This has been a long time coming!
But Elden Ring is a bit different in that it's still hard compared to all average action-RPG video games out there, but it's a tad more forgiving compared to Dark Souls and the rest of its cousins. It's also an open-world game with a highly-praised mythos and worldbuilding (the game's directed by Dark Souls' Hidetaka Miyazaki and part of the mythos is written by A Song of Ice and Fire's George R. R. Martin, and it's famous for heavily homaging Berserk and obviously Lord of the Rings).
I really was hesitant about picking it up when it was released in 2022. But the DLC was released around halfway through 2024, and... I didn't have the time or the focus to play the game at the time, but I've been slowly, ever so slowly, piece-by-piece going through the game and exploring it. (I have a draft of my slow, laborious let's play of the game, but since I'm not sure if I'll ever really complete it properly, I'll wait to see if that's going to be something I do).
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And as gods fight for the right to be the new ruler and restore the Elden Ring, the Lands Between paid the price. And that's where our story begins -- in the blighted-out ruins of the Lands Between, torn apart by wars waged by mighty gods wielding vile, corrupted magic, really royally screwing up the land. This 'Shattering War' ended in a stalemate, the demigods lurk in their strongholds... and you play as a 'Tarnished' -- one of several figures drawn by mysterious forces and pulled into this succession war.
A lot of the specifics (and even what a 'Tarnished' is) aren't actually told to the player, and honestly that's the interesting part of Elden Ring lore, where a lot of the things you meet in your journey clearly means something, but no real explanation is given. And I'm going to try my best to make this a bit of a 'live' review as I go through the game. I am told that there are some stuff that will make more sense as I travel a bit more through the game, and some context will be given to me later on. Now I'm a fair bit into the early game and I've had some context here and there, and I'm willing to read a bit of the fan-wikis but I'm also not really looking for major spoilers. Any major mistakes I'll probably correct in subsequent posts.
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Wandering Noble
The first tutorial goons you fight are these Wandering Nobles, who shamble around like zombies (and I thought they were just zombies for the longest time) throughout the weakest parts of the game. We really don't learn much about them beyond the fact that they're hostile, they don't speak much, and they wander around disorganized-like.
We later find out that these Wandering Nobles were exiled from their birthplace and forced into the Lands Between, but perhaps because of their nobility, they don't have much in terms of survival skills and just shamble along until the chaos of the Lands Between break their minds that they become mindless. And I guess it's meant to be ironic that these guys are 'nobles', but in-universe we see them being treated as the lowest by the other human soldiers, who watch over them as they toil.
There are several different variants of the Wandering Noble, as this picture shows... but Elden Ring doesn't actually tell you the specific names of your enemies so it's not the easiest to figure out if this or that or that other humanoid enemy is a 'Wandering Noble' variant or not, but does it really matter? Everything in this gods-forsaken world is hostile to you, and that's a lesson that the Tarnished needs to keep in mind.
Godrick Soldiers
A bit of a step-up are the various 'Soldiers of Godrick', some of them dressed up in rags and farmer hats like the left ones, but most of them dressed in red-and-green regalia and knight's armour. There is a relatively wide variety of these soldiers, with the ashen-grey ones being about the same strength as the Wandering Nobles, while the actual soldiers can vary in difficulty depending on their equipment -- some of them even have really massive tower shields, or ride horses, or operate giant firebomb-shooting ballistas.
As usual, I don't have too much to say about generic humanoid enemies, but I do really like just how... ghoulish-looking these guys look. It's perhaps a bit hard to see when you're rushing and rolling and stabbing these fuckers before they can stab you, but screenshots like these and inspecting their corpses show that their faces are... not the most humanoid looking. We're in the region known as 'Limgrave', ruled by the demigod Godrick the Grafted -- who these guys serve -- and whether it's the corruption from Godrick himself or just the general aftermath of the Shattering screwing up everything in the Lands Between, I'm not entirely sure. But these guys sure are easy to kill one-on-one. The trouble is, just like everything else in Elden Ring, the whole of Limgrave is the territory of their big boss Godrick and there's a lot of them.
