It might be me, as evident to the comments, but at the same time no, since people who have experienced all of fromsofts games feel the same . Unfortunately the souls game is now relegated to the Zelda treatment, grandiose visage in exchange for good design and what makes the game good to begin with. Elden ring has the worst bosses, and now in dlc, the worse boss design in souls history.

Criticism of these bosses and their difficulty usually receives the “get good” treatment. And unfavorable ways to beat the boss are presented as “solutions” (mimic, cheese build).

Having that in mind, An ironic thing is Miyazaki stating fiddling with the Elden ring difficulty will break the game . However Miyazaki has made the worst game balanced ever, which everyone suggests; the mimic tear, which effectively dissolves the difficulty and therefore “breaks the game”. I wanted a dance , not this.

I also dislike that the blanket term difficulty is seen as a positive. If so, Miyazaki did a terrible job, why wouldn’t he make all the bosses have ten times the health? Maybe take a full 100 hours in real time to widdle their hp?

I guess this change in design philosophy isn’t noticed by other more skilled players that were having a field day, but the rise of moves that you don’t even know how to dodge after you die countless of times because of their nebulous reads is immersion breaking (especially since you will have to look it up).

Anywho let me nip it In the bud and explain the design issues ranked bluntly and as brief as possible

1. One hit windows to punish boss feels unrewarding
2. Extremely aggressive nonstop barrages of attacks
3. Moves aren’t design well (don’t know how to dodge or what to do
4. Camera camera camera, especially in the final boss when looking up at him makes you not see his arms sometimes and hides what he’s doing behind his cape
5. Roll catches and weird weird weird delays… I heard this and it was true “it seems like you’re fighting the devs and not the boss”
6. Obscuring moves with effects like fire particles
7. Reaction time has to be way quicker
8.not last but enough is enough the anime bs moves -
- now you have bosses which can belong in number 3, but mixed with how to make them more powerful and cool,not only is there a huge boss that you don’t know what he’s doing half the time with camera issues, now they include weird anime moves? It’s like malenia scowl move all over again, they go in the air and do a bunch of slashes at nothing then hurl at you to then try and memorize the timing of the moves they do after while above your head , problem? I can’t see what they are doing, memorize the timing… not the pattern. That’s an issue

Anyways, I did have fun, cheesing lost the tension and a lot of joy but it was more fun than trying

Sekiro, bb, ds3. Easily wipe the bosses here. Clearly a different market here, if souls continues like this I might stop playing, from my favorite games and devs to just apathy.

Elden ring dlc is good, the world is amazing, the story is a bit confusing but I was super intrigued, the bosses are cool but aren’t well designed, I miss how it used to be, well whatever, hope to see what comes next . And miquella is a hot femboy so +1

(minimal spoilers until a certain point that will be labeled)

having finished the dlc a few hours ago, i’m reminded that, in my review for the base game of elden ring, i likened it to a walking corpse. i still stand by that, but i bring it up because, while playing shadow of the erdtree, i was reminded that this was not always the case. there were times in this expansion where i was just in awe at the construction of this world - how they created something even more laden with secrets, somehow with even more beautiful visuals, with a level of verticality and interconnectedness that is overwhelming to even conceptualize - and there were times were i was in awe, not out of respect, but out of sheer bewilderment. how could the same people who brought me such joy create encounters this terrible, this frustrating, this… boring? the shadow realm is an exacerbation of all the best and worst qualities present in the lands between, resulting in an experience that is, somehow, even more bipolar than the base game.

to begin discussing why that is, we have to first broach the topic of difficulty. it’s been the brand of developer fromsoftware since the very first dark souls, with the “prepare to die” edition to the death counter in majula, to the streamer reactions of orphan of kos and slave knight gael - the reputation of fromsoftware as “the developer that makes hard games” is one that they’ve fully embraced. phrases like “git gud” and “skill issue” have become emblematic of the design trend of these games, especially as they progressively get harder and harder.

the problem with this kind of brand image is that the fixation of difficulty as a ways to entice and engage the player has slowly given way to a very rapid, nearly exponential increase in difficulty. can you imagine showing a demon's souls player blackflame friede? or a dark souls player maliketh

demon's souls, dark souls and dark souls 2 respectively handle difficulty all pretty similarly - they all feel like an extrapolation of the same design ethos, though interpreted in different ways. dark souls 3 (and from what i’ve played of it, probably bloodborne) is where the trouble starts to crop up, especially 3. because it’s the end of a trilogy, and because it’s coming off the heels of bloodborne, the boss design is still in the same vein as what came before - but it results in a feeling of overcompensation all the more. you can’t make something easier than what came before, so what else to do but make it harder?

