Reviewing Monsters: Elden Ring, Part 10

Just like Stormveil, I did a bunch of exploration in-between doing Raya Lucaria stuff, but I decided to devote part 9 to talking exclusively about the enemies we meet there. Between the Rennala lore, Fingercreepers, the Abductor Virgin and the sorcerers themselves, I  think there was quite enough to talk about there? 

These guys are enemies I kind of found while wandering around and farming for runes to level up and get enough stats to beat up Rennala, while also trying to clear out other parts of Liurnia, Weeping Peninsula and Caelid. I did a lot of the shorter dungeons (many of the ones have became a fair bit easier) to just see more of the world and collect items, but I also made it a point to clear some of the larger overworld sub-areas like Carian Manor and Sellia the Town of Sorcery. 

And... to be frank, I've been really loving just exploring the Lands Between

without the pressure of having to grind a certain way to get certain objectives or whatnot. I'm just clearing dungeons and talking to people, yeah? While I figure out whether I want to clear Volcano Manor or Caelid first, which could honestly go either way. 

But there are a lot of bosses, a lot of humanoid enemies and the like, so this one has a fair bit more entries in it -- enough differences as human/humanoid bosses for me to remember them, but not really enough of a 'wow' factor for this review to be extended into two articles or whatnot, yeh?

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Ghostly Enemies

I'm going to lump all of these guys together because they're just "reskins" of enemies we've met before... they're not really significant in terms of design, but they were annoying enough and prominent enough in their respective dungeons for me to want to at least talk about them. 

The ones on the left here are the ghostly Raya Lucaria Knights that hang around in Caria Manor. I think them being ghosts is just a way for the designers to have them manifest and 'spawn' in ramparts and corridors so that they can ambush you. Some of them can teleport! Later on, you discover that these guys are technically 'puppets' and the puppetmaster is the last remaining servant of the Carian royals, who are tasked to create puppets of the Raya Lucarian forces that once laid siege to the castle. Not sure how, exactly, they do the 'teleporting in' if they're just puppets, though. 

The second one I'm mentioning here is a Headless Troll Knight Ghost. We've met troll knights before, and we've met troll knight ghosts before. These guys teleport around! The fact that there's a headless variant -- and they're found around the Four Belfries, which is an area to protect -- implies that they might've gone through the same ritual that created the Mausoleum Knights.

The next ones are ghostly versions of the Wandering Nobles and the Raya Lucaria Sorcerers (all three variants show up) that hang out in "Sellia, Town of Sorcery" in Caelid. While most ghosts tend to just be more or less identical to their fleshy counterparts, with maybe some additional teleportation skills, these assholes are actually invisible. They don't spawn in, they just exist and shoot glintstone magic at you from afar while you scramble to get close enough to trigger them appearing so that you can target them. 

And since the Lucaria sorcerers are already pretty annoying enemies in the first place, having invisible ones that can flit in and out of your targeting reticules is just extra fun. There's a lot of them swarming around this ruined town, which inherently requires you to explore and jump around to figure out how to unlock the magic doors there. I love and hate the design of Sellia in the same breath. 

Putrid Avatar
So in Caelid, the Minor Erdtree Avatars that I've been fighting in Liurnia and Weeping Peninsula are rotten, with some extra texturing on their wooden parts and a bonus Scarlet Rot attack. Not much more to say beyond that, though it does feel like a "natural" variant in this world. 

Commander O'Neil

This guy is considered a 'great enemy' in the Caelid regions, who I encountered and killed honestly by accident? He's important to a quest that I didn't discover until a bit later. He sure is a big guy in a fancy armour, wielding a halberd with a flag wrapped around it and he fights me by summoning a bunch of Exile Soldiers ghosts as minions. I can summon my own ghost buddies too, and he's honestly kind of slow in an area where I can jump around with my horse, so it was the terrain inflicting Scarlet Rot on me that was more of an issue. 

Item descriptions tell me that O'Neil is the only survivor of one of the factions that battled in Caelid, and he's still fighting in honour of that memory. I just find him extra memorable for his otherwise rather mundane name, O'Neil, in a setting with Radagons and Margits and Rennalas. 

