@@hollowhorizon7196 probably because of the enemies that snipe you across the map with their bows and almost always hits you. I left the area early on because of that but I came back later to clear it out
@@VZapphire all you have to do is clear the middle area and you won't deal with the laser arrow for majority of the altars. they don't use charged shots point blank, just a regular arrow or axes too so bumrushing the middle is perfectly viable.
"You can blissfully loot things while on horseback, and I hope whoever pushed for that at From gets a statue in the lobby.. of themselves.. on HORSEBACK.. PICKING. UP. THEIR. CROWN." Absolutely amazing work and I completely agree.
@@rolandngom5080 You’re flat out incorrect…you have to stop and wait for a little animation to play picking up literally anything in those games. I played Forbidden West right before ER and it was such a difference.
I cannot explain how far my jaw dropped when I opened that transportation chest in the weeping peninsula and got teleported to the very north side of the map…
You're one easily impressed, aren't you. "Wooooooow, map very-very big", except most of it is horse riging simulator across empty spaces between copypasted locations and bosses.
@@AikanaroSauron bro if seeing the size of the map fucking double with no indication didnt surprise you, idfk what will. Also shit is not filled with cipy pasyed content, although there obviously is some, but saying its completely empty is grossly underselling the game
Funnily enough, the most fun I’ve had with Elden Ring was on a NG+ “speedrun” I did. The goal was to just hit the bosses and finish the storyline as quickly as possible (I’m not actually a speed runner with actual strats. Just a man who ran to the next boss as soon as the previous one was defeated). I had a great time because I essentially ran from legacy dungeon to legacy dungeon with a character that had everything they needed. No exploration or side tracking was required. No wading through random locations. It was great fun because it gave me the cream from the top of what the game had to offer.
@@aravinds3846 It's tied to the netcode. In the patch notes you may have noticed that they did mention changes to how their networking works. The bug is probably from that. You'll be fine if you're just playing solo.
The way they made the map seem like the full map is exactly how I always said they should do maps. The true journey of discovery, not knowing how much more is out there is amazing!
I didn't watch any gameplay or haven't played any other similar games, I don't know how many times I thought to myself "there's no way there's more parts of the map". Really enjoyed the game but there are for sure parts of it that frustrated me and I'm yet confused about a lot of things.
@@abco9391 Yeah, I've played quite a few, and you always have the full map visible and you can imagine how much more is left. It's quite sad really and when they hide it this way, you never know if you'll find even more you know 😅
The only game I have seen do that, dynamically extend the map screen as you progress that is, was supreme commander. But frankly I found it more annoying there. Though I supppse in the context of a strategy game the meaning auddenly shifts from dixcovery to the game cheating to get one over you with aomething you couldnt have possibly prepared for.
True. However, I will say though, that the more fragments i found, the more disappointed i got with the ammount of water/unplayable areas there actually was. I mean, look at the mountantop map, for example. 75% of that is just an unplayable cliff. 7.8/10, too much water :/
Something that genuinely upsets me about the fan base for these games is that they conflate "doable" with "good" in terms of game design. Yeah, sure, you *can* do a full no-hit run of the game, but that doesn't mean it's *good.* I love the game, played through it again just because I saw a friend playing it. The community just seems so horrifyingly allergic to criticism. Criticize Malenia? Well *I* beat her at level 1 after dozens of hours of attempts, so that means there's absolutely nothing wrong with her fight. It's a dick measuring contest at this point, and any criticism just means that yours isn't big enough.
Absolutely, I remember some guy giving me shit for criticizing the enemy placement in the "perfect" first half of DS1, and they always respond with their motto "get gud", like, I already beat it, the problem is that it wasn't enjoyable.
I think Elden Ring might be one of the most garbage communities I've ever experienced, in the sense that no one seems to unanimously agree on wether they think something is good or bad game design. And I think that's sad because seeing fans blindly praise the game like it's perfect has had the opposite effect of making me like Elden Ring less. For every time I've brought up a flaw or questionable design choice, I get 5 different responses that tell me I'm wrong and that there's a solution that makes it ok to have in the game. Waterfowl is cheap? Well, you can technically dodge it if you're precise enough, so I guess that makes it fine. Bosses do too much damage? You just need to keep leveling up your Vigor. Too frequent delayed attacks? They're meant to punish panic-rolling so it's fine that they look extremely unnatural and are hard to learn instinctively without dying. Lore is too vague and I'm not given a reason to think about it beyond background noise? Well, once you go out of your way to learn it, it's good, so that makes up for the story-telling.
This game is the best, longest, most diverse, hardest game from software has ever made. It is also the worst, shortest, most repetitive and easiest game they have made
@@austin0_bandit05 Yeah its really odd how it manages to be both the greatest and worst game they've made at the same time lol. For me I could handle the lows of other from games but find it worse here because the game is much longer but can see how someone would just not mind that much
@@plugshirt1762 Basically sums me up. Like I dont want to rob someone of loving this game. I have my criticisms but I dont think they should love it any less. Cheers 🥂!
@@Duffyfactory I disagree. For example I think traversing the open world has zero tension. Not like an atypical Dark Souls level. There's no danger you can't just hop on torrent and run away from, it completely lacks the anxiety of being low on heals and praying for a bonfire in ER you can just teleport away, you're not rewarded by checking every nook and cranny as 75% of the time there'll just be some crafting ingredient and nothing else. Neither DeS or DS2 have this problem
@@JimJamTheAdmin I freaked the fuck out when I saw the dark souls designed chest near the Altus platau margit. The fucking chain scared me even though it wasn't mimic shaped
@@wax3825 There's a new glitch with this patch where she can heal while doing Waterfowl Dance without hitting anything. This seems to only be with that attack, and only when playing multiplayer though.
She's always been able to because it's just lag while on mp, i fought her yesterday and she doesn't heal out of nowhere. It's kinda like when you pvp with a bit of lag you'll get status through your dodges or get bleed and not take damage
"Don't watch until you've played the game yourself" I've been binge watching your critiques for multiple games now and this is the first time I've cursed myself for not beating this game sooner just so I can listen to your video. Keep them coming, you've earned my subscription; thank you for your content!
30:00 The first dragon fight was the best boss fight experience in the game for me. Playing for the first time, I died like 10 times trying to own that dragon, but I was still coming back to try again. Like you said, it was an epic movie scene.
afaict the lack of indication about what is/isn't jumpable (and surprises resulting from it) is because attacks aren't coded as jumpable or not, but rather that jumping gives you specifically lower-body invincibility. Which sort of works on paper, but means there's a lot of fuzzy edges about exactly how high an attack's hitbox reaches and where you are in your jump arc.
For most attacks it is like that, but there also exists an internal flag that some attacks have that makes them fail against anyone in the air. But for some reason, that was also used very inconsistently as well. For instance, the craters from godrick's slams have this flag, but the ones from gargoyle slams do not. Even though they look the exact same, you can always jump the first but not the second.
@@the_Red_Starso it’s sort of like fighting game attacks, where mids and high attacks can look the same, but only the highs are duckable, even though the hitboxes appear identical.
My main problem with this game is that I dread replaying it. I get excited once every twelve months to sink my teeth back into bloodborne or Demon Souls, Dark Souls 1-3. Once conquered these games can be enjoyed in bitesized portions, or if you’ve been replaying for a while like me, you can finish them in a couple of days. Elden Ring is just incredibly time consuming. And unfortunately a lot of that time is spent on a mixed bag of stuff that doesn’t quite work.
Cheats. How I did it was I chose myself 2 main weapons. One upgraded with normal smithing stones and the other with somber. I used cheats to keep all my other weapons at the same level I reached on my main weapons the legit way. I cheated to skip those boring low quality low effort caves and especially catacombs. I just gave myself whatever equipment was in them without going through that 30 minute chore of copy pasted content. This helps with increasing the variety on hand and reducing tedium. What can't be helped is knowing where all the stuff is. It's so easy to become stupidly overpowered by just running around and picking up upgrade materials. Except for the last few bosses which are a massive difficulty spike unless you use mimic tear.
It's funny how apologetic Joseph gets whenever he goes off-script, like we're gonna crucify him if he says a certain amount of words that aren't on the video script that we'll never see
@Violaphobia its sucks sometimes, good game but it does have artificial difficulty, which I dislike so much. This is coming from someone who enjoyed DS2 and has played every souls game with multiple builds and on ng+ multiple times while still keeping the 150 meta for pvp. Only soul game I haven't touched is sekiro, but I feel like BB is the pinnacle of fromsofts creation. The game is fun, in fact it's really great. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have issues dawg.
@@WhiteKnuckleRide512 except it does? You can't TP out until you find a grace of your own. I left the cave and wandered the swamp before finding one near Selia
@@hombreg1 You had to literally walk past a grace at the entrance of the cave in order to do that. That does sound like a really cool experience, but unfortunately not all of us have the advantage of visual impairment.
@@WhiteKnuckleRide512 calling me blind. Nice argument. Point still stands, though. Teleporter traps do "trap" you in the area. What's more, they rely on "you" to figure out you can and should escape, as the myriad of "how to escape selia crystal tunnel" articles would suggest. This makes the idea even more interesting, as having grace points relatively close by teases you with exploration. You also fail to address the fact that you can't teleport until you rest, which is something the game doesn't tell you. So, if you avoid taking too much damage whilst escaping the cave, and only activate the point of grace, you could even respawn inside Caelid whilst being still unable to escape, meeting your definition of "trapped".
This would explain why my favorite boss fight would be Godfrey, he felt like a Ds3 boss and had the simple and easy to punish movement to boot. (Edit: this comment now irrelevant after patch)
The problem with bosses in this game is that they do too much; at one point, fighting radhan without a proper build, I asked myself "Cool, but when do i play?" The bosses just continue to do random bullshit and it feels they misunderstood their own design; but the seeds of this are to be seen in the ds3 last dlc with gael and midir; gigantic Damage Health Bullshit hitboxes Never ending comboes
Yep felt bosses in this game were too aggressive, I could be aggressive as I want in ds3 but in this game I could only hit one time with a strength weapon and a few times with a katana. Let me remind you that these bosses have quite a lot of health which makes the fight unnecessarily longer.
@@fabioviti7384 with Gael it was fine, because it was 3 attacks poke, 3 attacks poke. But Margit the fell, has a 5 or 6 hit combo, he's already worse than Gael or SoC and he's the first boss in the game.
@@kriegscommissarmccraw4205 and, if a krieg commissaria says something is too hard it's a problem; when maliketh is harder to kill than a chaos space marine we have problems
I took note of your praise for Outer Wilds when watching this years ago. Hearing it compared to Ds1 in that you wished you could forget everything and experience it again for the first time was perhaps the best praise possible, and all I needed to hear. Took me years to finally get around to it, and now I feel a profound need to return and thank you
It feels like you spend 95% of the battle dodging and 5% attacking with some of these bosses. In the souls games it was more like 50/50. I.e it felt like an actual fight and not a fucking dodging simulator.
@@JL-lu1ul That was my problem with most of the bosses, some attacks are physically impossible to dodge unless you position yourself perfectly or you run away to position yourself (Malenias waterflow attack, Radagons attacks), also the passiveness of some bossed like elden beast took away from the experience, I spent 80% of the time chasing after the boss rather than fighting it
@@JL-lu1ul Elden beast would’ve been cooler if it was a humanoid enemy with the same attacks, most large bosses you can’t even see the attack they’re throwing at you when you only see 10% of their body up close
@@simplyzed8966 There shouldn’t have been an Elden Beast. After defeating Radagon, Marika should have taken over and shown us why she was the ruling goddess. Very disappointed I had to instead fight a cowardly cosmic Nessie.
@@kakackaa Any weapon within a class will swing at the same speed as every weapon in that class. So "what is the slowest weapon class?" is a better question that will give you to a more complete answer, unless you're counting the torch or some exceedingly slow weapon arts. Ultra Greatswords are pretty slow, Greataxes too.
I know this is a year old but I still have one point. I agree with almost everything you say, besides that. When you started using magic and summons in your 2nd playthrough, you started to wonder if this is the intended experience and everything else is just an artificial challenge you impose to yourself such as a fist only run. And I think, the way you described to play your first run through these games is kind of that. If you damage the enemy, you must be exposed to the risk of taking damage yourself and so on. Which pretty much boils down to a meelee only run. And with the amount of tools you have at your disposal (while still ignoring summons and cheesy magic strats) limiting yourself to only melee is making things harder than they actually are. And what I mean is that I think the game WANTS you to go hybrid in some way towards the end of the game. Not full on glass cannon that never gets near the enemy. But giving you more options against what this game throws at you. You start to reach soft caps and weapon upgrades and the last part of the game has that difficulty spike, that even through spending more points into whatever you've been putting them all along doesn't make you that much stronger against what you're facing. You don't need to abandon a melee focussed action/reaction heavy playstyle to incorporate some options into your build. You said it yourself that some bosses practically ask for you to use spells from afar. And yes it does get boring when that is the only thing you do. But there is so much else that you can be doing while still trying to do melee as much as possible. Figuring out what status a boss might be weak to and using consumables to inflict that status to aid you in your melee fight. This would admittedly be better if the game made it easier to upgrade a lot of different weapons or refund the upgrades you invested into one, so you can experiment more with different weapons, or have one for each element/status. Still I think there is a lot you can incorporate into a melee focussed build such as items or ocassional use of spells or ranged weapons for situations that almost require it.
I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I read somewhere that because both Sekiro and Elden Ring were largely in development at the same time, they didn't have enough time to implement a lot of the lessons they learned from Sekiro. Which might be why the combat feels all over the place.
That wouldn't make sense sekiro was released in 2019 and elden ring 3 whole years after that with sekiro having some development time itself there would have been a lot of time to implement those changes. I believe elden ring entered development in 2019 as dark souls 3 was also released 3 years before sekiro and sekiro does use the most original assets
Elden Ring takes a lot from Sekiro. It’s slight but you can see it. Also the combat is not “all over the place.” It’s way more concise then DS3 for example.
