Elden Ring is a good game. This has generally been the consensus from critics and audiences as a whole, and for the most part, I agree with the consensus. After playing 110+ hours and beating most of the bosses, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the work put into the world is more than worthy of praise. Personally, I think the aesthetic of the world, most of the story, and for a large part, the worldbuilding and lore are engaging. More importantly, I think that it’s better than anything any other publisher has even thought about making in the past five years.

If you want to read a review about how sick Elden Ring is and how much it does right, this is not going to be the review for you. I want to acknowledge it’s a good game initially because what I’m going to say is going to come off as harsh and deluded without said acknowledgment.

Let’s talk about difficulty in video games. In the current year, the standard for difficulty is something I’ll refer to as user-selected scaling of difficulty. This means that when someone loads up a game, for the most part, games will ask the user how hard they want the game to be and adjust the damage they take, the damage they do to enemies, how many enemies there are, how many resources are available to them, and a plethora of other variables to change the experience for someone playing the game. Soulsborne games, which are FromSoftware games like Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and other games that have been inspired by the previously mentioned games, do not allow the user to select how difficult the game will be, instead opting to enforce a standard level of play that the user is expected to conform to.

This is the part of the review where most Soulsborne fans would advocate for this type of game design, claiming that the abnormally difficult gameplay forces people to engage with the content with all their faculties instead of waltzing through encounters meant to be more difficult but tuned to appeal to the widest possible audience. In general, I would probably agree with this take, as unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of scaling difficulty systems get higher difficulty right in a large majority of games. If you focus on crafting the difficulty at one level, it’s obviously much easier to control the experience that the user will have.

For better or worse, this view that higher difficulty makes a game better has become the majority opinion in the video game industry. While it used to be a popular movement to advocate for Soulsborne-type difficulty in games, this acceptance of higher difficulty equaling a better game has taken on such a critical mass that there are now people talking about how it’s cool that other people enjoy Elden Ring, but the game is just too hard for them. Other good memes are people wishing that there was a quest log and a giant arrow pointing them to where they need to go. This sentiment is shared by a small minority of people who play the game, but there is also a more sizable minority of people who play games who think that Elden Ring is just too difficult for them and that they could never get into a game that was so difficult. I, on the other hand, am in the popular majority of people who believe that higher difficulty leads to a better game, as long as it’s actually achievable.

Now that we’ve established this groundwork, I am going to indulge in some criticism. I think Elden Ring is too easy. Not only that, but I would also further push and say that the difficulty of the game has pushed the gameplay into being just okay, which I want to further stress is better than 90% of gameplay out at the moment right now. However, as someone who has played all the Soulsborne games, I want to give my perspective as an audience member who has grown together with the games, similar to someone who read the Harry Potter series as it was released while growing up.

Before I do that though, I also want to explain some of my history playing these games. I started Dark Souls 1 playing as a sorcerer, which, for those unfamiliar with the gameplay, is considered one of the “easier” classes to play in the game as you don’t have to engage in fights the same way that melee-based classes have to. I played through most of the games like this until I went back to Dark Souls 3 and did a “real” playthrough with a strength build. Reflecting back on my playthroughs, I definitely struggled through learning the basics of these games, and more importantly, grasping some of the “surprises” that Hidetaka Miyazaki regularly employs in these games.

Even then, I loved the challenge of these games. I remember beating bosses in the first Dark Souls and being so excited that I would scream at my screen iconic phrases such as, “get fucked you dumbass motherfucker” and “eat my ass bitch.”

My perspective on Dark Souls changed drastically after playing FromSoftware’s iconic 2019 Game of the Year, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. You would think that a game made by the same creator, in the same genre, would share too many similarities to distinguish itself significantly from the other works. This was absolutely not the case for Sekiro, however. Without going too much into the specifics of why I love Sekiro, the game engages you in a way that the Dark Souls games just simply do not. The gameplay of Sekiro puts you into the action so intensely, it feels like you’re playing a movie or like you’re actually wielding the sword of Sekiro when you fight some of the more challenging bosses in the game. I have plenty of criticisms of Sekiro’s general gameplay as being too one-dimensional, and its lore and story are simply not as engaging as other Soulsborne games. When it comes to boss gameplay, however, Sekiro elevates itself above all other games ever (in my opinion) and elevates the art of video games closer towards what I would consider the ultimate goal of action in games: to simulate real stories/actions the player can engage in.