this kind of approach to difficulty continues into sekiro (although that game is much easier to stomach due to it having a much different combat system) and flows into elden ring with a ferocity that made that game’s combat pretty unfun for me. it was a mixture of a lot of things - hyper delayed moves with attacks that came out incredibly quickly, resulting in the only way of learning a fight by dying over and over; combo extender and mixups, where a boss could sometimes launch into a move sometimes in the middle of a combo where sometimes they wouldn’t; and especially in the back half of the game, bosses with extremely long and punishing combos where it was only possible to get one or two hits in before they launched into yet another extremely long and punishing combos, just to name a few. because of this, it’s a markedly different style of difficulty than seen in demon souls or dark souls 1, and it’s why the discussion surrounding the difficulty in these games are so boring and trite. there’s no nuance, no discussion of the level of difficulty, it’s simply regarded as a binary and not a spectrum. this treatment of game design has lead to the boss design in erdtree. it’s a natural progression, and as much as i loathe it, it is understandable.

what i don’t understand is why fromsoft seemingly insists on devaluing their creations so much. before fighting a hidden superboss, i had fought no less than five dragons in this dlc, more if we’re counting non-boss ones. there are still the same catacombs, shrines and caves as in the base game - filled with the same reused enemies and bosses (no, i don’t count unique npcs as unique bosses). the fact a few connect to new areas, like the sewers catacombs to the frenzied flame in the base game, is a welcome addition - but it still makes the ones that don’t stick out like a sore thumb. and if you want new bosses that aren’t a part of the story, then you’re out of luck. have fun fighting three runebears with a boss name for some reason! or a deathrite bird, for some reason! they even have the dancing dragon - a boss with an intro cutscene, for gods sake - in some random fucking temple, except this time he spits deathblight and summons those annoying frog guys that also spit deathblight. like what??

what is easily and glaringly the worst part of the dlc, though, is the fact that’s been impossible to ignore - these boss fights no longer have summons as an option, but are designed around them. i don’t have a problem with summons in these games, not at all. i think they allow more people to experience these games and that is undoubtedly a good thing. the issue is that, in the ever increasing difficulty of these games, it becomes increasingly not manageable to use summons. for the record, i’ve beaten all the dark souls games (and sekiro, obviously) without ever using summons. i’ve also done the same with elden ring - and would’ve been able to say the same about the dlc, if it wasn’t for the final fight.

if i’m being honest, most of my animosity for this expansion comes from this fight. not from a lore perspective, no, that’s not my thing. the design of this boss, is so incredibly, unbelievably, viciously abhorrent that there’s only two ways this was allowed to actually be in the final release of the game - that miyazaki has his head so far up his own ass he actually thinks this is fun, or he’s a giant troll and wanted to see just how bullshit he can make a fight before people stop blindingly praising the ensuing product. make no mistake - this fight is dogshit. it is monumentally so, it towers above and blinds the rest of the experience to such a comical degree. it reminded me, again, why i thought elden ring was a walking corpse - there’s only so much you can do with a combat system that only has a dodge roll and its central pillar. if malenia strained that framework, this fight shatters it - in my eyes, beyond all repair.

misc stuff that i couldnt fit in, with spoilers:

-the roster of fights in this expansion is very much on the malenia / maliketh side, much to my disappointment. it makes me sad, because much like those fights, there’s a lot to love, but it’s just executed so poorly that it results in a supremely diminished experience. the divine dragon isn’t as much a fight with a creature as much as it is a flailing, writhing mess of bone and flesh - and the camera, of course. rellana is an exercise in excessively long combos and over-the-top spectacle more than anything else. messmer would be a great fight if it wasn’t for a few minor things - the flurry attack as part of his longest combo, annoying mixups that require a level of reflexes that i found unfair, and a second phase that just felt ridiculously excessive in nearly every way. the other bosses i do actually mostly enjoy, even if i have some minor problems - scadutree avatar was a really cool, unique fight, commander gaius was rather simple and had an annoying charge move, but was simple enough, putrescent knight had a great flow when you got the hang of it, and bayle is probably their best dragon fight to date, even if it still suffers from a feeling of the devs trying to up themselves yet again – i think placidusax was more than enough, personally.

-it’s cool that so many areas of this dlc are so secret and difficult to find, but i do wish there were more ways to get to these areas. i had to resort to using a guide to find the last one, and that’s never really a fun feeling for me. i know the intent is to create a world where people collaborate to find a solution, but who’s asking their friend if they know something and not just looking at a wiki? it’s a design that worked when the internet wasn’t so omnipresent, but it doesn’t hold up now imo.

-as much as i love the open world, there’s a bizarre amount of empty space? there’s not really a ton of stuff to do in a lot of these areas - areas like abyssal woods, scaduview, and jagged peak, while gorgeous, just don’t have a lot of interesting stuff in them.

-new weapon types are really cool!!

-the last thing isn’t related to the game, but i do wonder how those who sneer at people complaining about the difficulty will regard the final boss. these games have been worshiped for so long, it makes me wonder: can they do anything that will break the spell they have on people?

