What a game, huh? This is my first 'Soulsborne' game from FromSoftware, with all its infamous 'get good' mentality and unforgiving ways to go through a game. No quicksaves, no easy mode, not even a pause button. Experience is lost. Going back to a boss fight involves walking back. And you know what? That does give a great sense of accomplishment.
The world-building is amazing, even if I will agree that the way quests and storylines are given out in this immense open-world game is... not the best. Perhaps it's a bit of a holdover from when the game was developed as a more linear Dark Souls like experience... but I enjoyed myself, even if I did admittedly need to open up a guide particularly in the middle portions of the game.
There were parts of this that I didn't enjoy so much... Farum Azula felt like it was there for coolness' sake; there was a lack of buildup on some of the major characters; and I also felt like the 'PvP invasion' stuff raises questions more than making it feel like something 'in-universe'. But despite that... I really enjoyed my time through it. It took me almost two years to complete the game -- admittedly with several hiatuses -- but I did it. And I'll jump straight into Shadows of the Erdtree after this.
So this page covers the two final 'dungeon' parts of the game. The main 'dungeon' is what people have noted to be a bit of a 'bonus dungeon', Miquella's Haligtree, with one of the two infamous hardest bosses in the game -- Melania, Blade of Miquella. And the other is just the endgame... Leyndell, Ashen Capital, is what the Leyndell dungeon was transformed into after the events of the Farum Azula stuff, and I'm waltzing in to claim my title as Elden Lord and beat up anyone who's in my way.
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Giant Oracle Envoy
As I first explore the Haligtree, the branches are filled with Oracle Envoys. We've seen the regular and slightly-larger ones in Leyndell, but they are a lot deadlier in a location where you have to jump from branch to branch, and they shoot homing bubbles that do way more damage than you'd expect a bubble to do. In addition to the regular Oracle Envoys and the Large Oracle Envoys, the Haligtree features the giant Oracle Envoys.
I like that whatever the Oracle Envoys are, their faces are always the same size, so despite this particular Envoy's body, arms and wrapped-up head expanding to dwarf its smaller counterparts, the head stays the same. Oh, and whereas the other envoys have smaller trumpets, the Giant Oracle Envoy holds a five-pronged one that launches a whole swarm of exploding music bubbles at you.
We still don't really know what they are beyond the fact that they 'appear' to 'herald the coming of a new god, or age. Finding one of their headwears as equipment gives us the cryptic description of 'no one knows what the cloth hides, but some claim to have heard a faint whimpering from inside. It must have been their imagination.' They also drop the item 'strip of white flesh', an item normally dropped by aquatic beasts like octopi, crabs, crayfish and slugs... which raises even more questions!
Haligtree Knights
Our final Soldier/Knight combo are the Haligtree Knights, who are knights sword to the Empyrean twins Miquella and Malenia. They're really just kind of there to exhaust you at this point. It is cool that the knight variants can enchant their weapon with holy damage, but that's not really something that's particularly useful against you, the player. Some of the weaker soldiers will rush you and explode, which... sure, not very 'Golden Order' of them, I'm sure.
Rather, far more impressive are the knights of Malenia -- the Cleanrot Knights, previously met as minibosses, who wander around the Brace of the Haligtree area.
Fungal Corpse
Tragically, while the Haligtree was initially a haven for worshippers of Miquella and Malenia -- and beings like the Misbegotten who found a haven there -- Malenia's status as the goddess of rot hasn't been kind to those around her. Malenia, lest we forget, was the demigod who caused Caelid to happen when she lost control of the Scarlet Rot within her. One of the main motivations for Miquella to set up his own Haligtree is to find a way to cure his sister, but with Miquella being abducted and killed by Mohg, nothing is stopping Malenia's rot powers from spreading wide. Giant fungi and lichen have been growing all around the Haligtree, and some of the people there have been overgrown with mushrooms in a way that looks a lot more uncomfortable than the Servants of Rot we've seen. Honestly, I'm not even sure if they are still alive or not, or if the mushrooms are just animating the corpses. Of course, contact with them causes the Scarlet Rot condition.
