From the other thread
>Nothing in particular. My critique of ER isn't that it has magic, it's that they made the melee so shit that it normalized using magic, buff items etc instead of being an extra option. I also dont care how people play their games, I just care how I play mine. Since FS's decisions led to making the 'pure' melee combat so shit, and making magic (along with other cheesing playstyles) pretty much be the only viable options of enjoying the game is what I don't like. I simply feel it made my preferred style of playing their games not fun.
>Part of the reason why FS games are cool to me is their challenging combat that demands the player to adapt to the enemy's moveset and counter and play accordingly. Magic mostly eliminates all that by staying back and spamming shit from a safe distance.
>I did do an Arcane run for Bloodborne once, and that was a fun one, so I do enjoy magic combat. If you ask me, this is how I like alternative combat choices, by making them cool for as options in a second run, not make them the only not miserable option for the whole game.
This taps into a broader discussion of how I feel FS can't do the 'for everyone' trope of making their games feature multiple different playstyle options, and why I prefer their more built-for-purpose restrictive games Bloodborne and Sekiro from the shallowly-open 'build-variety' featured in Dark Souls and Elden Ring.
I'm not sure if ER's melee is shit but I'm confident in saying it's "queered up", so to speak. It seems like the game isn't built around normal bonking anymore. Your melee choices seem to be: bleed (or other status effects), stance breaking, or Terraria style "melee is just magic". And on the other side of it they went into so much spellblade stuff that it seems like they're trying to also turn magic into melee. They're a lot of line blurring in ER and on retrospect I really don't like it.
I've said something before to this effect but I think the core issue with ER is lack of commitment. Just like how they did the open world thing but didn't really comit to it so you ended up with the dismembered body of a Souls game scattered across an open world. They could have just completely overhauled the magic system. BB and Sekiro did this and those games are better for it. Like in ER magic could have just been esoteric stuff like Dragon Communion and maybe FF stuff. Miracles could have just been a throwback to DeS and make them mostly non direct combat buffs. Then they could have made the beam shooting stuff just a weapon art thing. Or for "pure caster" you could have had perfumer and pot stuff, especially since those things take FP as well anyway.
But no instead ER kind of feels like first party knockoff of Dark Souls in a lot of ways.