Etymology of Elden Ring/SotE words [1].
2:59:30 in this video a random boss does a 1-frame 180 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P92MtJDRGoQ
I find the Souls series pretty difficult to talk about. The original Dark Souls is very important to me, so it's hard to disentangle my little-f feelings about the game from the big-F feelings. There are flashes of greatness in the earlier and later games, but From Software's insistence on moving the series deeper and deeper into exaggerated action has always disappointed me. Because the bosses I remember are the ones who got weaker as I killed them, the withered and tragic ones, the strange ones. And the thing that really stuck with me was Lordran itself.
Before an internally consistent world can take root in the player's mind, they are given an internally consistent game. Gravity is the first enemy you'll meet. Weapon swings have a convincing heft, and this is just as true for your enemies. Tracking is minimal on attacks, because swords are massive bodies subject to inertia. It feels realistic, this is not just a fantasy world like the opening cutscene might suggest.
The first true battle with gravity comes when a comedy boulder rolls down these stairs. Investigating the hole it leaves in the wall reveals Oscar dying atop some rubble. This visual and sequence of events are a perfect union of romanticized fantasy, surprising, funny game design, and realism. The romantic tragedy exists in this surprisingly beautiful image, but there's also the real tragedy--we still have to go on and hear Oscar's death. This isn't a painting. Both moments strengthen one another, they transcend words, and they can only exist because Dark Souls is interactive. The game is genius in a million other ways, but I think its core is a dialogue between this dying world and a series of figures trying to preserve its image--victims and perpetrators alike. There are shocks of beauty in Lordran, but it is not some perfect, apolitical fantasy world.
I'm not the kind of person to get dazzled by lore in isolation, but Dark Souls made people care about it, it was clear that this place had a deeper story, and when you dug into it the game always had answers. Dark Souls is seriously committed to internal consistency, and it changed how everybody talks about games.
Success in Dark Souls comes from paying attention. Whether that means memorizing boss attacks, identifying mimics, reading people's' intentions, or noticing hidden paths. It wants to make you think about Lordran like it's a place you have to get through, so the requirement that you walk from area to area, the beloved verticality, and the incredible shortcuts are not an optional feature like some make them out to be. The world design in the sequels suffers immensely from the player's ability to teleport between bonfires.
For the first time in a long time, Elden Ring's DLC stirred some of those old Dark Souls feelings. It comes 15 years after Demon's Souls, and while it is not perfect by any means I feel like the foundation of the game shifted slightly away from action and back toward that older sense of adventure. The Shadow Realm {== show yugi's grandpa ==} is very different from Lordran, but it delivers similar feelings with new tricks.
Malenia was an interesting boss, exceptionally hard to kill in a game full of hard bosses. Say what you will about fairness, but her presence in the game birthed an urban legend about the Blade of Miquella's difficulty. The strategy for dodging Waterfowl Dance is the kind of convoluted video game secret your friend's older brother might make up to mess with you {== joke idea: draw waterfowl like a football play ==}. Malenia even spawned a folkloric figure, Let Me Solo Her [2]. Way back when, the defining new feature of the Souls series was its hybrid multiplayer, and I can't help but think of all the discussions, wikis, and videos as an extension of that. One of my favourite things about Elden Ring was getting to discover this unicorn of a game alongside millions of others--although I have to admit I was never drawn into its various plots and lore.
It's not lacking in striking images, and they establish a hell of a tone, but the multitude of factions and the scattershot approach to storytelling overwhelmed me, and made it difficult to know what was at stake in any given conversation. The simple, striking battle with Sif in Dark Souls gave me an in, a particular character to learn more about, and from there the highly interconnected lore slowly unraveled into the story of this whole world. If seeing the Erdtree for the first time got you 100% on board, more power to you, but I think a few simpler plot elements would have helped me and others get into it. The game's immense scale doesn't help either, it was very difficult to make certain connections because so much real time elapses between plot points, and you're bound to miss some major events on a first playthrough.
