Elden Ring is a game that had colossal expectations from me going in. Hot off the heels of bloodborne and several friends telling me it’s amazing, I was very excited to sink my teeth into it. While it is by no means a bad or even mediocre game, it is not great. Character customization is pretty excellent with lots of cool weapons and armours for classic rpg specs and was probably the height of this game for me. The world is quite nice visually but many of the areas felt irrelevant to me since the game does not really incentivize exploration unless you want random gear you’d never use. Level progression, as a result of this, is kind of strange, you can go anywhere and do anything which for a lot of people is great but in a souls like I prefer a lot more structure. People have also often cited Elden rings world as an excellent one but I would argue against that pretty vehemently. While it’s not uninteresting the concept of demigods, gods and the Elden ring lack the amount of intrigue and divinity that they’re going for and as a result many of the “story beats” feel hallow. Especially as a lore scrounger myself, the lore is not up to par in my opinion. Obviously the main concern for people regarding these games is combat and the combat is pretty good. I think people like to glaze this games boss roster because It definitely DOES have some cool bosses like radahn, Maliketh and of course malenia but in the face of how many complete dogshit bosses there are I don’t see the vision. Every evergaol/cave boss is awful, have the great rune bearers suck complete ass and I have personal beef with among. Another thing about these bosses that underwhelms me is the give and take of damage. In other souls games (which I played after Elden ring besides bloodborne) bosses have high health and usually kill you in about 3-4 hits and there’s a lot more of a slow burn to beat them which makes victory rewarding. In Elden you either melt bosses with your TikTok build or you get sent to the shadow realm. Claim skill issue all you want but this is my opinion after beating every boss. Overall Elden ring represents a classic folly for me in which I rank a game before I’ve even played it. It’s a good game for sure but I don’t think it’s by any means great.