As of writing, I have not finished this game. I have almost 200 hours in it across a handful of builds, but I have never hit the credits. I have never fought the final boss nor have I entered their domain. That is largely because Elden Ring is a game that, while great, is also difficult to keep my attention. It has a sense of wonder which both excites and repels me. From the variety of builds, the different possible routes, and all of the potential endings, I always find myself distant from the game after about the third act.

This most recent play through I am accompanied with a travel companion; someone who has became an Elden Lord twice before and decided she wanted to become one once again. Utilizing the Seemless co-op mod, I have experienced great joy yet also great pain. Because like the numerous endings to the narrative, this game has multiple triumphs and failures.

One notable triumph is the scale of the game. It is truly breathtaking how much went into this game. Every area is beautiful and plentiful, and I have not even seen every area! I am not usually a fan of open world games; with a few exceptions, I typically lose interest before I can expend the energy to complete a main story. I always wanted to see the last cutscene of the game and it looks like I will be seeing it rather soon as my cooperative escapades has motivated me enough to finally finish a run. While there are hundreds of weapons and spells that I could distract me from finalizing a build. this time I chose an early game powerhouse and have powered through most of the game with the power of bleed and the bloodhound's flip of death. Still, there is one major complaint that dampens my otherwise positive experience with the game: the third act.

Elden Ring's third act is not fun. I know many gamers take pride in beating difficult content and exploring horrifying landscapes, and sometimes I am one of these people. I have completed Bloodborne numerous times and would happily do so again, especially if the fabled PC port ever comes out. However, Elden Ring's third act is not well designed. Several bad elements of previous games plague the final act. The mountain is not my friend, and the bosses held amongst its cliffs struggle to feel fair when compared to bosses of other games and even previous Elden Ring bosses.

Currently my friend and I are trapped in the rotted corner Melania once slumbered. I wish she stayed asleep. She does not feel like a boss designed with fun in mind. Instead, she feels like a brag boss. The kind of boss that players fight not for enjoyment but to prove they can handle it. Her leech-like healing does not blend well with her swift swings and monstrous damage values. Even an exploitation of her low poise and bleed resistance has led to futile attempts now spanning hours of gameplay. To some this may should like a true test of skill, patience, and mastery of a game. To me, it feels like valueless work; an assignment a teacher provides because he thinks his class should be hard but does not understand how to develop proper tests for the subject so he instead crafts duties which aim to make students drop out or fail. Like a student who cannot pass a needlessly hard class, I feel like I have learned nothing from this boss I want to beat her, and I want to be a major reason she was defeated. But what reward will I get. Satisfaction or relief? It is an challenge worth pursuing or just a strain on the limited gaming dexterity my fragile fingers have left.

I recognize I am not very good at games. I am not great at many things, but gaming is the one thing that I struggle with but often keep pushing in an endeavor to seek new thrills and traverse previously unthinkable thresholds. Elden Ring, as good as it can be, simply does not feel worth it. Maybe I am just losing tolerance as I age; I have similar opinions to other games which in the past may have been wondrous experiences. Now I am jaded and tired, and throwing myself at a boss is a gaming chore so tedious it makes the gacha model of constant grinding seem like an innovative way of play.

I will reassess and write more as I continue to play. I plan on finishing my seemless run, picking up and completing a previous run, and I am considering testing out the convergence mod as its new features intrigue me. Yet I also question if I should instead explore another game, one which better respects my time and treats me as a thrill seeker rather than a challenge runner.

I can't write for shit but i've opinions so here goes nothing.

Elden ring is by far the oddest modern FROM software release, on one hand an incredible, massive ARPG whose sheer size is mind boggling, on the other, it has a 3rd act so rushed by developer constraints that makes playing it some of the least fun i've had with any of these games.

Straight off the release of Sekiro, succesfull in its reviews and with some mild push-back from fans that for some reason wanted more dark souls, FROM took the idea of souls-like BOTW and absolutely ran with it. And for the first couple acts, it works so absurdly well it often has you pausing just to try to take in what you're playing. The first half of Elden Ring stands as a testament on how to not only revitalize the stale genre of open world action games, but to make it a protagonist in it of itself, MGR5 could be striped down to just modular missions like Ground Zeroes, Elden Ring could never be a modular metroid-vania like the original Dark souls.

