Elden Ring - The Many Problems With Its Bosses

a couple months ago i released a general critique of elden ring where i detailed some problems that i had with the game i think the most important takeaway from that video was how the overtuned and overly aggressive boss fights were often at odds with the quote-unquote hard but fair ideology that defined the souls games bloodborne and sekiro the more i've played eldon ring the more i've started to feel that its greatest flaw is that it tries too hard to surpass its predecessors and these boss fights are the biggest symptom of that mindset the best way i can describe them is over-engineered so much bloat has been attached in what feels like an attempt to uphold the fromsoft reputation of being mind-numbingly difficult which has ironically strayed them as far as they've ever gone from the series original appeal it pains me a little bit to say this but elden ring has left me with a nagging sense that the series is combat is showing signs of stagnation in this video i'll be detailing all of my praises and all of my problems with the game's boss design by looking at the major fights on a case-by-case basis the overall goal is to examine what makes boss fights succeed and fail in these games and talk about what kind of lessons can be taken away from elden ring because i worry that the game's monstrous success will propel future titles in a similar direction there's just a couple housekeeping items to go over before jumping into it first off this game has over 100 bosses with lots of different ways you can classify them so i've deliberated quite a bit over what constitutes a major boss there is no clear one size fits all criteria just doing remembrance bosses is a decent start but that would exclude lots of important fights like markets and loretta conversely talking about all 100 something bosses would be excessive plus there's a lot of duplicate bosses which needs to be somehow considered i would like to avoid getting bogged down in every single enemy with a boss health bar so here's what we'll go with if the boss gives you a remembrance when you kill it it's included in this video in addition to that i've picked out a handful of extra ones that have some relatively large significance whether it's through the story gating progression to an area or in their moveset complexity basically i've tried to pick things that would actually be interesting to talk about this is the final list that i've settled on it probably isn't perfect but for the purpose of studying the game's overall boss design philosophy i think it's perfectly adequate i should also mention that i've done all of these fights except for one of them without summons of any kind while i'll always advocate that it's perfectly valid to use the tools that you have the most fun with i really dislike the effect that summons have on the game so i won't be using them there's a chapter near the end of my elden ring critique that addresses this in further detail but the gist of it is they turn the tides in your favor too drastically by breaking the aggro on many bosses they're strong enough that they would render many talking points completely irrelevant and it wouldn't make for a very interesting discussion if i brute forced every single fight with a mimic tier i'd also like to quickly mention that i've gone through elden ring four times with very different builds each time first a dex arcane bleed build then a strength faith melee magic hybrid then pure magic then pure strength the wealth of options that elden ring provides means that two people could have extremely different experiences against the same bosses so i've done my best to cast a wide net and look at these fights with different approaches that should be everything so with all that said thank you for joining me let's talk about elden rings bosses starting with margaret generally speaking the more i've fought bosses throughout the soulsborne series the more things i've found to love about them unfortunately the opposite has happened many times with eldon ring including margate who's fallen from one of my favorite bosses to being just decent before getting into his actual move set though i think it's important to acknowledge margate's placement in the game he's somewhat analogous to the asylum demon or udex gundyr the tutorial boss that you need to beat to prove that you have the aptitude for the game the key difference is that marget doesn't block progression technically he's an optional boss it's just very unlikely that new players will skip him given that he's situated fairly early on in limgrave difficulty is difficult to quantify but i think it's fair to say that market is a considerable step up from many early bosses that the series has seen before now making an early boss such a massive roadblock would be counterproductive in many games simply because it's an easy way to turn away new players but it works greatly in elden ring's favor it's a teaching moment that takes nice advantage of the new open world format there's hours of content that you can tackle before market and if you do that first you'll come back to him with better levels and gear he'll be a lot more reasonable that way i think he communicates this intention very well and while fromsoft has never really shied away from bold choices like this one they still deserve some amount of praise for recognizing that it was the right thing to do there's more to market than just the fight itself it's a clever way to demonstrate that you aren't really required to do anything in any particular order it's encouraging you to interact with other components of the game regarding his actual mechanics he's a decently strong start but he marks the beginning of many problematic trends that are found across bosses for the rest of the game for example he has an abundance of delayed attacks with very long wind-ups leading into an instant spring of a hitbox moves that you can only dodge by learning their strict timing instead of reacting naturally to an incoming attack now these sorts of things are more forgivable with margat since he comes so early in the game when you are still being taught all of the lessons delayed attacks have a lot of advantages like punishing panic rolling and diverting from purely reactive play which are good lessons to reinforce with the first boss it makes sense that margate is here to foster that mindset early but the game relies on delayed attacks far too much to uphold its difficulty which will be a very consistent complaint throughout this video something else about market that i've only realized after fighting him so much is that positioning is often just as important for avoiding his attacks as rolling sticking close to him for most of the fight isn't really safe since some of his moves attack faster than you can roll and you need to make sure you're a safe enough distance to dodge away from them should they come out his 3 hit combo is a good example of this i've never been able to roll through it without getting hit at least once the timing is either extremely tight or downright impossible the second or third hit always catches the tail end of your roll animation before you can act again this would be fine if the telegraph gave you enough time to position yourself properly before his hitbox came out but the first sword swing of this combo comes out so quickly that unless you're already a safe distance away there's not much you can do it's one of many moves in the game that doesn't give you adequate time to adjust your positioning especially considering that he can do it just after you've punished one of his moves this isn't helped by the fact that lots of his recovery windows aren't very clear at the end of many combos he makes it look like he's done attacking but as soon as you get close he'll pull out his knife and start another chain it's a bit deceptive which i don't really mind in theory but it narrows your opportunities to engage with him and funnels players into being a lot more defensive i never started picking up on this behavior until i got more comfortable with the fight since it felt like my options for approaching him never changed with my skill level you still have to engage with him the same way you did on your first few attempts by playing very passively and only waiting for the handful of openings that you know are safe all of your decisions are the same you can just traverse through the flowchart of options faster while making fewer mistakes and such a noticeable skill cap makes him a lot less exciting to return to his greatest weakness is probably the issue of his ambiguous recovery windows either the animation would need to better communicate when he is and isn't done attacking or the constant knife sidearm moves need to be toned down it's very obnoxious having a boss only follow up as soon as you get close because it feels like you're being disallowed from playing the only reason i don't think marget is downright bad is because these problems have a comparatively smaller magnitude most of his moveset feels pretty good otherwise with a difficulty that's well adjusted for his place in the game the highest compliment that i can give marget is that he leaves a very strong first impression it's just that those feelings have dwindled a lot over time it is equally upsetting that even though he's just decent overall he still remains one of the better bosses when put against eldon ring's remaining lineup godric fares considerably better than margaret and he's one of my favorite fights the boss quality reaches a pretty high peak this early on with godric and takes a very shaky trajectory after him honestly i don't think it reflects very well on eldon ring that two of the better bosses are strategically placed right at the beginning as if to hide the troubles that the rest of the game faces but that's kind of a separate discussion anyway one thing they definitely got right with godric from a thematic standpoint is portraying him as one of the more pitiful demigods despite how intimidating he might look initially many other characters don't speak very highly of him not necessarily because he's weak but rather he's pathetic he tries to replicate the power of other demigods artificially by grafting all his body parts together and beneath all of those limbs is a character deservedly stuck in the shadow of his lineage i don't normally comment on lore details but i think many people's perception of godric has changed a lot over time and it makes for a pretty interesting character so i thought it was worth mentioning the main reason that he's one of the strongest bosses in the game is because unlike many others there's not tons of bloat weighing him down he has a nice combination of melee attacks aoes mobility tricks and so on there's no absurdly long combos no unexpected gimmicks and his downtime between attacks is very reasonable they knew when enough was enough with godric and the moves that he does have were given the care and balance that they needed for the most part once again though he relies on delayed attacks a bit too much for my liking particularly with one of his basic axe swings the common problem with these moves is that they'll be delayed to a degree where it just looks unnatural the reality with many games is that our brains have a tendency to apply real-life logic to whatever's happening on screen which is partially what determines our following actions when you see an enemy raise their weapon your natural response in both real life and an elden ring is to do something as soon as it's at the apex games that manage to tap into those instincts and let us operate purely on intuition without having to worry about the game's rules tend to feel the most natural to play lots of people would describe this as immersive or entering into that precious flow state delayed attacks will force the player to go against those impulses which isn't automatically a bad thing in fact it can create a lot of value if it's used properly for the purposes of creating a difficult game i'd say it's almost necessary at certain points since like i mentioned with margat it can punish bad habits and generate different responses from the player but when this trick is used as excessively as it is in elden ring you go too far with that idea and constantly punish the player for acting on instinct whenever one of these delayed attacks comes up you have to remind yourself that the boss isn't behaving how a normal entity would and the flow state is at least somewhat broken as a result the axe swing that i mentioned earlier is godric's best example of this but his mini earthquake his jump attack and his more powerful wide arc swing also do it to varying degrees the only one that i'd say ventures into overly frustrating territory is that xwing but these things can only remain tolerable for so long you need only to look at his 5-hit combo for an example of something that feels much more natural the swings come out when you'd expect and it's fun to weave through them while still being difficult to fully avoid he gains a few additional attacks in phase two but otherwise the fight is pretty similar i still greatly enjoy the second phase partially because of the cutscene that initiates it which is both incredibly cool and incredibly fitting for his whole pathetic demi-god portrayal i really like phase changes that come out of left field like this obviously it makes sense for godric's character to staple on stronger limbs like he does but i wasn't anticipating getting to see that change directly it's up there as one of my favorite phase transitions in the series another advantage of godric that shines throughout the fight is having very clear attack telegraphs this is somewhat in contrast to marget who didn't always make it clear when his attacks were finished godric is very much the opposite and it makes for a much more enjoyable battle not only is there adequate time to identify his attacks as they're about to come out it's also always clear when it's safe for you to retaliate this is part of what makes him feel like a more natural fight it never feels like you get unfairly punished for correctly identifying his behavior the numerous dragon attacks he gains are a great example of this his new arm sort of exhibits behavior of its own with moves like the grab and all of it is very satisfying to read and dodge unfortunately there is one element of godric that throws a pretty big wrench into all of this it's a very major issue that i'm surprised hasn't been addressed in patches yet his whirlwind attack has an extremely short startup and he can pull it out whenever he wants to compare him to margat again it's kind of like the three hit combo that i was complaining about only i think godric is worse if you walk in to punish one of his moves there's a chance he'll do the whirlwind before you have a chance to reposition safely it also comes out too fast to reasonably react to which just crosses the line into blatant unfairness attacks like these are part of why i don't think it's a reasonable defense to say that positioning is the solution to eldon ring's boss problems because you aren't even left with enough time to do that i think you would be justified in saying that this move alone is enough to bring godric standing down even though almost everything else about him is great if it did more