Guardian Golem

This is the boss of the Highroad Cave, which is a fun-designed little subterranean cave filled with natural enemies (including a Giant Octopus that hang upside-down like a bat!). Standing at the end is the Guardian Golem, which is a version of the Archer Golem we met before but with a giant axe with a glowing furnace for a chest. There were technically a bunch of them that guarded the way to Godrick's Great Rune tower or whatever, but I just... never talked about them? Well, I was doing some of the older dungeons and I guess I'll mention this guy. He's a big giant suit of armour with a big weapon. That's pretty cool, even if we still have nearly no context about who made these Golems beyond the fact that they're big, they're old, and some parts of them litter the Lands Between. 

Preceptor Miriam

Another new model, this one is the boss in sort of a mini-dungeon, the Carian Study Hall. It's kind of unique in that the whole hall's dungeon basically involves us chasing Miriam up the tower as she continually teleports upwards. She summons a giant Quincy bow and launches gigantic blasts of magic arrows, and summons a bunch of ghost soldiers. Being a 'Preceptor', she's a new model with a fancy hat and golden mask, but... as always, I find myself really out of words to talk all that much about humanoid enemies. 

Page
We met the 'High Page' variant in the Raya Lucaria Academy, but in my quest to clear the Carian Manor and its infestation of Fingercreepers and ghost knights, these guys show up. They sure have hood-hats and shoot me with crossbows! These are completely new models, technically, so I'm obligated to at least mention them here.

Royal Knight Loretta

The Carian Manor is basically the big overworld 'dungeon' in Liurnia, dwarfed only by the main 'legacy dungeon' of Raya Lucaria Academy. And after fighting your way through hordes of Fingercreepers, ramparts filled with ghostly knights, graveyards filled with living jars and a troll knight leading a bunch of sorcerers, the final boss of the Carian Manor is Royal Knight Loretta, who is faced in perhaps one of the most badass boss stages not given to plot-relevant demigod. It's giant circular pool used for moon-gazing, with a bunch of chairs arranged around it like a ritual circle. Loretta herself is a mighty knight on a horse, who, like most of the knights of Caria Manor, seems to be a ghost.

She's got a really cool spell where she channels her power into giant Quincy bow and fires it at me, which is basically a cooler version of what Miriam does. The best thing about Loretta, however, is the fact that you actually do get the bow spell after defeating her, which I thought is pretty cool!

Lesser Sanguine Noble

Yeah, while we're at it, might as well as rapid-fire some more humans. The Sanguine Noble here is quite neat. I meet him in the Rose Church, which is a church filled with some Resident Evil levels of random flesh lumps, and the Sanguine Noble summons like bloody briar thorns to fight me. He's a little preview of 'blood sorceries', which is associated with another one of the demigods we won't see for a while. It's a nice little showcase of some of the enemies we'll face in the future, which is nice worldbuilding. The Sanguine Noble here isn't quite entirely human, though. It's a bit hard to see when he's in motion, but screenshots like this show how clawed his feet are, implying some kind of mutation. 

Cleanrot Knight
This Cleanrot Knight is the boss of Stillwater Cave, a cave filled with poison lakes, Miranda Flowers, and the Servants of Rot who appear to be worshipping them. They are knights sworn to one of the demigods we have only seen in the cutscenes, Malenia, and are supposed to be guarding against rot... for as long as they can. It's a slight spoiler, but the idea of these knights that are devoted to their leader that they continue to wade into battle against the 'rot' while their body slowly starts to decay -- implied by the plantlike growths growing out of their body -- is pretty badass even if their design is yet another "it's a person in armour!" design. 

They've got fancy armour with branches sticking out of them, and they dual-wield a sword and a spear, with a little buckler shield. The one I fought also has this cool attack of slamming his (her?) weapon onto the ground to create a bunch of glowing spears that rise up from the ground. 

Nox Swordstress & Nox Priest

Yet another humanoid boss. Or a pair of bosses, more like. These two fellows are the final bosses after solving the puzzles in Sellia, the Town of Sorcery. The Priest fights with a club and sometimes throws down with his fists. It's hard to tell here, but the swordstress wielding a ridiculously oversized curved sword that can be 'moulded' into liquid metal and function as a whip. I know this, because her sword is the reward from the boss fight and I've been using that as my default melee weapon after this fight. 

