Critically, Elden Ring has always been a success both for official review sites and players. It’s sporting a glorious 96 on Metacritic and is on the verge of overwhelmingly positive on Steam with a 92% positive review score. It was the only thing anyone in the game sphere could talk about for several months, and despite having come out in February 2022, there was virtually no doubt that this was going to be the game of the year and that it would get almost every single award at the end of the year which it did. I hated it though.

Part of it was due to an admittedly stupid counter reaction I had to the overwhelming praise, the same reason I still haven’t played Undertale is because people who love something so much that they start bullying people for not seeing their game as the best thing that has ever been tends to rub me the wrong way (Rick and Morty is another such example) and FromSoftware’s games at large have had a similar problem for a while. Whilst arguably not as insidious, people who’ve enjoyed games like Dark Souls for a while most often derive a sense of pride from beating these games which are known to be difficult and anyone who finds them too hard or worse, unfair just needs to get good. This stifled the conversation around Elden Ring’s design for a while, as anyone who dared criticising it got buried by hate and insults. Bosses weren’t unfair, they were just more difficult, so just get more good, the open world was the best thing since Breath of The Wild (ha!), I mean just look at how big it is, if you find it uninspired then maybe you’re just stupid, puzzling the story and quests together is part of the fun, if you think a journal or a quest log were needed then maybe you just don’t have the braincells for this masterpiece of a video game.

I had little interest in FromSoftware’s games for all of these reasons, I like having some resistance and challenge from my games but I’m also not interested in trying the same boss several dozen times over, I just get frustrated and to be quite honest, I’m not that good at video games and that’s fine by me, Dark Souls just isn’t for me and I’m OK with that. As artistic as the open world seemed, I found the game lacklustre from a technical point of view and having been burnt out from open worlds for several years already, I didn’t find the scale to be a particular positive. Finally, whilst I don’t enjoy the Skyrim approach of a floating marker telling me exactly where to go next, having quests that revolve around interpreting “Wherst thoughst must leave me, thoughst must now return to the site of birth of the one whomst hatetht me” to know the path forward isn’t exactly my thing either, especially so when the game gives you absolutely nothing to keep track of what is a quest dialogue and what is just flavour text and that half of a character’s quest line is made of steps that can cancel or skip each other out if you defeat the wrong boss at the wrong time. Critically though I based all of my opinions on the game without having touched it once, I derived it all from my 1 hour attempt at playing Dark Souls 1 on PC almost 10 years ago and what my disagreement with almost everything people were praising Elden Ring for.

I did see the light however, and by that I don’t mean I started loving Elden Ring but rather that I saw that it was pretty stupid of me to judge a game just by second hand experience, so I tried it out. I wasn’t going in completely blind, the countless Youtube videos, Reddit posts and press coverage made sure that I knew some of the basics like not even trying to fight the tree sentinel at the start of the game or that the Weeping Peninsula was a noob friendly area if one got stuck on the boss Margitt. Despite that, I absolutely hated my time with the game, the movement was heavy, the attack timings clunky, the boss mechanics too numerous, random and unreadable to play around and being punished for every death with every single enemy respawning meant that I found no fun in the experience. So it is that I left Elden Ring behind, all my opinions confirmed and at odds with the community but to hell with it, I tried it, I hated it and I can leave it at that. Then came Joseph Anderson’s review.

Joseph Anderson is a youtuber who has covered almost every FromSoftware game released and has generally enjoyed all of them. He’s also quite good at these games and uses the redditor approved strategy of “no magic, no summons, no shield, only the most skill full dodges and melee attacks”. His review of Elden Ring however was significantly negative, he confirmed every single issue I had with the game, the boss design is unfair, the open world formula loses its charm quickly once you get past the impressiveness of its scale and the storytelling approach of delivering bread crumbs in item descriptions is reaching its limits. The release of his video had a bit of a floodgates effect on the community at large, people felt safe suddenly to voice their negative opinions on the game, backed by the fact that the great Joseph Anderson almost hated it. This also meant that I suddenly had a lot more critiques of Elden Ring to watch and with every video, my opinions were reinforced, I felt an amazing sense of vindication, finally people were waking up to see the true face of Elden Ring. However, along with overwhelmingly negative critiques, I also started watching other Elden Ring videos, challenge runs, lore introductions, build comparisons and slowly but surely I started to get an itch to play this game I despised so much. As awful as its storytelling is, Elden Ring’s world was really interesting to me, something I couldn’t say about Dark Souls. The challenge runs and build comparisons I watched also showed me some amazing spells, weapons and combat opportunities which all looked delightfully fun, but the problem remained: I don’t have the patience for a game that disrespects my time so badly it negates every effort I’ve made in the past 10 minutes if I happen to die at the wrong time and I have no desire to try the same thing over and over for upwards of an hour. This is when SeamlessCoop decided to blow up.

