Elden Ring Upholds an Unfortunate Dark Souls Tradition

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I think we can all agree that Dark Souls is a great game. The combat, the atmosphere, the lore– there’s a reason we have seen a wave of imitators follow in its wake. In fact, it’s been so influential that we now think about the gaming landscape as “pre” and “post” Dark Souls. Nothing is beyond criticism though, and any praise for FromSoftware’s breakout hit usually has one or two small qualifications to go with it. Resistance is a totally useless stat, for starters, some areas (looking at you Blighttown) are a pain to navigate, and having to farm for titanite can be a bit of a drag.

DUALSHOCKERS VIDEO OF THE DAY

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Minor complaints really, but there’s still a big Asylum Demon in the room; it hurts to have to admit it, but Dark Souls kind of falls apart toward the end. As anyone who has had to play through them can attest, The Demons Ruins and Lost Izalith are both horrible. They aren’t just bad in the context of Dark Souls’ other areas, they are straight-up miserable.

Things get off to a poor start in the Demon Ruins with the first boss, Ceaseless Discharge. At this point in the game, you’ll already have had stellar encounters like the Great Wolf Sif and the Bell Gargoyles, so a big orange blob who can barely bring himself to actually attack you is a bit of a letdown. He gets nowhere near our list of the 10 hardest Dark Souls bosses.

Once he’s out of the way, it only gets worse. Enemies are recycled (the Capra Demon shows up a few times) and the second boss in this area, the Demon Firesage, is a blatant reskin of the Asylum Demon. The Centipede Demon, meanwhile, is just a lazy attempt to make things difficult by covering the arena in lava and giving the player one tiny patch of dirt to stand on during the fight.

Lost Izalith, by contrast, is more bizarre than anything else. Picking your way across a lava lake, surrounded by huge fiery dinosaurs who don’t do anything (unless you make them angry, triggering a weird kangaroo jump attack), makes it seem like FromSoftware reached a point in development where they were slapping whatever they had together and calling it a day. To top it all off, we have the fight against the Bed of Chaos, one of the worst in the entire series, and little more than an exercise in jumping over holes and trimming a couple of unruly hedgerows.

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For all its quality, Elden Ring has a similar problem. I doubt it was a case of resources running dry this time, but something went horribly wrong toward the end. The pacing goes wonky, a couple of the more irritating bosses make their appearance, and the level design isn’t up to snuff.

As soon as you leave the capital–which feels so much like it should be the game’s climax– you’re hit with two of the worst areas in the game: the Forbidden Lands, and the Consecrated Snowfields, which feel like a sequel to the much-maligned Frigid Outskirts from Dark Souls 2. Visibility in the blizzard is almost zero and most of the enemies are ones you’ve fought dozens of times already. It feels like an unnecessary roadblock on the way to the conclusion.

Leyndell royal captital Elden Ring

Then there’s Crumbling Farum Azula which, beyond the cool swirling vortex imagery, is mechanically very dull. I killed the dragon on the bridge (which the camera makes an absolute pain) and another was after me minutes later, only this time I had to run a lightning-themed obstacle course before I could take it on. The platforming in FromSoftware games has never been great, and this sequence did little to change my opinion.

I haven’t even mentioned the Godskin Duo,- who are basically Throne Watcher and Defender, one of the worst bosses from, funnily enough, Dark Souls 2 again. At this point, you will have fought both Godskins on their own several times, so it was hardly very exciting to see them again. You have to fight them in a very small room, and they share a health pool, so even if you kill one of them, they will respawn pretty quickly. Cheesing the fight by abusing the sleep status effect feels like the best approach, which never feels like good design. Fighting one Godskin while the other is asleep defeats the point of a duo boss.

As with the original Dark Souls, Elden Ring’s pacing stumbles in the final quarter, but topped off with an overload of difficulty. Once you make it past the Fire Giant, you are funneled through a gauntlet of some of the hardest (and most annoying) bosses in the game. You’ve got the aforementioned Godskin Duo, but once you’ve beaten them you’re looking at Maliketh, Sir Gideon Ofnir, then Hoarah Loux, and finally Radagon (who, lest we forget, is actually two bosses). It’s too much too fast. All the freedom and exploration get chucked in the bin for a sudden boss rush and consequent difficulty spike.

Like Dark Souls, Elden Ring could’ve been cut down by about a third and been better for it. The final hours feel totally at odds with the rest of the game, and it brings the experience down. Where Elden Ring suffers from a sudden and prolonged shift into a higher gear, Dark Souls screeches to a halt. The same problem but in reverse. Any semblance of pacing goes out the window.

Gehrman The First Hunter

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It’s a shame because when FromSoftware want to, they can absolutely nail this. Bloodborne is nothing if not tight. From the streets of Yharnham, you plunge deeper and deeper into the nightmare, the world is turned upside down after the encounter at Byrgenwerth, and then you fight your way through Yahar’gul to a hauntingly beautiful final confrontation with Gehrman (for the “standard” ending anyway). There’s not an ounce of fat on it.

Elden Ring on the other hand feels like it’s had content bolted on just for the sake of it. The ascent through Leyndell toward the Erdtree feelis so much like a climax that it’s a little jarring to discover that you still have a ways to go, through areas that (just lke in Dark Souls) do very little to endear themselves. Encountering my 9th Night’s Cavalry in the Consecrated Snow Fields brought back unpleasant memories of the parade of Taurus Demons in the Demon Ruins.

So it turns out that FromSoftware are human after all, stretching their ambitions so far as to stumble at the final hurdle on more than one occasion. It doesn’t make these incredible games not worth playing, but it does give the prodigious developer something to work on for their next game, whatever that may be.

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