This made it difficult for me to look at Dark Souls 3, one of FromSoftware’s crowning achievements, in the same way I had before. What I had seen before as one of the better, more engaging games I have played, I now saw large flaws that I had been completely oblivious to. Most obviously, I think most of the gameplay comes off as not focused, especially the bosses. Challenging bosses like Midir in Dark Souls 3 or Manus in Dark Souls 1, on further reflection, aren’t difficult because of the agility they require you to employ to beat them, but rather they’re difficult because of how wide their attacks are, and the timing and positioning required to dodge their attacks. While in Sekiro, the difficult bosses require timing blocks to perfect parry, a feat that also doesn’t require all that much memorization. Dark Souls games bathe in the spectacle of attacks or the strategic difficulty of the situation rather than the difficulty of engaging in one-on-one combat with the boss itself. Bosses that don’t have these large, sweeping attacks and instead have focused attacks like Gael or Artorias, fights become largely about blocking or avoiding attacks instead of actually meaningfully engaging with the boss itself. And naturally, those that choose to engage with the boss will seek avoidance to some meaningful degree as the punishment for engagement is health loss and death. Avoid, maybe bait the boss into some attack pattern that it will be locked in for a few seconds, wait for the combo to end and designed opening to be exposed, attack or drink, if necessary, repeat to victory. This is the standard Dark Souls gameplay formula for most bosses. Tests of agility come in the form of how lucky your panic rolls are during a move you haven’t seen, or memorizing the timing of a move that keeps killing you so you can dodge at the perfect time.

Now, we come to Elden Ring. After watching the trailers and being really excited about the game, I gave myself a firm reality check by telling myself, “It’s probably just going to be Dark Souls 4.” In spirit, I believe this reality check was exactly correct. Gameplay in Elden Ring follows the exact formula of the previous Dark Souls games, and in some cases, ripping off ideas from previous games and implanting them as its own, making a patchwork super version of Dark Souls. While I would probably recommend the game to people who haven’t played any of the previous Dark Souls games, I think for me, and other Souls’ veterans I have talked to, the game fails to innovate the gameplay formula of the previous games, relying on safe gameplay patterns from Dark Souls 3 and implementing them into a strongly dreamed world like the original Dark Souls.

To me, Elden Ring is more like a Pokémon game. Up until recently, when you pick up a Pokémon game you can expect the same thing from the game as the last twelve generations of games. Handheld, X,Y movement, four moves per Pokémon, six Pokémon with you max, 2D animations, 9 gyms, Elite Four, rival fight, and boom, you’re done with the game. I think it was around Pokémon Platinum when I got sick of the formula, and Pokémon White/Black was the absolute last one I could stomach. It made me so angry to see them still releasing the same game after 20 years and people still praising the series as if it were doing something incredible. For Elden Ring, I feel gameplay-wise, it is in the exact same situation as Pokémon was at Platinum. It’s frustrating too because clearly FromSoft can develop games that move beyond that, but for better or worse, Elden Ring is designed by FromSoftware to appeal to as many people as it can through its time-tested gameplay patterns. People are eating it up now (as they should, I will reiterate, Elden Ring is a good game), but I wonder how long the Dark Souls formula can last when there is potential for so much more out there. You see Pokémon moving to open-world gameplay to mixed reception. Clearly, Elden Ring has much more going for it than Pokémon had at Platinum, but for me personally FromSoft games have hit a repetitive tipping point.

As the ultimate Dark Souls game, Elden Ring succeeds to a degree that it has never done before, especially commercially. The worldbuilding it engages in through its areas, items, art, and enemies is simply unmatched in the industry. Elden Ring aimed to build a compelling world like Dark Souls, and while I do believe that Dark Souls had a more focused, charming, and overall human vision of what FromSoft wanted it to be, Elden Ring achieves FromSoft’s vision through sheer scale and base quality of gameplay.

But I believe that if Miyazaki is not brave enough in the future to innovate Elden Ring 2 away from the traditional Dark Souls gameplay formula, the magic that made Dark Souls so unique will begin to fade in its veteran audiences.