Recent reviews by Mnemonick

I write this review in hopes to discourage people who may buy the game ahead of time, with the announcement of the DLC. Do yourself a favor and wait for the reviews to role in because in its current state this game is not worth your time, especially for fans of action RPGs.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is the Joker: Folie a Deux of video games: A sequel by a scorned director furious that his audience enjoyed his media in the wrong way. Itsuno viewed Dark Arisen's success and DD's fanbase of those who enjoyed the combat as an affront to the message of the game and its intention as a more tactical RPG. In response he made a game saturated in cumbersome mechanics and humiliation of the player character to remove any sense of power fantasy from the title.
That's not to say the game is remotely difficult. The game has ridiculous adaptive difficulty that will see several additional NPCs spawn to assist you when you die to a monster and reload. At times, upon reloading, monsters you died to will be despawned. All the more pathetic, the game has no semblance of balance between its classes. After the first few levels upon switching to Thief or Mystic Spearhand, the player can attain complete, sustained invincibility, leaving the original vocations woefully weak.
Overall, this game is a hellscape of adaptive difficulty, incoherent writing and plot, and prolonged hit-stun. What little of the dialogue comes out to be articulate reads as an insult to existing fans of the series. The final boss speaks as a stand-in for the director, asking the player whether they're there for the journey or merely to kill large monsters. I wish Capcom the best in trying to salvage the mess Itsuno left them, but I'm doubtful they can fix this disaster.

One of a kind masterpiece game. You owe it to yourself to play this if you like action RPGs. It's a little janky here and there, but only as a byproduct of the sheer ambition and passion that went into making such a comprehensive RPG.

*THIS GAME HAS HAD AN UNPATCHED BUG SINCE APRIL THAT MAKES YOU LOSE ACCESS TO THE GAME*

Do you love souls games? Do you love Crusade inspired and dark fantasy settings? Cool, me too. Do yourself a favor and don't bother with this game. On paper this game was made for me but it is REALLY unoptimized and even prone to bug out and prevent you from playing all-together, claiming you have a friend-pass copy. This is a very common bug. In fact it happened to me, and has been an unfixed issue since the co-op update. Please, do not buy this game, you are gambling that you won't fall victim to this bug.

The game itself is mediocre and lots of small issues add up. It suffers from a similar issue in most souls-likes where changes from the formula just make it worse. The umbral other-world mechanic effectively makes the whole game look ubiquitous and follow the same few gimmicks, and occasionally ruin a boss or encounter that requires you to use your lamp mid-fight. I can't stress enough that no matter if you think you may like the game, it is potentially unplayable in its state.

CINEMA

Really fun, if you like Elden Ring you will like this. Great with friends, okay alone unless you're a game journalist. It has its own learning curve just like any other souls game so don't expect it to be easy. A lot of people brigading the reviews about lack of duo. The game is exactly as advertised, so yeah if you don't have at least two friends maybe instead of playing any game you should go outside and make some friends.

Best game-feel of all time.

GOTY

Peak video gaming. THE BEST EVER.

I have loved From Software games for a long time. When Elden Ring first came out, I had been hyped for YEARS prior. It was a big disappointment featuring some of the worst bosses in the series. The "hard but fair" and "earn the win" mantras that had been the tagline of the Souls games had been completely done away with, in order to force the player to watch the devs' berserk OCs spam out 30 second long, 8 attack chain combos over and over. Bhe game was rife with content and I still felt some of the old From Soft charm, so how I could I not give it a lofty, positive review?
This DLC, however, is to me the end of From Software's legacy as geniuses and industry leaders. It takes the already played out open world and turns it into a completely boring slog, requiring you to run around looking for copy and pasted items to add a flat boost to your stats in order to contend with bosses. What an absolutely drab mechanic. And the bosses, usually the highlight of From Software games had been butchered even more. Some of them are alright, but most are appallingly awful, seriously UNACCEPTABLE to be in a game. The bosses in this DLC straight up have undodgeable attacks. This isn't somebody leaving a review in a fit of rage, using hyperbole to get their frustration across. They are literally undodgeable.
(Minor Spoilers)
Do me a quick favor and search up "How to dodge finger mothers attacks elden ring" into Youtube. I went through every video I could find. When it came to the laser attack, every single commentator gave up and said, "yeah I just tanked this idk." The only way to dodge this that I found is with a certain weapon art, Raptor of the Mists . I have no idea why From Software thought this was okay, or how they even got in this frame of mine.

TL;DR if this is Miyazaki's vision, no wonder he wears glasses.

A tragedy of a game with so much potential ruined by archaic and anti-player design philosophy. I would write a bigger review but even talking about this malignant jumble of code is draining.