Reviewing Monsters: Elden Ring, Part 21

Last we left off, we scaled the Mountaintops of the Giants, and defeated the Fire Giant, the guardian standing between me and the Flame of Ruin. My ally Melina uses the Flame to burn down the Erdtree, and she's really just trying to break down the old order and the rules of the world. But then, just as the Erdtree is set on fire, I get teleported away to a floating city called Crumbling Farum Azula, with no warning and context. Giant tornadoes swirl madly in the background, the city is floating inexplicably, it's infested with feral Beast-men, and a literal swarm of dragon is flying around the background. And at least in the beginning, there was no way to teleport back to the Lands Between. 

I do find the transition a bit jarring, to be honest, but apparently it's meant to. Farum Azula itself is placed in a previously unseen part of the map that feels 'out of bounds', and itself is a bit of an out-of-context problem before the final ending. 

As the picture shows, I also took the time to clean out the Moghwyn Palace sub-zone, which itself is a bit shorter than all of the other areas. This does mean what's left for me is the endgame -- Farum Azula and Miquella's Haligtree, as well as the final boss, as I understand it! Which means I'm also taking things slow in this segment, going back to a lot of areas to farm for equipment and explore since I did think I blazed through the snowy mountaintops and I need to slow down and smell the flowers slaughter the monsters and loot the chests. I did clear a lot of older areas that I missed, but a lot of them also doesn't have any new unique enemies. 

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Azula Beastmen

One of these guys served as a random boss in a minor Limgrave dungeon almost a hundred (!) hours ago. And back then he just blended in with all the monstrous humanoids like the demi-humans and misbegotten. Turns out that Crumbling Farum Azula, the dragon city swept up in tornadoes, is where the Beastmen came from! They remind me of D&D Gnolls, with a more pronounced animal head grafted onto a hunched-back body. They also use really huge, mean-looking weapons and some of them cast lightning spells. They do look more traditionally 'beast-man' compared to the Misbegotten, I suppose, but I'm not exactly super excited about them other than we've got a new type of enemy to fight. 

The description of things we loot from them do note that the Beastmen are special because they've got opposable thumbs, which seems to imply that they are the predecessors to humanity the way that cavemen were. I guess the finger focus is on brand for Elden Ring. I don't care about about the Beastmen to check if other non-human races like the demi-humans, trolls, giants or whatever have those or not, but I'm sure they have if they can hold weapons, right? 

Anyway, there are three main variants as far as I can tell. The regular ones wield curved swords (and some use pots as shields), the spellcasters shoot out lightning, and the big 'chieftain' ones are larger, have a lot of braids, and just wield pieces of architecture that the game classifies as 'greatswords'. 

Skeletal Beastman
In a city so filled with coffins everywhere, apparently the Beastmen are also not immune to the whole 'those who live in death' thing. And their skeletons wander around! The skeletal beastmen are essentially re-skins of the regular skeleton variants, right up to their weapons and 'you have to hit them after they shatter to permanently kill them' gimmick, but it's nice that they bothered to put in the beast skulls. Again, I'm not particularly excited about these guys, but it is nice to see some effort.

Farum Azula Dragon

Oh, yeah, that's more like it. Dragons in video games and fiction tend to want to fill one of two roles: either as big scary fire-breathing Godzilla/T-rex giant beasts that fly and breathe fire; or as these super-advanced race that are immortal and are masters of magic and lore and whatnot. In some settings, like D&D or Skyrim or World of Warcraft, the dragons try to fill both roles to different degrees of success because sometimes it really ends up feeling like a huge 'depending on the writer' thing. Sometimes these settings asks us to accept killing dragon eggs and babies like exterminating bugs when we've established them to be sentient; and sometimes the cool 'immortal elder species' part doesn't come across when members of their species are acting like Jurassic Park raptors.

Elden Ring manages to make it feel a bit more neat by having two different types of dragons. The 'wyvern-style' dragons we've been fighting all these while? They're Lesser Dragons, turns out. Two wings, two legs? They're the 'diluted' offspring of these guys, the Farum Azula or Ancient Dragons. A lot of modern fiction like Skyrim, Witcher II, Game of Thrones and several others have popularived the 'wyvern' shape as a more realistic form of a dragon, and it is cool...

But there's just something to say about the coolness of having four legs and two wings. And in Elden Ring, the ancient dragons have two pairs of wings, making them feel a bit more otherworldly and more like 'magical beasts' than the more winged-dinosaur lesser dragons. Also, with Elden Ring having so much focus on hands and fingers, well, these guys clearly have more than the wingless Lesser Dragons. Their torsos and arms are also a bit more humanoid when they stand up on two legs, but not quite into 'guy in a suit' territory. And this pose really does make them feel a lot more intelligent for the simple reason that they are casting spells. They manifest giant dragon-sized lighting sabers and start swinging them around. 

Ancient Dragon Lansseax

So in the middle of going through Farum Azula I remembered I've seen one of these bigger dragons before in Leyndell, but I just ran the shit away from it. Ancient Dragon Lansseax is fought in two places in Leyndell, and she just crackles with lightning, the red lightning just positively bleeding off the horns in her head. These ancient dragons have a body that's made of a rocky exterior as opposed to the more 'fantastic animal' reptile scales of the Lesser Dragons. 

To add to note, these 'rocky' dragons have also shown up all throughout the journey as corpses in the dragon communion temples, as well as the giant body of Gransax that lies covering half of the capital city. It's not just them using a different texture to indicate they're dead and part of the environment, it's actually them kinda-sorta foreshadowing the ancient breed later on!

