Elden Ring is a masterpiece.

Elden Ring is a huge open world game set in the Lands Between. The game is divided into 5 main areas: The kingdom of Limgrave, the Caelid wilds, Liurnia of the Lakes, Altus Plateau and the Mountaintops of the Giants. There are many sub-areas as well as legacy dungeons, normal dungeons, caverns and many more secrets to explore. It’s truly one of those games where if you can see it in the distance you almost certainly can and will go there. Each area is also distinct from one another in multiple different ways ranging from theming to the terrain to the enemies found there to even the main color palettes shifting from area to area or from night to day. It's funny because the game doesn’t force you or tell you to explore these places and most of them aren’t even necessary to finish the game. You just want to explore them. Elden Ring has managed to build a world that players want to explore not because the game tells you to but because it’s fun. I immediately realized just how well the open world works with a Soulsborne game. It feels like you’re playing DS3 but with so much more freedom. It’s literally perfection.

There really isn’t a way to balance Elden Ring when you combine an open world with a Soulsborne game. Because of this the experience and difficulty will drastically differ from person to person. You as the player will have to balance the game yourself and one of the ways to do that is by exploring. It’s obvious that people who explore a lot will get rewarded with more runes. I am someone who likes to explore everything and when I killed the first main boss I realized just how overleveled I was. The hardest time I've had in the game was literally at the very start against the Tree Sentinel or Crucible Knight. I understand that you don’t want to balance the entire game around assuming you explore everything because then it would be extremely hard for those who explored less. I wanted to explore the whole land and still have a good challenge. To balance that I completely stopped opening runes and after a while the game started to get much harder. If you’re someone like me who likes to explore a lot and you want the game to be challenging I recommend you to not open the runes at all.

Elden Ring has an incredible mechanical depth. There are many different types of weapons, armors, spells, consumable items and stats that allow the player to customize nearly every element of their gameplay. You can be slow and tanky or quick but naked. Use a dagger that is light and apply strikes in rapid succession or wield a slow but deadly gigantic sword. Incantations can summon the powers of magical beings such as the breath of an ice dragon while sorceries can call down meteors or conjure magical projectiles. The variety of combat styles or enemy abilities is staggering as almost every special move you see in the world or on a given weapon can be bought or found. This means that you’re not bound to use a single weapon or shield with the ability that you like because you will find the ability independently and reapply it to an item that you prefer. This comes in addition to the reward of many boss weapons and armor sets which have unique skills that the boss once wielded against you.

This does nothing to mention your mount Torrent nor the special potion customizations nor the talismans nor the many summonable Spirit Ashes which can help you out against powerful foes. You can seriously make this game as easy as you want. The greatness of gameplay possibility is something that I can’t fully cover and likewise it’s something that you deserve to discover for yourself. I played through the game by dual wielding Straight Swords and later on combined them with some fire skills and I had a blast with it.

The side bosses are easily the worst part about Elden Ring. Practically none of the cavern/dungeon bosses are interesting. Of course I didn’t expect these locations to be filled with Nameless King level bosses but this is just extremely disappointing. The bosses are just extremely boring to fight against. In some of the fights you even have to take long breaks from offense to go completely on the defense while the boss gets a seizure and spams attacks for 10 seconds. I never felt this annoyed about bosses in DS3 but in Elden Ring I sometimes start getting mad right away because I know it’s just straight up bad design. I quite liked the side bosses I fought in Evergaols or in the open world but dungeon/cavern bosses are mostly just bad. It’s a real shame because everything else about this game is amazing especially the exploration.

One thing I liked about the side bosses though is how they become normal enemies as you progress in the game. Let’s take the Crucible Knight for instance. He is a very tough boss at the beginning but as you grow stronger and get further into the game he becomes a normal enemy. There are also several other bosses that you later on encounter as normal enemies and I do like that. Since the game is so huge there’s obviously gonna be a lot of reused bosses and for the most part it really isn’t that bad.

Now the main bosses. At the beginning I was feeling a bit disappointed and had mixed feelings about them but they got much better once I crossed the first third of the game. There are some bosses that I actually fell in love with but I’ll avoid talking about them bacause I don't want to spoil anything. In terms of gameplay and consistency I enjoyed the bosses in DS3 more but the designs, buildups, cutscenes and overall the atmosphere of bosses is what Elden Ring does perfectly. In conclusion I was more than happy with the main bosses once I finished the game.

One more thing I want to add here is that some of the bosses had ridiculously low health bar despite the fact that other enemies in the area were challenging. I noticed this not only in the side boss fights but even in some of the main bosses and I’m not quite sure why they balanced it this way. Fighting these bosses felt like a joke.

When I first started the game I guess I was just expecting “Elden Ring”. Instead I got DS4 but it’s more than I could’ve ever imagined it to be. It’s expansive, it’s adventurous and has a level of wonder to it that DS3 didn’t have. It carries the dark fantasy of Dark Souls but isn’t restrained by it. Just as often as the game is horrific, dark and hopeless, it’s intriguing, bright and beautiful. It takes the mistakes that DS3 made and refines it to a polished masterpiece. The magic system is a strict improvement, the tutorials are far more forgiving, the way to progress is less abstract, the map is fantastic, fast travel is better, there are more NPCs and side plots/quests to explore, there’s a mount that lets you traverse the world a lot faster and there’s even dedicated places for PVP. It’s arguably Dark Souls perfected and I can’t recommend that enough. The only real problem I have with Elden Ring are the side bosses but even then it's one of the best games I've played. If you’re into big fantasy worlds or you’re a fan of Soulsborne games at all just give it a shot. You won’t regret it.