“But I am so tired.”
Well, this has been a long time coming, hasn’t it? I talked about it way back when the game first released, and I gave it a glowing, if brief, review, and then it’s been radio silence since then. I mean, I remember mentioning somewhere else in a different post that I wasn’t quite in love with it as much as I hoped I would be, but other than that I don’t think I’ve said word nor wail of Elden Ring. Why is that, then? Well, because as I said initially, I wanted to take my sweet time with the game, and have a chance to really let it settle in my digestive tract before trying to regurgitate up a review of it.
You know what, though? It’s still settling. Because I only now, just this last weekend, finished the game. And I never, ever, once before in my life thought I would say this, but I am so glad that I am done playing this FromSoft game. In what is perhaps the biggest gaming twist of all time, I am very, very tired of Elden Ring and do not want to play it or anything else like it for a good long while.
SPOILERS FOR ELDEN RING! Read at your own risk.
If you’re a long-time reader here and familiar with video games, this may come as a bit of a surprise to you. I adore FromSoftware and their games. They’re the people who made Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. I’ve written about all of those games, sometimes several times. They are things that have consumed my evenings, spare time, my YouTube video suggested watching sections, my every waking thoughts at some points in my life. I don’t know if I’d say Bloodborne is my favorite game of all time, but I’d be pretty hard-pressed to find anything else that comes close to it besides maybe Pikmin or Mario (but that’s kind of cheating, anyway). I have spent more of my life playing these games, thinking about them, writing about them, sometimes even dreaming about them, than I’m comfortable admitting. Nothing else sticks in my mind quite like the lore of Dark Souls, or the level layouts of Bloodborne, or the lonely beauty that all these games exude.
I spent dozens of hours beating Dark Souls 1 across three separate consoles, through false starts and deleted save files. I’ve beaten Bloodborne four separate times and still ached for more. Steam says it took me 61 hours to finish Dark Souls 3, and 54 to complete Sekiro. I never did play Demon’s Souls because I never owned a PS3 and the PS5 doesn’t actually exist. It’s a marketing gimmick by Sony and anyone who says they own is lying to you. But anyway. After every game, I always wanted more. I wished so hard for more. So I thought, finally, Elden Ring would give that to me. I got what I wanted, and so much more.
And for this reason, my excitement and expectations for Elden Ring were feelings that had only been matched once before (with Mario Odyssey). I was so, so excited to play Elden Ring, and I hoped so hard that it would be everything I wanted it to be. And then I played it, and it was so much more than I could have possibly imagined. It didn’t just break my expectations; it absolutely shattered them, pun intended. The game is so huge, so vast, and complex that wrapping my head around this absolute marvel of a piece of media, this monument to creative talent and focused design, this pinnacle of adventure gaming that I don’t know where to go from here.
To be fair, Elden Ring is fantastic in a very specific genre lens. It isn’t a platformer, it isn’t a puzzle game, it isn’t a shooter. It can’t do everything, so take everything here through that sort of a lens; Elden Ring is great at doing everything that big, bold, adventurous, exploratory video game experiences are made to do. But it is an adventure unlike any other. If you want a game to make you feel like you’re on a real quest, where progress is made by your will alone, where you’re in a Lord of the Rings or a Harry Potter kind of grand world-shaping quest, where you’re exploring a living, breathing world, Elden Ring is that game. No doubt about it. Little else comes close.
I put a lot of time into Breath of the Wild. About 75 hours, I think. I thought Legend of Zelda games were adventure entertainment perfection. But Elden Ring is everything Ocarina of Time was, wanted to be, and tried to do, and more. It’s everything Breath of the Wild stumbled on in building a vast, complicated open world, plus some. It is every good idea Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro have ever had, wrapped up in what feels like endless content and no gut-wrenching flaws. It is perhaps one of the single greatest artistic achievements in interactive media, and I feel comfortable saying that with zero reservations, genre or otherwise. But this came with a price.
It is way too much.
Take a quick look at that map above. It’s chock-full of nonsense sketches, items to collect, bosses to fight, and things to find. Kind of overwhelming, right? The game doesn’t show you any of this, of course. It doesn’t have to, and that’s perhaps the greatest trick that Elden Ring has pulled; it’s filled in the same kind of over zealous quest design from other open-world games, but made it feel so natural that it isn’t overzealous. The map can be sparse. It doesn’t need Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry or Skyrim-style open-world reminders and mindless collectathons, because Elden Ring immerses you in the world and tells you to fend for yourself, and it works. So, so much has already been written about this, and why it’s such a departure from other open-world games. And that’s great. I’m not going to rehash it here. But the game is still mind-numbingly massive. That map up there? About 10% of the game. Some of the first 10% of the game, too.
