Recent reviews by Aether

For context, I've beaten the game and gotten all endings.

Elden Ring feels like Dark Souls 1 all over again. It has an amazing, unforgettable first half, and a rushed, unfinished second.

I'm still recommending it. It's accessible, and the first half is absolutely worth the price of admission -- the game is so long it may as well be three dark souls games in one anyway -- but it's not a masterpiece by any means.

Lots of reviewers have already been focusing on the pros, since most of these reviews were done when people were still in the early game, so I'll focus on the later game cons.

What you'll experience in the second half
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- copy pasted bosses
- copy pasted enemies
- bosses that are completely overtuned, and I can't help but feel like it's because they expect you to go in with +10 spirit ashes. The bosses spaz out, never knowing who to target, and have absurdly high damage output so that they can melt the mountain of hp that spirit summons have. Not to mention, there are far too many duo bosses, where it feels the intent was to summon a spirit summon and have a normal, one-on-one battle. It feels janky with a summon, and unfair and unfun without one. Bosses being tuned against spirit summons is probably the worst part of this game.
- crafting remains worthless, and, annoyingly, lots more 'rare' crafting materials show up purple, so you fight through a side area for a leaf you will literally never use
- your steed, which will never die to anything but fall damage in the first half, will get two shot by everything in the late game. Not to mention there is an annoying prompt that asks if you actually want to resummon it while in the midst of combat. The fact that this was left in shows me that hardly any gameplay testing was done on the second half of the game.
- dungeons get overly long and tedious while still containing the annoying bleed gremlins from the very first one you find five minutes in
- and, finally, the places in the second half feel far, far too sprawling for their own good. Hardly anything to do but horse around, the enemies are the same ones you've already seen, and they all have so much hp that doing anything but running past them feels like an exercise in tedium

All of these things combined to kill most of my enjoyment in the second half. I still finished it out, but damn. I was completely blown away by how much I enjoyed the beginning of the game, but it fell off, and it fell off hard. I probably sound overly critical, and maybe I am, but far too many people are praising this as a perfect 10/10 game when it's anything but.

TL;DR - L + maidenless + git gud + touch grace

Awesome game with a ton of potential. The gameplay loop is great - even when you lose there's always another thing to incrementally upgrade and make progress on. Plus there's even more progression when it comes to unlockables in the form of new items, new potions, new blessings, etc.

I was able to beat the game in 10 hours which seems a bit faster than average. I could easily see 15 hours of gameplay here, or even 20+ if you like new game+ mode.

Definitely excited to see what new updates bring, I'm excited to get an excuse to start my dungeon delving again!

7/10 - it's alright, but alright games don't really cut it when there are so many awesome indie games you could be playing instead.

For some context, I got my team to max level, beat the currently available content, and got most of the hidden power ups. I didn't do any late game minmaxing to try to get as far as possible in the endless challenge.

Anyway - why didn't I like this game?

I think there are two big reasons.

1. The score mechanic sucks the fun out of the game and
2. The difficulty is extremely inconsistent.

Let's talk about the first point - the score mechanic. You get points for: winning the fight quickly, overkilling the enemy, and not taking damage. Basically... if there's any sort of chance you're not going to win, you don't get a good score. It's a tough battle and one of your monsters is knocked out right away? Enjoy getting 1 star. You're fighting tooth and nail? 1 star. You roll in with a completely overleveled set of monsters, just spam your first attack and demolish the entire battle? That deserves a 5 star for sure.

The overkill mechanic has no place in the game. It's called monster sanctuary. You shouldn't be rewarded for sadistically using your strongest attack and hoping for a critical hit to completely wipe out an innocent slime with 5% hp left off the face of the planet. I think that really hurts the roleplaying aspect of the battles (which, let me remind you, is like 75% of the game).

The other point is damage being penalized. Again, this makes it so that the fights are never close. Just roll with a healer, a buffer, and a dps (that you pick depending on the type of the enemy you're facing) and watch as you steamroll the entire game. And again, this is what the game incentivizes with its score mechanic.

This leads me to my second point - the wild encounters are boring, but the trainer battles are disproportionately way too hard. Not only that, but you get zero preparation for them - you can't swap items around, you can't level up the skills of the monsters you've been keeping in your backpack and not using for the last hour, you just get launched into a very difficult battle. Also, the tactics you've been using now no longer work _just because_. Shields? Bad. Healing? Bad.

And, because all of your trinkets and equipment is optimized for minimizing time to kill (which, again, is what the game rewards) - all of your monsters basically have 0 defense and get wiped out in one hit from your opponents aoe spam.

It's almost not worth talking about anything else - the monster encounters are the majority of this game and I don't think they're done particularly well, so just for that reason alone I wouldn't recommend buying this game. But, to point out some other things - the writing isn't particularly interesting (except for the massive essay dump in the monster encyclopedia that you don't look at until the very end and briefly skim over), the music is very forgettable, the actual overworld, """metroidvania""" mechanics are basically you just waiting to get lucky and hitting that 30% chance you get an earth monster drop so you can activate that earth orb blocking your progress, and finally - there's basically nothing to do with your money. I never felt the need to buy anything, and had 15k gold by the end.

Can I see myself ever giving this a positive rating? I suppose it's _possible_ but, man, every part of this game would need to be revamped - better music, better writing, better difficulty ramp, better gameplay mechanics. I just don't see it.

Nevertheless - I'll give this one more play once it's officially released, and am willing to revise my review based on the improvements (or lack thereof). I can see potential, but right now I'd avoid it.

I put in 2 hours into this game but it was already a chore to play around 30 minutes in. I haven't played any other games in the series, and knew nothing about the game, so I was just going in completely blind. In that sense, this is a completely unbiased review.

I found the gameplay to be very dull. Essentially, the point is to go dungeon diving with monsters you find (pokemon). However, unlike pokemon, where a lot of the time you're fighting other trainers and thus getting variety in your gameplay, you're basically just walking around in the grass and fighting pidgies 24/7. The balance in these fights is completely whack - either you're completely overleveled and just hold down the a button the whole fight, or the monster is completely overleveled, casts one spell, and wipes your whole team.

The reason why games like pokemon work so well is because you want to play as optimally as you can to preserve health / items, so the game loop keeps your attention. In this game, your creatures heal to full after every battle, so there's no point to doing anything other than holding a until you win.

I looked at some other reviews and they all have crazy amounts of hours played. 100, 500, 1000+ hours into the game. These are probably people that have played earlier games and knew what they were getting into. Maybe the game opens up a lot down the road and becomes a lot more fun... But as a new player I care about the new player experience... And the new player experience I got really wasn't that great.

Anyway... it feels like there's some potential here. For example, the writing is pretty good, but the gameplay leaves much to be desired.