Finally finished it at 123 hours.
I played a faith caster/melee hybrid although I spent most of the game just melee-ing and spamming weapon arts.
Game is great but I greatly disliked some of its parts. It's been said many times already but the open world dilutes the experience way too much and combined with the fact that you pretty much stop seeing new enemy types after Caelid makes the second half of the game a boring slog with occasional moments of excellence like Leyndell.
Most major bosses were fun but I think they would be more fun in a different game, where your character is faster and has more defensive options. In this game your character is a disabled person that runs out of breath after two swings but you keep fighting powerful godlike enemies that fly/teleport all over the place, wield weapons twice your size, do 10 hit combo after 10 hit combo, yet they keep losing to this dude whose only superpower is a barrel roll that makes him phase out of existence for half a second. This makes every fight feel like this weird unrealistic situation where I feel like I won not because my character bested the enemy through superior skill but because he went through a choreographed circus performance that involved barrel rolling through obstacles for 2 minutes or something.
My favorite boss was Morgott. It was the only boss in the game that I felt some sort of narrative connection with. It was cool to have a re-match with a pretty fun early game boss that gets a lot of new moves and tools. Reminded me of Vergil from DMC3. Still have no idea why he hates you so much and why he wants you dead but I have never cared for From's "Zanzibart, forgive me" style of storytelling and I don't think I ever will. The fight itself was very good, Morgott is very aggressive and it is hard to find an opening but at the same time he didn't have any bullshit nearly unavoidable moves like some of the later fights.
Shittiest boss (not counting all the endless re-skins and normal trash mobs the game sometimes pretends are boss fights) was the Fire Giant, because 95% of the fight consisted of either running after him or standing under him and left clicking his ankle.
Hardest boss was Malenia. Seems to be a popular choice, I've seen even veteran Souls speedrunners spend several hours trying to beat her. 80% of the difficulty of the boss is just one move though, I think we all know which one. Because of that the fight felt a little bit like RNG - my chances of success each run decreased proportionately with how many times that move was used. In my winning run, in her 2nd phase she didn't use the move at all and all I did was unga bunga jump attack that stunned her every 4-5 hits.
Favorite area was Leyndell, although I really enjoyed all of the big dungeon areas except Radhan's castle, which was dogshit. Feels like they forgot to properly design it or something. It was less complex that the smaller optional castle areas you find in each zone and when I arrived the festival was happening so there were no enemies and none of the locked doors were interactable and the only way to get around the castle was to use teleporters. When I first saw this, I legitimately thought my game was bugged.
So overall, even though the game was fun, it feels like a step back in some ways from Sekiro, which I enjoyed more because it was a much more tightly focused and better designed experience that didn't overstay its welcome. It's unfortunate that so many people praise Elden Ring as some perfect 10/10 masterpiece, so we will definitely be getting an Elden Ring 2, which will most likely have all of the same problems because the fanboys will eat it up regardless. Still, as far as AAA releases go, this is the best (or rather, the only good one) we got in years.