The more chests I opened without a mimic encounter, the more I was convinced the next chest would have one. It also didn't help that the game has several unique assets for 'generic treasure chest' which seem to be interchangeable and serve no purpose other than to make you suspicious, similar to how the level design in dungeons will often include a small cubby with no items that seems tailor made for an invisible wall that doesn't exist.
I have watched this video many times. Only tonight did I notice the freeze frame of Malenia's blade clearly missing you as she kills you. Bravo, Joseph. I miss you. Please upload that lost Sekiro video someday.
Great video! After all that praise you gave Sekiro i got motivated to come back to it, right where I left: to ghost lady in Mibu village. She stopped me a year ago and I've wasted hours trying to tackle her souls-style, with dodging and punishing. Somehow I missed the mechanic where you can regenerate stamina by blocking. It took me half an hour now to defeat her. I did not expect an Elden Ring review to help me come back to Sekiro.
In case you didn’t know, your health also effects how fast your posture bar recovers. Trying to stay near full health is super beneficial if you are trying to break an enemies posture with deflects. Glad you came back to it. Sekiro is From’s best game in my opinion
19:44 There's actually 5 ways up there that I know about. Aside from the 3 you listed. If you beat Radahn and then go to face Fia's Champions in the Deeproot, you can use the teleporter there to go to Leyndell. Additionally, if you use the teleportation chest to go to the Divine Bridge in Leyndell and either use the Taunter's Tongue or summon a buddy, you can actually use an invader to raise the elevator for you, giving you really early access to the capital. My friend did this on his first playthrough, so he actually beat Morgott without ever acquiring a single great rune. 1:37:22 As a shield-user, I cannot describe how awful that felt. The fight didn't feel like a test of skill, so much as a test of endurance. It was pretty rough. At least using shields stops her water fowl move from killing you (unless the attack glitches through the shield, which happens sometimes).
I would have much preferred if Elden Beast was tied to a secret ending, much like Moon Presence in Bloodborne. That way players can be rewarded for exploring and getting a final surprise as they end their game. As well as making Radagon a proper final boss, because as much as I agreed with your problems with him, I think that he's still a really good boss to end the game on.
Seriously, like Gwyn wasn't this crazy over the top anime fight, it was just a husk of a man who you were putting out of his misery. He was about the same level of intense as Radagon. Imagine if you beat Gwyn and then a gigantic fire demon climbed out of the Flame and it was this whole ridiculous 10 minute extra thing
Like it feels so close to the relationship between the hollow knight and the radiance but this time the radiance is mandatory and you don't have to do anything special to unlock her
@@Hugsloth Well, Dark soul 1 also was way, way less obsessed with Difficulty for the sake of Difficulty. True King Alant and Gwyn where ment to show a theme, once grand and powerful beings having broken down to shells that you put out of their misery. But now, all the big bosses need to be super cinematic, multiphase superbosses. Making the individual bosses way less unique.
@@plinfan6541 it’s that dark souls 3 boss design taken to its extreme. Too much extravagant anime nonsense. Just give me a good one on one. That’s why everyone loved Champion Gundyr; it was just you, and this big man with his big bardiche. No surprise phase 2 pus demons, no Elden Beast climbing out of nowhere, no 3 phase boss reviving after death
I like to come back to this video when I here people call this game a masterpiece with no issues. It helps me remember I’m not insane for not completely liking the game
@@bluesfrombluesclues4201 First of all, I don't remember all the issues, after all, it has been roughly a year since i played the game. But here is what i remember from the top of my head. - Selecting spells is extremely annoying. It's entirely possible you have to press a button 5 times to get to the spell you want. To add insult to injury, the number of presses you have to do depends on the spell you currently have active. There is also no way to just go backwards one spell, you have to cycle though all spells to go back one. And all that, while you are in combat, in a game like this. Yes, there is an entirely undocumented feature that helps a little bit with this issue. If you keep the spell selection button pressed for a second or so, you select the first spell in the list. How ever you are supposed to find that out by yourself. And even then, during that time you can't move, since you need the left thumb. Which is really bad in a game like this. - You can't open the map when the game thinks you are in combat. This is very annoying if you are just riding somewhere on Torrent and aggro some random enemy, that seems to be chasing you for ages, even though they are much slower than you. And it's completely unnecessary to forbid opening the map. - You pick up some equipment and want to check what it does. Finding said item is a huge pain, because later in the game you are carrying hundreds of items and you can't sort them by "recently picked up". - There is no description of the stats in the character creation screen. If you don't know how FromSoft games work very well you are creating your character half blind. - You have to talk several times with NPCs until they say the important stuff. In every other game, the NPCs say the important stuff first, and then maybe add other things if you talk to them several times. There is absolutely no point in this, other than just to go against the norm. I wonder how many people missed out on a lot of important stuff because they don't talk with NPCs in games until the dialog is exhausted. - Lock on is the same button as camera reset, and lock on doesn't work if there is some obstacle, such as a corridor corner or even a crate (even if it's smaller than the enemy). I died several times because instead of locking on, my camera turned in a "random" direction and i completely lost orientation. I know, by now you can turn off the camera reset, buy by the time that was patched in, i was already done with the game.
This vid is really interesting because I just finally got and beat ER and I loved every second of it and I don't really mind that I'm now hyper over-levelled for my NG+ run. Yet I also agree with everything he's complaining about. I guess I just like being in and exploring the world enough. And now that I can 3-shot some bosses, I can go basically wherever I desire without worrying about dying.
@@valterlindblad4419 Just because something has been a certain way in the past, doesn't mean it's a good idea to keep doing it. But a lot of fromsoft fans, like you, vehemently defend them whenever they make bad decisions like this, which imo is the main cause that they keep doing the same mistakes. And having important mechanics completely undocumented just because they were in their (and afaik nobody else's) previous games (no idea if they were documented there) is no excuse whatsoever. As for an alternative: Wheel selection, like Horizon for example. You can even keep the short press to simply select the next spell as is. If you weren't supposed to skip enemies, then there is absolutely not point in having Torrent in the game at all, and the map would be way too big. In addition: Enemies still aggro you even if they are way below your level, when there is no point in fighting them. And i said you can't see what stats do in character creation, not while leveling up. I already wrote that they patched in the camera reset thing, but that it came too late for me.
"Bosses in Elden ring will do anime acrobatics for a whole episode including attack chains that involve them taking off into the air, landing into an attack that explodes, and then taking off again into the air, because they're still not done." LOL This describes my experience playing the game so well.
They not only made Pontiff Sulyvahn’s combos and Aldrich’s arrows look tame, but also made an attack more insane than Sephiroth’s Octaslash. Multiple times. In the same game.
Absolutely agreed and genius analogy of the boss fights in Elden Ring. I started realizing this the more I fought Elden Ring Bosses. You need to be super careful and take your time as they get aggressive in order to attack. Elden ring combat systems are still great but its still has some issues with some boss fights. Sekiro and Dark souls 3 have genius great boss fight builds and reactionary combat systems That works for each other.
I appreciate the depth and length of this video and your analysis. But what I really want to point out is how slick that Shania Twain reference was. Impressive indeed.
Hey Joseph. Big fan of your videos, because of how technical and in-depth they are. Due to that, I want to recommend you try out Rain World at some point. I'll admit I'm biased because I love it so much and just want to see a really cool video on it, but beyond that it is an utterly fascinating and unique game in terms of its design. It is the only game I've ever played that breaks its own rules in an interesting and somewhat positive way (in my experience) so would love to see you take a crack at it, if you ever have the time! Definitely think you are one of the few youtubers who could dig past the initial layers and discover what really sets it apart.
I'd be surprised if it isn't revealed some day that Malenia's moveset was originally designed for a Sekiro DLC boss (maybe Tomoe?): --- She wields a katana, moves around insanely quick, almost exclusively has sword-based moves (like most human Sekiro bosses), and has visually stunning attacks that straight up would be fun to deflect in Sekiro and would complement that game's mechanics (as mentioned in the video) --- Her healing from blocking makes way more sense in Sekiro, as it would be a way to punish bad deflection timing, making her an ultimate challenge that requires complete mastery of deflection --- A lot of people have pointed out how she mirrors Wolf in many ways, wielding a katana, having a form of rot, having a prosthetic arm, and even being able to resurrect once (!!!). Malenias die twice, indeed --- There is dialogue in Sekiro implying that Tomoe is in some way connected to a dragonrot outbreak, further connecting her to Malenia in my tinfoil hat world as a mirror version of Wolf --- Not unique to Sekiro, but she does have all the attack types that define the combat of that game, including: sweeps that could be jump countered, stabs that could be mikiri countered, and of course a brutal grab that'll mess your day up. The second phase attack where those ghostly beings attack you, would be fun to learn to deflect before mikiri countering Malenias follow-up stab Data mining has revealed that the version of waterfowl we got in the final game was likely one of the last moves made for the fight. Before that, it appears she had a different version where she danced on the ground and covered much less distance. It appears they went out of their way to make waterfowl the most oppressive, unfun attack in the entire series. Boggles the mind. On the topic of Elden Beast, Joseph definitely nailed it. Why can we not ride Torrent? It not only makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but also from a thematic one. Here we are, at the final challenge, conquering it together with our steed who has been at our side all along (insert Ludwig neighs). We were able to take on Radagon alone, but to defeat the ultimate being in the lands between, we need our trusty companion, almost as if both Melina and Ranni knew we would have no chance of becoming Elden Lord without Torrent. And of course, almost all of Elden Beast's moves seem to be designed around horse combat, including: --- Tracking projectiles that can be outrun on horseback (fear the orb) --- Sweeping attacks and long range sweeping beams that can be jumped over --- The holy elden rings that you're meant to jump over, but can't dodge through (as if the attack was designed for a horse that can't dodge) --- Large AoEs that could be fun to ride away from on horseback --- The boss moving around a huge arena, meaning you have to chase after it on horseback, as you've done countless times against the game's dragons Truly only leaves two explanations. 1: As proposed in the video, Daenerys -- er, I mean, the devs kinda forgot about Torrent. 2: At one point in development they tested the fight without Torrent and thought the added (albeit unfun) challenge enhanced the fight and scrapped the idea of using Torrent, even though the boss was designed around this. Hopefully it's option 1, as 2 makes my blood boil.
@@RedgraveGilver No she probably wouldn't fight like that. Tomoe was all lightning and fighting like she is actually dancing, this is indicated by how the Okami warriors fight in the fountainhead palace. Waterfowl Dance is just straight up copy of Isshin Ashina's one mind except her spinny bullshit covers the entire arena and lasts 10 times longer.
@@arhamsaa Well, like OP said, data miners found that the old Waterfowl Dance was a lot more like dancing. Here's the vid showing it off: ruclips.net/video/xywpJ26hS70/видео.html
@@James-vw4jz yes, he is one of my favorites amongst content creators, who deliver extensive reviews, retrospectives or video essays. Some people speak too fast, or have an eccentric intonation in voice, use some memish-sounds or have poor mic quality. It's also nice that he doesn't emphasize mechanics or story, but talks about all the aspects of the games (usually).
Having played the games, it’s incredible how you direct this video. Cutting to clips and edits that we know exactly what you’re talking to without saying it, but also not spoiling a thing. The witcher edit for bloodborne made me write this lol
1:14:45 - After the Elden Ring Poise video from Illusory Wall it's actually worse than not taking "stagger" damage. Malenia will just ignore being in the negative sometimes.
I realized that we basically had Sekiro bosses but we were limited to a Souls style moveset when I saw a meme on the subreddit that asked "Who would win: Wolf or Malenia". I thought about it for a sec and came to the fairly obvious conclusion that it would be Wolf simply because he could just deflect and contact poison himself to victory... Somebody seems to have misunderstood that the design of the bosses needs to fit with what we're capable of as the player.
Her flowing dance move basically makes her Genichiro on steroids. Lore wise I'd also say that it's unfitting for the central theme of the game being about us rising to the challenge of becoming Elden Lord but with no gameplay means to square up to these demigods in a show of determination and skill. Spectacle wise Godfrey/Hoarah Loux is my favourite boss fight but the fact that I spend most of the second phase running away from him makes his congratulation of my victory in the end ring hollow. If Wolf had defeated him with his combat capabilities it would've been much more fitting.
Indeed, as someone who plays mostly Greatswords and Colossal Weapons, I felt like the game was just punishing me for choosing the wrong weapons. Though mimic tear on NG+ with power stanced Colossal Weapons is very cathartic lmao.
In Dark Souls 3, I can no-hit Champion Gundyr and Pontiff (which I think are the 2 most aggressive bosses of that game) with any greatsword and rolls only. Almost every of their attacks can be punished easily after you know all of them. In Elden Ring however, even with straight sword, I still don't know how to manage doing that consistently with fucking Margit. Yes, I have seen a lot of video about people no-hit him at SL1 naked with a stick, but I know for the fact that they only can attack him when he does some specific certain attack or they just use parry. The only time I think I can hit him safely is when he raises his hand and does a long wind-up attack, go behind him and smack, and then wait to see if he whips his tail to roll. "Just use spirit ash and summons lol". I guess my first playthrough of Elden Ring is exactly like Joseph describes at 48:27. I know I can use them, but why? To me, they make every boss attacks become "punishable attacks", which kinda cheats the boss to me.
@@clixx13 If you've played previous souls games you really shouldn't have TOO hard a time with Margit specifically. I do think that there are problems with the design late game but Margit specifically is fine.
Yeah, so far that's the thing I'm hating. Waiting for my turn to get a single hit it, otherwise I get knocked down. I can deal with one Margit and have fun, find it again later on I just get annoyed.
I watched some Bloodborne, yknow the really aggressive fast game, and it’s like watching pudding roll down a slope compared to the speed of Elden Ring bosses
Joseph has said "Head On" so many times now with such strong inflection that I am starting to think that he's gaslighting me into having the ad stuck in my head again. You know the one.
The observation about the "natural" world being built on ruins struck me too. Mostly because by the endgame I had noticed that almost all the lifts in the game are rising pillars instead of platforms. This is unusual among from soft games. The column lifts in cylindrical shafts gave me the distinct impression of machine pistons rising from deeper machinery.
