A Serious Critique of Elden Ring 

New Mandela effect: Godrick isn't an Elden Lord. Excuse my lore.

It’s kinda crazy that I generally agree with most of your points on a base level. But even so I can’t help but feel Elden Ring is my favorite Souls game as a complete package. Even after replaying the Souls trilogy and Sekiro I still have such this warm feeling towards Elden Ring that I genuinely can’t help but start up a new play through when I’m bored with other games. It just hits all the right notes for me, even with its problems.

The fact they reused the same ruined "Shack" over and over again really pissed me off.. pisses me off even more when you realize that same shack was used for the first proper Undead Settlement bonfire in DS3..

by the time i got to the end of the game, after 9 months of time and 100 hours of gameplay, i was so happy for it to be over

I love how across the Fandom everyone shits on the Godskin duo equally

Bosses roaming the world, mobs fighting in random skirmishes, npcs with actual quests, fractions. Interesting pvp systems and areas. Yeah, I imagined a lot during that year when we all waited for ER 😐

>the reusing of bosses takes away from the original experience yes , thankyou , someone gets it , this is a fantastic review , at no point in playing ER did i have have.... yeah yeah make anime game reviews instead like me LOL..... the music for the theme of the duo foreskin apostle fights (of which there are like 6 copy/pastes of) that fromsoft made communicates to me that they think they made something truly grand and amazing here , that this is peak video game design that you can't get anywhere else , that their worked really hard to serve me this 5star meal squilliam style when in reality what they did was take a beautiful painting of orstein and smough with their names engraved on the frame , pulled down their pants , and take a huge shit right in the center of the painting , scratched "foreskin apostle duo" over their name , and served it to me as their main course and im not even a simp for the orstien and smough fight like most others are , but as i sat there to watch all of it , it was such an insult to me personally as well as to good game design , that i knowingly accepted their plate with a scowl on my face and dined on their fresh pile of shit , it was the worst bossfight i had ever eaten , and after i beat that boss i uninstalled the game , and nothing will ever be able to compel me to play it ever again , and makes me wish pirating had an option where i could be granted some of the dev's money for how much of my time they wasted playing their game.......

Holy shit man, what a great video. Hope you continue to create more of these.

You are one of the few channels on here for which I have the notifications turned on. I might not be able to watch this now but I'm looking forward to it when I have time. :)

Elden has the exact same glaring issue that Breath of the Wild did. It is waaaaaaaaay too much physical space. When you make the game world so large, all you are doing for yourself as a developer is making things way too difficult for yourself and also guaranteeing that people are going to get exhausted and bored playing your game, especially in terms of replay value. Cut the amount of catacombs/caves/mines in half or more, carve off huge chunks of land, and suddenly Elden Ring becomes a far more enjoyable experience. I still love the game but they could have cut the game size and cut-and-paste locales in half, made the remaining areas much more unique and detailed and bam! Could have been the greatest game of all time. Well, if they fixed the boss designs too. Bullcrap like Malenia, Maliketh, Elden Beast(at least give us Torrent for crap sake), Fire Giant, Astel, Godskin duo, Crucible Knights(they just feel unfair the first time you fight them and it only gets worse), Commander Nial, Gideon and his neverending barrage of spells...pretty much everything from Leyndell onwards just sucks, boss and area wise. I do love Radagon though. That guy is a boss.

what an awesome piece of commentary, I'm so glad youtube brought me here :)

Elden Ring is definitely too large. As evidenced by their inability to actually fill it with interesting content. You could cut half of the world, and actually make for a better game. Get rid of EverGaols, all the extra catacombs, the Mountaintop of the Giants, make some of the areas smaller. Focus on the legacy dungeons and the underground. Also, this game would have been made so much better if it had Sekiro's progression system. If you were getting something like Prayer Beads from these mini bosses, you would feel better about fighting them. Big bosses give you attack power, so we don't need to waste time with upgrade materials and upgrading weapons (which I always found an unneeded mechanic), Minibosses give health upgrades, and otherwise you can get experience to unlock skills and other abilities. An Elden Ring with Sekiro combat-progression would have been a legendary game....

good critique, i love ER but i also have a lot complaints that align with yours. i trust FromSoftware will look at the critical feedback on the internet and make ER2 a better game. on a unrelated note, why did you choose that icon for your channel?

