Every game needs to be open world, it's just the way it is, and it doesn't matter how little substance that open world can have or how much it directly contradicts the point of a game. If you build it "they" will come, and give you fat shekels in the process. Time and time again you'll see franchises you played turn into open world for no reason other than open world games just sell more, and it happened again here...yay.

Some background information/ setting things up. No, prior games from Fromsoft were not open world...or at least not in the same scope as something like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim. Fromsoft games, to varying degrees of effort and success, were always a bunch of linear paths somewhat connected (well talk about this design choice a bit more in depth later).

And now my credibility, I'll admit I do not have all the achievements yet and I haven't done anywhere near the same amount of cheek clapping in pvp as any other Fromsoft work. This is because I have near no interest in doing so and still haven't worked up the will power to do NG+ a few times/ hunt down the more obscure loot, mea culpa. I have beat the game once though and feel like I've done a reasonable amount of the side content, did it rather easily too for the most part, so eyyyy I kinda know what's going on ere.

And what's going on ere is that people straight up lie when they say this game is a 10/10 game and the culmination of everything Fromsoft lol

Elden Ring is a game of extreme difficulties, as in despite Fromsoft's supposed stand against different difficulty settings Elden ring has a baby's first souls game mode and total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SLASO run mode, and this comes from a couple of things.

Firstly, summons. Okay so everyone knows if you summon a player, or sometimes even a overturned NPC, to help with a boss you're just bad at the game and you didn't actually beat the boss. From has tried to balance this by increasing boss health when you have a summon but that did a whole lot of nothing for anyone remotely competent because bosses in Dark Souls games simply do not know how to handle more than one opponent. You can double the health bar, triple it even, if you want but it doesn't change the fact that a boss that will entirely ignore you half the time and give you every opportunity to heal and get some easy licks in will be less than half the challenge of a boss who is on top of you every second. Let's give them props for at least trying to balance it tho...then spirit ashes came along and any notion of balance for splitting aggro was thrown out the window. For a minuscule cost of either FP or Health you get access to a tanky blob (or multiple blobs) to soak up boss aggro as you pound away with out worry, straight up only pros no cons really.

By itself this would be alright, because hey if you're good at the game you can just forget that summons and spirit ashes exist like I did, but the issue is the nagging feeling that the game was made with these spirit ashes in mind, not to mention the fact that Miyazaki has said they reduced the hoops to do multiplayer (a total lie) in the hopes that people would be more welcoming to summoning help. Almost every boss due to the sheer stamina they seem to have, input reads, and the absolutely bonker damage they do in one hit points to the idea that you're almost playing the game wrong for not using summons, but if you do the boss it an absolute cakewalk. A boss in this game seldom feels satisfying to fight because of these two extremes in difficulty.

Next, balancing of builds (this also bleeds over to how bleeeeegh pvp is now). Somebody at Fromsoft genuinely thought a consumable that gave you infinite FP for a period of time would be a good idea that wouldn't see any abuse...string that peabody up by his toes. My knowledge of just how busted things like sorceries. weapon arts, and bleed/ frostbite buildup is entirely secondhand because I'm a giga chad who doesn't rely on such crutches but speedrunners or any doofus with a youtube guide will quickly blaze through this game with no effort what so ever because Fromsoft felt bad for Miracle users in DS3 or something, idk.

Now onto the giga chad approach of leveling nothing but strength, vigor, and endurance (and maybe a couple points to the other stats to make them even numbers because odd numbers are ikcy) you'll find this game was probably not made with chads in mind. This was somewhat improved with a patch that came in at the very end of my run but strength weapons seem entirely inferior to damage output of other weapons with the added benefit of having way more recovery time after hits. Did I have a harder time than people who didn't do a strength build with out using any summons? Probably, but only a marginal amount because holy hell am I good at these games but my heart does go out to the fellow strength users who aren't as amazing at these games as me : (

The bane of almost every open world game, having most of the map actually be worth exploring and fun to do so. It's no secret that Elden ring is BIIIIIIIIIIIG but outside of the pretty good legacy dungeons (aka, the thing that most resembles older From games) the amount of good content is not so BIIIIIIIIIIG. I know PC gamers will never have access to Bloodborne but for some background info that game also had a slew of side content in the form of chalice dungeons and the same exact complaints I have with those are here (for the most part, somehow Elden Ring has done an even worse job at it). Chalice dungeons were pretty much impossible to differentiate from each other and the boss was either a copy paste from the base game, a generic enemy, or a boss but times two most of the time (sound familiar?). Now bloodborne had the decency to have some entirely unique boss fights in the chalice dungeon every once in a while or a challenge tied to it to shake things up, Elden Ring does not.

