There are, at least, a couple of extra new one-off enemies in Godrick's castle which does help to address my earlier complaint, but I really did feel like there could've been more. More Trolls, more Living Jars, more Strays, more... stuff than just having 90% of the castle be just Exile Soldiers, Warhawks and Banished Knights.
Anyway, I did explore a fair chunk of the castle, including a bonus miniboss that I could've completely missed if I went straight to Godrick after exploring through the whole eastern side. So I have a bunch more I'm gonna talk about here! (I couldn't beat the Ulcerated Tree Spirit thing yet, so it's not here. But rest assured that I know it exists, and I'll talk about it in full detail at some point)
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Mausoleum Knight
We'll start off with some non-Stormveil enemies! Wandering around the Weeping Peninsula is a giant 'WanderingMausoleum'. But walking around the mausoleum are these guys. Ghostly apparitions of knights... without heads. They can also teleport around a bit. These guys patrol around the giant Walking Mausoleum, attacking any fools that dare come close... as if the giant Walking Mausoleum itself isn't already impressive enough.
An interesting visual, and apparently these guys, like the tree guardians, are also willing servitors in death, performing some kind of ritual that involves them losing their heads in the process to guard the tomb for all eternity.
Wandering Mausoleum
What are Wandering Mausoleums, you ask? Well, these guys have been showing up all over the load-screens with no real context, and it's when I met one around the Weeping Peninsula that I finally realize what I was looking at. This thing looks so much more impressive in motion, particularly with the loud ringing GONG's of the gigantic bell under it. It literally is what you'd expect from something called a 'Wandering Mausoleum' -- a whole-ass building atop a chunk of the land, which sprouts four dinosaurian or elephantine-like legs and is jsut walking around while the bell under it makes large, ominous gongs.
It's honestly such a majestic and awesome setpiece that I really was surprised to find out that this thing isn't hostile at all. I mean, it'll still kill you if it accidentally steps on you, but that's about it. Most of the threat comes from the headless ghost-knights that seem to escort this thing around the land as it moves in a predetermined route. Most of the damage, in fact, will come from you trying to get the Wandering Mausoleum to stop so that you can go in and do some grave-robbing.
How do you, in fact, stop one of these lumbering colossi, you ask? It was a bit hard to figure out, but turns out that around the Wandering Mausoleum's giant titan legs are these:
They're a bunch of white, encrusted stuff that resemble barnacles in shape. Not too creepy to find on a giant pillar. But a closer inspection reveals that instead of little crustacean mouth-holes, the holes are shaped into screaming skulls. As you attack and clear these skull-barnacles from the legs of the Wandering Mausoleum, the way they dissipate turns them into ash just like many of the bosses in the game, confirming that these bizarre barnacle-souls are alive; to some definition of 'alive', at least.
And after you destroy all of these barnacles? The Mausoleum grinds to a halt and sinks back into the earth, allowing you to jump and climb up to access the building on top of it. All Mausoleum Knights around it also disappear. Are these the 'tethers', the literal heads of the knights? Did the ritual that make the Mausoleum Knights also animate the grounds connected to the mausoleum? If so, what is the purpose? Is it a strange burial ritual, or is there something more to it?
Regardless, I love how creepy they are and just how much of a great set-piece they are in this world. It's a bit more whimsical than most of the other things in this game, perhaps, but I do think it fits in perfectly.
Chanting Winged Dame
Essentially the 'elite' versions of the Giant Bats that has became little more than a nuisance at this part of the game, Chanting Winged Dames are your traditional 'harpies', with very human-looking faces placed on top of the bats. They also sing rather melodiously -- which made me mistake the song as an important NPC and I was running around trying to find her before a bunch of giant bloodthirsty bats attack me.
The Dames' song lyrics are actually in Latin and has been translated, and it's surprisingly mournful for what it is. I'm not sure if the Winged Dame are truly mournful and mean what they sing, or if they're just repeating what they heard to lure luckless Tarnished to their doom. Sentient enemies don't tend to really want to communicate with you, so it really could go either way.