There is so much to do, and so much of it is fun. Just moving around, fighting enemies and discovering surprises, is fun. This game is very surprising, too. There are so many unique encounters and things to find. But here’s the problem; I’ve done all of it. Everything. I have been playing the same game, on one file, on one character, for one-hundred and fifty hours, and I have seen everything. Beaten every boss. Beaten every side-dungeon. Found every item, even though I’ve used the same sword and spells for the last 80 hours. This is a problem with me, surely, because of some sort of completionist or perfectionist in my subconscious, or perhaps because I am slow and, at the end of the day, not very good at this game, but I have done everything. And I am so, so tired of Elden Ring.
The problem of scale here may lie with me, with the fact that I feel compelled to do and see everything. But I think the problem also lies with a mismatch between the game’s ambitions and what it is actually capable of doing. This is something that has way more going on that I can get into there, so I’ll link this video which gives a pretty good detailed view of it, and give the short version here instead.
Elden Ring is huge. It has hundreds of bosses and items, several dozen dungeons and castles and forts and mines and catacombs. You can spelunk your way through all of them, dying over and over again, and at first, everything is exciting. Everything is new. But then you get later on, and the same enemies start to crop up as bosses here and there. All the dungeons and catacombs start looking the same. You find new treasure all the time but it’s either a slightly powered-up version of an item you collected fifteen hours ago and don’t use, or just a new item you won’t use because it doesn’t fit your playstyle. Sooner or later, if you spend enough time with this game, you figure out that a lot of the game is just the same kind of stuff, remixed and rematched in different, surprising ways.
This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. I mean, you can do a lot of cool things by reusing the same generic assets. But that doesn’t mean the game is necessarily better for it. And for me, who spent probably 60% of my time scouring every corner of the map and hoovering up dungeon treasures like some sort of deranged vacuum cleaner in a bank vault to reach some sort of sense of completion, it began to feel like a slog at the end. Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean.
In Elden Ring, you can access 75% of the game right from the very start. To get to the final three areas (Mountaintop of the Giants, Consecrated Snowfield, and Farum Azula), you have to kill one specific boss in the city at the base of a giant tree. Only one other area is really tied to story progression and killing specific bosses, but even then it’s possible to just kind of stumble into these huge regions of the game by accident. It’s kind of a long story, but know that you can access almost everything without having to even do the main quest. SO, I did exactly that. I meticulously combed through everything before killing the boss at the tree and opening those last areas. That was probably fifty hours ago. So, like a month and a half or so. I spent the next fifty hours struggling through the last quarter of the game. Which, normally, would be fine in a difficult game like this. But so much of it feels like the same stuff.
I need to make a distinction here. There are two types of “levels” in Elden Ring; dungeons, and what the game likes to call Legacy Dungeons. The smaller “dungeons” are little self-contained mines, catacombs, and forts that have a few enemies, some light puzzling, and maybe a cool boss fight. The Legacy Dungeons are where the game really feels like Big Dark Souls, though. Because Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro are all known for their intricate level designs, for relishing in 3D spaces that twist and warp and wrap around each other like the vessels in a still-beating heart. Elden Ring’s huge, open world design means that the game does have to sacrifice these dense spaces for open plains, but it instead packs that level design into Legacy Dungeons. And Elden Ring has some of the best ones of the entire series, if not some of the best level design in the entire video game medium. Stormveil castle? Maybe one of the best video game levels of all time. Leyndell? More like Leynhell yeah. Raya Lucaria? Is pretty solid. The Eternal Cities? They’re damn cool. But The Haligtree? mmmm, *chef’s kiss* to that entire section. The Consecrated Snowfield is, for my money, one of the best areas in the game (after the annoying blizzard part), it’s such a shame it’s so hard to get to. The Legacy Dungeons are so good, it’s hard to get the words across. But everything else in between is just kind of…. well, a lot.
I know I say all of this, but then I’m gonna turn right back around and complain about it. I don’t know what was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but I groaned when I realized that I had to get through the Mountaintop of the Giants and Consecrated Snowfield to get to finish the game. I got to what felt like the end, and then there was more. And it wasn’t enough for me to just ride my horse to the good parts. No, I had to stop myself and slow down and do everything. And maybe that’s my fault. But I waited for this game for so long, and who knows when there will be something else that even comes close to being this special, so how could I not see everything?
