Elden Ring Nintendo Switch 2 Review - Is It Worth It? transcript

Hello there, lovely people. It's Alex from Nintendo Life here, and today we're reviewing for you Elden Ring Tarnished Edition on the Nintendo Switch 2. This review is originally written by the wonderful Mitch Vogel, and has been adapted for video by me. But anyway, that's more than enough waffling. Let's dive right into things. >> [music] [music] >> At this point, what is there left to say about Elden Ring? FromSoftware has rightly become one of the most influential developers in the industry after its pioneering of the Souls-like genre, and Elden Ring is arguably its finest contribution yet to the genre.

It's won countless awards and been lauded as one of the best games ever made, and all that praise still rings true even now after it's been a few years since the original release. Yet, whilst we wait for the studio's next major project in the curiously PvP-focused and Nintendo exclusive Bloods, the decision was made to first remind the Nintendo audience of its pedigree with the bespoke Elden Ring Tarnished Edition. Bundling Elden Ring and its major expansion together into a neat little package, this new port showcases that the Switch 2 is comfortably capable of handling this genre-defining game.

And of course, it goes without saying that it's easily worth your time and money, especially if you haven't picked this one up yet on another platform. The narrative in Elden Ring is arguably its weakest but most intriguing aspect, offering a vague and often confusing story that's rarely delivered to you directly. The gist is that the eponymous Elden Ring was destroyed and its various fragments were then fought over by an increasingly aggressive group of demigods and royals who all sought power for their own agendas, leaving the Lands Between broken and ruined after the dust of the conflict settled without any clear victors.

You then come in as a nameless Tarnished, a revived warrior who was once banished from the Lands Between and is now called back by divine presence to gather the remaining shards of the Ring and become the next Elden Lord. Those of you hoping for a gripping, character-driven narrative won't find much of one here as the story is mostly told to you in fractured bits of random NPC dialogue and item descriptions. That being said, it's undeniably cool to uncover bits of lore and make connections between various events and characters yourself as gaps are slowly filled in.

Despite its ephemeral nature, this kind of storytelling does feel like it fits the gameplay very well. There's no telling exactly in what order you'll tackle various bits of the game content, so the story is similarly fractured and uncovered just like new locales and secrets are. Gameplay in Elden Ring follows a true and passionate commitment to open world design. After the initial vague cutscene giving you some smattering of the story, you get dumped into this enormous world and left to figure out the rest for yourself.

Sites of Grace act like checkpoints scattered about the Lands and sometimes offer hints to the direction you, quote unquote, should be going, but there are almost no limits on where you can travel or what you can choose to do next beyond those you impose upon yourself. You want to go straight to Caelid? Do it. You'll regret it. At first, this makes the world amusingly terrifying as you find yourself accosted at nearly every turn by unimaginable monsters, boss fights way above your level, and absolutely no clue as to where you're supposed to go next.

Yet this initial confusion is an intended part of the experience and part of the joy of the open world is that you always have multiple paths you can take in order to make further progress. By the time you first stumble upon Margit, the Fell Omen, you're likely nowhere near ready for the challenge of his fight, but this simply encourages you to hop atop Torrent, who's sort of a wildebeest horse thing, and ride off to another part of the map for something that feels somewhat more fair.

In doing so, you not only get the opportunity to level up and upgrade the efficacy of your gear, but you find more weapons and tools that build out your kit more effectively and ensure the rematch against him will have more even odds. In this way, Elden Ring is certainly the most approachable Souls-like game from FromSoftware, and we say approachable because the word easy is feels just inaccurate. There's almost always somewhere else you can explore, someone else you can fight, something else you can scavenge up that helps maintain the thrilling sense of forward progression, no matter what you come across.

Overworld exploration follows more in the footsteps of something like Breath of the Wild, where your next destination is simply dictated by finding something on the horizon that looks interesting and going and seeing what it's all about. Sometimes it pans out to be nothing more than visually interesting ruins, other times it's an entirely new dungeon that goes way deeper than you ever would have expected to at first glance.

This leads to a world that feels very alive and thrilling despite its grim and dim aesthetic. It's very dense with varied activities, locales, and NPCs with quest lines to uncover, most of which are entirely optional and missable unless you happen to stumble upon them. Our personal favorite thing to find is the various mini dungeons scattered around the Lands Between, which act like little mini bite-size shrines that offer a fun challenge and rewarding treasures, but without being too distracting or just, you know, sort of too meandering.

Just these little sort of like enclosed little bits. If you don't find the entrance yourself naturally, there's usually a more obvious statue on a hill somewhere nearby that points to it. Once you get inside, it plays out a little bit like a Chalice Dungeon in Bloodborne, offering a relatively brief and compact 30-minute adventure in which you navigate maze-like rooms, get repeatedly ganked by enemies hiding in the walls and corners and wrap it all up with a simple boss encounter at the end that grants you something like a new spell or weapon attachment if you can beat it.

