So I've been traveling around Liurnia of the Lakes in an attempt to level up. And... I'm just taking it quite easy, since I do think that I've lost a bit of the momentum when I was grinding to beat Margit and Godrick. The lack of overworld NPCs (or at least ones I could find) around Liurnia as compared to Limgrave also doesn't help.
I am having a lot of fun with short bursts of playtime, clearing out shorter dungeons or going back and beating dungeons I couldn't do before -- like that one Peninsula dungeon with a Runebear boss.
As a side note, I am kind of running out of starter class art to use, so I'm trying to think of what to use as the eyecatchers for future articles. Maybe the fancier weapons or demigod Remembrance artwork.
As a side-note, this "Prisoner" is a reference to Berserk's Griffith after his one-year torture, isn't it? Honestly I'm getting a lot of Berserk vibes from this game! The one regret that I do have with choosing Astrologer is that I can't swing around the huge Berserk-reference greatsword.
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Three-Headed Erdtree Burial Watchdog
I wasn't really going to talk about him, since he's basically a 'reskin' of an earlier boss... but I really do respect the Erdtree Burial Watchdogs, and the fact that they now have three heads makes it extra creepy. I like the fact that all three heads seem to grow out of the same neck, and the crown-necklace makes it even weirder. This guy is the boss of the Cliffbottom Catacombs, and wields a giant staff that shoots out magic missile swarms, in addition to the typical creepy 'hover up and slam down' attacks that made it unsettling in the first place.
I wasn't really going to talk about him, since he's basically a 'reskin' of an earlier boss... but I really do respect the Erdtree Burial Watchdogs, and the fact that they now have three heads makes it extra creepy. I like the fact that all three heads seem to grow out of the same neck, and the crown-necklace makes it even weirder. This guy is the boss of the Cliffbottom Catacombs, and wields a giant staff that shoots out magic missile swarms, in addition to the typical creepy 'hover up and slam down' attacks that made it unsettling in the first place.
I like the story told in the Cliffbottom Catacombs just by the monster layout, by the way. A basement filled with Omens, the discarded 'cursed' people that merely had the misfortune of being born with horns? And one of the Omens is even worshipping at an altar? I appreciate that.
Glintstone Miner
We've seen miners before, but the mines in Liurnia has these guys instead, who seem to have rocky growths growing out of their body. We've previously established that Glintstone is a huge deal for the mages of Raya Lucaria, so in addition to the mutated wildlife of course there are some weird creepy mining operations going on.
Most Glintstone Miners will actually ignore you if you don't bother them, but some are actual guards that patrol the area. They have these weird magic drill-tipped spears. Interestingly, just like the Cuckoo Knights, the Glintstone Miners are able to use some glintstone sorceries, specifically "digger sorceries" that allow them to unleash shockwaves meant to cut rock. Just as happy to use them on lowly Tarnished that wander into their mines, though.
The mines we find these guys in have Marionettes patrolling, and some material note that the absolute failures of mages get sent to this duty essentially permanently.
Crystalian
The boss of the Liurnia Mine is the Crystalian, who is a guy made of crystal wielding one hell of a giant chakram. There's an interesting mechanic where it really seems like they have a high amount of defense and HP, but deal enough damage (particularly blunt weapon damage) and suddenly that defense drops and they take much more damage. A nice representation of how brittleness works, I suppose.
Even the wiki doesn't have much information on them, but these inorganic beings are presumably another form of life similar to the Alabaster Lords (who are aliens, lest we forget).
I really don't have a whole ton to say here. The model is cool and the animations are cool! I do like the bit of 'uncanny valley' that the slightly off proportions have. And the attack patterns of the crystal blade-ring dude I fought is pretty neat. They're different enough from the enemies we've seen before... it's cool, I guess, even if it's not quite my 'style'.
Ancestral Follower
Going to a group of overworld enemies in Liurnia are these Ancestral Followers, who admittedly don't have the most catchy name. I remember them for the giant glowing arrows that they shoot, which comically pokes out of my character when they shoot me. I thought they were just this setting's version of minotaurs, albeit a bit more humanoid, but this isn't the first time I've seen a tribal-themed minotaur adaptation in a fantasy game. Looking at you, World of Warcraft Taurens.