Lansseax is one of the dragon leaders that used to attack Leyndell and she led an ancient dragon cult... and while no dragons in the game actually did it, Lansseax 'took human form' to 'commune' with her cultists. Which is absolutely the euphemism you thought it was. We don't actually see any of her, um, descendants, but apparently those dragon cults were really communing. I'm not sure what to make of it; I almost wanted there to be 'proper' dragon knights and cultists, you know? 

Eagles

After spending most of the game conditioned to seeing eagles as nothing more than background decoration, the eagles in the Mountaintops and Farum Azula are insanely aggressive, behaving, in gamer terms, as a 'reskin' of the Warhawks in Godrick's castle. This also brings to the question why Godrick needed to graft those swords to his eagles if random wild birds elsewhere are so, so much more powerful. 

Lightning Ram

I've skipped a lot of the regular animals in this review series, but since the eagles are actually significant enemies, I guess I can talk about these guys. Found primarily in the Atlus Plateau are these Lightning Rams, who wander around fields that are prone have lightning bolts fall. The Lightning Rams aren't overtly hostile, and are quite fragile, but they attack you by... by rolling at you, trying to bowl you over as their fur crackles with lightning. It's such a silly thing, and the idea of rolling at the enemy is a pretty cute in-joke for the Dark Souls series. You can even do the Lightning Ram's own rolling-lightning attack if you have the right items!

White Mask Varre

So as I go through the Mohgwyn Dynasty's blood-encrusted caves and desecrated temples, I'm continually assaulted by Sanguine Nobles... but also by 'Nameless White Masks'. One of the final white masks that I can optionally fight is Varre, the creepy, masked guy who speaks to us in the beginning of the game (and is the source of the "Maidenless" line that became a meme). The item descriptions note that these White Masks used to be battlefield medics, who have now turned to a blood cult to gain more power. Varre himself is the cult's recruiter, egging us on to kill others in order to view if we're worthy to get an item to teleport to this secluded place. He fights with a mace shaped like a bouquet of flowers.

Varre's such a smarmy little shit that I was quite happy to kill him. I actually think the unnamed Sanguine Noble goons are a lot easier than him. 

Other than the the ones we've covered previously, all the enemies in Mohgwyn Palace are just variants of enemies we've met before with some extra effects, like more Putrid Corpses (that explode!), Sanguine Nobles and giant skeletal slimes. A bit of a disappointment of a 'legacy dungeon', I must say. 

Mohg, Lord of Blood

"Tres! Duo! Unus! Nihil! NIHIL! NIIIIIIIHIL!"

And so we end this sequence with Mohg again. Not a lot about Mohg's plan is explained until after defeating him and reading item descriptions, and on face value he's just... one of the demigods who set up a blood cult in an underground city in the middle of nowhere. We learn when we arrive that he's also kidnapped kindly Miquella, one of the other demigods that the base game has been hammering into our ehads is one of the kindest and nicest and harmless demigods... and did... something to him. When we find Miquella, we only see what's left of his emaciated arm protruding out of an egg-shaped 'cocoon of rebirth'. Apparently Mohg has kidnapped Miquella from his base and defiled him in his own gambit to godhood. The DLC heavily features Miquella, and while I haven't been spoiled, I think there's going to be a bit more to this. Regardless, while Mohg isn't mentioned as much as his siblings, it's quite clear that the game just wants us to see him as this uber-despicable demon man. 

The design is also quite clear, although we have seen Mohg with rattier clothing before. He really is just a big horned demon man, isn't he? With a trident and robes. In the second phase he sprouts a majestic set of black angel wings and starts flying around spewing flaming blood everywhere, because, well, he's a 'blood god'. Looking at the detail on his face in the cutscenes, he does have a nicely intricate set of horns, some of which form a goatee (funny!) and one of the horns actually curling around and piercing Mohg in one of his eyes (less funny!)

Mohg has one of the more fun gimmicks as a demigod boss, where at specific points of his health he starts counting down from three... and then when he hits zero ('nihil'), the blood runes around you deal three beats of consecutive damage as Mohg yells NIHIL like the lunatic he is. He also heals back up, and engages the phase two where he starts flying around. The Nihil damage is unavoidable, he heals up (tracks for a blood god) and you do have to make sure you pop your potions or damage-reducing stuff right at the point this happens. 

Mohg is also one of the more polarizing bosses depending on your build... and I found him, by a huge margin, the absolute easiest of all the bosses, a reverse of how I felt fighting against some of the others. Once I understood the 'Nihil' gimmick and realized I have to keep some health potions up for that, I just... ended up two-shotting him with the spell Comet Azur and some setup. Mohg isn't terribly fast in his first phase, and it's so easy to set up buffing spells and potions while he's slowly walking down the aisle of his temple. Then you can just tank the Nihil sequence, and repeat for phase two. 

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It is also worth noting that to access the DLC Shadow of the Erdtree (which I have not owned... yet) you actually have to reach this point of the game and defeat Mohg. Which is such an insane requirement for a DLC but also one that feels like a hilarious middle finger to those early video game reviewers and content creators who just play the first hour or two of a game instead of experiencing it as it was intended to. Will I play Shadow of the Erdtree? I'm not sure. I guess it's more of a when than if, and I feel like it's probably something that'll take another year and I do want to play other games... but I feel I'll still do monster reviews regardless of I pull the trigger on the DLC or not.