For a while, Elden Ring was a perfect ongoing nuclear reaction: FromSoftware had developed a dedicated following who could yell about the game every time it wasn’t shown, and yell a bit louder when it was; pandemic-fuelled delays edged the studio’s fans into a prolonged communal fervour for their next game; a new series title freed many newcomers of the fear of jumping-in at the wrong point, or of even needing to know about prior FromSoftware games; expanded assistant features—such as the freedom to summon helpers practically whenever you’d like—made the game a good fit for those who found, or would have found, Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls series too difficult; the game’s agnosticism of platforms and console generations meant that it could be bought, played and promoted practically everywhere. This is all to say that you have likely played, seen or at least heard of Elden Ring, and don’t need me to tell you that it is, indeed, very good.

I have big problems with the game, however, and wasn’t very surprised to feel the same way about its expansion. After all, it turned out to be More Elden Ring, for everything that means, and Elden Ring was essentially More Dark Souls III with a Jump Button and Breath of the Wild’s World Structure. I played through Shadow of the Erdtree as soon as it was released to the public, before the balance patches that followed, and so my impressions are coloured by that context. If you’ve yet to play the game and expansion and intend on playing them, it’s worth holding-off on reading this. I’ll be talking about the combat system, as well as the expansion’s final boss fight, and I generally recommend that people play games as blindly as possible. If you’re still here, feel free to read some thoughts I had while fighting this final boss in his original incarnation, although they’d been brewing for a long time.

Elden Ring and its Shadow of the Erdtree expansion both suffer from issues that began with Dark Souls II, regarding how many of its enemy types, encounters and boss fights are foils to the player: rather than challenging one aspect of the player’s kit, much of the game is testing all of it. This seems to be an overt attempt to make each game difficult for those who played its predecessors, even while reusing those games’ tricks, although this is often offset to some degree by expanding the player’s moveset (or, in Elden Ring’s case, their potential assistance).

A key result of this is that most of the enemy types and bosses have become akin to rhythm games, asking for long strings of specific answers to rhythmic behaviours, albeit with intentionally unorthodox rhythms. Importantly, attempts to develop subversive and unpredictable enemies make their encounters like playing rhythm games without “note highways,” as most of an enemy’s kit often has to be learnt by losing to it. This is evident in enemies’ and bosses’ long attack strings, large variation in attack start-up timings (ranging from near-unreactable to unnaturally long), varying combo routes, large amounts of poise (restricting the pay-off of counterattacks), small windows between attacks, ample attack tracking and large active periods (either with one extended attack or, most often, some kind of secondary attack or explosion after an initial hit).

A result of the attempts to make attack start-ups difficult to judge is that most bosses (and many enemies) seem to have complete control over the effects of gravity. When bosses spend so much time floating in mid-air and holding their weapons outwards, the animators and VFX team have to work extremely hard to make attacks look like they actually have an impact once the boss decides to land. Particularly with non-humanoid bosses, the floating is paired with general flailing, where such control over bosses’ limbs would imply that they’re entirely weightless. Perhaps this isn’t an issue for FromSoftware, though, since so many of their more difficult bosses and enemies are framed as fighting as if dancing (usually with two weapons, sometimes of different elements, and often with elemental trails or explosions left after each swing). Often, attacks surpass being difficult to predict, and reach effective unpredictability, with no tells as for when the attack will actually trigger outside of a consistent timing that relies on pure memory after failure. During Shadow of the Erdtree’s final encounter, Radahn’s plummet to the ground not only offers no visual indication as to when it will land, but also barely telegraphs that it will hit twice, likely killing you.

On the other end of the spectrum, some attacks land very suddenly, so as to catch the player off-guard. One issue with including attacks with a short start-up is that Elden Ring’s rolls are still activated on the button’s release (to allow for the input to be shared with sprinting by holding it), making the actual required reaction time to avoid damage even smaller. This is a large point of differentiation from the parry system of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, whereby the guard is activated on the button’s press, and a successful parry is based on properly timing that press with the impact of an attack. Another problem, though, is another quirk of FromSoftware’s implementation of unpredictability: the start-up animations of many attacks are either very similar to one another or so awkward as to be practically illegible. Part of this is that they often share key tells, such as which arms are being raised or which colour is being blasted as an aura around the character. In my experience, this leads to me not knowing whether to immediately roll or to stand still in preparation for a similar attack that’s expressly designed to catch early rolls. This seems to be the intent, and it’s getting very old.

