Talking a bit about bosses in general, and some of the late game bosses I didnt care of.
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I actually one shot all the bosses post the capital except malenia and mogh (took me about 7 tries for malenia and 2 for mogh, damn you second phase bleed proc) but they are mostly terrible slogs imo, malenia isn't as bad but the lifesteal will make the fight unbeatable for a lot of the more defensive players. The only boss I didn't do is the one from fia's questline because I killed her so I don't know that one.
Hitboxes are fucked I agree, the story also makes no sense at the end (why do you teleport to farrum azula???? Why kill malekith????)
Thoughts on Malenia?
I'm very happy that the opinion of the late game bosses are bad is popping up more and more.
The illusion that From Software makes “super hard boss fights” has been shattered for some time now. They’re not super hard, they’re super cheap and it’s just a recycled “more health and more damage” mentality. The games are great, story is quite good, exploration is phenomenal. They need a new boss formula.
Yeah, I managed to suffer through the first three games but I generally find the experience exhausting. Personally I like decent amount of plot and better exposition that would give me better incentive to play through. As such, the story aspects of the game are at best static and archaic. It makes about the same reason as why Kingmaker doesn't have a calender built into the game despite being heavy on the time managment.
Over on the Elden Ring discord a lot of people have had the same experience but I didn't. I think that was because the Malenia fight was so hard that I decided to fight fire with fire and used a bleed katana build with mimic +10. That build is so good I beat godskin in one try, maliketh in three, and godfrey in two. I knew that I was not really learning their attacks but after seeing what people have said, I'm glad that I did it because it was cheap and so were these bosses.
Come on Loux is one of the best late-game bosses. He does not read your input and just does his thing. Learn his move and you can beat him that's that. While the all-known is the bane of mages. Mages usually tell him information to learn his magic, therefore he would use the information about boss mage characters beaten before and learn new and more powerful magic.
I just had this conversation with a buddy on Friday and pretty much every critique was what we noticed as well. Couldn't decide if it really was that sloppy or if the extremely poor PC performance makes it feel that way. And before anyone recommends anything I have 4 gaming PCs at home with various capabilities, all have appropriate graphics settings for thier hardware, all have been tried with lower settings, none of them can create a smooth enjoyable experience. That's not including any of my buddy's PCs either, same level of jank. I think the game is still fun and I'll keep playing, but why make PC an option if you don't take advantage of what a PC can do, or make it perform as expected.
The bosses are way too aggressive with too many aoe attacks and combos. Most of the time if you are a melee character, you just wait until they finish and attack once, then wait again.
These bosses feel like they belong to bloodborne or Nioh series where the main character has much better movement sets and more ways to counter the bosses' attack comparing to the elden ring.
A lot of the house-sized boss fights/enemies could be solved if they bothered zooming the camera out all the way.
Started in bloodborne with a single boss' (darkbeast parl I think?) swipes coming from offscreen. Never learned from that in ds3.
Smaller big boys or wider camera please.
Or better telegraphing from their legs and feet..
So for the Black Blade i will say there is a item specifically made for this boss that makes it so you can counter hes attacks putting him instantly into a staggered state.
Also i absolutely hate the elden beast just due to the fact that all it does is run away and if you ever lock on up close it becomes a clusterfuck as you cant see anything that is happening
Couldnt agree more: The last boss fights feel cheap and are simply no fun. Also fall damage drove me nuts during the last third of the game.
3:55 double jump on torrent dont help with rhis attack?
Radagon should not be two phases
The boss repetition part does not bother me. Its a Japanese game after all. Anyone that has played enough JPRGS know how this works. you got like 10 monsters and they repeat throughout the game through reskins and added skills/stats. Yes it sucks..but it what it is, and the moment you agree to play anything made by a Japanese dev you agree to this crap as well.
Bosses being "cheap" on the other hand is an issue. Mainly cause the best way to beat any boss is to be either A)extremely aggressive and cheesy or B) extremely passive and just wait for those 1/2 openings they allow every 2 minutes ( Malenia is a very egregious example of this second strat). You either cheese the bosses ,through broken mechanics, within minutes; or you dodge for hours till you kill em. There should be some more room for give and take between player and bosses, instead of this "whoops you did not dodge one attack now u gotta restart" thing.