But the Ancestral Followers are actually... well, those horns are not growing out of them. They actually wear the horns that they pillage from animals or something. They also have funky weapons that look strung up together from animal parts they scavenged, which is neat I guess. And they sure are different. I do like that the model makes it clear that the heads are slightly disproportionately smaller than their muscular body, not enough to look silly but enough to be noticeable if you examine them a bit, which hints at their true nature -- they're originally humans, who eschews technology and civilization in favour of living in the wilds, but ends up apparently worshipping and drawing power from the nature or something.
Troll Knight
A bit of an interesting one. I've only fought these in the form of 'ghosts', but turns out that one of the factions in Liurnia, the Carian Knights, employ Troll Knights... and they're actual, real knights with helms and swords and everything. At some point, thanks to machinations within the rulers of the region, the Carian royals ended up fighting in what's essentially a civil war against the Raya Lucaria Academy, who's basically doing what crazy powerful wizards do and began doing their own thing. All this political stuff is kind of given in piecemeal from different sources, but essentially in addition to knights that use fake sorceries, Caria also employs Troll Knights. And they're not treated like 'let's put some armour on brutes and set them loose', but actually considered as, y'know, knights and allies and comrades and stuff.
Also, the Troll Knights can cast spells! Again, it's a small thing, but it also helps to really hammer home how these guys are just as sentient and capable as the humans in the setting. Sure, the trolls may be giant, grunting lumbering brutes, but they can also learn swordsmanship and summon magical spears and stuff!
Burning Slug
Found in some locations of Liurnia and clearly a portent to the next area -- the obligatory volcanic area -- are these Burning Slugs. Who are... slugs on fire! I think it's a surprisingly common trope in video games? We've got Slugma and Magcargo in Pokemon, and I know Zelda has Torch Slugs in at least three of its games, and World of Warcraft recently added those to their game. What is it with slugs that make game designers associate them with magma?
Not much to say here, they behave how you expect them to. They shoot lava/magma/fire, they move around rather slowly and they're not the most dangerous enemy to fight.
Frenzied Villager
These guys I encountered a bit earlier in the Weeping Peninsula, in a location called the 'Ailing Village' where they're just standing around with the village itself ransacked -- the church is abandoned and filled with monstrous rats, while most of the villagers are in the center of the town locked in positions of worship (?) around a crucifixion and burning of some luckless corpses. They're just utterly silent until you come close, at which point they start attacking you while glaring with their fiery eyes. Turns out that they are probably converted by the same fire cult that the Fire Monks come from!
Thorn Sorcerer
A little bit more dangerous than the Burning Slugs or the Frenzied Villagers are these guys, who are yet another new class of humanoid enemies, the Thorn Sorcerers. We've got a bunch of plant symbolism in this game already, and we now have the Crown of Thorns nod with the Thorn Sorcerers. They've apparently gouged out their eyes, and wear crowns of thorns and wield giant sticks of thorns... that extend into fire whips for some reason! Some reason that will be explained, but suffice to say that fire isn't particularly friendly to our Tarnished protagonist and the power that the Lands Between would appreciate.
Anyway, these guys are associated with 'fire briar' forbidden sorceries. These thorns are originally meant to punish these Thorn Sorcerers, who are apparently mostly exiled sorcerers from the Raya Lucaria Academy, but they end up finding some mysterious god-like entity called the 'Blood Star' and began worshipping it, and this entity is granting them power.
Fire Monk
The Thorn Sorcerers are led by these stern-faced Fire Monks, who look pretty cool, actually. I like the metal armour plate contrasted with the santa-style fur cape. The Fire Monks lead the Thorn Sorcerers throughout Liurnia, and aer the priests that worship the 'Flame of Ruin' and can create fire attacks with incantations. These fire guys will show up a bit more in subsequent areas, from what item descriptions imply, but I do like the idea that they seem to have arrived in Liurnia to recruit Thorn Sorcerers into their little cult.
Revenant
Before we go into all the dungeon enemies, let me highlight a bit of a 'miniboss' outside of the Academy, the Revenant! Throughout all the lakes, we've seen a lot of the Wraith-Callers, who worship these beings called Revenants. This is a Revenant, and... uh... yeah, they are nasty, huh? I think one of the NPC's call them 'centipedes', and it sure is a centipede! A human centipede. A potentially undead human centipede, based on the title of 'revenant'.
