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My gripes, big and small, with Elden Ring (part two)

Posted on October 24, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

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 vant to be alone

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Day Five

go. away. — I’m ready for the apocalypse.

It’s day five with no end in sight. Life as we know it is over, and I may not make it out of this alive. If I don’t, tell Shadow I love him.

I’ve been up for almost three hours, and I’ve had to answer four tech questions for my father already. Now, I know this isn’t a big deal because many of us have older parents who are uncomfortable with technology. Let’s throw some additional wrenches into this shitshow. One: I don’t read Chinese; my father’s phone is in Chinese. Two: I don’t use cell phones for any serious work because it makes me angry, scared, and confused. I like a full-functioning keyboard and all my keyboard shortcuts. Three: One of the problems has to do with PowerPoint, which I don’t use at all.

So. We have the comedy of me pointing at something on the screen and asking my father what it says. He doesn’t speak English on the regular any longer and hasn’t for at least two decades, so he struggles to translate the Chinese into English. Then, I try to figure out the equivalent in English before poking his phone, mostly in random.

This is fairly funny, but it’s also irritating because both my parents expect me to drop whatever I’m doing and help them RIGHT NOW. Yes, I know their emergency is not my emergency, but Asian parenting training is real, yo. You don’t say ‘no’ to your Asian parent. You just don’t. I’ve gotten much better at it, but it’s hard not to slip. Plus, my mother has a singular mind when it comes to, well, anything. And she has no ability to rate how urgent something is. If she wants it done, then it’s urgent. It’s hard because my ‘office’ is my couch, which is in the living room. So they feel free just to wander in and ask for whatever it is they need or just to chat.

Small annoyance: My mother is like a caster of her own thoughts. You know that inner voice that is constantly narrating what you do and think? That’s my mom. “I’m going to cut the vegetables now. First I have to soak them, though. I soak them for twenty minutes to get the–what do you call it?” That’s an actual question which she waits for me to answer. I know what she wants, but I’m not going to give it to her. I am not. No, no, no. I am not going to say toxins. “I leave it for twenty minutes, and–” I cannot tell you what follows because by this time, my eyes have glazed over, and my pulse is nonexistent.

I know that I’m making all this sound amusing (and it is in retrospect, it kinda is), but it’s mostly irritating at the time. The last few times they’ve been here, I’ve been able to let this shit roll off my back, but for whatever reason, it’s been harder this time. It started when my mom called me a few days before the visit. We were just talking about whatever, and then she said something that was patently a statement of denial. I was telling my brain, “Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it,” as my brain formulated a statement that I knew wouldn’t make things better and might actually make things worse. My brain wouldn’t let me not say it, and, yes, it didn’t make things any better.