I don't recall who it was, but one of the original "I wanna climb mt everest" guys was once asked in an interview why exactly he'd want to do it, knowing the risks it entailed, he answered something along the lines of "we want to climb everest because it is there". FROM uses this basic human spirit will to guide you through their game, you don't need quest markers, or a story journal, or side-content icons, or a mini-map. None of that was ever necessary to entice a player to See Big Tree, Go To Big Tree. Its a gameplay progression that happens, at times, so organically that's almost remeniscent of how it felt to play levels designed by single persons back in the early days of FPS, but on a scale much larger than we could've imagined back then.

The art design in all their games has always been consistently stellar, I won't comment much on it as i've nothing interesting to add, genuinely the prettiest sky boxes i've ever seen in a game!

But then there's the combat design. Like I said, They had come straight from Sekiro, whose combat was the main meat of the game as it had the formula's RPG elements removed. In that game, combat felt like a dance, all moves were so perfectly coreographed you never felt at odds with the game's design, not once would you be taken out of the experience by something being so dramatically different from the core combat loop it seemed like from a different action game. The same can't be said for Elden Ring, here the regular overworld enemies behave mostly similar to how they would in Dark Souls 3 (Which is what I imagined they had in mind), but once you enter a fog gate, you get faced with a team trying as hard as they can to make their game "difficult" to uphold a silly reputation they garnered with people who think beating ARPGs makes them good at their hobby, Again, I don't need to be stating this, bosses holding up their arms for 3 to 4 seconds before doing the attack just looks silly. In the shooter genre theres a thing people coined as "Shooter trance", where you're so invested in constantly moving and aiming and all that, that you basically get really really immersed in the game, which is good! This could never happen with Elden Ring, the fundamental design of the boss fights makes it so you'll never have a good combat flow, you'll always need to be overriding your brain not to dodge and wait a few seconds while the guy holds his arms up before striking. I won't go into it much, but I also believe Malenia is the worst boss they've ever put in a game of theirs and we got robbed from being able to actually enjoy that fight in Sekiro.

It'll be forever a shame that its as successful as it was, as it means FROM will continue down this design route instead of focusing on the tight design of Sekiro and Bloodborne. Elden Ring is a fantastic enough game to be the best game released whatever year it could've wanted to come out on, but its so fundamentally flawed that playing it will never be as fun as it could've been had they dropped the need to have its weird boss combat flow and extend the game for an extra act that felt empty and unpolished.

I'm genuinely surprised to be telling you I like this. But I totally did. For most of this game I was of the opinion it was real bloated open world garbo, and it's still like 20% that don't get me wrong, but the ending really fucking blew me away. I am a sucker for some cheap theatrics, of course, but I genuinely didn't think I'd give a shit about this game's narrative the entire time up until the final moments of the plot.

Spoiler warning, I guess, but if you didn't play this and are skeptical I'm gonna assume you don't give a shit about spoilers anyway. I certainly wouldn't.

Far Cry 5's final mission, if you choose "Resist" when confronting the villain (because of course you would. why the fuck wouldn't you? I looked up the two other endings, I don't understand why they were included, lol), you enter this final arena that exists outside of the reality of the game prior. Some Ghostbusters shit. Giant walls of green fog and genuine mind control from the cult leader villain that's been hyped up as a more genuine, human threat prior. Upon breaking the mind control of one of my squadmates and hearing their voice line, it clicked. I recognized the voice and felt some sort of sadness for them.

And then, the game inevitably ends with the cult leader being 'right' about their doomsday prediction, and the voice actors give some performances they straight up weren't giving the rest of the game. They're playing some country-rock song vaguely talking about hellfire and the end of things while you try to escape it, maybe I would have recognized it better if I hadn't just gone "okay kinda funny" and ignored it for the dialogue, but it's all a real emotional mish-mash to throw at ya so suddenly there. I was genuinely terrified because of the voicework. It reminded me of some of the people in my life and how they'd talk when going through an awful panic attack. This compounded with the inherent silliness of the song choice and the apocalypse imagery all coming at you at 55 miles an hour, and then like some score multiplier it all worked for me even more because of how shocked I was that I even gave a shit.

Sometimes all you need is a wowza of an ending to get some positive reception from me. Maybe that's true of other people, too. Or maybe I'm a fucking idiot. Hard to say!