Elden Ring is about figuring out what a boss does, not make the player feel like a super awesome ninja with constant button mashing, big flying numbers popping everywhere and constant flying spinning attacks.
Uh... are we playing the same game? You know, Elden Ring. In which you can dual-wield bleed katanas and with them make jumping attacks that see you slash six times in a second, with blood splashing all over the place as a result ?
Or are you talking about Corpse Piler, and Waterfowl Dance, and Ordovis' Vortex, and Bloodblade Dance, and Black Flame Tornado, and Blood Tax, and Loretta's Slash, and Stormcaller?
I mean, let's be honest: Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1&2 are unfortunately long gone. Miyazaki has gone full anime, and even that isn't new since it began with Bloodborne and DS3.
I don't want to ditch the whole thing to make yet another Japanese twichy spazz fest.
Give Nioh 2 a solid try. It's quite a lot faster than the Souls games, but it's not twitchy unless you want it to be.
If you want to keep it as un-flashy as possible, go with the Odachi as a weapon and make a super tanky character in heavy armor. When understood well, wielding an odachi while wearing Tatenashi and Acala gives you the ability to forego any magic and ninjustu and all the flashy stuff; you can just dodge, tank, block, and strike hard when appropriate.
And that game has boss fights that trample all over 95% of bosses' design in Elden Ring. Shuten Doji and Lightning Gods Of Yomi in particular are simply wonderful—and I really mean wonderful.
I used jump attacks in prior games too, but it was a pain in the ass and felt way worse.
Other than that, outside of melee combat, the magic feels more varied than prior games, even DS2 which used to feel more varied and better than any of the other games in the series.
The jump attacks in Elden Ring is basically a copy of the warrior class' jumping attacks in Dragon's Dogma. Everyone and their sister was spamming it because it was the quickest standard attack with the least recovery and huge stagger ability.
And about the magic, that's why I liked fighting against Loretta with Eternal Darkness and Carian Retaliation. It changes things. I'm not only dodging and waiting for my turn; I'm actually defending myself from her attacks and simultaneously countering them in a meaningful way.
WHO THE HELL THOUGHT WASD A GOOD IDEA to PUT 2x of an enemy to make things more challenging?
The intensity of schadenfreude I'm feeling about that cannot be expressed.
"Dark Souls 2 is shit, bruv. It's full of artificial difficulty. It spams multiple bosses and groups of enemies like it's going out of style. Man, the B-Team at FromSoft doesn't understand what makes a Souls game. They're shit without based Miyazaki.". Hasn't that aged well, now?
