Pushing seventy hours in the game, I finally decided to drop it before beating it. I at least wanted to gauge how close I was to beating the game, and it appears I am shy in one area. I've done just about everything else in the game except beat it, but at this point, the game is far beyond being able to be enjoyable for me, so for the sake of limited time I opted to drop the game now. When I realized I started summoning help from other players not because I felt the boss was too much to overcome on my own or even just out of frustration, I just wanted the game to be over with, that's when I decided there was no coming back with this game for me (Sorry, I also work a full-time job, I sometimes make the call to drop something a bit early).
This isn't a review that's going to complain about the difficulty, it's honestly not as difficult as a few other Souls games, but in a lot of ways, the feel of the Souls games is lost. It took talking with someone else on Twitter to be able to word all of my issues properly, and I am stealing this quote from Oliver Campbell, "Oh no, they broke their rule. Souls games are always 'vague'... and this is just obtuse." (
). I am going to go ahead and give you an example, around 20-30 hours in the game I came across the Volcano Manner, and they asked me if I ever doubted the teachings of The Two Fingers and the Erdtree. At this point I started to realize something, I have no idea what their teachings or ideals even are. It goes a bit farther than that, but that may be the most prominent moment for me, I realized I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing. It always takes some digging in a Fromsoftware game to get the full picture, but you always have at least some idea of what's going on and why you are on your quest. This game seems to think keeping things vague and mysterious is what makes it interesting. (I could get into why it's called 'The Land Between', which gave me the impression it wasn't part of the normal plain of existence and some world between worlds, but the Wiki just kind of says it's just the name of the land).https://twitter.com/oliverbcampbell/status/1499585024047337475
- oliverbcampbell
The game is also missing a sense of wonder and exploration, despite being an open world. Exploration has always existed in the Souls games, but it's always been a more tight and focused environment. Here in the open world, however, I stop feeling like I'm discovering things about the world and more stumbling across random neat things. It's not a bad idea, but there is so much of it with so many boss fights that are little more than re-skins I start to feel like I was just meandering about rather than focusing on achieving my goal. That feels like what was lost in this game, the same thing that many open-world games fail to do (Not all, it's not an inherent problem with the concept), focus. Even the world doesn't really feel like a living breathing world, just a collection of random areas thrown together to fill out the map.
Those are the reasons I just do not like this game, and I don't know if in the long run it's going to get the same acclaim as Demon Souls, Dark Souls one and three (I do still like two, despite being the black sheep), or Bloodborne did. But at the same time it's not a game without merit, I do understand why a lot of people are liking it. There is something to just being able to explore and find a lot of neat stuff, I stumbled across my fair share of quests that were pleasant enough. While I think there are plenty of lame rewards and stuff as well, they did make sure to fill out everything with enough cool stuff to not make exploration feel tedious.
And while I don't like how much I saw the same bosses over and over (Seriously, it feels like they did not have enough ideas to fill this place out), there are quite a few challenging and enjoyable fights to be had. It's not the hardest souls game, but it's still going to give you that challenge. Yes, it's easy to find some pretty broken exploits for people familiar with how Magic generally goes (Look up clips of people one-shotting bosses with some nutty Sorcery shenanigans if you want to see), but that requires some knowledge of how this all works.
Visuals are also still fantastic. Your mileage may vary depending on your tastes (Bloodborne I think is the best looking game), but if you are more into a standard fantasy aesthetic, they did nail it here. I wanted to be a bit more critical of the game because of it, and it did detract from the game for me, but that's just because I was expecting something else from one of their games. For what it was they wanted to do, they did it very well.
On performance level, the game does still have some bugs on PC. I experienced a fair few crashes, and the few fights where I summoned some help to get through and mid attack a few times people suddenly dropped from the game. I'm not sure if this was a network issue, an issue with the game itself, or someones connection. I didn't summon help for many fights until the end, so it's possible the disconnects are not common, and just temporary issues.
Mechanically the game is fine, it's like any other Souls game with its unique twists, but the Soul of the other games (I'll go sit in my corner now) just isn't here. The open world they created only detracted, the game went too far into the realm of obtuse, and they didn't have enough ideas to fill out the scope. It's a game that I'm hesitant to say I don't recommend because I realize to a degree some of this is just my own wants of a Fromsoft game conflicting with what they gave me, but at the same time I feel these criticisms would hold regardless. I'm not going to say it's a bad game despite not liking it, but I will say you should probably temper some expectations going in considering how many people are hyped about it. In the end, once the hype fades, I don't think it's going to be looked at as a bad game, but I don't think it's going to be looked at in the same glowing light you are seeing now.
And for the record, my PC specs while playing this game.
Ryzen 5 3rd Gen 3600 (3.60GHz) (6 cores, 12 threads)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
16GB DDR4 3200MHz RGB
1TB SSD
AMD B450 (Motherboard)