@@Farengast I will be.. But “almost all the lifts in the game” is a pretty big exaggeration, I ain’t seen one yet and been about quite a bit in every area up to and including Lyndell.. Countless lifts, all platforms
Bruh, that chalice dungeon vs Elden Ring dungeons is insane and wrong. Chalice dungeons are so much more repetitive and boring than Elden Ring dungeons. Absolutely Elden Ring dungeons aren’t perfect but I would take them a million times before going back to chalice dungeons.
BRUH there are once again infinite amazing quotes in this video, here are some of my faves: "You can also blissfully loot things while on horseback, and I hope whoever pushed for that at FROM gets a statue in the Lobby. Of themselves. On horseback. Picking up their crown." "That's why she's called Malenia, because it takes a Milennia to be able to safely hit her" "From a gameplay perspective, I like that Steve can do this ~because I'm clearly biased for Sekiro~ because it's a dynamic way of mixing moves and responses" Perhaps the most important one: "The world of Elden Ring is stunning. The journey I had through it was amazing. The dungeon design is a work of genius, and the combat that filled it as it came near the end bored me to tears even if the visual feast continued."
Reminds me of the mod in Skyrim from like 2014 that let you auto loot items in a radius around you from foot or horseback (configurable to even the kind of items that get picked up) It’s such a simple idea that doesn’t get implemented for some reason in other similar games
For me most memorable quote in this video came someone near the beginning 7:00 with Joe calling the map of Elden RIng a grower compared to a shower XD.
Only having finished Elden Ring now, 10 months after your video. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your critical view. The idea of universal upgrade items isn't even new to From as there was a system like that in the original Shadow Tower which had a hybrid leveling system of upgrading by repeating actions and by spending "Soul Pods" of varying capacity which you could assign to your chosen stat/skill.
i echoed every sentiment in this video, its exactly how i felt when i played, i love this game to bits, but man i seriously felt like there was something off playing it i just could never perfectly put it in to words like you did, amazing review of an amazing but flawed game.
It seems really natural, it's weird he's not there. Someone I talked to mentioned there should be a spiritspring activating when he leaps into the air, so you could fly up there and smack him down, and I agree 'cause that would be super hype
I literally never even tried to use it. Because I assumed I couldn't because I'm in a zone that previously I was not able to use it. I didn't even think I need it either.
Your videos always have very valid critiques of things that don’t really proportionately ruin the same experience for me but I still love how these still manage to bring me down to earth
@@TheHeavensPride I think he means that Joseph isn't to be taken 100% at his word for his critiques because often times he overlooks many important pieces of information in order to push his perspective, even if it comes at the cost of later making him look disingenuous or in some cases even downright arrogant/pretentious. Like when he insulted his audience on twitter for finding Horror games to be scary.
@@fancypantsy2741 I don't know about that twitter story, since I don't follow social media all that much. But yeah, he has his opinion, but that's just like his own opinion, if you ask me. I like his videos in a "On paper this is true, however now I'm gonna draw my own conclusions" kinda way. For example his Mario Odyssey video. I can understand his critique on moons. Heck, I felt the same when I first started watching a friend play the game. But after playing it myself, I came to the conclusion, that it didn't break my gameplay flow as much as it did for him. In the end, it was just different perspectives. And in that sense I value his videos as they present a strong opinion, that I can use to formulate my own.
Just a note on 19:40: there's actually a fourth way to reach the plateau, I think I've seen a few speedrunners use it but beyond that it's extremely obscure. If you get to the Erdtree roots via Nokron, beat Fia's Champions you can then take the teleporter straight into the capital proper. I loved this sort of thing about the original Dark Souls and it's great that it's back. EDIT: There's a FIFTH way. If you take the tower trap teleporter to the capital, usually there's no way down as the elevator is locked. Thing is, it turns out that an invader *can* activate the elevator for you. Requires either luck or a friend. Probably unintentional, but it makes use of regular game mechanics rather than any glitch so I'd call it valid.
@@pinou1894 you can also begin the festival by doing Ranni's questline, after talking to Blaidd in Siofra then speaking to Selivus and Sellen the festival is triggered
@Kill Bill You can't play a game wrong, if you can't enjoy an rpg with the playstyle you want and actually in the game the best thing to do is just not support the franchise anymore. Great to see this meta cuck mentallity ruin another once amazing franchise.
@Kill Bill He said that line specifically when talking about combat. You can't make the bosses fun for him, as he cannot fight them the way he likes it
@Kill Bill learn how to read that's literally not what they're saying. When you're as good as you can be and the game still isn't fun because it's made in a specific way then it's not a skill issue.
that sounds right at first glance, but it doesnt make that much sense, does that mean that if you dont have fun with a game the game is bad? no, games are a combination of freedom and challenge, part of the fun comes from adapting to the games rules and then mastering them. Joseph basically learned how to play the other dark souls games and expected the same strats to work, so when they didnt he just deemed the game unfun
Elden ring's later bosses kind of make me sad because many of them were so close to being great. Malenia would be phenomenal if Waterfowl Dance were changed or removed, as well as perhaps the removal of lifesteal. Godfrey was one of my favorite bosses but Hoarah Loux needs to act more like a living creature and not like a machine testing your ability to count seconds for dodging. In fact, that applies to most bosses, they don't act like a living thing. When a boss takes a while to heft up a massive hammer before striking, that's fine, but it's not fine when three seconds later they swing it around like it weighs nothing. The AOEs on attacks are also ridiculous, I love when a guy hits the ground near me and I spontaneously keel over dead. Overall, I want to like Elden ring, but it has too many flaws in its combat for me to really enjoy it a lot.
it's rare for people to bring up that second point: many bosses are frankly, poorly animated. margit, the leonine misbegotten and the omen all have at least 2 jumping attacks each, but they all fall down at different speeds! some of them even float in place for a moment, then suddenly slam down like a tetris piece. inconsistencies like these made the learning process very frustrating: visual cues are all we have to go on, after all. I don't wanna know what the animation curves look like in this game, lol. probably like an electrocardiogram.
for the comparments to sekiro and how they feel that there is regrestion, its because both games were being developed at the same time by 2 different teams. things like the camera or better understanding of what a player is able to do in a boss fight comes down to that it, while Miyazaki had his hands in both games, one had a lot more focus
I cannot express enough how much I love the idea of one of the caravans being a surprise mimic boss fight and how disappointed I am it's not a thing the moment I heard Joe suggest it.
@@Killroy007 Yeah but the chest coming alive and attacking you after you spent some flasks on one of the caravan trolls and a few of the patrolling soldiers would have definitely been a memorable moment. The thing with the Night's Cavalry bosses patrolling with the caravan at night is that you can see them waaay ahead of time, so it gives you time to plan and prepare. The mimic coming alive with no warning after we spent the whole game not encountering a single mimic would definitely bring back those Sen's Fortress flashbacks.
@@SirGrimLockSmithVIII Just an addendum (you might even already know this). You don't need to kill the trolls, or even fight them at all. If you hit a troll, they'll counterattack, but sit still for a good while, where you can just pop in the back and steal their stuff. In fact, you can even jump up while the carriage is moving and steal the thing! Also, it happened to me multiple times where I'd see the trolls, but their entourage was super far back, so it was a free steal, sadly. Still such a good idea, but the implementation - especially adding a mimic carriage *UNIQUE* boss would be amazing.
@@candy-ass4915 Hell yes that's exactly what I meant. A unique boss fight mimic caravan as a surprise would've been a spectacularly memorable moment that would've been a fan favourite, especially if it was a good boss fight.
@@couchwilly5575 I mean, that's probably not such a bad thing. With Godfrey and radagon coming right before him, I would have been ok with elden beast being a spectacle fight vs what we ended up getting, but yea you're probably right it had to have been a last minute decision.
I agree. I think the combination of Radagon / Elden Beast as a final boss fight on horseback is very reminiscent of Ganondorf/ Beast Ganon in Zelda BotW. As FS took inspiration from BotW anyway these similarities don't seem arbitrary to me.
Finally!!! I gave up on new content from J.Anderson, then I randomly check his channel and find out I'm late. He's now officially the George R.R.Martin of youtube games reviewers 😅
Yeah, my entire time in the endgame I was just thinkining ,, Am I going insane or are there piles upon piles of unavoidable moves, I know I'm way worse at the faster pace fromsoft games than I am at the slower ones like ds 1 and 2, but this doesn't feel fair" and turns out I wasn't alone.
@@shinysnivy6604 you’re absolutely not alone. Hell, I liked the quicker pacer combat of ds3 and Sekiro, but even then a good chunk Elden Ring’s bosses were really hard to keep up with
im sure someone's said it already, but i xant find it in the 17k comments, so i'll just say here - getting a flask back from killing an enemy is never "random." there is a tutorial popup (as intrusive and poorly integrated as they are) that tells you you get flask(s) back for clearing designated enemy groups and camps, based on the size of the camp.
I saw that tutorial too, but it does feel pretty random while playing. Sometimes like 3 or even 1 enemy alone will refill your flask, and other times you'll kill like 40 enemies or clear out an entire area with no flask refills
He meant that in regards to Dark Souls 3 which is why he shows footage of that game there. In a different section, he explains that he knows how it works in Elden Ring. This was to setup how the healing system works mostly in Legacy Dungeons as the healing is different in the open world.
18:57 Dude the ladder discovery was arguably the thing that made me love every single souls game from software made before and after. It was literally a revelation.. I wanna wipe my memory and replay DS1 all over again.
Elden Ring Bosses felt like their 'vulnerable' animations and 'attacking' animations were completely separate. And random. if i were unlucky, i would get attacking animation after animation without any vulnerable state. With some trys being almost a cakewalk while others felt insanely relentless.
From my experience bosses kinda of lack these long windows after combos (like DS3 has it) because the combat itself ISN'T like DS3 combat. Elden Ring has a literal fuckton of boss attacks and animations that will punish players for being too passive, but reward them for being daring and rolling/moving towards the bosses, and most of those actions will give opportunities for dealing damage. If a boss doesn't seem to have a "downtime" after a combo, then the combo itself is flawed and an opportunity for you do deal damage. Is that immediately obvious? No. I also got quite frustrated with some bosses my first time around. But after defeating bosses like radagon and elden beast like 50+ times i genuinely got to appreciate them more, since it just took some time to actually understand their fights.
The thing that gets me are how attack anims are structured In every game, once you start swinging, you're swinging. But enemies will literally step over themselves and hold that initial pose for weirdly long, turning what should be reactionary in to a question of explicit knowledge, and it's MADDENING Like, fuck me I guess, I assumed a swing was, a swing, and not falling with style, so I deserve to get punished for that
Yeah the attack pattern RNG is so bad that it feels like the difference is as big as fighting O&S with sorcery vs fighting them with just a whip and no shield. You can walk through the same fog gate 10 times and get 5 Midirs, 3 Friedes, 1 Capra Demon, and 1 Covetous Demon. Which boss you get is just a dice roll when you walk through.
@@axelnova123 The boss patterns are perfectly fine, you just gotta stop approaching it as Dark Souls 4. Start being more aggressive, roll into attacks and utilise the jump more (not to just do jump r2 attacks but as a tool to avoid attacks) and don't roll preemptively, instead waiting with the roll until the attack actually is being signalled by the boss and suddenly the combat feels a lot more smoother and actually works better. Especially the last couple bosses have moves that actively punish players for rolling away and being too passive and as soon as you try to stick to them more and start being less passive they'll have a lot more openings. Malenia and Margit both have moves that are far more punishing if the player is further away with followup attacks. Radagon has a bunch of roll catches that wouldn't leave a big window of opportunity if approached passively/defensivly, but if you roll into them it's both far easier to avoid any followup damage and to deal damage. Malenia has the quick triple slash that acts as a roll catch but if rolled into it you can easily avoid the 3rd slash. Most of if not all of Fire giants melee attacks can be avoided by just running towards him while on torrent (fighting him on torrent makes the fight pretty simple). I can go on about boss behaviour and attacks, but yeah. Once you stop playing the game like Dark Souls 4 it becomes a lot more fluid and engaging to play.
I feel so validated that someone else is actually criticizing the "boss does 15 moves while I roll-dodge over and over and once they're done I have no stamina to attack". It was the most infuriating on Maliketh because after his insane Devil May Cry Bitchin' 10x in-air combo, he lands 50 feet away and is back to attacking by the time you reach him. So many late-game bosses just made me ask "is it my turn yet?"
Devil May Cry "Bitchin" 10x was freaking hilarious! I deadass laughed out loud. And I feel your pain. i said screw it and used my +10 mimic in phase 2 for that nonsense. Eff that. 😆🤣
This is literally a problem that does not exist. You are making it up lmao. Maliketh has 0 health and massive windows in 2nd phase, especially when he does the standing swipe-overhead combo, where you can literally walk under him and attack for free because the 2nd attack will always miss. He's also a boss that rewards positioning, like with the explosions that he triggers. If you position behind him, he'll jump there after the explosion, giving you a massive window for some hits. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that boss, he's a glass cannon.
late to the party - but i think all the "useless" rewards you get actually help greatly with the NG+ cycles. if you did a completionist playthrough (or close to it), with the ability to respec you can effectively play totally different characters in each NG+ run, using the massive collections of options. and if you found all the bell bearing for smithing stones, you can near max out any weapon you want with a bit of grinding. i did a jack of all trade (but mostly quality and arcane build) for my first run, and made a pure sorcerer out of it in my second run. in my third I'm going to go full dragon priest.
you can, but keep in mind that when this video was released you wouldn't keep ANY bell bearings when hopping into the next NG+ cycle. even if you knew about it beforehand, you'd have to prepare all your new gear in an empty, finished world, and when you actually got on a new cycle to test it, you were stuck with it until you re-unlock everything. and besides... NG+ balancing is pretty poor. early NG+ enemies are like 40% more powerful, sure, but the player is 500% times stronger now, with insane healing, vigor, and maxed-out weapons. you end up killing bosses in 5 hits, it's like a different game.
