Elden Ring Nightreign clicked the moment I hit level 2. My squad had just dropped into Nightreign's remixed version of Limgrave. Unlike in every other Souls game, I didn't have to create a character or weigh the options of starting equipment. I was a bird man named Guardian, and all I really had to know about Guardian to get started is his passive ability that makes him good at blocking. We dropped 100 feet onto a camp of soldiers, sliced them up in seconds, and beelined toward a site of grace to level up.
The From Software leveling experience is one reason why I like Souls games, but don't love them. Agonizing over where to dump points into stats to make meters slightly longer isn't my idea of satisfying progression, so when I touched a site of grace in Nightreign and watched my stats automatically increase according to my character's specialties, I thought, "This rules, and it's gonna piss some people off."