damage i would probably feel that way too it's a really bad move that would benefit greatly from a slower startup if you did that plus made a couple of his attacks less delayed godric would pretty easily be my favorite boss and up there as one of the stronger fights in the whole series as it stands now he's one of the best in eldon ring which while great is generally at a lower standard than its peers either way i do really like godric it's just a big disappointment that things don't get a whole lot better from here has a whole lot of style but with very little substance her two phases try to combine a gimmick boss and a normal boss into a single fight but i think it would have gone over much better if they committed to one of those styles because the two phases sort of clash with each other in their current state phase one is the gimmick fight it's a puzzle where she's invulnerable until you break her shield by attacking certain enemies in the arena it's not difficult and there's very few attacks coming at you but i think that's fine the atmosphere makes it worthwhile the music lends quite a bit to the scene and i think the grand library environment fits very well with raya lucaria's magic academy theme the entire dungeon is more occult than stormvale and the boss has a mysterious tone to match that i also think using sound to identify where the shielded enemies are is kind of cool it took me a while to realize this but the singing always originates from the enemy you're supposed to attack once you figure that out it's a lot easier to blitz through phase 1. the main problem with gimmicks like these is that they only have an emotional impact the first time you see them if you die any subsequent attempts lose their luster since the experience had to be interrupted i won't spoil what it is here but sikuro addressed this issue with one of its gimmick fights by making it so easy and simple to understand that you can win on your first try even without any prior knowledge of the boss it dropped the pretense of being anything other than a spectacle fight and it's very successful as a result this is where phase 2 of ranala comes in it still isn't hard but it is an actual fight where you're more likely to die a couple times learning how everything works if that happens the phase 1 gimmick becomes a chore that you have to put up with every time you want to re-attempt the actual fight the first attack is another delayed move with heavy damage and unusual timing and that alone can catch players off guard right away i would have preferred to see the second phase given the complete spotlight it's pretty easy once you realize you can just stick close and wail on her while only needing to sprint around every now and then to dodge most of her magic the way you respond to everything isn't very involved since you can get away with just running in circles she's also faced with the issue of most of her attacks being ranged which means her ai has to move far away from you to stand a chance since avoiding her attacks is pretty monotonous there can be quite a bit of empty time where no side is making progress towards victory it's kind of like elden beast's behavior just on a smaller scale this is really just my long-winded way to say phase 2 is boring even though the arena remains visually strong i also dislike how easy it is to get stun locked against some of her attacks if you get clipped by a single piece of magic it can very quickly snowball into a bunch of stacked shots that deal a massive chunk of health if they don't kill you entirely if something like this happens on your first couple encounters with phase 2 they don't feel like fair deaths it can become an overly harsh punishment for what was probably a pretty minor mistake on your part stun locks aren't exclusive to her at all but she was the first instance where it got under my skin her most notable ability is the summoning of other enemies during the fight which is yet another disappointment i'm not sure if it had the effect that they were going for they don't stick around very long and it's easy to ignore them while continuing to focus on ranala trying to kill them as more effort than it's worth because you still have to deal with her magic attacks on top of that enemy's normal moveset it's not like she's summoning unique enemies that are built to work in tandem with her magic they're just the same wolves or knights found all over the world that have little bearing on how you fight the boss the one final dig i want to take at her is that she's tied for the worst run back in the game now that we have stakes of america it's very odd to me that this is still a problem especially in a boss fight that's already very tedious if you use the shortcut and send the elevator back down each time it takes about one minute to run to her from the nearest grace that may not sound like much initially but it adds up when combined with repeating the same phase 1 puzzle every attempt on top of it i know the lore justification for this is because ronald probably hates america so why would she want her stakes in the academy but i disagree heavily with letting such a mild story detail make gameplay more cumbersome it's one of those things that feels more like a coincidence that we only notice after the fact if there was one hypothetically sitting outside of her arena would anyone actually question it i'd argue no i wonder how much the existence of phase 1's gimmick hurts phase 2's mechanics and vice versa i wish more focus could have been put on making her actual fight more interesting but i would also accept the entire fight being a gimmick if they could have found ways to make a cooler puzzle the focus on ronald's fight was spread too thin so neither phase really got the attention they deserved the thematic elements are definitely the saving grace on this one i'm just glad it isn't too difficult so the player isn't stuck repeating phase one for too long the magma worms arguably aren't prestigious enough to be on this list but i wanted to include them solely for one reason their repeated fights do a good job at demonstrating the importance of the arena the magma worms have lots of long lasting aoes that can restrict your mobility depending on where they're placed and sometimes these aoes can be spread by a charge move where the magma worm runs a pretty good distance across the arena basically their attacks can cover a lot of ground so the wiggle room that the player has to respond factors in a lot when determining the quality of these fights magma worm makar is the first variant of these that i fought and it takes place in a nice open arena where all of its attacks get a chance to shine the ai can get confused and run into walls every now and then but even so this is the best instance of the magma worms since there's nothing to distract from the fight itself the lava pools that it can spawn are a more unique addition to its moveset as a dynamic way of introducing obstacles on the field if we look at the magma worm in mount gelmer things will change this one takes place right beside a large pool of lava and the shape of the arena is much different it's more like a narrow strip along this pool instead of a wide open space as you might expect this makes the fight a whole lot more frustrating even though the enemy itself is more or less identical you have much less maneuverability in the gelmer version since a boss that already takes up a lot of space is thrown into a more restrictive environment this can create incredibly long stretches without any opportunities to touch the magma worm because the ai can decide to use the running attack three or four times in a row which covers the entire place in lava and strips away possible angles that you could approach at the magma worm enemy itself is quite good when you have the space to deal with it once again it has quite a few delayed attacks but there's also a lot of movement going on as you run away from its fireballs or position yourself in the safest spot to attack it that strength is just stunted by only one of them having an arena that takes full advantage of the worm's potential it goes to show how multi-faceted constructing a boss can be i appreciate wanting to add environmental hazards in certain fights but the magma worms aren't a good execution of that idea it takes a good boss and places it in a bad context which definitely hurts its overall standing if i were just discussing magma worm makar i'd say it's a very solid fight but when looking across all of the magma worms it gets a whole lot worse for that it averages out to being a very lukewarm boss overall before we begin allow me to paint you the full picture radon has a much more elaborate build up out of all the bosses in the game the radon festival is referenced by several npcs and he's often heralded as one of the most powerful demigods in the lore i think the fight itself mostly satisfies the expectations set by all of this but it's a bit tricky to judge radon has received several changes since the game's launch and i'm not sure how that should factor in when appraising him one thing that's held firm throughout the patches is his fantastic presentation there's a scope to the radon battle that isn't really captured by any other fight the arena is so vast that it takes up a massive portion of caleb's map and radon embodies the spirit of an insane battle-hardened general very well he's relentless and brutal in a way that commands your respect and i can't think of a better way for him to go down than in the blaze of glory offered by the radon festival i think i recall the main problem plaguing him upon release were his hitboxes they were way too large and inconsistent and his damage was incredibly high to boot if the fight was still in that state it would be pretty terrible but fortunately i think the changes they've made have been for the better even though he still isn't perfect perhaps his most defining trait is the heaps of npc summons sprinkled throughout the arena it lends a lot more to the theme of the fight rather than the mechanics they aren't required to win and honestly i find it harder with so many summons since you never know who radon is aggroed on that way they felt more important pre-nerf when you needed tons of health sponges to stand a chance but nowadays it's more of an optional bonus for those that want to go all in on the festival idea i honestly don't have much to say about it it's a fun way to fight him but i still prefer riding solo the other unique thing about radon is that this is one of the few major bosses where you can use torrent which i'm not sure how to feel about many of radon's attacks do seem to take torrent into consideration which is both a problem and a solution to the terribly primitive horse combat for the most part i hate fighting on torrent there's barely if any iframes it's so much easier to get stun locked and attacking is a whole lot slower with timings that are just really weird to learn it's extremely unwieldy and relegates torrents to being mostly a traversal mechanic radon accounts for this by making many of his moves avoidable by just running around on your horse which was a wise choice if they wanted to make torrent a viable option but it also does make things a little bit more boring you aren't able to make quick adjustments on horseback since there's no equivalent to rolling so the best way to dodge is just by staying on the move you can rely on hit and run tactics pretty safely this way and it isn't as engaging as battling on foot i've ultimately enjoyed the fight the most by switching between the two i try to stay up close early on when his melee combos are easier to dodge around but as soon as it gets too hard to see what he's doing or when i need a get out of jail free card i'll switch to torrent it's not a terrible approach and in tandem with the hitbox nerfs it makes radon pretty fun but given how many different ways there are to fight him i think whatever their intention was is communicated rather poorly if you're meant to use all of the summons and steamroll him then that's fine but it would make for a pretty anticlimactic finish to the supposed mightiest demigod in the world alternatively torrance awkward controls makes that option very unappealing but also necessary if you want a reliable way to avoid some moves so i'm not sure somewhat similar to ranala there are some conflicting priorities here honestly i think more of my problems lie with torrent than with radon if torrent wasn't as clunky as he is radon could have been turned into the game's signature horse battle he's designed with tauren's limitations in mind and i appreciate that but they are just that limitations even if part of the fight works around them it's hard to avoid heaps of problems that crop up with horse combat to be a little bit more positive radon does have a more well-balanced moveset in terms of damage timings and recovery windows fighting him on foot is still a viable approach at least against some moves and he's at his peak during those moments even though many of his melee attacks just flail around everywhere they are possible to dodge through with enough time to follow up afterwards i shouldn't have to praise bosses for this but there's also no cheap surprises for when you get up close nothing blatantly unavoidable like godric's whirlwind to deter you from being aggressive once you can find the confidence clashing with radon does make him feel worthy of that legendary status and for a fight of such grand proportions it's very satisfying to feel like the two of you can stand on even ground radon's problems being addressed in patches goes to show how elden rings bosses are very fixable it's just frustrating that as of the making of this video others haven't gotten the same treatment that he has i suppose it was important to fromsoft that they got this fight right since radonable probably lasts in the memory of elven ring players for a while for better or for worse he embodies the scale and identity of the game better than most other bosses so even though there are several slip ups on the execution it's difficult to ignore how memorable he is once the beautiful music and atmosphere wears off the regal ancestor spirit is pretty bad in fact because it's a more atmospheric fight it suffers very heavily from being recycled almost everything about this boss is identical to the regular ancestor spirit found in theophra so it leaves a much weaker impression this time around i don't want to undersell just how good the visuals are but we're only 6 bosses in and i've allotted both ranala and radon for the same thing i would be more okay with these aesthetic focused bosses if the traditional fights were up to par i don't mean to suggest that every boss needs intensive mechanical complexity on the level of godric or ratagon because having some simpler bosses like this one can serve as a refreshing break from those but it's harder to justify their inclusion when the rest of the bosses are suffering much like ranala there's a lot of empty time where you're just running around to close distance the thing can teleport across the arena which just feels like the fight is being unnecessarily padded it's actual attacks aren't bad in terms of variety and fairness but it's very slow paced in a way that causes lots of impatience on top of that the regal