With that said, all of the pieces I did find created a fantastic atmosphere that the game managed to sustain for all 150 hours of my first playthrough. If Dark Souls created the mirage of a greater world, the Lands Between simply is a greater world. Elden Ring's scope is nothing short of miraculous, and even without understanding the text of its lore every inch of the game serves as environmental storytelling. Games are a lot like music; even if the lyrics don't make sense line-to-line, the momentary experience carries meaning, and it can make a deeper type of sense than any coherent sentence.
I'm not going to check all the tier lists to see how cool and skilled I am, but I'll say most of the main bosses in Shadow of the Erdtree initially gave me more trouble than Malenia. In my first play session I found four bosses that were such caricatures of everything I hate about these games that I just left after one or two attempts. Constant spinning, forty-hit combos, and the ability to turn 180 degrees in a few frames.
The mobs weren't much better; I always do my first playthrough with a Zweihander if it's available, and some of the harder foes would take my sword without flinching. Popcorn enemies went down easily, but the DLC is replete with scripted ambushes and long, annoying grab animations {-- any time you enter a piece of structured content --}. It falls into the same trap as all the Souls games after DS1: everybody expects the ambushes so they just feel like a waste of time. I enjoyed the sights a lot, and the plot seemed interesting, but my first session ended with the exact thought I expected: yep, they made a bunch of hard, flashy bosses again.
Then I talked to a friend about it, and realized that we had entered most areas from different points. Without killing any bosses I was able to find my own way into many regions. In fact I think the Abyssal Woods is the only region gated by a boss, and they're a bit of a pushover. The exploration was still fun, they outdid themselves with the different areas this time around, and while side dungeons and the like are much rarer, they are also larger than the base game's numerous but shallow offerings, not to mention DLC dungeons come in several flavours. The DLC catacombs also have funny slapstick traps, which temper the malicious, ambush-heavy design a bit.
The base game is flabby, and while it's infinitely better than any other game at this scale, so much of Elden Ring is unnecessary. A specific item to heal Torrent when the flask does the same thing. A million types of consumables and a crafting system. A bunch of copy-paste dungeons and bosses with useless rewards. Replaying the game is daunting, it's hard to remember where the good stuff is and there is so much noise to sift through to find a signal for your build. The open structure aggravates this, since wandering around collecting gear doesn't even advance the story. But on a first playthrough the game's generosity feels like a miracle, there is something interesting to do every ten feet and the world just keeps growing as you explore its borders, I think it was totally worth the trade-off even if I rarely want to return to Elden Ring. Shadow of the Erdtree is smaller, and maintains a consistently high quality. I wanted to jump right back in after I finished it.
I've seen complaints that The Shadow Realm is empty, and there's definitely an argument for that, although I strongly disagree. The DLC is gated by a frustrating boss and it extends the endgame, so there isn't much they can do to reward you at this point. White items abound, mainly to lure you into ambushes. But accidentally or purposely, this frees the game from its own carrot-on-stick design pattern: players are less motivated by shinies--at least I was--and exploration is integrated with more rewarding forms of progress: finding new areas and bosses. So despite an abundance of shitty items all over the place, I think Shadow of the Erdtree has created a more intrinsically rewarding adventure experience. Some dungeons even have the Dark Souls-style shortcuts that bring you back to a previous site of grace, always a welcomed sight.
My second session was devoted almost entirely to Shadow Keep, one of the series' largest dungeons. I didn't want to fight the Golden Hippopotamus, but eventually found a way in through a flooded courtyard and entered the keep proper. By the way, the Scadutree Fragments are a fantastic feature, a player who leaves a boss frustrated is practically guaranteed to be stronger on their next attempt. They are also an incentive to engage in my favourite part of the game, the exploration.
Shadow Keep features a long stretch of dungeon crawling in the visually impressive specimen room, which culminates in raising a rack of dead creatures and climbing around on them. Elden Ring does visual spectacle like no one else. The enemies here are typical to Shadow of the Erdtree, lots of spinning and tricky roll timings, but my character can stun-lock most of them without a problem.