For me God of War and Elden Ring are the GotYs of 2022 but Elden Ring is not a 10/10 or masterpiece, for being a masterpiece it has to many flaws. Tbh I would give it a 7,5/10 that means not its bad omg, but it is to big for its own good. :( And yeah From Software can't make good oversized bosses. When I want to fight oversized bosses Capcom has a really good series for this! 😊 Like in Armored Core, the best fights are against enemies they are in your size and have "equal" abilities of the player. And From Software need more critique, than without critique they can't improve.

I always have incredibly fond memories of my first elden ring playthrough. I think up until Leyndell the game was borderline fantastic - everything after that was a significant dip in quality and the repetition starts to drag the exoerience down.

I wonder how much covid affected the amount of content in this game. Hopefully in the sequel they don't have to make compromises

"having to look for things to do is not something I attribute as a positive to the open world" ...wait what? I couldn't disagree more. That's what I woudl consider an actual good open world....because it facilitates actual exploring, which so few open worlds do (this and Outer wilds are the best imo)

8:10 Its all on you. Both hollow knight and elden ring allow you to mark the map so you can go back to places of interest later.

Elden ring is a game that i feel absolutely no guilt or shame for quitting. I just got fed up of contrived bs difficulty. Im just gonna go replay ds 3 😂 nice video.

I like how its a whole thing to circlejerk about souls fanboys whenever a critical elden ring video comes out. The video itself is fine, bro has opinions some i think are ok some i think are aight, but in the comments i constantly see people saying stuff like “ wow! You validated my opinion on this game. Im glad you arent like those souls fanboy. I cant believe this game was GOTY. It is so flawed!” Aight

You forgot Elden Beast on unique 1 time encounters Thanks for the video! :)

" I think we need a little more criticism in the from software community" THANK YOU DUDE I'm a big fan of fromsoftware but i think elden ring have so much bad thing, it's a really good game, but it's a low/average fromsoftware game and for those who think an open world make a good game you're wrong, you can't have a fucking good level design ( Like dark souls 1 for example) with an open world because it's too big and you can't focus on that Well i'll start the video now i'm already hype :D

So glad to see this, I really love your past videos, ones of the best of soulsborne critiques! Keep it up!!

11:40 That's where you go wrong. Fromsoft's tourists love having f^ck all to do besides taking screenshots, imagining they're a character in the next Vaati video 🤯 😂 Perhaps we should look at it like it's Witcher 3 but even then my criticism remains, it just shifts from the lack of difficulty and "zero stakes exploration" to other, more specific shortcomings of this "intricate Open World". Like poorly implemented, few and far between quests, NPCs that are just shadows of the fascinating and cryptic figures of DS1 and feel totally out of place - world is the size of the Continent but, yet again, we get same ol' tiny group of dead-already characters Miyazaki likes to present since Demons... why? Sure, it would be cool to compare the living World of W3 with Lands Between, if these lands weren't so flat and stagnant in comparison. Not to mention that Witcher's naturalistic looking caves were actually more impressive in 2015... when on the other hand, Fromsoft was perfecting their level design with the release of Bloodborne, even making a genious (imo) use of randomised content, introducing Chalices. Now those been turned it into Catacombs and I'm supposed to... not notice it?? wtf? Hey Wafe, check out "Elden Ring Dissected #1 - Fall Damage Explained" by illusory wall, if you haven't already. There are some "design choices" that still bind all From games together, surprisingly. (It's an amazing video! And yours as well, hah 😊)

And yet, even with all its flaws, 10million + people went to watch the shadow of the erdtree teaser trailer. Despite its flaws Elden Ring is still a fun game.