Then, in the main junction points of the map and story, you have the legacy dungeons, which function like the good old-fashioned Souls level you've always known and loved. These expansive dungeons offer much more intricate layouts and more memorable aesthetics, packed to the brim with unfair enemy placements, tons of collectibles, and a brutal boss at the end who you're likely going to get hung up on for a good hour or so if you decide to stick to things and learn their patterns and tells.

Though the legacy dungeons aren't nearly as common as some diehard fans of the traditional Souls-like formula may prefer, we thought that there were more than enough here to provide a dense volume of traditional Souls content and keep the open world from feeling too sparse and devoid of meaningful discoveries. As you'd expect, boss fights are the natural star of the show here, playing host to some of the biggest and most memorable set-piece moments this adventure has to offer.

Whilst most of the bosses are in the classic FromSoftware lineage of offering incredibly tough but fair encounters that test the limits of your build, your knowledge of your chosen weapon, and your ability to learn and read tells, there are additional boss fights here that bring a whole new dimension to the encounter design that so many have come to know and love. With the introduction of the open world, there are now whole spectacular boss fights that take place right out there in the field and can be just as easy to stumble across as yet another site of grace.

The difference here is that you have Torrent available to you for these fights, and having a summonable steed that you can dismiss at will changes the dynamics of battle in meaningful ways. Not only are some of the attacks and timings of the fights clearly built around the expectation that you'll utilize Torrent mid-battle, but simply having this additional powerful tool available to you changes the way that you approach the usual cycle of pressing the attack and playing defensively.

Plus, these overworld fights grant you another option that many have likely wanted to use often in past Souls games, running away. I'll never forget how woefully underprepared I was for my first surprising encounter with the putrid avatar, but the fact that it didn't entrap me in a fog meant that I could just run. Like as soon as I saw that I was like, I am not fit for this battle. Or at least, you know, at least died once or twice, you know, and then I went in again.

I was like, you know, no, I'm not doing it. I'm just going to junior birdman the heck out of it. And the game lets you do that. That is oddly refreshing for a Souls-like game. Character building still follows the same tried and true system that fans are well acquainted with by now. Using runes gathered from killing enemies without yourself getting killed and losing them, of course, you can incrementally invest individual points into different stats to gradually grow your character and carve out a build for them.

Alongside this, you can collect better equipment or use resources to improve existing equipment to give you a bit more of an edge in fights. So far, so similar, but Elden Ring takes the equipment modification aspect a bit further. Now, you can utilize various Ashes of War you collect over your journey to modify your weapon of choice to scale off of different stats and use a different skill. This may seem like a relatively small change, but it means that now you have more granular control over the state of your arsenal.

This gives you that much more agency to experiment with different builds, trying out different Ashes, and reinvigorating weapons with different playstyles that meaningfully change the way that you use them in fights. This is the kind of iteration that is really nice to see. The team at FromSoftware knows it has a winning formula with its character progression, so they focused on more iterative, incremental improvement on a system that's been built up over several games now.

Elden Ring will take you anywhere from between 60 to well over 100 hours to beat, depending on your skill level and meticulousness, but the Tarnished Edition also includes the award-winning Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, which is honestly the size of a separate game on its own. Once unlocked, this 20-to-50-hour journey takes you to the creepy realm of shadow to chase after a demigod whose subplot isn't fully wrapped up in the base game.

In this separate and more vertically designed map, the same gameplay loop present in the base game plays out, but the difficulty feels like it's been ratcheted up another even another notch. To help you meet it, there's not only a supplementary level system present in the Scadutree Fragments, but there are new weapons and weapon types for you to come to grips with. Shadow of the Erdtree thus functions as incredible end game content that perfectly builds out an already excellent game, giving you a whole explorable map and additional fights to conquer with your high-level character and put them through their paces.

As far as visuals go, the grim and melancholy world of the Lands Between absolutely wows with its dark fairy tale aesthetics. The crumbling castles, expansive vistas, and horrifically disfigured citizens. It's not a particularly colorful game, but it still has a unique capacity to just inspire awe in you with its spectacle. With mine and Mitch's favorite instance coincidentally being an unassuming lift in the overworld taking us down to a huge underground area with constellations and a hazy fog making it look as if the ceiling of the cave has somehow been replaced with the night sky.

It really is something to behold. Regarding performance, those who were concerned over the chatter of the unstable early build of the port can rest easy. Elden Ring runs very well on Switch, too. In both docked and handheld, the frame rate target is 30 frames a second, and it holds to this broadly very, very well with only occasional minor drops when out in the overworld or dealing with massive bosses that are chasing you across it.

It does even go above 30 on occasion. It's definitely an unlocked frame rate, but it's undeniable that 30 is the target. It's just in certain, you know, sort of small corridors or looking up or looking directly down, you will get more. You will get 40. You will get 50 frames a second. It's nothing major, but it's just nice to see that they've really been able to squeeze more out of it. Whilst the frame drops that you get are mildly disappointing, they don't have any meaningful effect on gameplay and certainly aren't to blame for the fact that you died again.