Exploration is genuinely a source of difficulty in the DLC, and Shadow Keep shows that off. That flooded courtyard I mentioned has an ulcerated tree spirit flailing around in the water, so it's clear that you can drain it. It feels like every fork in the road leads to a new, massive area, so I was taken in by some other mystery and just forgot to drain the water. It is difficult to maintain a mental checklist of everywhere you can go; the Keep itself has an infinite series of branching paths, but once I finally ran out of things to do I remembered to go find that lever.
I largely play these games for the exploration, and Shadow of the Erdtree delivered. This gorgeous little area is what inspired this video. {== show boss intro ==}
This boss crystallized exactly what Shadow of the Erdtree is for me, it's the first time since Dark Souls that one of these games has made me want to understand what was going on. Up until now the bosses weren't much more than Sword Person or Magic Animal, but this sunflower guy radiates tragedy through its withered form and the understated music that makes the Avatar feel weaker as the fight goes on. Its attacks also reek of desperation, it clearly isn't confident that it can beat the player in melee combat, and this contextualizes its tendency to fight from distance. It's torn between defending the Scadutree and whatever self-preservation instincts a giant sunflower has.
I didn't have to read item descriptions and trick myself into thinking this boss felt significant, the game just showed instead of telling. As a counterexample, Rellana's visual design, and her extended combo chains with the occasional long windup imply a sort of high-class smugness, which the lore actually reinforces, but this is betrayed every time she runs away from you. The fight ultimately reads to me as a game designer trying to make a hard boss. That's all fine and good but I know the people at From Software are capable of way more than that. One more lore complaint: Rellana and Messmer should probably have some overlap in fighting style, like Artorias and Sif do. Instead, the connection is relegated to item descriptions and the fire damage in her second phase.
The long, hyper-aggressive combos they share might do the job if that wasn't common to nearly every enemy in the DLC.
Rellana's lore might be good, in fact I know it is, but they skipped the important part of making the experience unique and meaningful, there's nothing there for the lore to contextualize or redeem, it's just a separate story that exists next to the video game. They could change all the lore around Rellana and the fight would be exactly the same, although credit where it's due her moon attack does communicate the relation to Rennala. The Scadutree Avatar has clear motivations and personality that are communicated through the action, it has real scars that make the history feel real in turn, it's part of a world that we might want to know more about.
It drops Miquella's Great Rune, which again shows before telling by mechanically twisting the Great Rune concept we're used to. Before this fight, I hadn't cared about much in Elden Ring. The massive world stretches the NPC quest mechanics of the old games to their breaking point, and my approach to the game meant I was locked out of many of them. That's fine, it makes my experience unique, but I inadvertently missed a lot of what I actually wanted in a game like this. The NPC plotlines are more convoluted than the main story by a huge margin, and the world is sorely lacking in friendship outside of maybe Roderika and Blaidd.
{++ new ++}
A lot of the time, I felt like I was solving other people's problems for no particular reason.
{++ new ++}
Each of these games comes with a whole new set of Proper Nouns that characters are going to throw around, and in the base game I never found a way to orient myself so I just accepted that the strange, interesting world was beyond my understanding. I wanted something solid, meaning directly experienced, for my thoughts to crystallize around. The Scadutree Avatar finally gave it to me.
The DLC contains many characters and is thankfully much smaller than the base game, so I was able to actually meet them before my weird progression track broke the main quest. Although they fan out over the course of the story, everybody is here to find Miquella, a fascinating character in his own right. So we enter the DLC with extremely clear motivations, and consequently when the fellowship starts to fall apart characters' actions are completely intelligible. The DLC also revolves around two major developments with extremely obvious consequences.