As for these two... eh? I really like the weaponry they have, which sets them apart, but we have so many humanoid knights and priests and warriors of many sorts on this page alone. There is some cool, if spoilery, lore about the Nox civilization that these guys are aligned with... but that makes the backstory interesting. These ladies are just cool-looking hooded women with fancy weapons. The fight against them was... surprisingly easy, which is a bit of a surprise considering that Sellia kicked my figurative nuts when I was exploring it. 

Ball Bearing Hunter

I like the execution of this guy. There are some locations in the overworld where it's a site of grace where you can teleport to a safe place. Some of these places are near merchants! And... at night, in some areas, the merchant is gone. After looking around in confusion, a scare chord plays and this large guy wrapped up in thorns and chains and whatnot stride out of the darkness. He is called the "Ball Bearing Hunter", which is a reference to a mechanic in the game where if you kill a merchant, you can get their 'Ball Bearing' to essentially transfer that merchant's wares to a centralized location. It's a nice little game mechanic, and apparently the Ball Bearing Hunter here is going around killing merchants. Now, no actual merchants you meet will actually be harmed by this guy, but it is an interesting concept nonetheless. 

The guy attacks with a cool glowing sword that he can telekinetically manipulate away from him, but ultimately he's just some guy. Unlike Edgar, there doesn't seem to be a story yet about the Ball Bearing Hunter, but I do like the presentation and the shock factor of seeing this mofo appear for the first time when you were expecting safety. 

Mad Tongue Alberich (and other Invaders)

Okay, maybe talking about these named human enemies is a bit of a mistake. I really don't have much to say about most of them without going into Fashion Souls territory. Alberich here is fun, though. He's a secret encounter if you jump off the balcony in the Roundtable Hold, which is supposed to be a quiet base where no combat occurs.

But... yeah, I tried talking about other invaders, like Edgar the Revenger, Anastasia Tarnished-Eater, Recusant Henricus and Bloody Finger Ravenmount Assassin... but they're just people, y'know? There's not much of a gimmickry to them without going into their story. And not all of them even have a story! Edgar does, at least. He's an NPC we helped (or rather, failed to help), and is driven by grief at the death of his daughter that he's going around killing people and we have to put him down. 

Also, I just find them being covered in a red aura to be so ugly. I realize it's a holdover from Dark Souls or something, but look at the screenshots of the 'regular' non-invader humanoids like the Nox Swordstress or Preceptor Miriam! This is a leftover from the Dark Souls games that Elden Ring is based off of... and I don't know if Dark Souls explains this 'invasion' PvP mechanic in-universe, but this is probably the thing I dislike the most about the otherwise pretty top-notch worldbuilding of this game -- I felt like the NPC 'Invaders' feel utterly unnecessary and there's no reason why all of these guys have to be glowing red and pretend to kinda be spectral entities or something. I dunno. Just be regular people, guys.

Necromancer

These guys vexed me. Not that the idea of a necromancer summoning skeletons is particularly new or anything, but... but for the rest of the game, skeletons have been showing up and doing their whole 'hit their corpse one and they die for good' schtick. And then I walk into the Black Knife Catacombs, and the skeletons not only have gained the ability to roll, but they also refuse to die. Like, I died so many times like a dunderhead trying to stab the fallen skeletons only for it to have no effect.

Turns out that only in this dungeon, skeletons are maintained by these Necromancer bastards, who look like the commoners in Godrick's castle, holding torches. And you have to kill them to get these 'special' skeletons (sometimes there's a bunch of them!) to die. But not all the skeletons are tied to the necromancer, though, no! Some are just regular skeletons that behave like they do in the wild. Oh, and of course the necromancer is always located in like a corridor after the skeletons, so you really do have to dodge the skeletons and hunt down the necromancer and rush him down before the skeletons gank you. 

It's not that hard once you get into the groove of things, but this gimmick did really bamboozle me in the dungeon. 