You'll find yourself clearing a mine that looks the exact same, finding some underground room in some ruins, and fighting the same Aslyum demon wannabe enemy at a big tree over and over in this game. Elden Ring has a distinct feeling of being a Dark Souls game copy and pasted a few times to justify an open world, which begs the question...why go open world if you can't fill the open world with original content?

Tell you what I thought was kinda neat was the big underground area with all the torches you had to light to fight a deer boss (which the fight itself was entirely lackluster, but hey that's just Elden Ring bosses for you) gave me some Farron keep flashbacks almost...minus the good boss fight . Then I did the same exact same thing over again to fight what is essentially the same boss...lit.

Also I get that it's a fetish for the man right next to feet but holy hell Miyazaki, how many times are you going to bring poison swamp to show and tell? My man really just couldn't help himself from making what seems to be a third of the game some form of poison swamp, the charm wears off quick...which can be said of Elden Ring as a whole tbh.

Fellas let's be real here, there is no game company that has a more obnoxious and rabid fanbase than Fromsoft. Most of the worst of this fanbase has been contained to Dark Souls 2 but due to the similarities between this game and DS2 (We'll get to that later) some of them have migrated to Elden ring and boy are they loud. The relatively recent release of Elden Ring has brought the cringe of these creatures to new heights, as they are in the "honeymoon" phase so to speak where new fromsoft content has them leaking pre at every given moment, but hopefully with time they'll come to realize just how bad this game really is...until then this what you'll typically see.

Denial- "No bro, trust me the bosses get better. Just wait till you get to Radahn he's so great and an absolute spectacle to fight...You beat him solo within 3 attempts? N-No, you didn't fight Radahn pre nerf/ buff that fixed the issues of nerf so it doesn't count. Whatever though, you'll get your ass kicked by dragonlord placenta (or whatever his name is)...you killed him and two attempts and the hardest part of his fight was finding it? W-Whatever, you're just mad cus bad". I swear this, and bouts of hushmouth time after time when I killed a boss who "totally would of turned things around" is an actual conversation I would have many times in discord with Elden Ring fanatics. They really didn't like how I didn't die 44 times to Melania lol.

Anger- "Bro ♥♥♥♥ you, you keep just pointing out the myriad of ways this game isn't perfect and falls short of previous works. Why can't you stop being so bitter you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, just let people enjoy things, ♥♥♥♥ you and your mother." Much like the DS2 fan, Elden Ring fans hate it when you display anything other than praise for this game. What probably should have been the first red flag for me came before I even owned the game. I was playing sea of thieves (I know, sue me) and played with a crew of randies (again, sue me). Shooting the ♥♥♥♥ as you do we eventually got to the topic of Elden Ring, where I voiced my excitement for the game but said I was waiting a couple of patches to iron it out as I had heard in typical Fromsoft fashion the game had a lackluster PC launch. This was meet with one crewmate going on a 10 minute unironic rant about how perfect the game is and he wouldn't let anyone besmirch it, and how I was an idiot for not immediately buying it and listening to reviews on the steam page poiting things out like optimization. Elden Ring fans, touch grass...I beg of you.

Bargaining- "Yeah a lot of the bosses kinda suck or are repeated, but you can just skip the side content if you don't like it." Despite that without a guide, which you're a baby if you use for your first playthru, it would be impossible to judge what side content is what type of defense is this even? Yeah all the side content sucks but you don't have to do it? My brother in the Christ, if content is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ don't put it in the game. We see this time and time again with open world games being big for the sake of being big with only specks of quality content in it yet the Elden Ring fan is desperate to give their beloved game a pass.

Depression- See any Elden Ring fan comment below.

Acceptance- Hopefully in time we'll start seeing this, not now though.

Any game that even vaguely reminds me of Dark Souls 2 has points deducted from it in my book (the only reason Dark Souls 3 isn't a perfect game is the occasional reminder that Dark Souls 2 exists) and elden ring took one very big thing from Dark Souls 2, wanna guess?

No silly goose, I'm not talking about powerstance (because most DS2 fans admit this is the only take away from DS2 and act like it excuses the rest of that abysmal game) I'm talking about the thing DS2 is best known for. Absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boss fights...with a couple exceptions.