It's fantastic that Elden Ring has such a well-considered and complicated world, but that doesn't mean everyone we meet has to be secretly plotting to overthrow the Golden Order in a very different, specific, and unexplained way. To be honest I didn't even bother to beat the game, I fought all the bosses and left satisfied, only seeing Ranni's ending when I played with a randomizer. When Miquella's charm breaks in the DLC, Leda's lapse in trust is very easy to understand, it deepens her character, and it drives a B-Plot which impacts the fight against Leda later on. {== joke: first meeting with Leda "miquellas charm keeps us together" smash cut to later when she's describing cutting people up ==} Thiollier loses conviction for Miquella and turns to Miquella's "discarded half," Saint Trina, and this leads to the second of three great story moments I happened upon. None of this plot simplicity undercuts the lore, if you like these characters then you actually have an impetus to dig into the lore and understand why they're doing what they're doing.
Now that I care about this mythos, I've seen some absolutely ridiculous talk online about it being incoherent or incomplete. Dark Souls content popularized this totally denatured approach to game analysis in the first place, and now we're at a point where people lament the fact that there aren't books in Elden Ring that just explain the whole story to you. As though shattering the game's greatest strength--the mirage of a history beyond what we see--is in any way desirable. The lore of these games is not delivered in fragments by accident, and what we get is not the capital-T True story of the Lands Between, it's a collection of history and folklore mixed together from a bunch of biased perspectives. She's called Queen Marika the Eternal, surely that tells you something about how reliable our sources are.
Although it didn't click with me initially, Elden Ring is excellently presented and intentionally defies explanation at times with presences like the Outer Gods. The piecemeal storytelling in these games is meant to texture the gameplay, and give you something to chew on while exploring. It's both a bold choice and a perfect fit for a game this open.
The base game managed to be completely open while still funneling players into important areas. The solution--cliffs--doesn't seem complicated but it's the first open world game to do this really well. If you know where to go, you can fill out the map pretty quickly, but on a first playthrough you are likely to encounter the important stuff more-or-less in the intended order. Case in point, Stormveil is hard to miss, but you can just go around it.
Most of my time in the DLC was spent searching for new areas. Since the only rewarding items at this point are the Scadutree fragments, exploration has been made more difficult, and finding a new area is its own reward. Reaching new areas often demands that you go to one specific place, so you get a very puzzling and involved journey on a first playthrough and an easy to remember route on your second. Each region is very visually distinct from the others, but they still cohere nicely. I think they managed to pull this off by putting huge vertical distances between regions, and using liminal corridors--sorry for saying the word--to actually move players between areas. The incredibly confident presentation is also a big factor, these places feel real because the game just insists over and over that they are.
On the whole the DLC looks maybe a little more spectacular than the base game, which is quite an achievement. {-- Dark Souls 3 had good graphics for its time but, with the exception of Irithyll and some of the Ringed City, it is sorely lacking in charm and I think it aged pretty poorly. Well, according to the lore it's supposed to be grey and ugly and not fun so I guess that's fine. --} Elden Ring's visuals intensify the high fantasy elements of the Souls games, and the expansion re-injects a lot of the tragic, human stuff I felt was missing. All the complexity is there in the base game, but Shadow of the Erdtree grounds it in the moment-to-moment, so it's a really nice complement to the main experience. The focus on people echoes Miquella's own tendencies and goals--his power is manipulating people, and he wants an age of enforced peace. {== patlabor 2 ==}
Searching for Thiollier brings us to a peninsula off the Cerulean Coast, which will furnish more evidence for the shift away from action and toward adventure. The constant ambushes in Elden Ring are a way to make you pay attention, but they really aren't that interesting. In the expansion you're likely to have a character that can deal with any mob one-on-one, which must have been a challenging thing to design around. The problem is solved with some really exciting types of encounters, and some disappointing ones.
Legacy dungeons in the DLC are littered with enemies that don't flinch, and their attacks are often delayed to catch rolls. There is very little they can do to make fights interesting at this stage, and while these enemies do incentivize a very careful playstyle they simply aren't good enough to fight twenty plus times, and I ended up just stunlocking them or running past {== show fire enemies in messmer tower ==}.
