And it's the Deeproot Depths that most of this particular review will be focusing on, since I ended up exploring it. It's very spooky as we go through the roots of the gigantic Erdtree, finding out a fallen Eternal City that has collapsed down into the depths of this (implied to be previously part of Leyndell, accounting to why a chunk of the city is a strange endless void of a moat). And it's also filled with giant insects and signs of rot and the undeath due to a certain thing within we'll talk about.
So I've also been skipping back and forth to the older areas, clearing minor dungeons, minor Erdtrees and giving Altus Plateau and Mt. Gelmir a more thorough combing-through now that I'm of a level where it's a lot more manageable to slaughter most of the enemies in my way while I explore.
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Godefroy the Grafted
We'll start off with some enemies we meet in the outside dungeons, and first of it is... Godrick, is that you? No, it's Godefroy the Grafted, who is met in one of the evergaols in Altus Plateau. There are some very obscure items that note about how Godefroy was imprisoned by some knights before, and we do know that there have been other nameless demigods that have fallen prior to the war. But really? The boss that you use as a repeat is Godrick, whose whole point is that he looks kind of unique with so many arms and legs grafted to his body? The idea that this relative of his not only discovered grafting, but also grafted the exact same limbs in the same way that Godrick does feels a bit off from a lore perspective, and makes it a bit more clear that this is a rather lazy asset reuse.
Godefroy also only replicates Godrick's first phase, and eliminates some of his more devastating attacks. And at this point in the game, that's not really particularly impressive anymore.
Alecto, Black Knife Ringleader
Imprisoned near Ranni's rise in an evergaol is Alecto, the ringleader of the Black Knives organization that were the assassins who killed Godwyn the Golden and kickstarted the whole demigod Shattering war in the first place. The Black Knives are fast and brutal and have been a pain in my butt any time they show up, and Alecto is all of that with a couple of extra blood skills. But it's nice to see someone who's actually mentioned here and there in the lore, unlike Godefroy who kind of came out of nowhere!
Festering Fingerprint Vyke
Oh, Vyke. Vyke is an interesting character in that no NPC ever explicitly brings him up, but he's actually the character on the cover of the game! Vyke is the closest person to become the Elden Lord before us, and if you look at random ghost NPCs and item descriptions here and there, Vyke had refused to give up his maiden as kindling to burn down the Erdtree. And in an attempt to give a giant middle finger to the Golden Order and the Erdtree, Vyke ended up finding a strange being locked deep within the catacombs of Leyndell, the Three Fingers. Which I suppose I'll also cover here, even though he's not strictly an enemy:
The Three Fingers only appear in a cutscene if you're going through the Frenzied Flame storyline, which locks you out of all other endings. Now the Greater Will is the god of the setting, and it communicates with demigods, tarnished and other beings under its rule via its envoys, the Two Fingers... which are gigantic two fingers. The Frenzied Flame, whose effects we've seen manifest in some enemies here and there (and some crazy cultists) are beings that are associated with flames, madness, and blindness. Their cultists like Hyetta and Shabriri preach about how it's so much better for the world to all be burned down into... well, into nothing. If there's no life, there's no suffering or death, right? The Three Fingers seem to speak to those who were persecuted, desperate and vulnerable, and then mark them with its fingers, imbuing madness and fire within them.
Vyke is one such being, a former candidate to becoming the Elden Lord, reduced to a madman hanging out near a village of frenzied inhabitants. Checking out the nearby church reveals a dead Finger Maiden, implying that Vyke has given up everything -- his destiny, his sanity, his soul... all for nothing. Poor Vyke.
Using the fingers as an analogue to old-school angels (in their capacity as 'messengers') is an interesting and bold choice that the game makes, for sure. There are a lot of theories and confusion revolving around them. Were they created from the fingers of the giants? Did they sprout from the Erdtree? The Greater Will? Were the 'Three Fingers' once whole with the Two Fingers, making a full set of five (even if none of them look like a thumb, and there are multiple Two Fingers-es?) Questions, questions, questions that we'll cover if/when we get to the DLC.
Frenzied Enemies
There are a bunch of 'repaint' enemies showing up in areas associated with the Frenzied Flame in Liurnia and the Mountaintops. They utilize the Frenzied Flame Incantations that we can learn, most epic being the one where they clutch their eyes and then a storm of fireballs burst out of it like an insane, over-the-top anime crying. Frenzied Villagers and Frenzied Trolls make sense, since we know the two species are sentient, but we also see Frenzied Rats. I guess those rats also succumbed into madness... for... reasons?
Crucible Knight Siluria
We've been fighting a lot of Crucible Knights, one of the more (if not most) powerful knight-style enemies in the game... and we've got a named one deep down in the Deeproot Depths! Which itself is the gnarled, tower-sized roots of the Erdtree infested with Mausoleum Knights and Giant Ants. And in one of these locations in the Deeproot is a Crucible Knight called Siluria. These Crucible Knights utilize the power of the 'Crucible of Life', which is primordial magic. Always a fun challenge to fight them. Siluria herself uses a giant spear with giant crown-like tree branches on the tip. It's neat.