So first thing first for a fist time the exact definition of "boss fight" needs to be defined, and this is what I'm going to roll with: If there's a titled health bar and you get a little text box after killing it (enemy, great enemy, god, etc. defeated) it's a boss. The Elden Ring fan at this point begins to panic because that means at least 90% of ~105 bosses in this game are inexcusable garbage but ♥♥♥♥ em, if From wants to treat them likes bosses then so will I. The same exact ♥♥♥♥ you came to hate in DS2 bosses are here, lazy gank fights, repeat fights, and fighting generic enemies as bosses (Elden ring especially loves this one).

Gank fights are always 2 or more enemies that may or may not have any sensible lore reason to work together being methheads and spamming 6 hit combos or doing input reading constantly in an attempt to eventually catch you with a move that will take half of your health bar, as opposed to something like having one of them being in a state of less aggro or having movesets that compliment each other (things that From have shown the ability to do in the past with things like O&S or the demon below/ in pain). Similar to this are "mob" bosses where there is one/ two "big" enemies with a bunch of smaller goons running around in cheap attempt to overwhelm you.

Repeat bosses are almost always a sign of laziness but something frustrating about some of these repeat bosses though is that it serves no purpose other than devaluing the boss, like it's no longer all that special and memorable when you fight it 9 times.Take Astel for example, a remembrance boss (something an elden ring fan would probably try to argue is a "real" boss). You fight this thing after going on some massive underground quest and fighting through a myriad of different locals and some earlier copy pasted bosses (dragonkin soldier/ gargoyles/ think there was a wyrm somewhere down there idk) and he serves as a critical part of a NPC questline...you also fight in him in some random cave in bum♥♥♥♥nowhereville. Other "real" bosses that repeat this trend is Godrick, elmer the briar, and some spell casting tree sentinel that I forgot the name of. Notice how I'm not bringing up Godfrey or Morgott here, that's because they're both admittedly repeat bosses done right (much like gundyr from DS3). It's okay to reuse a boss if you expand upon it with future fights, either with an expanded moveset or a completely different 2nd phase that may or may not involve WWE moves. It however does not show off great game design if the fights just take place in different arenas, perhaps with the boss copy and pasted as well.

Oh and spoilers, the final boss for this game sucks too. Boils down to a first phase that would have been serviceable if it had a bigger health bar and a second phase that exists solely to make fun of you for enjoying the first phase or something idk...at least Nashandra had the common courtesy to be her own boss and sit in one spot.

Shame that Fromsoft figured out absolutely impeccable boss fights in DS3 only to immediately forget it huh?

Get it? Saving graces? As in the few good things about this game...and grace sites being checkpoints? wheeew, I'm a riot, anyway if even Dark Souls 2 managed to do some things right it should be no surprise that Elden Ring has at least a few boons to it, because nothing can ever be worse than Dark Souls 2, and here they are.

Ranni. As if to taunt pc players for never having access to Bloodborne Fromsoft introduces a new doll waifu, you have to respect the hustle.

Rya. hehe, snek.

Rykard/ world devouring serpent. hehe, snek. On top of that though since Demon Souls Fromsoft has struggled to have a gimmick/spectacle boss that is also entertaining to fight, and they finally managed to achieve something decent. He'll probably never be anyone's favorite boss but when compared to the blunders of storm king or Yhorm he seems like a masterpiece.

Godfrey. He has given thee courtesy enough. A man who kills his stand to flex and autistically screech before powerslamming you has my respect, and is easily my fav boss of the game.

Stake of Marika. Not that I ever had to use them of course but having a mini checkpoint right outside the boss fog is an excellent QOL change, why this isn't there for every boss without a grace site right outside their room is beyond me though...again, not that it matters to me.

Lore/ Storytelling. People will lie to you and say they always had a concrete understanding of the lore of any Fromsoft game (probably after binging 10 hours of lore explanation videos from youtubers who rely on pointlessly convoluted story telling to make a living) but Elden Ring has lore that's maybe 10% more sensible than previous entries. The still like to do really big exposition dumps in a starting cut-scene with a bunch of cool sounding words that almost make a sensible sentence tho. " In the golden age everything was peachy until Dah elden ring shattered and tarnished went all booboo angry until destined death did the yada yada bing bong you have no maidens" or something idk, sounds cool tho.

Seeing the lazily copy and pasted Dark Souls 3 enemies and animations reignited my drive to play that superior game, I'm enjoying my current playthru : )

Yeah, probably just go ahead and stick to Dark souls 1 and 3.