Elden Ring (George RR Martin and From Software)

And done. Hit an unexpected road block with the final boss that took me a few hours. Some seriously bullshit moves in the second phase of that fight - trying to do an impromptu game of jump rope while being chased by a few dozen homing shards isn’t exactly an easy thing to do! But eventually got a co-op player and we managed to stagger the boss and that did the trick.

I’ve a few final thoughts about the game for later, but for now… phew. It was a hell of an 80 hours, but eh looking forward to playing a few smaller games for a while 😂

A few thoughts after finishing:

The game's biggest achievement by far is making a huge, sprawling open-world that feels full of bespoke, memorable content. I'm not sure I've played any game of this scale where I was so in-tune with the layout of the world, thanks to an endless variety of landmarks, encounters, dungeons etc... It's a massive, massive game but feels handmade and tailor-made in ways these sorts of games usually don't. And the setpiece legacy dungeons very much feel as 'authored' as anything you'd find in a previous Souls games on top of that... there's just so much more to find. It's not a particularly revolutionary game in its take on the open-world formula, but it's evolutionary in ways you'd really hope other designers would learn lessons from. I also love the few moments where the world state changes in some momentous way - that's an old From trick, but great to see in a game of this size.

It is still a 'Soulsborne' game, and lore, naming conventions and setting aside you wouldn't really bat an eyelid if it was called Dark Souls 4. I'm not really sure where From can take the formula from here, because this is all their previous games in the genre blended together into one monster accomplishment. You'd almost imagine they'd need to make a more focused game ala Sekiro after this one, although I'm sure the commercial pressure to make Elden Ring 2 will be immense. I'd still love to see Miyazaki and co make a big swerve and try something totally different, but Elden Ring does prove they can take their well-trod formula and make it feel fresh again without reinventing the wheel.

After Sekiro was the most particular and focused of the Soulsborne games with its tight action gameplay, it was gleeful fun to see the polar opposite - a chaotic, vast RPG with a mind-boggling amount of possible builds and approaches. There's definitely some balancing to be done (especially with some boss design) but it's a wonderful kind of chaos seeing how different each player's build will inevitably be. That said, it's clearly designed to encourage things like summoning in a way that'll likely frustrate those looking to play it purely Sekiro or Bloodborne style.

Easy / hard? For the most part, I'd maintain this is the most accessible of the From games - there are many, many more ways to even the odds, especially after the 'get skilled or go home' approach of Sekiro. There were three big difficulty spikes for me though: Radahan (since patched, thankfully), Malenia and Elden Beast. The latter two drifted into unfairness IMO - there's a certain amount of luck required as you can sometimes simply get caught in a combo you don't really have much hope of surviving. Elden Beast is as much a camera battle as it is a monster battle, because even when you finally get up close enough to attack things get so chaotic you mightn't be able to see what's happening properly and the beast may just unleash a flurry of homing missiles at you from above. I think there's probably room to patch those two fights a tad. But other than that I think it was tough but fair, and the overworld is definitely 'easier' to navigate than many of these games, one or two tricky spots aside (always laugh at that area near Castle Sol where the giant skellies summon and you just need to f***ing run for your life). Most other bosses took a handful of tries - even downed some of the major ones first go.

And final tip: Black Knife Tisch is invaluable, and a much more reliable help than Mimic Tear in some of the final battles.

The War Dead Catacombs boss is a great joke to be fair.

From: We made Radahn easier.

From: Oh, sorry, we made him too easy, we're making him harder again.

Incredible 😂