Elden Ring perfectly “fair” in that it is possible beat every boss with a pure melee build, but I agree that “fun” is getting lost among all the “difficult but fair” debate.

When I fought Malenia, I knew about waterfowl dance ahead of time, but I didn’t want to cheese her, or find a new spell or ash of war, or use mimic tear, or anything like that. So I fought her 1v1 and got to the point where I could dodge waterfowl dance 50% of the time while medium rolling. This required a huge amount of time and focus but it meant that if she does it an average of 3 times per fight, 87.5% of runs are an auto-loss. This feels really bad, an attack this difficult to dodge without the assistance of a very specific item shouldn’t be an automatic one-shot. Training frame perfect dodges is just not fun so I equipped bloodhound step and beat her that way. There are a few instances where I think “difficult but fair” was prioritized over fun, like the wombo combos, giant AOE spam, and gank fights. It’s still probably my favorite Fromsoft game, but it could be better in ways that should have been obvious.