This game is being overrated because all the best content is frontloaded

and most people haven't even left the first two areas, the quality drops off heavily in the latter half of the game.
1/2
Everyone here seems to be showering the game with praise, calling it FromSoft's magnum opus, when they have yet to even experience the majority of the content. Having only the final boss left I'd honestly rate it a 7-8/10 at best. Before someone parades in with skill issue as an argument, I'm a big fan of all of FromSoft's other games having beaten them all numerous times and have beaten every boss in the game thus far up to the last one melee, no shield, no magic, no ashes and no summons. I'm no sl1 no hit challenge god, but I'm at least competent and experienced enough that you can be assured by criticisms are not a result of ineptitude.

To begin with, the exploration. The world is very expansive and pretty, yes, but ultimately it's also very shallow and empty. In the first areas all the caves, catacombs, evergaols, mines and world bosses are new and exciting, you've never seen them before and you can't wait to dive in. But what many of you don't realise is that the vast majority of locations in the later areas are dull copy pastes of these with little alteration, which may as well not even have been included because once you've seen one you've seen them all. In addition to this, something like 95% of these places or bosses you can find don't even offer a worthwhile reward, meaning you're not even getting something out of running through the reused assets. Except of course for the 5% of locations critical to quests and items that you can lock yourself out of getting by progressing elsewhere, which are typically not differentiated from the useless places in any meaningful way, so you can enjoy being punished for taking advantage of freedom in an open world.

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2/2
Now, onto the enemies. Past a certain point in the game quite literally any non-fodder mob has extended combos and the ability to kill you within a couple seconds if you slip up a roll, if you think I'm exaggerating I encourage you to face the dual wielding Banished Knights that can be found in Castle Sol among other places. It gets to a point where anything beneath 40 vigour is a death sentence, and even with 60 vigour and heavy armour you can still very easily be wombo combo'd from full health to death for daring to mess up a couple of rolls. Tons of enemies now also have hard hitting ranged magic which is also often homing, even when it seemingly doesn't make sense for that type of enemy, because how dare you wish to fight without having to spend half your time sprinting. And to top it all off, just about everywhere later on has gotcha type enemy placement, where the game is simply constantly trying to catch you out with people waiting around corners to gank you, stood on roofs with bows or forcing you to fight in an area where you'll suffer status effects. In moderation this is fine, but when it’s every encounter it simply begins to grate on you.

This is true about the rest of the souls games

3/2
Since the enemies have been discussed, may as well also discuss the bosses. Concerning the minor bosses, in the first area they're unique, by the last area they've been fought three to five times and the novelty has worn off. Occasionally they'll just throw in two of them once, but this just makes things tedious as opposed to interesting, because unlike Ornstein and Smough they're not designed to be fought together and will just walk side by side waiting to stunlock you to death, leaving you to have to engage in a prolonged hit and run fight if you want to safely beat the boss without the risk of being instantly killed for a single mistake. Anyone that complains about Dark Souls 2 padding itself out with pointless bosses has no right to give Elden Ring a pass on this, yes the world is open but they could've made it smaller as opposed to just having you fight a couple handful of minibosses over and over again.

Now, onto the proper bosses, the ones during the story, optional quest lines or in legacy dungeons. It's plain to see that the bosses in this game are a cut above prior games in terms of difficulty even from the very beginning, Margit is the very first story boss and he's certainly no slouch. He has high mobility, many different attacks and many different ways to combo them, varying delays to catch the player off guard, quick ranged attacks to interrupt the player and also magic. This makes him sound stronger than he is, but he is actually very doable and no more difficult than a mid game boss from the previous games. But if the boss difficulty begins at the mid game boss difficulty of other games then where does it go from there? Because the bosses surely have to get harder and more complex as the game progresses right? I'll tell you where it goes, it goes to unfun slogs that were made to be tough for the sake of tough as their primary design goal.

4/2
From the Godskin Duo onwards there is not a single boss that could accurately be described as a fair or balanced fight, in previous games different bosses had different strengths and weaknesses and toolboxes, now every boss just has every tool available. They all have incredibly long combos, they all have multiple aoe attacks with them often just being tacked onto other moves because why not, and then many of those aoe attacks then have a secondary aoe after effect because dodging once wasn't enough, they're all incredibly mobile being able to easily run circles around the player, they all hit like trucks and will make you regret having anything short of 40 or possibly even 60 vigour, they all have ranged attacks in case you try to back up and close range flurries or aoes in case you try to stay close, and worst of all, they all input read incredibly heavily to the point of it being obvious even on first attempts. Between all of the aforementioned grievances it gets to a point where the boss fights are simply running around for 10-15s for a single opening to get a couple hits in, and yes playing defensively is part of the series, but when the gaps between safe windows are this long it's not even a fight anymore it's a Devil May Cry style beatdown where you're the pleb getting smacked around by the protagonist.

5/2
ow of course, many of these boss complaints could be answered by just use ashes since bosses are designed with them in mind, but if the bosses are designed to not be reasonably beatable without having an entire extra ally spend half the time tanking hits while you hit the boss in the back, does that not suggest the boss is a little overtuned and probably not that fun to fight? And even if you think the line into unfair hasn’t been crossed yet, consider that the DLCs always have the hardest fights, which means there will be fights harder than getting taken 100 to 0 by Commander Niall and his gank squad goons, getting ganked by respawning the Godskin Duo, getting flurried by Malenia which even if you survive leaves her with a quarter of regained health, having to have a specific physick to use against Mohg or having to do the fight with three crimson flasks forfeited or getting killed by an armada of homing projectiles fired by the Elden Beast non-stop when you can’t even see the whole thing on your screen. I think most would already consider these things relatively unfair, and yet things will be taken further.

The beginning isn't fun either
RPGs are dogshit

6/2
The final thing I want to touch on is the quest design, the typical Dark Souls style quest design works just fine in a non-open world, where there's only so many directions you can go and so you're bound to find the place eventually. But in an open world like Elden Ring it leads to scenarios where there is no way someone could reasonably find where to continue the quest, particularly since NPCs typically give vague and unhelpful directions. Blaidd says he's headed to the forest, little did you know it's one halfway across the map back in the starting zone, and that once you get there he's trapped in an evergaol which there has never been up until this point a reason to return to if you've beaten one. The NPCs need to give you some more precise directions, because there are many quests in this game I doubt even 1% of the player base could organically get through all of without resorting to a guide. I'm not even asking for a quest journal, just the dialogue for directions including actual place names.

That’s not to say the game doesn’t do anything well, NPCs feel better written than the previous games, the worldbuilding of GRRM often shines through with extra little details in the lore, the open world is actually very engaging to explore up until the point of heavy repetition, the addition of jumping and stealth introduce more options for tackling things like camps of enemies, the ability to switch weapon arts across weapons makes for some very interesting combinations, but the games flaws simply should not be glossed over. I think this game is a fantastic first shot at an open world game, and that elements of it’s design will alter not only future FromSoft games but future open world games in general, but it quite simply is not FromSoft’s finest work. It feels severely lacking in playtesting and polish, even without going into the many bugs, one of which means I’ve had to tackle the endgame missing a talisman slot.

Elden Ring is probably the only game that does open world correctly.

Every other open world game you become overpowered 3 hours into the game.
Elden Ring is the only open world game I've actually seen that incentivizes players to explore for the sole sake of getting stronger since everything slaps your shit hardcore from start to finish.

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You too late to write the big autistic critical review.

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