The reason why the Godrick Soldiers and the Wandering Nobles look so emaciated and almost zombie-like is because of something that I've been kind of spoiled on, but basically death doesn't really work right in the Lands Between after the shattering of the Elden Ring. Essentially, the way I understand it, dying of old age doesn't work in the Lands Between anymore, causing everyone to shamble about, undying, unmoving.
And for special beings like the Tarnished, they have a form of quasi-immortality that allows them to resurrect near sites of Grace, which explains the 'respawning' video game mechanic. I thought that combination was pretty cool.
Tree Sentinel
This is our last 'human' enemy in this page, though I'm not entirely sure that big boy here is a 'human'. Right after the tutorial cave where the 'boss' is a generic Soldier of Godrick with slightly more health, we get free rein of the open-world game, and one of the first thing you'll see is a golden knight with a big-ass halbred riding a golden horse. And this guy... is actually a boss masquerading as a regular enemy, because the Tree Sentinel is near-impossible for you to defeat right off the gate, and would be a bit of a challenge even if you've grinded your character up a bit.
And I'm just using the Tree Sentinel here because monster-wise he's just a big knight, but I'm using him (and his reputation among Elden Ring players) to illustrate how the world is actually very purposefully unbalanced and you have to really pick your fights. There are a lot of enemies that I've met and ran the hell away from, like Flying-Dragon Agheel or these skeleton giants that lumber around, and I won't actually talk about them until I've defeated them and seen some, if not all, of their animations. I think that's fair, I don't get to talk about them (or look up their wiki pages) until I actually vanquished them.
Animals
Just like most open-world RPGs, there are a bunch of... technically non-combatant enemies that aren't harmful to you. Sure, the boars can deal some minimal damage if they run into you, but most of these guys are just here for flavour. A bunch of boars, some deers and goats and sheep, turtles with loads of HP, scarabs that you really need to kill for a specific type of loot, some birds and penguins... basically, the one thing to note is that the goats in this universe can roll to escape. Like Sonic the Hedgehog. That's just something so bizarre and not something I would associate with a goat, but why not, y'know?
Wolves & Dogs
Canines of all sorts probably form the 'mundane' animals that fight you the most, because the Soldiers of Godrick domesticate them and use them as watchdogs in their camps. Wild wolves are also found all over Limgrave, and there's even a small dungeon populated almost exclusively by wolves. Not much to say, we all know what wolves look like... but the dogs are surprisingly a fair bit more interesting, being so mangy, so raggedy-looking and the art department did a wonderful job at making this poor pooch look so utterly wretched. You just know this isn't like a well-taken-care dog, this is the stray mutt of the stray mutts, probably filled with all sorts of mange and rabies and lice and fleas. Nasty!
Giant Bat
Right, something a bit more uncommon now -- giant monster bats! Pretty cool design. The main body is a fair bit exaggerated from a real bat, with long human-like legs and a body structure with a ribcage and abdomen that resembles more of a Man-Bat than an actual bat. Love the face, too, which has such large, nasty leaf-like ears that take up so much of their head and makes them look more intimidating than they already are. Many real-life bats have these big leafy ears, but their faces are usually a lot cuter -- or at least not a snarling demonic mess like this guy.
Because these are video game monster bats, the giant bats have a sonic-scream ranged attack. Also, being bats, they are more of them at night. They're honestly not particularly threatening, but they would also be one of the first airborne monsters that would give melee-exclusive builds a bit of a trouble.
Demi-Human
It's not all soldiers, and in the fringes of Limgrave are these Demi-Humans, who lurk in caves and beaches and dress up like your stereotypical 'goblin', or your stereotypical cave/jungle-dwelling barbarian primitive pepople. Their faces are deformed, their mouth are filled with fangs, their skin are chalk-grey, they are always violent and they wield crude clubs and swords. At night, their eyes glow and they become a bit more feral, but are otherwise as easy to take down as most of the basic humanoid enemies.