@@the_Red_Star being OP and shredding through content is the point of NG+ xD Thats why scaling only starts to hit hart in NG+2, the first one is intended as your victory lap, showing the game that gave you so much trouble who's boss.
@@ich3730 that only applies to early game bosses. the late game monsters that you'd want to stomp, like radagon and malenia, are all stronger in NG+. you're fighting them with the same maxed-out weapons you used in NG, but they get improved stats, if only slightly. whatever they intended NG+ to be, it doesn't pull it off consistently.
I agree with some of this , granted I did explore "harder" areas first and made me appreciate when I could 1 or 2 hit enemies especially after beating the game
Well, you essentially dissected the feeling I had when fighting bosses in ER that I would struggle to articulate at the time of playing - a lot of bossfights make you feel like it's the boss playing the game and you're just standing there waiting to squeeze a punish and still being reluctant about getting hit by a followup or simply not landing it due to not being fast enough. Well done, good essay as usual, keep them going
"a lot of bossfights make you feel like it's the boss playing the game and you're just standing there waiting to squeeze a punish and still being reluctant about getting hit by a followup or simply not landing it due to not being fast enough. " emphasis on your first sentence. MAKE YOU FEEL. kill that feeling and go in there. 1st playthrough, you are probably going to die wither you swing or stand so start swinging. you cant believe thr amount of guaranteed openings enemies and bosses have MID combo that you can even stagger them out of if u were aggressive enough(aka how the game actually wants you to play, hence the watered down posture system). so many bosses have such long wind ups u can smack them with a greatsword and dodge right after, so stop standing around. this game is a 2nd guesser. it constantly makes u second guess yourself. thats a deliberate design choice that makes the games combat far better than their previous games barring sekiro. the games are evolving beyond the dull and tired back and forth boss designs of ds3 and below. in this game, u can attack bosses during their wind ups, alot of bosses have shit tracking with vertical attacks and can be strafed or jumped through + jump attack rather than dodge and poke like weve been doing for 10 years. dodge into the bosses with long combos while taking notice where u end up. alot of bosses keep comboing into the wind while i either heal up close or swing. i only killed margot after i learned all this. frankly i think alot of souls veterans are just salty about this game not operating exactly like dark souls. if it was up to the fanbase, we wouldve constantly gotten dull ds1 and bb clones up until now.
@@flamingmanure Obviously, if you learn the boss proberly you will find plenty of additional openings. I did the learning for the SL1 run and even knowing speedrunning/no-hit strats there's still a lot of downtime on certain fights. Good examples of those would be Maliketh/Morgott/Malenia but at the same time fights like Mogh/Godfrey/Radagon are more similar to traditional DS bosses and guess what - they are much more enjoyable to learn and grind as a result. Even after properly learning 'new' bosses I still struggle to like those fights, they just drag too much by making you Player 2 instead of Player 1. Additionally, from what I saw, when asked about their favourite boss in ER majority of players generally name one from the second category, which should be a good indicator if you ask me.
I think the issue with the bs movesets from the bosses always lead to me barely ever leaving a bossfight feeling accomplished. In the back of my mind I always had the feeling that I only won that fight because I got lucky and didnt get too many unfair moves thrown at me.
agreed in many cases, but there is still a decent number of bosses that were solid and, too me at least, they did evoke that familiar feeling from previous games - for example, Godrick, Mohg, Godfrey/Hoarah Loux, Fallingstar Beast (if you stumbled upon that fight at the "correct" level), maybe Morgott if he had more hp from these examples, it seems like they haven't forgotten how to make good bosses, but rather run out of time/resources and decided to slap on something like this for the endgame
I spent the better portion of a day on the final boss because the first phase has an aoe spam that he just would not let up with. The final final boss was cake mostly but id be depleted of my resources from the first phase... My 10 year old son gets to the final boss, first phase never even once drops the aoe attack on him and second phase stays relatively in the same spot so he beat the final bosses in one try. I felt so cheated lol.
@@ThelaziaCafe I never get the fuss about Radagon’s ‘aoe spam’. Dodging into and behind him negates 90% of those and leave you prepared for the remaining 10%.
I'd heavily disagree on that, because the moves rarely ever felt bs. The only bs boss move that's in the game, in my opinion, is malenia's waterfowl, but beyond that every other move is telegraphed and recognizable. Even Margitt telegraphs all his attacks pretty well.
@@jakubpuawski3875 I’d say that Crucible Knight is a better example of a solid boss/mini-boss then Fallingstar Beast. He’s a nice evolution of the Black Knight archetype
The memory stones could have been made valuable to martial characters by changing how Ashes of War were equipped. Rather than having them directly tied to a weapon, you could have them equipped like how spells are. Thus memory stones would allow martial characters to have more than one Ash equipped, and would help them keep pace with the versatility of caster characters.
@@RennyblueI played pure magic build and I had lots of unused slots because I figured out that cycling between too many spells is actually a detriment. I was using Magic Glintblade, Comet, Big Sword Phalanx (forgot name) and Carian Slicer. It literally covered all bases and all other memory slots were mostly useless. Sometimes I used some other spells ociasionally but this setup solved 90% of game
The spear example from Sekiro of an untelegraphed attack out of phase that's a random chance at least works because you have to do something specific to trigger it. I always saw this as a "you cannot jump into spearmen" mechanic. It would be like if dragons always counter-bit you if you jumped into them in elden ring: that's something you can design in that way that feels good and makes sense because it's learnable and doesn't dominate a fight
But he doesn’t do it every time and can do it in response to a sweep which you have to jump over. The only options in that scenario are to assume the attack is coming and deflect (not as bad as it would be in elden ring since the deflect window is so large) or dodge backwards to disengage entirely. Having a move define a fight to discourage something is fine, but having a move require two opposed responses from the player isn’t good design. It’s just not as bad as it could be since you can block midair in sekiro.
@@spinningchurro Yup. But only during co-op. I think people were saying it's a latency glitch where Malenia would heal if she hits summons in the host's world, even if the summons dodged it on their screen. So it ends up looking like she's healing from hitting the air.
Just put Seath's immortality crystal in her room and make it immune to everything except moonveil, NaF sword, Rivers of blood, bloodhound stepping through it and ash summons. Fits perfectly with the design philosophy of that fight.
Dang, lotta comments didn't have fun, not sure what everyone wanted from the game but I got EVERYTHING and more, game had issues but they were overshadowed massively by the good feels. The games open world, can't explore it every single time or you will get burnt out, but thats an open world issue, not an elden ring issue imo.
One more comment I'd add is how frustrating uneven terrain is on many of these bosses. For instance, when you're fighting a dragon, even a slight slope, all of a sudden you can't hit his face. God forbid the boss also has big rocks they can roll on (fire giant).
they shouldve really lowered the dragons heads of centre of gravity or what have you. dragons are the only real gripe i have with this. easily the best game they made by far.
Sometimes slopes also interrupt boss move-sets. So if an enemy is finishing a 10-minute long combo and steps off a lip they'll enter an extremely short falling animation that pretty much makes them skip the recuperating animation and will allow them to transition into another chain. Effectively taking away your window
Игры
43:03 "I stumbled upon Siofra" with 5 giant arrows sticking out of his body was hilariously relatable.
🤣🤣🤣 yes it was
siofra is so pretty but so fucking cheap that it ruined it
@@michaelwerkov3438 what do you mean?
@@hollowhorizon7196 probably because of the enemies that snipe you across the map with their bows and almost always hits you. I left the area early on because of that but I came back later to clear it out
@@VZapphire all you have to do is clear the middle area and you won't deal with the laser arrow for majority of the altars. they don't use charged shots point blank, just a regular arrow or axes too so bumrushing the middle is perfectly viable.
"You can blissfully loot things while on horseback, and I hope whoever pushed for that at From gets a statue in the lobby.. of themselves.. on HORSEBACK.. PICKING. UP. THEIR. CROWN." Absolutely amazing work and I completely agree.
They just patched it into Horizon Forbidden West lol
Timestamp for that?
@@GreebusBleeb that has always existed in horizon it was literally in the first game. Let’s not lie now
@@rolandngom5080 You’re flat out incorrect…you have to stop and wait for a little animation to play picking up literally anything in those games. I played Forbidden West right before ER and it was such a difference.
@Taylor Womack Dude what a GREAT logo for a non-subs channel.
I cannot explain how far my jaw dropped when I opened that transportation chest in the weeping peninsula and got teleported to the very north side of the map…
And then it turns out it's not even the most north you can go, in fact it's closer to the middle!
You're one easily impressed, aren't you. "Wooooooow, map very-very big", except most of it is horse riging simulator across empty spaces between copypasted locations and bosses.
@@AikanaroSauron bro if seeing the size of the map fucking double with no indication didnt surprise you, idfk what will. Also shit is not filled with cipy pasyed content, although there obviously is some, but saying its completely empty is grossly underselling the game
Funnily enough, the most fun I’ve had with Elden Ring was on a NG+ “speedrun” I did. The goal was to just hit the bosses and finish the storyline as quickly as possible (I’m not actually a speed runner with actual strats. Just a man who ran to the next boss as soon as the previous one was defeated). I had a great time because I essentially ran from legacy dungeon to legacy dungeon with a character that had everything they needed. No exploration or side tracking was required. No wading through random locations. It was great fun because it gave me the cream from the top of what the game had to offer.
Agreed, just playing like normal Dark Souls is the most fun in this game
"Why doesn't she attack the air in front of her to heal as well"
This definitely didn't age well lmao
wait, what happen? did malenia get a bug that buff her after patch 1.04?
@@kooe9554 There seems to be a bug with networking where if you're playing co-op Malenia can now heal just by hitting air.
@@0x6e95 lmao good. get poopied on "let me solo her"
@@aravinds3846 It's tied to the netcode. In the patch notes you may have noticed that they did mention changes to how their networking works. The bug is probably from that. You'll be fine if you're just playing solo.
Yeah Joseph needs to stop giving From ideas for even more broken OP bosses...
The way they made the map seem like the full map is exactly how I always said they should do maps. The true journey of discovery, not knowing how much more is out there is amazing!
I didn't watch any gameplay or haven't played any other similar games, I don't know how many times I thought to myself "there's no way there's more parts of the map". Really enjoyed the game but there are for sure parts of it that frustrated me and I'm yet confused about a lot of things.
@@abco9391 Yeah, I've played quite a few, and you always have the full map visible and you can imagine how much more is left. It's quite sad really and when they hide it this way, you never know if you'll find even more you know 😅
@@hansa5867 Yeah it made me happy every time realizing there's more :D
The only game I have seen do that, dynamically extend the map screen as you progress that is, was supreme commander. But frankly I found it more annoying there. Though I supppse in the context of a strategy game the meaning auddenly shifts from dixcovery to the game cheating to get one over you with aomething you couldnt have possibly prepared for.
True. However, I will say though, that the more fragments i found, the more disappointed i got with the ammount of water/unplayable areas there actually was. I mean, look at the mountantop map, for example. 75% of that is just an unplayable cliff. 7.8/10, too much water :/
Something that genuinely upsets me about the fan base for these games is that they conflate "doable" with "good" in terms of game design. Yeah, sure, you *can* do a full no-hit run of the game, but that doesn't mean it's *good.* I love the game, played through it again just because I saw a friend playing it.
The community just seems so horrifyingly allergic to criticism. Criticize Malenia? Well *I* beat her at level 1 after dozens of hours of attempts, so that means there's absolutely nothing wrong with her fight.
It's a dick measuring contest at this point, and any criticism just means that yours isn't big enough.
Child fanbase got larger with this game
Absolutely, I remember some guy giving me shit for criticizing the enemy placement in the "perfect" first half of DS1, and they always respond with their motto "get gud", like, I already beat it, the problem is that it wasn't enjoyable.
I think Elden Ring might be one of the most garbage communities I've ever experienced, in the sense that no one seems to unanimously agree on wether they think something is good or bad game design. And I think that's sad because seeing fans blindly praise the game like it's perfect has had the opposite effect of making me like Elden Ring less. For every time I've brought up a flaw or questionable design choice, I get 5 different responses that tell me I'm wrong and that there's a solution that makes it ok to have in the game.
Waterfowl is cheap? Well, you can technically dodge it if you're precise enough, so I guess that makes it fine. Bosses do too much damage? You just need to keep leveling up your Vigor. Too frequent delayed attacks? They're meant to punish panic-rolling so it's fine that they look extremely unnatural and are hard to learn instinctively without dying. Lore is too vague and I'm not given a reason to think about it beyond background noise? Well, once you go out of your way to learn it, it's good, so that makes up for the story-telling.
@@leithaziz2716The lore one is explainable but the rest is spot on.
Small wiener issue lol
This game is the best, longest, most diverse, hardest game from software has ever made. It is also the worst, shortest, most repetitive and easiest game they have made
Fucking accurate! It has the highest highss and the lowest lows
@@austin0_bandit05 Yeah its really odd how it manages to be both the greatest and worst game they've made at the same time lol. For me I could handle the lows of other from games but find it worse here because the game is much longer but can see how someone would just not mind that much
@@plugshirt1762 Basically sums me up. Like I dont want to rob someone of loving this game. I have my criticisms but I dont think they should love it any less. Cheers 🥂!
@@austin0_bandit05the lows of demons souls and dark souls 2 are way lower then elden rings. By a huge margin
@@Duffyfactory I disagree. For example I think traversing the open world has zero tension. Not like an atypical Dark Souls level. There's no danger you can't just hop on torrent and run away from, it completely lacks the anxiety of being low on heals and praying for a bonfire in ER you can just teleport away, you're not rewarded by checking every nook and cranny as 75% of the time there'll just be some crafting ingredient and nothing else. Neither DeS or DS2 have this problem
I love that whenever Joseph shows a chest in-game, he first hits it with his sword, because the distrust the other Souls games sowed runs deep.