To me, it seems you play these games exclusively for bosses and combat. I think you get minimal value from exploration, especially considering your complaint about hollowknight. As for me, I value exploration, navigation, level design, enemy encounters, and secrets equally as much as I like bosses. I get as much satisfaction from finding an obscure secret as beating a boss in elden ring. So when I'm exploring the open world I'm constantly running into things that are valuable to me. When you go through the open world, you run into things that are not bosses or bosses that are reused, so you can't enjoy it.

sekiro is one of my favourite games ever and knowing how miyazaki likes fumito huedas work made me think elden ring would be differnet but has a lot of problems that ds2 got just wantting making a bigger game more bosses more weapons. Its a good game and much better than latest tripleA games but i spected something differnet.

Malenia Blade of Retribution lmfao, Godefroy the Grafted is like when you go to a local discount store to buy some knockoff brands of your favourite products... Yeah, this one hurts. 33:22 or mini-DSA in the Ringed City swamp? Shadows of Yharnam casually patrolling a regular nightmare area? How about out of the blue Ornstein in a Heide's Tower of Flame? Seriously, there isn't now and there wasn't before, enough critique you can put on the games you love, how the hell those npc-fans don't understand that?? "Praise the pointless" was a message left at the end of an empty corridor that you went on exploring nonetheless, lead by the nose with impeccable level design. You were actually surprised that the game, so well designed and dedicated to not wasting player's time has... played you. Message on the floor was never a critique but rather an expression of gratitude towards devs for respecting us. And also just a cheeky little message 😂