ancestor spirit can heal a bunch of health with as far as i can tell no way to prevent it it absorbs the souls of the rest of the animals in the arena and the only way to counteract it is just piling on damage i suppose that calling it a dps check would be a reasonable justification but that doesn't do anything to change the boring factor the magic breath attacks are especially annoying since all you have to do is back off and wait for them to finish it's not like it sticks out for being exceedingly terrible but it doesn't do anything particularly well either if the regular ancestor spirit didn't exist i'd probably feel differently but that fight comes first and does everything that this fight does in fact it's more memorable since that's the first time you get to experience the atmosphere i won't rehash all of my complaints about the generous boss reuse in eldon ring but this definitely demonstrates why it can be a problem the ancestor spirit isn't interesting to fight and just getting to experience it once would have been plenty unfortunately i don't really know what else to say about it the boss is very basic and one of the more forgettable remembrance bosses they would do well to prolong the fight a lot less perhaps letting the player kill some of the animal spirits to stunt the healing would be a viable option i'm not sure if there's a limit on how often it can heal but it definitely needs one i've had fights where i had to go through at least three full health bars to take it down and its moveset isn't nearly interesting enough to warrant it taking that long all in all the fight doesn't really bring anything to the table and i would have much rather seen a unique boss occupying knockron rather than fighting this thing again it gets a very disappointed thumbs down from me gank fights have always been extremely hit or miss throughout the series and elden ring is no exception the valiant gargoyles are a pretty big miss and the only reason i didn't used to hate them as much as i do now was because i usually and unknowingly came to the fight over leveled they're available as soon as you have access to knockron but the deeproot depth that they guard always felt like a more late game area to me so i would hold off until further in the game by that point i usually had enough dps to kill the first gargoyle before the second one even showed up and the fight was nothing special now that i have experience fighting them at what seems like a more reasonable level i really don't like them the trap with gank fights that this boss falls into is that it pits you against two enemies whose movesets don't complement each other these gargoyles and the black blade kindreds that they're based on feel like they were designed with one-on-one fights in mind since their melee attacks don't sync up well when fought in a pair it's also incredibly annoying to keep your attention on two of them at once when they both decide to attack there's basically no chance for you to do anything other than watch and dodge compare this to something like ornstein and smo who are built with each other in mind they'll often take turns attacking so that you can juggle each of their movesets throughout the fight these gargoyles are pretty solid enemies when placed on their own but they don't add any value to each other as a result the only good part of the fight is the time before the second gargoyle shows up individually they exhibit the traits of a well-balanced enemy with fair telegraphs and dodgeable moves and all of that there's still a few unnecessarily delayed attacks but some of them do look more natural on the gargoyles to make it a bit more excusable the only move i'm not a huge fan of during the initial phase is the giant aoe that the first one can do since it's kind of like godric's whirlwind if you aren't a safe enough distance away when he starts it up you're probably going to get hit as soon as the twin blade one shows up everything goes downhill there's one single attack that these guys have that makes initiating on your own way too risky at any point in the fight they can start spinning out a poison mist which covers a good portion of the ground and deals tick damage while applying poison build this single move is all it takes for the fight's quality to plummet the first problem with it is that it has a terrible audio cue and visual indicator for where the poison is you need to keep both gargoyles on screen at all times because otherwise there's no way to know when it's coming out the noise they make when doing it is ridiculously quiet and the actual poison is difficult to make out and you won't notice it hitting you until your health is already being chunked for starters it needs a much more obvious audio tell and the poison needs to be way more distinct on the ground this move can also cause you to take damage through no fault of your own if you're in the middle of an engagement with one gargoyle and the other starts spitting poison out it's very likely that the poison will reach you before you can run to safety even if the second gargoyle is really far away this is part of what i mean when i say these enemies aren't meant to be fought together once poison mist can completely interrupt your fight with the other like they want to constantly reset your tempo and drag things out as long as possible with all of this in mind the best way to fight them is to turtle and wait until their attacks line up in a way that you can sneak in a single hit play very passively until the stars align and you can take down one as soon as it's back to a 1v1 things are better but that doesn't excuse the nonsense that goes on when both are alive it's extremely tedious and you have to be really careful about when you choose to engage because the poison will absolutely rip through your health if you get caught in a bad spot the second gargoyle alone is already too excessive but throwing in one of the worst moves in the game on top of that makes the fight a complete train wreck i'm not sure what the rationale was behind both of these decisions it's not like adding in a second gargoyle makes the fight unique it's just piling on more and more boss reuse which the game already has too much of the poison mist is so blatantly ridiculous that i'm guessing it's one of those things that they didn't have enough time to properly adjust and playtest they're usually pretty good about telegraphs on ranged attacks like this and i would like to have enough faith in fromsoft that they just didn't have the resources to fix this rather than it being an intentional design decision with this game though who knows i don't think there's any gank fight in eldon ring composed of completely unique enemies it feels like whenever there's a two on one it's with guys that aren't originally meant to be fought two on one if they didn't have time to make two completely unique assets to fight alongside each other then that's understandable but at that point you should be questioning whether gang fights are a good idea to have in the first place tossing in the same enemy twice just screams unoriginality and you wouldn't be wrong to argue that the game's scope proved too much for them to handle it's not a good fight lots of it is unnecessary and it's yet another one that i've grown to hate the more i've played estelle is pretty weird both in terms of quality and of his context in the world as the finale to ronnie's quest i think he's very fitting his design doesn't really seem like it belongs in eldon ring but that ends up working in his favor it often feels like there's larger things at play when going through ronnie's quest and putting such a peculiar looking fight at the end lends very well to that mysterious feeling the sequence of events you go through to reach a stell is also worthy of a finisher like this so in terms of looks and theme it'd be one of the strongest in the game at least that's what i would say if estelle weren't casually recycled near the end in the consecrated snowfield it really tarnished his unique image and the stars of darkness version is so much more anticlimactic he was such a special entity to fill in a special quest but the fact that he can live in any old cave makes his presence a lot less impressive i digress though that doesn't speak much to the mechanics of the fight so let's talk about that estelle reminds me a bit of the amygdala from bloodborne in that you have to stick under his body in between his limbs to avoid lots of attacks it's a bit of an unconventional method that's made possible thanks to the lanky construction of his body and it does lead to some more interesting responses to his attacks it can be trickier to damage him this way since his hurt boxes are pretty narrow but i never found it frustrating or unfair elden ring is actually pretty good about having accurate hitboxes and hurt boxes across the board even with a twiggy body like estelle's it's easier to focus on his head whenever possible anyway the one exception to this is his grab hitbox now i don't have any personal experience with this so i can't show any examples but i've seen many clips floating around of his grab being able to catch you when you aren't near where the actual hands meet it always looked like that it extends too far up his arms i'm not sure if this has been fixed in patches or not but if it hasn't i'd consider it a more notable flaw with him these games have always struggled with grabs like this so i guess it's not that's outlandish to see it happen in elden ring that aside the main disadvantage that larger entities usually have is that you can't see what they're doing when you're so up close and that does happen with estelle 2 but i'm honestly not sure how much that should be held against him fromsoft has demonstrated before that they can make massive enemies work nicely with the camera and it's always a luxury to see that happen but the fact that they don't implement these solutions regularly means that there must be some rationale behind making you fight oversized enemies like this one potential draw that i can think of is that it makes you rely on sound cues which is a completely different skill than reading the boss visually if the move is happening off-screen but has a unique sound effect you can ideally identify it that way and do your dodge timing accordingly estelle doesn't fully realize this potential since many sound effects on his attacks are the same but it can still be helpful against some moves for example whenever he teleports he can either move to another part of the arena or he can appear on top of you and go for a grab it's not always easy to spot where he's coming from before he appears but if he's going for the grab then the teleporting sound effect for when he reappears is less delayed if you catch on to that quickly enough you know to look above you instead of panning around the arena so that you can dodge the incoming grab mix-ups like that are a bit under-utilized not only in elden ring but across the whole series so it's always an interesting way to create varied defensive options and depart from the usual roll out of the way method it's also hard to deny that large entities like this one would lose a lot of their visual appeal if they were shrunk down to fit into frame and by this point it's pretty clear that fromsoft wants to preserve that aspect with these bosses even if it doesn't always play nice with the camera there are just two moves with estelle that i don't really like the first is the aforementioned teleport that makes you run to the other side of the arena it's similar to the issue with the regal ancestor spirits in that it creates a lot of empty time though at least estelle does have some ranged magic that you have to dodge while closing the distance i'm still not a fan of moves like these since the game isn't really suited for running long distances without torrent the other is when he summons a bunch of meteors that rain from the sky for a few seconds with things like this i've never felt that there's any patterns or timings you can learn the best way to stay safe is to roll or run away from them and just hope that you don't get hit it's in the same courtyard as reichard's skull reigning attack or even elden beast's elden stars among these moves estelle's is probably the least annoying but it still doesn't elicit a very interesting response overall i'm not sure what to make of estelle it's a lot fairer with less of the bloated design that weighs down other bosses but it's also the most ruined by being recycled later in the game and it's so hard to just ignore that i think it would be fair to say that estelle along with the regal ancestor are great examples of why reuse can really hurt the image of a fight and why it's excessive in elden ring at least they got more right with his movesets because on that front he's pretty good at first glance there's a lot to like about lich dragon fortisacks it's a nice break from the over abundance of field dragons found throughout the world and the secrecy of his fight gives it a little bit more prestige he's somewhat similar to estelle in that he lies at the end of an optional questline though i feel like fia's quest is easier to miss than ronnie's i did my first playthrough completely blind and fortisaks is one of three bosses on this list that i missed completely the other two being the gargoyles and lord placidu sacks i'm curious to know how many people missed major bosses like this one actually given how expansive elden ring is i imagine it's fairly common to have missed at least one boss by playing blind but it also probably depends on how thorough of a player you are i would be interested to hear your experiences with this anyway i want to like for sax more than i do but there's a couple pretty big issues holding it back first off the overwhelming visuals that accompany forta sax's fight are both a blessing and a curse they serve the aesthetic much more than they serve the mechanics because if there's one fatal flaw to fortisacks it's that it's too visually busy the special effects flashing everywhere like the red lightning or occasional death blight pools can be highly distracting and make it hard to tell what you're actually being hit with while the lightning has very good contrast everything else including the boss itself blends in too much with the arena's dark color palette which doesn't always make for a great experience when it's difficult to make out everything in the arena like this some amount of time has to be spent discerning what's actually happening before evaluating your response to it and while such an approach can work it's omnipresent in forta sax's fight which i'm not a huge fan of i think it's just too excessive and there are plenty of bosses that prove you can make fights visually interesting without having to distract the player as much fortisack still has some fantastic animations with his attacks particularly the signature lightning lance spins so even if the special effects were toned down the boss's spectacle could still remain intact the main culprit to me is all of the red lightning flickering over his body when you're up close trying to do melee attacks it can make it a bit harder identifying where his actual hitboxes are coming out during his attacks there's also a quirk with fortisacks that acts as something of a melee deterrent external