Real ones check the curve of the metal chain on chests to save weapon durability.
lol I was about to write that. mimic chest still give me PTSD
@@JimJamTheAdmin I freaked the fuck out when I saw the dark souls designed chest near the Altus platau margit. The fucking chain scared me even though it wasn't mimic shaped
"Why doesn't she just attack the air in front of her?"
AS OF PATCH 1.04 SHE DOES
Explain?
@@wax3825 There's a new glitch with this patch where she can heal while doing Waterfowl Dance without hitting anything. This seems to only be with that attack, and only when playing multiplayer though.
@@LoudWaffle I've seen her heal with other attacks like the prosthetic kick or any of her normal slashes, but it seems kind of random.
i was gonna say that lmao
She's always been able to because it's just lag while on mp, i fought her yesterday and she doesn't heal out of nowhere.
It's kinda like when you pvp with a bit of lag you'll get status through your dodges or get bleed and not take damage
"Don't watch until you've played the game yourself"
I've been binge watching your critiques for multiple games now and this is the first time I've cursed myself for not beating this game sooner just so I can listen to your video. Keep them coming, you've earned my subscription; thank you for your content!
30:00 The first dragon fight was the best boss fight experience in the game for me. Playing for the first time, I died like 10 times trying to own that dragon, but I was still coming back to try again. Like you said, it was an epic movie scene.
Oh my God it's 2024 already, we have been blessed
Hi RT
Indeed we have. Was not expecting an Anderson review anytime soon.
hey RT, Godrick the Grafted smash or pass
King
hello RT
“I finally finished Noah’s 5-hour Dark Souls essay, now I can go outside”
How naive I was.
I was just about to start that one before seeing this 😂
Was going to say the same thing lol!
Noah's essay is indeed a masterpiece to behold.
Lol.
Agreed with all the above statements. That 5 hour video was really enjoyable.
afaict the lack of indication about what is/isn't jumpable (and surprises resulting from it) is because attacks aren't coded as jumpable or not, but rather that jumping gives you specifically lower-body invincibility. Which sort of works on paper, but means there's a lot of fuzzy edges about exactly how high an attack's hitbox reaches and where you are in your jump arc.
For most attacks it is like that, but there also exists an internal flag that some attacks have that makes them fail against anyone in the air.
But for some reason, that was also used very inconsistently as well.
For instance, the craters from godrick's slams have this flag, but the ones from gargoyle slams do not. Even though they look the exact same, you can always jump the first but not the second.
@@the_Red_Starso it’s sort of like fighting game attacks, where mids and high attacks can look the same, but only the highs are duckable, even though the hitboxes appear identical.
My main problem with this game is that I dread replaying it. I get excited once every twelve months to sink my teeth back into bloodborne or Demon Souls, Dark Souls 1-3. Once conquered these games can be enjoyed in bitesized portions, or if you’ve been replaying for a while like me, you can finish them in a couple of days. Elden Ring is just incredibly time consuming. And unfortunately a lot of that time is spent on a mixed bag of stuff that doesn’t quite work.
Cheats. How I did it was I chose myself 2 main weapons. One upgraded with normal smithing stones and the other with somber. I used cheats to keep all my other weapons at the same level I reached on my main weapons the legit way. I cheated to skip those boring low quality low effort caves and especially catacombs. I just gave myself whatever equipment was in them without going through that 30 minute chore of copy pasted content. This helps with increasing the variety on hand and reducing tedium.
What can't be helped is knowing where all the stuff is. It's so easy to become stupidly overpowered by just running around and picking up upgrade materials. Except for the last few bosses which are a massive difficulty spike unless you use mimic tear.
these games are best playing co op
I loved replaying Elden Ring almost as much as I did replaying Dark Souls 1. Dark Souls 2 and 3 on the other hand, not so much
Yeah I dont think I can see myself ever doing a replay of this game
i have max characters in this game that i manually have to delete to replay… i feel like this game is my favorite to replay
No way. 2 years Joseph, and we get an elden ring video? Man I'm just happy that you're back
He never left. Just became a weaboo a bit
@@MrIlya494 wat?
@@ADFloyd a jab on joes livestreams. He streamed a bunch of weeb games around the time the second witcher video came out.
@@MrIlya494 The Persona 4 incident monkaS
I couldn't fathom the influence Recettear had on this man's future
It's funny how apologetic Joseph gets whenever he goes off-script, like we're gonna crucify him if he says a certain amount of words that aren't on the video script that we'll never see
I think he’s saying sorry to himself lol
Well, he IS Canadian.
@@Nightfurygaming247 lol
Saying anything remotely bad about Elden Ring will make the Reddit cabal send shadow assassins to get you.
@@Ecliptor. you mean they’ll send black knife assassins after him.
I will cry real tears if Joseph ever makes a proper video on outer wilds, the best game of all time
W take
I’ve beaten this game like 3 times now, and I’m working on my fourth. And this video explains every gripe I’ve had with the game perfectly.
So, you also think it sucks?
@Violaphobia its sucks sometimes, good game but it does have artificial difficulty, which I dislike so much. This is coming from someone who enjoyed DS2 and has played every souls game with multiple builds and on ng+ multiple times while still keeping the 150 meta for pvp. Only soul game I haven't touched is sekiro, but I feel like BB is the pinnacle of fromsofts creation.
The game is fun, in fact it's really great. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have issues dawg.
@@Violaphobia No, just because I have gripes doesn’t mean I think it sucks. You can dislike things about something, and still love it to bits.
@@Violaphobia
Saying it sucks would just be dishonest
@@josedorsaith5261 I agree, Joseph was just fishing for a hot take again
Getting teleported to Caelid was one of the scariest moments I've had in gaming, and getting teleported to Leyndell was one of the most astounding.
I really just wish the game had the balls to actually trap you there.
@@WhiteKnuckleRide512 except it does? You can't TP out until you find a grace of your own. I left the cave and wandered the swamp before finding one near Selia
@@hombreg1 You had to literally walk past a grace at the entrance of the cave in order to do that. That does sound like a really cool experience, but unfortunately not all of us have the advantage of visual impairment.
@@WhiteKnuckleRide512 just like seths said lobotomy playtrought is the true way to play eldenring.
@@WhiteKnuckleRide512 calling me blind. Nice argument. Point still stands, though. Teleporter traps do "trap" you in the area.
What's more, they rely on "you" to figure out you can and should escape, as the myriad of "how to escape selia crystal tunnel" articles would suggest. This makes the idea even more interesting, as having grace points relatively close by teases you with exploration. You also fail to address the fact that you can't teleport until you rest, which is something the game doesn't tell you. So, if you avoid taking too much damage whilst escaping the cave, and only activate the point of grace, you could even respawn inside Caelid whilst being still unable to escape, meeting your definition of "trapped".
This would explain why my favorite boss fight would be Godfrey, he felt like a Ds3 boss and had the simple and easy to punish movement to boot.
(Edit: this comment now irrelevant after patch)
The problem with bosses in this game is that they do too much; at one point, fighting radhan without a proper build, I asked myself
"Cool, but when do i play?"
The bosses just continue to do random bullshit and it feels they misunderstood their own design; but the seeds of this are to be seen in the ds3 last dlc with gael and midir; gigantic
Damage
Health
Bullshit hitboxes
Never ending comboes
Yep felt bosses in this game were too aggressive, I could be aggressive as I want in ds3 but in this game I could only hit one time with a strength weapon and a few times with a katana. Let me remind you that these bosses have quite a lot of health which makes the fight unnecessarily longer.
@@fabioviti7384 with Gael it was fine, because it was 3 attacks poke, 3 attacks poke.
But Margit the fell, has a 5 or 6 hit combo, he's already worse than Gael or SoC and he's the first boss in the game.
@@kriegscommissarmccraw4205 yeah, one time I tought 4 hit combos were too much... now elden meme made me play mages
@@kriegscommissarmccraw4205 and, if a krieg commissaria says something is too hard it's a problem; when maliketh is harder to kill than a chaos space marine we have problems
I took note of your praise for Outer Wilds when watching this years ago. Hearing it compared to Ds1 in that you wished you could forget everything and experience it again for the first time was perhaps the best praise possible, and all I needed to hear. Took me years to finally get around to it, and now I feel a profound need to return and thank you
Always appreciated the effort you put into your reviews
What effort? He did no research
@@highlightermarca-texto3281what research my dude its a fkin game. He played the games multiple times
"Why doesn't she attack the air to heal as well?"
prophetic lmao
Funny how there was a glitch where she does that exact thing
When he said “lack of punishable attacks”…
I felt that.
It feels like you spend 95% of the battle dodging and 5% attacking with some of these bosses. In the souls games it was more like 50/50. I.e it felt like an actual fight and not a fucking dodging simulator.
@@JL-lu1ul That was my problem with most of the bosses, some attacks are physically impossible to dodge unless you position yourself perfectly or you run away to position yourself (Malenias waterflow attack, Radagons attacks), also the passiveness of some bossed like elden beast took away from the experience, I spent 80% of the time chasing after the boss rather than fighting it
@@JL-lu1ul Elden beast would’ve been cooler if it was a humanoid enemy with the same attacks, most large bosses you can’t even see the attack they’re throwing at you when you only see 10% of their body up close
@@simplyzed8966 There shouldn’t have been an Elden Beast. After defeating Radagon, Marika should have taken over and shown us why she was the ruling goddess. Very disappointed I had to instead fight a cowardly cosmic Nessie.
@@Sylentmana Agreed that would’ve been amazing, or even Miquella but that’s probably going to be DLC
in Dark Souls, you feel strong enough to survive a fight.
in Bloodborne, the enemies feel strong enough to be a fight.
Hunting the comments trying to find the throwing knife conglomerate
He did it. The madlad actually did it.
that was actually my comment to make :(
"He did it" is for The Witcher 3.
No, he didn't
I like how he beat Dark Souls 3 with the slowest weapon he could find out of spite.
I kinda want to do that too now lol
What is the slowest weapon in DS3?
@@kakackaa probably the Fume knight ultra greatsword, not sure though
@@Epm1771 Yeah, pretty much any UGS or Great Axe should fill the bill
@@kakackaa Any weapon within a class will swing at the same speed as every weapon in that class. So "what is the slowest weapon class?" is a better question that will give you to a more complete answer, unless you're counting the torch or some exceedingly slow weapon arts.
Ultra Greatswords are pretty slow, Greataxes too.
Smoughs Great Hammer would add insult to injury, as it also covers up 80% of the player model
I know this is a year old but I still have one point. I agree with almost everything you say, besides that.
When you started using magic and summons in your 2nd playthrough, you started to wonder if this is the intended experience and everything else is just an artificial challenge you impose to yourself such as a fist only run.
And I think, the way you described to play your first run through these games is kind of that. If you damage the enemy, you must be exposed to the risk of taking damage yourself and so on. Which pretty much boils down to a meelee only run. And with the amount of tools you have at your disposal (while still ignoring summons and cheesy magic strats) limiting yourself to only melee is making things harder than they actually are. And what I mean is that I think the game WANTS you to go hybrid in some way towards the end of the game. Not full on glass cannon that never gets near the enemy. But giving you more options against what this game throws at you. You start to reach soft caps and weapon upgrades and the last part of the game has that difficulty spike, that even through spending more points into whatever you've been putting them all along doesn't make you that much stronger against what you're facing.
You don't need to abandon a melee focussed action/reaction heavy playstyle to incorporate some options into your build. You said it yourself that some bosses practically ask for you to use spells from afar. And yes it does get boring when that is the only thing you do. But there is so much else that you can be doing while still trying to do melee as much as possible. Figuring out what status a boss might be weak to and using consumables to inflict that status to aid you in your melee fight. This would admittedly be better if the game made it easier to upgrade a lot of different weapons or refund the upgrades you invested into one, so you can experiment more with different weapons, or have one for each element/status.
Still I think there is a lot you can incorporate into a melee focussed build such as items or ocassional use of spells or ranged weapons for situations that almost require it.
I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I read somewhere that because both Sekiro and Elden Ring were largely in development at the same time, they didn't have enough time to implement a lot of the lessons they learned from Sekiro. Which might be why the combat feels all over the place.
That wouldn't make sense sekiro was released in 2019 and elden ring 3 whole years after that with sekiro having some development time itself there would have been a lot of time to implement those changes. I believe elden ring entered development in 2019 as dark souls 3 was also released 3 years before sekiro and sekiro does use the most original assets
you simply don't understand game development timelines, then.@@soprasy7735
Elden Ring takes a lot from Sekiro. It’s slight but you can see it. Also the combat is not “all over the place.” It’s way more concise then DS3 for example.
@@soprasy7735
Depends on how the game was developed
But the combat DOES take a lot from Sekiro. It's the DS3 base with the Sekiro reactive boss AI
I love how even though there are no mimic in this game, he NEVER not hitting a chest before opening it. The sen fortress ptsd is real
I mean i do that too out of instinct
Why? The mimics have front facing chains at their side instead of the normal, backward facing chains, every other chest has. No need of hitting.
The more chests I opened without a mimic encounter, the more I was convinced the next chest would have one. It also didn't help that the game has several unique assets for 'generic treasure chest' which seem to be interchangeable and serve no purpose other than to make you suspicious, similar to how the level design in dungeons will often include a small cubby with no items that seems tailor made for an invisible wall that doesn't exist.
@@AbelMusa i DIDNT KNOW THAT
@@AbelMusa I knew that about DS1, It took me a while to learn about the chest differences in DS2 though.
If eldin ring had one more tree spirit only then would i call it a masterpiece
If only we got to fight Godskin trio : (
And then the Godskin quadruplets
A mod exists for that
Same
How about Gargoyle Trio
I have watched this video many times. Only tonight did I notice the freeze frame of Malenia's blade clearly missing you as she kills you. Bravo, Joseph. I miss you. Please upload that lost Sekiro video someday.
'Thats why she's called malenia, because it takes a millenia to be able to safely hit her'
lmaoo 1:20:45
Certainly wasn't expecting another video before witcher 3, can't wait to watch!
@Melvin Deeply but I thought this was my comment
@@spaghett5531 I guess he bought your comment in an auction man. 🤷🏾♂
OUR comment, comrade
@Melvin Deeply damn… I call dibs on your comment then.
