LOL I've always said this about From's alleged "lore". If even half of the stuff you can find online is actually in the game itself, then From are profoundly bad storytellers.
People will get on Reddit and transcribe what looks like the Silmarillion, and I just shake my head. "All of this, from a handful of item descriptions?"
I laughed out loud at the video they released yesterday. Once again, it's like someone scribbles two sentences on a cocktail napkin, someone else reads it r-e-e-e-a-l-l-y f***ing s-l-o-o-o-o-w-l-y in a vaguely British accent (always your standard good vs. evil boilerplate) and hey-o it's an Epic Tale™! The internet goes wild.
(Good thing the gameplay itself is aces.)
Nah I think at least Vaati is usually pretty good at sticking to what is actually in the game. But because it's littered into item descriptions it's difficult to piece together a full story, and most of the cutscenes in the games are vague at best.
I don't necessarily hate it because leaving something up for imagination is good, sort of like you imagine things when reading a book to flesh out what you think the book's world looks like based on limited descriptions.
Bosses in general are the most overrated aspect of this entire genre. Annoying gate keepers that, at best, you put behind you; and, at worst, stand between you and the game you want to play.
To me the bosses, at their best, are half the fun. To me a good boss fight is something where you feel like you are going head to head against the enemy instead of just getting knocked down repeatedly, getting wrecked by bad hitboxes or struggling against the camera as well.
Nioh 2 is to me one of the best of the genre when it comes to boss fights. Each boss requires different tactics and there are only a few gimmick bosses or overly large "camera is the real enemy" bosses. Being able to cast debuffs on the boss, while managing your own buffs during the fight adds another layer. On top of you having a vastly bigger moveset than From games, and multiple stances to switch between slow but powerful and fast but wimpy attacks.
Sekiro fails by being so heavily parry-reliant to the point you can't do real damage to the bosses in any other way, but it's still very satisfying to be able to land those parries and dodges. The true final boss of the game is a fantastic way to require the player to use every single technique at their disposal to fight an enemy with an equally wide range of attacks where it just gets increasingly more epic with each phase. It's hard, but never feels like you failed for any other reason than your own mistakes.
But most of the bosses in ER are just not fun. From tried too hard to make bosses difficult for veteran Souls players, to the point that they are not fun for anyone, with their long combos and excessively delayed attacks. Most of the time you can't get more than 1 or 2 hits in and need to whittle down each boss.
While I'm looking forward to playing the ER DLC, to me Elden Ring is one of the more disappointing From games with its excessive scale, repetition of bosses, largely empty open world and few core gameplay improvements over Dark Souls 3.
