Elden Ring review

    THE ELDEN RING is not really a game that needs me to review it. It is a video game that has sold thirteen millon copies and is only selling more as time goes on. It has won countless awards. It was written in conjunction between Hidetaki Miyasaki and George R.R. Martin. The game is good, fantastically good, really, and is up there with some of the all-time best ever made. That is, with the caveat, "Do you like Dark Souls-esque games?" Because that's actually something that not every gamer can answer yes to. They're something a lot of gamers love. However, prior to this game, I'd never played a Souls-like before and it became a punishing learning curve to get used to the game's quirks.

    Basically, for newcomers, a Souls-like game is a game where you play a character that is immortal in-universe. In this case, the Tarnished has been given the ability to come back from the dead but no real other superpowers. You are expected in this game to die a lot and to master the parry, dodging, as well as stabbing abilities needed to survive through trial and error. This is a game where you can grind levels and are expected to but death is punished by losing all of your unspent Experience Points (called "runes") unless you can get to the place where you died to recover them. That comes with the caveat, though, that if you die a second time then the runes are lost forever. This incentivizes the PCs to play well by punishing them for loss.

    The lore of the game is exceptionally deep but incredibly difficult to find out in-universe. The short version is that Marika, the God Queen of the Lands Between, has disappeared and the Elden Ring that provides prosperity has been shattered. All of Marika's demigod children and her Elden Lord husbands have claimed a fragment of the Elden Ring in hopes of assuming rulership of the universe. You, as the immortal Tarnished, are part of a group of warriors resurrected to make their own play for the Elden Ring. If you're a good person, you want to be Elden Lord to fix the world and if you're a bad person then you just want to be elevated to godhood.

    I really like George R.R. Martin's touch in a much more high fantasy world than Westeros and the focus on the Olympian-like demigods and their dysfunctional family that makes this gameworld so great. He apparently wrote much of the backstory that the game requires you to research to understand and its readily apparent. Almost every god has a deep and messed-up backstory relating to their families with messy breakups, long-buried lust, as well as deep philosophical issues with the way the world functions. For millennia, the Golden Order has created a paradise but it was only one for humans and under an immortal God Queen.

    I think my favorite of the demigods are Ranni and Melina, who both are willing to help the Tarnished for their own reasons. I think both characters could have had much more presence in the game and interactions but it is the nature of Elden Ring that anything other than pure gameplay takes a great deal to coax out. Of the bosses, I actually really like Godrick and Rennala who are the runts of the litter of gods. Godrick is a diluted demigod who has turned to Frankensteinian body experimentation to try to become a true immortal while Rennala used to be the world's greatest sorceress but just lives as a madwoman in her academy's attic these days.

    If you want to know what playing the game is like, basically you just wander around multiple gameworld-sized domains looking for monsters to slay and secrets until you're leveled up enough to go after the bosses. The game is fantastically beautiful but takes a special delight in not letting you know when you're underleveled for an area until you're easily smashed by a local monster. Part of what I enjoy is the fact that you start with being able to see the Erd Tree and you never really stop being able to see the miles-tall God-Thing. It provides a focus for the story just by its constant presence.

    There's very few NPCs to interact with compared to many other games but that doesn't mean that they're absent entirely. There's things like talking giant jars, a host of heroic immortal knights that have fallen on hard times, and a few twisted individuals like the loathesome Dung Eater. Figuring out how to trigger their quests is an incredible struggle but that's part of the "no hand holding" nature of the game. There's a lot of things that flat out are impossible to do at the start of the game (and sometimes later) that the game simply laughs at you for. "You can come back from the dead! Start again!"

    In conclusion, the Elden Ring is an incredibly hard but rewarding game. I had a huge amount of fun with it and am already thirty-five hours into it but have yet to even approach endgame. This is a game where I actually recommend you farm your runes and level up as well as allow yourselves to check guides. I never would have managed to enjoy it as much as I came to if not for the help online as well as gaming the system as much as I had. I needed those extra ten levels or so I got from shanking Elder Dragon Greyoll.

Xbox X

Playstation