Elden Ring was my second FromSoftware game I have ever played, my first was Dark Souls which I had only played six months prior to the release of Elden Ring. I found myself really enjoying Elden Ring.

The open world of this game feels good to me, the areas are all quite different and distinct, which is important in a game offering an open world. The main bosses in these areas and the regular enemies all feel like they fit in their given area. A majority of the NPC's that you can find are interesting and I feel like their questlines (at the time of this review) are resolved in a satisfying way and have different endings depending on how you interact with these NPCs both heart-warming and heart-breaking. At the time of release NPCs were a little hard to find when they moved around the world as the map is very large, but with the most recent patch, if you've rested at the site of grace they’re near, you have a lot easier time finding them and completing NPC questlines as long as you’re exploring the map (or using the wiki lol). I really enjoyed your horse companion, Torrent. There are many bosses in this game and many of them you can find in the open world that are well designed for mounted combat but are also well designed to be fought on foot if you desire. The mounted combat felt really well designed, although I found it a little harder to fight on horse with larger weapons, so if you’re constantly swapping between normal, great, and colossal sized weapons like I was you might need to adjust to the timing of when you start an attack and when it hits as you switch between differently sized weapons, but otherwise feels good once you get the timing down. Some of the platforming designed for the horse can be little hit or miss, the movement of Torren doesn’t seem tight enough to me when you are trying to jump down a series of tombstones and try to position yourself correctly to make the next jump, or generally are just trying to do something that might require precise placement to navigate but I didn’t find many of these sections so it didn’t become an annoyance and most of the time I was always able to find another path. I would also like to mention that the Art Design of this game is a masterpiece, and you won’t have to wait long to see this.

However, I do feel like there are aspects of the open world that do take away from the experience. Some of the items you find in the open world might have you jumping rooftops, risking a fall that kills you, or placed behind a hard enemy feel like they did not warrant the effort you went through to get them; in these cases the item is some crafting agent that isn't just a standard white item marker, a lot of the time it will be a purplish item marker that makes you believe it’s going to be a cool weapon, talisman or piece of armor and in the end it’s another Nascent butterfly or some other crafting item that you might never use as the crafting system went largely unused for me, except for boluses, multiplayer items, and fowl-foots. Depending on your build you might get a lot more mileage out of these crafting regents, so I don’t want to condemn the crafting system just yet until I’ve completed a couple more playthroughs, but for my first playthrough I found myself rarely using it and left me disappointed with the amount of these crafting regents you will get as rewards for things you do out in the open world.

Now I want to touch on the bosses a bit. Most of the bosses are very well designed, fun, and incorporate mechanics that have been added to the game. I really enjoy that instead of rolling you can instead jump to dodge some attacks, which to me just added more things that I could do to plan an effective strategy for defeating bosses as some attacks may be easier to dodge by jumping and some are easier to dodge by rolling. Some bosses you can find are repeats which at least in the open world can be tedious because you might face a particular boss five or six times with little or no changes to their move set, only buffed damage. This even happens in the dungeons you can find but for those instances there is typically something added even if it’s just having another boss in the arena or smaller enemies and while not perfect, I didn't notice it as much in the dungeons but it happens in both and its mileage will vary depending on the given repeated boss whether it’s enjoyable. I also found that some of the boss arenas felt way too small for the massive boss you might be fighting and made the camera go crazy if you locked on, or just made it generally hard to see what’s going on as this massive boss attacks you in a small space while you not able to get far enough away to see what the boss is doing. In these scenarios I found myself just coming back when I was higher level and could just strong arm the boss to get it over with and get the item they drop, it doesn’t happen too much but it’s something I noticed and felt was worth mentioning.

I think some of the end/late game bosses could have used a bit more testing, in some cases the boss will be in a massive arena, you will run 5 miles to reach them, attack once or twice, then it will travel to the other side of the map and you will have to sprint back over to it and repeat this process until they’re dead. Maybe I just need to "Git Gud" but I find when bosses do this it’s a little tedious as typically they’re HP bar is massive and it takes so much time to kill it, and when you inevitable die while learning how to defeat them it just feels like you're spending so much time running from one side of the arena to the other just to get one or two hits and do little damage to said boss even when you are a very high level with maxed weapons, despite the boss having a pretty cool move set that I think would have been very enjoyable if they didn't move so far away or if the arena was a bit smaller, but I played a melee only character so you might find it more enjoyable if you’re playing a ranged build. Some late game bosses may have moves that are extremely hard to dodge and do massive damage or just kill you if you don’t dodge it perfectly, although with the bosses at this late in the game it didn’t happen often but I found these bosses to feel more like a chore than something you want to do for fun.

Lastly, I just wanted to mention a couple other things that I enjoyed. The pvp and pve is really fun, I typically don’t enjoy pvp in games, but I’ve had a lot of fun dueling invaders with friends. I also want to touch on the story, which I feel is pretty good although sometimes I felt a bit lost in understanding what was going on, but I had an easier time understanding it than Dark Souls and most of the time NPCs will give you enough information to have a good understanding of what your purpose is in the world, you might need to do a little more exploring/reading item descriptions to get a deeper understand of the lore, but I felt like I always had a motivation story wise to continue on from an immersion perspective. I really liked the different endings and I look forward to the best waifu debates that will come as more people play the game lol.

Overall, I would say that if you like the challenge that a typical Souls-Like game presents and enjoy open world games, you will love Elden Ring. The positive far out way the negatives to me. FromSoftware has been patching the game to tweak things and add unfinished NPC questlines. The Aesthetic of the game is nothing short of amazing, the gameplay is fun, and the exploration kept me playing. My first playthrough took me 100 hours to reach the end of the game. Elden Ring is a 10/10 for me, I feel like I haven’t experienced a game this fun or this good looking in a long time and approaches masterpiece territory, for me. Your mileage may vary, but for being a new player to FromSoftware games I am very happy with the experience I’ve had.