This comment reminds me of Shuhei Yoshida comments on Demon's Souls while it was in development:
> "For my personal experience with Demon's Souls, when it was close to final I spent close to two hours playing it and after two hours I was still standing at the beginning at the game," he admitted. "I said, 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game'. So I put it aside."
He later became a massive fan of the series.
These games don't click with everyone, but they're not meme games. And for some people, it takes awhile before they finally understand the appeal. I hated every second of Dark Souls until I got about 7 hours in (due to continual prodding by a friend), and then everything clicked, and suddenly I couldn't play or think about anything else for a very long time.
Elden Ring is easily one of the better games I've played in a good while. I still wanted to throw it away the first day.
The worst part about it is how clunky and unintuitive some of the things are, and how incredibly poor the PC port is in UX. Some controls can't even be changed, or even seen anywhere in the settings page.
In general, though, I think it's pretty safe to assume that when millions of people are enjoying something and you aren't, it's probably because it's a good thing in the grand perspective, and it's you that doesn't "get it". Assuming that it's a "meme" is kind of like ignoring overwhelming evidence proving you wrong and thinking everyone else is an idiot.
