Hey everyone. This week i wrapped up my replay of Mass Effect 2. I haven’t started my replay of ME3 yet since I will be out of town for the holidays and am leaving it for when I return. I also as usual do some Balatro on my phone; I have less than 100 stickers left for Completion++. Hope everyone has a good holiday week!
I finally finished the nightmare that is Elden Ring's DLC after some time of just putting the game down.
Barely figured out how to find the Abyssal Woods, but I gotta say, I got the luckiest fucking RNG ever on the guy guarding them. He didn’t get to teleport once since I just kept doing backstabs on him. After exploring some of the area I finally found the mansion and Midra, who was an actually kind of fun boss all in all, took me a couple dozen attempts maybe. But after that detour to make sure I got all the bosses, I finally got to the big, heart stolen boy himself. I gotta say, after worrying so much about him, the fight itself was terribly anti-climactic all in all, took me only 3 tries (would have been 2 if I had bothered to dodge the grab attack). Although I will say I just used the shield poke strategy, with bleed on. Honestly, with a Verdigris shield +10 and the shield talisman, Radahn might as well have been hitting me with a toothpick.
All in all, what can I say. This game clearly isn’t even close to being the GOAT, nor is it a terrible game. Sure, that horse is cool, moddable Weapons arts (refuse to call them the dumb elden ring name), the world is fucking massive and the art direction of it deserved the award it got. But at the same time, as much as they expanded the game, it really feels like they actually hollowed out the core experience. The bosses never played by the same rules you did obviously, but I don’t think it has ever been this egregious. They have 50 hit combos, which then if you try to hit them, chain into other 50 hit combos. If you get hit once in some of these combos, you’re dead, since you can’t recover. They input read and hit you specifically when you’re healing. They very realistically delay their attack, and then swing it at the speed of light. One of them even has an attack where you either have to be a kilometer away to dodge it, or you have to go on youtube and look up the most unintuitive way to dodge an attack ever.
But even the RPG aspect is rather trimmed down in a way, with metas now being the prevalent way to play. And those playstyles require having all the necessary items, which can only be found if you look at the wiki and run the risk of spoiling yourself. Although you no longer really have to worry, since you can pretty much fast travel from any point of the map, but that still kind of defeats the feeling of danger you had traversing the worlds of the other games. It’s a massive open world, there is no way someone is going to explore all of it alone, especially when there is only 7 bosses that aren’t repeated, despite there being like 150 in total. A boss fight used to be a pretty special event in the other souls games, whereas in Elden Ring it just feels like another mindless obstacle that you overcame 10 hours ago with a beefed up statline. Despite it being massive, the game just kind of gets stale, and you’ll be begging it to end by the late game sections. On the whole, I’d give it about a 7-7.5/10.
Good post.