Fia's Champions
On approaching the final part of Deeproot Depths, an obvious boss chamber starts up and a wave of enemies starts to fight me. Three of them are designated as 'Fia's Champions', while two are characters we've met before and seen die, Sorcerer Rogier and Lionel the Lionhearted. Fia the Deathbed Companion is an interesting character who's trying to, at least to my understanding, trying to normalize 'Those Who Live In Death', or the undead people. I do think Fia's lore is probably a bit more confusing than most, and after seeing the way the boss room was set up, I am more than a bit disappointed that all we get are a bunch of blue-filtered dudes.
Godwyn the Golden
And so this is what 'Godwyn the Golden', originally one of the most pure demigods, looks like now. Godwyn was killed with a foul god-killing weapon during the 'Night of Black Knives'... but due to some tampering with the Elden Ring's runes, the Rune of Death was removed and Godwyn was imperfectly killed. His soul died, but his body remained, festering, and when it was returned to the Erdtree's roots, ended up causing a whole lot of transformation and corruption everywhere. Chief of all is the 'Those Who Live in Death', undead beings rising up of catacombs.
Godwyn's body is found chained-up in the innermost parts of the Deeproot Depths, and it's mutated into... a strange mockery that's best described as a mermaid with a twisted-apart flat scallop head with only his golden hair really showing what's left of him. All around him flies fester, and strange mutant deathblight thorns grow everywhere. It is genuinely a bit hard to find pictures of his full body because of how much it blends into the background material. It looks a lot better in-game. The concept art does a nice job at showing it off, but the best part is this video that breaks Godwyn's anatomy down.
Not actually being a boss fight, that would've just been a 'neat' little piece of background. Except it isn't! Godwyn doesn't just exist as a creepy god-corpse. No, what's cool is that finding Godwyn's main corpse explains a bunch of weird stuff we've been seeing all over the Lands Between.
Chiefly being that this explains the giant, strange flat head in the depths of Stormveil Castle, all the way at the beginning of the game. This strange duck-skull head seems to have a 'bill' made up of fungal growths, and its presence at the bottom of Stormveil Castle's basement (guarded by an 'Ulcerated Tree Spirit', no less) seems to imply that Godwyn -- or at least, the bundle of strange death-blight that was Godwyn -- is spreading apart with the roots of the Erdtree. We know that his influence is what's causing all the undead in the catacombs, which were built around Erdtree roots for the 'Erdtree Burial' ceremonies', are all affected by Godwyn's strange influence of undeath. It's not quite the same with Scarlet Rot, which seems to be more like the unbridled growth of life, but deathblight's flavour is in dark spiky thorns, and flies that burst out everywhere. It feels a bit more 'natural', I suppose, if still more oppressie than what regular death should be.
But that's not just all, because you can actually spot Godwyn's eyes sprouting in roots all over Deeproot Depths... but also on some strange creatures that are associated specifically with the 'Deathblight' affliction. Some crabs that are scuttling aboveground where Godwyn's body lies are mutated so much that Godwyn's fungal-face has begun to grow on them, and you can even see his golden locks sprouting in patches around the crab's body. Certain models even have miniature versions of Godwyn's plant-face on its back.
The Basilisks, too, previously a recurring enemy in Dark Souls games, are one of the few creatures who infest the Deeproot Depths, and their huge fake eyes are revealed to be the same eyes as Godwyn's. And guess what, they also spread Deathblight!
It really is weird, because just having Godwyn be a 'fungus rot god' would be interesting enough and would play in the whole theme of it being the parasitic evil influence in a world so deeply connected to a holy tree. But then we get the combinationa of it affecting both living creatures in addition to corpses, and there's also the random marine-creature features that Godwyn's corpses (and the animals he influences) have. There's some strange logic here to Godwyn's corruption across the Lands Between, but he's not telling. Regardless, it's a pretty cool story that explains a bunch of stuff in the Lands Between while also raising even more questions.
Lichdragon Fortissax
...which is a huge shame, by the way, because while we do get all of these creepy stuff about Godwyn, we don't actually fight him. He's just... he's just a corpse! Instead, the boss fight in Deeproot Depths is a strange bit that happens in Fia's mind. Fia is an obsessed worshipper of Godwyn, and she's convinced that with certain items, she can 'lay with' Godwyn (spiritually, I think, and I hope) and conceive a 'child' in the form of a new rune that will overwrite the rules of the world to make the undead 'normal'. It's a bit metaphysical, but in the process of Fia doing this with our help, we can enter Fia's dream-world to fight Lichdragon Fortissax.
He's a bit less special now that I've killed quite a bit of dragons, although he does have a really cool move of summoning two thunder spears and slamming it down to the ground. Fortissax is explained to be an old friend of Godwyn, but he was also consumed by the death blight... and somehow ended in a weird, spiritual realm within Godwyn? As is noted by the remembrance item, "After Godwyn the Golden became the Prince of Death, the ancient dragon fought long and hard against the Death within its companion. Alas, victory was never achieved and its only reward was corruption." It explains why Fortissax became evil and a 'lich' dragon, but not why he was shunted into a plane within Fia's dream or something. It's all a bit weird, really, and I honestly wished we fought a more fungal-themed dragon boss instead of one that shoots out lightning again.
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