And since I mentioned her. Malenia is the worst designed boss ever. Not cause she is unbeatable ( she very much can be melted if you learn her patterns) but because its a boss that literally tells you to cheese . Malenia wants you to cheese her cause if you try to straight up fight her, without using some broken gimmick, you will lose your mind. Its basically a BS boss that asks you if you can BS more than her ( which I repeat is not that hard to do but it just sucks it has to be beaten this way)
I'm surprised you didn't mention Malenia. She gave me the most trouble by far, and I only managed to defeat her after switching tactics multiple times.
A caveat for the other bosses: without spirit summons, these are all insane. I don't really know why you wouldn't use them except to make the game purposefully more difficult, but that is a choice. Now, to the bosses:
The fire giant is just awkward, I agree there. I think one of the lessons with him is "close the gap before he does". Usually, I would use his roll-attack to heal up and stuff, but the attack you mentioned makes it very dangerous to stay at range against him. So get under his feet and smack him. Even then, the slams are very difficult to identify and react to… Not too bad overall though.
Godskin Duo is completely fine if you use a good spirit summon, imo. My guys managed to distract the larger one until I had killed the skinny guy, but he got a revive from his friend after my summons were dead and I had to manage them both for the last quarter or so of the health. I can very much see why fighting them both head on would be an unpleasant experience.
Maliketh was also very hard. I did feel like I learned his moves by the end, but he is very fast. There is the Blasphemous Claw which is supposed to counter him, but I cannot comment on its effectiveness, since I didn't find it.
Ofnir is fine, as you said.
Hoarah Loux can be distracted by spirits, but the AoE nature of his attacks make it difficult to attack him in melee regardless. The second phase does insane damage, but I felt like all of those attacks were comparatively (!) easy to dodge (maybe the one were he rips out the rocks from the ground excluded).
Lastly, Radagon/Elden Beast. Well Radagons moveset is incredibly punishing imo, everything in his second phase gets (delayed) AoEs… but again, I think this isn't even that difficult compared to some of the things that over Souls Games have pulled. And then Elden Beast/"who can read off attacks from a leg"… I think all large bosses have this issue. Again, I think there have been worse examples, but as a melee character, there are consistent strategies here which make him manageable. If you didn't have to fight Radagon beforehand, I would call this boss easy. In general, Elden Ring manages to fix some of the camera issues I had with previous souls games when it came to larger bosses. In particular with the ulcerated tree spirits, if you lock on, the camera zooms out slightly, so that you can see the boss in its entirety. I found this incredibly helpful. I think this also happens with the dragons, but the fire giant is an exception here, for sure.
All that said, the difficulty spike and lack of tools to make these bosses easier is striking to me. I feel like all bosses before these guys were fine if you got properly geared and leveled up. But entering Crumbling Farum Azula with a +25 weapon and solid armor, I don't know what would have made e.g. Hoarah Loux easier. There was pretty much no way to increase the strength of my character significantly from there.
However, there are 2 things I wanted to mention: Greases and Wondrous Physick. You can farm the ingredients for lightning and/or fire grease very easily in Limgrave, so there really shouldn't be a problem to just spam them. Drawstrings are a different matter, though. And I would encourage everyone to experiment with their physick. It's easy to get stuck with your default "this has always been decent" flask, but try different things in order to get through those late game bosses. I don't think I would've gotten through Commander Nialls ads if without the one that increases posture damage…
It says something that I was so far in this game that I thought for sure I would be able to watch this video without being spoiled on anything I haven't seen, and then the very first boss was a spoiler for me. Not a big one, because I am close to him and it was clear that would be the type of boss, but still a spoiler nonetheless.
So like many other ER videos, I'm sorry but I'll have to come back later. Unfortunately I just don't have the time to put in as much time as I used to in video games. I've only got 40 hours in the game so far and have only just reached the mountaintops of the giants.
I would like to say though that I loved your review. I found myself agreeing with damn near every point you made about the game.
