So I've been following Ranni's quest. Which, to quickly recap, has me run some typical RPG detective work and errands for her, beat her brother so the stars can move and a meteorite can pulverize a chunk of the terrain, go through an underground Eternal City to retrieve an artifact, go through an upside-down tower, go through a second underground Eternal City, find the Lake of Rot below that city, go into a temple of rot even below that, and then sleep in a coffin to wake up in an even deeper part of the world where an artificial night sky lurks... and, well, I'm going to talk about the Remembrance Boss first this time, because I really, really like it.
But other than that? I've been also slowly exploring a lot of the older dungeons, leaving the 'main' Mountaintops of the Giants storyline for a bit later. I did unlock the Consecrated Snowfields and Mohgwyn Palace, although I have not really explored either. But for the most part, the combination of Ranni's quest and clearing the insane depths of Leyndell's catacombs (which is also like 3 dungeons stacked on top of each other) has been taking up most of my time.
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Astel, Naturalborn of the Void
"A malformed star born in the lightless void far away. Once destroyed an Eternal City and took away their sky. A falling star of ill omen."
Hell. Yeah. I am a huge fan of fantasy games where you fight a recurring enemy that feels challenging, and you go 'whew, that's that monster dealt with'. And then some time down your journey, you find out that the boss you just beat? That's just the baby. And the adult is much, much, much more terrifying. It's why D&D has stats for all age groups of dragons, why Pokemon has almost all of its creatures evolve into stronger and stronger beings... and in Elden Ring, they applied this, surprisingly, to the 'Malformed Stars'. Strange otherworldly beings that are said to fall from the skies, and have an insane ability to control gravity magic.
We have seen a bunch of other beasts like these before, and people have been quick to point out that the Fallingstar Beast looks a bit like a rocky-themed antlion larvae. All well and good, but going deep into the underground cities, some of the larger caverns feature Malformed Stars, which also look very insectoid. Malformed Stars are always shown hanging down in large caverns, their wings folded up against themselves, in a pose not dissimilar to a post-molt dragonfly.
One of the 'named' bosses in Mt. Gelmir is a Full-Grown Fallingstar Beast, which is a bit stronger and has a strange, eye-like clump growing out of its head... which would tie it well to the Malformed Star's design of a skull with two massive pincers. The presence of metamorphosing insects like specifically the dobsonflies (the game renames them into dragonflies) leads me to believe that, yes, similarities were intended. Which means that, yes, the Fallingstar Beasts are larval stages of these Malformed Stars (or some have theorized to be a separate adult stage, with the winged adult form somehow needing the underground environment)... but if they are malformed, what does the real adult look like? Well, I've already shown the pictures up above, but...
This is Astel. Naturalborn of the Void. A being who apparently was responsible for the annihilation of the Eternal Cities, and 'stole their sky', whatever the fuck that means. Walking into Astel's super-duper-subterranean chamber deep beneath the core of the planet (is this even a 'planet'?) you walk into a chamber with a ceiling not just full of stars like the artificial skies of the Nox, but a full-blown galactic view.
And scuttling in the middle of it is our boy Astel. How do I even describe him? I think the easiest way to describe him is that he's a dragonfly-scorpion monster with a giant zombie attached to his front end? Like a giant zombie mermaid, but buggy? But that really does underscore just how weird this void creature is. Yes, grabbing our attention immediately are the gigantic dragonfly wings and the big, scary skull with bug fangs, and the super-long spindly human arms replacing bug legs.
Those are really cool... but it's not until you take a proper look at the body and realize that the long, tapering dragonfly/scorpion-tail body are actually orbs. Orbs that appear to be patterned by planets, or stars. Some of them even have rings on it, similar to what you'd see on Saturn. The weapon you get after defeating Astel, "Bastard's Stars", specifically calls these orbs 'star debris'.
And it's still got the body plan of an insect, albeit a gigantic one, and except I really do love how unsettling just replacing bug legs with spindly skeleton arms are. Astel's front legs are particularly pronounced, which I think is true for a lot of insects out there. And that's without getting to that wonderful skull head. It's a skull, but it's also covered with a lot of bristly hair, two gigantic bug-pincers jutting out of the side, and just like the Malformed Star, the forehead 'bone' has caved in to reveal a glowing orb within. It's a bit hard to take in when you're dodging Astel's gravity-blasts in-game, but it's actually an eyeball that twitches around.
That super-long body ends in a gigantic rocky spiky tail that neither has the bone nor the stellar consistency of the rest of Astel's body plans, but in a big fucking spiky rock club that it uses to kill you from range. I love that. But Astel attacks with a lot of gravity magic, unleashing beams of purple light, or teleporting around, or creating portals that unleash gigantic storms of meteorites down on the entire battlefield. In a particularly memorable action, Astel can also turn off gravity in an aura around it, causing you to float up before being brutally smashed down.
