Elden Ring / Sekiro / Souls / Bloodborne / Souls-likes

Fuck off.

Extremely mild level spoiler

Uninstalled the game after being one-hit killed from a mile away by the final boss for the 20+ straight time. Don't need this kind of drama in my life.

Interesting--to me, it actually feels like they toned the rollcatch bullshit attacks down a little from Dark Souls 3.

I've been carving through pretty much everything with the Bloodhound's Fang all game on a dex build. Sometimes i feel almost too powerful, like yesterday when I first-tried the Leyndell demigod despite playing it like absolute shit because I only needed to hit him like 12 times. My only real roadblocks so far have been the Volcano Manor demigod and just generally getting lost. But from how Froh describes the endgame I'm about to start getting effed in the ass since I'm pure melee.

I leveled up INT a bit so that I can actually use glint pebble and the worst staff but I dunno how much that is gonna help me.

The design and visuals of the capital are absolutely incredible. Part of the reason I spent so much time was just gawking at the views. And like I said in an earlier post it's really designed like an actual city. Like even if it's not gonna help you progress at all there all of these side streets, avenues, buildings, sewers, etc. to explore. A highlight so far.

I just stepped beyond there for a bit last night and it already does feel like a significant difficulty spike.

Sounds like they nerfed the Mimic Tear ash before I could even use it on any endgame bosses. Think the boss of a certain castle in the far north would be pretty much impossible without that dude. And I'm still pretty far from the end I think.

Frustrating as it was to play through the final section of the game with my fully upgraded battle hammer (favorite Dark Souls 3 weapon) while doing completely negligible borderline scratch damage to every enemy and boss despite the lengthy cooldowns using such a heavy weapon typically requires, turning every fight into a prolonged game of patiently waiting my turn like it's a World of Warcraft raid boss, it seemed obvious that most of my issues in that regard would be resolved in a patch. Which isn't to say I find making every post-Rykard boss act like they've just done a hero dose of Adderall while they flail around the area, instantly pivot on a dime so you're always within reach, and read your inputs to punish when you try to heal which you'll inevitably need to do frequently due to the copious damage every single attack does even remotely excusable. Never before had a FromSoft game made me feel like certain bosses were just colossal, insulting wastes of time like Elden Ring routinely did. 

Of course there were elements I actually enjoyed such as how despite being an open-world game released in 2022, instead of going the tried and true Ubisoft or Skyrim clone routes, they took a page from classic CRPG/JRPG design philosophy where areas in the overworld are clearly demarcated into smaller zones with differing levels of difficulty. You can wander from the opening section of relatively tranquil Limgrave to Caelid if you make a wrong right turn and continue on for a couple minutes where you'll be instantly slaughtered by a crow or a terrifying giant dog. Likewise, you're never told where to go explicitly, since the game expects you to have the modicum of intelligence required to figure out which areas are safe to traverse according to your current level. You're also never told that it's an incredibly foolish idea to keep brute forcing Margit and instead you should probably wait until you're properly equipped to fight him, which I respect. 

I beat it. In-game it says 91 hours but my Playstation account says 79 so not sure what's up with that.

Everything up to and including Morgott is a solid 10/10 best game ever made. Well, with typical minor quibbles that you have with all Souls games. After that it gets...mixed.

I actually loved the semi-secret area hidden behind another semi-secret area that for some reason contains the boss that is the center of the marketing campaign, which seems to put me in the minority. That boss however pretty much ruined the rest of the game for me. Just absolute bullshit. She does Isshin's One Mind move from Sekiro with about 1.5 second's warning, and if you happen to be in the middle of an animation and anywhere near her, you just die. Then in the second phase she adds a status effect to that same attack, along with 2 or 3 other devastating attacks that begin with the same jumping animation. Cool! Oh also she heals every time she hits you, even if you block it completely with your shield. Cool!

I beat her after 86 (or so) attempts WITH the Mimic Tear that is basically a cheat code. Though in hindsight i wonder if i was making it harder because attacking the mimic just gives her another way to heal. And like I didn't even feel good about it, it was just a chore. Awful.

So that really impacted my enjoyment of the endgame. I was so frustrated that I just used the Mimic Tear on the whole ending gauntlet of bosses which just trivialized all of them. Then after I finished I was watching a boss ranking video and saw I missed one major one, so I went back and it's locked behind an insanely long and dumb boss run with no Stake of Marika, it's another beast so massive that if you're a melee build you can't even see what it's doing, and then in the second phase you have to sprint across a massive arena and then he teleports to the other side before you can hit him once. So I said fuck it after 2 attempts which is unprecedented. Like that's the whole reason I spent all that time on Malenia, because I wanted to kill every boss.

So yeah, 9.5/10. Can't wait to play again.

considering getting this

If you go back to Redmane and talk to the festival host dude he will like reset it back to a normal place where you can open the doors and fight a forgettable boss.