lightning will target you and strike periodically for as long as you're underneath his body it's kind of like a timer that's constantly ticking and every time it reaches zero you have to be ready to dodge this is a pretty interesting idea in principle but it's difficult to tune properly since ideally you want the lightning to land only at moments where the player isn't in the middle of dodging a regular move from the boss since every move has different timing though there's no guarantee that this will happen it's another case of potentially locking you into a risky situation even though you didn't make any direct mistakes yourself the best way i found to circumvent it is to just stay on the move which to be fair might be the intention the tracking stops briefly before the strike actually hits and i'm pretty sure that that delay is long enough for you to just walk out of the way this is definitely better than forcing you to roll but then the problem that crops up is that it can prevent you from attacking at otherwise opportune times as soon as fortisacks is done attacking you need to check that lightning timer to make sure that it's safe to lock yourself in an attack animation if the timing doesn't match up there's not much you can do about it as you may have noticed punishing aggression in some capacity is a very regular thing across bosses and it's one of the more general trends that i really dislike i talked about this a little bit with margate but fortisack is a good example to elaborate with finding ways to initiate yourself is a great means of skill expression that the series has always utilized well but many boss behavior in elden ring completely abandons that possibility no matter how good you get at the fight margaret will still pull his knife out when you try punishing some attacks the gargoyles will always spit poison that you have to run away from forta sax's lightning always has a chance to disrupt your attack opportunities these are roadblocks that you just have to accept as limitations on what you can do against the boss rather than obstacles that can be countered with some improvements to your play not only does it reduce motivation to get better at eldon ring it also actively reduces your engagement with the boss one would probably expect eldon ring to have the most replay ability out of all the souls games but things like this would suggest the opposite fighting bosses feels the same every time because there's not much you can do to give yourself an advantage because of his lightning tracking fortusax is one of few bosses who i found more fun when using magic instead of melee different bosses being made easier with different builds is a strength of the game as far as i see it but it goes overboard when one build feels blatantly discouraged over another it leaves me feeling very lukewarm to fortisacks overall i would take him over the field dragons any day but he still has some things to improve on i'm not the biggest fan of rycard but i do view him more favorably than i used to on one hand he's arguably the best presented fight in the game with such an epic scale that makes it the most memorable gimmick boss in the whole series on the other hand because it tries to behave somewhat like a regular encounter it exhibits many of the same problems that the rest of the bosses do first off i really like that nothing in the fight is scripted even though it places a heavy emphasis on visuals and theme it is a full sequence of gameplay that you have agency over there's no mid-fight cut scenes where you just watch your character kill reichard no quick time-like events you're just given a cool weapon and a cool boss to use it on i would also like to point out that reichard only appearing once is a huge relief if the serpent hunter gimmick appeared elsewhere it would lose lots of its dramatic effect for lack of a better word but thankfully the game never spoils reichardt's identity like that the spear is satisfying to use the effect looks awesome it's perfectly suited for this fight i really have no complaints there it feels like yorm's potential from dark souls 3 has been fully realized with reichard when we delve into his moveset though i'm less enthusiastic i have a feeling that reichardt is one of the more polarizing bosses in terms of difficulty one that has a very wide spectrum of people that found him incredibly easy on one end and people that could never click with it on the other i fall more towards that latter side he's always really frustrated me since i've never been able to find a consistent strategy there's a few frustrating subtleties that crop up throughout the fight for instance while the arena is very spacious to make room for everything that's going on i never know where i'm supposed to stand in relation to the boss the serpent hunter has pretty solid range on most attacks but i still often find many of them falling just barely out of reach i also don't feel very safe standing closer since its animations are actually pretty long and reichard can attack with the frustrating frequency that many other bosses do i'm well aware that this could be a skill issue but it's annoyed me enough times that i think whatever the happy medium is is too well hidden either that or it moves around too much since reichardt is always slowly inching towards you that's not the worst thing about the fight though he has two attacks that are just straight up and defensible the first is during phase one where he has the earthquake-like move where a bunch of fire shoots up from the ground it's a really large aoe right in your direction and as far as i can tell is an instance of unavoidable damage running to the side rolling in different directions positioning at different distances jumping i've tried all of these things and nothing has worked my guess is that they want you to run perpendicular to where it's coming from but then it's like godric's whirlwind it doesn't give you enough time to do the intended response the reigning skulls in phase 2 are significantly worse though once again you can only avoid it through running away but this time there's much less guarantee for your safety even when running away as much as possible sometimes you can get unlucky and a skull will just block your path and you get hit these two attacks are what weigh him down the most the skull rain is the more puzzling one to me because even if you could consistently dodge it just by running the time it takes for them to subside still puts a damper on the whole experience it's one of those moves where it's hard to think of any redeeming qualities for it reichardt can also freely attack you while the skulls are falling so again it's possible to get trapped in a risky situation if he forces a roll at the wrong time you're probably going to take a bunch of skulls to the face on the bright side most other attacks from him are pretty solid not to sound like a broken record but a few of them are still too delayed for my liking particularly the bite grab in phase 1 and some of his sword sweeps in phase 2. once again these look like pretty unnatural delays designed specifically to trip you up instead of testing any particular skills it's a pretty big ask to overlook all of these problems but if you can manage to reichardt is pretty good the most important takeaway is that he demonstrates how to properly combine a gimmick fight with a normal fight he does so much better than ronaldo does you still need to apply typical strategies to beat him like rolling to dodge and finding safe attack opportunities and all of that but the weapon that you're provided with makes the experience a lot more special it's a gimmick that doesn't completely warp how you play the game and while it is still a gimmick at the end of the day it's probably one of the best that they've ever willful done morgot was once a contender for my favorite boss in the game in hindsight i think i was being a bit too generous and letting the story context carry most of the fight alden ring's story peaks at this moment in my opinion but defeating morgot marks the beginning of the end game which is easily the worst part in terms of gameplay never mind that though nearly every fight so far has had a strong theme and atmosphere and i'm tempted to praise morgot for the same thing but we're far enough in the game now that i don't think the spectacle should continue being the best things about these fights it's clear by this point that every fight on this list is presented well and that the thing that's been lacking is a fantastic boss with nothing to complain about morgot still isn't that boss but he is very interesting and he's a good opportunity to elaborate more on something i generally hate about bosses across the board bosses in this game attack way too often and when i say that fromsoft tried too hard to surpass their previous games this is one of the better pieces of evidence going back to dark souls 1 for a little bit after playing eldon ring has really opened my eyes to how ridiculously short the down time is between most bosses attacks it often feels suffocating with how many combos they'll dish out in such a short period without giving you an equal chance to retaliate obviously the games have sped up since dark souls won so it might not seem like a fair comparison but the other games have always sped you up with the enemy when it comes to elden ring it feels like bosses have been sped up way more than you have it's like playing a chess game where your opponent gets to make three moves every turn while you can still only make one i suspect that this along with the myriad of delayed attacks is what fromsoft had to resort to in order to keep the series difficult for veterans they've had to put in absolutely overwhelming patterns for people who are used to dodging the comparatively simple stuff but if you ask me that really wasn't the way to go the result is a game that's extremely defensive without any room to express yourself even though there's more options than ever for building your character they aren't included in this video but leonine misbegotten godskin noble and elimer of the briar are all prime examples of enemies that attack way too frequently what makes morgot interesting is that he might be the only boss who manages to get away with all of this because he has it all the excessive combos the delayed attacks and the crazy mobility the only reason that he kind of not entirely but kind of makes it work is because his numbers across the board are a lot lower each hit really doesn't do very much damage either because they wanted it to be a fight about hit trading or because it's made up for by how long and how often his attacks come out it's probably a bit of both for instance his most ridiculous combo is one where he pulls out three different golden weapons he swings his dagger around then flails two swords in front of him then spins around a bunch of times with a hammer before finishing with a final slam i haven't been able to count an exact number but i'm pretty sure this combo throws out at least 12 different hitboxes and dodging through all of them has pretty strict timing but you don't need to learn it because you can just roll through it on a whim and stomach whatever hits managed to catch you the same is true for his spin attacks and even some of his more common combos it's probably more worth your time to fight him this way because odds are you'll be able to out heal him as well in addition to his low damage he has relatively low health i don't have footage of it anymore but i distinctly remember my very first kill on him only taking about 2 minutes and that includes the time it takes for him to change phases to be clear i don't think bringing down the numbers is the solution to other bosses that have equally aggressive behavior in fact it's mostly been the opposite it hurts the enjoyment of morgot on subsequent playthroughs because unless you go into the fight intentionally under leveled you're probably going to steamroll him every time he's still poorly balanced just in the other direction it gives you the advantage to make the fight less frustrating but also too easy fortunately there are still other redeeming qualities to help make morgot fairly enjoyable he has some distance closing moves that he can pull out whenever he's far away which justifies his rather erratic mobility for example his somersault looking move will often put a lot of distance between u2 but his charging spear attack or the impaling thrust with his sword can rocket him in your direction after the fact so there's less pointless waiting even if he doesn't attack he can just walk back up to you sometimes to keep the action going fights like ranala and the regal ancestor were lacking this which is why they were a lot more boring morgot has the right tools in his kits to prevent the pacing of the fight from being interrupted additionally i think morgot shows how boss reuse can be done well i talked about this in my elden ring critique so i won't repeat everything i said there but even though he is the same character as margate he's gotten a very good moveset upgrade to keep the fight from being a carbon copy i still like that many of marget's moves return so that you can test your old muscle memory but these moves don't make up the majority of his kit there's a lot of new stuff that very much feels in the spirit of market without replicating him too much unfortunately the fact that you can find regular markets out in altus plateau before this partially ruins the surprise of morgot showing up here but purely from a moveset perspective it's a very sensible upgrade i just really wish he had more health so that his fight had more time to shine it's always over before it has a chance to begin at any rate morgot is the only boss in the game who i can say manages to be at least a little bit fun in spite of his excessive attack patterns it can turn it into a hit trading fight which is at least unique even if it's not super fun many bosses in the late game have behavior that follows in morgot's footsteps just without the low damage numbers and they'll be a hell of a lot worse than him because of it i don't have a whole lot to say about commander nile other than that his fight has a solution that i don't really like he summons a pair of adds at the beginning of the fight one of which is the dual sword banished knight who is one of the worst enemies in the game their spin attack has insane tracking and their combos are really long it's not just bosses that are overtuned it's also regular enemies like these they were wise to make some adjustments to numbers and ai for this fight since i'm pretty sure his ads have less health than they do as normal enemies and if you kite them around the arena nile will mostly leave you alone to deal with them i still really don't like the fight though these obnoxious enemies distract a lot from nile himself and he would have been just fine if it remained a 1v1 it goes back to the valley in gargoyle's problem these enemies don't compliment each other they were just uninspired and failed attempt to make the fight more interesting if you want to make the fight easier for yourself you can use bewitching branches on the adds and turn them against the boss it effectively makes them your own summons this is probably the best way to fight him simply because it makes it