Wait this isn't the Witcher 3?
RETURN OF THE KING
Not to mention the owner of the "Wubba Lubba Sub Club"
The Witcher 3 video will probably come out after another 2 year hiatus
I cannot express the joy I feel that one of my two favorite video essayers watches the other one of my two favorite video essayers
this guy gets it 😌
He said Siofra River wrong so I get to dismiss all criticism he makes
Great video!
After all that praise you gave Sekiro i got motivated to come back to it, right where I left: to ghost lady in Mibu village. She stopped me a year ago and I've wasted hours trying to tackle her souls-style, with dodging and punishing. Somehow I missed the mechanic where you can regenerate stamina by blocking. It took me half an hour now to defeat her. I did not expect an Elden Ring review to help me come back to Sekiro.
In case you didn’t know, your health also effects how fast your posture bar recovers. Trying to stay near full health is super beneficial if you are trying to break an enemies posture with deflects.
Glad you came back to it. Sekiro is From’s best game in my opinion
You got to mibu village while playing Sekiro like a souls game!? How...
19:44 There's actually 5 ways up there that I know about. Aside from the 3 you listed. If you beat Radahn and then go to face Fia's Champions in the Deeproot, you can use the teleporter there to go to Leyndell. Additionally, if you use the teleportation chest to go to the Divine Bridge in Leyndell and either use the Taunter's Tongue or summon a buddy, you can actually use an invader to raise the elevator for you, giving you really early access to the capital. My friend did this on his first playthrough, so he actually beat Morgott without ever acquiring a single great rune.
1:37:22 As a shield-user, I cannot describe how awful that felt. The fight didn't feel like a test of skill, so much as a test of endurance. It was pretty rough. At least using shields stops her water fowl move from killing you (unless the attack glitches through the shield, which happens sometimes).
I would have much preferred if Elden Beast was tied to a secret ending, much like Moon Presence in Bloodborne. That way players can be rewarded for exploring and getting a final surprise as they end their game. As well as making Radagon a proper final boss, because as much as I agreed with your problems with him, I think that he's still a really good boss to end the game on.
Seriously, like Gwyn wasn't this crazy over the top anime fight, it was just a husk of a man who you were putting out of his misery. He was about the same level of intense as Radagon.
Imagine if you beat Gwyn and then a gigantic fire demon climbed out of the Flame and it was this whole ridiculous 10 minute extra thing
Like it feels so close to the relationship between the hollow knight and the radiance but this time the radiance is mandatory and you don't have to do anything special to unlock her
@@Hugsloth I’m not looking forward to fighting elden beast on higher ng+’s. The unavoidable tracking sphere projectile thing is going to hurt so bad
@@Hugsloth Well, Dark soul 1 also was way, way less obsessed with Difficulty for the sake of Difficulty. True King Alant and Gwyn where ment to show a theme, once grand and powerful beings having broken down to shells that you put out of their misery.
But now, all the big bosses need to be super cinematic, multiphase superbosses. Making the individual bosses way less unique.
@@plinfan6541 it’s that dark souls 3 boss design taken to its extreme. Too much extravagant anime nonsense. Just give me a good one on one. That’s why everyone loved Champion Gundyr; it was just you, and this big man with his big bardiche. No surprise phase 2 pus demons, no Elden Beast climbing out of nowhere, no 3 phase boss reviving after death
0:00 Intro
2:15 World level design
21:30 THE NEGATIVE
23:05 recycled content
27:20 Boring shire style dungeons
35:03 disappointing rewards
42:10 lack of Level Scaling
46:56 late games Bosses design
1:14:14 misc negatives
1:27:57 misc
1:38:18 Conclusion
Much appreciated
👑
hope he pins this
💎
was about to comment, a video this long not split into sections is a bold strategy. real hero
regardless of the future thank you for your videos bro whatever you do thank you fr
I like to come back to this video when I here people call this game a masterpiece with no issues. It helps me remember I’m not insane for not completely liking the game
And the video doesn't even touch on the plethora of other issues, many of them related to the UI.
@@Naryoril what problems does the ui have? genuinly curious
@@bluesfrombluesclues4201 First of all, I don't remember all the issues, after all, it has been roughly a year since i played the game. But here is what i remember from the top of my head.
- Selecting spells is extremely annoying. It's entirely possible you have to press a button 5 times to get to the spell you want. To add insult to injury, the number of presses you have to do depends on the spell you currently have active. There is also no way to just go backwards one spell, you have to cycle though all spells to go back one. And all that, while you are in combat, in a game like this.
Yes, there is an entirely undocumented feature that helps a little bit with this issue. If you keep the spell selection button pressed for a second or so, you select the first spell in the list. How ever you are supposed to find that out by yourself. And even then, during that time you can't move, since you need the left thumb. Which is really bad in a game like this.
- You can't open the map when the game thinks you are in combat. This is very annoying if you are just riding somewhere on Torrent and aggro some random enemy, that seems to be chasing you for ages, even though they are much slower than you. And it's completely unnecessary to forbid opening the map.
- You pick up some equipment and want to check what it does. Finding said item is a huge pain, because later in the game you are carrying hundreds of items and you can't sort them by "recently picked up".
- There is no description of the stats in the character creation screen. If you don't know how FromSoft games work very well you are creating your character half blind.
- You have to talk several times with NPCs until they say the important stuff. In every other game, the NPCs say the important stuff first, and then maybe add other things if you talk to them several times. There is absolutely no point in this, other than just to go against the norm. I wonder how many people missed out on a lot of important stuff because they don't talk with NPCs in games until the dialog is exhausted.
- Lock on is the same button as camera reset, and lock on doesn't work if there is some obstacle, such as a corridor corner or even a crate (even if it's smaller than the enemy). I died several times because instead of locking on, my camera turned in a "random" direction and i completely lost orientation. I know, by now you can turn off the camera reset, buy by the time that was patched in, i was already done with the game.
This vid is really interesting because I just finally got and beat ER and I loved every second of it and I don't really mind that I'm now hyper over-levelled for my NG+ run. Yet I also agree with everything he's complaining about. I guess I just like being in and exploring the world enough. And now that I can 3-shot some bosses, I can go basically wherever I desire without worrying about dying.
@@valterlindblad4419 Just because something has been a certain way in the past, doesn't mean it's a good idea to keep doing it. But a lot of fromsoft fans, like you, vehemently defend them whenever they make bad decisions like this, which imo is the main cause that they keep doing the same mistakes. And having important mechanics completely undocumented just because they were in their (and afaik nobody else's) previous games (no idea if they were documented there) is no excuse whatsoever.
As for an alternative: Wheel selection, like Horizon for example. You can even keep the short press to simply select the next spell as is.
If you weren't supposed to skip enemies, then there is absolutely not point in having Torrent in the game at all, and the map would be way too big. In addition: Enemies still aggro you even if they are way below your level, when there is no point in fighting them.
And i said you can't see what stats do in character creation, not while leveling up.
I already wrote that they patched in the camera reset thing, but that it came too late for me.
"Bosses in Elden ring will do anime acrobatics for a whole episode including attack chains that involve them taking off into the air, landing into an attack that explodes, and then taking off again into the air, because they're still not done." LOL This describes my experience playing the game so well.
They not only made Pontiff Sulyvahn’s combos and Aldrich’s arrows look tame, but also made an attack more insane than Sephiroth’s Octaslash. Multiple times. In the same game.
It's one of the biggest issues. You have 10% of the time to attack
Absolutely agreed and genius analogy of the boss fights in Elden Ring. I started realizing this the more I fought Elden Ring Bosses. You need to be super careful and take your time as they get aggressive in order to attack. Elden ring combat systems are still great but its still has some issues with some boss fights. Sekiro and Dark souls 3 have genius great boss fight builds and reactionary combat systems That works for each other.
@@Zephhi 2%
I appreciate the depth and length of this video and your analysis. But what I really want to point out is how slick that Shania Twain reference was. Impressive indeed.
I think it was a callback to his dark souls 3 video
Hey Joseph. Big fan of your videos, because of how technical and in-depth they are. Due to that, I want to recommend you try out Rain World at some point. I'll admit I'm biased because I love it so much and just want to see a really cool video on it, but beyond that it is an utterly fascinating and unique game in terms of its design. It is the only game I've ever played that breaks its own rules in an interesting and somewhat positive way (in my experience) so would love to see you take a crack at it, if you ever have the time! Definitely think you are one of the few youtubers who could dig past the initial layers and discover what really sets it apart.
I'd be surprised if it isn't revealed some day that Malenia's moveset was originally designed for a Sekiro DLC boss (maybe Tomoe?):
--- She wields a katana, moves around insanely quick, almost exclusively has sword-based moves (like most human Sekiro bosses), and has visually stunning attacks that straight up would be fun to deflect in Sekiro and would complement that game's mechanics (as mentioned in the video)
--- Her healing from blocking makes way more sense in Sekiro, as it would be a way to punish bad deflection timing, making her an ultimate challenge that requires complete mastery of deflection
--- A lot of people have pointed out how she mirrors Wolf in many ways, wielding a katana, having a form of rot, having a prosthetic arm, and even being able to resurrect once (!!!). Malenias die twice, indeed
--- There is dialogue in Sekiro implying that Tomoe is in some way connected to a dragonrot outbreak, further connecting her to Malenia in my tinfoil hat world as a mirror version of Wolf
--- Not unique to Sekiro, but she does have all the attack types that define the combat of that game, including: sweeps that could be jump countered, stabs that could be mikiri countered, and of course a brutal grab that'll mess your day up. The second phase attack where those ghostly beings attack you, would be fun to learn to deflect before mikiri countering Malenias follow-up stab
Data mining has revealed that the version of waterfowl we got in the final game was likely one of the last moves made for the fight. Before that, it appears she had a different version where she danced on the ground and covered much less distance. It appears they went out of their way to make waterfowl the most oppressive, unfun attack in the entire series. Boggles the mind.
On the topic of Elden Beast, Joseph definitely nailed it. Why can we not ride Torrent? It not only makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but also from a thematic one. Here we are, at the final challenge, conquering it together with our steed who has been at our side all along (insert Ludwig neighs). We were able to take on Radagon alone, but to defeat the ultimate being in the lands between, we need our trusty companion, almost as if both Melina and Ranni knew we would have no chance of becoming Elden Lord without Torrent.
And of course, almost all of Elden Beast's moves seem to be designed around horse combat, including:
--- Tracking projectiles that can be outrun on horseback (fear the orb)
--- Sweeping attacks and long range sweeping beams that can be jumped over
--- The holy elden rings that you're meant to jump over, but can't dodge through (as if the attack was designed for a horse that can't dodge)
--- Large AoEs that could be fun to ride away from on horseback
--- The boss moving around a huge arena, meaning you have to chase after it on horseback, as you've done countless times against the game's dragons
Truly only leaves two explanations. 1: As proposed in the video, Daenerys -- er, I mean, the devs kinda forgot about Torrent. 2: At one point in development they tested the fight without Torrent and thought the added (albeit unfun) challenge enhanced the fight and scrapped the idea of using Torrent, even though the boss was designed around this. Hopefully it's option 1, as 2 makes my blood boil.
Her waterfowl dance is clearly something Tomoe would have done based on the descriptions of how she fights. Imagine waterfowl dance with lightning.
@@RedgraveGilver No she probably wouldn't fight like that. Tomoe was all lightning and fighting like she is actually dancing, this is indicated by how the Okami warriors fight in the fountainhead palace. Waterfowl Dance is just straight up copy of Isshin Ashina's one mind except her spinny bullshit covers the entire arena and lasts 10 times longer.
@@arhamsaa Well, like OP said, data miners found that the old Waterfowl Dance was a lot more like dancing. Here's the vid showing it off: ruclips.net/video/xywpJ26hS70/видео.html
Waterfowl Dance: Run away for the first flurry, dodge into the second flurry twice. Never get hit again.
@@20Gero09 Who asked?
Finally, a new video to rewatch 8 times over in the next 6 months :)
Spot on :D
@@Simotin The mans voice is the most soothing way to fall asleep
@@James-vw4jz yes, he is one of my favorites amongst content creators, who deliver extensive reviews, retrospectives or video essays. Some people speak too fast, or have an eccentric intonation in voice, use some memish-sounds or have poor mic quality.
It's also nice that he doesn't emphasize mechanics or story, but talks about all the aspects of the games (usually).
Totally different review styles but I like Noah Cadwell Gervais. He just put out a long video on ds1-ds3 pretty good.
Need your videos to fill the void :D
Having played the games, it’s incredible how you direct this video. Cutting to clips and edits that we know exactly what you’re talking to without saying it, but also not spoiling a thing. The witcher edit for bloodborne made me write this lol
1:14:45 - After the Elden Ring Poise video from Illusory Wall it's actually worse than not taking "stagger" damage. Malenia will just ignore being in the negative sometimes.
I realized that we basically had Sekiro bosses but we were limited to a Souls style moveset when I saw a meme on the subreddit that asked "Who would win: Wolf or Malenia". I thought about it for a sec and came to the fairly obvious conclusion that it would be Wolf simply because he could just deflect and contact poison himself to victory... Somebody seems to have misunderstood that the design of the bosses needs to fit with what we're capable of as the player.
Her flowing dance move basically makes her Genichiro on steroids.
Lore wise I'd also say that it's unfitting for the central theme of the game being about us rising to the challenge of becoming Elden Lord but with no gameplay means to square up to these demigods in a show of determination and skill.
Spectacle wise Godfrey/Hoarah Loux is my favourite boss fight but the fact that I spend most of the second phase running away from him makes his congratulation of my victory in the end ring hollow.
If Wolf had defeated him with his combat capabilities it would've been much more fitting.
Well said. You nailed it. That's why this one pisses me off THAT much. And why I still think Sekiro is the real masterpiece.
Malenia fits Elden Ring much more than Demon of Hatred fits Sekiro.
Not necessarily true, Malenia is very doable m8.
I think she’d just heal off deflections. Wolf is an easy clap for her.