Black Knife Assassin

I think we met a 'named' one near Patches' cave? The Black Knife Assassin serves as one of the two bosses in the Black Knife Catacombs, hanging out in the tomb's equivalent of a chapel. She's one of the Black Knives that killed one of the demigods, Godwyn, in the prologue to the story, and I think I'm supposed to hunt all of them down and collect certain items to help one of our allies unravel the truth about that night. Apparently they stole fragments of a rune of death of Maliketh, another demigod, and used it to kill Godwyn the Golden. Okay!

They have a rather cool grab animation where they latch onto you and really slice into your jugular. They move quickly around the room, your typical 'glass cannon' archetype, but can be staggered quickly with fast attacks of your own. Okay!

Cemetery Shade

The actual final boss of the Black Knife Catacombs is a Cemetery Shade, which takes place in a similar room with giant roots with corpses growing out of/being fed to it or something. Instead of a giant kitty-cat statue, however, the boss here is this... black shadow-man. It's got glowing eyes and tentacle hair, and summons a bunch of those aforementioned annoying skeleton friends to attack. 

...it turns out that the Cemetery Shade's bark is way worse than its bite, though. It dies to like, less than four hits, and the only real difficulty is to dodge his skeletons and chase him down as he smoke-forms all around the room. Which is kind of a shame, because I really didn't even get to absorb what this guy is all about as a boss. I'm not sure if it's just my build that's suited to fighting him, but surely it would be a Faith build, not an Intelligence build, that would one-shot undeads, right? 

Googling proper images of the Cemetery Shade gives me a closer look to what it's all about... those aren't actually tendrils, but rather bug legs. And it's actually wielding a pair of giant mantis scythes, with the description of some item (that I haven't obtained yet) describing them as 'insect-ridden grave keepers'. And it's a bit clearer from other specimens seen in brighter areas that the rather underwhelming tendril hair is... actually some Facehugger-esque bug legs that curl around the Shade's head like a crown. Actually, the central two horns almost look like engorged moth antennae or something. These close-up images also really shows off the actual texture of the emaciated, skin-and-bones ghoul-corpse beneath all the shadows.

This breakdown of the monster's visual design within the files of the game further showcases something more about the Cemetery Shade... that it's implied to be either a corpse or a near-dead person being pupeteered by a monstrous crab-thing. I wouldn't think of crabs as my first choice of a parasitic monster, let alone a parasitic monster associated with the undead and catacombs... but Elden Ring really does love using crabs to symbolize scavengers and corpse-feeders, so I guess that's the connection there? There's also apparently a 'web-spitting' attack that the crab-hat creature can do, so there's some 'spider' baked in there as well. 

Even without taking my long-running love for insects of all sorts, this is so much more interesting than the honestly rather banal 'it's a shadowy boss that summons some skeletons' boss fight I just had. I'm honestly kind of disappointed! Such a great concept, such a great design, and honestly, such great animations... and I barely saw any of it. 

Tree Sentinel

Oh, hey, yeah, I try not to repeat monster 'reskins' if there's nothing super-interesting to talk about (that troll being headless and a ghost is one such interesting factor) but since this guy was one of the first encounters in the game, I think it's obligatory to cover the Tree Sentinel now that I've beaten him. Mostly by accident! I was testing out some new summons when the Tree Sentinel attacked, and I fought back, and managed to beat him. 

Having played through a fair bit more of the game now, I can see a lot of the 'tree' imagery built into the Tree Sentinel's shield in particular, with vines growing around it. The Tree Sentinel is also able to conjure one hell of a cool-looking Dr. Strange style magic circle to bombard you with magical golden missiles, and I think we've established elsewhere that the plants in this world are what other fantasy settings' holy magic are associated with. The colour gold is also a running theme across the game, with Godwyn the Golden and the main religion of the world being the Golden Order. 

It is nice that the Tree Sentinel design is ultimately just still the same, and my commentary is still the same -- it's a cool looking knight with oversized weapons. It will look cool, just like how all the dragons in this game look cool, but we've seen this before. But I do like that after exploring the world and seeing more of it, some of the design choices I had taken for granted ended up feeling a bit more significant.