So. I actually broke my own rule and rode through the Mountaintops of the Giants, skipping everything except the final boss, and I got to Farum Azula. I got the medal to open up the Consecrated Snowfield, and then I had to stop for a minute and think. I had already put a hundred hours into this game, and I had so much more to do. I could make a beeline through Farum Azula, skip the Consecrated Snowfield and beat up Malenia, and ignore all the side content and finish the game. Or, I could squeeze every last possible discovery out of this game like some sort of secret-filled lemon, and subject myself to two more open areas of samey-dungeons and enemy encounters with the same kinds of bosses.
Which one do you think I chose?
Yeah. I did finish Farum Azula, and it was pretty fun. But then I went back, and I did everything in the Mountaintop of the Giants. And I went back to Leyndell and cleared up that Subterranean Shunning Grounds I had ignored earlier. And then I did Consecrated Snowfield, and all the side stuff there. And then I just had the Haligtree left, and then the game was over. And I got the Haligtree, and it was so good that I had to stop and think about why the hell am I surprised this is so good? I had been unhappily forcing myself to do this for the last however much of the game, and then I go to the Haligtree and I actually had fun again? What gives? I was so surprised to find myself smiling again at this game that I hadn’t smiled in for the last forty hours or so. And that was… sad.
There is something kind of poetic in that, I suppose. Let’s be real here, every Souls game is kind of about the same thing, whether it admits it or not. Even the ones that aren’t by FromSoftware are guilty of this! The storyline revolves around the grand collapse of empire and the accumulation of despair and sorrow that builds up around things that try to outlive their own time. They’re about grappling with powers far beyond our comprehension, and what powers like that can do to the people who try to wield them, both for good and for ill. So isn’t it kind of fitting, then, that at the end of the day, I hate myself for trying to make this thing last way longer than it has any right to? And, for the game’s own part, isn’t it kind of fitting that all the highest highs of Elden Ring are bogged down by an accumulation of stuff that just feels like excess?
I am so, so tired of Elden Ring, but I’m grateful to the Haligtree for allowing me to enjoy the game some more before I let it go. People who have played this game five times or content creators who make a living off of it, I don’t know how they do it. Maybe they skipped the side content. Or maybe they have a higher tolerance for Miyazaki’s bullshit than I do. I wish that I could go back and tell myself to take it easy with this game, to enjoy it, but don’t stress myself out about it. Because that’s exactly what I did: I was so worried about doing everything that I forgot to have fun doing it. What the hell is the point of spending all this time with what is, effectively, a giant toybox if I’m not having fun?
I did have fun with Elden Ring. I had a lot of fun. In the end, I still got more hours of fun out of it than any of the other Souls games before it. And like I said, it is still one of the most glorious entertainment experiences that money can buy, and I think everyone should have an interest in that. But I have never felt this tired by a game before, let alone a Souls game. I have never been trapped in this kind of rock-and-a-hard-place position before, where I’ve felt compelled to complete something because I love it so much and yet I need to let go. You know, with games like Skyrim, or even Breath of the Wild, I could look at it and say, yeah, I’ve seen enough. I’m ok to not do it all. Or even Marvel’s Spider-Man, which is a rare game that I did 100% of, it did not take me more than sixty-ish hours to do. Elden Ring is something else entirely. Because I always wished for more from those other games. And now I finally got it.
Few other games have held my attention for a hundred hours. Maybe only, like three. Minecraft, which is just infinite Legos, Animal Crossing, which is, you know, beginning of a global pandemic, and the entire Halo franchise (or perhaps COD Zombies), which is multiplayer-heavy and I grew up playing with my friends down the street. And now Elden Ring. It is going to be a game that cements itself in my memory, just like Dark Souls, just like Bloodborne, just like (weirdly enough) Mario and Pikmin. But it will be cemented in a very weird way. It is now, to me, some sort of reminder of my own limits, of my own hubris. My brain works against me in all things, mental illness is not an easy boss to beat. But it doesn’t usually leak into my free time like this. So if I’m going to love these things, I also need to know how to let them go. And now that I’m ready to do that, it’s perhaps the hardest challenge of all.
I just hope that the next game is much, much smaller.