I know everyone sings the praises of licensed super hero games like Spider-Man 2 and Arkham City, but I wanna shine a light on this game for a change. While I don’t think its gameplay is amazing and by the end it runs out of steam, I think this is probably the best adaptation of a comic book character in sprite.

Punisher is a character that really needs a writer with a good understanding of the character to really do a good job writing him. Making him too nice and you could make him generally uninteresting and another basic mercenary for hire Marvel super hero, and if you write him as a murders monster you lose that connection to the reader which makes Frank Castle an interesting character. I personally think Garth Ennis who is the writer for this game is one of the few writers who has probably the best understanding of what The Punisher is and what he isn't. He isn’t a by the books mercenary who just occasionally goes out of his way to break the geneva convention, what he is is an extremely depressed and violent man who through a warped sense of right and wrong will do some very morally questionable ways, and then other times he’ll do funny stuff like suffocating The Russian with a giant fat guy. The game does an amazing job with that characterization with the addition of the interrogations minigames. You’ll have to scare the ever loving shit out of crooks by doing all shorts of stupidly violent thing like hanging them over a meat grinder, curb stomping them, pushing their body into a wood chipper, pushing their head into a bear trap, tangling them over a hungry shark, and many many more. After a certain point these methods of killing people go from gratuitously over-the-top; to flat out ridiculous doing a really good job capturing that very over-the-top nature of Ennis’s work on Marvel Knights and Max. It’s a damn shame that most of this game has been censored to hell and back but oh well you can just mod that stuff out and play it the way Volition meant it to be, violent as hell and

When it comes to adapting a character from one medium to another a lot can get lost in the translation (Hell I went on a whole tangent about that in my Deadpool review) but I feel the general essence of what made Garth Ennis’s runs so great did make it to this game still intact, sure the basic gameplay is nothing to write home about but it’s still really fun, the run and gun style of gameplay the Saints Row series would spawn off from is still leaps and bounds better than it has any right to be, and the arcady nature of it’s score system really does give way to a lot of replayability, it’s a really great time license tie-in jank aside. If you like Garth Ennis’s run of Punisher then I think you’ll get a lot out of it, and if also like weird esoteric 6th gen games that’ve been mostly forgotten by the general public and are only remembered by weirdos who unironically laugh at Family Guy jokes then it’s 100% for you.

Crazy how sexual tension between 2 girls and a guy makes the story that much better.

Everything else is just better than the original too, absolutely zero issues aside from the last like 20% of the story, it's a bit too samey to og considering what happened just before it but apart from that I loved it.

Chaos ending is so cool man, I think law fits more and is better but chaos is just COOL.

All human conflict that has ever existed can, under a certain lens, be compounded to a microcosmic world of pairs; two bodies, two hearts, two minds, two souls in unison. Beasts called “man” circling, waiting to pounce, to swipe, to put out the flame of another’s candle.

The will to protect one's world / The pride and joy of conquest
The universal desire to be understood / Blatant disregard of foreign perspective
The fear of losing one’s life / The ancient, primal thrill of the hunt
The sacrificial call to arms / The lonely road of revenge
The love that binds all hearts / Hate enough to carve to the bone

In a flurry of steel, sparks, and sinew, we shed our faces.
Under all that armor, under all that skin
We are animals all the same.
「これは英雄の物語ではない」

So, you’ve come hoping for a really in depth and detailed review? Unfortunately I’ve only ever played this game once and to be honest…it is a much MUCH more interesting story. In the future, I promise I will actually sit down and review this game. But for now: get a drink and a nice snack, sit back, and enjoy my glorious tale.

It was around about 8 years ago I’d say and me and a friend were in a random arcade. We were sort of browsing around, looking through all the different games they had to show. And that’s when…we saw it. Time crisis. For those that don’t know, time crisis is essentially a first person on rails shooter which were pretty popular in the arcades during the late-ish 90’s. The thing is here is that you have a small pedal which if pressed: will allow the player to duck down and reload their weapon. So when me and my friend saw this game, we decided to give it a go. How hard could it possibly be? We said to ourselves.

I’m sure this is the point where in your mind you’ll probably hear thinking ‘oh this is the part where he reveals how hard it actually is and then there is some funny moral to the story later’. Unfortunately, I’m gonna have to crush those expectations.

So my friend inserted 50p of British currency into the machine and started playing. We’d both agreed that he’d have the first go and later I’d have a go after he died. But after 10 minutes or so, we realised that he was better at time crisis than we thought. He was brilliant at it in fact. I just sat there watching him. He decimated every single enemy in his path. The villain laughed: thinking that he was some sort of joke. But, he was so, so wrong. My friend kept pushing the pedal like there was no tomorrow and landing every hit. After a while, I began to wonder if the machine was rigged. But those thoughts were soon put to sleep as finally: he beat the game.

So what is the moral to the story then? Just because you think a game is gonna be really hard doesn’t mean it always will.

Great gameplay, story happened, pedal was harmed, ACTION! RELOAD!