But there is another way, which hearkens back to Sen's Fortress or even Stonefang Tunnel. The Stone Coffin Fissure has us descending the coffins in question while avoiding laser-shooting caterpillars. This is a very simple concept--the enemies aren't even new--but it's a unique combination of elements that give the area an identity, on a mechanical level, which the homogeneous combat can't. It's not just difficult for difficulty's sake, it's a notable thing which you do on the course of a journey, and in classic From Software style it is completely optional, as is the vast majority of the DLC.
{++ new ++}
The Untouchables in the Abyssal Woods are another example. Half-baked stealth sections are rarely fun, but they are a new idea, and the Untouchables elevate an otherwise forgettable forest full of rats.
{++ new ++}
I'd say most of the legacy dungeons lean toward the boring, difficult enemy style of encounter, but the DLC catacombs each have a fun or funny take on traps, and they are quite long compared to the base game. The weirdly over-tutorialized forges have you change the area itself to access new parts of it; an old trick, but a good one.
Another flavour of encounter involves a mass of enemies that you can see ahead of time. If you pay attention before entering aggro range, this gives you a lot of control over the starting conditions of the fight, and the game expects you to use that to your advantage. I finished the DLC around level 180, so there were plenty of points for secondary stats. I went into Shadow of the Erdtree expecting more difficult combat, a pretty-looking tree, and not much else so I kind of hated this puzzle-adjacent design at first. As I got deeper into the DLC, I expanded my arsenal with a bow and some of the dragon breath incantations. On my second playthrough, the one you're watching, I carried a torch and played with some of the new weapons. In retrospect, I think it's fantastic that the expansion is designed to reward problem solving beyond your ability to press B at the right time. There's so much equipment in Elden Ring and it's nice that we have a reason to use it. The Memory Stone system also shines as your level gets higher--no need to waste points on attunement.
I like a good, technical video game, but Shadow of the Erdtree's bosses melted my brain. Dark Souls' sense of weight is sorely lacking here, and the game is clearly designed to punish you if you roll in a way that makes intuitive sense. Maybe it's just cope, but the DLC bosses feel impossible to sight read because the wind-up for each attack transitions instantly into the damaging portion. If you can't anticipate the timing on a first attempt--in other words if you guess wrong--you're practically guaranteed to get hit. Purely reacting to a swing is rarely an option since the "snap" part of many attacks is only a few frames long. Instead you get lucky or get hit and then start memorizing the proper timings. {== Messmer is a great demo for this ==}
This is not helped by the fact that you sometimes need to roll in a particular direction now, and in my opinion the animations rarely communicate which direction it is.
Fighting Rellana with a summon really shows how silly these attack patterns have become {== cartoon SFX would be good ==}; Radahn's ability to hold back the stars doesn't seem as impressive when half the characters we meet can turn around so quickly the energy they expend should make a black hole. Along with the un-intuitive timings there's an abundance of long combos and a degree of bling that makes it very difficult to read attacks. Every time I reached phase two of a boss for the first time, and it started doing its extra-epic elemental attack, it instantly got thrown onto the 'maybe later' list and I went back to the irresistibly fun exploration.
A lot of that is just me, but the boss designs do blend together mechanically, and it's rare that the right answer for normal players is not to roll at the correct time and try to get a single jumping R2 in before the next 15 minute combo. Unless you're a caster. Bosses tend to have instant gap closer and retreat moves, so spacing is rarely in the player's hands. The bosses need to space you correctly for their attacks, and they're a hell of a lot better at it than the player. It's kind of ironic that as the difficulty climbs in these games the combat loses even more of its complexity, to the extent that the DLC bosses are mostly a one-button rhythm game. Where Sekiro stripped down the mechanics and had bosses built for a simpler, locked-in style of play Elden Ring is somewhere in the middle, and its hitboxes are nowhere near as polished as Sekiro.
Fights are so aggressive that you barely even need to manage stamina, they can't put in combos that exhaust you completely--you should go level up if that's happening--and you can usually only get one attack in. So stamina manages itself. Healing feels like a complete gamble, there must be some logic to it, but cooldowns on boss attacks are not guaranteed. Usually it's OK, sometimes an attack comes out too quickly and you take damage.
