Elden Ring first playthrough thoughts

When playing a new souls game, I always do the same thing:
-No co-op summon stuff. This included summoning ashes for this game.
-Only upgrade strength, stamina / equip load, and health. Occasionally I'll get a few points in Dex for equipment requirements or Int/Faith for low-level support spells (like "cleanse me, o flame" in Elden Ring)
-Use either a big ol' sword or a sword & shield
-Don't look anything up, but try to find everything I can
-Don't skip past any enemies (typically) or bosses
-Don't do obvious cheese (e.g., long-distance sorceries/bow & arrow on enemies that don't react, making enemies kill themselves, etc.)
-Don't farm souls

These are pretty basic restrictions but the goal is to force me to play the game. If I farm for souls, look up the best weapons and spells, etc., it wouldn't be as fun for a first playthrough. Melee also typically requires you to think a bit more in boss fights, which I enjoy. I like doing challenge runs and over-powered runs after I've done my exploring.

By the end of the game through natural gameplay I was level 178 with these stats:
Vigor: 60
Mind: 10
Endurance: 46
Strength: 99
Dexterity: 14
Intelligence: 9
Faith: 12
Arcane: 7

I had two +25 Gargoyle Heavy Greatsword with Barbaric Roar, a +24 Brass shield, the beast talisman.
I used a Great Helm and Radahn's Lion Armor set for pretty much the whole game. Prior to that set I used the Nomad's armor set I started with.

I used Erdtree's Favor +2, Pearldrake Talisman +2, Crimson Amber Medallion +1, Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman

My most memorable moment was when I was level 29 with 1 extra flask at +1 flask and had a +1 Lordsworn greatsword. I walked (not teleported) through Caelid and found a cave that gave smithing stones. I then found the boss room and ran into the Falling Star Beast. It took me 7 hours to beat it at such a low level but it was a ton of fun really getting good at the boss.

When I got to the end of the game, I had completed all the achivements except the ending, legendary ashen remains, legendary talismans, and legendary armaments. I went ahead and looked these up and found that the one talisman missing was in the final area (oops), the one ashes missing was in a random grave area from the beginning, and the one armament I was missing was in the capital city... which I couldn't access anymore since I had burned the Erdtree. Didn't like that, but other than a random ash from the beginning I was able to find everything just playing through the game. Some of it definitely helped by seeing messages on the ground for sure, though.

Overall I found the game very fun and will try to play it again in some capacity. I did have a lot of gripes with it, but it is really good despite them. My list is probably:

Dark Souls
Dark Souls 3
Demon Souls
Elden Ring

Bloodborne
Dark Souls 2
Sekiro

With very little gap between the first 4 or between the last 3.

With that in mind, here's what I found as good/bad:

Good:
-Jump button. So good.

-Horse. The horseback combat was the best I've seen in a game, though I wasn't a huge fan of it. The actual movement and exploration with the horse was great though. I didn't like it at first because it felt like I had to force myself to stop moving to do anything, but it grew on me quickly. The double jumping, mounting while moving, dismounting and not falling to your death, all great.

-They did the open world very well. I didn't like it as much as linear gameplay, but it is just personal preference. Best open-world I've seen so far. Nothing felt super intrusive and you didn't need everything spelled out to you. I didn't actually know what those "to the roots" statues were until the very end of the game!

-Crafting. I originally didn't like it at all and hated mashing Y while running, but it was just convenient not having to go to merchants.

-Maliketh fight, Mohg fight (both of them), Red Wolf of Radagon fight (first one), Elemer of the Briar, Falling Star Beast, and the Malenia fight were all memorable and fun. The Red wolf wasn't particularly difficult, but was just super unique. The others had a bit of difficulty that made the game have the same feeling of fulfillment I expect from a souls game, most especially the Malenia fight. I was disappointed at Malenia at first as I (just barely) beat her on my second attempt.... then the second phase started. That one took some serious effort for me, even at a high level.

-Lots of early game weapon choices. If I want to do a certain playthrough, I can start it pretty fast with how many options are provided.

-Dungeon types were all good. Traditional long dungeons were good, short caves/dungeons were good.

-Lantern was good... maybe too good. I had it on the whole game, to the point where I wonder why it isn't just on there by default.

-Roundtable hold having everything you needed in one place was great. The layout was interesting.

-Smithy constantly thinking I was dead

-I liked how some bosses were easier to fight dual wielding, some with sword and shield, some alternating between two-handed and sword+shield.

-Greases were fun to use and let you tinker around with damage types. I didn't end up using any until the end of the game (Maleniaaaaaa) but they never felt super OP or useless (except poison).

-Ash of war switchups were a great addition. I never used them, but the fact that I could switch between keen/heavy/fire/magic/holy/whatever was great.

-They added a "here is where the NPC is", which solved an issue I had. Unfortunately I was nearly done when the patch came out, but whatever.

