Gaming Reference & Reviews

Elden Ring is a masterpiece with flaws

FromSoftware & Bandai Namco have proven yet again that they have some of the strongest grasp on quality game design in the industry, even when tackling an entirely different style of world. With an all star library including universally acclaimed titles such as Dark Souls, Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne & Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring somehow finds a way to inject an all new open world approach to the formula but also retain the same standard of quality as all their previous works.

For those who have already delved into the rabbit hole of the beloved Souls franchise &/or its offshoot titles, Elden Ring already has a pristine place in their libraries. But if individuals have had negative experiences with FromSoftware games before then Elden Ring will do very little to change their minds. FromSoftware have stuck to their guns & made Elden Ring exactly according to their vision, unmoving in the face of complaints & demands for things like an easy mode. If you aren’t looking for a game that will challenge you, then Elden Ring will not be the game for you.

Compared to previous entries in the FromSoftware catalogue, Elden Ring offers a drastically larger experience in almost every way. The Lands Between are absolutely gigantic with multiple radically different & unique regions, the build variety is immense with numerous weapons, armor, spells & more, & the sheer spectacle of the game’s long anticipated boss fights blows most previous titles out of the water. Players looking to sink their teeth into a deep, rich experience will find Elden Ring has plenty of meat on its bones, offering dozens, if not hundreds of hours of content depending on how thoroughly one wishes to explore the game’s world. Replay value is high thanks to the expansive character build variety as well as the Lands Between’s incredible depth of locations & landmarks, so much so that it’s near guaranteed you didn’t see everything your first playthrough unless you really went out of your way. Despite the increase in scale, Elden Ring somehow manages to avoid most drops in quality, as the game is still able to capture feeling fans love from FromSoftware, even appealing to the fans who prefer the tight, linear level design of Dark Souls & Bloodborne in the form of legacy dungeons.

While graphically Elden Ring may be a step behind the modern console generation, the artstyle & majesty of the game’s world & landmarks more than make up for the slight lack of polish. More notably however, Elden Ring launched with some severe performance issues like poor framerates & crashing problems even on high end PCs, which is an unfortunately common problem due to FromSoftware’s sometimes lacking technical skills, especially in the optimization department.

Elden Ring gets many, many things right. But even a game of this pedigree can’t quite do it all without any missteps. Due to the revolutionary scope of Elden Ring’s world, many of the game’s boss fights are recycled multiple times with very slight variation, & the standard of quality has reached uncomfortably close to Dark Souls 2 territory, especially in the game’s dungeons which are often host to fights with multiple opponents that were very clearly not designed to fight together, resulting in unfairly punishing gank fights which can easily lead to frustration with the game. Even the primarily important demigod bosses of the game aren’t all safe from problems, as many can now cancel out of the end of attack animations to immediately hit you with another when you move in to counter or sometimes just leap halfway across the arena to deny you a punish anyways. The main problem is that you can never really see this coming since they don’t choose to do this all the time, leaving you guessing when you can get some safe damage in or take another hit to the mouth. This pantheon of bosses may not reach the same consistent level of quality as Dark Souls 3’s roster, but they will still offer you spectacle & challenge in true FromSoftware fashion. Elden Ring has also been wrought with balance issues in both single player & online PvP combat, as many cheesy strategies were discovered that could break the game through many of Elden Ring’s initial patches. While many have since been removed, there are still plenty of methods players can use to trivialize a boss fight or ruin somebody else’s multiplayer experience.

Despite these apparent flaws, Elden Ring has still managed to reach heights of both sales & critical reception never before seen by any of FromSoftware’s other titles because what the game brings to fans is simply to good to be brought down by the flaws here & there. FromSoftware takes all the best elements from Dark Souls, Bloodborne & Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice & combines them into what truly feels like the culmination of two decades of honing their craft, resulting in an absolute triumph for the company & their design philosophy. The game sits at a hefty AAA price point of $80 CAD, but for anyone already planning to pick it up it will be well worth the investment.

Since assigning a numerical value to art seems somewhat pointless to me, instead included below is a handy list of pros & cons to help you come to your own conclusion

Pros	Cons
The best open world in a video game to date	Poor raw graphical presentation
A true refinement of the Souls formula	Too many recycled/poorly made boss fights
Boundless hours of content	Many game breaking bugs
High replay value	Poorly optimized for PC especially
Jaw-dropping locales & aesthetic	Sidequests that can feel impossible to follow without a guide