I've done a bunch of stuff, and... I love this game to bits, but it really would benefit from a less 'yolo, figure things out' quest system. Like... I thought a lot of the stuff with Melina, Ranni and the Roundtable Hold was pretty well done. Not hand-holding a lot but not out-of-the-way to confuse you. But man, after finding several NPC's that are clearly there to teach other classes (the Faith spell vendor in the Hold; the Skills vendor in one of the shacks...) it's a bit unfair that Sorceress Sellen, the lady who sells Glintstone spells and who allows me to even read the Glintstone spell scrolls I have, is in a rather out-of-the-way part of Limgrave where I have to kill a bunch of flowers... then find the secret stairways into the cellar... then beat another boss... then realize that there's a door at the back-end of that room. It's easy once you know what to do, but it's so easy to miss her!
And the extra spells like the Carian Slicer did finally give me the extra oomph for me to beat Margit, meaning that I can slowly explore Stormveil Castle, the first "legacy dungeon", as the game calls it. I still alternate between going into Stormveil and running around the overworld, though it is nice to know that I'm making progress in the main story!
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled monster reviews!
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Skeletal Slime
We'll start off with some overworld enemies before we go to Stormveil Castle. And... okay, so basically the game's basic 'slime' enemy is... the Skeletal Slime here, who's just a mass of viscera and bones. It's actually a bit hard to tell what's going on here without knowing the name. It's actually surprising that the game designers didn't actually make the 'skeletal' part a bit more obvious like having a skull (or several skulls) be a bit more prominently displayed... but I guess it is just a mass of rot and clump.
While visually not the most interesting, and gameplay wise I think they're there just to be annoying (they're not strong, they just absorb damage a lot) I do like the flavour of this one... the idea that necromancy doesn't just bring back whole zombies and skeletons, but sometimes just... just this butcher-shop... slop of nothing but gunk, yeah? A bunch of indistinguishable meat-blobs and random bones sticking out here and there... with the amount of people that die in the Lands Between, you can see how some of the undead that manifest would take this form.
And from a gamer perspective? I find it cute that we have a traditional 'slime' enemy but done a bit differently.
Miranda Sprout
Bizarre-looking flowers, aren't they? They're also deadly. I took them to be part of the surroundings, just... just a nice part of foliage, y'know? They dealt me the most humiliating death I've gotten so far. It's not even the big boss version that I'll cover shortly after this. It's these roughly child-sized flowers with nice pink petals and very visible plant anatomy... my botany isn't good enough to identify flowers, I'm afraid, but I do know that this guy's got stamens, and they also kinda remind me of like snail eyes or something.
I do like that they resisted the urge to make this an obvious venus flytrap or some kind of a humanoid plant-man. No, it's just a big flower that actually does look rooted to the spot. Those roots actually wiggle around and allow the Miranda Sprout to move like the Pokemon Bellsprout, which is adorable. Speaking of Pokemon, these Miranda Sprouts are also extremely weak to fire magic, which will stun the plants and destroy the spores.
Giant Miranda Sprout
The Giant Miranda Sprout is a fair bit bigger than its tiny buddies (you can see the regular Miranda sprouts near the roots of the one in this picture) and... it's still ultimately a big flower. There are some growths that might be intended to be teeth, and the pistil looks a bit mutated, like a fungal growth is growing out of it... but it's still just a flower. It's not mutated into a plant-animal monster like a Carnivine or a Audrey II or a Sarlacc! It's still a big, fat flower that shoots out clouds of poison.
...and orbital laser beam barrages. I'm not shitting you. I really was bamboozled by this one. Again, I was attacking the giant poison flower from afar after being screwed over by its younger cousins, but then it extends its stalk to lift the flower into the sky... and then a rain of heavenly white laser beams rains down from the sky.
I mean, sure, why the fuck not? If I can believe that Grass-type Pokemon can launch Solarbeam, why not this girl, right? Though honestly, considering how the ever-present giant glowing Erdtree is basically god in this setting, it actually doesn't feel too far-fetched that 'plant magic' in this setting translates roughly to 'light magic' as well.
