I Finally Beat Elden Ring

I finally did it. I finally beat Elden Ring. Or at least got one of the six endings the game has to offer. It took over 100 hours and plenty of deaths. In the end though, I'm so happy that I completed this endeavor. While I was very excited in the first 30 hours of experiencing the game, I think I have different thoughts after completing the game. 

One thing that has remained constant is how impressed I was at how large this game truly is. Each area kept my jaw dropped with how big each area was. Stumbling across vast open vistas with verticality in each area never got old. Underground dungeons, hidden passageways,  and sneaky shortcuts strewn about everywhere to encouraged exploration. So many "legacy" dungeons very expertly crafted (legacy being basically larger, story-driven, dungeons). And while it certainly was a positive, the grand scale of Elden Ring really got tiring. By the end of the game, I was exhausted. 

Don't get me wrong, each area was fun to explore, but there came a time where things started to get repetitive. Boss fights and enemies started to get less unique and more by the numbers. The more I explored, the more the game got easier. Which was okay, but it got boring relatively quickly. For something like Dark Souls, the challenge really helps reinforce the atmosphere. When the game got easy, it lost some of that charm. Thankfully, I was banging my head against the way at the very end of the game when FromSoftware  gave me the middle finger again. I'm serious, the last few hours of this game really got me a bit aggravated. After finishing the first few areas, I was able to take down each new boss with relative ease. Nothing was hard, even the story bosses. But the minute I got to the end game, they decided to give each boss an enormous health bar and punished me for trying to learn boss patterns. Certain bosses will add extra moves to their combo if I tried to hit them after I thought the combo ended. It's almost like the lulled me into a false sense of security only to pull the rug out from under me. This didn't feel fair which is a little unsettling for a Dark Souls  game. 

Also I missed a lot of stuff.  

There were plenty of villages, characters, weapons, and bosses I missed during this playthrough. There's literally discussions of characters on Reddit I don't even know the names of. Heck, during my playthrough, I found out about items solely through the patch notes from updates. I ended up getting frustrated talking about this game with friends because I kept finding out about new things I never knew existed. It was fine for the first 30 hours (and pretty impressive) of the game, but figuring out I missed out on a cool weapon 90 hours into the game was not very fun. 

I think around the 80 hour mark is when I got a bit upset with the recycling of enemies and bosses. FromSoftware really used the mentality of quantity over quality in this game and to a small detriment at that. So many different dungeons that had repeat bosses; "hey, you fought one of these before...why not two?"... "what if this boss had more health and...uh a couple of dogs!?" None of these fights were inspired and some of the loot wasn't that great to boot either. Most of them were tucked away in optional dungeons, so they weren't too bad. But some fights were actually part of the story which was weird and disappointing.

I also started to realize how much I missed a cohesive story. I'm always the one to champion how coll it is for lore and story elements peppered in the Dark Souls series for the player to find, just like  items, consumables and weapons. Even some of the items and weapons will have flavor text to help fill in some lore details. But the games in the Dark Souls series are less than half the size of Elden Ring and only require 40-50 hours to beat. Elden Ring took me over twice that long. And as much as I still like the way this game doesn't handhold, not having good story beats to reward for besting challenging boss fights really grinded my gears. There was definitely a lack of  cutscenes in this game and it was a shame. I think more could have been done to flesh out story elements after beating each story boss, but instead I got a  long exposition from one man who has as many animation frames as old school Mickey Mouse cartoons.  

I might be nitpicking here. Can't blame a game that can keep dropping visually appealing areas for 100 hours. And there were definitely several awesome moments. One of them being an event that changed some of the landscape and advances several side quests. I won't get into spoilers but the fact that this event added another area to explore was mind-blowing (at the time). There is another point that happens way later in the game that actually made me groan and think "will have to explore more areas now?"

Altering the landscape of an open world game is always a cool feat in game design because it creates a sense evolution in the game. The world isn't static and the main character has an impact on said world. But when the late game event happened, I really wondered if I had to comb through the enormous Lands of In-Between to see if there were new areas to explore or bosses to fight. Thankfully, I didn't spend much time after this and proceeded to finish my current playthrough. 

I still highly recommend this game, but I don't think it has the same replay-ability as other games from the series. I didn't get into it as much but if you can deal with the repetitiveness in the late game, you'll be rewarded with some awesome moments of discovery. If you have a memory of a goldfish like me, you'll most likely need to either watch a lore video or wiki to understand what is going on. But all in all I hope FromSoftware makes a slightly smaller world next time but with the same density, or maybe do something fresh like Sekiro or Bloodborne.