After one year, there are some aspects that aged like fine wine, others like aged milk. Fine Wine: > Bosses -- They have some of the most complex, fast, and fun movesets in the entireFromSoftware catalogue. I also love the emphasis on how positioning can radically change boss ai and influence combo branches. Because of this, it's much easier to bait out both easier attacks and hard cool-ass combos. No joke, some of the bosses here rival the great DLC greats of DS3 and Bloodborne. Only issue for me is asset reuse, delayed attacks, and infuriating mechanics slowing down the pace of the fight and forcing player passivity. > Combat / Player Moveset & Abilities -- It's basically Dark Soul's combat but refined to perfection. Dodging is responsive, instantaneous, and has the perfect amount of i-frames. Parrying feels super satisfying and there are many different types to choose from. Ashes of war add great customizability to weapons that make even basic ones have personality. Every weapon is viable, even the colossal weapons. Class variety is INSANE and abundant, meaning more player freedom and expression. There is no softcap for stamina/endurance which means you don't have to worry about pausing or halting the pace of the fight too much, so level-up that endurance stat. It also has great hidden mechanics that can elevate fights and solve problems. JUMPING HAS i-FRAMES for 2/3rds OF YOUR BODY, as wells as skills, sorceries, and incantations that make you jump, levitate, or float. Jumping can be used in places when dodging feels much more tight and awkwardly timed like jumping over shockwaves, AOEs, 2 attacks you have dodge with one roll, etc. Because of this, you can capitalize on these dangerous attacks by jump attacking which let's you simulataneously dodge and punish your enemies' low hanging attacks which further blends the line between defense and offense that I loved so much in Sekiro. Jumping can also turn seemingly BS bosses into fun ones like Maliketh and Godfrey. The only thing I don't like is the addition of adding a slow final attack because it ruins the pace of fights and won't allow me to be as aggressive. I missed it in Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne when your player character won't slow down their final attack. Your light attack combo back then didn't have a slow final attack with a long recovery window, which meant that the light attack combo, once finished, would instantly cycle again repeatedly. Other than this, the combat system in this game is simple yet perfection. > Music - Aside from just the fire banging Boss Themes, I also really love the environmental soundtracks. My favorites of the environmental / background tracks are the ones for Caelid, Haligtree, Elphael, and ... there's just so much. Honestly, the soundtrack brims with so much personality that any of the tracks are memorable enough to become classics, with some of the background music even rivaling Minecraft's in my opinion. However, the boss themes though... those go so fricking hard, especially the Rememberance Boss themes. Hoarah Loux's sounds like a hyped-up viking/barbarian theme that increases my adrenaline and testosterone; Regal Ancestral Spirit is spiritual and breathtaking; Lichdragon Fortissax oozes so much power and awesomeness with it's organs and choir giving it this unique vampiric vibe; and my personal favorite being Maliketh's heroic yet desperate last stand theme being so frenetic and dynamic. In my opinion, this is the one aspect of Elden Ring that legitimately has no flaws Aged Like Milk: > Common Enemies & Enemy Variety-- I hate how much the common soldiers and knights are repeated. They ruin the uniqueness of the Legacy Dungeons, arguably the best areas of the game. If the demigods are at war with each other, then why frick are the usng same soldiers? Wouldn't they each have armies different from one another? This is something I missed in Sekiro as there is so much enemy variety in that game, some common enemies existing for a single part of a Legacy Dungeon. I also hate how you can just R1 / light attack spam them. Fighting them isn't as fun as the fighting bosses in this game, but at least make them fun to fight. They don't offer much in terms of combat because all you have to do is just attack and roll occassionally. Chad of Astora did a great video on Sekiro's common enemies which is something this game has to learn from. > The Open World - While I love the abundance of places to explore, the places you end up going to have bland level design, stale layouts, samey viduals, and formulaic. This is why I don't ever bother going to caves, catacombs, or tunnels since they are super boring compared to the legacy dungeons and heroes' graves which offer much more detailed level design, awe-inspiring art direction, fun layouts, and variety. Even though there are many of these side areas, I don't to explore any of them anymore. It feels as though they went with a bit more of a quantity over quality approach here which I don't like. I also hate that the entrances of these side areas are always the same. Formula: go through doors to get into catacombs, openings for caves, and mine entrances for tunnels. It's very formulaic. Wouldn't it be cool if you fell through a hole somewhere while exporing the open world only to land in a complex labyrinth of a catacomb that you can't get out of until you put int the hard work to escape it? Woudn't it be also cool if tunnels connected to other tunnels and you break walls like you're mining to access other ones? What if instead just going into the same old small cave hole to enter a cave, you see this giant hole in the moutain that reveals the expanse of the mountain's insides. This doesn't just have to apply to entrances, but exits as well kind of like those trap chests teleporting you to an overleveled side area only for you to get out of them and be in an entirely dfferent zone. There's also that one dungeon in Caelid that, if you complete it, allows you to go through an exit that gives you access to other parts of Limgrave. Stuff like the lack of entrance and exit variety for side areas could've elevated them, but they were always the same which made them formulaic and boring. I also don't like the fact there are basically no villagers just people in general which is very immersion breaking. In the lore, you go on hearing about the gods and demigod's people and how they were affected by their deities, but I don't see nobody. In the lore, there are still normal bystanders and people living in the lands between which is why it puzzles me that there are almost no neutral settlements or poeople walking about in Legacy Dungeons. It would be cool if the structures in Legcay Dungeons / Kingdoms were inaccessible, but there are transparent windows where you can see people living their day-to-day life in the broken and post-apocalipticlike Lands Between. I also think it would be cool if people, especially in Leydell, saw you traversing the Legacy Dungeon by roof jumping and alerted the guards or something. I want to see people praying in churches for whatever Outer God they devot themselves to, or peasants buying from merchants, or angry villagers rallying while soldiers hold them back. Stuff like this would've made Elden Ring even more immersive because you actually get to see for yourself how the world AND IT'S PEOPLE are affected by the Shattering and living in the Lands Between. There's only one peaceful settlement in this game, but all they do is just stay in the same looping animation with almost no changes. I also would've liked to see characters and NPCs actually talking to each other instead of just you since almost all of them are very opinionated. it would've been cool to see a falling out between Nepheli and Gideon, a wholesome interaction between Roderika and Hewg, battle plans with Bernhal and the Recusants, or Ranni plotting with you and Blaidd for her ext move. Instead, all we get are just he-said-she-said or I-said-they-said from them while you are the only able to talk to them. I dunno, but it's always been a thing that has bothered me with the FromSoftware games. Sekiro actually followed through on this. I still love Elden Ring despite all this. Let's all hope that the DLC will be good. For now, I give Elden Ring an 8.5/10. It's my second FromSoftwre game, with Sekiro being my first.

