing all cool incantations or sorceries you find in this game; for those on a first run, I highly recommend doing a hybrid build in this game since having a little bit of faith provides a ton of utility and a lot of cool little tricks for sticky situations while still having access to the melee combat for most encounters. The perceived weapon/build diversity is also incredibly high, though viability is another issue.

Okay, back to grievances, this time about the rune arc system. The long story short on this one is that there just isn't enough rune arcs for single player gamers. I can understand not caring to give as much since they are effectively buffs and not a way to obtain your default stats, but it is still frustrating how sparse they are in this game compared to say, Dark Souls 2, where the first NPC you meet in the game is capable of giving you 5 at once if you come back at a later time. I thought that you'd find more in later game areas, but you really don't. This would be less of a problem if the multiplayer foundations of this game were good, but that's far from the case.

If you're familiar with any of the previous Souls games, like DS3 or Bloodborne, you'll also be familiar with this game's mishandling of Co-op. The invasions in this game use a system that by default sends you into a co-op world, meaning that co-op players get invaded constantly, generally within a 15 minute loop where invasion cooldowns happen. This unfortunately discourages co-oping through entire levels online as no one wants to get invaded every 15 minutes, and would rather just want to get a boss done and over with. This also makes invaders forced to use super optimized builds since taking on 2 or 3 foes at once requires you to kill each of them quickly, reducing the capacity for build diversity in achieving success. All in all, nobody wins, and participating in this game's online kinda just sucks aside from aiding people with bosses. On that note, clearing area bosses for hosts is one of the few consistent ways of getting rune arcs, and I just failed to enjoy doing so at the rate I got summoned compare to other entries. At this point I'd rather Fromsoft do away with online or rework it completely if its just making their game dramatically worse having it.

On a final note, I think there's something very, very good in Elden Ring, plagued by Fromsoft failing to learn from previous mistakes while somehow making new ones. A part of me loves this game, but another part of me seriously loathes this game and is frustrated by the encouragement of Fromsoft's shortcomings. Its beyond me how a game this flawed got game of the year and is so universily praised.

This game has invisible quick time events, the WORST combat I've seen in any game, the game doesn't pause when you're trying to get an item mid combat, it always deselects the item when the combat is done, the inventory is filled with useless crap that comes up later, you gotta be pixel perfect to interact with items AND crouch sometimes, many including mandatory items are invisible and are only discovered by spamming the select button SOMETIMES REQUIRING crouching, the platforming is ass, and every room in the game looks the same with a few exceptions. The music is ok though and Pipo is funnny. I don't know why they murdered Razz's VA to get authentic death sounds though, I think that was too far.