7:00 this fight gives me drizzt vibes
Oh oh Mort is criticising Elden Ring, watch out the fanbois are gonna be frothing at the mouth. According to them this game is absolute perfection with nothing wrong with it despite the rediculous amount of bloat and repetition in this game and the numerous copy paste boss design with shitty imput delayed controls, a camera that just doesn't work 90% of the time and bosses tarding out all over the place able to attack endlessly while we attack at the speed of a constipated hippo.
I've started calling Elden Ring the AC:Valhalla of the soulsbourne franchise. Partly to annoy the fanbois, partly because like Valhalla its bloated, tedious, repetitive and 40 hours longer than it should be.
Elden Ring does not feel like you are fighting some creature in the world but rather a video game boss. Best way I can put it really.
you did mention it later in the video but yes. jumping is key. they took this from sekiro. it sounds like most of the attacks you mentions are ones you jump over. the giants attack. as soon as he starts to rolls away, mount up and sprint towards him, gotta close that gap. double jump on torrent and you can avoid it. also, a side note to torrent. you get iframs when you mount and dismount. not saying that's how they intended you to fight with him, but it's an option. also, side side note, the flipping moose shamans in the underground that shoot those magic arrows. they are actually unavoidable on horseback. it's awful.
you can jump over basically every ground attack while not mounted and the timing between the multiple ground attacks lets you jump and strong attack. if timed right, it destroys their poise and lets you do a critical. so basically if you run away from the boss, you are safe but you can only watch. if you stay close, it's your chance to punish them.
Also, Godskin duo is fucking awful lol. personally, all of the fights with the Godskin were terrible for me as melee until I got the sword of fire and night. then I just beamed them to death.
I do agree that some bosses would just spam attacks for a while. it felt like 2 mins of dodging and then I get a 3 seconds window to attack. I know a lot of their attacks can be parried, but I suck at parrying. with malenia, you have to parry her 3 times before you can get a critical in. bleh.
overall I love this game. i'm about to start my 2nd play through as magic only. I love the content you been putting out.
Jump over the plate attack
I see that as I try to play legit with meele builds in my first playthrough (with no OP magic spells and just mostly utility ones) that I'll have a hard time after I clapped Margit, Godrick, the Crucible knight in Limgrave. I tried not to look at the footage to not spoil myself too much but I was already expecting we'd fight the beast priest and I'll be frank here, more and more Souls bosses are pending towards the action aspect almost scratching the hack n slash genre, with the only safeguard being the stamina system in the game to prevent the player doing the same. Seriously, I love the boss encounters in these games but I ponder sometimes if we aren't going too far with it.
The footage you showed of Maliketh wasn’t yours but showed the AOEs being dealt with really well, I think only one connected.
what i think is a huge problem is when you figth big bosses like dragons and radahn, i cand see anything, how am i supposed to dodge and know in what direction to dodge when all i can see is the boss feet, theu should really add a zoom out mechanic when you engage them
Godrick was a bitch to beat. Rennala disappointed me.
After beating Malenia the last couple of bosses seemed to be way easier. The Bloodhound step ash of war seems to be really useful for dodging most of the moves from the last couple of bosses. It also seems to not trigger any moves that would punish dodging.
I can explain why WIndup Attacks feel so unnatural and difficult for us to deal with.
Because if this happened in real life , you'd just stab the guy first and he'll be dead.
I think they overloaded all bosses, in DS3 all were "hard" but punishable, in this game you literally have to spam B for dodge fuking massive AoE attacks. The final boss fight probably is the most boring and non memorable of all FromSoftware games.
I still prefer DS1 over all.
Man I agree with all your points. The first week was the honeymoon phase where negative opinions are drowned out by fanboyism, but now more and more people are getting to the later points of the game, the overtuned difficulty is becoming more apparent.
I love tough bosses, been playing FromSoft games since OG Demon Souls, but in ER many fights just seem to be a chore, especially if you are playing solo melee. I understand that spells always make the game easier, but in ER the disparity of difficulty between melee only and magic builds is huge compared to earlier games.