Commoner
Okay, technically I have to beat up Margit (who I've mentioned many times now) before I can enter the first 'true' dungeon of the game, Stormveil Castle, who is ruled by the mighty demigod, Godrick the Grafted, infamous throughout the lands of Limgrave for his deviant acts of grafting, which means that I was anticipating a whole Resident Evil, Frankenstein's Monster level of body horror.
...instead, we just get... humanoid enemies? Huh? Newer ones, sure, but the 'Commoner' here is really not that different from the 'Wandering Noble' enemies other than the shackles around their neck. Sure, a different kind of raggedy cursed human, I admit. Some are assholes who throw fire grenades to blow up explosive barrels. It's rather surprising that all the Commoners in Limgrave seem to be in Stormveil Castle, while only soldiers and nobles wander the overworld.
Exile Soldier
Apparently, Godrick didn't care for the knights running around in tabards to guard his castle. Instead, these Exile Soldiers wearing a different set of armour and red hoods form the bulk of the soldiers in Stormveil Castle. I thought that maybe we'll get something cool with them, maybe these guys are grafted with Godrick... maybe if not visually, then maybe some abilities, like, maybe they can sprout extra limbs or something... no?
Oh, wait, we've got these thorns running up their shields and leg armour and we've got thorns all around the castle! Aha! We established that the Erdtree magic has something to do with plants, maybe these guys have something related to plants and... huh? No? They just... shoot crossbows? Wow, Godrick, your soldiers are lame.
These guys are 'soldiers sent to penal colonies', which... at this point, feels like it's a distinction without a difference from the lore given to me about the Wandering Nobles, except these guys get to run around in hoods and swing axes in the castle.
Banished Knight
One of the stronger 'common' enemies in Stormveil Castle are these guys in full-plate armour. I respect them, and they are just the right amount of difficult to get me to tense up and get ready to throw down whenever I spy them. There's even one that ambushes you in a locked, dark room. It's a bit hard to tell, but there are several different helmet variations, too. Their lore is... they're 'knights sent to the fringes, where they were forced to start anew'. Because they're not as much losers as the other vagabonds sent to the Lands Between, they can still remain knights. They can create giant whirlwind shockwaves and there's a variant that breathes fire. Okay, neat.
And... they're cool, but they're still just regular knights. I don't mind humanoid enemies, I really don't, but you can't really build up someone called "Godrick the Grafted" and not deliver with his minions!
What's a bit surprising is that we don't even get to see some of the creepier enemies in Stormveil Castle. Not the Skeletal Slimes, not the Pumpkin Heads (apparently Godrick wasn't responsible for fusing pumpkins onto people's heads), not the Trolls (in fact, the only Trolls we see are hung upside-down)... just knights and hooded mercenaries.
Warhawk
All right, at least something that is 'grafted'! The Warhawks are giant eagles that... have... fucking swords grafted in the place of their talons. You know what? That loops around into being so ridiculous, I actually appreciate the game designers for doing it. It's both whimsical and would've been a nice little 'oh, that's cute, Godrick also did that?' if the rest of the dungeon actually had some body horror enemies.
The Warhawks, despite their goofy-looking appearances, hit hard, hit fast, and are gigantic assholes who can somehow perch with those giant samurai katana attached onto their feet. HOW DO YOU PERCH, HAWKS? To make things worse, these yahoos are intelligent enough to actually pick up explosive barrels and chuck them at you like a goddamn grenade. I would've been impressed if I wasn't so mad!
A stronger black-feathered variant also has a mask, and the mask has a pokey blade pointing out of it. I remember him, because he was hiding under a ledge ready to impale me as I jumped down off that ledge to try and progress. I like the Warhawks.
Stray
Not exclusively found in Stormveil, but also showing up in some exterior parts of the castle (in particular a large clearing with a pile of dead corpses) are Strays, which basically behave similarly to the Wolves and Dogs. But where the dog looked rabid and diseased, the Stray model here just looks... rabid, diseased, and dead. Look at how its torso is basically already showing muscles anad ribcages underneath, and I don't think it's even got an abdomen left. This thing looks like a nasty undead dog, and I think they might've gotten transformed from feeding on the nasty corpses all around the castle.