SeamlessCoop is a mod for Elden Ring which turns the game into a fully fledged cooperative action adventure game. The base game always had some cooperative aspects but it was impossible to roam the world and run through the quests and bosses in a…seamless way whilst also sharing progress and unlocks. Seamless fixes all of these issues and as an added bonus as long as one player was still alive, my own death didn’t mean that the world was going to reset and respawn everything. So I got my partner to play the game with me and off we went. The game was dramatically different with two players, it was easier of course but all the better for me, it was less frustrating, I was following a build guide to minimise difficulty spikes and it was generally a pretty good time. The game however suffers from a wildly admitted problem: the quality drops off a mountain as soon as you get past Leyndell and I felt that drop more intensely than I had anticipated. Every issue I had with the game was compounded in the regions following the capital city, bosses and enemies were becoming more and more frustrating and unfair again, the open world got terribly boring as was my meta build by then. This all culminated to the Haligtree where somewhere halfway through it after yet another death I instantaneously decided that’s it, I’ve had enough, it’s not worth it, I’ve played this game for 100 hours, it was fine, but I am not interested in forcing myself through something that wants me to hate it so badly and that’s where it should have ended.

It didn’t though, Elden Ring was nagging at me, I still liked the world, I still had a good experience for most of my time playing and whilst I was rigidly sticking to my meta build I couldn’t help but notice all those cool weapons and spells I would have liked using but were meant to be worse than the build I was using. So after a few months of cooling down, my partner and I went in fresh. Same game but new approach, we weren’t going to meta build it, we were just going to do builds that seem fun to us. As an added bonus, I had purchased the official game guide which detailed every NPC and its associated quest so we may engage with the world to its fullest. This made me see the game differently once again, my character had a story this time, a mage who on their way to Liurnia encountered Rani, the princess who might be the only one deserving of sitting in the Erdtree and on their way to free Rani from Radahn’s hold on the stars, discovered the power of draconic communion which they embraced with full faith. It felt like playing a real story based game, I had a storyline to follow, my fights against bosses had a narrative reason to be, my build was derived of a role-played personality for my character and I got to use all of those cool dragon spells. This did make the game more difficult than by using a meta build but it also made it easier to stomach frustrations because I was having actual fun playing. This wasn’t without hiccups though and right on schedule, the Haligtree arrived and whilst it wasn’t the issue, its boss Malenia did break my enjoyment of the game at this stage. Dragon spells just weren’t good enough anymore and I was forced into a more meta and more cheesy bleed build. It was frustrating for my roleplaying to be discarded like that by the game’s design but Elden Ring isn’t an RPG so I strictly speaking can’t hold it against the game even if I hate it. We beat Malenia and still had some ways to go, I stuck to my bleed build which was at least funny in how broken it was compared to my dragon build, and it was fairly smooth sailing until we got to the final boss of the game which once more required me to dump out the bleed build for a tailor made monstrosity of a build with no identity whatsoever aside from “beating Elden Beast” and it’s on this sour note that this playthrough ended. The game had been mostly fun, the ending sucked, it was fine, I was happy to be done with it, but I was also happy to have played it to completion.

A third playthrough attempt had to happen though with the release of the DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree. I was anxious about it, especially with FromSoftware removing the possibility of out levelling enemies like in the base game which meant that there was no way for us this time to skirt around the difficulty by doing some side exploration but hopefully after two full years FromSoftware would also have learnt of all its mistakes and poor design decisions in base Elden Ring, right? Yeah, no it was worse, exploration rewards were already mediocre in the base game and became downright insulting in the DLC, boss design has not changed, storytelling is even more nebulous and once more aside from its scale, there’s nothing in this DLC that I can say is honestly good. So it is that somewhere around the 80% completion mark in the DLC area I just randomly said “I really truly despise this game” something my partner picked up on with concern, had I been playing this game for over 200 hours without enjoying myself? This got me thinking, why am I playing this game? I hate it, I genuinely truly and entirely despise the majority of this game, the only reason I’m even trying to play it is because I can play it with my partner, on my own I can’t make it past Margitt without deciding that there’s easier ways to torture myself…and yet I cannot drop it. I have spent more time watching videos and reading lore of this game than I have for any other game (minus Warcraft), I feel an irresistible pull to play the game because it feels comforting to roam the lands between and fight some cool creatures but the game tries so hard to get hated and puts no effort into being enjoyable. It keeps breaking its own rules by randomising boss attacks. It presents a plethora of interesting NPCs but does nothing with them unless you know the exact dance to do to have their story move forward. It boasts hundreds of weapons and spells but designs its bosses to only be beatable with one or two specific builds (if they’re designed to have weaknesses at all). It shows the most artistic open world in a long time but offers no reward for exploring it and it all comes at the price from the game being 10 years out of date from a technical point of view, the textures are blurry, the geometry lacks detail, the lighting is an Instagram filter, the gameplay is rigid and refuses to modernise itself since Dark Souls 1, it just sucks in every single possible aspect.

Yet here I am, doing a fourth playthrough with my partner now. We’ve installed a new mod, Elden Ring Reforged, which brings many fixes, modernisations and gameplay changes the base game dreadfully needed and so far it already is a much more fun experience. I’m sure it eventually will devolve into a frustrating mess that will make me regret allocating it time once more but I’ll be damned if I don’t do it again. I despise this game as much as it hates me but it somehow managed to encapsulate something that I cannot get enough of and that I cannot get from anywhere else and that’s just enough to make me love this game so much nonetheless.