And... what are these guys? Cursed humans? A separate race entirely? Is this what became of humans that aren't "Tarnished" like your player character, or aligned to a demigod like the soldiers of Godrick? Or is this something else entirely? And actually, one of the first questgivers is a very verbose Demi-Human called Boc the Seamster, who's a bit of a pariah among his own tribe. Are the Demi-Humans actually intelligent and they just refuse to communicate to humans? Or is Boc a bizarre anomaly?
Demi-Human Chief
The boss of the Coastal Cave that Boc sends you off to in his sidequest has two massive Demi-Human Chiefs as the boss, and their face look a fair bit more beastly, looking like... well, a 'rat-man' was what came to mind when I first saw them. If rat-men were twice the size of a human, wear armour made up of scraggly animal corpses and bones, and jump around and try to murder you with giant daggers (which would be swords to humans), that is.
There's ultimately nothing super-interesting about the Demi-Humans other than the ambiguity of what they are (or what the term 'demi-human' really means) but it's always a fantasy staple to have these goblins or orcs or morlocks or troglodytes or moblins or bokoblins or falmer or rieklings or whatever you want to call them.
Beastman of Farum Azula
A boss of a different dungeon (which's populated by wolves) is the Beastman of Farum Azula. They're also humanoid, but their face are modeled in a bit of a more... mangier and ferocious-looking manner than the Demi-Humans. The jaws are larger, the hair around their body is messier, and they wield this large giant mean-looking murder-blade, and around their bodies are golden chunks of ornate armour.
They're a bit of an early-game hint towards an area in the future, so I shan't really say too much about them, but while they're not my thing I do like the variety of monstrous humanoids in the game.
Kaiden Sellsword
Dressed in Nordic-style fur armour, riding horses and having giant curved blades, the Kaiden Sellswords patrol some parts of Limgrave. As their name implies, they're here to work for money and kill whoever their bosses wants them to. Unfortunately, this also apparently means you. They're a fair bit more dangerous than the average Godrick soldier, and they're a nice lesson to not always rely on your horse Torrent to escape since the Sellsword can and will run you down and knock you off your horse. Not much to say other than describing the fight itself -- as always, this will be a common theme in these reviews if you're just a human.
Giant Crab
We're back to some beasts with some enemies that are a bit more dangerous than wolves or giant bats, and... we've got a giant crab! I think there's just something so humiliating about being killed by an animal that, to us humans, never ever pose any kind of threat. Crabs aren't like spiders or snakes that already pose some 'danger' to our minds due to their ability to kill us with venom; and they are most certainly not like the wolves or bears or lions of the world that can make a meal out of humans. So there is a hilarious sense of 'aw man' when a giant seafood special scuttles up and makes a seafood special out of you.
I would also like to say how immaculately well-done the crab is modelled in this game. Particularly the mouthparts, which are adapted very faithfully from the real organism, and how they all move around creepily as the crab goes around to murder you. And it's not just able to murder you with its massive, gloriously rugged-looking claws -- the crab's able to pull off a Pokemon and shoot a fucking hydro pump to snipe you as you're trying to run away with a horse. The crab's also able to hide under the sands and swamps -- the first one that killed me ganked me right after I rode away from the dragon in the swamp, just bursting out of the ground in what looked like a safe corner of the map and snippety-snappety and I'm dead.
Runebear
Regular bears are also around in the game, but they're only marginally a bit more powerful than wolves. Not too much of a threat unless multiples of them come out to murder you... or if they're hanging around one of these guys. A big bad Runebear. From the image you can see the glowing runes scrawled all over his chest, which presumably is how it got stronger and much more larger. These Runebears are the size of small dinosaurs, lumbering through the forests accompanied by its smaller regular bear buddies (which now look like baby bears next to the big Runebear). They're unbelievable hostile, powerful, and... well, the way I managed to kill one was to aggro it all the way to a bunch of Godrick soldiers, and wait for the Runebear to wipe out all the Godrick goons before I rush in with my ghost-wolves for the kill.