Input buffering becomes a worse and worse problem as these games speed up and diversify your options, and time seems to be the only factor for inputs leaving the buffer. I have had inputs from before an attack hit me come out after my character falls down and stands back up. In the old days this was an occasional annoyance, now it demands a lot of discipline on the controller.
From this point of view Elden Ring is trying to be an action game, but it's stuffed into an engine built for a slow dungeon crawler. This is most evident with the game's atrocious camera. If you must turn up the speed and difficulty, you need to actually address all the disorienting camera movements, and come up with a better solution for walls than "the player goes blind and dies." {== so much of this in divine beast. show god hand as well ==} Unlocking the camera helps, but that forces you to engage practically every input on the controller at once, which is less than ideal. If this is an intentional choice, it's super awkward and they should just zoom out the camera sometimes.
For a long time, I thought Elden Ring's bosses were held back by needing to be difficult, although there are some great moments like Godrick's phase transition. It's a tough situation--the developers basically have to keep making the games harder because challenge is inseparable from their intended experience. FromSoft's identity at this point is difficult action games, even if that fundamentally misunderstands the birthplace of their dynasty, Demon's and Dark Souls. When Armored Core 6 came out, I saw hardcore AC fans go through the same grieving process that I had with Dark Souls 3. The need for difficulty overrides both mechanical complexity and emotional complexity at times--it's like trying to discern the notes of caramel {++ pronounce "carmel" ++} in Everclear. But if From wants to make something emotionally impactful again, they can't just go back to the 2011 balance of difficulty, they've made us all too good at their games. The only way out of this thing is to go through it.
And I didn't notice at first, but I think they did. There are hints of this in the base game, with blatantly unfair {== I don't want to discuss your definition of fairness please stop typing that comment. I know about the tear. ==} attacks like Mohg using you as a blood bank, and the much-maligned Waterfowl Dance. The DLC reigns in a lot of the really crazy stuff, but the baseline difficulty is much higher. Things only really clicked when I realized the bosses are still fun if you embrace some of the more broken mechanics like Mimic Tear. All but one of the main bosses has an NPC summon, and boss HP scales so much that the fights aren't trivialized, your friends just pull aggro so you can heal. A couple NPC summons are tied to quests, but some of the optional ones still trigger special dialogue, a nice way to deepen our attachment to these characters. {== freyja after divine beast ==}
If this is the intended way to play, which I really think it is going by Miyazaki's recent interviews,
"The amount of freedom that we give players helps offset that difficulty curve and makes the game more accessible and engaging"
it's a move away from both Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3. Bosses are definitely more cinematic now, but that never erodes your choices. You can beat the game with a broken straight sword, or a frost-bleed Colossal Weapon combo with the Mimic Tear and two summons, or anything in between. Miyazaki said in an interview that the high fantasy of the Lands Between informed the game's flexible approach to character building, and I think it's an incredibly good fit--it's also largely the reason re-specs don't bother me [4]. In the base game, I still felt like a cheater for using all the tools at my disposal--even Malenia was trivialized with the best version of my build.
It's not that I want everyone else to git gud or whatever, but they put all of this stuff into the game and I want to experience it. Playstyles that completely break these games are only 'wrong' in the sense that you're skipping so much you can't even maintain the fiction your enemies are powerful. The actual difficulty is a non-issue, as you've seen I am not very good at Elden Ring. If you try to play the old way, with a sword and a B-button, you'll find that avoiding all damage is impossible--I know pros can do it, but you and I probably can't. Some fights just have too many overlapping damage sources and timers. This is sloppy, in the sense that the game is less technically fair than its predecessors, but it points to the fact that you should be using tools to get an advantage, it communicates the game's intent while still preserving your ability to choose. In other words, you can refuse the tools the game gives you, but you are consenting to being frustrated.
