Elden Ring Review | “Death is just a new beginning”

In a world where gamers are becoming more and more impatient as they get stuck on a level design and instantly open a YouTube tutorial. In a world where developers are making easier games just to satisfy the casuals, one company breaks all the rules and goes against all odds to create what we now know as “The souls-like genre”. The company with a cult-like fanbase that provides one solution to all your problems which is “Git Gud”, yes, we are talking about the infamous FromSoftware. The company that gamers love and casuals hate enough to leave a bad review because they could not Git Gud.

After releasing The Dark Souls Series, Demon’s Souls, and Bloodborne FromSoftware had created a name for themselves as the company that actually challenged the player. They became infamous for not going easy on the players. From getting no minimap to being ambushed at every corner a player runs off to, FromSoftware had made it clear that they were here to unleash hell on gamers, and hell they unleashed with their difficult bosses that blocked that path of each player and tested the patience of every player. This sudden shift in game design luckily intrigued a lot of players that loved being tested on their skills and were hungry for a new challenge. So, after four years of teasing the Souls fans, Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R.R.Martin finally released Elden Ring, THE GAME THAT BROKE THE INTERNET, and a few controllers in the process.

Elden Ring is considered FromSoftware’s successor to the Souls series. It is often compared to FromSoftware’s previous games but with new features that make it a unique experience in its own way. The Elden Ring is so much like Dark Souls at times that sometimes it feels a bit distracting. There is a woman named Melina who levels you up in exchange for runes. Enemies that you beat inside the game drop runes for you which you lose if you die in the game and fail to pick them up again after. Some monsters in the game feel the same as the ones in the other Souls games. Despite reusing some aspects of its previous games, Elden Ring added a new counter system similar to Bloodborne. You can now jump in the game and use special attacks like jump slash that can stagger an enemy for a critical hit. You have your trusty spirit steed named Torrent that helps you travel the world faster and has a double jump feature that lets you climb up to places where you previously could not. So, despite using some previous features, the Elden Ring world is so vast that it creates a new experience for the player every time they start a new build path.

Elden Ring has a vast amount of builds that you can try out this time which none of the previous FromSoftware games had. You do have the traditional strength, bleed, and magic build like previous games but this time you can go hybrid build, sleep build, hex build, battlemage, Carian Spell Knight, crystal mage builds and so many more. Your only limitation is your imagination. With different build paths to choose from many newbies might feel overwhelmed as to which build should they play with or if the game is too hard for them. Elden Ring has even thought about that and gave the players a new summoning system. Players can now summon monsters ranging from low tier to S Tier to help them battle the difficult bosses in-game. You can only summon once until you die or rest at a grace (similar to a bonfire in Dark Souls). While most of the summons are usually just meatshields designed to tank for the player to dish out their damage, a hand full of summons is actually pretty good when it comes to bosses. These S-tier summons can sometimes even deal enough damage to bring the boss’s health down to half and then die. At this point, unless you live under a rock you should probably know this but there is a unique summon in Elden Ring called “The Mimic”. What the Mimic summon does is that after you beat the mimic boss, you get the summon, and when you summon the mimic, it transforms into another version of you with equal stats and damage. There was a time when the summon actually broke the game with players just using the Mimic to beat all the bosses and progress throughout the game. After a couple of nerfs, the mimic is still a pretty good summon to bring to a boss fight.

To Give a proper introduction player now play as a tarnish who was blessed by grace and is now compelled to make the journey to the lands between and become the Elden Lord. Even if it is pretty vague, players will soon discover more about their goal and what that giant glowing tree in the distance actually is. all things players will have to explore and discover for themselves. Just like other FromSoftware games, the story is pretty deep and hard to piece through in your first playthrough but if you manage to understand or just watch a Vatividya video to get the entire lore, you will actually discover that the lore of Elden Ring goes even further beyond when it comes to storytelling through a game.