There's a surprising amount of clues as to what Astel and its species are, but every item description raises some questions... and I love just how... how out-of-context Astel and his kin are. A lot of the things in the game deal with aspects relating to the disruption of the Golden Order of the world -- death runes being removed and causing death to not work right; influences of the forces of Frenzied Flame and Scarlet Rot encroaching all over the world... political infighting as demigods fight each other... and then we have this out-of-context, casual eldritch horror of a giant space bug that swoops down and tears apart an Eternal City and has been nestling quietly deep, deep beneath the world. Many people have noted that there were so much references to Starscourge Radahn using his gravity magic to 'hold back the stars' as a reference to him having held back Astel's species specifically, and I thought that was quite cool as well.
Anyway, all the demigods and dragons in this game are cool, but Astel here might just be one of my favourite things in this game.
Glintstone Dragon Adula
Adula shows up again, that scamp! She briefly served as an optional boss earlier in the Ranni quest, and also serves as kind of the final obstacle before we get one of the final cutscenes with Ranni. It was admittedly a bit dickish of the games after I went through Nokstella, the Lake of Rot and the Astel fight to go up to a peaceful rise in the overworld... and then Adula teleports in, and goes full-on Roronoa Zoro and conjures giant ice-blades that she grips in her mouth. The heck, Adula! That's in addition to her regular repertoire of crystal spells. I do get the Adula's Moonblade spell after beating her, which is actually exciting because most bosses aren't sorcerers and don't exactly drop stuff I could use.
Adula shows up again, that scamp! She briefly served as an optional boss earlier in the Ranni quest, and also serves as kind of the final obstacle before we get one of the final cutscenes with Ranni. It was admittedly a bit dickish of the games after I went through Nokstella, the Lake of Rot and the Astel fight to go up to a peaceful rise in the overworld... and then Adula teleports in, and goes full-on Roronoa Zoro and conjures giant ice-blades that she grips in her mouth. The heck, Adula! That's in addition to her regular repertoire of crystal spells. I do get the Adula's Moonblade spell after beating her, which is actually exciting because most bosses aren't sorcerers and don't exactly drop stuff I could use.
Fighting her when she's not flying around really does make me appreciate just how overgrown the glintstones are in her head and body. Around this Moonlight Altar area, there are also a bunch of unnamed lesser glintstone dragons.
Flying Dragon Greyll
Killing Adula made me go on a bit of a dragon-hunting binge, and I've got a bone to pick with Flying Dragon Greyll, who I've never been able to really kill before. He's stalking a long bridge in Caelid back and forth and is clearly meant to be a gate-keep for lower-leveled characters from reaching an NPC called Gurranq... which you can do anyway after doing a very short quest and talking to some people. But Greyll is still there, a spiky eyesore going back and forth on the bridge. I got him this time! He's honestly a bit more basic, because he's just a fire dragon... but still quite fun to fight due to actually being a fight, and I like how the AI prevents him from flying until after he's walked off the bridge. I guess he is really faithful to whoever assigned him the duty of guarding the bridge!
Killing Adula made me go on a bit of a dragon-hunting binge, and I've got a bone to pick with Flying Dragon Greyll, who I've never been able to really kill before. He's stalking a long bridge in Caelid back and forth and is clearly meant to be a gate-keep for lower-leveled characters from reaching an NPC called Gurranq... which you can do anyway after doing a very short quest and talking to some people. But Greyll is still there, a spiky eyesore going back and forth on the bridge. I got him this time! He's honestly a bit more basic, because he's just a fire dragon... but still quite fun to fight due to actually being a fight, and I like how the AI prevents him from flying until after he's walked off the bridge. I guess he is really faithful to whoever assigned him the duty of guarding the bridge!
Blaidd the Half-Wolf
As an honestly depressing little coda to Ranni's quest, we get Blaidd's story happening alongside it. Being a giant wolf-man twice the size of our character swinging around a greatsword, Blaidd has been helping us in various spots throughout the game, partially to help further his mistress Ranni's ambitions... but also because he's just a swell guy! Blaidd himself is apparently made to be a 'Shadow' of Ranni by the Two Fingers, meant to bodyguard her... but also to eliminate her if she ever goes against the Two Fingers and the Golden Order. Which Ranni was definitely trying to do. And it is kind of a sad story as Blaidd does this knowing full well that at some point, his pre-programmed instincts will take over. However the heck that works for a wolf-man.
There really is no way in-game to prevent this, and after doing the whole Ranni questline you find Blaidd struggling -- and eventually losing -- what's left of his sanity and reverting into a mad, rabid beast that we have to put down. It does look cool that he's a wolf, and he's one of my favourite NPCs in the game, but otherwise he behaves more or less like just any warrior with a greatsword.
Nomad
So I'll take a brief detour to a different complex subterranean location in the Lands Between, the catacombs beneath Leyndell. I've gone through the Leyndell dungeon as part of the main story, and made a comment about how big it is. It's even bigger! There's a network of dungeons and sewer systems called the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds that you access through a very specific well, which was where I did the Dung Eater quest. Then there's another entrance to a 'catacombs' puzzle dungeon (which was clever but assholish video game design in that they made me run around what appears to be a closed loop but actually three different levels), and even deeper than that is a long cathedral leading down to a hidden door that leads into a downwards tower filled with a lot of corpses, bodies turned into husks and faces in rapture. It really is disquieting.