less of a headache but then it has the same problem that spirit ashes do the fight becomes a joke since the ai isn't well suited for handling multiple targets plus the banished knights are so busted that they can deal half of nile's health without you having to do anything there's no medium between laughably easy and ridiculously frustrating maybe the challenge is supposed to be realizing that bewitching branches are the solution but if that's true i would have liked to see some kind of hint or reminder that the item exists with how many materials and consumables are in elden ring it's easy to gloss over a lot of them and bewitching branches fall into that category i completely forgot they existed until i was reading about other people's experiences with the fight it would also be easy to criticize the fight for encouraging the use of consumable items but fortunately this isn't a major problem for nile there are enough bewitching branches available for purchase that you probably won't have to spend much time farming for them i don't mind fights needing items as long as those items are easily replenishable such as to eliminate grinding as for nile himself he's just a very average enemy his moveset is a little small and i don't like how delayed his flying kick is and none of the problems with him get solved by throwing in a couple extra enemies my guess is that his limited moveset is supposed to be compensated by the adds which just isn't a very creative way of expanding on a boss in short commander nile is very unimaginative it's a simple boss that had to be inflated by making it a gang fight with a solution that isn't particularly satisfying to use among the quote-unquote side bosses the ones at the end of smaller overworld dungeons like castle soul he's definitely one of the least exciting welcome honored the guest moog is the boss who i've probably had the biggest shift in opinion on since my last eldering video and fortunately it's been for the better his fight is very well paced despite the presence of several delayed combos the thing with moog is that pretty much all of his moves come out at least a little bit slower than you would expect and the entire fight is defined by adapting to these unusual timings it doesn't hurt moog the way it hurts other bosses because 1 these delays usually look sensible with his animations and 2 the entire fight maintains a slower tempo delayed attacks can create an inconsistent flow in other fights because they're specifically meant to throw you off they force you to make some very jarring adjustments to your rhythm by coming out in the midst of more naturally timed attacks for instance after weaving through morgot's rapid dagger sword hammer flurry he can suddenly shift to a three second wind-up stab the transition between these moves doesn't feel very smooth when you know that all of moog's moves have these mild delays on them you don't go through those sort of frustrating adjustments you just have to train yourself to do every dodge a half second to a full second later than you're used to once you settle into that rhythm you don't have to worry about being unexpectedly ripped out of it moog respects that you've learned his timings and just wants to put that to the test as much as possible there are still a few things that you could criticize him for with the most pressing one in my opinion being his transition to phase 2. this is an instance of literal unavoidable damage when going into phase two moog will apply blood loss on you three times and there's nothing you can do to stop it however the damage can be heavily mitigated by drinking one of the wondrous physic tears that you acquire from doing eures quest line at a certain point there's an npc invader at a church in altus who will drop it for you honestly it's not so much the unavoidable damage part that's bothersome as it is the weirdly obscure item you're supposed to use mitigating the damage simply isn't very intuitive missing out on quest lines is pretty easy in this game and if you didn't happen to progress euros far enough before this point i'm not sure how you're expected to work out the solution nothing about yura suggests a connection to moog and i can imagine the frustration someone playing blind will experience when they come across this attack and just assume that you need to chug a bunch of health flasks to deal with it i was lucky to have found the tier naturally on my first playthrough but it's still not a very good gimmick another fair criticism would be that he exposes problems with the game's buffer system this is not exclusive to moog but i was waiting until now to talk about it because i find that he and radagon are where it punishes you the most simply put alden ring buffers your roll inputs for way too long if you mistime your dodge by the tiniest amount it will still often queue up your input and make you roll as soon as you're freed from hits done even though you only pressed the button once this is one of my biggest complaints about the combat system and it's frankly asinine to me that they thought the buffer being this large was okay many attacks are specifically timed to punish incorrect roles which means that failing one dodge will often lead you into getting punished twice you'll get hit for pressing the button too late which is fair but then you'll roll right into another attack afterwards and take another hit that you didn't deserve the buffer has existed in all the games before this but it's never been this unnecessarily punishing buffer systems are very helpful when you have to execute highly complex inputs that's why they're a core mechanic in fighting games but elden ring is not at all like that there's no reason for it to be as long as it is it's a very noticeable issue with moog because his attacks look a lot slower so when you watch your character dive straight into another attack after your mistake it's like watching a car crash in slow motion it'll look like there should have been plenty of time for the buffer to clear but it still doesn't lastly you could argue that the blood fire pools in phase 2 are his indicator of bloated design i previously criticized them for limiting your engagement opportunities too much and trapping you into unsafe dodges i mostly take back what i said though these moves emphasize positioning and careful play better than other similar attacks do you want to stay relatively close to moog so that his blood fire flies over you if you get cold feet and try to back off that's when you'll get punished the fire tends to accumulate behind you so rolling away from him usually isn't safe you need to stay confident and trust that it'll miss you the truth is moog's attacks are well balanced for that approach so that he rarely forces you into a risky position with these arena hazards it seems like the ai knows which moves to chain together and which ones not to so that you always have a safe option when dodging moreover the blood fire pool durations are properly tuned to work with his moveset they will disappear when you need them to disappear and he doesn't attack so relentlessly that he'll cover all of your space even though it may not feel like it at first you're always given the proper leeway that you need it is true that sometimes he'll stand on top of it in a way that makes melee engagement impossible and i don't really like those moments but they make up a very small portion of the fight the key is to not let impatience get the better of you that's the trap that i fell into trying to find shortcuts to circumvent the fire just isn't an option you have to play moog's game once that clicks with you you'll hopefully find that moog's game is actually pretty fun elden rings endgame has been very frequently criticized for the enemies having way too much health and dealing way too much damage mountaintops of the giants and the consecrated snow fields easily exhibit the most balanced issues out of any area in the game and for proof of that you need look no further than the fire giant this is yet another tedious fight that's prolonged by empty time where you often need to close distance and dodge attacks by just running around that's about all torrent is good for when it comes to combat so it's nice that he's available but that doesn't make fighting on horseback any more enjoyable lots of the giants wide reaching attacks don't even feel dodgeable on torrents the lack of iframes really stings here i've only been able to dodge some moves by mounting and dismounting at the right time which isn't very intuitive or smooth he's also easily the biggest boss in the game so naturally the camera is going to cause problems it's the most frustrating with him because his attacks will always be coming out off-screen the frame can barely fit in a single foot but his attacks come out from his hands his stomach basically everywhere that you can't see with estelle and forta sax you could at least notice their bodies shifting or use sound cues to get a feel for what's going on the fire giant doesn't have anything to justify his gargantuan size other than the spectacle which by now isn't a good enough reason a colossal hp bar combined with very high damaging attacks doesn't do him any favors either chipping away at him gets extremely tiring and that progress can very easily be ripped away if you make some small slip ups and die in just one or two hits giving enemies so much health can be a good thing if the fight is meant to test your mental stamina even moog kind of did this since he heals most of his health when transitioning to phase 2 and it worked well in that fight because you don't get instantly chunked when you take a single hit the fire giant on the other hand is extremely unforgiving since his attacks do so much damage which is really counterproductive if the intention is to make the fight an endurance test it's naturally more likely that the player will make mistakes the longer a fight lasts because there's more time to mess up and if the boss is to recognize this i think it's much wiser to only kill you if lots of little mistakes build up over time instead of giving them a chance to kill you over a single blunder the further you get into the fight the more frustrating you'll feel if and when you mess up dying when he's at 10 or 20 hp is extremely discouraging since it takes so long to redo all of that progress this boss needs a much better balance of letting the player make mistakes while still preserving the challenge of being a drawn out fight i think his worst attack is when he starts summoning large fireballs that track you for a really long time before exploding the best way to avoid them is just to stay out of reach and drag them around until the explosion is out of the way you always have to be very alert to these because they tend to explode off screen if you're not paying attention the fire that lingers on the ground afterwards can stun lock you and leave you stuck underneath the giant's body if you aren't vigilant it's another good example of a move that disrupts the fight's pacing if you're trying to attack the giant when one of these fireballs comes out you have to run away to safety before you can continue i could sit here and nitpick the rest of his moveset because honestly all of his attacks are problematic in some capacity but it isn't worth the time his numbers are the main issue his size and moveset don't lend itself well to such a drawn out fight as the boss of the mountaintops i guess he's fitting in a sort of twisted way it's like the ultimate metaphor for everything wrong with eldon ring's endgame bloated hp bars terribly unforgiving damage lots of empty time and most important of all he proves to be way too big for his own good even though she isn't super remarkable loretta is probably my favorite boss in the game she's great for many of the same reasons as godric she's a nicely refined encounter without any excessive mechanics tacked on to inflate her difficulty my main complaint is less to do with her mechanics and more the fact that she's another recycled fight there's lots of time between this and the korea manor version so the frequency isn't as bad but it is kind of an anticlimactic boss given the area putting that aside the most refreshing thing about loretta is that she has very few delayed attacks her moves look and behave a lot more naturally which is an important reminder that relying on instinct for fights can still be very fun it feels like fromsoft forgot that not every single boss needs their own gimmicky curveball to make them harder loretta does nothing of the sort it's a very back to the basics test which ironically makes it stand out in the sea of overtuned fights she also doesn't attack with the same ridiculous frequency that morgot or malekith do even with a heavy weapon there's adequate time to punish her and it's always pretty clear when those opportunities arise like many bosses staying in melee range is a pretty safe bet you can iframe through many of her sphere attacks and her patterns remain consistent throughout so whenever she starts a combo you know what to expect you know that it's not going to lead into any unexpected surprises allowing for these openings makes loretta a whole lot more fun to return to on subsequent playthroughs there's a higher skill cap on her compared to things like market and reichard once you get more comfortable with the fight you'll become more keenly aware of openings that you hadn't noticed before it might feel like loretta attacks too much initially but everything she does is consistent and telegraphed at a certain point her behavior becomes much more predictable which you can exploit once you've gotten better at the fight it's things like this that make improving at the game worthwhile and it's disappointing that so few bosses give that opportunity there's not many fights in elden ring that i look forward to returning to but she is one of them the only move of hers that really bothers me is her magic length spin in phase 2 since she hangs in the air for so long it's the only exception to the delayed attack praise i was giving earlier it just looks a bit silly and feels very at odds with the rest of her moveset that aside there's not a whole lot to complain about here loretta shows the power of simplicity she doesn't feel the need to rise above and prove herself they were content with making her a relatively standard soul's boss that ticks all the right boxes it would be hard to argue that she's one of the greatest bosses to have ever graced the series because she doesn't have the sort of wow factor that the best of the best do but within eldon ring she sits in a very comfortable place i am melania blade of mykola melania has garnered the most infamy in the eldering community and rightfully so in my opinion so there's not much i can say about her that you haven't heard already i mentioned at the beginning of the video that there's one boss that i haven't beaten without summons and she is that boss i cannot beat melania solo and if that makes me bad at the game then fine i'm bad at the game i've wasted too much time putting up with waterfowl dance to care anymore i think the most tragic thing about her is that she's very very close to being great there's good ideas in this fight that are ruined by elden ring's habit of not knowing when to stop and say that enough is enough for