Let’s head any suspicions relating to this being a hit-piece off in the past: Elden Ring Items is brilliant. The combat, always the jewel within the fetid crown of the FromSoft game, is precise, brutal, and fair. It’s a combat model which has you sitting and considering it long after you place down the controller.
It also works being an open-world game, the industry feat for that genre. The story starts with achingly beautiful illustrations and solemnly voiced nonsense about various dead kings. It is eked in a typically enigmatic fashion, hiding away in corners and revealing itself simply to people who worry about it. The boss battles are plenty of, memorable, and masterfully designed.
Still, 94 on Metacritic. Ninety-four. When the original Dark Souls didn't break 90 on any platform. Not the remaster. Could we possibly know this type of vast game and something that guards its mountain of secrets so closely, good enough to declare it the king of FromSofts so right after launch?
For example, I liked its zero-handholding policy to spread out world design around everyone else on release. Elden Ring felt just like a studio that had really paid attention to the player’s cumulative exhaustion from massive world maps filled with filler content and icons. We all desired to see much more of this sort of thing. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild playbook, in which the space can be used to assemble memorable encounters and also to give the player room to improvise and experiment. To muck about.
Worlds apart
What the fullness of your time has revealed in my experience, however, is the fact that I preferred Dark Souls’ cleverly disguised corridors. All three Souls games use a hub area system, whereby larger maps connect by linear passages that don’t feel linear whatsoever. When I play the maligned Dark Souls 3 I feel as though I’ve picked a random direction to go off into and located a whole game waiting there. I might just like easily have turned left rather than right 40 hours ago and met an entirely different string of landscapes and bosses – that’s the illusion.
In Elden Ring, you need to graft using the geography around the globe to get anywhere. It’s like being a freelance cartographer, albeit one that constantly needs to pull themselves from their map to battle off another gaggle of Giant Land Octopi, massive bears, or Golem Warriors. I like the thought of that more than the truth. Because the truth is alt-tabbing between your game along with a guide every 5 minutes.
Remember the Great Elevator of Dectus? That giant structure that gates the second 60% approximately of Elden Ring, as well as you to find two medallions from totally disparate locations to make use of it without communicating that to you whatsoever? Like, whatsoever? Yeah. Screw that fancy lift. I got stuck at that time of the game all night before admitting defeat and alt-tabbing to a guide, and I have simply no regrets about this because I’d not have found the above medallions otherwise.
The Dectus elevator makes Elden Ring feel just like a game caught between two design philosophies. It really wants to be enigmatic and reward those individuals who pore over every inventory item and NPC dialogue line. But it also really wants to convey this large number of space and freedom. And the result, during my case a minimum, was just a feeling of being daunted, confused, and frustrated.
You could reason that this is a failing on my small part, not the Elden Ring’s. You’d be right. But with a year’s hindsight and, in all probability, several playthroughs beneath your belt, does Elden Ring’s world provide the same flow and wonderment of the Souls game? I found it didn’t, even throughout the passages when I determined where to visit next on my small own. Since the options were so vast and also the critical path am vague, I started considering it like a game title – what am I leveled sufficiently for? Which encounters are optional and which are mandatory?
Bossed it
Elden Ring’s bosses, however, really are a different story. Margit has become legendary for his ruthless attack patterns, a dizzying variety of animations, and knack for punishing you for doing Souls moves. And he’s the very first mandatory boss. It’s a baptism of axe strikes, a boss fight that appears to know every move you’ve internalized in prior FromSoft titles and really wants to punish you for implementing them. You wouldn’t call the encounter enjoyable, not by any definition, but you need to admire the look behind it.
Nobody can perform visual design in boss encounters such as this, either. Renalla, Queen from the Full Moon, coos at you in a soothing motherly voice while her acolytes sit around in nightdresses, emitting gentle murmurs. All this is going on while she’s absolutely leathering you and also her students are hurling books everywhere. It’s not the inherent look of those enemies that’s unsettling, but the dissonance. It has the appearance and feel of the place you’d tool up before you take on a boss fight, maybe become familiar with a great narrative revelation or perhaps an ultimate ability within the confines of the friendly space. But no, this is actually the boss fight. It makes you seem like you’re the monster.
To reach Renalla, the (roughly) 12 other mandatory bosses, and also over 100 more optional bosses, you’re really carrying out a lot of alt-tabbing to guides. Somehow this felt less jarring within the more linear Souls games since the questions you had been googling were direct - ‘how to conquer x’ and ‘how to obtain the y armor’ - but here you’re asking ‘what to do after beating x’ or ‘Elden Ring mandatory bosses order’.
One year after its release, elden ring items begs the question: is game design once we actually need it, or did we appreciate the principles more than the truth? As it turns out, personally I’ve learned I like the confines to become a bit narrower.