“Lack of punishable attacks” this was it. This nailed it on the head
Indeed, as someone who plays mostly Greatswords and Colossal Weapons, I felt like the game was just punishing me for choosing the wrong weapons. Though mimic tear on NG+ with power stanced Colossal Weapons is very cathartic lmao.
In Dark Souls 3, I can no-hit Champion Gundyr and Pontiff (which I think are the 2 most aggressive bosses of that game) with any greatsword and rolls only. Almost every of their attacks can be punished easily after you know all of them.
In Elden Ring however, even with straight sword, I still don't know how to manage doing that consistently with fucking Margit. Yes, I have seen a lot of video about people no-hit him at SL1 naked with a stick, but I know for the fact that they only can attack him when he does some specific certain attack or they just use parry. The only time I think I can hit him safely is when he raises his hand and does a long wind-up attack, go behind him and smack, and then wait to see if he whips his tail to roll.
"Just use spirit ash and summons lol".
I guess my first playthrough of Elden Ring is exactly like Joseph describes at 48:27. I know I can use them, but why? To me, they make every boss attacks become "punishable attacks", which kinda cheats the boss to me.
@@hoangphuc6041 I've done a RL1 playthrough. Margit is actually pretty straightforward to deal with imo
@@gdn5001 A majority of people seem to not have this experience, including people who enjoy previous souls games.
@@clixx13 If you've played previous souls games you really shouldn't have TOO hard a time with Margit specifically. I do think that there are problems with the design late game but Margit specifically is fine.
The armour mannequins in the roundtable hold is such a good idea omg
I hope Joseph comes back for TOTK. Your videos are some of the best out here
I knew he'd bring up the ringed city at some point. When I was playing through the capital I was thinking "damn, Joseph probably loves this".
The way you described the boss combos and punish windows was so spot on.
I'm starring to realize maybe that's why we have spirit summons since it can be hard to punish bosses
Yeah, so far that's the thing I'm hating. Waiting for my turn to get a single hit it, otherwise I get knocked down. I can deal with one Margit and have fun, find it again later on I just get annoyed.
except for beast clergyman. the attack he said is unreactable has an animation telling you its about to happen for almost a full second
I watched some Bloodborne, yknow the really aggressive fast game, and it’s like watching pudding roll down a slope compared to the speed of Elden Ring bosses
@@lilramennoodle8056 starting to? Seemed pretty clear when from gave them to you and also had a billion spam bosses.
the writing here in this video is immaculate, but Shabriri Gripes is just. beautiful and amazing, thank you so much lol
Joseph has said "Head On" so many times now with such strong inflection that I am starting to think that he's gaslighting me into having the ad stuck in my head again.
You know the one.
The observation about the "natural" world being built on ruins struck me too. Mostly because by the endgame I had noticed that almost all the lifts in the game are rising pillars instead of platforms. This is unusual among from soft games. The column lifts in cylindrical shafts gave me the distinct impression of machine pistons rising from deeper machinery.
To be be fair it probably is as there are whole undrrground ruins that used to citys
Almost all the lifts are rising pillars?? 52 hours in and every lift I’ve seen has been a platform
@@Primitive01 keep playing
@@Farengast I will be.. But “almost all the lifts in the game” is a pretty big exaggeration, I ain’t seen one yet and been about quite a bit in every area up to and including Lyndell.. Countless lifts, all platforms
@@Primitive01 if you've made it to Lyndell you have absolutely ridden on many pillar lifts. They are more common later in the game though.
It took him 2 years to review a game that came out 2 months ago....
That's what I call dedication. WELCOME BACK!
1:12:26
"Do you know what this means as a player, FromSoft!?!"
😂😂😂
Bruh, that chalice dungeon vs Elden Ring dungeons is insane and wrong. Chalice dungeons are so much more repetitive and boring than Elden Ring dungeons. Absolutely Elden Ring dungeons aren’t perfect but I would take them a million times before going back to chalice dungeons.
BRUH there are once again infinite amazing quotes in this video, here are some of my faves:
"You can also blissfully loot things while on horseback, and I hope whoever pushed for that at FROM gets a statue in the Lobby.
Of themselves.
On horseback.
Picking up their crown."
"That's why she's called Malenia, because it takes a Milennia to be able to safely hit her"
"From a gameplay perspective, I like that Steve can do this ~because I'm clearly biased for Sekiro~ because it's a dynamic way of mixing moves and responses"
Perhaps the most important one:
"The world of Elden Ring is stunning. The journey I had through it was amazing. The dungeon design is a work of genius, and the combat that filled it as it came near the end bored me to tears even if the visual feast continued."
Reminds me of the mod in Skyrim from like 2014 that let you auto loot items in a radius around you from foot or horseback (configurable to even the kind of items that get picked up)
It’s such a simple idea that doesn’t get implemented for some reason in other similar games
For me most memorable quote in this video came someone near the beginning 7:00 with Joe
calling the map of Elden RIng a grower compared to a shower XD.
This guy is literally putting into words the feeling i had when fighting each boss in a way I wouldn't be able to express.
Only having finished Elden Ring now, 10 months after your video. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your critical view. The idea of universal upgrade items isn't even new to From as there was a system like that in the original Shadow Tower which had a hybrid leveling system of upgrading by repeating actions and by spending "Soul Pods" of varying capacity which you could assign to your chosen stat/skill.
i echoed every sentiment in this video, its exactly how i felt when i played, i love this game to bits, but man i seriously felt like there was something off playing it i just could never perfectly put it in to words like you did, amazing review of an amazing but flawed game.
Absolutely agree that the horse was meant to be used against the elden beast, first thing I did when I got into the room was try to summon torrent.
Yeah it really feels like you are supposed to be faster/jump higher to avoid attacks it really has the feel of a dragon fight
It seems really natural, it's weird he's not there. Someone I talked to mentioned there should be a spiritspring activating when he leaps into the air, so you could fly up there and smack him down, and I agree 'cause that would be super hype
its so arbitrary what's summonable where in this game sometimes lol
I literally never even tried to use it. Because I assumed I couldn't because I'm in a zone that previously I was not able to use it.
I didn't even think I need it either.
Your videos always have very valid critiques of things that don’t really proportionately ruin the same experience for me but I still love how these still manage to bring me down to earth
Have you seen his Soma video? Or his subjectivity is implied video?
Heyyy I love your shit!
@@leelee8d793 What about them?
@@TheHeavensPride I think he means that Joseph isn't to be taken 100% at his word for his critiques because often times he overlooks many important pieces of information in order to push his perspective, even if it comes at the cost of later making him look disingenuous or in some cases even downright arrogant/pretentious. Like when he insulted his audience on twitter for finding Horror games to be scary.
@@fancypantsy2741 I don't know about that twitter story, since I don't follow social media all that much.
But yeah, he has his opinion, but that's just like his own opinion, if you ask me.
I like his videos in a "On paper this is true, however now I'm gonna draw my own conclusions" kinda way.
For example his Mario Odyssey video. I can understand his critique on moons. Heck, I felt the same when I first started watching a friend play the game. But after playing it myself, I came to the conclusion, that it didn't break my gameplay flow as much as it did for him. In the end, it was just different perspectives.
And in that sense I value his videos as they present a strong opinion, that I can use to formulate my own.
I'm listening to this in the car and had to pull over to commend you for 'shabriri gripes' 😂 10/10
He killed Rykard without the gimmick weapon. Good lord
Just a note on 19:40: there's actually a fourth way to reach the plateau, I think I've seen a few speedrunners use it but beyond that it's extremely obscure. If you get to the Erdtree roots via Nokron, beat Fia's Champions you can then take the teleporter straight into the capital proper. I loved this sort of thing about the original Dark Souls and it's great that it's back.
EDIT: There's a FIFTH way. If you take the tower trap teleporter to the capital, usually there's no way down as the elevator is locked. Thing is, it turns out that an invader *can* activate the elevator for you. Requires either luck or a friend. Probably unintentional, but it makes use of regular game mechanics rather than any glitch so I'd call it valid.
You can get to the plateau via Erdtree roots but you need to kill radahn first, and unfortunately the festival only begins once you reach the plateau
@@pinou1894 you can also begin the festival by doing Ranni's questline, after talking to Blaidd in Siofra then speaking to Selivus and Sellen the festival is triggered
@@pinou1894 Ranni's questline also activates the festival, and doesn't require getting to the plateau.
@@StormKidProductions and here I am hearing for the first time that you don't actually need Ranni to go beat Radahn
“If you’re having fun, your playing the game right.”
Thank you
I feel like a lot of people forget that’s the main reason we game. To have fun.
@Kill Bill You can't play a game wrong, if you can't enjoy an rpg with the playstyle you want and actually in the game the best thing to do is just not support the franchise anymore. Great to see this meta cuck mentallity ruin another once amazing franchise.
@Kill Bill not exactly if the game _doesn't allow_ for him to enjoy it
@Kill Bill He said that line specifically when talking about combat. You can't make the bosses fun for him, as he cannot fight them the way he likes it
@Kill Bill learn how to read that's literally not what they're saying. When you're as good as you can be and the game still isn't fun because it's made in a specific way then it's not a skill issue.
that sounds right at first glance, but it doesnt make that much sense, does that mean that if you dont have fun with a game the game is bad? no, games are a combination of freedom and challenge, part of the fun comes from adapting to the games rules and then mastering them. Joseph basically learned how to play the other dark souls games and expected the same strats to work, so when they didnt he just deemed the game unfun
Can’t wait for the video on Ragnarok
I really love this video
When the world needed him most, he came back
Cannot agree more!
unoriginal
When the world didn't need him most, he returned
Without Witcher 3
Hopefully soon, im glad he took a break though. He needed it
I just miss him streaming tbh, the Witcher vid can come whenever
Elden ring's later bosses kind of make me sad because many of them were so close to being great. Malenia would be phenomenal if Waterfowl Dance were changed or removed, as well as perhaps the removal of lifesteal. Godfrey was one of my favorite bosses but Hoarah Loux needs to act more like a living creature and not like a machine testing your ability to count seconds for dodging. In fact, that applies to most bosses, they don't act like a living thing. When a boss takes a while to heft up a massive hammer before striking, that's fine, but it's not fine when three seconds later they swing it around like it weighs nothing. The AOEs on attacks are also ridiculous, I love when a guy hits the ground near me and I spontaneously keel over dead.
Overall, I want to like Elden ring, but it has too many flaws in its combat for me to really enjoy it a lot.
Skill. Issue.
Be better buddy
it's rare for people to bring up that second point: many bosses are frankly, poorly animated.
margit, the leonine misbegotten and the omen all have at least 2 jumping attacks each, but they all fall down at different speeds! some of them even float in place for a moment, then suddenly slam down like a tetris piece. inconsistencies like these made the learning process very frustrating: visual cues are all we have to go on, after all.
I don't wanna know what the animation curves look like in this game, lol. probably like an electrocardiogram.
for the comparments to sekiro and how they feel that there is regrestion, its because both games were being developed at the same time by 2 different teams. things like the camera or better understanding of what a player is able to do in a boss fight comes down to that it, while Miyazaki had his hands in both games, one had a lot more focus
I cannot express enough how much I love the idea of one of the caravans being a surprise mimic boss fight and how disappointed I am it's not a thing the moment I heard Joe suggest it.
Isnt that somewhat the case with the caravan that's patrolled by dark knights?
@@Killroy007 Yeah but the chest coming alive and attacking you after you spent some flasks on one of the caravan trolls and a few of the patrolling soldiers would have definitely been a memorable moment.
The thing with the Night's Cavalry bosses patrolling with the caravan at night is that you can see them waaay ahead of time, so it gives you time to plan and prepare.
The mimic coming alive with no warning after we spent the whole game not encountering a single mimic would definitely bring back those Sen's Fortress flashbacks.
@@SirGrimLockSmithVIII Just an addendum (you might even already know this). You don't need to kill the trolls, or even fight them at all. If you hit a troll, they'll counterattack, but sit still for a good while, where you can just pop in the back and steal their stuff. In fact, you can even jump up while the carriage is moving and steal the thing! Also, it happened to me multiple times where I'd see the trolls, but their entourage was super far back, so it was a free steal, sadly. Still such a good idea, but the implementation - especially adding a mimic carriage *UNIQUE* boss would be amazing.
@@candy-ass4915 Hell yes that's exactly what I meant.
A unique boss fight mimic caravan as a surprise would've been a spectacularly memorable moment that would've been a fan favourite, especially if it was a good boss fight.
Torrent for elden beast actually makes so much sense and would have made elden beast a fun fight
You also would've been able to dodge the falling stars attack too.
I honestly think the fight was made for Torrent in mind, but was switched up last minute. Maybe the fight was too easy with torrent?
@@couchwilly5575 I mean, that's probably not such a bad thing. With Godfrey and radagon coming right before him, I would have been ok with elden beast being a spectacle fight vs what we ended up getting, but yea you're probably right it had to have been a last minute decision.
I agree. I think the combination of Radagon / Elden Beast as a final boss fight on horseback is very reminiscent of Ganondorf/ Beast Ganon in Zelda BotW. As FS took inspiration from BotW anyway these similarities don't seem arbitrary to me.
I'm actually amazed that torrent wasnt an option
This is the greatest video i’ve ever seen 👏
Finally!!! I gave up on new content from J.Anderson, then I randomly check his channel and find out I'm late. He's now officially the George R.R.Martin of youtube games reviewers 😅
Always so fascinating seeing someone literally explain my exact feelings towards a video game far better then I ever could.
Same especially with the boss part, thought I was crazy
Yeah, my entire time in the endgame I was just thinkining ,, Am I going insane or are there piles upon piles of unavoidable moves, I know I'm way worse at the faster pace fromsoft games than I am at the slower ones like ds 1 and 2, but this doesn't feel fair" and turns out I wasn't alone.