The first few hours of Elden Ring might remind a few about the calmness of Breath of the Wild. Players are greeted with a small tutorial and they open the gates to see the beautiful world of Elden Ring for the first time. They feel this safety as they think they have some time to level up and have a chill gameplay like Breath of the Wild until they face their first challenge. They see a guy on a horse called “Tree Sentinel”. Despite being twice the size of the player’s character, every player has approached the Tree Sentinel thinking this is the first stage, no way they are going to put a difficult boss here right? And then they get one shot by the Tree Sentinel. Yes, this is how Elden Ring welcomes you. It shows you that even on the beginner map, you are not safe. It makes the player learn that death is just another beginning for you to approach the fight differently. Many players have spent hours and hours stuck in this one boss fight that they never cared to check if they can just walk past it and come back later, stronger, faster, and with a steed next time. Their mind makes them think that if they can dodge everything, they can beat this wall they have hit. But there is only so much you can dodge when you are only level 10. You will eventually roll enough times for you to have no stamina and the boss only needs one hit to end your life. Elden Ring forces the typical Dark Souls and Bloodborne players to learn the game from scratch. Nothing you learned from before will work here as this new environment brings new challenges and it’s only going to get worst the further you progress.

After players finally adjust to the world of Elden Ring they get to truly enjoy its glory. As it took me over a hundred hours to beat Elden Ring, I was put through an absolute hell of an emotion filled with oh my god I just beat that and this is a stupid boss I want a refund. But as I pushed through trying to forget about the hundreds of thousands of lost runes to some of the toughest bosses and ambushes I finally felt the meaning of one of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s famous quotes –

“To feel fulfilled, you must first have a goal that needs fulfilling. At the same time, it must actually be possible to fulfill said goal. I think death is a crucial element when designing games around the theme of satisfaction of overcoming overwhelming odds.”

I finally felt fulfilled as I saw the end screen and the creator names started scrolling. It was the journey that made me feel complete. It was the hardship of coming here after battling all those that stopped my path I felt like this was worth the hours of pain and agony.

Throughout my entire gameplay, I was constantly in awe of the many absolutely jaw-dropping scenery. I could have never imagined the scope of this world as I explored each and every corner of it. They say curiosity kills the cat but I say curiosity only gets you to see interesting encounters that you would have never seen if you had just stuck to the main story route. Curiosity in Elden Ring will get you valuable rewards, new NPC encounters, or something even valuable like a scene of a giant bear scratching a tree, an elevator that keeps going down until you discover yourself in a new level, or meeting Patches for the first time.

If I had to nitpick one flaw in Elden Ring that would be because of having no quest marker on the map often times I have discovered myself missing out on certain NPC interactions that my friends experienced but I didn’t because the world of Elden is so vast that you can easily get lost in multiple questlines and forget the quest was even active. Despite that, there is not much to nitpick about in Elden Ring. It has amazing graphics with multiple combat routes that you could take and an amazing story that presents a meaning behind each boss fight. With how games are made these days’ players can often guess what’s going to happen as they progress through a game but Elden Ring loves to surprise the player and exceed their expectations with bring new and overwhelming interactions that make the loss of runes because of death meaningless. For example, I was running around on Torrent near a shallow river when I see a cult-like ritual happening in the distance. As I approached expecting a fight with the cultists, a giant dragon ambushes me from the sky and I die instantly. Despite dying there I felt this rush of adrenaline that made me want to go there again and try to beat the dragon. This rush that we feel, the joy of expecting the unexpected is what makes Elden Ring the best game I have ever experienced in my life. Overall Elden Ring is a perfect game that deserves to be nominated and win the game of the year award.

After talking about all the offline modes in Elden Ring I thought I should create a small section for multiplayer enthusiasts. First of all, yes, you can play co-op in Elden Ring with your friends and yes this does make the game a bit easier. Then there are the PVP areas where you get to face off against players in a battle of strength and skill. If you don’t want to be invaded, you can turn it off in the settings but you will still get invasions from NPCs in offline mode so it’s always better to sharpen those skills as the NPCs don’t really go easy on you either.

In conclusion, Elden Ring is like caffeine for the FromSoftware fans.  No matter how many playthroughs you go for there will still be something that hasn’t been discovered by you and when you discover it, the feeling of joy is indescribable making the game one of the best games in gaming history.