This article is the fifth in a series exploring the game Elden Ring and its design. You can read the prior entry on the game’s many dungeons and bosses here.

Starting this piece I realized I may need to give myself a break before working on any further Piece-by-Piece follow-up series, writing them in full or mostly full before posting them onto the website. It’s not because keeping up with the weekly pace has been surprisingly difficult – though a sudden medical disruption threw me completely off track. I’ve otherwise been surprisingly more capable of keeping this up than any prior attempts at regular columns and series on this website! No, it’s more that my initial outline has not gone precisely where I first had anticipated it. I should have known this would happen, as it’s the same issue I frequently ran into when writing scripts for my video essays.

I emphatically agreed with Joseph Anderson when I watched his feature-length video essay on Elden Ring and declared the “final stretch” to be unreasonable. He had effectively illustrated how multiple later-game bosses were designed not for the combat stylings of Dark Souls, but Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I had also found other videos with similar titles and emphasis on the imperfection of the game. I had seen others express identical feelings regarding late stage bosses, and then would witness the mockery of these opinions in meme format on the game’s subreddit.

I would have kept on insisting that the game’s latter third or fourth is horrifically balanced, but at the same time I’ve admitted within this series that my Dex-build was an awful one. Just by swapping out to a strength build I’ve found much more success in damage scaling and poise-breaking with little adjustment to my overall playstyle and strategy. My knowledge has certainly deepened, turning a pair of once troublesome burial watchdogs into a piece of cake by disrupting one with crystal darts and turning them against one another. It’s an example of using a subtle and surprising game mechanic to make my second run through the game even “easier”, though I’m still primarily relying on basic melee attacks and spirit ashes in order to take out my foes.

Then, the Friday before this post is scheduled to go up, YouTuber NeverKnowsBest posted his Elden Ring analysis. Needless to say, it got me thinking, and it got me thinking a lot.

My demi humans may be nearly dead, but thanks to them crystal darts one of these watchdogs is about to kill the other.

I think the reason it is difficult to ascertain whether Elden Ring is properly balanced or not is because so many of the game’s fans or detractors are too busy projecting their own reader response onto both the game and the developers. As I had stated early on, the Tree Sentinel does not exist to “teach” you anything. It’s simply there, and while that placement is an intentional choice on the part of the designers, it’s not there with the ulterior motive Game Maker’s Toolkit wannabes want to believe it is. “The world is dangerous” is as vague as the lesson gets, and what the player does with that information is all their own. This, at least, is my belief.

Unfortunately, the second you try to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Maliketh’s endless combos with little-to-no opening is completely broken, you’re bound to be informed of what Maliketh’s endless combos are supposed to teach you because that’s what the fanbase has collectively decided From Software’s games do.

Once upon a time I tried playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice on a base-PS4. While I found many of its stealth and maneuverability mechanics to be satisfying, I found the parrying and blocking mechanics to be imprecise and inconsistent. Or perhaps I should say they were too precise and very inconsistent. After doing some research and arguing on a forum that the game demands sixty frames-per-second while barely accomplishing thirty, all the while suffering erratic latency between those frames, I was given some empty argument about how the game is “teaching” me some way to play it.

I cannot even begin to comprehend the mental gymnastics required to assert that a game’s technical problems are not only an intentional design choice, but a lesson in getting good.

Totally, completely unrelated picture of Gurranq here. Yup, totally unrelated.

The strange thing about Maliketh is that he was immediately followed by two fights I found far more manageable: Gideon and Godfrey. I’ve seen how much Godfrey is memed on Reddit as being one of the game’s harder bosses, and yet I defeated him in a single attempt. Did I use the Mimic Tear spirit summon? Why, yes, I most certainly did. However, that same summon did little to ease the pain and suffering wrought by Maliketh, an opponent that took multiple attempts to defeat.