example she's another overly aggressive enemy that can unleash ridiculously long combo strings before giving you a turn but it's actually almost fun on melania because she can be quite vulnerable to hitstun which is a very good idea when giving players an option to counter her behavior directly allowing the player to knock melania out of her combos can go a long way in fostering aggression and it can actually happen sometimes during the fight i've tried playing hyper offensively against her before and when that works in your favor it's such a foreign feeling because you're finally being rewarded for taking the initiative it takes me back to some of the best hunter fights in bloodborne where the pace never slowed down and you were always having meaningful interactions with the enemy unfortunately this is not a consistently viable approach and playing aggressive against her is just as risky as against any other boss for two reasons the first is that some of her moves have hyper armor and there's a chance you can initiate one while you're in the middle of an engagement so really she can only be put into hits done sometimes and you can't reliably predict when those times are because her attacks come out so fast if your mid-attack animation when she gets hyper armor there's not enough time to exit that animation and roll away afterwards the second reason is because of waterfowl dance because of course it is when you get her hp into waterfowl territory staying near her for an extended period is no longer safe whether that's in neutral or when you're trying to attack her if you're trying to hit stun her when this move comes out you are super screwed because dodging waterfowl from up close is just miserable you're risking way too much damage for it to be worth it this is such a shame because otherwise she has all of the mechanisms to make relying on hits unfeasible she can free herself by backing off to prevent that strategy from being too spammable and she still uses several gap closers to prevent that from creating excessive dead time additionally it would really help turn her into a fight that you have to master through confidence i'll reference this game again because i think it's a great comparison to those that have played a lot of bloodborne the evolution of fighting her could have felt like fighting father guess gone when you encounter him for the first time you're more inclined to be defensive and avoid damage through dodging because he seems so relentless but as time goes on you'll realize that he can be stunned in combo just as easily as you can instead of dodging his moves you can just suppress them entirely and the boss progresses from this passive engagement where you were too nervous to fight back into a bloodbath where you can become the dominant force and overpower him it's a fight that inspires confidence melania never passes that passive stage even though she had the potential to you always have to hesitate before trying to attack her because there's a chance she'll just armor through whatever you're doing and i really do think that she could have been one of the game's best fights if her poise didn't work this way the other mechanic worth talking about with her is the life steal i think this would have been fine if not a little gimmicky because yet again it can encourage aggressive play players would be less inclined to try dodging through her moves if messing up meant giving her additional health it goes back to that gascon approach i was just talking about it might be easier to just keep wailing on her to prevent those opportunities in the first place that would require her hyper armor issues to be resolved first though instead of that i suspect the intention was to discourage the use of spirit ashes which for the purposes of creating an ultra hard super boss i can appreciate summons are naturally much worse at dodging than humans are so when combined with her attack frequency they could just become a free healing source for melania i don't really think this worked out in practice because if you get lucky the two of you can just out damage her lifesteal but the idea is good it just needed better execution that being said the fact that she still heals on blocked hits is complete nonsense again maybe they did this to discourage being defensive but as i've hopefully established the boss doesn't accommodate offensive play either so i don't really get what shield users are supposed to do it's very weird that such a specific playstyle is completely invalidated and it should be common sense that if you don't deal damage you don't get lifesteal it's a decision that just goes way over my head what's stopping her from running up to the wall and smacking it a few times to heal too the concept is equally ridiculous these issues could have been fixed and turned into a wonderful fight if melania was in any other game besides elden ring it's very hard to imagine them creating her in the same overtuned fashion if she was made for bloodborne or dark souls 3. lady maria and sister freda are both pretty good foils to see how melania's battle could have been executed much better a melania critique wouldn't be complete without talking about waterfowl dance but this move has already been discussed to death and i don't want to let it distract too heavily from the other issues that the boss is faced with i'm very firmly in the camp that waterfowl dance is a terrible move but instead of continuing on this tirade for another 10 minutes i'd just like to quickly address some of the rebuttals to criticisms that i and many others have thrown at it namely the idea that it's too hard to dodge when one brings that up there seem to be three common arguments made in defense of waterfowl dance use bloodhound step to avoid it easily use a freezing pot during the startup or just get good and learn since dodging it is technically possible at any distance the problem with the bloodhound step argument is that it invalidates build choices there's dozens upon dozens of ashes of war in elden ring and i don't think it's fair for a fight to funnel players into using the same single one to overcome it i know accommodating every build 100 equally is basically impossible with how many there are but that doesn't mean one option should be so blatantly encouraged over literally every other one no other fight demands such a specific play style and for good reason as for the freezing pot it's a good example of how not to incorporate consumables into a fight you'll die on melania a lot and if you used a freezing pot for every single waterfowl you'll probably spend more time grinding for them than actually fighting the boss enemies also build up status resistance the more you proc them it's just not reliable to do this for every time she uses the move as for the age-old get good response the margin of error for dodging it normally is simply too small especially when you have to dodge up close not only that but dodging at that close distance entails doing a really weird circle around her so that she misses you there's no footage of me doing it because i've never been able to but either way it isn't an intuitive method at all and i don't see how you're supposed to naturally infer such a silly specific response the easy way to surmise this is that dodging it normally is too hard even for a soulsborne game it takes way too long to learn how to consistently avoid all the damage and by that point i imagine most players are just begging for the boss to be over with because spending so much energy to learn their response to a single attack just isn't fun that's all i want to say about waterfowl dance i hate the move i hate melania i've bashed my head against this fight for so long that i'm sick of even talking about it she's exhausted me to the point where i just don't care for her for being the game's capstone challenge she is such a major letdown and i will always remember melania as the only boss in fromsoft history that's defeated me among the bosses in pharah missoula and beyond dragonlord placidus x is easily my favorite there's a few fights in the series that don't have anything gimmicky about them yet they still manage to meet and often exceed the presentation and spectacle of the actual gimmick fights placidusacks is one of those bosses somewhat similar to fortesacs he is pretty hidden away and you fight him in a separate arena that's only accessible through a secret teleporting spot there's a very great build in tension as you approach placido sax's battle crumbling far missoula's environment has a very stark contrast to the relatively peaceful and transcendent cutscene that brings you to his arena everything goes silent and the dungeon's tornado starts to reverse as if to bring you to a time before this destruction occurred it's hard to know what to expect since many other bosses have dialogue to accompany their cutscenes whereas placito sax's circumstances are largely kept a mystery when you awaken in his arena you spot placetou sacks looming in the distance and suddenly there's this strong sense of anticipation it's the calm before the storm and you know that something flashy is about to go down invoking that sort of mood in the short time frame it takes from initiating the cutscene to starting the battle is a very strong aspect of the fight it may not be as detailed or elaborate as say radon's build up but it still sets the player's expectations appropriately and in my opinion the fight itself does a better job at satisfying those feelings placed sax's destructive behavior makes for a very chaotic atmosphere that suddenly fits with the rest of the tone of pharah missoula many of his attacks are lightning or fire aoes with a much larger scope than similar attacks from forta sax or the numerous field dragons the wide coverage of his attacks makes the fight trickier and it took me a while to work out how exactly to dodge everything from a mechanical standpoint one of the best things about placido sax is that many of his moves require a more creative outside the box response that you don't really use on other bosses for example if you're staying behind him sometimes one of his heads will curve back and spit fire at you initially this feels pretty cheap since they're like the fire attacks from all the field dragons it covers such a wide area that you have a very short window to start running away if you want to avoid all of the damage it's made even more challenging with placidus axe since you don't have access to torn's mobility he's great at running away from other dragons but that isn't an option here all you have to do though is jump over his tail to the other side and get some free hits in the tail is like the dividing line between where you can and can't be standing these games have only been able to rely on moving and rolling when it comes to mobility options and even though this tail response still isn't very complicated it is a rather clever application of your limited tools it uses a problem-solving element of figuring out how placetosax's fire can conceivably be dodged when it covers so much ground this is augmented further by turning the camera into a tool instead of a nuisance placidusax is yet another massive enemy but for the most part lots of what he does can actually fit on screen if you play unlocked i always like angling the camera so that i can stay behind him to attack while still being able to see his heads and claws it ensures that his telegraphs aren't coming out off screen so that you can actually know what to expect the camera in elden ring probably hinders players a lot more than it helps but placido sax at least makes it a bit more satisfying to use making sure that the right things are always in frame is part of the challenge and it makes you rethink the role of the camera in these games a little bit it's something that you have full control over and thus can be incorporated into solving some in-game problems if the developer so chooses i also think he has some very creative implementation of sound later in the fight sort of like an expansion on what estelle did when he starts teleporting around he often uses a claw attack quickly after reappearing and frantically spinning the camera around to find him can be a bit of a headache but there are a couple clever ways to deal with it the first is to not even bother trying to find him and just rely on the sound queue to signal your dodge the noise he makes when winding up the claw is very distinct so that's a perfectly viable approach people generally have better auditory reaction time than visual reaction time anyway so it takes a little bit of the pressure off if you decide to focus entirely on using sound you don't have to spread your focus as thin i've found it a bit easier to respond to positional sounds instead though since placido sax will almost always appear somewhere behind you you can listen for the general direction that his claw noise is coming from and hopefully detect his presence that way you can then adjust the camera accordingly instead of just rotating it everywhere and hoping for the best i can't think of any other major instances where the game uses positional audio so this is always a cool trick to execute his teleportation is a bit of a double-edged sword though while it allows for that cool sound cue implementation it also creates another empty time problem pretty much every fight i've ever had with placito sax has been very drawn out towards the end he likes to teleport around or use his long range breath attacks during these phases and it takes forever before you get the opportunity to strike back again in a way this could help build tension since it's throwing some endurance tests at you so close to the end but placidus x doesn't attack super frequently so the end result is just a bunch of running around it's easily my biggest gripe with the fight and it gets really obnoxious watching him run away when you know you can beat him he's just not giving you a chance to close it out it feels like a game of cat and mouse by that point he also has a really annoying run back tied for the worst in the game with ranalas which is a more minor issue but i still don't really understand why there isn't a stake of america or even a sight of grace in or near the arena those two things aside placido sax is a fantastic boss i think it's the most creative fight in the game both with how it's presented and with how his moves are structured it's very nice to have one endgame boss that manages to hit a fantastic stride both in gameplay as well as in presentation death elden rings rotten cherry on top is a boss rush and malakith is the kickoff to that finale his first phase the beast clergymen is probably the most egregious example of unfair punished windows in the entire game and it ruins a good portion of the fight i honestly think he's worse about this than malekith i think it's pretty clear that you're supposed to keep your distance as much as possible because he has several moves and behaviors that are specifically meant to punish close quarters play the problem is that these countermeasures are so powerful that i'm not sure what heavy weapon users are supposed to do when you're up close many of his claw attacks come out almost instantly to the point where it's nigh unreactable it's perfectly fine for some fights to be more defensive in nature but one