It's good to twist the mechanics of the game to create an emotional reaction {== MGS microwave hallway/MGS1 torture ==}, and I think Shadow of the Erdtree acknowledges that this difficulty arms race has to end one way or another. Difficulty was always a means to an end, and now that the hard but fair style of Souls-like bosses is almost exhausted, new means are needed. Bullshit attacks are honestly a smart compromise, you are practically guaranteed to feel overwhelmed by the strength of your enemy, but the game doesn't shift into a cutscene or QTE for the sake of fairness. Player expression is a huge part of Elden Ring, hence the bottomless supply of weapons and armour, and the continuity of your character is more important than fairness. Elden Ring's approach allows people to do their hyper-difficult no damage runs while regular players can make use of tools to even the playing field.
Once I realized that, in moderation, the new tools don't break the game, I really started to love Shadow of the Erdtree. Bayle--another FromSoft dragon boss whose foot can initiate a mouth grab--is not just more fun with Igon's help, the fight has the whole context of helping Igon get revenge. Again, you don't need to dig into the lore to understand this, he's literally screaming about it every time you meet him. It's strong and simple writing, neither condescending nor obscure word salad, and it made me want to learn more. Myths are made of exaggerated, archetypal characters like Igon.
At their best, summons like Igon are built with the target boss in mind, but they often just act as damage sponges without much personality. That's a huge missed opportunity, but it's better than nothing--it is much easier to like a character if they measurably help you. And I really can't ask for more in an expansion this expansive.
They do still favour roll-focused difficulty over interesting design. Cut-able tails or cripple-able limbs are sorely lacking. Elden Ring bosses have some very complicated behaviour to be sure, but that will never feel as dynamic as the player-initiated crippling mechanics in Bloodborne. The latter is something you have to figure out and integrate into your strategy, and it makes the boss's health bar feel like a real measure of their vitality, since getting slashed by a sword many times would make walking slightly challenging. {== the injured part explodes into gore! ==}
So if these bosses are supposed to be a memorable, specific experience rather than pure difficulty, there is still a ways to go. But they're getting there! Despite any technical gripes, the bosses do get my blood pumping, and that's helped along by the music which has much more variety than the base game. Some of them are miserable and frustrating, Gaius was my true final boss, but the ridiculous power gap made victory all the more satisfying.
Before this series of tangents I was talking about the Coffin Fissure, which houses the end of Thiollier's story. I found the boss here unremarkable, but he's immune to Thiollier's signature poison, mechanically reinforcing that our buddy is way out of his depth. The trick to Thiollier's quest is nigh impossible to solve if you are trying to immerse yourself in the Shadow Realm as though it's a place. It only makes sense to kill yourself four times if you treat it like a video game. There's no reason to hide the story like this--Elden Ring is very much a you're the chosen one kind of game already, and they could easily have had Saint Trina whisper something incoherent the first time you imbibe. That would actually reward paying attention instead of counting on players to pull the Saint Trina lever like a rat.
Nonetheless, Thiollier's quest was an interesting side story, and the idea with Saint Trina is very good. There's a surprising variety in the DLC's characters, and meek Thiollier was a worthy inclusion.
{== I will never forgive you ==}
{-- This is the ultimate example of a simple, effective plot moment. I wasn't even that attached to Thiollier but this is such a nakedly hurtful thing to say that it got me anyway. --}
### Conclusion
In the end, the wheels fall off just a little bit. Enir-Ilim is a breathtaking area, and it has us battle Leda and her allies in an anticlimactic end to their storylines. The player can intervene to save or kill some characters over the course of the DLC, and this changes the final battle a bit, but it unfortunately feels like bashing action figures together. The game went out of its way to give these characters divergent interests, and all of that is flattened into a monochrome fight where everybody says an epic line or two. When Miquella's charm breaks, the overwhelming feeling is disillusionment, and the factionalism in this fight might make sense for Freyja, but I really can't see Moore or Thiollier summoning up enthusiasm for it.