I’m certain that, somewhere out there, someone would try and toss lore reasons at me why Maliketh is supposed to be harder than Godfrey, who is not only the first Elden Lord but guardian to the actual final boss of the game and therefore, on a logical scale of progression, should be more difficult to defeat, even if by a smidge. At the same time, I am certain there are other players that used the Mimic Tear summon on both bosses and found Maliketh easier than Godfrey. After all, the Mimic Tear is based upon you and your load out at the time of summoning, and therefore certain builds might be more effective against certain bosses than others.

Note that I haven’t even brought up Malenia, Blade of Miquella, who has never known defeat, and continued to never know it in my first run through the game. After a few failed attempts I decided enough was enough with Elden Ring’s optional content and to just beeline towards the game’s conclusion. As I watched YouTubers like Iron Pineapple and Ymfah show off crazy builds I began to wonder if the real problem was my inability to break games. Even going back to older entries in the Final Fantasy series I’ve never been very imaginative when it comes to load-outs or class possibilities. I’m the sort to try and color inside of the lines, and therefore I adhere to what I’ve been told and instructed of a game’s mechanics with only so much exploration done. I thought that, maybe, had I been more of an adventurous min-maxer, I’d have done far better with this game’s final stretches.

Then I watched that Neverknowsbest video and was reminded of every single debate I had gotten into with Steve regarding Destiny 2 and its Meta: that dreadful concept of a limited set of equipment that “only the best” players use. Why use weapons you like when you can use the weapons that win? I had never wielded Rivers of Blood, but I’ve certainly seen how devastating it can be in and out of the player-versus-player environment of Elden Ring. Watching Neverknowsbest evaluate the tactics of several streamers and Wikis regarding Malenia made me realize that the problem was one of balance after all, and it wasn’t just me.

I will confess that I enjoyed the actual end game area of Farum Azula quite a bit. It was challenging, but I did not find it to be unreasonable, especially after several diabolical deaths suffered in the overly large Haligtree and descent to Malenia. From the moment you arrive in the tree branches to the final step onto her battlefield, the entirety of that optional Haligtree seems designed with a gleeful desire to be everything the Soulsborne reputation claims these games to be. There are areas in Bloodborne I’d rather not revisit, but none that felt so ridiculously unfair and malicious as the Haligtree.

Once again I have to wonder if the sheer size of Elden Ring is the problem. Did they feel it necessary to amp up the difficulty for fear of the player being too high-leveled? Or, perhaps, they simply felt that their latest game needed to top their last? That there needed to be a boss even more memorable and discussed by the community as the Orphan of Kos?

I’ve been wondering for a long time if my Dex-based warrior was indeed a bad build, but when you consider how players are beating this game – and Malenia – at level one without any armor and wielding a basic club, you have to wonder just what is a bad build in this game.

I do not agree with everything that Neverknowsbest said, and given that the only other From Software game I have beaten is Bloodborne I cannot really answer whether the Meta is as big of a problem as he asserts or not. I did not go into Bloodborne blind as I had played with a friend for my entire first run, and I feel such a method is an advisable route to go for a first time Soulsborne player. However, I’ve since played the game a second time on my own, and even began to run through a New Game Plus in solitude after that. I’ve been itching to go through the game a third time, especially now that I’ve gone through Elden Ring. What I can say is that, even though I’ve seen plenty of videos by folks like Ymfah or boss advisories by VaatiVidya, I’ve never once thought any build or preference of mine was either invalid or at a disadvantage. Every weapon truly feels useful in Bloodborne.

Or, perhaps, it’s just my preferred builds work really well in that game as opposed to something like the Dark Souls trilogy or Elden Ring.

Nevertheless, while I wanted to provide a more in-depth glimpse at the final bosses of Elden Ring, I am really unfit to do so. They require far more experimentation and playtime than I am capable or willing to give. So, while I do feel I have offered some substantial observations regarding the other aspects of the game, I can only give what limited subjective experience I’ve had and seem to be shared by others: that Elden Ring gets lost in its own hype and creates some unreasonably difficult bosses towards its climax.

I’ll be bringing my thoughts on Elden Ring to a close next week.