The full grown falling star Beast follows a pattern just like every other boss I learned the fight 2 days ago. I ruined my first play through being a caster so now I'm going through as a strength/faith Build. I'm actually learning the fights This Time and I'm having a blast! I honestly Don't agree with most of what you're saying but that's what opinions are for.

I really hate how cultish some, seemingly a lot, of Fromsoft fans have become. You literally cannot criticize this game at all in any way without being told you are just bad, to "git gud" and how the game is perfect because it's hard. I saw one guy say that he actively decided to dismiss all criticism of the game because 1 time he saw 1 guy say 1 stupid thing and therefore all criticism is invalid. I asked him if he thought Fromsoft was perfect and above flaw and he told me he wouldn't answer because it was a bad faith question.

A really well-made video! Your style is engaging, and I like the fact you always have a sense of a structure to your points and argument progression, even if doesn't make sense sometimes. As it happens, I'm also writting an ELDEN RING essay, however, the pain levels have stopped me from finishing it for now, as I'm actually writing about every single dungeon and every single boss attack, so that I can show just how shit these are (in the case of boss attacks, I'm taking how ridicilous the delays are sometimes). As for your criticisms, I'd like to have the time to adress them deeper, but I just haven't, so sorry for that. The point about confusion isn't handled well, as you bring little evidence and don't show a lot of examples, and it doesn't help that you yourself aren't sure if it's a criticism. There were some more minor things in between, but overall the rest of the video was valid. As for the boss segment though... You really have to elaborate if you wish for this to be a propore critique. Of course, if you don't and want to appear more in line with the video's character, that's fine, but it diminishes your argument. You call some really bad bosses, such as Maliketh, good and bosses that aren't that bad, sunch as Rykard, bad. Altough I definetly really fucking like Maliketh and his moveset, and everything about him, his recovery cancels are just unfair and a time waster. Of course, Maliketh is sadly made bad because of Beast Clergyman. You make a point about how it's possible to get hits in mid-combo, but fail to show a lot of examples, and funnily enough, you claim that in Godfrey's fight you have to dodge trhough all of the shit, but it's the one fight I know that I can do this in. As I said, asside from what I think are badly formulated sentences here and there, your video is mostly very good. I hope I brought up some points that could help you improve, and the mist important, I think, is more elaboration and examples. Please don't stop making videos, as I think I just found a really passionate content creater, who's teying to make best of a critique and comedic commentary.

first off, this one is serious

The balancing of Elden ring is horrible and grinding levels seems to be the standard method to ensure you’re not one shored by the bosses. Poor effort by the from soft

Speaking facts. Ignore the cult-like fromsoft bots who can't handle the sad reality of this sub par game

Great video. Glad to see more people being rightfully critical about ER's faults. My one issue with this video however, is Loretta. Loretta is easily the most balanced boss in the game. She has no bad hitboxes, no garbage combos, every move is fair and avoidable, and she has no gimmick that makes or breaks the fight like Mogh. She is quite literally, the quintessential perfectly designed boss. Honestly, Loretta rivals even the best bosses in the series in terms of mechanics, and I'd say she might even be better than some of the best. Objectively speaking form a mechanical perspective, she might be less interesting than bosses like Gael, Ivory, and Dragonslayer, but she's so much more balanced than all of them. Even Gael suffers from the funny hitbox syndrome every once and a while, but Loretta has none of that. Even her lore is built well and rivals some of the best. If it wasn't for he three games of build-up, I'd say she'd rival Gael in terms of interesting lore, but she fits perfectly in that tertiary character lore role that other characters like The Ivory King, Raime, Alonne, Sir Yorgh, Sir Vilhelm, and the Dragonslayer Armour all fit into, that being the character who's somehow more badass, powerful, and awesome than the final boss for some reason. It feels like you rated her low because you personally found her mechanical perfection boring. It's interesting how there's always a fine line between unbalanced and too balanced. Loretta is probably, objectively speaking, the best boss they've ever made, but because her quality is so perfect, most players find her boring. While I understand it's opiniated, it's very disappointing seeing even more people throw Loretta under the bus. She's definitely in the leagues of Raime in boss design perfection, but people just always neglect her. She's somehow reached the underrated level of Dragonslayer Armour, that being the level where they're some of the best bosses in the game, but they have this aura that causes amnesia so almost nobody knows how perfect they actually are. Also, very spicy putting Mogh that low.

