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Why Elden Ring is not a 10 for me, part two

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I want to start this post by saying that I don’t believe in 10s. Here is yesterday’s post. I don’t think anything is perfect, and while I get in theory that there is a perfect score, well, I mentally call it “a really damn good game” or something like that. I also get that you have to have a top score. If there wasn’t a 10, but only a 9, then the 9 would become the perfect score. It’s just a thing to me that I don’t like a perfect score or talking about numbers as if they are objective (when it comes to ranking).

It makes it kinda pointless, then, for me to talk about why I don’t think of Elden Ring as a 10, then, right? Maybe, but I’m going to do it, anyway. And it’s not just the number 10, but the fact that people think it’s the perfect game–or close to it. It’s not. I hasten to add that it’s my favorite game for good reason, so I’m not dissing it by saying it’s not perfect. Then again, I get freaked out by the whole talk about perfect because by definition, nothing is perfect. Nothing can hope to be perfect! So I guess I should just make my peace with it by thinking of it as ‘a really fucking good game that is a cut above the rest’.

My brain doesn’t work that way, though. A 10 is perfect and it means that nothing can be better. Or if things can be improved, it should just be little things. The fact that the port sucked on release knocked it automatically out of 10 territory for me (though, ironically, I didn’t have much trouble with it on my mid-tier PC). I ended up giving it a 9.65 or so–which is equal or just above/below what I would give Dark Souls III. I think? That may not be what I gave it, but it’s what I would give it now after playing the DLC.

We won’t talk about the last boss of the DLC because I have way too many felings about that boss to cover it in this–well, no. I will touch on it because it’s emblematic of what I found problematic about Elden Ring–and the rest of FromSoft’s games.

I want to be very clear that I am a huge FromSoft fan. I admire their unrelenting vision and the way that they do what they want, no matter what. They have changed the landscape of gaming, and it’s overwhelmingly for the better. They are the standard against which others can measure themselves, and inevitably come up short. They are almost gods in the industry–deservedly so.

Why Elden Ring is not a 10 for me

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I love Elden Ring (FromSoft). It’s my favorite game of all time, tied with Dark Souls III. I need to play DS III again; I haven’t done it since February. The RKG Discord did a Return to Lothric then, and it was fun getting back to it.

I will admit, though, that I’ve been playing mostly Elden Ring since the DLC came out–hell, before that, too. It’s interesting to me that when people talk about the best From game, they like to pretend that there is an objective answer to that. I mean, it’s not unusual that human beings want to rank things, and it’s certainly not unusual to think that your opinion is FACTS. It’s just amusing to me how vehement people get about it. I know that I’m in the minority with Dark Souls III, and I’m really in the minority with placing Bloodborne and Sekiro at the bottom of my list.

While I adore Elden Ring and have played it almost nonstop for two-and-a-half years, there are things that could have been done better. I am currently doing NG+ with my strength character, so I want to start with my issues with NG+ and beyond. This is not limited to this From game, but it’s exacerbated in this one because…well, I’ll just jump into something that really irritates me about NG+.

There are important items in the game that when you get there in NG+, you get nothing. Not a replaced item, but nothing. There are rises in the game that are towers you have to unlock by solving a puzzle (usually). Some are as simple as finding three ghost tortoises and striking them. Some involve jumping; some involve gestures; one, memorably, involves a *sigh* hidden path. They are a fun break from the dungeons, and I enjoyed most of them. They are outposts for the sorcerers of Raya Lucaria (I think) so you usually get something intelligence-related from them like a spell or a memory stone. The latter is how you get another spell slot.

Side note: This is one of the notable improvement in Elden Ring from the prior game. The memory slots, I mean. I can’t tell you how irritating it was to have to dump so many levels into attunement in order to get spell slots. I normally had five slots–and I think that was only with a ring that gave me an extra slot. In this game, every character starts with two memory slots. You get more from certain bosses and from rises, mostly. By the end of the game, you have ten slots. There’s a talisman that gives you an extra two. I think that’s the most you can have (twelve); at least, that’s all I’ve found.

When you reach the rises with memory stones in NG+, you get nothing. That’s right–nothing. No replacement item–not even a damn smithing stone. You open the chest and there is literally nothing in it. I can’t tell you how deflating that is.