Recent reviews by Asminthe

Outstanding.

Elden Ring is the Mario Odyssey of Punch-Outlikes.

It is a good game.

This game is an absolute treasure. One of the best I have ever played.

Excellent remaster of a fantastic game. The DLC is a wonderful addition.

Absolutely amazing.

It is full of story tropes ("chosen one destined to save the world") and game systems ("harvesting/crafting") that I am so incredibly sick of and generally can't stand, but I loved it anyway because every bit of it is so astonishingly well-made that even the parts I hate in other games were enjoyable.

The localization is the greatest I've ever seen. Virtually all of the locations, items and monsters have names that are amusing and memorable and the sheer quantity of text that had to be localized makes it frankly miraculous that the quality remains so high throughout.

On the normal difficulty the game is relaxing and fun and won't present any real challenges or require any grinding to reach the credits, but, if you're looking for a challenge, enabling all of the Draconian Quests makes the game very difficult and requires that you both understand the game systems very well and are willing to spend some time grinding to be as strong as possible before facing most bosses.

If you want something in between, you can pick and choose which Draconian Quests to enable. If it's your first playthrough but you really like challenging games, I'd probably recommend the combination of "No fleeing from battle", "All enemies are super strong" and "Reduced experience from easy fights". These will make the battles challenging while mostly preventing you from simply overleveling all the content instead of learning to play well. The other settings will make it even harder but alter the game in ways that might not be as fun for someone who hasn't already played through the entire game at least once. "No armor", for example, robs you of the ability to experiment with different armor/accessory setups for specific fights, greatly reduces the number of meaningful items to craft, and takes most of the fun out of collecting the cosmetic items. It's a great additional challenge, but probably better to play the game once without it first.

It's hard to find more things I can say about how good this game is without getting into spoilers or talking about game design decisions in specific detail, so I'll just end by saying that I thought I didn't even like JRPGs anymore and this quickly became one of my favorite games of all time.

An exceptional puzzle game which values your time and wastes none of it.