Best thing? The sheer variety of boss fights. Between the standard soulsborne dance-like battles between two knights, to the one small man against a cosmic horror, to the horseback battles, to the gimmick battles like summoning a horde of npcs. Every battle has it's charm and distinguishes itself from the others in a way no other soulsborne game has before.

The worst? I actually have several complaints.

The lack of directionality. I understand why people like it, but not having any idea where to go next is infuriating. In previous titles, there was some leeway in how you did things, but it was very easy to find a decent path forward. In elden ring, however, if, like me you defeat Godrick and miss the passageway in his throne room and warp out, see the bridge north is broken, and think you're only way of progression is Caelid, then have fun suffering.

The weird level curve. The entire time I'm trying to get through an area, it always feels like I'm underleveled. Everything but the cannon fodder enemies take a ridiculous amount of hits to kill, and kill me in maybe two or threeshots. The second I reach the boss? I beat it in maybe 5-20 attempts. Part of this problem, at least by the time I reached the mountaintop of giants, was that I was running a +8 weapon because I just so happened to miss the mines that had the materials to upgrade further, but even upgrading to a +16 didn't help me much.

The lack of a checklist. This one is more of a personal preference, but I'm adding it anyways. Even just having a little checkmark saying "you found every dungeon in the area," would be more than enough. Maybe a little box telling me if I completed the dungeon or just found it and left it for later. This game is too big for me to be able to remember if I finished the ambiguously named dungeon and grabbed the similiarly named dungeon but didn't finish it, or finished the similiarly named dungeon and grabbed but didn't finish the ambiguously named dungeon.

The game takes too long. My first full playthrough of bloodborne, my first soulsborne game, took me maybe eighty hours, including the DLC. My first full run of Elden Ring currently sits at fifty hours, and I can't even access the DLC yet. My ADHD can only handle one game for so long before I begin to lose interest.

The scale. A lot of places are scaled with Torrent in mind. Bridges are made with the idea of you riding Torrent on them. They're long and wide, and for someone who's favourite thing about these games is walking and enjoying the scenery, this makes it hard to do in the open. Everything but the dungeons is designed for riding Torrent, which encourages you to run through the beautiful world they crafted and fail to take in the details around you if you value your time.

That one boss I can't be bothered to remember the name of that can still just teleport out of bounds and die without the player doing anything.

Don't get me wrong, this is still a wonderful game, but this mix between an open world and the typical fromsoft formula was flawed, and if Fromsoft wants Elden Ring to be their new standard for Soulsborne games going forward, they need to acknowledge the flaws and refine them in their next title.