I love Elden Ring. I know I don’t have to say it, but I wanted to state my love at the forefront of this post. I’m trying to shield myself from the inevitable pushback when I note what could make Elden Ring better. I speak from a point of wanting to make the game better, not to take it down a notch. My philosophy is that you have to acknowledge someone’s flaws before you can truly love them. Otherwise, well, your love is incomplete.
First of all, there are a bunch of enemies that are jerks. The video I’ve included is his community’s top ten most hated enemies. Now, yes, enemies aren’t supposed to be fun. They’re meant to be a challenge, but most on this list, I’ve given up fighting. Runebears? Ha! The last one I actually fought was in a catacomb and I thought it was unavoidable. Once I realized you don’t have to fight it, I skipped it the next time around.
The giant lobsters/prawns/whatever the fuck they are that shoot out highly-potent streams of water? No thank you! There is one that turns into a Grafted Scion and gives a Larval Tear when you kill it and that’s the last one I killed on purpose, I think. Abductor Virgins? I want no part of them, thank you very much. Look. When you have many enemies to kill, why bother wasting so much time and energy on one enemy? Especially late in the game when every enemy is so hard.
I talked about how I had so much difficulty with Leyndell Royal Capital the first time around. It was such a grind with the common soldiers one-shotting me. Carefully, painfully, making my way through two rooms, which took me five or ten minutes, only to be ganked by a group of enemies that I couldn’t possibly beat. And I don’t mind pulling one enemy at a time (mind out of the gutter, please!), but there were rooms in which there were enemies hiding around the corner and I could not possibly see them without first entering the room.
Side Note: I always crank the gamma up to the max. Games want you to have it so you barely see whatever insignia they present to you, but, hell no. I have bad eyesight and spatial perception difficulties. Why the hell would I make it even harder on myself by deliberately lowering the gamma? That’s why I always have my hip lantern turned on when I’m in a cave or catacomb.
Leyndell made me rage so many times in my first playthrough. It’s a huge area and there are so many ways to die. In my first playthrough, I wanted to explore everything and kill every kind of enemy at least once. There is also a–oh, yeah. *SPOILERS*–subterranean area that is HUGE and necessary for one of the endings. I’ve zipped through most of it, ignoring many of the enemies along the way with my Hidden Form/Crepus’s Vial combo. Again, it’s not as good as in Dark Souls III, but it helps when I want to motor through an area.
There is the little bit to get from this area to the next via rooftops and by the fucking fanged imps who are such a pain in the ass. They do an insane amount of damage for how prevalent they are–and they’re surprisingly hardy. Plus, there are a bunch of them clustered in a room, with at least one of them hidden. I have spun the camera so many times to see if there is a hidden Fanged Imp, only to be surprised, anyway, because it’s hidden out of view.
Honestly, it’s one of the reasons I don’t like the catacombs in addition to them being tedious and samey. The Fanged Imps make them joyless to traverse. Plus, there comes a point when I just give up trying to fight and just run for the next Site of Grace.
I will say that having 30 Vigor instead of 18 at this point is a real luxury. Still, I have Vigor envy when I watch vids and others have health bars that stretch across the whole screen. I was watching a cheese video for a guy you have to invade for an NPC questline. His health bar was literally twice the length of mine. Yeah, it’s easy to cheese when you have that kind of health bar.
I took several days to do Leyndell Royal Capital the first time. This time? I got through all the main points in a few hours. Granted, I have things I need to do related to the ending I want this time–and it’s so fucking unpleasant–but I’ve already made it to the next area.
Oh, right. I was talking about that. To get to the next area, you have to traverse the rooftops, and I cannot tell you how many times I died doing this the first time around. Because I had so little health, the Fanged Imps could get me in one or two hits. But what got me the most was trying to jump from one rooftop to another (a specific one) and falling to the floor. Moving away from the houses, there are two of the regular enemies, three or four of exploding foot soldiers, and another enemy, I think. Because I have no idea how to escape from this death corner, if I’m able, I fast travel back to the Site of Grace I started from and do it all over again.
This should take five minutes, max. I even looked up the optimal way to do it. And I kept dying. It was so enraging. Those fucking Fanged Imps. When it wasn’t them, it was me falling down. By the way, learning how to run and jump at the same time is such a game changer. I use my thumb for both of these and the buttons are A (jump) and B (run). I can’t hit them both at the same time with the same finger so late in the first playthrough after I beat the final boss, I figured out to hold down run while simultaneously smashing jump, which is a game-changer.
Anyway, it took me an hour in the first playthrough to get to the next area. In the second playthrough, I got it in three or four tries. It was a breeze and it’s because I could survive getting hit by those goddamn Fanged Imps. I’m in the Mountaintop of Giants now with a few bits and bobs to do, including the NPC questline that leads to the ending I want. I’m doing that next because it’s fiddly and hard, and then the third time around, I’ll go for a standard ending just so I can get the goddamn plat. That’ll make me much less low-key stressed about not having it–and I can fully enjoy the game at every turn rather than focus on getting the plat.