You Don't Have The Right, O You Don't Have The Right, all the more You Don't Have The Right, O You Don't Have The Right

I'm not apologising for whatever formatting that title breaks.

Elden Ring released in 2022 to never-before seen levels of hype. Open world! George R.R. Martin is involved in the writing! There'll be a poison swamp somewhere! The announcement trailer set a strong bar for the story to follow, and dropped some fascinating aspects of the story that only became clear after playing the game fully. Big fan of that approach.

My first few hours in this game were mesmerising. Ultimate freedom, you could hop on your horse and charge in whatever direction you wanted. With the open-world design, this wasn't even excessively punishing, as the game gradually ramped up the challenge in a way that felt natural and encouraging. You were free to yeet yourself 100km across the map to blast through the game, but why? Take your time and take in the sights, and the locals. There's plenty of them!

There's no shortage of anything. Hundreds of weapons, armour sets, areas to explore, bosses that land in the middle of a clearing with little warning apart from clever environmental hints. In its early stages, Elden Ring felt limitless. Plus, with some revamped mechanics, it felt like a genuine joy to explore and learn from scratch. Most old tricks didn't work any more, and adaptation to the Lands Between was key. You didn't know what to expect any more, and that was wonderful.

At the end of the first major open area, the game clamps around you, pushing you through a Legacy Dungeon, a stunning set piece that could have been a game all by itself. Stormveil Castle is the first major challenge for new players, and it tests your ability to adapt to unfamiliar conditions, amusing challenges^[1], and a boss that feels suitably tricky and satisfying. At this point, I felt on top of the world in a way rarely felt since Dark Souls 1.

The best moment of Elden Ring also peaks soon after this. Spotting an innocuous looking magical elevator hidden in the forests, following it deep into the bedrock, and finding another humongous stunning area was an absolute masterclass in surpassing expectations. Just when you thought you had a grasp on the game, it expands in a wonderful and eerie way.

The bar has now been set supremely high. I've spent something like 15 hours in Limgrave and have combed the hell out of it. Now I can see Liurnia of the Lakes up north, and Fucking Caelid over to the east. How many times am I going to keep doing this?

The game carries on, carefree. It drops its lore slowly, spread over increasingly wide areas that welcomes you with open arms. I take on my second Legacy Dungeon - Raya Lucaria Academy - and the enjoyment is back in near-full force. The bosses are a little bit odder here, but it's still a fun experience. Again, after victory, my character feels a bit fuller, a bit closer to the full picture. I saunter into more hostile areas, get pushed back, but know that they can be beaten later. All still good.

Many hours later, mostly spent figuring out that the massive elevator to the seeming endgame is looking for two specific key items hidden away who fucking knows where, you arrive at the outskirts of Leyndell. Visually, thematically, everything has been leading here. The hype builds yet again. Soon after, the cracks begin to show.

Before entering Leyndell, there is the Altus Plateau. Once again stretched over a massive area, you begin to spot that you've seen these bosses before. Mostly optional, but the urge to comb through the game still persists. You have no idea which way is the correct way, or where a valuable or necessary item is, so you feel the need to beat that one dude again. And again. And again. After all that, you push through, and you're not actually at Leyndell yet. You're now in Capital Outskirts, which is its own big area. Yippee.

There are also dungeons, as distinct from Legacy Dungeons, which are story and mechanical centrepoints. Regular dungeons follow a conceringly similar gameplay loop, traversing through caverns and catacombs that all begin to meld together and look the same. After the first few, you begin to realise that the rewards for these areas are stretched thin to the point of absurdity. There are 61 regular dungeons in the game. Most of them only contain (at most) one useful item, mostly after the main boss of the area. But the bosses are increasingly all the same. You fight Erdtree Burial Watchdog SEVEN different times. This was a huge contributor to my growing exhaustion.

But! You push through it all, and arrive in Leyndell! You fight through another dense, difficult area, fighting the increasing urge to run straight through and just get on with it. You have a visually engrossing, loud fight with a Very Important Dude - three separate ones, actually. And for being this late in the game, you think, the reward must be enormous. What you actually receive is: the Erdtree tells you to fuck off. Go to this brand new area and figure shit out. It's an overwhelming let-down.

After a bit more time of figuring out where to go, you're now in Mountaintop of the Giants. Big final reveal, right? No. It's an endless snowfield, with dungeons that achieve little, and setpieces that only serve to annoy you. After another 5-10 hours spend trudging through this, abandoning the idea that 100%-ing these areas is a good idea, you take on another lore-relevant gigantic imposing boss, with a diminishing idea of what the hell the point of this is, you behold the sight of a previous area burning to the ground. It's a new area now. Go explore it :)

At this point, the retrospective opinion of the experience turns sour. What was the point of the entire Weeping Peninsula area? Did Dragonbarrow only exist for one dude at the very end? All those hundreds of items I picked up in the wild - why are 99% of them never used?

The tone of the game relentlessly ramps higher all the time. The boss doing its infinitely flipping bullshit, before unleashing a 27-hit combo that you're supposed to dodge perfectly somehow, all to the chorus of loud orchestral crashing, all melds into one. Did the previous sentence describe Margit the Fell Omen, Godrick the Grafted, Red Wolf of Radagon, Starscourge Radahn, Lichdragon Fortissax, Ancient Dragon Lansseax, God Devouring Serpent, Rykard Lord of Blasphemy, Morgott the Omen King, Fire Giant, Mohg Lord of Blood, Malenia Goddess of Rot, Godskin Apostles, Malekith the Black Blade, Godfrey First Elden Lord, Hoarah Loux Warrior, or Radagon of the Golden Order? I'll wait.

I still recall the exhaustion that came after beating the final boss. I was totally checked out on what the concept of a final boss even looked like at this point. Just keep killing Big Important Dudes until I can get the ambiguously-translated ending with my wifey of choice. Same as everyone else's wifey, but never mind that.

Buried in all this rambling, the story is enjoyable! The charaters are a mixed bag, but they're memorable! Areas like Siofra River, or the evolution of the Roundtable Hold, had me gripped! The game would have contained all its wonder, compressed into half its size, and would not have burned me out to this degree.

The DLC had all the choice to amend these issues, and focus it into the beautiful experience it was always capable of being. Instead, it doubled down. Massive, ultimately pointless areas. Bosses that ramp the volume up to 11 and spam those attacks like you would not believe. The biggest disaster was Scadutree Fragments. Affecting only the DLC, these items raise your offensive and defensive capabilities, and are absolutely necessary to traverse and climb your way through these areas. THERE'S FIFTY OF THEM. WHY.

I still enjoyed the story and the characters, who were particularly strong in this DLC. The bones of the game always remain good. However, the final boss was nothing short of an absolute disgrace to the series.

Radahn, Consort of Miquella is everything wrong with modern FromSoft boss design. Spinny flippy leaps and attacks that make no sense. The soundtrack blasting your ears to bits. His attacks result in blasts of light from the sky, which are so bright you cannot see a single thing, while he charges his 0.1 second 1000+ damage attack. Every cheap tactic employed to make the experience as miserable as possible. And to top things off, this unforgiveable atrocity:

This killed my enthusiasm for the game stone dead. There was nothing waiting for me after this.

I truly hope FromSoft have had enough of this. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 were truly creative, flawed, pieces of work. Everything since then has been iteratively built on the same engine, same design methodology, same trains of thought. They have not forgotten how to make good games from start to finish, but they feel misguided, pulled by the shouts of the masses that ask for the same old tricks, ramped up yet another notch. Give us that spark again.