we're at the end of the game now and nearly every fight has been like that and two he can still whip out these moves even after you go in to punish something slow it's like melania with waterfowl dance just with less damage even when you engage after dodging a slower move he can immediately swing his claw around and reset to neutral you are always risking damage by walking towards him this is the problem with so many of these defensive fights after you spend an eternity dodging their extended combos when it finally looks like you have an opening to engage you still aren't given a fair shot it feels like he is straight up cancelling his recovery animations half the time and i can't tell if he actually is but he can attack so often that he may as well be which would be basically unheard of in any of the previous games even the faster paced ones like bloodborne and dark souls 3. committing to an action has always been a very key principle in these games but it wasn't just for players bosses had the exact same limitation and that's not true anymore beast clergyman has the luxury of being extremely aggressive and non-committal at the same time he can go in finish an entire combo disengage and throw a ranged attack at you all in a third of the time it would take for you to do the same thing it's hard to identify any of his key weaknesses at all unless i'm doing a magic build i've resolved to just trade hits with him and hope i can sustain enough health to get through phase 2. you only need to put up with him for half of the health bar so it isn't worth the time spent turtling and sneaking in a single hit every 10 or 15 seconds when it comes to these end game bosses it's hard to know if hit trading is the intention for melee builds the beast clergyman's fast attacks don't deal tons of damage so it's not like you can't stomach them but if that's what you're supposed to do then and isn't communicated very well bloodborne had rallying and sekuro had deflecting so that hit trading could make sense and eldon ring has nothing of the sort malakith has a very similar flow to his fight he's just better at hiding it like fortisacks i really want to like him more than i do his attacks aren't unfair in the sense that you can avoid them just fine it's purely the timings between them that's overtuned now there is a way to help circumvent this but it's kind of disingenuous it only creates the illusion of a more fairly paced fight because nothing about malekith himself really changes having fought him several times now i'm pretty certain that you're only meant to do it with the blasphemous claw it's only optional in the same way that moog's physic tier is optional sure you can fight him without it but you're making things so much more frustrating for yourself by doing so there's simply not enough opportunities to attack him without it this is an item that you can get nearby in pharah missoula if you progress bernal's questline far enough he'll invade you and drop the claw up on defeat it's an unlimited use tool that allows you to parry malekith sword attacks and doing so will stun him for a good few seconds so that you can counter at first this seems like the solution to all of malekith's problems it makes sense for an enemy to attack so rapidly if you're supposed to parry them that's what sekuro's combat system is about and it works brilliantly in that game it's also not consumable so you can practice with it freely plus it's super satisfying to hit him with so what's really the issue well first off they did a very poor job at communicating how to actually use the blasphemous claw properly all the tool tip states is that its quote can deflect the power of the black blade when instead it should say can deflect the power of the black blade sometimes the blasphemous claw only works against a few of malekith's attacks where his sword has a golden shine the timing for the parry is actually pretty lenient but it only works on those two or three attacks i have no idea why the item description mentions nothing about this limitation it's so intentionally obtuse and i think that's led to a lot of unnecessary confusion players will take this item try deflecting the first attacks malekith throws at you then get frustrated because none of that is working and dismiss the claw as some kind of gimmick or maybe it's not actually applicable to this fight at all the entire series has always been vague with its information so i really don't think you'd be wrong to draw that conclusion it's also a very strange trick to work out on your own his blade glowing gold isn't something that sticks out until you already know to look for it the boss's attacks already have lots of visual effects on them and that one doesn't seem any different i honestly never would have noticed it if i hadn't known any better so the blasphemous claw doesn't communicate itself very well but let's move past that and work with this knowledge to see how it changes malakith if you try fighting him without the claw your opportunities to damage him are extremely limited as a melee player he flips through the air shooting projectiles and doing epic combo spin attacks like he's a wannabe devil may cry protagonist then when he finally lands he either immediately runs away to start another combo or unleashes an explosion at his feet to completely halt your attempts at punishing him between the mobility the explosions and the giant aoe slash moves there's too much about him that deters you from approaching as a result the least frustrating way to fight him that i've been able to discover is to not even try to aggress you hold your ground and dodge through his moves over and over then when he gives you a glowing sword attack you parry it and land some attacks yourself before he recovers from the stun that's the cycle of fighting malakith he doesn't have tons of hp so repeating that three or four times should net you the win despite the claw seemingly having a profound effect on the fight this doesn't feel any different from what you've been doing the entire time you're not actually being more aggressive or engaging with the boss any more than you would normally be it's just that the periods of time you each have to attack each other have been lengthened even though he gets stunned for a long time he also gets to attack you for a lot longer before you get a chance to parry him the pacing of the fight isn't accelerated by the claw it just makes things easier so that you don't have to try weaving in your own offense through his flurry of attacks i can't deny that this is a very cool idea and if there was a gimmick fight built entirely around a mechanic like this i would probably be on board with that but it doesn't end up making malakith more interesting i still hate that you can only attack him during the few moments that the game says you can i honestly find malakith a bit of a pushover if you fight him this way so i guess the saving grace is that at least it's an easy fight if you've done the fight without the claw and really struggled that way i encourage you to go back and give it a try if you can the difference is seriously night and day and once you work out how to use it properly it's hard to assume that this wasn't the intended method either way what had the potential to be an amazing fight is ruined the same way many other fights are upon my name as godfrey in many ways godfrey addresses the frustrations i just had with malakath while both bosses are very relentless with lengthy combos godfrey is much more tolerable simply because his recovery windows are just a little bit longer more downtime is all a lot of these bosses would need to be considerably more fair and i think godfrey demonstrates that quite well at the same time i have to concede that i'm still not a huge fan of the fight i'm just a bit conflicted because it's difficult to explain why godfrey is considerably less frustrating since you aren't just staring at him flail about waiting for your opening the two of you are almost always in close proximity to each other so as soon as you identify an opening you can retaliate and it's not like beast clergyman where he'll suddenly pull out a get off me move that deals unreactable damage so i wouldn't say that the fight is unfair those openings can be a little small if you're using a heavy weapon but overall it doesn't rob you of your victories as much i think my conflict comes from the fact that godfrey doesn't have a consistent rhythm the same way something like moog and loretta do moog was a bit slower whereas loretta ran at a pretty smooth medium speed both of these bosses fostered something of an internal metronome to make sure that you are always matching their pace whether players think about that metronome consciously or subconsciously is up in the air but either way you could settle into something that felt very natural and that state was never interrupted unless you died i would say godfrey is on the faster end but his rhythm always fluctuates a tiny bit not necessarily because of delayed attacks but because he doesn't always chain together his moves in the same way and that creates a lot of hesitation when deciding whether it's safe to punish him or not sometimes it doesn't even feel like you can make an informed decision because there's no way to know what the safest option is until it's too late that's a bit of a messy explanation so here's an example he has a basic two hit combo that sometimes he'll extend and sometimes he won't but the time you have to identify which option he went with is too short attacking as soon as the two hits end is risky since if he follows up you're going to get hit but if you choose to play it safe instead you may have given up an opportunity to deal damage by the time you realize that it's too late to commit and he's moved into his next action he has all sorts of these weird decision trees sometimes his stomp will be followed up with a close range blunt and sometimes it'll be followed up with another stomp or sometimes he won't do anything at all his attack sequences don't have any kind of pattern and unlike margat i haven't been able to figure out what makes him decide to use certain moves after others that's neither here nor there though the more important question is how much should this be held against him is that unpredictability unfair or is it part of the challenge i could go either way on that one a part of me feels like his short down time between attacks is still a problem because it doesn't leave you enough time to process his behavior if you play 100 safe and don't retaliate on those unpredictable moves then sure you'll still be avoiding damage but you won't be able to do anything back if the best way to counter his unpredictable behavior is to just not engage then by that point we're regressing back to something like beast clergymen alternatively because godfrey is so relentless it's pretty clear that he forces engagement a lot more than other bosses do so maybe it masks these problems fairly well i feel like i really need to stress that dodging the attacks themselves also isn't unfair again nothing like beast clergyman's claw moves it's just the ai's behavior that's making things difficult and even if you only engage on his guaranteed safe moves the fight is probably better than others of its type ultimately i tip more towards the cons outweighing the pros on this one because it feels like godfrey only stands out for being the best of a bad lot he doesn't reach any mind-blowing heights and unfortunately the game is almost over so this was really one of their last chances to nail a boss fight and godfrey's not quite there his second phase doesn't do him any favors either the face transition is honestly pretty entertaining so it gets some points for that but i find horolu a lot less enjoyable to fight than godfrey and it hurts the enjoyment of the overall boss quite a bit the main issue with this phase is that hora loo is the king of delayed attacks if the game wasn't chock full of these already then it could have been a more central part of his identity to make it a curveball encounter but instead you have yet another boss whose entire purpose seems to be built on faking you out this is terribly frustrating when you're first learning the fight because you basically have to die to learn some of his timings and that means repeating godfrey several times until you can get everything down i'll rehash this point again because it really shows with horolu most delayed attacks in this game just don't look nor act naturally and it makes it way harder to get immersed in the battle since you need to remember all of these artificially long timers and at a certain point it just looks ridiculous too like this boss will slow down time for a second when he's diving towards you just so the attack can be delayed or he'll charge up his arm for several seconds before flailing them around because of course having him swing like a normal person would just make too much sense for eldon ring again lots of this could have been fine if it was his signature trick but it isn't hora loo is also hindered by showing up at a rather inopportune time by this point in the game i was just tired tired of all the aggression tired of all the delayed attacks and tired of not feeling like i was actually fighting bosses just watching them then horuleu shows up with all of those traits mixed in like fromsoft just had to have the last laugh it's a joke that goes on far too long and by this point we had heard it a million times already no one is laughing anymore and fromsoft just won't put it to rest godfrey and horolu strike me as another fight with polarizing difficulty i've seen many call them one of the easier bosses largely due to their relatively small health pool which is definitely true but other people including me have just never been able to click with it godfrey's patterns are still pretty unrecognizable and horuleu's patterns still mess me up it's another fight that i've started to like less the more i've played even with that said i probably came off as more negative than i really am on the fight because godfrey is still good it's just that he's good when compared to other elden ring bosses which by this point isn't a super high bar to clear it's a real shame that eldon ring ends the way that it does from a thematic perspective ratagon is excellent he is a very fitting final boss for eldon ring and all the visual motifs relating to the shattering creates a nice sense of excitement when the fight begins there's a great sense of finality it's just squandered by a horrendous second phase that comes at a really bad time let's focus on ratagon first though i used to think that he was one of the best fights in the game and while i still really enjoy it he's not wonderful there are some similarities with godfrey here in that many of his attacks start out as melee and sticking close to him when you dodge is a safe bet which definitely helps make the fight feel considerably more fair despite his aggressive behavior maintaining a close distance between the boss and the player is a decent way to alleviate the game's shorter recovery windows since very little of your time has to be spent walking back up towards the boss it's often better to roll into attacks and try to stick behind him so none of the lingering hitboxes will catch you then when you're