It took me over 130 hours to finish Elden Ring. As someone who is widely regarded by others as an actual grown-up, my adventures in the Lands Between were usually limited to a couple of hours late each Friday evening. The cumulative effects of age, weariness, and good red wine made some of those boss battles difficult, and I nearly gave up several times.
This was the first Souls game I’d played (not counting the ten minutes I spent on Dark Souls 3 before noping out a few years ago). I’m pretty proud of myself for persevering through it, I’m by no means a hardcore gamer.
Here are a few notes on what I thought of the game. Spoilers ahead, if you’re one of the few people slower than me at finishing it…
Difficulty
Souls games are famously difficult. I knew this when I bought the game, and I doubted I would ever finish it. I just wanted to see what all the hype was about, and I thought it would be a good game to test my shiny new Xbox Series X with.
One of the first things the game does is to pit you against an enemy that is almost impossible to kill. Lesson 1: you are going to die regularly. Shortly after you encounter another very difficult enemy, which will almost certainly kill you too. The difference here though is that you can, and should, avoid him. Lesson 2: you don’t have to fight everything you see straight away, you can always come back later.
Even the regular foot-soldiers kicked my arse early in the game—I found dodging really hard at first, and my instinct to mash the roll button didn’t help things. Elden Ring rewards patience and calm, precise actions. This is not how I played at first.
I think it took several hours for me to get to the first ‘boss’—a gigantic troll that jumps down from a bridge on the road to Stormveil Castle. I rapidly learned that I needed to draw it out so i could fight it without being sniped by the human archers hiding in the bushes. After half a dozen attempts I had killed it, but my self-congratulation was cut short when I realised that this wasn’t a boss, just a regular mob of which there are dozens of around the game world.
Mechanics
The inventory and equipment system in Elden Ring sucks. Search would have helped here, and would have reduced some of the endless scrolling. I found myself switching between several ‘kits’ depending on the area I was in or the boss I was fighting, it would have been nice to have saved these as presets.
It goes without saying that combat was the highlight of this game. Although I found timing dodges and reading enemy attacks really difficult, it never felt unfair. These skills developed over my lengthy playtime, until I felt somewhat competent by the endgame.
I played a strength build so got almost no experience with magic, I might try a mage build on NG+.
World building, lore, and story
This game was different to most other RPGs I’ve played in that the story was delivered relatively sparsely, largely by occasional dialog and big, set-piece cinematics. This felt like the right approach in such an action oriented game, and the richness of the story and the world didn’t suffer for it. Like all the best fantasy, the game doesn’t reveal all of its internal history, and the Lands Between feel like they have been around for a very long time. I never really understood what a ‘Tarnished’ was, but that added depth to the game for me.
Will I buy the DLC?
I’m not sure. I enjoyed the game immensely, but feel like there were several points where I would have given up if the difficulty had been slightly higher. If the DLC is harder than the base game, then it might be out of my comfort zone. I’d rather have just finished the main game cleanly than buy the DLC to leave it unfinished. Let’s see.