Most interestingly is that the Runebears have a much more humanoid stance, which I thought was just my eyes playing tricks on me but it's extra-obvious next to the regular bears. The Runebears have a much more humanoid-shaped chests and far, far longer forelimbs. I think the longer forelimbs is a reference to this extinct short-faced bear, but that doesn't explain the massive gorilla chests that these Runebears have. The place that I find them from is around some mysterious runes tied to a big magical tree, which might be an explanation as to why the bears got magically mutated, I suppose.
Again, I might do a 're-review' in subsequent entries as I learn a bit more about the game and explore different areas!
Giant Dragonfly
Of course I have something to say about the big creepy bugs in a video game. I always have something to say about the big creepy bugs in video games! These guys show up quite early in swampy areas, darting around your head and moving quickly and zipping in and taking a bite out of you. Not the most threatening (especially since I'm playing an astrologer class, who can shoot magical bolts) but in numbers, and when you're also being simultaneously harassed by bears and stuff? Yeah, it can be quite disorienting.
But the thing is, these aren't exactly giant 'dragonflies'. No, the size and ferocity of this creature is certainly exaggerated compared to the real animal, but the anatomy -- including the characteristic wings, the long tapering antennae, and those iconic monster jaws -- are based on dobsonflies. Specifically, the male variation, which are the ones with the iconic and nightmarishly large Pokemon-sized claws.
I guess the team assigning names either didn't have good communication with the art and design team (which I find unlikely, considering how polished this game is), but maybe they just find the name 'dobsonfly' to be weird in a fantasy video game? Who's Dobson, am I right? But then I felt like they missed a huge opportunity to call these dobsonflies by their larvae's common name... the hellgrammite, which already sounds like a D&D monster anyway.
Anyway, these Giant DobsonDragonflies exist in two different variants -- a brown one and a green one -- which are assigned differently shaped mandibles. They're all functionally identical, though.
The Land Squirt, meanwhile, is a bit more accurately named -- and it's based on the real-life animal, the Sea Squirt... which are one of those immobile animals forming coral reefs and stuff, similar to the more famous anemones, who are actually classified and behave like animals, and not plants. Sea squirts of the subphylum Tunicata are extremely varied in shape, but at the core they do have a similar body plan that's reflected by Elden Ring's Land Squirt here -- a body, and two siphons, one acting like a mouth and the other acting like an anus. Both siphons function for respiration and for feeding. They're otherwise just sessile and don't have too much for me to talk about... other than the fact that subphylum Tunicata, despite their very simple form, actually possesses a notochord -- which is the primitive, stiff central rod that in vertebrates have evolved into spines.
Anyway, we're supposed to be talking about the fictional Land Squirts in Elden Ring. They sure are giant, bulbous and tumorous. I'm not sure if they're just working off of the most basic sea squirt body plan or if they had a specific species in mind, but sea squirts aren't the most exciting subphylum for me to spend a couple of hours trawling through. I do really like how they are interpreted here, with the two siphons being faithfully depicted. It uses the horizontal-pointing siphon (the 'anus' one, in real squirts) to shoot out clouds of poisonous gas. Which, by the way, is something that real sea squirts can do when an annoying fish gets too close. They also have these fleshy, almost gastropod-like 'root' system extending out from beneath their main body, which visibly tears off when you kill the squirts and cause them to tumble.
I do really like the design of this thing. It's so... simple, honestly, in video game enemy terms, but it brings a bit of a 'wtf' out of me when I first saw them and I tried to figure out what they are. I thought they were some kind of tumour-fleshblob monsters until I bought the 'Note: Land Squirts' item from a random merchant which puts a name to the creature. Pretty fun, and honestly I also do think that from a game design perspective having an immobile enemy with a very clear direction of where they're going to attack does make for a nice way to introduce players to the poison status effect.
