Elden Ring was one of those super-popular games that, for the longest time. I refused to touch simply because of how many people had treated it as the best thing on earth. I'd heard nothing but good things about it, and for some reason decided that all of the hype was undeserved. It's a hard video game where you get stomped constantly, I thought. And waved all of the hype away with that thought alone.
It wasn't until somewhat recently that I was asked by a few friends to play it with the seamless coop mod. Reluctantly, I said yes. Still not certain just how much I'd actually enjoy the experience due to how frustrated I can get at video games that seem annoyingly difficult. It didn't take me very long until I started to have a lot of fun with the game, Stormveil Castle is where I'd say the game really begins to really get gripping. An area I'm certain that I still haven't fully explored simply because of how packed chock-full of stuff to do there is.
The fight against Godrick The Grafted was an experience I revelled in, despite bashing my head against the boss a few too many times for me to admit, the feeling of finally besting him was gigantic in comparison to the first boss we'd fought, the Tree Sentinel. Godrick's second phase especially felt like a real, genuine blast to lean and master. Rolling through the flames rather than trying and failing to create space, learning how to best use the weapons we had. Even finding out about light, medium and heavy loads. It all felt like a puzzle I had to click into place, and once we were done with Godrick, I was hooked, although we certainly didn't destroy him, the fact that we were able to kill him even having used every flask we had at the time was a point of pride for me, so we continued on with the rest of the game.
Many fun times were had, from running around Raya Lucaria, utterly terrified of the rolling balls that squished us a good few times, to finding ourselves in the scarlet-rot infused wasteland of Caelid, fighting Radahn with everything we had, largely trying to summon everything before a stray arrow turned us to a pile of flesh, or before his gravity magic married our bones to the sand below, I enjoyed every moment of it. Being every bit the adventure I was promised, and more.
Before we knew it, we stood Infront of Radagon, someone I admittedly knew nothing about, after an agonising amount of time fighting him, we'd defeated him! Hooray! Only to find out there was in fact a second phase. The Elden Beast took us even longer to beat, with several breaks ranging between hours, or even days between attempts. Finally beating the Elden Beast was enough to make me cheer. The first playthrough was great fun, and something I truly wish I could experience again.
