Reviewing Monsters: Elden Ring, Part 7

So yeah, all the feeling of being powerful after beating down Godrick and his castle full of soldiers and knights rather expectedly disappeared once I entered Liurnia of the Lakes, the next 'proper' area for me to go through. 

At the time of writing, I've been into the dungeon itself and went through a couple of rooms, but I've hit a bit of a soft-block due to my build. This was bound to happen sooner or later, since I'm sure the game is designed to punish and reward different playstyles at different points of the game, but it honestly does make sense that my mage-like Astrologer build has hit a wall on the Academy of Raya Lucaria. 

I haven't really read up too much on the lore of the Academy, and I'll probably have to return to this article to make addendums at some point, but the Academy of Raya Lucaria is this huge castle-academy of wizards that study glintstone magic... but the whole academy has been sealed with magical spells, and their mages are hostile towards outsiders lewhile their creations run amuck. We've seen a couple of their creations in other regions -- most notably the Marionette Soldiers. The area around Raya Lucaria are rich with blue crystals -- the same Glintstones that I've been using to kill almost everything in this game, and I wonder if the concentration of Glintstones in Liurnia is because of the mages being there, or if it's the other way around. Basically, expect "glintstone" to come up a lot in Liurnia's bestiary. 

Anyway, I'll probably spend next part running around gathering runes and leveling up while I clear dungeons in Liurnia and Caelid. 
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Giant Crayfish

We covered some of the wildlife around Liurnia before, most notably the Wraith Callers and their annoying bells, but these guys were the bane of my life. The giant crayfishes are a step up from the giant crabs -- for the simple reason that they picked up on their Pokemon counterpart, Clawitzer, and can actually launch high-pressured streams of water that have a pretty good range. Presumably, just like the Pokemon, this is an adaptation of a real-life shrimp that does use high-pressurized jets of water to hunt, the pistol shrimp. They only do it underwater, though, and they're not the size of a dinosaur.  

(Also, yes, crayfish, not lobster. The two are quite different.)

One notable thing is that while the giant crayfish's left claw is a regular crayfish claw, the right claw is actually mutated into something with a very sharp stabbing limb. To my knowledge there isn't a specific crustacean that has adapted their claws to look like they're designed to shishkebab you, but punching-glove mantis shrimps exist so I'm happy to be proven wrong. I love the animation where they do this, too, where they grab you with their regular crayfish claw, and then stab you many times with the spike-nail-claw. 

I really do love the texturing and the details they do on this thing. The overgrown of moss and algae and barnacles on the crayfish's upper exoskeleton is very nice and atmospheric, but the crayfish will actually hide under the waters of the lake; whether partially or completely. And I know I've been fooled into thinking that the moss-covered part of their dorsal segment is actually a log or something!

As a side-note, there are several variants that are very hard to tell apart especially if you're dodging claws and hydro pumps -- this youtube video shows them off very well. One cosmetic variant just has a mass of crayfish eggs underneath the abdomen... but the other, the ones visible in the overworld as red-eyed ones, actually has giant parasitic lungworms bursting out of their abdomen, potentially explaining why they're more aggressive compared to other crayfishes. 

Love this little detail. They didn't need to do and model a whole separate writhing, wriggling worm-parasite that 99% of players won't even get to see, but they wanted to. The red eyes would be enough to signal that these crayfishes are more aggressive and drop something nice, but they had to tie in something biological to it. Glorious. 

Raya Lucaria Foot Soldier & Cuckoo Knight

I think we covered the tabarded Raya Lucaria Soldiers in a previous segment, but essentially reskins of the same Limgrave enemies also show here, except that they've got slightly different armour. I really do like that they put a lot of thought into this, but slight differences in armour really isn't as exciting as discovering that the game developers modelled a whole-ass crustacean parasite to denote an enemy variant, yeah? 

The knights, at least, are a fair bit more interesting than their Limgrave Kaidan Sellswords. They're actually part of a proper knighthood, so they certainly look more impressive, and these 'Cuckoo Knights' (named after their cuckoo feathers on the helmets instead of anything cool involving the cuckoo bird, unfortunately) use Faux Sorceries -- basically artificial items that mimic the usage of real magic. That's a nice little detail! 

Night's Cavalry
They technically also show up in some locations in Liurnia and Weeping Peninsula, but this is the first time I've felled one of them properly. The Night's Cavalry, as their name indicates, only show up at night. And they are big, dark-armoured horsemen! Their horses are covered entirely in a cloak! They can re-summon their horses if you kill them, and the item description from the flail of the one I killed note that these are 'funeral steeds'. I guess they used to be knights related in some way to funerals and burials. I mean, they sure are knights! They're a fun little overworld miniboss, and I do commend the little additional things they did to make him feel just a bit more different, I guess. 

Vulgar Militia

Yeah, these guys exist. Despite their rather cool name, they're just... some dudes? They're short people, apparently. A whole militia made out of short people, which is... interesting? It does make them a little bit hard to fight and see in the terrain, and I guess they are 'vulgar' becuase they do hit-and-run tactics? That's the whole idea of them, I think, that they're the 'savage' militia that use unconventional weapons. They have a lot of weird weapons -- some of them use a sick-looking kusarigana, and some have this... spear-with-a-saw-instead-of-a-blade weapon. 

They also have very phallic headgear? Apparently, according to item descriptions, they wear it to look a bit taller and more intimidating... hard to break it to you, vulgar friends, the hat doesn't make you intimidating.

They sure are little dudes. They also show up in Caelid, and the ones there drop a surprisingly large amount of runes proportionate to their difficulty, so I guess they get paid a lot. 

