The open world just destroys the flow of the game. It doesn't feel like exploring, but more like working a 9-to-5 just to reach the next legacy dungeon and finally get another taste of actual level design.
More than half of the game is made up of useless horizontal planes with different textures or, when the game feels generous, those same planes decorated with good-looking solid objects planted into the ground.
The game can often be visually impressive, but that alone contributes very little to the actual enjoyment of the exploration itself.
And the legacy dungeons aren't that much better, to be honest. Excluding Farum Azula, I don't feel like any of them really tries to propose a distinctive or interesting way of exploring in the way almost every area of Dark Souls did. Stormveil is basically a castle, Raya Lucaria is a castle with mages, Volcano Manor is a castle with lava, Leyndell spends most of its time feeling like a traditional dungeon crawler, and the Haligtree is okay but ultimately forgettable.
This doesn't mean the game looks bad. Quite the opposite: very often it looks fantastic. But visuals are only part of the job in a medium built around interaction. It's crazy to me that, despite being the first entry with a dedicated jump button, this somehow feels like the Souls game where exploration is least enjoyable.
The reward structure makes things even worse. The game fills the world with useless items in an attempt to create the illusion that wandering around is worthwhile. Half the time you go out of your way to reach some distant corner of the map only to find a crafting material or recipe whose function you'll forget five seconds after picking it up.
And then there are the catacombs and mines.
I hope you really like those assets, because you're going to see them a lot. They feel almost procedurally assembled: repetitive, unimaginative, full of dead space and absurdly unrewarding considering how much of a slog many of them are.
The entire map could have been one quarter of its current size. If that smaller space had been properly filled and given more attention, I'd probably be the happiest Souls player alive.
But thank God there are the incredibly rewarding boss fights.
Yes, I absolutely love being input-read into an AoE, roll-catching, delayed one-shot attack during a seven-hit tracking true combo. At some point you genuinely start wondering whether having somebody punch you while you're playing would improve the experience, if only because the physical pain might distract you from the spiritual hassle of fighting yet another random boss.
And that's assuming the boss isn't recycled. Be prepared to fight the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing over and over again, or, even better, a normal enemy arbitrarily promoted to boss status for the occasion. It's lazy design taken to an absurd level. There isn't a single boss in the entire game that I genuinely look forward to fighting again. Maybe Malenia and Morgott.
Regular enemies aren't much better, although their biggest problem is less the movesets themselves and more the absurd damage numbers. After a certain point, even with a full tank build, almost everything can practically two-shot you.
That doesn't mean their movesets aren't filled with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, because they absolutely are, but the damage is so aggressively overtuned in an attempt to inflate difficulty that every other problem almost becomes secondary.
That constant feeling of unfairness, combined with some of the least rewarding exploration I've experienced in this kind of game, pushes the frustration to another level.
What keeps Elden Ring afloat is its build diversity and lore. In combat, you can use almost anything and create an enormous variety of viable builds, while the world and its mythology are genuinely compelling. The problem is that the experience surrounding those strengths is often so exhausting that eventually you stop caring about what is in front of you, because everything starts feeling like another chore.
Worst entry in the series, and overall an average to below-average game.
If I also judge it against the minimum level of progress one should reasonably expect from a later installment in an established series, I have to mention how unacceptable the state of the AI is. Enemies are frequently just braindead.
The environmental storytelling has also become strangely self-celebratory. It was one of the defining strengths of the earlier games, but an open world should have been the opportunity to expand that formula and communicate the setting in more organic ways: through cities, settlements, populated spaces, or basically anything that made the world feel more alive.
Instead, despite having exponentially more space to work with, the game often falls back on the exact same formula: empty ruins, cryptic environmental details and item descriptions carrying most of the narrative burden.
At that point it stops feeling elegant and starts feeling lazy.
Bad.