Loretta, Knight of the Haligtree
The miniboss here is a lady knight on a horse shooting spells at you. We've met a specter/echo of Loretta before in the Carian Manor, and apparently Loretta left the Carians to serve Miquella, with the item descriptions noting that she's a champion for Albinauric rights and she wanted to help them find a haven. Such a noble cause ends up causing all the courtly nobles to gossip that maybe Loretta herself is an Albinauric herself, otherwise why would she help the non-humans? Except... it doesn't seem to be too far-fetched a leap, since we've only seen Loretta on her horse, and all of her signature spells involves creating giant bows and arrows out of magic, essentially a stronger version of the Albinauric Wolf-Riders' archery. That's a neat little story detail that elevates Loretta from being essentially a reskinned Tree Sentinel with some extra moves.
I spent way too much time fighting Loretta because I was insistent on killing her with the spell Loretta's Bow.
Putrid Avatar / Putrid Tree Spirit
At this point in the game, these guys have graduated (or degraded, I suppose) from being 'oh shit oh shit oh shit' to just an enemy with a huge health bar that you just have to be careful at dodging. The Erdtree Avatars show up at basically all Minor Erdtreees, and also in places like Leyndell, Royal Capital. Ulcerated Tree Spirits tend to show up in catacombs that thematically have roots of the Erdtree... and also Leyndell. Makes sense that the two tree-themed enemies show up where the big holy divine tree are at, yes?
Except in several locations, they are infested with Scarlet Rot. Which are also true for the specimens we met in Caelid, but I don't think I've reviewed them before. And with the Haligtree dungeon taking place in an attempt to copy the Erdtree, having these tree-themed enemies show up makes sense... except the presence of Malenia has inadvertently befouled the roots of the Erdtree, causing pools of rot to appear everywhere and for the manifestations of these beings that appear in both the Haligtree and the Mountaintops to also be rotting.
Again, they're functionally the same boss with their regular versions, just with a noxious rot breath attack instead of the holy beams associated with the Golden Order plants. But it's a neat bit of visual storytelling -- if you're going to reuse enemy models, reusing them in ways that fit to the lore is very much acceptable to me.
Lesser Kindred of Rot
We've seen the 'centipede-prawn-men' Kindred of Rot in any place where the Scarlet Rot has infested, namely Caelid and the giant underground temple in the Lake of Rot. Malenia's unchecked disease in the Haligtree, however, has created rivers of rot, corrupted the local plants, and also either spawned or drawn in a bunch of Kindred of Rot. Nothing new there... except that there's a smaller, weaker version of the Kindred of Rot that appear here, scaled to be around half as strong as the regular Kindred.
The model is actually more or less the same, with several clear differences -- the long human legs that the regular Kindred of Rot has are absent, forcing them to swim or crawl around. This does make them look a lot like 'prawns', which is a comparison that I didn't really see in the main or 'adult' Kindred of Rot. I also like that they have a lot of creepy little limbs running down their abdomen that are still made up of human hands.
It is interesting, too, to bring up the lore behind these guys. We now know that the Kindred of Rot worship the Scarlet Rot -- this entity of pure rot, disease and unchecked growth that seems to be the manifestation of some 'Outer God', an incomprehensible force who manifests in the form of the Scarlet Rot. Whatever the nature of this being is, it's currently 'incarnated' or 'sealed' within Malenia as a curse. Malenia herself doesn't want anything to do with the Scarlet Rot and, in fact, has been trying to purge it from her body. The Kindred, however, go around trying to worship her because she's the goddess of rot! One Kindred called Sage Gowry even impersonates a human and adopts an 'offshoot' of Malenia (implied but not confirmed to be a daughter/sister/clone created when Malenia unleashed the giant spell that created Caelid) called Millicent and is trying to groom her to become their new Scarlet Rot goddess. It is an interesting little story, I feel, that makes these 'Pests' a lot cooler than just being weird bug people.
Millicent's Sisters
In our journey through Caelid, we find a mysterious girl that resembles the Goddess of Rot, Malenia, called Millicent. Talking to the aforementioned Sage Gowry, who adopted Millicent, we can get the idea that the Kindred of Rot are trying to get Millicent to 'bloom' into a new flower, a new avatar of the Scarlet Rot for them to worship. Millicent, interestingly, is the only one out of five sisters -- 'offshoots' of Malenia born during the creation of Caelid -- either clones or fragments that split off the main Malenia. It is a bit ambiguous other than her birth and creation has something to do with Malenia. We befriend Millicent in our journey, even stymying the Scarlet Rot ravaging her body by Gowry's instructions. Helping a sick lady stop her disease, it's something good, right?