Magic Miranda Sprout

Some enemies show up with different variations, and I'm not about to do every single one, but I like the Magic Miranda Sprouts. They're blue now, and they can still summon massive solarbeams to rain devastation from the heavens. But they now have a huge resistance to magic, and congregate and flourish in locations where the glintstone crystals are plentiful. Not much to say in terms of mechanic other than forcing the very magic-reliant me to finally diversify and invest some points in melee weaponry, but I really do like the idea that some of the wildlife have adapted based on the nature of the land. In Liurnia's lake, the high concentration of magic caused by the mage academy (or perhaps that drew the mage academy there) made them resistant to their 'predators'... or to their 'prey'. 

Albinauric

Huh, okay, okay! I've spoiled myself a bit with the lore for these guys, but I'll just say what's needed to understand what they are. these guys are weird, lumpy Gray-alien frog-people that just... wander around with their crude weaponry. These guys are called Albinaurics, and they wander around with equipment that seem like they're made out of the nearby plants. And from their shape and behaviour, it's tempting to handwave them as another set of 'swamp people', maybe meant to be a more humanoid version of frog-people or a lumpy lizard-people or something. Not every lizard-men have to look like a dinosaur, they can look like sad geckos. 

And I didn't really think too much of them when I battled them. Runes are runes, after all, and there's nothing that distinguishes the Albinaurics from the visually more striking crayfishes or wraith-callers. Sure, the Albinaurics can actually do somersaults to dodge your attacks, which is just hilarious to see these plumper guys do. 

Albinauric (albus = white; aurum = gold) or their Japanese names, shirogane, means 'white gold' in both languages, a term that could also be used for silver or platinum. Turns out that these are homonculi, lifeforms created by human hands, and live outside the 'normal' cycle of what's designed by the Erdtree. If there's any such thing anymore, with the sheer amount of abominations that prowl the land. 

The fact that there are so many of these Albinaurics raises some questions, mainly if there's still someone making them, or if they've been able to reproduce on their own. Also note that these are second-generation Albinaurics, and I'll go in more depth once we meet the other generations. For now, they're just hanging around the swamp, wandering around and whacking any foolish Tarnished who comes close enough to them with their big wood clubs.

 

Glintstone Sorcerer

So these are the guys that are behind so much of the nonsense going on in Liurnia! At the very least, we know they're behind the Marionettes that travel all over the land to act as guards in sites of interest, and I'm going to hazard a guess that they're also behind the creation of the Albinaurics. They sure are magicians in robes... but they wear giant helms made entirely out of stone, carved out of the side of an ornate building or a statue. I love it. It's ridiculous and memorable in the same breath -- we've been fighting 'generic' knights and mercenaries all game long, I like that another staple fantasy humanoid enemy, the sorcerer/wizard/mage, is given a little flair, and a fun one at that. 

I have to admit, it makes them look distinctive and weird -- but since they're technically stone sorcerers, I guess they really want to be stone? Or to embody stone or something like that? Each of the stone masks actually come from a different 'school', which I haven't really encountered and I'll only really talk about if it becomes relevant in the story or to understand some other monsters. But there definitely are several variants here, with different-coloured crystals and expressions... but I like that the giant stone masks are essentially their Hogwarts' House. 

In a hilarious bit of animation, while they mostly rely on spamming Glintstone spells, get close enough and they have two types of hand-to-hand combat... the first is to headbutt you with their big rock helmet-masks. Cute enough! The second? Use the spine of their super-thick textbooks to whack you in the head. That deals more damage than the swords of the Godrick soldiers, but then have you ever seen like, a medicine or law textbooks? Being hit by those can kill you. 

School of Graven Mages
Oh ha ha ha! What the fuck are you? I met the 'School of Graven Mages' in a location in Limgrave, but decided to talk about it (them?) here. The School of Graven Mages show up in Limgrave's Witchbane Ruins, which is populated by Marionettes and held a sorceress with the same statue-head as the Glintstone Sorcerers prisoner, so clearly it's Academia shady business, and clearly I'm going to meet ehese Schools as I explore Raya Lucaria Academy. 

And it's... how do I even describe it? It's a giant ball made up of the same stone-masks/helmets that the Raya Lucaria mages use, all smooshed together into a giant wacky ball. The thing just attacks like a goddamn mortar machine, launching magical missiles into the air to bombard the land. 

And you could, I guess, handwave this as another golem, another automaton, similar to the Marionettes. Maybe it's those gemstone eyes (which always looked a bit too alive even on the living mages) and I haven't really read all the lore yet because it's apparently going to spoil huge chunks of the Academia storyline... but this 'School of Graven Mages' used to be people, aren't they? Or a bunch of people? Whether enemies, or rival groups, or failed experiments or something, I have no doubt that with Elden Ring's penchant for body horror that I'll find out that the School of Graven Mages are actually a bunch of sorcerers merged together, and somehow turned into a giant head meatball missile-shoooting machine. Okay! I really like this one. It skirts the line between creepy and hilarious. 

Magic Putrid Corpse

And these motherfuckers are the reason I need to grind. I don't really even have anything interesting to say about it. It's not even a cool variant of the Putrid Corpse enemy I talked a while back, and it's not like a cool miniboss like Margit or whoever. No, a whole-ass graveyard courtyard filled with these guys are stopping me. They have high magical resistance, which nullifies my entire playstyle, and they have this grab-and-bite attack that drains my FP (this game's mana). And there's a lot of them, and they also show up with Rotten Hounds and Marionettes sometimes, and sometimes multiples of them rise from the ground. 

Again, thematic for the whole 'magic academy' thing, and if these were the reanimated bodies of mages (since they're in a graveyard within academy grounds) it kind of makes sense that they have high magic resistance... but man, that sure isn't any comfort to me!