QS stands for “Quickshot”, a series of short form review/preview/opinion articles.
(It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Unfortunately, I had some health issues that worsened, necessitating a visit to the hospital for surgery. I’ve mostly recovered back to normal by now, but that’s why I’ve missed the past two weeks of articles. Hopefully, moving forward, things will get back on track. I’d also like to do some longer articles coming up here, but for now, have another short Quickshot finishing off my thoughts on Elden Ring.)
So, I finally finished Elden Ring…and I have to admit that a few of the sentiments I expressed in my earlier Quickshot article have not held up under longer scrutiny. It’s not entirely unexpected, knowing what I know about open world games, but it is definitely a little disappointing.
See, open world games have it rough. There’s a crazy amount of appeal behind the idea of constructing a massive sweeping landscape littered with endless possibilities and nooks and crannies to hide secrets in. These are 100 hour endeavors, and when a player is only 20 hours in, it can seem like the sky is the limit. I think there’s a general understanding amongst gamers that the opening, blissfully naïve experience of a fresh open world game is the best part.
Unfortunately, many, many, MANY open world games start going downhill once the first act is over. The longer you play, the longer the cracks in the framework begin to show. A huge amount of open world games suffer from this plight. Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, basically any Far Cry game. There’s only so many times you can repeat the same actions over and over before it grows old. The vast world has nothing new left to show you, and the rewards that you stumble upon have no more value to give.
There are a few extremely special open world games that buck this trend, and they are standout shining stars of their console generations. Xenoblade Chronicles X is consistently a fresh and exciting experience because of the sheer depth of its customizability and combat mechanics, alongside unparalleled exploration options (no fall damage, giant robot vehicles, flying). The Witcher 3, might theoretically get old, but the lengthy and fully voice-acted side quests and hunting contracts do an amazing job immersing you into the world. The writing is top notch.
Elden Ring is NOT one of those special open world games. Obviously, the game is still super fun, as the foundations (rooted in Dark Souls-esque mechanics) are very solid. The world is intricate and detailed, the lore is fairly intriguing, and the soundtrack is great. Just like all open world games before it, Elden Ring‘s first half is a joy, a such a fresh and addicting experience. I could hardly put the game down for the first 50 or so hours.
And then the novelty wears off, and the enthusiasm begins to wane. A small grievance or two blows up into a whole laundry list of problems. You begin to notice the copy-pasted churches, ruins, towers, caves, and catacombs, all of which use the exact same layout and enemies. Enemies and bosses begin stringing together uninterruptable combos and one-shot moves. Chests yield pathetically useless loot, discouraging thorough exploration. The last three main areas of the story, and the final optional zone, have ZERO new enemies that can’t just be found elsewhere in the world.
Did you know that Elden Ring has over 100 bosses? Did you also know that, out of those 100 bosses, only NINE are wholly unique encounters only fought once? Every other boss in the entire game is copied and reused at least once. Some bosses are fought over 10 different times across the world. Frankly, I find this to be borderline inexcusable. Every repeated encounter cheapens the impact and enjoyment of that first fight, and every time I entered a boss room and found myself staring down a cloned boss (or even worse, two separate bosses lazily put together), my love for the game died just that little bit more.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Melania (The Blade of Miquella). She’s gained a reputation in these past few months as one of the hardest bosses ever created. Is she as bad as that? No, not in my opinion. Is she a bad boss, though? Yeah, she is, and its extra disappointing because there is the blueprint of an excellent duel underneath the mistakes and missteps in her design.
Every issue with Melania revolves around the same core: Waterfowl Dance. That’s the name of Melania’s super move that can kill your character in the blink of an eye. She can use this move whenever she wants to, without any sort of pattern, and you only get a second to react before it hits. To make matters worse, the number of surefire ways to dodge the move can be counted on just one hand, and require specific character builds. You can try to run, but with no way to know when she’ll next use the move, the fight becomes a prolonged exercise in tedium.
I died 9 times to Melania, beating her on my tenth attempt. Though I consider myself skilled at Elden Ring and other Dark Souls games, I can’t even begin to take credit for the win. In the 9 attempts where I died, I was defeated by Waterfowl Dance each time. What happened on my winning attempt? Melania never used that move. If this isn’t prove of how extremely problematic that single attack is, I don’t know what will. No fight should ever be so dependent on an entirely luck-based attack.
(And this is to say nothing of that fact that Melania’s other moves are so quick and deadly that certain playstyles themselves, most notably slow and heavy builds, are outright invalidated. Practically every boss in the back half of the game is problematic to some degree.)
All of this is then on top of a game that released in a distractingly unpolished, buggy, and glitchy state. Though updates have tried to alleviate this, they haven’t fixed everything, and they can’t change the past. You and enemies could clip through the ground, or get stuck floating in mid-air while riding your horse. Some bosses would freeze up and stop functioning, their animations shutting down. Some questlines in their entirety were incompletable because of faulty programming. It was (and sometimes still is) madness.
Is Elden Ring a bad game? No, it isn’t. It’s actually still pretty incredible what they’ve accomplished here. Open world games, even at their worst, are still pretty amazing. Open world games tend to also be the most disappointing types of games when you play them for the long haul, and Elden Ring is no different.
7.5/10
The Contrarian Corner 