7.5/10
Must play if you are into Souls game. You start off as feeling as strong as a normal slime in Dragon Quest and keeping getting your whooped until you memorize just the right timing to strike with Kakashi's 1000 year of pain attack, at which point you feel lucky just being able to final move on. Was a little dissapointed that this wasn’t a Sekiro sequel. Loved that game, with the whole parry and stance mechanic. The feeling of parrying a huge opponents weapon swing with enough poise, as a sharp tang reverberated at the moment of impact as the blades crossed one another was truly unmatched in Sekiro. No games has made me feel as powerful as Sekiro had , but I digress this post is about Elden Ring. Although we can block some damage, we are back to the dark souls type combat, which no doubt requires a level of skill that I feel I just don’t have.
Graphics
The game is truly a work of Art. The above picture is an in-game screenshot. The art style of the Gothic European buildings with its sharp lofty towers, the rustic cobblestone pathways and the cacophony of strange and eerie enemies you fight along the way, truly fit the dark yet hauntingly beautiful emotion that the game tries to express. I ran the game on my gaming PC at QHD resolution and RTX 3080 and it ran smoothly with no noticeable frame drops.
Music
The opening theme song is catchy and fits the game very well. The rest of the music however is quite similar to Dark Souls music so far. Very heavy in violins and orchestric scores. The music fit the environment quite well, did not feel repetitive and I cannot remember anything being out of place in the music as I listened to it for the hours and hours I spent playing in the game. But that exactly is also the reason why it is not so great. There is no track that felt unique to a specific boss, nothing that I remember after turning of the game.
Gameplay and Story
You are the tarnished, and the game revolves around your jounrey in becoming an Elden Lord. You traverse through the wide open land butchering everything from the time you enter the open world till the final boss. You start by fighting a boss who immediately makes you remember that you are playing a souls game by whooping left and right, but by the end of the game you fight A GOD. Typical JRPG stuff!
The best addition in this game is the ability to traverse the land with a spectral steed. The environment is lush with life and activity, from soldiers and patrols marching along the well-trodden pathways, to strange decayed beings praying to their gods, a whole village partying and dancing over meadows of lush bright flowers. The world definitely seemed more lively and well designed than ever before in a souls game.
The feeling of satisfaction you get as you kill that boss, who kept killing you is unmatched. The locations and the level design is one of the high points of the game. One of the later levels had me scaling a broken down castle atop the sky with huge tornadoes roaring in the background visible just outside the palisades and windows. The sheer height of the tall towers and spires, and the vertical level design is by far most prounounced and memorable.
In the end the whole story is no doubt complicated and has tons of hidden lore, and missed messages that I probably willfully ignored in my first walkthrough. I finished the game and got the default AGE OF FRACTURE ENDING with a samurai build character.
Would definitely consider revisiting the game but those dungeon underground levels keep me from picking up the controller and restarting the game anytime soon. I hope one day game designers, design an RPG without the mandatory sewer levels, cause they deifnitely break the immersion of the world and my investment in the game and just serve to prolong the game a few more hours. These games are frustrating as it is, and adding more reasons don’t really help keeping new entrants to the genre invested.
My score is based on my subjective experience and were I to objectively review it I would probably have given it a 8.5 or even a 9, since I can’t find one thing, other that the sewer levels, that I would recommend fixing. It is a well polished game that checks all the boxes with no major shortcoming that can I can complain.