Like many action games, most encounters in FromSoftware’s are about taking turns: in standard melee combat, the player spends the attack string of an enemy dodging to the rhythm of their attacks, blocking them (if equipped with a good enough shield and enough stamina) or running to evade them. Many enemies and some bosses can also be parried, expediting the pay-off at the risk of taking more damage. In any case, this pay-off is getting to land attacks until the enemy is back on the offensive. Balancing the windows between attacks to feel satisfying is something that I’d argue Dark Souls II failed at, possibly largely down to its high frequency of encounters with multiple high-poise enemies. Bloodborne was arguably stronger in this area, making most combat scenarios feel like a frantic back-and-forth, encouraged by the “Rally” mechanic, common access to parries and easily staggered enemies. Elden Ring’s reliance on giving bosses long attack strings skews the rhythm of combat in their favour, particularly because FromSoftware typically give bosses “true” combos (meaning that successive attacks are unavoidable if one lands), while letting them “armour through” player strings (often until they hit an arbitrary breaking point).

The counterattack window can also be a reward for proper spacing in an action game, whereby preemptively getting out of the way of an attack means you can counterattack before it’s finished (or at least without first waiting for a roll to end). This isn’t so much the case in Elden Ring, because many enemy attacks track in both angle and distance, with plenty of wide-sweeping lunges. I expect this was a measure taken to provide challenge to players who summon others or keep their distance, which is understandable for a game whose combat was seemingly designed foremost for melee encounters. However, the result is a combat rhythm that leans heavily on the side of waiting for your turn instead of making an opening, with tiny, unsatisfying counterattack windows. Given the number of enemies and bosses who create distance during or after attacks, you often get no counterattack window at all. It’s also worth considering that the counterattack window doubles as an opening in which to heal, making longer onslaughts of attacks feel far more oppressive and threatening.

Radahn was seemingly designed as the climax to a series of intentionally difficult boss fights, employing every trick to make a foil (as most of the expansion’s bosses did), except with a greater number of attack strings, wider flowchart variation, smaller counterattack windows, longer active attack windows, and less clear timing and telegraphing. Particularly of note is that Radahn’s attacks achieve longer active windows by employing excessively repeated secondary attacks, with seemingly unavoidable combined active windows that often act as true combos when they do land, on top of dealing counter hit damage if you dare to try evading them. Guaranteeing hits feels like a very cheap way to make a boss seem more powerful than others, although I’m sure there are very specific answers to these attacks, albeit within a game with greatly varying player approaches.

On this note, with all of the ways in which FromSoftware have tried to increase the difficulty of their action scenarios, they’ve continued to choose to contend with the balancing nightmare of variable character stats and builds. I respect the commitment to the latter for the variety of ways in which people can play the game, allowing for countless approaches to combat and many player-controlled methods of adaptive difficulty. I’d say, however, that having a combat system that accommodates such variety encourages a catch-all approach to challenging players, so as to avoid one particular solution being easier than others. Continuing with variable stats, though, feels like it adds far too much volatility to an already unpredictable set of player capabilities for encounters to be consistently challenging and satisfying. Elden Ring’s world structure only increases the potential variability of player character ability when approaching any given area, making for an often very unsteady difficulty curve. The expansion’s Scadutree Fragment system seemed to be intended to combat this issue, but when combined with the general threat level, it ended up feeling like the answer to any struggle was to wonder whether there were any more Fragments available.

As most of FromSoftware’s bosses are employing the same techniques to continue raising the bar in difficulty, they’re at the point of blending together in terms of function. Foils to the player are no longer a big deal, as most enemies that are designed to be threatening follow the same wide archetype. This generally applies to its areas, too, at least those separate from its open world, with the usual expectation that I’ll have to stop at every doorway and “be wary of left/right/up.” FromSoftware’s bosses usually have beautiful visuals and rarely fail to get my blood pumping, yet Elden Ring’s and Shadow of the Erdtree’s somehow often managed to feel boring and tedious. I’d love to see the studio come up with a wholly different combat system (further than Sekiro’s revision of the Demon’s Souls framework), with new challenges and solutions. Maybe then, their games will feel special to me again.

Originally written on the evening of 27/6/24, after days of Shadow of the Erdtree and a good handful of attempts at its final boss. I beat the boss the following afternoon, after a fortunate stagger during his AoE blast and having memorised the rough timing of the meteoric explosion. Made more suitable for human consumption on 27/12/24, and tweaked and posted on 3/1/25.