For each thing Elden Ring does right, there's frustration to be had elsewhere. This makes certain parts of the game great, while other areas feel like a chore. As much as the adventure can be memorable and the controls exceptional, several of the bosses are not fun to engage with at all, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
If Breath of the Wild's open world made you wonder what's over the hill, Elden Ring's open world often makes you question where the designers really intended for you to go next.
That is largely due to the game's cryptic NPC questline progression, coupled with the fact that each area has a hidden recommended level. You either find out where you're meant to go the hard way, or through a guide. If you explore a harder area before an easier one, you'll be over-leveled for the area you were meant to go first, and the bosses there won't be as enjoyable as they could have been, further encouraging the use of a guide.
Many bosses are either too easy to be satisfying, or too much of a pain in the rear to be enjoyable to fight. An example of the latter would be the Fallingstar Beasts. A keen eye will have noticed the plural there. That is because this game reuses almost all of its bosses several times, to pad out the ill-conceived open world. Also, some of the main bosses are gimmick battles. These should be epic moments to test your personal build against the game's mightiest foes, but they are not.
I don't believe anyone enjoys being forced to change their build or weapon type just because few options remain viable for the whole game. The point of a roleplaying game should be to keep growing your character from start to finish. If you're stubborn about designing your game in this manner though, at least give the player unlimited respecs so they won't be scared to experiment. This would allow players to figure out, through painful trial and error, what is viable in the game without relying on guides. Larval tears aren't an ideal solution at all, as there's no way to know how many there are in total, as well as where they are, without consulting external sources. Plus, if you respec into something bad, you're screwed until the next larval tear.
The filler space between the content, fittingly called "The Lands Between", is often uninteresting. This is something I feel no open world game has fully solved yet, but it can be pretty noticeably bad here. It's not like you'll have memorable encounters with NPCs on the side of the road or anything like that. It's mostly all combat, especially the further you get into the game. Which is fine, it's a FromSoftware game right? But, that means the only really enjoyable thing to find in the open world is a cave or a dungeon, as they are designed spaces for you to explore, with carefully placed enemies to clear out, and a boss to vanquish at the end. Each one makes for a satisfying little adventure. The problem is, without a guide, you might spend more time searching for the next location of interest than it took you to complete the last.
Furthermore, due to how item locations are static in this game, there's an optimal route for you to take in order to obtain the items you'll actually use as part of your build. You have no real reason to clear content outside of that, because the loot obtained in those other areas will be completely useless to you. Receiving completely unusable loot is generally lame in any game, but it's especially bad here, because it's not random loot. This is bad design because it means that following a guide is needed to make the pacing of the game's progression bearable, but doing so makes the open world feel completely artificial because you no longer have the sense of wonder bequeathed by the unknown.
If we're really honest here, this game has core flaws and is often more annoying than fun, despite its exceptional controls that make your hands feel like they were made to hold a controller. Maybe Elden Ring's flaws are what makes it interesting. Maybe the idea that you can overcome a painful experience with a community of like-minded individuals and forge a communal bond through it is what makes Elden Ring worth engaging with. Or maybe 2022 was a bad year for big game releases, and this is the best one we could salvage from it. Either way, this game will always be as loved as it is hated.
Hopefully, the success of this game will encourage the industry to look at the formula and figure out how it can be improved further, because it has a ton of room to grow. In some ways, this game succeeds where Breath of the Wild faltered. In other ways, it's the opposite. A lot more needed to change from the Souls formula to make this a homerun. Co-op could have been at the forefront of this game, but it clearly is not. The Seamless Co-op mod helps with this, but does so at the expense of other important features, doesn't solve other issues this game has, is still buggy, and should not be needed to begin with.
I think Elden Ring's biggest flaw is that it has an identity crisis. Some bosses feel designed for co-op, some feel designed for single-player, while a few feel designed for another game entirely. If the co-op was actually built into the game in a seamless way, some of the design decisions could be overlooked because it would be an amazing co-op experience, which is a rare thing. Unfortunately, it will only become harder for me to recommend this game to most people past the initial hype it had at launch, because I strongly believe better games will come out that will make Elden Ring seem archaic. This is why this review is so negative, despite the game having a great foundation and best-in-the-biz gameplay feel.
There is obviously a lot to enjoy in this game, but I've studied it enough to understand the ways in which it is flawed and could be improved, and I think it's important to address these flaws now that the game has sold like hot cakes and won GOTY awards, if only for the sake of information.
In conclusion, I look forward to the day when we can look back at Elden Ring and call it an obsolete relic of the past. Not because it's a bad game, but because we'll have a truly incredible game under our hands then.