Except Millicent realizes that Gowry and her own sisters are trying to make her into the new 'Malenia'. And she removes the magical gold needle preventing the disease from ravaging her body so she can choose her own death instead of being forced to transform into something else. During this, we fight 4-on-2 against Millicent's sisters: Mary, Maureen, Amy and Pollyanna. It's interesting why these four are allied to the Kindred of Rot (even using the Pest Threads spells only available to Kindred of Rot) while Millicent is more independent.
Malenia, Blade of Miquella
"I am Malenia. Blade of Miquella. And I have never known defeat."
And here she is. The woman, the myth, the legend. Malenia, Blade of Miquella. Empyrean, bearer of the Scarlet Rot, the woman who has never known defeat. In video game terms, she is one of the two 'superbosses' -- bosses you can fight before the final end of the story, but is so much more difficult and powerful than them. The entire Haligtree area is completely optional, even moreso than anything else in the game, and in fact does require a fair bit of work to even access. Nothing in the game (other than Millicent, who's a bit more obscure anyway) narratively points you towards the Haligtree and the slumbering goddess beneath it, since even if you're interested in the Miquella stuff, he's not even there in the Haligtree -- and primarily saved for the DLC anyway.
And then she wakes up... and fights you. I think the previous couple of entries did talk quite a bit about her. She's a badass who fought the other strongest demigod, Radahn, to a draw. She's the undefeated woman, and she looks like a tall valkyrie with that winged helmet. Her right arm, since rotted away, is a prosthetic golden arm and she fights with a gigantic katana (which actually locks onto the golden arm) that she swings around like a toothpick.
And she is deadly fast. She doesn't do anything special in this phase, but she is fast, she can dodge everything you throw at her, her range is insane and once she starts doing her 'Waterfowl Dance' combos, she's unleashing an insane anime blender-slash of doom with that katana. In a game that actually does a pretty great job at making all the demigods have impressive monster forms, Malenia is the epitome of a speedy, deadly warrior in the way that the other two 'just a tall person' demigods that embody a certain aspect of what a warrior should be -- Radahn and Rennala representing a strong warrior and a mage respectively.
"The scarlet bloom flowers once more. You will witness true horror. Now, rot!"
Once you reduce Malenia down to zero health, she flops face-first onto the water in an almost undignified way... before she asks you to 'wait'. And then she blooms, a fiery flower called the Scarlet Aeonia, the signature spell that Malenia does in the trailers leading up to the Elden Ring story (a cutscene I wished was in the game itself) and we see the calcified remnants of in the center of Caelid.
And we get to see Malenia's second form. Her clothes have rotted away to reveal what lies beneath... a beautiful female body, but ravaged by rot. We see some of her limbs have rotted away to be replaced by golden prosthetics. And probably the coolest feature in her Goddess of Rot form is her massive almost-angelic wings. Unlike the wings of someone like, say, Mohg, Malenia's wings are made up of a literal horde of butterflies. Butterflies have shown up a lot in the game in areas associated with the Scarlet Rot, and these butterflies are particularly prominent as they flutter off of Malenia's body during her transformation. Her long red locks also meld into the butterfly-clumps as well.
The result is an interesting look, for sure. It's not my 'kind' of an enemy, but it does fit what we know of Malenia and how much she herself despises the Scarlet Rot incubating within her and how she rejects it so much. Our fight against her pushes her to the brink that she finally ceases holding back and embraces the power within her. Or alternatively, no longer has the willpower to control it. She still has everything that she can do in her first phase, except she's faster, and she unleashes these massive scarlet blooms that afflicts you with the Scarlet Rot condition.
Very cool boss fight, very cool character, and probably my favourite boss on this page. I feel like she's a lot cooler to fight and a lot more... fair, I guess? Her attacks are deadly but there's a nice split-second for you to roll away or react to it, which isn't something I felt from a boss like Rykard (who's still the one that gives me perhaps the most trouble in this game) or Placidusax.
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Sir Gideon Ofnir, the All-Knowing
As we continue our journey, more and more of our fellow Tarnished allies in the Roundtable Hold either die, or leave... and up until this part of the endgame, Sir Gideon Ofnir the All-Knowing (or more accurately, "Sir Gideon Ofnir... the ALLLL KNOOOOWING!") is the de facto leader of the Roundtable Hold, sitting in his library and researching and looking for information about the demigods and informing us about who they are and giving us hints about them.