Grafted Scion
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, now that's a 'grafted' creature for you. The Grafted Scion is actually a monster we meet in the prologue, where it drops out of the sky and kills you, right before you wake up in what's basically the tutorial cave. I think having seen what a 'Grafted' monster looks like, I was expecting milder versions of the Grafted Scion to show up as Godrick's minions.
And it's just an amalgamation of many limbs! It's just scuttling around, this giant mass of meat and corpses, on a dozen human-sized arms... as well as some arms that are multiple human arms merged together. There's also a random bird wing stuck onto it. But I think the creepiest thing here is the contrast between the Resident Evil anatomy horror show and the fact that the main 'face' of the Spider is... a youngish-looking child, who was grafted mostly with an intact upper body and merged into this amalgamation of nasty limbs.
The end result does really look quite nasty and visually impressive, and I love that while there's a clear 'head', there's not a clear set of 'main' legs, which makes the whole thing look extra creepy. It just mostly makes use of its size and the swords it's holding in its massive hands... and honestly, while the initial encounter in the prologue was pretty terrifying, the actual Scion I meet in the Stormveil Castle felt quite... pathetic. It just wanders around and it's so stupid that you can sneak past him many times. And even if you do fight him, he's trapped inside the big building he's in, so you can really cheese him by shooting him from outside the door he's too big to get through, or use it as a way for him to 'cool his aggro', so to speak. Ultimately the Grafted Scion is just a mass of victims grafted together by Godrick, so we're essentially just mercy-killing this poor thing.
People who are able to peek and inspect the model find out much more horrid moulded detail that you can see here, including features you wouldn't be able to see normally like feathers and multiple spines fused together to form this creature's 'main body'. It is pretty nasty-looking, even if you don't really get to see any of these in the game itself!
Margit the Fell Omen
And Margit here is our first boss in the game's main story, blocking the way to enter Stormveil Castle. He's a pre-dungeon boss fight, and honestly a fair bit harder than most of the dungeon's actual content.
After an epic speech, Margit engages you in an epic battle above the bridge where he literally gatekeeps weaker players from getting past him. Expect 'YOU DIED' to show up multiple times as you challenge this guy, and expect to listen to him yell "put this foolish ambitions to rest" a whole lot of times. As a complete beginner to this whole 'SoulsBorne' genre, I actually do think Margit is a perfectly nice and challenging boss fight when I stumbled upon him -- it's clear that he's hard, and I can't beat him right now... but I can beat him with a bit more skill in dodging, in attack pattern observation, and maybe some better gear. It's nice. And it's a nice way to show that the game is not intended to be speedran, at least not without some skill in the genre. Go around and explore the big open world game you paid for, dummy, instead of rushing through the dungeons!
It's not that easy to get a nice, clean screenshot of Margit since all of these bosses move around a lot, but Margit is a cloaked, humanoid figure with a massive knotted cane, and a giant scorpion-esque tail bursting out of the back. His face and eyelids are encrusted with some kind of... coral? Is that coral? Writhing worms? It's a bit hard to tell, honestly, and that's not taking into account him jumping around and trying to murder you with his stick and his magic glowing knives.
He is a pretty impressive setpiece visually. There is some lore about 'Omens' that I don't want to read yet. But I do like the fact that this ragged, weakened-looking demigod looks more like a wanderer but actually is a very powerful threat. But how does he fare as a monster? My verdict is... he's all right. How he made me feel and the epic music and voice-acting and the presentation and role of him as the beefgate boss is certainly impressive. We haven't really seen the last of him yet, based on his taunt after defeating him. But at the end of the day, he is just a giant guy with some growths on his head and a giant scorpion tail. That's pretty cool, but that's also pretty 'first boss of the game' material, y'know?
I can't really complain, at the end of the day, not when I feel like Margit and I have a fair bit of kinhsip after how many times we keep bumping into each other. I'd spend all my runes on upgrades, I'd run in, I'd test Margit out, over and over again, until I finally went in a run where I finally felled him. It was satisfying.
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