Land Octopus / Giant Land Octopus
Probably my favourite enemy so far is the Land Octopus, or its bigger cousins, the Giant Land Octopus. I didn't even realize what I'm looking at until I saw the bigger versions with the more visible beak and the more splayed-out tentacles, actually -- the smaller Land Octopuses are the size of like a small dog, and the tentacles are so bunched up together that they look like a moving mass of... viscera, or feces, something.
But I guess the idea here is to take 'cephalopod' and be way, way more 'pod' (leg) than 'cephalo' (head). Because the interpretation of the Land Octopus here is to change just a little bit of the design, make the head made up entirely of tentacles, and just have this thing transform into the creepiest globster-looking regular 'wildlife' in the game. The drops we get from them, the 'Land Octopus Ovary', tell us that the land octopus actually specifically hunt down humans for blood to nourish their little eggs, which explains perhaps why the species is so hostile.
Just like the regular 'crabs' in the game, the smaller Land Octopus aren't particularly dangerous. The big ones, though, tower over you and have two giant tentacles that it whips around for range... and if you try to run, They can use the tentacles to vault themselves off the ground and slam down next to you -- not the way you'd expect an octopus to behave! Most bizarrely is its beak -- interpreted not as a clean, smooth chitinous beak like real octopi, but this desiccated bird-beak skull that poke out monstrously out of the mass of tentacles. Nasty!
Another nice little detail -- and I only know this because I was a huge fan of octopi and kept a couple as a child -- is that the Giant Land Octopus model, in addition to having a visible beak, also has a bunch of tiny little tumour-like growths poking out from between the folds of its tentacles. These aren't a sign of Resident-Evil style rot-monsters, no! We don't get to meet the actual rot-monsters until a couple of areas into the game! No, these are octopus eggs. I guess Mama is out and about, lurking into where these silly adventurers are, to slaughter you and specifically nourish their eggs!
While all of this alone is already enough to make the octopus be memorable, they also have one last trick that I found out to be pretty cool -- the Giant Land Octopus, when its HP gets low enough, can heal itself. Pretty simple for a video game enemy, and hardly noteworthy... until you see how it does it. Octy here will eat its own limbs, tearing off the long tentacles temporarily to convert them into food that heals its HP. It's a huge exaggeration of an octopus's ability to regenerate its limbs (since let the battle run long enough and the Giant Land Octopus will regrow those limbs) but it's a fun and very 'comic-book-y' one!
Mad Pumpkin Head
This one has a fun and almost whimsical name! Any large creature standing in a bridge immediately gains some suspicion from me, particularly after being traumatized by good ol' Margit (who we'll cover later after I beat him). Mad Pumpkin Head here is a big, hulking brute with a giant stick (which I didn't realize was also tipped with a pumpkin-shaped club) and a giant... well, I guess it's a pumpkin around his head! His bark is a bit worse than his bite, though, because -- and it might be a factor of my class and abilities -- ranged glintstone pebbles really shreds through his defenses.
He's a big, angry muscular giant-man, and when I meet him he's just bashing his giant pumpkin-shaped helmet onto rocks or his weapon. Or, at least, I thought that was his helmet and he's just a crazy lunatic. Apparently, the Mad Pumpkin Head is cursed to wear the pumpkin-shaped helmet (or maybe cursed for his head to turn into a pumpkin? This is a fantasy setting, after all) and he's on the verge of a panic attack. The Pumpkin Head I fought was alone, but apparently he can be driven into a frenzied rage if we agitate him enough.
...which also means that it's also very possible for you to sneak past him since he can't really see you. I think it's a mercy-kill for you to actually engage him in combat and put the poor guy out of his misery, though, considering how pained he is as he bashes his head over and over and over and over...
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And that's all the time I have for you today! Again, I'm doing this as I play through the game and defeating the enemies, so while I have encountered bosses like Flame Dragon Agheel, those undead giants with no stomaches and everyone's good buddy Margit the Fell Omen ('put this foolish ambition to rest', am I right?) I'm going to leave them for when (if?) I beat them. See you guys next time!
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