There are maybe a couple of these Nomads still alive, sitting down playing music or wandering around seemingly blind. When they attack you, they vomit out a lot of flaming projectiles from their eyes, which is a sign of a far more intense corruption of the Frenzied Flame. Creepy set-up, but it's just more flame cultists, right?
Wrong! We've met the Nomad's people before -- the Nomadic Merchants that sit all over the world and play their little violins, and hold those weird hand-scratcher violin bows (very creepy when there's like a hundred of those sticks poking up of the ground). Managing to find the very hidden armour set in that location tells us the tragic story of the Nomads... the were an entire tribe called the Golden Caravan who was infected by a 'maddening disease'. Now, mind you, not all of the Nomadic tribes were infected, but there were enough that they were accused of harbouring the Flame of Frenzy... and the entire clan was rounded up, tossed into the deep catacombs, and sealed up even on a level of disdain below the Omen. It's pretty neat! Not often do I really care about human enemy backstories, but I feel like they got me with the Nomads.
Lesser Spirit-Caller Snail / Inaba
One of these guys served as the boss for a minor dungeon in Liurnia or something, but the Spirit-Caller Snails have begun populating entire dungeons, hiding in little nooks and crannies while they summon monsters to fight for them. The idea is that these Spirit-Caller Snails are essentially doing what your Tarnished does when they use the little Spirit-Caller Bell to summon spirit ashes, except the snails can continually summon minions ad-infinitum until you kill the summoner.
The idea, of course, is that these Spirit-Caller Snails are summoning ashes of people who have died before. But why do snails, or more accurately, snake-snails have necromantic ability? These go from summoning things like simple wolves to warriors called Inaba who arrive from the Land of Reeds, to even Crucible Knights and Godskin Apostles when they serve as bosses. With the revelation of how much snakes are equited to blasphemy in Rykard's little side of the world, the snakes do raise a couple more extra questions instead of just being a cool little weirdo fusion-monster.
Mohg's Goons
We've got a couple more named human bosses that show up here and there as I explore. Bloody Finger Okina is significant, I suppose, because he's a member of the Cult of Blood that worships the Mohgwyn Dynasty, the cult of blood of the Sanguine Nobles we've met very sparingly. I've met him previously before as one of the random Tarnished that answer our call in the Radahn fight, but apparently he's been seduced by the allure of a blood cult. I do like the description in the items I got after killing him how he was particularly seduced during his work on his katana, which drove him into madness and obsession. He and another unnamed Sanguine Noble are just hanging out in the Mountaintops of the Giants.
Another member of Mohg's cult of blood which I found as one of the bosses in one of the many segments of the Leyndell subterranean catacombs is Esgar, Priest of Blood. Not Edgar, I think I killed Edgar a while back. Esgar is a bit special because he fights me accompanied by two of the rabid dogs, which does make the boss fight a wee bit harder. Dogs are mean in this game.
Mohg, the Omen
And here is Mohg, the Omen! Spoiler alert, of course, but I don't think you'd be reading these if you cared about spoilers. The name of Mohg would be hidden quite a bit unless you've been actively seeking out certain side-quests, since he isn't listed among the ranks of the demigods. Even Gideon Ofnir, the guy who gives exposition about the demigods and the royal lineage, really only starts mentioning Mohg after you do a lot of legwork in exploring the locations that would lead to him.
And he's just... hanging out in the Catacombs beneath Leyndell. Mohg is the twin brother of Morgott, and like his brother, he was shunned as an Omen and imprisoned deep underneath the city. It's a tale of contrasts, though, because despite their shackled upbringing, Morgott grew up to be Last of All Kings. Dressed in ragged furs, ashamed over his Omen growths, he still conducts himself with the grace and poise of a ruler, even fighting against other demigods in the Shattering War and managing to keep Leyndell's armies more or less intact. There's something admirable in his sheer dedication to his family and cause.
Mohg? Mohg doesn't give a shit. He dresses up in opulence, but shuts himself up in the deepest depths of Leyndell where he would have been most exposed to torment. Oh, he also founded a crazy blood cult. Of course! He wields a nasty-looking demonic trident where his brother channels the holy light of the Erdtree. He casts spells, but they are blood spells with mean-looking demonic magic circles. And most of all, he lets all of his Omen horns grow out while Morgott shaves them down. The result is a pretty stark contrast, which is very nice. Having said that, Mohg himself is 'just' a big bulky horned demon guy. His appearance at the end of the underground Leyndell areas is a neat surprise, but without dialogue or a cutscene he's just some bloke I beat up. Mohg's going to have a bit more about his character later on, but this early bit of appearance just feels a bit random... which, to be fair, isn't that far off from Morgott's first appearance as 'Margit'.
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