Bizarrely, unlike almost everything else in Raya Lucaria, there is nothing tying the Revenants to whatever the hell the sorcerers are doing in the academy. They're not a failed magical experiment like the Albinaurics or School of Graven Mages; they're not otherworldly beings that are tied to the glintstones like the Crystallians or the Alabaster Lords; they're not constructs of magic like the Marionettes or whatever. The Revenants just.... exist.
More bizarrely, they... they really do look like something that should be hanging out in Godrick's realm, yeah? The design of this thing looks like multiple torsos (and only torsos! He's only got arms!) stitched together, terminating in a noblemana's face locked in a grotesque undead scream. Oh, just like real-life centipedes, these motherfuckers are fast, being able to literally teleport next to you with swirls of orange-black energy. The Revenants I've encountered are almost always surrounded with their little worshipper clique, which makes things even more annoying.
Again, we don't know really anything about the Revenant, and unlike most of the other monsters in the game, there isn't a book or a item description somewhere that sheds some light about them beyond "they're undead, so healing spells burn them", and that they are "cursed"... but they don't count towards my little sidequest of gathering 'Deathroot' from 'Those Who Live In Death'. So if we take the lore at face value and not handwave this as 'the dev team moved an enemy to another location from where it's planned', then... then this is a creature that looks like what Godrick is creating, but isn't affiliated with him (Godrick's grafted creations, what little we see, mostly seem to focus on physical strength anyway). It behaves mechanically like an undead and is named after an undead, but isn't affiliated with 'true' undeath like the Deathroot monsters. It is kind of mysterious, but I honestly just am a bit irritated (which might be the intentional response they want to elicit) that this guy is so similar yet so different.
Ulcerated Tree Spirit
I'll end this with a 'bonus' boss from Godrick's Castle, in a wing that I completely missed. And I went back there to kill the lion boss and everything! In a subterranean part of the castle lies a series of caverns filled with corpses and a giant head made out of fungus that looks very disturbing (and the internet has spoiled me on what this is, exactly), and this motherfucker bursts out of the central chamber and attacks me.
The Ulcerated Tree Spirit, from its name, implies that it has some connection to the Erdtree Roots or the Minor Erdtrees that we've seen before, and indeed the biggest and most prevalent aspect of the Lands Between is the presence of the mighty Erdtree seen in the distance, and how its roots stretch all throughout the land. We have seen Erdtree Avatars take the form of giant tree-trunk humanoids, but the 'Ulcerated' Tree Spirit here is... it's really hard to tell what it is. I'm way more focused at dodging this massive thing, and the sight of it in the battle makes it look like a giant undulating snake or worm, just with a bunch of branches sticking out of a body that seems to be half-wooden, half-flesh. He also has a giant yawning mouth that shoots solarbeams, and we've established with other plant bosses that the trees and flowers of this setting shoot holy magic.
Having Youtube videos slow things down doesn't help to make the Ulcerated Tree Spirit any more coherent, though the 'giant snake-worm with long arms' body layout is a bit more clear. A combination of its already very... well, ulcer-covered body, its unconventional and fucked-up proportions and the fact that it's moving around faster than a toddler who's drank a can of energy drink by accident really does make it feel like this is the intended reaction of the audience when first seeing it? It's a bit bizarre and messy, and I would expect this from like, a wraith-style enemy or a Resident Evil flesh-glob giant monster, but this is supposed to be a tree and to see a wood-based creature be so agile adds an additional layer of 'wrongness' to everything going on here.
I can't say that I particularly like the design, but I definitely don't hate it. It's very memorable, and the seemingly intentional contradictions in the themes that go into making this creature is an interesting jumble of madness. It does kind of embody the frenetic 'oh shit, a giant eldritch creature, survive or die' vibe that these Dark Souls-like games are known for. Too much of it, I think, isn't a good thing and diminishes a lot of the effort that goes into modelling the visuals of these video game enemies, but once in a while -- and as a surprise boss at that -- it is definitely a fun experience experiencing fighting a giant hypercaffeinated undead snake-like wooden tornado of flesh and wood.