Let me preface this by saying Elden Ring (From Soft) is my favorite video game of all time. By a hair. My second favorite? Dark Souls III, also by FromSoft. In fact, I’ve gone back and forth several times as to which game is actually my favorite. I finally landed on Elden Ring, but that doesn’t mean it won’t veer back to DS III.
I’m saying this because I’m going to be very critical of Elden Ring, and I wannt it to be clear that it’s from love. Well, also frustration, but mostly love. I want them to be better, that’s all. Here’s my post from yesterday in which I talked about the frustration I had with fulfilling a small side quest, one that frustrated me several times when I’ve done it in the past.
I want to talk about a bigger issue with this game–and it’s an issue that happens in many of the From games. That issue is that a large portion or all of the second half is not good. Let me explain. In doing so, I’ll be spoiling some of the second half of the game, including a major area. I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but I need to talk about specifics.
*SPOILERS*
About a hundred hours into the game (I’m slow), I made it to the halfway point. Of course, I didn’t know it was halfway, and I thought it was more like two-thirds of the way there. Honestly, it should have been because the next area was my least favorite in the whole game. Hm. I can talk about it without naming it, I guess. It’s a meaningful area in the game as it’s talked about before I even reach it. An NPC talks about it, and it’s mentioned in at least one item.
This area is easily the worst in the game. Not even a later optional area that is harder and more frustrating is as bad as this area. Someone noted that there is not one single new enemy in this rather vast area, and they’re right. All the enemies are from earlier in the game, although some of them might be reskinned. And, yes, one type of enemy is from this area, but one shows up much earlier in a gaol as the boss of that jail. Yes, he’s much easier then, but it’s the same enemy.
This area (and the optional area that branches off from it) are the snowy areas, which makes me sad because I love snow. But why is it usually a bad sign in a game? Because devs love to make visibility limited or nonexistent in said area. It happened in Dark Souls II in what is almost universally agreed upon as the worst area in the game–and it’s in the last DLC. It happened in this game and this area as well. There’s a section where the wind is constantly blowing and you can’t see anything. It’s the only area of the game I don’t know at all becuase I was constantly hooning it through that area. It’s not fun. It’s not cute. It’s not exciting. It just…is. It feels, dare I say it, cheap.
I will say up front that I felt much of this area was filler. It felt very uninspired and dull. And like a leap in difficulty. There’s always a tighrope in From games bectween “hard, but fair” and “that’s fucking ridiculously hard”. Of course, that line is different for everyone, but it’s there. There’s also a fine line between having an area be enemy-heavy, but fair and having an area that is thoughtlessly choked with enemies, and this area is the latter. There is no artistry to the placement of the enemies–they are just flung willy-nilly into every nook and cranny.
It’s artless, and I hate this area so much. In fact, and this is one of my issues with From games in general, I find the second half to be much less interesting and fun than the first half. In fact, I start way more playithroughs than I actually finish. I know that’s pretty usual, but it’s often this part that stops a playthrough. I’m coming up to it in this playthrough, and we’ll see if I keep going.
To be clear, I’ve finished the game at least six times (that’s how many endings there are), and maybe a few more. So it’s not like I haven’t played it all the way through (including the DLC. Which is incredible). But I find that my interest drops once I reach this mid-point area. And it’s loooooong. And the boss of the area, which is an important boss you can’t skip is so fucking boring. It’s basically everything I hate in a boss. He’s big and hits hard–I think he could kill me in one blow the first time I met him. He covers a lot of ground and comes at you from odd angles, which means I can’t gauge where he’s going to hit me from. Plus, he’s a gimmick boss in that there’s one specific place you need to hit him to do the most damage. At least in the first phase of the fight.
By the way.
Let me quickly (hah!) rant about multiphase bosses. Back in the OG Dark Souls, the few times it happened, it was such a shock. It was epic, and it signified that oh, it was on. Then, slowly, it became that it happened more often than not. Now, it’s just standard. The vast majority of boss fights have phases if not actual different life bars. At some point during a boss fight, one of two things is going to happen. Either the boss is suddenly going to get all new powers/moves, or there’s a cutscene and a whole separate scene/boss (well, same boss, but some different form of the boss. For the most part).
This crescendoed until we hit the first DLC of Dark Souls III. In which they took it even a step further and had a three-phase boss fight. They made it seem like it was ending after the second phase. They even gave you a Titanite Slab (best upgrade material in the game). And then they start round three. At that point, it’s like, “Ugh, what?” At least for me, there’s no elation or anticipation. I was so tired by that point, I just wanted it to be over. I feel that way with many of the bosses from that point on. Especially in Sekiro. We don’t talk about Sekiro, though. There’s really no reason to do so.
More tomorrow.