You died again. Meanwhile, the visuals on screen are reasonably sharp and perfectly pretty to look at, resulting in an experience that it frankly looks great in motion. Okay, there is motion blur, but it's subtle, it's soft, and it means that that sort of variable frame rate is far more well hidden and just nicer to deal with, particularly in handheld with a variable refresh rate. I mean, obviously, the Switch 2 version was going to have compromises compared to the strongest hardware that can run this game, but if you're talking handheld versions, I'd say that this is easily the best bespoke version available.

Okay, you might get more out of a handheld PC that uses as much energy as a tumble dryer, but this is the Switch 2. It uses about 0 W. It uses more than 0 W. But not many. Elden Ring Tarnished Edition is a tremendous achievement and one of the finest games that you can currently play in the Switch 2 library, offering up an enormous and densely packed open world, tons of tough boss encounters to overcome, a huge DLC and game expansion, and presenting it all with great performance.

There are few, if any, games in the console's library that can match its spectacle, difficulty, and raw quality. If you've ever been a fan of the Souls-like genre or simply looking for a deep and challenging game to add to your system that takes full advantage of the Switch 2's power, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up whenever you next can. Elden Ring deserves the praise it's received as one of the games that's defined this generation, and it feels right at home on Nintendo's handheld.

Elden Ring Tarnished Edition, you're getting a 9 out of 10 from us. Now that we've done the formal stuff, it's time for Alex's personal thoughts, and I mean, Mitch has nailed it mostly, but uh there's a few things I want to say, absolutely. The chief among them, my god, I have a weird relationship with this game, because I absolutely love it. I absolutely do, but it does not love me back. Oh my god, this game, you know, loads of people will say, you know, sort of the game's impossibly difficult and you know, other people say the game's not that hard, you just need to get good and all that sort of thing.

And the thing the reality for most people is it's somewhere between that. Yes, it's a very very difficult game, but it is it is sort of you can overcome it. You just need to sort of practice, level up, understand that the game is not there for you to just blitz through. You're going to need to do some not even grinding, you're just going to have to go off the beaten path and do things in a different way. But at the same time, you can just, if you want, go and deal with Radahn in Caelid before you've done Godrick the Grafted.

It it's perfectly possible. I didn't do it this time around, but in my initial play through on Xbox, I did do Radahn before the festival actually began, you know, when the there's loads of enemies in the castle and everything. I did I did it that way. I think I sneaked through a lot of it, but you know, I still did it and I actually defeated Radahn first time cuz I was a magic user. Um that did not happen this time around because I was using a completely different build and uh yeah, it turns out it turns out magic is the way to take him down.

That or scarlet rot, but I do want to touch on the performance on Switch too a little bit more just because I want to. Frankly, this is excellent. Yes, it's only targeting 30 frames a second and that's what you should expect and when you see other people playing online, it's always, you know, like 60 frames a second on other platforms. That's that's that's just the way that it is. But you are able to play this like portably?

Well, okay, the joy-con sticks aren't great for a game like this, but they work and it just, you know, I mean, okay, yes, it it does push the Switch too quite hard, but in terms of like the power consumption, it just sips it. It just sips it. It's like what? 12 watts maximum? You're running Elden Ring on a console that uses 12 watts handheld? That is just it's just unfathomable. I realize I say 12 watts is maximum. I don't know if that is the maximum.

But I'm so we'll just say 12 watts. But the fact that there are instances and plenty of them, I want to be clear, where the game can get into the high 30s, 40s, and sometimes even 50s, it just it shows a confidence that is really, really refreshing, particularly after the initial reveal and like Felix's first impressions being like, "Oh, this runs terribly." And now it's running excellently. Like again, I know some people are going to go, "Oh, 30 frames a second, it's unplayable." You need to get You You just need to grow up.

It's a portable system. What are you thinking? This time around I did things arguably a little bit more normally as in like the the order that you do things or you are kind of expected to a degree to do them. And it was definitely a um an interesting experience. I wouldn't say it was necessarily better or worse than what I did before where I kind of jumped around a little bit more. I mean, I jumped around a bit. I I defeated Mog because I needed to get at least some footage of Shadow of the Erdtree.

And um J- J- um Mog Mog is Mog is horrible when you're under-leveled. Like absolutely horrible. Might be something to do with my build. I went with like a holy build and I know that's not ideal against him. But, you know, it Oh, it's different when you're like level 60 or something. But I wasn't meant to do that essentially. I wasn't meant to go and defeat Mog before I did Radahn. But I could do it anyway. And there's just so much confidence in that design.

They know that they've created an incredible game here and they welcome you to play it however you see fit. It is very like Breath of the Wild in that sense. It's a very different game at the same time. But that level of freedom, that level of just go and do what you like is just it's just undeniably incredible. >> Oh, wow. >> [music]