I personally didn’t experience the final boss like Nightmare King Grimm. I barely rolled except when I already knew the timing for sure.
My impression is that it was the late-game version of how Elden Ring assumes players will actually invest significantly in defense, without signaling that except by one-shotting you. With a 36 STR +20 greatshield and the 27 Faith holy defense buff I could block and tank hits like any other boss.
Ok but the game lets you do a lot of builds for the entire game and I did a different one
Edit: Ok I shouldn’t be so flippant. So this is basically what I did for the Nameless King in DS3, a boss everyone hates, and it’s a great strat on some bosses, but I do not have any of the items to do it, haven’t practiced any of it and I dunno if I want to spend another many hours farming for everything I’d need and completely changing the play style I’ve spent the entire game with
I liked Isshin a lot. SUPER good boss design. But I think the thing is after I did that, and then did it a couple more times for other games, I kind of got the idea. I just don’t really want to do it again. I don’t think this boss design is as good. It’s kind of cool but mostly just a chore at this point
yeah Isshin was legit great even though I felt like the least I could do in order to get revenge on Sekiro for having such a bad tutorial was not bother beating him
There’s this problem I started to identify with these games where extreme difficulty and precision are a high stakes move on a developer’s part, because you’re just asking a lot from a player and you really have to give back. Isshin has some sick moves, the setting is incredibly dramatic and it has narrative tension because you’ve spent half the game with this guy as ostensibly your ally and now he is crawling bodily out of his own son to kill you
Meanwhile the boss of Elden ring is just a big guy you probably don’t even remember; he only comes up like one time if you talk to the turtle pope for a while. He’s literally the second Elden Lord and this is right after you killed the first one who was just a normal boss. And then it’s a big amoeba star dragon which is kind of cool but also kinda… I dunno. I mean I never heard of this thing until now and I’m not sure what it is or why it matters.
Everything you’re saying fits Malenia perfectly for what it’s worth. Especially now that they patched out all 3 of the top damage-dealing methods that people were using to obliterate her before she found much opportunity to attack. I’m probably going to give that one a pass with your reasoning
yes i did not attempt malenia for very long before deciding to just finish the game. also, i think the bloodhound’s step ash would be my strategy for her if i stuck with it.
my double fully upgraded warhammers were fine in terms of DPS (and they often broke her poise!) but i needed a more reliable way to dodge some of her bullshit.
radagon comes up a lot. he was with rennala and queen marika. he’s the dad of like half the bosses. and you can find out that marika and radagon are, somehow, two halves of the same entity
I heard about him like one time. Please remember how big this game is
On that same sense Gwyn worked pretty well for DS1. Have you ever tried to defeat it without shield? How about healing in that situation? Manus was less aggressive even if scarier.
But the thing of beating Gwyn… Yeah it is just that thing that completely makes you overlook how abusive the boss is… In fact makes you enjoy it and plays the roll of “making the player justifying for the devs faults” very well.
On DS2… The hollow king dude kinda worked for me like that. Different feeling… Always made me incredibly sad. Nothing on all Dark Souls gave me so much the sense of decay as that boss. No ruins, no stories… That was just a very sad hollowed former powerful person.
On Bloodborne again, either German or the Moon presence work pretty well imo.
German for kinda the “super rival” thing, after defeating so many hunters now you get to go against the first one. And that was an actually well designed boss in so many ways. Low HP imo though. And the Moon Presence… Only worked for plot. A Great On, the manipulator of the hunters of the dream and what-not. But still did gave a kick.
Yeah! And also like regarding the MP, the whole game is nothing but moon this, moon that, and then at the very end the moon just keeps getting bigger until you fight the manifestation of the moon!