-The NPCs were a lot clearer in what they wanted you to do than in other souls games. The questlines I went through seemed pretty intuitive.

-Inventory usage was great. Having the Y button bring up 4 saved items was fantastic. 2 common buffs, horse, and lantern, Flask on normal and occasionally having status heals. Felt way better than mashing down from other dark souls games.

-Coming across random things in the overworld that were interesting was common, which was awesome. Even though I used like... none of the rewards, it was still neat.

Bad:
-Horse. While the horseback combat was the best I've seen, I didn't particular enjoy it. Any boss fought on horseback was instant-win as for some reason you did more damage AND had more mobility, and bosses didn't seem to have any AI setups to deal with the horse. I added a new rule of "no horseback combat vs. bosses or tough enemies".

-Ashes for summoning was dumb. I summoned a jellyfish once (during the falling star beast grind) and it was pretty unfulfilling to just wail on something that wasn't paying attention to me. I didn't use any summoning ashes from this point forward. It might be fun to do a "summoner" style playthrough at one point, however that might be done.

-Counter-attack. Shield -> hit -> counter-attack felt brain-dead, even more with how it contributed to stagger.

-The flasks in this game being able to go fully for HP felt silly to me. If you had been able to straight up find additional flasks, or get more of one flask or another with your seeds, the game might not have allowed someone to just tank hits. I almost always had extra flasks after a fight and it wasn't because I was dodging. I had the same problem with Dark Souls 3, in that simply choosing to use magic meant you were choosing to have one less heal.

-The "sacred tear" and "golden seed" upgrades being littered randomly across the map encouraged exploring in a shallow manner. If I replay the game... what would stop me from just seeking out every church on the map and getting +4 or +5 at the start of the game? I have to pretend to not know things to not become overpowered at the start.

-Smithing stones vs. Somber stones is confusing to me. You need waaaay less somber stones to fully upgrade certain weapons, and the result is you could get a +7 to +9 weapon that uses somber at the start of the game without much issue. Even with regular weapons you can just beeline towards the mining caves to get a bunch of stones than instantly level up your weapons. I would have loved your upgrades being blocked behind certain boss fights, like getting great runes or something. Or even just finding a hammer or spark for the smithy or something. They actually did this in DS3 with embers, would have worked way better in this game -- especially if they had given it to you automatically after beating a boss.

-Game was way too easy on a first playthrough, with a few cool exceptions, even with my restrictions. I had missed two entire early areas, but my constant exploring resulted in a higher level than I should have been. Most bosses were steamrolled and I didn't have to learn their patterns because I had enough health to tank direct hits. I wish that the game design didn't emphasize upgrades and levels quite as much, and that maybe you'd be forced to change equipment for different damage types. As it stands, any exploring essentially "stands in" for grinding.

-Stunlocking enemies being super common. Jump attack x3 -> critical hit -> 2-handed charge attack while they get up. This worked on regular enemies everywhere, but also a ton of bosses. Add in the wonderous physick that allows for easier poise breaking and it was pretty ridiculous.

-Lots of repeat enemies with larger health bars. I didn't expect quite so many "recolor" enemies in this game, especially to the point where I fought the same boss several times.

-Most of the armor that gives good defense looks pretty bad. Some of it seems to be designed to look bad, but I was surprised at how much of it was just goofy or ugly looking.

-Mystery "can't open the map" enemies. I understand turning off warp, but I wanted to see the map while exploring. :(

-Poison was useless with scarlet rot existing. I'm not sure why they just didn't something where poison made endurance drop faster or something.

-Bleed and Frost were both far and away the best, and I didn't use either natively. I just used bleed and ice grease on the malenia fight and the amount of extra damage frost does is nuuuuuuuuuuts. Bleed is bad, but frost? I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't use it.

-Lantern. It was useful and great, but to the point that there is no reason to use anything else for light. "Darkness" wasn't ever a thing. It might be fun to add "no lantern" as a restriction to future playthroughs... but why would I go in the caves and whatnot?

-Ashen capital not letting you get the legendary spear there that I missed. >:[

-Great Runes don't stick around after NG. Can't do neat "no flask" runs with mohg/melania great runes. :(

-Random nighttime stuff was odd. It was fun for a bit, but it seems that just about everything that is time-centric is night only, which means hunting for it involves just fast traveling and resting until night, then looking around.

-Replayability is basically... none? Unless you give yourself challenge playthroughs with big limitations or are doing some sort of themed run, I can't see running through the game again being enjoyable since a lot of it is just walking through the open world. Combine this with how easy a lot of the base game bosses are and I'm not sure how much I can replay the game from scratch. I'm going to run through NG+ with just some of the mandatory things and see how it feels, but I imagine this will be a challenge-run-only type of game. If you just decide to play it with all your knowledge, why would you not immediately have a +9 somber weapon and a bunch of tears/seeds? Kind of the same problem Demon Souls had with its uber weapon at the 4th stone that you could get right at the start.