Elden Ring Is Exhausting

Summary

The video is a retrospective on how replaying Elden Ring changed the narrator’s view of the game. Rather than walking through the plot, it focuses on exploration, combat, pacing, and replayability.

First Playthrough and Replay

The narrator’s first run lasted around 250 hours and felt like an expedition, driven by the thrill of discovering new places. On replay, prior knowledge made that sense of discovery harder to recapture, while the game’s repeated content became more noticeable.

Following the Fextralife progression guide made the replay feel tighter and better paced. The narrator skipped many repeated caves and dungeons, avoided duplicate bosses, and prioritized legacy dungeons and major questlines.

Freedom and Self-Imposed Rules

Elden Ring gives players many ways to respond to difficulty: they can leave an area, level up, respec, summon, or take another route. The narrator notes that players often add their own restrictions—such as avoiding summons or over-leveling—to recreate the tension of more tightly designed FromSoftware games.

Boss Combat

The bosses are praised for their visual design, but the narrator found their combat rhythms increasingly familiar. Delayed attacks, long combos, and area-of-effect moves became recurring patterns. Fights against enormous enemies often involved attacking their legs, which felt less intimate and mechanically varied than duels with human-sized opponents.

World and Scale

The game’s scale and atmosphere remain major highlights. The narrator singles out Limgrave’s early discoveries, Caelid’s distinctive landscape, Liurnia, Volcano Manor, Siofra River, and the Ruin-Strewn Precipice for their sense of place and wonder.

At the same time, the narrator argues that the game’s freedom and size can weaken its pacing and make exploration feel like content management. By the Mountaintops of the Giants, they felt burned out, despite continuing to admire the art direction and wanting to see areas such as the Haligtree and Farum Azula.

Overall View

Elden Ring is described as an exceptional open-world game, but one whose replayability depends more on discovery and player-created journeys. By contrast, games like Bloodborne and Sekiro can become more rewarding through mastery of their tighter, more authored experiences.

Replay Approaches Discussed

• Use a progression guide to streamline the route.
• Skip repeated caves, copy-paste dungeons, and duplicate bosses unless they offer something useful.
• Focus on legacy dungeons and major questlines.
• Consider self-imposed limits—such as avoiding summons or over-leveling—when seeking a more challenging, authored-feeling run.

People, Sources, and Games Mentioned

• Forrest Spellman — video creator, according to the channel metadata.
• Fextralife — progression guide used during the replay.
• Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware — discussed in relation to the studio’s design philosophy.
• Games mentioned for comparison: Sekiro, Bloodborne, The Witcher 3, Ghost of Tsushima, and Rise of the Ronin.
• Bosses mentioned: Sword Saint Isshin, Lady Maria, Artorias, and Malenia.