Clayman
Thanks to a random elevator I found while exploring the overworld, I ventured into the Siofra River, which is a location deep, deep underground. And it's populated by these... guys. Claymen. They look like rough fascimiles of humans, wielding glowing spears and shambling towards you in a way not too different than the zombies. They're much tougher, and they have hollow eyes and a face that tapers down into drooping clay... well, you can either consider it a beard or Cthulhu-esque tentacles. When they die, they melt down into globs of clay.
And... sure, we've seen golem enemies before in games. They tend to be more hulking brutes instead of skinny old men, but turns out that these aren't like, magically animated clay or something, but rather the remnants of exploration teams who entered these underground lands in search of archaeology, but are mutated by whatever energies are within the undergrounds. Instead of becoming Morlocks, however, they become clay. And that is a bit more creepy and disturbing than just having them degenerate into pale sub-human gibbering creatures, or 'just' into zombies or thralls or tentacle-beasts. Clay is such an inorganic substance that to see that these guys were once humans and are turned into things that just resemble the shape of humans (remember, they melt into clay blobs when they die) is rather disturbing.
Omen
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Ah, so that's an Omen? "Margit, the Fell Omen" wasn't just talking about omens as in the regular noun meaning a portent or a prophetic vision, but that he's an actual member of the Omens, a type of creature? Interesting. There's one of this guy sitting in Stormveil Castle, and he's a big, more traditional-looking ogre compared to the stomach-less, bearded trolls of the setting. The Omen has a giant sword, a bunch of armour pieces, and what looks initially like red growths on his body that I mistook as the Caelid fungi the first time I saw him. When I looked at the pictures on the wiki when I'm not too busy trying to dodge Mr. Omen, though, they're actually sawed-off stumps of... horns or something.
Normally I don't really try to spoil myself on lore of characters or the setting when I trawl the online wikis for pictures, but I got spoiled a bit about the Omen, and it does help add some kind of a context to them. Omens, apparently, are some kind of a mutation where they are born with horns. "Omen born to commoners often have their horns excised, generally ending in the child's death, while Omen born to nobility are allowed to retain their gnarled horns, but are hidden away underground to live in obscurity." Now clearly the Omen we fight don't quite have full-on horns, with them having been sawn off. I guess even if the horns are sawn off, they can sometimes survive?
There is a parallel to be drawn with how people in medieval times would treat birth deformities as being something 'devilish', when those would've been considered as being perfectly able to live a normal life in modern times. I'm not sure if the gigantic statue of the Omens are a result of their Omen mutation, or if it's something else entirely.
Lion Guardian
This guy is a miniboss guarding a regal-looking courtyard on the eastern side of the Stormveil Castle. I guess if you tried to waltz in like a boss and brave the gauntlet of ballistas from the front castle, this would be the miniboss you face instead of how I snuck around the side door and moved through wine cellars and chapels and dining rooms to fight the Grafted Scion?
I suppose the Lion Guardian is another showcase of a 'grafted' creature, though it's nowhere as epic as the Grafted Scion being a giant spider-monster made up of dozens of limbs. The Lion Guardian sure does look impressive, but at the end of the day it is just a feral, ragged lion with couple of armour pieces and a giant sword 'grafted' onto its legs. Honestly, I don't even think it's even grafted on, it just looks like Godrick used some chains to attach a blade to the Lion Guardian and called it a day.
Pretty neat-looking, and pretty haggard looking. I don't dislike it as a miniboss, I suppose. Sure makes a nice breather from all those endless armies of humanoid soldiers.
Living Jar
JAR BOIS! I actually met a Living Jar ally, the friendly Alexander the Iron Fist, basically within the first couple hours of gameplay. Alexander got his big fat jar ass stuck in the ground, and he needed us to whack him from behind to free him. And... it was just confusing what these jars are.
And a single room in Stormveil is filled with a trove of these jars. Most are quite small, the size of small pots and jars, but there's one big one the size of Alexander that's around twice the size of a regular human. And... they're pretty adorable, aren't they? Little pot people with their lids sealed, and they've got gnarly long arms and stubby little legs seemingly made up of some rocky or dirt-y material. Pretty adorable, and while the ones in Stormveil are waddling around before they attack me, I could imagine that they could make a living acting as this setting's Mimic, hiding as regular jars. I guess there just aren't that many jars in the actual background of these environments. (They'd give Link hell, though).
