Elden Ring - 8/10
I think what FromSoft did was remarkable, but there are some things that held it back for me.
I liked it for all the reasons I liked FromSoft already. The combat is rewarding and the art direction is some of the best in the business. I'm not the biggest fan of open world games, but they did it about as good as you could IMO. No map makers, but there was always something to catch your eye and you'd usually run into a few other things on the way. Torrent is the best horse. You call him and immediately you're on him. You don't have to call him, wait for him to run over, then press another button to mount like Ghost or RDR2. He's also much faster and you don't have to keep pressing a button to sprint. I don't need realistic. It's a video game. Just made getting around much easier. There's a ton to like about the game. It's been gushed over for months now, so I'll just leave it at that.
I'm sure there's been a ton of critiques as well, but now it's my time to vent
. When I boil it down, I think most of my critiques comedown to it being too big.
I'll start with the bosses. Some were great, but some I feel were leaning a little too far into the unfair category. They were so fast. I loved the Bloodborne and Sekiro fast paced bosses, but I was also fast so it felt fair. Not the same in Elden Ring. They also hit incredibly hard, some even able to 1 shot you which I never appreciate. They were relentless with really long combos that they'd sometimes follow up with another combo so you are constantly dodge rolling away and never on the offensive. Not nearly as engaging IMO. Some could teleport right on top of you or hit you from across the arena with some magic, so you couldn't heal. Some would teleport away from you, so you couldn't get any hits in and then have to run across the arena. Some of this might just be bad design, but I think a lot of it comes from how big the game is. They don't want it be easy for anybody, so if you use magic and summons, they have to ratchet up the difficulty. But if you're a melee build who doesn't want to use summons, it makes it incredibly difficult. A couple of times, it was like "No way, I have to use summons." Then the summons basically trivialized the boss. There's also the problem of timing. You could spend so much time exploring, getting runes, and leveling up. You could be level 100 and then run across a boss they intended you to fight at level 50. Vice-versa is also true. Am I underlevled? Or do I just need to 'git gud'? It's one of the reasons I liked Sekiro so much. You could only get so strong at certain points in the game. So if a boss is kicking your ass, you know you just need to get better. For an open world game like this, it's a balancing act that frankly might be impossible. Either way, I don't think Elden Ring nailed it.
The other big criticism I know has been talked about a lot and that's recycled content. It's the same trap as other open world games. Well, we have this massive world, we have to populate it with stuff. They came up with an incredible amount of enemies IMO. I understand how difficult it must be to constantly be coming up with new enemies, but then maybe the world is just too big? As much as I liked exploring and going through the dungeons initially, it also got old after awhile because they weren't all that different even as you moved into new areas. It especially got old when most of the rewards for completing them aren't something that fits your build anyway.
The last more minor criticism I have is something that I've always thought about FromSoft games, but made even worse with the open world stuff is the amount of items. On top of the usual stuff from FromSoft, I must have picked up 1,000's of items to use for crafting and I think I only crafted some healing boluses and some grease for Malenia. I only used a few of the summons, Ashes of War, weapons, and basically zero of the magic stuff. I also never really did the whole Great Rune/rune arc thing.
There's a bunch of other nitpicky stuff, but overall, I enjoyed the game quite a bit. I just prefer smaller, more focused games. I understand something like Sekiro might not be for everybody, but the people that it does land with, I think it executes it much better than Elden Ring. I think Elden Ring did a great job of convincing people to give FromSoft a chance. Hopefully they found some new fans, but hopefully the next game is a little more focused.
And then there were points, post inflection, where exposition dump city, Batman! It was wild how much it changed. 
