For me, this game is a soulless cash-cow built upon the legacy of Dark Souls. If you rip the soul out of Dark Souls, you're left with just the dark. A world built on bleakness for bleakness' sake, carrying none of the charm of characters and themes in past games and ultimately not much of a personal reason for your Tarnished to participate.

If you choose to walk one the paths laid out to you, whether that be becoming Elden Lord, Mistress' Dearest Consort or the source of kindling for the Erdtree, you will face odds that should really be impossible. Both in lore and mechanical construction, the world of Elden Ring should not ever have an Elden Lord of the nature of your character. No amount of iron will or perseverance should allow a tarnished to slay multiple of the enemies found in this game. While previous games carry with them an order that is decaying due to the weakening of the Gods protecting that order, Elden Ring presents more of a power vacuum held empty by great opposing forces; forces that should be too great for the player to overcome.

This raises the question; why is the player able to become Elden Lord? The answer, appears to me, to be that the game is, as most action games are, a power fantasy. A power fantasy set in a bland, generic world where the unreasonably strong main character tears through enemies of unimaginable power with no true explanation and then the credits roll. Dark Souls subverted this trope by showing the player through dialogue and boss weaknesses that they are one of many, but also that making a real change was achievable in a world that is indifferent to your success, even if difficult. To sacrifice this in the name of satisfying the desire of players to feel uniquely powerful is immensely disappointing.

And it was not the only sacrifice made; the open world trend is also responsible in part for the way this game turned out. Dark Souls I features an interconnected, tightly woven map that made use of vertical space to allow the player to explore naturally without needing constant checkpoints to warp between and create a feeling of cohesion and coherence when finding a path to another area. It was a world with a video game in, rather than a world made *for* a video game (Dark Souls II also fails monumentally on this, and yes, Lost Izalith bad, everyone knows this). Elden Ring is a sprawl that is at times tiresome to travel, even with the addition of Torrent and loses the artistry of an interconnected map.

Lastly on the major negatives; it seems to me that the game is built around using a guide. That sucks really bad. Margit's Shackle, as an example, is an awful implementation of the concept that players should explore other areas before fighting the story boss. Why the ♥♥♥♥ does Patches have it? Maybe I missed something in the game that makes that make sense, but hiding away an item intended to help players with a specific boss in a cave means that the difficulty gap for players using a guide and those playing blind is wider than ever; building an appropriate difficulty curve when widening that gap is an impossible ask, and so of course the game falls short. The game is simply too hard without a guide, and too easy with one (my experience of this effect is exacerbated by the fact that I played the early game close to release, when it was much easier to miss Renna turning up at the Church of Elleh to provide the Spirit Calling Bell, but I believe it still stands).

So, are there any positives? I think despite lacking character, the world is pretty aesthetically beautiful at times; the first entrance into Leyndell rivals the entrance to Irithyll or Anor Londo, if not for the fact you end up seeing it so many times due to how the Sites of Grace are distributed in the area and it loses its lustre somewhat. The game presents an overall theme of 'conceptions of ambition', and I think it does an okay job guiding the player towards this subtly, as well as tying in the endings with the theme. It makes perfect thematic sense for endings featuring aims of personal ambition and incremental change to follow the same mould, while the 2 endings with less personal notoriety yet wider systemic change receive unique conclusions. I think the endings also mirror modern politics in some meaningful sense, so I like that.

But anyway; if you like power trips in generic fantasy world 435602, you'll probably like Elden Ring. If you want an artful, empowering, internally coherent world in which to participate, you won't find it here; just a denigration of what the Souls world was.