done dodging you have more time to attack him since you're already in range compare this to something like malekith who has so much mobility that many of his attacks end far away from you by the time you close the distance he'll fly off again as if he wasn't tested to account for that extra time if you could dodge close to malekith maybe he'd be more reasonable but you can't ratagon did well to identify these issues and make the fight very close quarters it also helps facilitate aggression on the player's part better since there's potential to catch ratagon when he's in the middle of a combo if there's a longer delay between some of his moves you can sneak hits in during that time if you have the confidence and that can go a long way in making the player feel like they're improving at the fight initially it might feel like his giant aoe attacks force you into unsafe positions since they cover so much ground and he can occasionally chain them together but i found that this isn't always the case it's mostly a matter of just eye-framing through them again he encourages you to roll towards him and that works on many of these moves as well additionally while ratagon can have some unpredictable behavior like godfrey did generally speaking there's much less hesitation when you're trying to attack him his recovery time is more pronounced and made clearer thanks to the animation again many problems with bosses just stem from timing issues and ratagon is more well adjusted on that front that's not to say that he's entirely free of the over aggression trend that's been present since the beginning though sometimes he can let out these really long chains where you have to dodge way too much before getting one chance to strike back in the example i'm showing on screen right now he attacked nine times in succession and i only had time afterwards to hit him once i don't think these problems are as bad with ratagon since they're less frequent it strikes me as an unlucky string of ai decisions rather than him being intentionally designed to be that aggressive that doesn't change anything about how unfair it feels when it does happen but at least it isn't an omnipresent problem more of ratagon's problems arise when he starts using specific attacks there are a couple big ones holding him back from being a top tier fight incidentally both of them go back to the inconsistent behavior issues that brought down godfrey the first one is the quick light blast that he can sometimes do after an initial hammer swing usually ratagon's simple swings lead into a melee combo with either a heavy attack or a large aoe to close it out and whenever that happens it's fun to dodge but sometimes he can swing his hammer once then immediately shoot out a bolt of light which comes out so quickly that you barely have any time to act after dodging the initial swing there's about 12 frames between when your roll ends and when the lightning bolt hits you which is a very short window when you consider the variables that you need to process before deciding your action if you just assume he's going to use his light bolts after the first swing you can spam roll and dodge it fine but if you do that and he decides to melee attack instead it'll catch your roll and you'll take damage so i would have liked to see this move have a slightly longer startup to lengthen that window a bit it's cutting really close to being unreactable his more frustrating attack is when he starts teleporting around everywhere which has similar problems when he reappears there's no telling what he'll do sometimes he'll attack immediately and other times he'll do something with a slower wind up and it becomes a 50 50 for avoiding the damage you either roll immediately when he appears and hope he does a fast attack or wait a little bit and hope he does a slow attack this one can be more obnoxious because sometimes he'll teleport around multiple times in a row and combined with the visual effects the move has it's very hard to get a read on what he's doing given how ratagon is more finely tuned in other ways i suspect that these attacks just flipped through the cracks when it came to balancing and they didn't have time to be adjusted again it signals a need for further balance patches to help repair a lot of these issues and the more time goes on the less hopeful i get that this will happen but who knows the only other attack of his that i don't really like is the golden grab since it's such an egregious delay but that's a less pressing issue none of that comes close to the worst thing about radagon though the fact that he's tied to the elden beast if this boss didn't exist ratagon and the entire game for that matter would be markedly better eldon beast is the worst boss in the game and to be frank i don't know if i have anything constructive to say here it's pretty incredible that this boss manages to be the worst when it's in the same game as stuff like the valiant gargoyles and godskin duo it's not even like melania where there's some cool ideas everything about it is just terrible beyond redemption i don't even know if it looks nice the arena is very pretty as always but the elden beast itself just looks off see estelle looked like it didn't belong in the world whereas eldon beast doesn't look like it belongs in the game it doesn't capture the same alien feeling instead it looks almost cartoonish the character design doesn't feel grounded in the same principles as the others in elden ring that's just the beginning though even the worst of the worst fights in the game or even the whole series don't have anything on elden beast the entire fight is defined by its tendency to run to the opposite side of the arena and spam magic attacks at you attacks that you aren't even rewarded for dodging because he's too far away to do anything about it you genuinely spend 80 percent of the time running towards him and 20 of the time actually dealing damage and i really don't think i'm exaggerating those numbers i'm not even going to go into detailed examples because i think the footage can speak for itself it's almost comical with how terrible it is torrent being disabled for this fight is a decision that is completely beyond me not only would it help alleviate these distance problems it also feels like almost every attack from eldon beast is supposed to be dodged on torrance eldon beast has some fire breathing attacks kind of like the field dragons which always give you access to torrents you could jump over the enclosing circle attack on torrents you could run away from elden stars on torrent i'm sorry for making this more of a rant but i really don't understand it even if you had torrent i don't think the fight would be very fun but at least it'd be tolerable it's such a blatant oversight that's so out of character for from software it is also worth mentioning that the elden beast is the finale to this endgame boss rush that we've been going through since farah missoula to recap the end game entails fighting seven different boss entities without any exploration or dungeon content in between you go from beast clergymen to malekith to gideon off near to godfrey to horolu to ratagon to elden beast and that number could be boosted to 8 if you count the draconic tree sent no guarding malachite's arena the prospect of doing that many fights in a row is daunting enough alone but if these boss fights were more well engineered it could have made for an enjoyable challenge instead it's like a boiling pot of problems designed specifically to test your patience and to top that off with a fight as slow paced as eldon beast it is a huge slap in the face to players that have spent so much time going through this swamp of combat encounters i was practically begging for the game to end by the time eldon beast showed up given that the fight lasts so long it's very possible that you'll die a few times starting out and that inadvertently hurts ratagon because then he pads the time it takes to power through to the end credits he also takes up some of your resources so that you go into elden beast with less flasks which increases your chances of dying now i think it's only right to acknowledge that the series hasn't always tried to make their final bosses a challenge sekuro is really the only one that i'd say has a difficult final boss otherwise it's been more of an experience designed for you to absorb the atmosphere and reflect on your journey and there's nothing wrong with that approach if the final boss can still hit strong emotional beats then it can work just as well if not better but the end of elden ring is so draining that players can be left too tired to fully appreciate what eldon beast is going for i'm pretty comfortable saying that it's worse than dark souls 2's final boss purely because of how much it disrespects your time it is an offensively terrible fight and the only way that i can think to repair it is to remove it entirely now that we're at the end if there's anything you take away from this video i want it to be what i'm about to say it's a shame to end on such a negative note but the game doesn't leave me with much choice bosses really fall apart towards the end with how inconsistent they are you have greats like loretta and placido sax to bring the game up followed by things like malekith and eldon beast to tear it all down if we take a step back to see how all of these fights average out the cons definitely outweigh the pros eldon rings better bosses aren't good enough to be worth trudging through all of the bad ones i think that's the main realization i had while making this video elden ring is from soft's most ambitious most commercially successful title to date and one would hope that incredible combat encounters would be included in that package unfortunately that isn't really the case through all of my playthroughs there isn't a single boss that i get actively excited for nothing that i specifically look forward to when starting up a new playthrough when a boss health bar shows up in elden ring it feels like an inconvenience not a thrill when looking back on the series in search of jaw-dropping exhilarating combat encounters i don't think any of the ones in this game will be easily remembered and if they are it won't be for anything good instead of remembering how much fun i had while fighting ratagon i'm going to remember how much elden beast inadvertently ruined that experience there's a lot of very compelling arguments you could make as to why this is the case too large of a scope not enough development time a lack of new ideas no one can really say for sure but at the end of the day the boss fights demonstrate to me that they failed to deliver the grand convergence of all of the soulsborne games that many were hoping for players have only gotten better at from soft games over the years and by this point it's basically expected that their titles will be difficult it's clear that they were looking for ways to crank that up this time around and i really do understand that impulse given the studio's reputation the problem is that like every game the souls formula has limitations on what's possible and if these games are to continue on into the future i think it's about time we address that reality before eldon ring came out we were four souls games deep six if you want to expand that to bloodborne and sakura and with the exception of sakura which is a different beast entirely it's not like any of these games were extremely mechanically deep you can walk attack block and roll all of which are done with single inputs fromsoft has worked with a very limited set of player options to create over a hundred different bosses across the series and before elden ring came out i would say they did a pretty damn good job even when they were onto their fourth souls game they were still producing some very good ideas dark souls 3 has a very high proportion of quality bosses but there's only so much you can do with this system before the well runs dry and all of elden rings ridiculous combos and delayed moves suggests to me that we're close to reaching that point if we haven't already i really do think that the reason bosses are as overtuned as they are is because fromsoft didn't know what else to do if they wanted to keep elden ring difficult for veterans this might have been the only option we've been rolling to the side or rolling into attacks or adjusting our positioning for over 10 years now we've basically seen it all so what other direction were they supposed to go perhaps the more important question is has every worthwhile souls boss been created already to me the solution is making some more dramatic permanent changes to the combat system and i know that won't go down well with everybody but we've reached a point where elden ring is difficult for the wrong reasons if turning every boss up to 11 was the only way they could move forward then maybe it's time to re-evaluate the series priorities this is why i'm such a big fan of bloodborne and sekiro they weren't afraid to implement some very bold new ideas bloodborne streamlines many defensive options and implement systems like rallying to shake things up while sakura strips the combat of many essentials and manages to mold something incredibly unique as a result elden rings guard counters and jump attacks aren't enough to fundamentally change how bosses are structured if it wanted to create its own cast of memorable fights it needed to do more sticking with what they knew was obviously the safer option and given how sky high expectations were for elden ring i can't really blame them for a lack of innovation but i think that it signals that the way forward for fromsoft is games that retain the soul's dna while still breaking away from many established conventions basically what bloodborne and securo tried to do the optimist in me has faith that they're capable of moving the series in a new direction sekuro proves how multi-faceted their talents are and i would be incredibly happy to see them try new bold ideas like that it's not like eldon ring undo's all of the lessons they learned either fromsoft knows how to make good games but the more pessimistic side tells me that given how much of a fervor alden ring has generated they want to continue down this road to maintain their reputation no matter how much of the quality of their games will suffer for it the game already shows signs of that mindset festering and that worries me i don't know what the future holds for from software but i can only hope that eldon ring won't turn out as the title that marked the beginning of their fall from grace thank you for watching as always feel free to like and subscribe if you enjoyed support from the audience is always very appreciated if you have any thoughts or feedback please don't hesitate to leave a comment as well i can't respond to all of them but i do make sure to read them hope to see you next time

Channel: VG Matthew

Views: 809,199

Keywords: elden ring critique, elden ring, elden ring review, elden ring gameplay, elden ring new gameplay, gaming critics, elden ring bosses, elden ring retrospective, elden ring all bosses, malenia elden ring, game critics, game critique, elden ring video essay, elden ring masterpiece, elden ring final boss

Id: UfwXf7AisAs

Length: 116min 35sec (6995 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022