For Elden Ring, I don’t know what “Elden” is (is it just supposed to mean old?), so I don’t know what an Elden Beast is. I don’t even really know what the Elden ring is about or why or how it broke except that if you get it you get to be Elden Lord. And like they make it pretty explicit at this point that the competition among Tarnished to become Elden lord is obviously fake and rigged to suppress everyone who could actually threaten Queen Marika, which is why burning the tree is a cardinal sin, etc. I don’t really get what the Rune of Destined Death is supposed to be or why I had to get it to take the tree from slightly burning to all-the-way-burning. And mostly I don’t care about this stuff as long as the game is cool and I’m having a good time—I think most big lore compilations on FromSoft games are heavy speculation and these games are mostly meant to be big and impressionistic. My problem here is in the end game I just don’t feel like the game has built up much of an impression of anything except some GRRM cringe (the humans fought the giants or maybe the dragons or both for the Elden Ring, which is important for some reason) and a bunch of NPCs with very similar names who feel like they don’t really add up to anything. So it’s hard for me to feel very much narrative tension. When the last boss’s name came up I literally said “Who!?” out loud because I’d got him confused with another guy I’d already killed
Edit: actually (more spoilers, sorry) all the stuff about The Greater Will and Astel (a fallen malformed star that was deployed against an ageless underground city) and glintstone and the cosmos is like… VERY bloodborne. I dunno—this game feels narratively kind of like recombinant dregs of everything else FromSoft has ever done. I honestly suspect this game is high satire of the high fantasy genre and it’s not really supposed to come together, but that might just be because it’s so belaboured and confusing. Either way it doesn’t make me feel like it’s doing anything that I get any particular feelings for or impression of.
Edit edit: I also want to say on the micro the narrative is fucking great. There are all kinds of weird little beats, cool areas and stories of weird doomed guys you get to watch be doomed. All that stuff is great. It’s just that—and maybe this is because it’s 100 hours of FromSoft bad guy stomping—but the broad strokes do not feel like they add up to very much for me
i think this might be my favorite souls game? i definitely like it more than dark souls 1
it reminds me a lot of dark souls 2 and king’s field 3j, like a manifestation of ideas that those games had but couldn’t entirely deliver on
note i have not beaten the dude on the tiny horse, that fucker has a gravity spell that always oneshots me and i have never once dodged it lmao
yeah that gravity spell in the second half of the fight fucked me up a surprising number of times, like I thought I had every other part of it down and then I would whiff that dodge
This game is a five disc fromsoft greatest hits collection. So what’s not to like? It’s literally all their best songs back to back to back for a hundred hours.
Thirty seconds into the first song you’re already smiling. Half way through disc one you’re tapping the steering wheel and singing along. At the end of disc one you think to yourself, “god they played this song too many times on the radio when it came out. I actually might be sick of this song,” but then disc 2 starts and it’s your jam of the summer of 2015 and you’re thinking “my god this kicks ass; I’m having the best time.” The middle of disc 3 is all weird jam numbers from their experimental phase and honestly it’s a lot. You’re stuck in traffic and you’re not really having fun anymore and it feels like this disc is never going to end. Disc 4 kicks off with their underrated pop reboot but quickly segues into the saccharine, overeager phase of said reboot when everyone basically just made fun of them. Disc 5 is a bunch of alarmingly polished and overproduced stuff you’ve never heard before, and while it’s honestly pretty good you feel like you kind of liked these hooks better when they were recorded on cheap tape recorders in touring hotel rooms twenty years earlier.
By the end of the collection all you can think about is how you haven’t listened to basically anything else in the better part of three weeks and you’re hearing these songs in your dreams. It’s too fucking long, man. Five discs is just too many discs of anything. You had to find something in your apartment that could play CDs just to listen to it when you weren’t in the car. You get kind of mad you wasted this much time on something you still REALLY enjoyed maybe 60% of. Why not just release that 60% as a svelte collection of listenable music? Is this even your favourite band anymore? Are you a different person now? I dunno. Let’s put this on the shelf and not talk about it again.
I think I can tell you why.
Show me one RPG fan who didn’t wished at some point doing a game this big?
They just went ahead and did it. I’m still bummed that they got out of the path oriented world into an open field one. Feels like FromSoft throwing in the towel saying “yeah this is how big company games will all be from now on and we won’t fight it anymore”. To me they lost their unique world building, but maintained the “souls” which is the entire underlying mechanics.
Is it good? It’s great but I think this is a damage they won’t be able to repair so soon. Stepping down is always hard, and they delayed stepping up as much as they could.
As someone that recently played all main Assassin’s Creed, Horizon, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Witcher 3 a few years back twice… Welcome to the future, and it is exhausting.
they made him into starscourge taft
I’m not sure easier Radahn and harder Malenia was really what this game needed
Teddy Roosevelt should’ve just run for a third term in the first place smh
well that sucks, since I killed the gatekeeper and haven’t seen nepheli since stormveil. rip