Gideon, however, has been shown to be very much not a nice person, the type who would achieve victory by any means necessary. One of the most horrific things we see on-screen is sending out Omenkillers to annihilate the entire Village of the Albinaurics, and it's also implied that he's the one that sent the silent Ensha to try and get a plot device from us. So to have him barring our way to the Elden Throne? It's really not a surprise that he betrays us, it's honestly a matter of when and how. He does seem to have somehow fallen into despair just prior to the fight, though, with his dialogue being more despondent than gloating... apparently having found out some truth that broke him.
Gideon is delightfully easy to beat up, even compared to other 'minibosses' I would've faced recently like the Godskin Duo or Loretta. Which makes sense in-universe... there is a reason he needed people to do all his dirty work. There is a cute little gimmick where he uses spells of some of the demigods -- namely Mohg, Melania and Rykard, all optional bosses -- against me. But only if I've beaten them! The implication is that he's been studying and collecting data while stalking us. That's cute, even if Gideon himself isn't too impressive of a boss fight.
Godfrey, First Elden Lord / Hoarah Loux, Warrior
"Tarnished Warrior. Spurned by the grace of gold. Be assured, the Elden Ring resteth close at hand... alas, I am returned."
Yeah, a lot of the endgame bosses are admittedly just dudes. Godfrey's cool, though. I find him a bit less cool than Malenia up above, but that's more of a praise to Malenia than any real dislike of Godfrey. The first Elden Lord Godfrey is this big burly viking dude wielding a shattered axe. That alone would have been boring, especially since I don't actually find Godfrey particularly interesting as a character, but he's also got the ghost of a lion attached to him like a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Stand. This is Serosh the Beast Lord, and apparently this is how the 'grafting' that Godrick tried to mimic is supposed to look like.
Anyway, just like Malenia, Rennala and Radahn; Godfrey exemplifies the 'barbarian' archetype, going for heavy attacks and just looking cool while doing it. I did enjoy it, and I like Godfrey's more boisterous voice-acting, but I don't have much to say here.
"I have shown thee courtesy enough!"
Godfrey's second phase is Hoarah Loux, Warrior, revealing that he is one of the major Tarnished mentioned a hundred hours ago in the prologue. Which... honestly, doesn't really do anything to me lore-wise. But I do like that Godfrey kills Serosh the lion attached on his back. In a nice little subversion, turns out that the lion has been acting as a power limiter for Hoarah Loux, who is normally so savage and unrestrained, and the addition of the lion somehow prevents him from going too wild? You'd think that this is a trope in media where someone "shunts his emotions aside", and Hoarah Loux is just absorbing it back... but no, Serosh is very much sentient and acting as an actual confidant and advisor. And this leads to Hoarah Loux fighting barehanded. No lions, no battleaxes... just a whole lot of wrestling moves from a big muscular blood-soaked grandpa. Okay then.
Godfrey's lore has always been a bit more straightforward -- he rose to the status of being the first Elden Lord... or at least, the first Elden Lord associated with Marika's Golden Order. The Golden Order by Marika requires a 'god' and a 'lord/consort', and Godfrey was Marika's consort during the early days of the order, leading a lot of wars against the dragons and giants before he 'lost grace' and reverted back to Hoarah Loux for a while. The Tarnished that the game has been revolving around are all noted to trace their origins to him. It's neat, but again, I didn't really find too much attachment to him considering he doesn't get too much focus even compared to the other mostly-unseen characters.
Radagon of the Golden Order
"..."
Okay, the design of Radagon is quite cool. Second husband to Queen Marika (the ascended 'god' of the setting, who tried to break the Elden Ring which is essentially the core of the rules of the world), this meant that we're fighting the two previous Elden Lords back to back. It's left quite a bit ambiguous what they are, but a boss fight that seems to be leading up to the imprisoned Queen Marika leads to a fight with Radagon instead.
Except this is a shell of what Radagon used to be. It's a bit harder to tell in static images, but half of Radagon's body is gone, and made up of shadowy clumps that is replacing his entire upper left torso, arm and head. The idea does sell a crumbling, statuesque god. Within the void of his chest, the light of the Elden Ring shines. And... he fights with his hammer and a lot of holy-themed spells. Only... Radagon is completely silent throughout the entire fight, leaving a lot of theories and arguments as to whether Radagon is even sentient or if some otherworldly force is just using him as a rock-meat puppet.
