After 73 hours of gameplay and 5 days in a row of wake up --> eat --> elden ring --> sleep 5 hours and repeat, I decided it was a good time to finish elden ring and get back to having a life IRL.

This game is fucking amazing, from start to finish it surpassed all my expectations and everything that at first I thought was lame, managed to convince me that it was better than I thought it was.
The level design of the dungeons is phenomenal, it's amazing how they all have a super different and fun layout, and I love the way they balanced the game, always grateful that the enemies don't have a cheap scale with level, they are genuinely well thought out and well placed. The world is fun, it's amazing, and I thought it was going to be overwhelming, but it really always ends up being "do what you want to do, in the order you want to do it" and I love it. I love being able to skip the main bosses and then go back and get them, I love knowing that every dungeon I do and every boss I do will be useful to me even if the loot doesn't interest me, because what matters to me is not the loot itself, but the experience that the game provides with every dungeon, every boss, and every trap.

Having played the King's Field and replayed Dark Souls 2 recently, Elden Ring didn't feel like dark souls, but like another king's field, a more fun king's field and with a story just as beautiful.
like by god, I could talk for hours about why I love the elden ring story and the NPCs, which by the way there are more npc questlines than all of darksouls combined AND I LOVE IT. Eventually I'm going to get 100%, but I decided to rush the ending because I wanted to be more relaxed about spoilers from my friends and so on.

Speaking of friends, I love the new group system. I love that you get a buff if someone within the group kills a main boss and get a bunch of DMs from my friends saying "yoo congrats 🙂 ", I love writing messages helping others or posting a message saying "dog! " to any non-hostile creature, I love reading messages saying there are hidden walls and making me a mental bet on whether it's really an illusory wall or not, I love messages saying "fort, night", even the ones obstructing stairs/chests, forcing you to use the dpad and change action, it's just a culture I missed already having passed souls so long ago.
I love how non linear it is so much, I haven't felt so at ease since Dark Souls 1.
Thank you, Miyazaki and FROMSOFTWARE for making Elden Ring something real, I can't wait to see what else you guys are going to do in general, even if it's an armored core or a king's field or idk, I love it. Amazing game, 100% my GOTY.

The final stretch with 3 double phase bosses was super exhausting, especially because none of them were easy, the final boss was literally 1 hit away from death and with no mana or estus. At the beginning I was really annoyed, but now that I passed it... god, probably one of the hardest things I've ever played.

Reviewed on Jul 19, 2023


Comments