@@shinysnivy6604 you’re absolutely not alone. Hell, I liked the quicker pacer combat of ds3 and Sekiro, but even then a good chunk Elden Ring’s bosses were really hard to keep up with
Ain't no way he disappears 2/3rds through a series and comes back on an elden ring video and in 14 hours he's top 24 on gaming. Legendary
im sure someone's said it already, but i xant find it in the 17k comments, so i'll just say here - getting a flask back from killing an enemy is never "random." there is a tutorial popup (as intrusive and poorly integrated as they are) that tells you you get flask(s) back for clearing designated enemy groups and camps, based on the size of the camp.
I saw that tutorial too, but it does feel pretty random while playing. Sometimes like 3 or even 1 enemy alone will refill your flask, and other times you'll kill like 40 enemies or clear out an entire area with no flask refills
He meant that in regards to Dark Souls 3 which is why he shows footage of that game there. In a different section, he explains that he knows how it works in Elden Ring. This was to setup how the healing system works mostly in Legacy Dungeons as the healing is different in the open world.
@@raccoonlad”Feels random” vs “Is random.”
It’s not random.😊
18:57 Dude the ladder discovery was arguably the thing that made me love every single souls game from software made before and after. It was literally a revelation.. I wanna wipe my memory and replay DS1 all over again.
Elden Ring Bosses felt like their 'vulnerable' animations and 'attacking' animations were completely separate. And random. if i were unlucky, i would get attacking animation after animation without any vulnerable state. With some trys being almost a cakewalk while others felt insanely relentless.
From my experience bosses kinda of lack these long windows after combos (like DS3 has it) because the combat itself ISN'T like DS3 combat.
Elden Ring has a literal fuckton of boss attacks and animations that will punish players for being too passive, but reward them for being daring and rolling/moving towards the bosses, and most of those actions will give opportunities for dealing damage.
If a boss doesn't seem to have a "downtime" after a combo, then the combo itself is flawed and an opportunity for you do deal damage.
Is that immediately obvious? No. I also got quite frustrated with some bosses my first time around. But after defeating bosses like radagon and elden beast like 50+ times i genuinely got to appreciate them more, since it just took some time to actually understand their fights.
The thing that gets me are how attack anims are structured
In every game, once you start swinging, you're swinging. But enemies will literally step over themselves and hold that initial pose for weirdly long, turning what should be reactionary in to a question of explicit knowledge, and it's MADDENING
Like, fuck me I guess, I assumed a swing was, a swing, and not falling with style, so I deserve to get punished for that
Yeah the attack pattern RNG is so bad that it feels like the difference is as big as fighting O&S with sorcery vs fighting them with just a whip and no shield. You can walk through the same fog gate 10 times and get 5 Midirs, 3 Friedes, 1 Capra Demon, and 1 Covetous Demon. Which boss you get is just a dice roll when you walk through.
@@tsunamie1015 That happens when combat carries over almost 1 to 1, the boss patterns on Elden Ring are not meant to be fought with DS3's toolkit.
@@axelnova123 The boss patterns are perfectly fine, you just gotta stop approaching it as Dark Souls 4.
Start being more aggressive, roll into attacks and utilise the jump more (not to just do jump r2 attacks but as a tool to avoid attacks) and don't roll preemptively, instead waiting with the roll until the attack actually is being signalled by the boss and suddenly the combat feels a lot more smoother and actually works better.
Especially the last couple bosses have moves that actively punish players for rolling away and being too passive and as soon as you try to stick to them more and start being less passive they'll have a lot more openings.
Malenia and Margit both have moves that are far more punishing if the player is further away with followup attacks. Radagon has a bunch of roll catches that wouldn't leave a big window of opportunity if approached passively/defensivly, but if you roll into them it's both far easier to avoid any followup damage and to deal damage. Malenia has the quick triple slash that acts as a roll catch but if rolled into it you can easily avoid the 3rd slash. Most of if not all of Fire giants melee attacks can be avoided by just running towards him while on torrent (fighting him on torrent makes the fight pretty simple).
I can go on about boss behaviour and attacks, but yeah. Once you stop playing the game like Dark Souls 4 it becomes a lot more fluid and engaging to play.
I feel so validated that someone else is actually criticizing the "boss does 15 moves while I roll-dodge over and over and once they're done I have no stamina to attack". It was the most infuriating on Maliketh because after his insane Devil May Cry Bitchin' 10x in-air combo, he lands 50 feet away and is back to attacking by the time you reach him. So many late-game bosses just made me ask "is it my turn yet?"
Devil May Cry "Bitchin" 10x was freaking hilarious! I deadass laughed out loud. And I feel your pain. i said screw it and used my +10 mimic in phase 2 for that nonsense. Eff that. 😆🤣
Skill issue
Actually it’s really easy for maliketh to not have to roll if you u circle around the pillars
This is literally a problem that does not exist. You are making it up lmao. Maliketh has 0 health and massive windows in 2nd phase, especially when he does the standing swipe-overhead combo, where you can literally walk under him and attack for free because the 2nd attack will always miss. He's also a boss that rewards positioning, like with the explosions that he triggers. If you position behind him, he'll jump there after the explosion, giving you a massive window for some hits. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that boss, he's a glass cannon.
It's not the boss it's you get good
late to the party - but i think all the "useless" rewards you get actually help greatly with the NG+ cycles. if you did a completionist playthrough (or close to it), with the ability to respec you can effectively play totally different characters in each NG+ run, using the massive collections of options. and if you found all the bell bearing for smithing stones, you can near max out any weapon you want with a bit of grinding. i did a jack of all trade (but mostly quality and arcane build) for my first run, and made a pure sorcerer out of it in my second run. in my third I'm going to go full dragon priest.
you can, but keep in mind that when this video was released you wouldn't keep ANY bell bearings when hopping into the next NG+ cycle.
even if you knew about it beforehand, you'd have to prepare all your new gear in an empty, finished world, and when you actually got on a new cycle to test it, you were stuck with it until you re-unlock everything.
and besides... NG+ balancing is pretty poor. early NG+ enemies are like 40% more powerful, sure, but the player is 500% times stronger now, with insane healing, vigor, and maxed-out weapons. you end up killing bosses in 5 hits, it's like a different game.
@@the_Red_Star being OP and shredding through content is the point of NG+ xD Thats why scaling only starts to hit hart in NG+2, the first one is intended as your victory lap, showing the game that gave you so much trouble who's boss.
@@ich3730 that only applies to early game bosses. the late game monsters that you'd want to stomp, like radagon and malenia, are all stronger in NG+. you're fighting them with the same maxed-out weapons you used in NG, but they get improved stats, if only slightly.
whatever they intended NG+ to be, it doesn't pull it off consistently.
I agree with some of this , granted I did explore "harder" areas first and made me appreciate when I could 1 or 2 hit enemies especially after beating the game
Well, you essentially dissected the feeling I had when fighting bosses in ER that I would struggle to articulate at the time of playing - a lot of bossfights make you feel like it's the boss playing the game and you're just standing there waiting to squeeze a punish and still being reluctant about getting hit by a followup or simply not landing it due to not being fast enough. Well done, good essay as usual, keep them going
"a lot of bossfights make you feel like it's the boss playing the game and you're just standing there waiting to squeeze a punish and still being reluctant about getting hit by a followup or simply not landing it due to not being fast enough. " emphasis on your first sentence. MAKE YOU FEEL. kill that feeling and go in there. 1st playthrough, you are probably going to die wither you swing or stand so start swinging.
you cant believe thr amount of guaranteed openings enemies and bosses have MID combo that you can even stagger them out of if u were aggressive enough(aka how the game actually wants you to play, hence the watered down posture system). so many bosses have such long wind ups u can smack them with a greatsword and dodge right after, so stop standing around. this game is a 2nd guesser. it constantly makes u second guess yourself. thats a deliberate design choice that makes the games combat far better than their previous games barring sekiro.
the games are evolving beyond the dull and tired back and forth boss designs of ds3 and below. in this game, u can attack bosses during their wind ups, alot of bosses have shit tracking with vertical attacks and can be strafed or jumped through + jump attack rather than dodge and poke like weve been doing for 10 years. dodge into the bosses with long combos while taking notice where u end up. alot of bosses keep comboing into the wind while i either heal up close or swing. i only killed margot after i learned all this. frankly i think alot of souls veterans are just salty about this game not operating exactly like dark souls. if it was up to the fanbase, we wouldve constantly gotten dull ds1 and bb clones up until now.
@@flamingmanure Obviously, if you learn the boss proberly you will find plenty of additional openings. I did the learning for the SL1 run and even knowing speedrunning/no-hit strats there's still a lot of downtime on certain fights. Good examples of those would be Maliketh/Morgott/Malenia but at the same time fights like Mogh/Godfrey/Radagon are more similar to traditional DS bosses and guess what - they are much more enjoyable to learn and grind as a result. Even after properly learning 'new' bosses I still struggle to like those fights, they just drag too much by making you Player 2 instead of Player 1.
Additionally, from what I saw, when asked about their favourite boss in ER majority of players generally name one from the second category, which should be a good indicator if you ask me.
@@sailor_selleru just wanna complain about anything
@@sailor_seller Mohg isn’t even like that wdym. Mohg has tons of delays
@@janterri3539 Not in second phase…
I think the issue with the bs movesets from the bosses always lead to me barely ever leaving a bossfight feeling accomplished. In the back of my mind I always had the feeling that I only won that fight because I got lucky and didnt get too many unfair moves thrown at me.
agreed in many cases, but there is still a decent number of bosses that were solid and, too me at least, they did evoke that familiar feeling from previous games - for example, Godrick, Mohg, Godfrey/Hoarah Loux, Fallingstar Beast (if you stumbled upon that fight at the "correct" level), maybe Morgott if he had more hp
from these examples, it seems like they haven't forgotten how to make good bosses, but rather run out of time/resources and decided to slap on something like this for the endgame
I spent the better portion of a day on the final boss because the first phase has an aoe spam that he just would not let up with. The final final boss was cake mostly but id be depleted of my resources from the first phase... My 10 year old son gets to the final boss, first phase never even once drops the aoe attack on him and second phase stays relatively in the same spot so he beat the final bosses in one try. I felt so cheated lol.
@@ThelaziaCafe I never get the fuss about Radagon’s ‘aoe spam’. Dodging into and behind him negates 90% of those and leave you prepared for the remaining 10%.
I'd heavily disagree on that, because the moves rarely ever felt bs. The only bs boss move that's in the game, in my opinion, is malenia's waterfowl, but beyond that every other move is telegraphed and recognizable. Even Margitt telegraphs all his attacks pretty well.
@@jakubpuawski3875 I’d say that Crucible Knight is a better example of a solid boss/mini-boss then Fallingstar Beast. He’s a nice evolution of the Black Knight archetype
The memory stones could have been made valuable to martial characters by changing how Ashes of War were equipped. Rather than having them directly tied to a weapon, you could have them equipped like how spells are. Thus memory stones would allow martial characters to have more than one Ash equipped, and would help them keep pace with the versatility of caster characters.
Even spellcasting builds don’t need that much memory slots
@@Rennyblue yeah at some point I was just equipping a bunch of random stuff I knew I never used or might need in some sort of nieche event
That's actually a really cool idea
@@RennyblueI played pure magic build and I had lots of unused slots because I figured out that cycling between too many spells is actually a detriment. I was using Magic Glintblade, Comet, Big Sword Phalanx (forgot name) and Carian Slicer. It literally covered all bases and all other memory slots were mostly useless. Sometimes I used some other spells ociasionally but this setup solved 90% of game
You can by hard or soft swapping weapons(hard swap is going into the inventory to equip it and soft swap is normal swapping)
The spear example from Sekiro of an untelegraphed attack out of phase that's a random chance at least works because you have to do something specific to trigger it. I always saw this as a "you cannot jump into spearmen" mechanic. It would be like if dragons always counter-bit you if you jumped into them in elden ring: that's something you can design in that way that feels good and makes sense because it's learnable and doesn't dominate a fight
But he doesn’t do it every time and can do it in response to a sweep which you have to jump over. The only options in that scenario are to assume the attack is coming and deflect (not as bad as it would be in elden ring since the deflect window is so large) or dodge backwards to disengage entirely. Having a move define a fight to discourage something is fine, but having a move require two opposed responses from the player isn’t good design. It’s just not as bad as it could be since you can block midair in sekiro.
This video perfectly nailed everything I ever wanted to say about this game. Thanks for coming back from the dead to make this.
"Why doesn't she attack the air to heal as well?"
Patch 1.04 be like: Actually, why not
Did the patch seriously do that?! That’s hilarious!
@@spinningchurro
Yup. But only during co-op. I think people were saying it's a latency glitch where Malenia would heal if she hits summons in the host's world, even if the summons dodged it on their screen. So it ends up looking like she's healing from hitting the air.
She should have a passive heal 100 hp per tic.
@@thunderlifestudios No she should just heal to full every time you don't manage to 1 shot her.
Just put Seath's immortality crystal in her room and make it immune to everything except moonveil, NaF sword, Rivers of blood, bloodhound stepping through it and ash summons. Fits perfectly with the design philosophy of that fight.
Dang, lotta comments didn't have fun, not sure what everyone wanted from the game but I got EVERYTHING and more, game had issues but they were overshadowed massively by the good feels. The games open world, can't explore it every single time or you will get burnt out, but thats an open world issue, not an elden ring issue imo.
if its an issue in elden ring than its an elden ring issue
7:00 "Shower vs grower," the comedic bits in these videos are perfect.
One more comment I'd add is how frustrating uneven terrain is on many of these bosses. For instance, when you're fighting a dragon, even a slight slope, all of a sudden you can't hit his face. God forbid the boss also has big rocks they can roll on (fire giant).
*Flashbacks to that Demi-Human Queen in the Volcano area*
they shouldve really lowered the dragons heads of centre of gravity or what have you. dragons are the only real gripe i have with this. easily the best game they made by far.
thank god someone mentioned it!
Sometimes slopes also interrupt boss move-sets. So if an enemy is finishing a 10-minute long combo and steps off a lip they'll enter an extremely short falling animation that pretty much makes them skip the recuperating animation and will allow them to transition into another chain. Effectively taking away your window
MHW slopes in a nutshell