Of course, in anything whimsical from a Souls-like game, there must always be something creepy. You visibly see a giant explosion of blood and viscera whenever you defeat and shatter one of these jars. And the jars drop rather disturbing items -- the raw meat dumpling is a nasty ball of meat and viscera that explicitly tells you that you don't want to know where it comes from; while the living jar shard show how the consistency of the porcelain-like 'skin' of the jars give way to flesh.
Alexander being a very intelligent and kind soul really does emphasize how these guys are alive and have human sentience, even though the implication is that the Living Jars contain... well, human body parts. It's quite disturbing... who's making these jars? Do the jars reproduce by killing and stuffing more human parts into jars? Did Godrick make them? Are their personalities independent of the humans that make them? Apparently there will be some other quests that explore their story, and the DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, actually feature the contents of the Jars as enemies and they look disturbing. That is currently the only thing I know from the DLC, and... yeah. I almost wished we didn't actually get to see what they are, because that quantifies them a bit and I kinda enjoyed the Living Jars just being this creepy unknown.
Godrick the Grafted
"Forefathers, one and all... bear witness!"
There we go. I have expressed some disappointment about the content of monsters within Godrick's castle, but Godrick really does live up to his moniker of being 'the Grafted'. Our first impression of him is a hunchbacked, cloaked titan, until he shakes off his cloak and reveals his super-long gorilla arms with multiple extra arms grafted and dangling off of his upper limbs. His 'main' arms, by the way, are made by clumps and clumps of arms. He dual-wields gigantic axes, one of which is held by one of his itty-bitty arms that grows out of one of his elbows, and he's hammy as all hell.
He's basically a more 'complete' version of the Grafted Scion miniboss we saw before, where the Grafted Scion scuttles around like a crab-spider thing while most of Godrick's grafting basically just makes him bigger and super-duper buff. The various information we've learned from various NPC's both inside and outside of Stormveil Castle paint a pathetic image of Godrick -- he is related to the gods and demigods of the land, but his bloodline is 'diluted' and he's met defeat to at least two other demigods, being forced to retreat, once 'disguised among the retreating womenfolk'.
Honestly, since FromSoftware clearly doesn't have a shortage of creepy monsters in subsequent areas, I now think it's intentional that Godrick's castle is filled with 90% humanoids and warhawks, with the occasional single Grafted Scion, big lion, or Omen... even as a Lord of Grafting, Godrick sucks at it. Or he's so selfish that he takes almost everything to himself. I guess that makes sense from a lore perspective, but it doesn't make Stormveil Castle any less boring to explore from an enemies standpoint.
Either way, the fight against him is... actually a fair bit easier than Margit's. I think it's a factor of me being a bit more leveled and understanding the fight more, but the arena we fight Godrick is a rather huge courtyard with more room to maneuver. Godrick mostly just jumps around with surprising speed, swinging around his axe and creating wind-themed shockwaves, essentially the jacked-up version of the same skill that we see the Banished Knights do in the castle. That, I suppose, ties into the 'Stormveil' theme (the area does have constant storms) though I don't think Godrick's design or personality communicates the wind aspect too much.
He is a video game boss, and as such he has a second phase. It's a very metal one, even if I personally don't think it makes the second phase all too much harder. It's hella memorable, though, and you can watch it here. Godrick just slices off one of his arms, and sticks it into the head of a dragon... and the dragon head sputters to life and starts breathing fire as Godrick yells to the heavens to BEAR WITNESS!
I do like that he only does this once, to preserve the epic impact -- one could design a Godrick-like boss to graft, like, a Runebear arm at one phase, or a knight's shield, or something, but I like that it's just the one time, and that one time is just so insanely over-the-top. I can't not like Godrick. He adds a couple of additional fire-breathing attacks now that he's got a dragon as an arm, which I thought was pretty cool.
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Anyway, a pretty banger ending to Stormveil Castle! See you next time for more monster reviews as I wrap up Limgrave and start my journey to the next area, Liurnia of the Lakes!
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