Regardless of whether Marika and Radagon are reduced to nothingness or if they just don't deign to interact with us, it is a bit disappointing that two enigmatic characters whose whole deal is that 'are their reputations and stories right about them' get zero lines of dialogue at all. But at least the music is nice. As the cutscene plays, turns out that it's set in tune to the opening main theme, which builds up to a truly epic crescendo as Radagon prepares to battle us. Which made the repeated fights against him to at least be an audial delight, even if I find him far less satisfying as a character, a boss or a design compared to Godfrey or Malenia. I am also disappointed that Marika wasn't a phase in this fight either.
The Elden Beast
Thankfully, the second phase of the boss fight changes to something far more esoteric. As Radagon's body collapses to the ground, the entire scene changes to a strange goopy fluid, as a gigantic hand lifts up, pushes Radagon into the ground and turns him into a sword, because why not? And this thing, the Elden Beast, shows up. Final boss time!
And the Elden Beast is huge. It's also hard to describe, although I think most people agree that it's meant to resemble some sort of aquatic sea slug, magnified several times to the size of a dragon. Considering how much of the game has nautical themes (sea squirts, octopi, crabs, crayfish, the prawn-like Kindred of Rot, Godwyn's fish parts...) it kind of fits.
It's got two very well-developed hands with five fingers each, very important in this game. It's got several pairs of feather-like wings, a long neck that terminates in a glowing orb, two stubby legs... and when it flies up, its tail kind of spreads out like a strange feathery tree. More distinctive than the strange anatomical silhouette, however, is the fact that running through its body are designs that resemble the nebulae of space, and yellow light -- both resembling the veins on a leaf and the rough structure of a nervous system -- run through the Elden Beast's body.
The explanation given to us from items gives us hints that "it was the vassal beast of the Greater Will and living incarnation of the concept of Order." and "it is said that long ago, the Greater Will sent a golden star bearing a beast into the Lands Between, which would later become the Elden Ring." So the game itself is kind of ambiguous on what the 'Greater Will' is, and whether it truly is part of the Lands Between. Or even if such distinctions matter at all? The Elden Beast is at the same time a cosmic alien, the most powerful archangel of 'god', and the manifestation of the Elden Ring itself.
So this thing is the Elden Ring's universe's incarnation of a Lovecraftian Elder God, something that represents the whole order of the world. A running theme of the game's story is how the Golden Order is set up and seemingly treated as absolute, while most of the endings wish to tweak or break this unfair and biased Order in some way. And after defeating everything in your way, you fight with the cosmic embodiment of the world, in a strange realm of water that your character can walk on. Oh, and strange trunks of Erdtree-like trunks run the background.
The Elden Ring primarily fights by swinging the giant Radagon-sword around, but also casts all of the most powerful Holy spells -- since in this setting, 'holy' magic comes straight from the Erdtree that's being worshipped as the fundamentalists' primary faith. It also casts the same 'Nebula' explosion spells that the other giant alien, the Astel, casts. And it also can swim up and down through the strange watery realm that is most likely metaphysical. And in a hilarious visual pun, its most powerful attack involves it creating gigantic concentric rings of light that center upon you. It fights you with literal Elden Rings! All the holy and space-y spells are fine and good, but I find that the most simultaneously goofy and unsettling thing about it is that such an eldritch being still finds the need to swing that big sword around.
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I could go on and on about the world-building of Elden Ring, which I also frustratedly admit hinges on a lot of assumptions and theories. What does the Elden Beast represent, and how does it relate to Marika, Radagon, Godfrey, the Golden Order, the Greater Will, the other Outer Gods, et cetera, et cetera? The game gives us a world that's clearly constructed extremely well, but with a lot of questions still left lingering, never to be answered. The fallen leaves tell a story, but not the entirety of it. Normally, that would be terrible. Normally, that would be frustrating. But the execution and the journey through the Lands Between works in spite of all of that, due to how well-executed everything is. And at the end of the day, as I ascend to the title of Elden Lord despite not comprehending huge chunks of the world... I am happy to have gone through this journey and talked about almost every monster and enemy in this game.
Next up... the Land of Shadow.
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