The fact that there are only 8 unique actual bosses, really shows that the game went overboard with its quantity over quality. On my first playthrough, I really thought it was a good idea to have a regular enemy as a boss and then as a regular enemy to show how far you've come, but it honestly does feel like tons and tons of filler just to say they have over 200 bosses. Honestly the reskin I hated the most was the dragons.

You like Witcher 3 💀

did humans even make elden ring? Semes like it was made by some otherworldly beings. The game just seems impossible.

What the heck are you doing? Stop it. Not watching every VaatiVidya video?!?!? I mean come on bro! Get your life straightened out.....

This game screamed "lazy and cut corners" so many reused assests from prior games and many of the side dugeons are copy paste with a common enemy givin a health bar at the end.

Agree. Elden Ring kind of sucks. It gets a pass from so many people because it's From.

You don't need to be a lore genius to figure out that the world of elden ring is post-apocalyptic. If you expected actual villages and cities with npcs like skyrim then that's on you but yeah this was not a fun watch. You sound so angry that it makes you come across as unreasonable and unlikable. I would personally recommend toning it down and adding a little more humor so perfectly reasonable critiques don't come across as hyperbolic rants. Remember the title of the video is "A Serious Critique of Elden Ring" not "Elden Ring Rant"

None of you accurately diagnose the problem with Elden Ring or Fromsoftware. The actual problem is the combat is shit. Not just outdated but repetitive shit. Elden ring just exposed that. Great combat translates to any design. Fromsoftware is not good at combat which is why they used tighter areas to hide the bad combat. Get in a big open free area and its jarring how restrictive the combat really is.

I'm happy to see people aren't letting thr critiques in elden ring go past by that other games get blasted for for example repeated bosses and reused dungeons etc and some unavoidable flaws in open world games get in the way of them loving the game. i hated how people are blasting almost all games with reused stuff but elden ring got away with it because of biases ( especially people like theactman who just never critiqued the game fairly). I love genshin, it's a game for Anime asthetics lovers more then people who love a medevil atmosphere, i play genshin and haven't played any soul games because my pc couldn't handle them, so I play genshin on my shit phone and the accessibility and casual nature of the game attracts me with its incredibly designed open world, music and character and some misunderstood and amazing lore, ik I'll love elden ring regardless of the reused stuff because I don't find these criticisms good or game breaking because there's no solution to balance games that try the large open world rpg story character building route otherwise the storage requirements would go haywire, most people can't afford such equipment, i don't mind linear and ubisoft formulas because they are really casual player friendly who don't have time to spend hours on a game so these criticisms fall apart for me fortunately , i can just turn of navigation and not look up minimap if I want to go the pro gamer move and have time but since most don't it's fine for us. there's lot of quests in genshin especially enkanomiya region which is something of an artistic masterpiece and the quests there aren't directly telling me where to go but point to general areas and hints from npcs and figuring puzzles which aren't obvious like many starting areas , from elden ring critiques I've watched which are many, there's isn't much different in genshin and elden ring except artstyle and combat, it has similar elements of fetch quests, npcs, combat in genshin is more complicated and structured because of team structures and micromanagement of buffs with all the possible combinations of elemental reactions and sequence in which you arrange your characters and slightly harder in elden ring but being honest the difficulty is badly balanced in elden ring enemy scales with region in genshin and your adventure rank , in elden ring the thing I love is its emptiness tbh i feel like I'm an post apocalyptic, idk the lore properly because it didn't find it that interesting unlike genshin which is its own manga that people actually don't know about. overall i want to play elden rn.