And then there's the final boss. The Radahn fight isn't actually a retread, but it's inherently disappointing to see an old character return like this when the obvious move is facing Miquella one-on-one. An anticlimax like Maiden Astraea would have put Shadow of the Erdtree straight into S-Tier, but that was never going to happen. It's a hard boss, it reveals very little, the visuals in phase 2 are pretty nice. On the whole there's no reason for us to be doing any of this--you weren't actually guided to the Shadow Realm by Kindly Miquella, you were guided by purchasing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. I guess that's why the base game didn't leave much of an impact on me, the Tarnished try to become Elden Lord because it's their fate. It was fun to meet all those characters, but none of their problems were my problem and I helped them out of a desire to see all the content rather than any emotional connection.
There are two reasons to try to kill Gwyn: it is Oscar's dying wish that we ring the bells of awakening, and we are constantly reminded that the only guaranteed fate of the Undead is going Hollow. Your character is an avatar, so you probably don't want that to happen. There you go, the player has a stake in this world and its lords, time to make your own fate. The DLC is a side activity, but Artorias is central to the main game, and we follow in his footsteps. Miquella is only important in dialogue, although there are some limited similarities between him and the player.
As we play through Artorias of the Abyss we learn that the legend of Artorias is exactly what Alvina said it was--a fabrication. Artorias is just a husk, he rage quit at Manus and we have to go and finish the job. Beating the DLC changes your experience of the base game; Sif recognizing you is an actual change, but the context of the entire Abyss plot-line has shifted. The expansion is fun on its own and enhances the main game. People are disappointed with the new DLC because it has very little to do with our main task.
Elden Ring's story is a victim of its own ambitions. {-- Dark Souls is incredibly tight and coherent, Elden Ring is flabby. --} There is so much going on that it struggles to say anything in particular. I disagree with anybody who thinks fifteen lines of text about the Gloam-Eyed Queen or whoever else would have made the DLC's story perfect, the only way to do that would be to remove a ton of the base game and hard-focus on Marika, Miquella, and the Fingers. At the end, mend or destroy the Elden Ring. All the factions can figure their own shit out. Maybe Miquella kicks the whole thing off by restoring our body or something, so the frequent name-drops actually have some meaning to us.
Shadow of the Erdtree is a mixed bag but it has gotten me pretty excited for whatever From Software does next. If I can shatter my rune of fake objectivity, playing through the DLC again has only made me love it more. Repeat playthroughs burn away the flaws and leave a game that can be wholly appreciated for what it is, scars and all, a bar the Souls sequels never cleared. Experiencing this place again only draws its themes more tightly together, although I do pick and choose--I don't care about the Madness stuff at all, and the Finger ruins have little replayability. That's a major advantage to Elden Ring's design, to a large extent the game is what you make of it.
Even as they grow in scope and success, most of From Software's games have a forward-looking quality. Even when they go back to this lineage that arguably started with King's Field thirty years ago the studio continues to find new life in it. It might be a trite observation but nobody is doing anything this good at this scale. Elden Ring shouldn't exist--even with its shortcomings the game is unmatched in quantity and quality. I thought it was impossible to put this much detail into a map this large, and Shadow of the Erdtree is a perfect send-off.
I've played a decent chunk of From Software's catalog at this point, and at their most memorable FromSoft games have an irresistible mixture of enthusiasm and jank. They oscillate between intricate and blunt in all the right ways. Miyazaki's particular genius is undeniable, but it's clear that their older games were made with the same love and attention. Dark Souls 3 had me scared that they exchanged that love for the sweet promise of yearly sequels, but here we are eight years and three great games later.
Things do get lost between iterations, and I would love to see another tightly designed, semi-linear game in this style that carries over more mechanics from the previous games. So many fun details have been lost over the years--tail cutting and crippling are two big ones, the old covenant system was way better than Elden Ring's PVP, and Demon's and Dark Souls had a ton of small but impactful multiplayer interactions like world tendency and the bell in the Undead Parish. It was always those little things that made Dark Souls great. The bosses were hard, traversal was hard, but that difficulty set up the beautiful moments in between.
And Shadow of the Erdtree recaptured some of that. It has those great moments, and it arrives at them in entirely new ways. {== Shaman Village ==}