I didn't enjoy it very much either OP.

I've played hundreds of games in so many genres but Souls games do not push my buttons at all. I've only played Mortal Shell (god what a dull fucking uninteresting game that was) and Elden Ring.

Everything I liked about Elden Ring was the stuff that I'd honestly just rather seen transferred to a different game (scenery/environment, lack of UI clutter, and free form exploration). But the fundamental Souls mechanics are... ugh.

I found the boss fights tedious after about 20 hours in and unbearably boring (zero satisfaction for killing a boss) 40 hours in. Some bosses were more enjoyable than others while some were nothing but annoying. After spending 30 minutes fighting an annoying ass boss my reward could be something completely useless to my character and it really just felt like a waste of time. I need to invest 30 minutes learning the moveset of a boss I'll probably never fight again? For a piece of equipment that is as valuable to me as a dog turd? It also doesn't really matter what I do the first couple times unless I am way overlevelled in comparison to the boss or have reflex times in the top .5% of humans, I must die typically a handful of times to learn the moveset before I can defeat the boss because they will feint attacks and other shit like that which can be completely unpredictable. Every boss fight I would just play defensively the first couple times trying to gauge the timing of their attacks, then I would beat them. Rinse and repeat with increasing difficulty/unpredictability with no other game mechanics to really keep my interest inbetween, which I will elaborate on.

Typically I like my open world games to be more like simulations/immersive. Skyrim/TW3/AC:Odyssey being examples (to varying degrees) of worlds I felt immersed in and cared about what was happening around me. Elden Ring is a video game ass video game (in the words of fellow nerd Jake Baldino) and it feels like it in this regard. Every enemy just follows the same path and respawns after you sit at a bonfire. Like automatons they patrol their set path and the more you play the more noticeable it is. It feels like a linear/non-open world game and I'm unconvinced that Souls games are a great match for the open world format or at least in this iteration.

The NPCs feel like talking cardboard cutouts. They feel lifeless and I quite frankly could not give 2 shits about any of them. The non-humanoid NPCs were admittedly much more interesting, like that Blacksmith Iji. Voice acting is at times spectacular like with Iji, and other times drab as the games overall tone.

The lack of handholding in exploration is taken a step too far in some cases.There are random walls that are "secret passages" that you cannot find unless you just... randomly swing at every wall hoping it slowly fades away in a lazy animation? Apparently this is a staple in the franchise, and it feels like a mechanic from a 2005 game. I might expect it maybe once or twice, perhaps as an easter egg rather than a commom mechanic. There are things that you can completely miss that would make your game experience tremendously more enjoyable, various of which I am not sure how you could find without looking stuff up on the internet. If you intend on only doing one playthrough, you can easily overlevel by going off in a random direction only to come back to those places later and find the enemies to be weak and the experience of going through those areas to be less impactful and less enjoyable had you done those areas when you were the proper level.

There is a lot of lore and stories you can piece together through reading, listening to NPCs, and by reading the environment. But as someone who found the setting a little to drab, eery feeling in a hard-to-explain-bad-way, and ultimately just not that intriguing to me, I had very little motivation to make the effort to really invest myself into it and thus the game world and universe created felt like a backdrop to the front and center combat loop that I dislike so much

Last 2 opinions:

Super massive bosses the size of sky scrapers always feel dumb to fight when you are just a normal sized humanoid

PVP games are better if you want to just be in constant combat loops. I'd rather duel someone in Chivalry 2 or For Honor than duel some dark knight in Elden Ring, especially since I don't feel immersed in the game