On February 24, FromSoftwares released Elden Ring for Xbox, PC, and Playstation and it is one of the best games to release this year! Elden Ring takes many elements from FromSoftware’s previous games in the Dark Souls franchise and adds to it. The game is an open-world action RPG, but it is not for the faint of heart, with its extreme difficulty and time it takes to play through. You play as one of the Tarnished, a group of people banished after a powerful object called the Elden Ring was shattered and then scattered across the Lands Between. Your objective is to find all of the pieces of the Elden Ring and become the Elden Lord. 

The Lands Between

In Elden Ring, you will explore the Lands Between, a vast land filled with many enemies, places to explore, and powerful items you can use. The Lands Between is split into five main regions; Limgrave, Liurnia, Caelid, Altus Plateau, and Mountaintops of the Giants. Each of these regions have their own unique elements. 

Character Building

One of the most important aspects of the Elden Ring is the character customization system. You can choose from one of ten classes; Hero, Bandit, Astrologer, Wizard, Prisoner, Confessor, Wretch, Vagabond, Prophet, and Samurai. Each of them specializes in different stats, stats are what determine how profeffieceint your character is in certain skills. Some weapons, staves and armor require a certain level of a skill in order to be used. You can upgrade your skills by collecting runes which are the form of currency in the Lands Between, the higher level your character the more runes it costs to upgrade your stats. These stats are; endurance, strength, faith, dexterity, arcane, vigor, mind, and intelligence. Endurance influences how much stuff you can have equipped at once, and your stamina. Strength as the name suggests determines how strong your character's attacks are. Dexterity is how well your character can handle their weapons. Vigor decides how much health your character has. Arcane governs your discovery, the ability to find items.Faith, mind, and intelligence all affect your spellcasting in different ways.

Weapons

In Elden Ring there is a very large variety of weapons scattered throughout the Lands Between. All weapons have unique stats for different types of damage being; physical, magic, fire, lightning, and holy. Every enemy will have different amounts of weaknesses/resistances to each of these types of damage. Also, different players excel at using certain weapons, for example, a character with a high intelligence stat will perform much better with stalves. This works with stat scaling, most weapons will have scaling stats, which means the higher level a certain stat is the better the weapon will perform, scaling stats are measured from E to S. 

Enemies

In Elden Ring the player will encounter countless amounts of unique enemies all of them having completely different behaviors. The player will also have to face many harsh bosses, the first one many players have to fight is Margit. Margit is an extremely strong boss that the players must kill in order to enter Stromveil Castle. Margit has a wide variety of combos of attacks that are very hard for the player to dodge. Although he does have his weaknesses like all other enemies in Elden Ring; poison, scarlet rot, hemorrhage, frostbite, and sleep. By utilizing his weaknesses the player can kill him and carry on with their journey. Properly analyzing and figuring out enemies’ weaknesses are a necessity to survive in the Lands Between.