I have finished the second legacy dungeon. Let me rephrase that. I have killed the second boss of the second dungeon–which might be the last boss? She’s definitely the main boss of the second legacy dungeon. But after I fought her–I’ll get to that in a minute–I discovered that you can get to the second level of the area through the roof. I found this out by looking up where to find a certain item that I needed for one of the NPC’s questlines. That’s when I realized that I could get to the top level of the dungeon–which I had previously thought was off-limits.
That’s the thing with FromSoft games. You have to look everywhere, including up and down. There is no place they won’t stick a shortcut or a whole new way to go. On the one hand, it’s very cool because that means that there’s something to see everywhere. On the other hand, it means I miss so much because I don’t think to look a certain way. My spatial issues are something I have to work around, but I’m not always aware of them.
The second legacy dungeon is nowhere near as big as the first, but now I know why. It also makes me wonder if there is something I’ve missed in the first legacy dungeon. I have found a few bits and bobs in the first legacy dungeon that I had missed before. I think I’ve done a pretty good job clearing it out, though. For the second legacy dungeon, I feel as if I’ve barely touched the surface of the dungeon. It was surprisingly short, which was why I’m not unhappy that there was more to the dungeon.
Now. Let’s talk about the second boss. Spoilers, obviously. Massive ones at that. Seriously. But I really want to talk about her so I’m going to. Everyone says she’s an easy boss, but I did not find her to be so. At all. In addition, she is very similar to a boss in Demon’s Souls–at least her first phase. Let me take you through this boss. You go in and she’s shrouded in a golden glow as she cradles a golden egg. She’s a magic person, obviously. There are a ton of female students in the room as well, crawling around like little worms. One of them gets encased by a golden glow as well and a purple glowing orb stick gives her some kind of power. She shoots purple glowing books at you until you go ever and kill her. Then, another student has the same thing happen and you have to kill her next. After the third one (or maybe fourth? I think it’s third), the main boss comes down with a thump and you whale on her until she goes back up with a big explosion. At some point, she’ll shoot magic at you. She’ll also make a chandelier fall on you. After however many rounds of this it takes to get her health to zero, she goes into phase two. I knew there was going to be a phase two, but I was hoping there wouldn’t be.
Phase two is a fucking nightmare. She has strong magic that she can just spam over and over again. Plus, she can summon troll giants, dragons, assassins, and who knows what else? One time, she summoned all three at the same time. It was really frustrating because it’s basically a DPS race that is hard for me to win. I resorted to two-handing and just praying he magic wouldn’t hit me. I managed to get her the sixth or seventh time I made it to the second phase of the fight.
I hate the first phase because you have to wait for the minions to do their thing while keeping an eye out on the boss. Until I started using the bloody sword ash of war (it staggers and takes off huge chunks of health), I was having to do four cycles of her falling to the floor. With two-handing and the blood slash, I got it down to two. But it’s still annoying to have to wait for the minions to do their thing. In general, minions in a fight annoy the fuck out of me.
The second half of the fight just feels unfair to me. I can’t use my magic myself that much because I just don’t have the time to throw my Pyro incantations. That’s governed by dex, of which I have very little. Plus, humanoids can move, irritatingly, at the last moment and be missed completely. It makes sense why this happens, but it means that my main attack is neutralized.
This is an issue with all the From games, by the way. People like to say that magic is easy mode in these games, but it really isn’t. Not only do you run out of it (more so in Elden Ring than the third Souls game), but magic is never as powerful in my hands as it is in the enemies’ hands. Or rather, while it may do the same amount of damage, a boss has way more health than I do. I have less than 20 points in Vigor in Elden Ring at the moment. I want to use a sword that has 24 Intelligence and 24 faith. I have the latter, but not the former. I’m ten short in the former.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t mind grinding. It’s part of the game and the way to get beefy. I love it when I’m in NG+5 and have maxed out all my stats. I am invincible! Hear me roar! It takes that long, yes, and by then it’s 500,000 for one level. At the moment, I think it’s roughly 18,000 per level. Which is more than I can get in any one exploratory journey at this point.
Technically, I can go to the end game at this point. I think? At least I can go to the area where I think the end game is. I’m nearly 90 hours into the game and nowhere near the end. I always take three times as long as other people do to finish From games, which puts me at roughly 300 hours estimated to finish the game. I just went back to the first legacy dungeon because I needed to do something so I could use something from that first dungeon. That opened up another small area with a tough enemy that I ignored so I could do my thing. I’ll go back and try to kill it, of course, but I was just marveling that it was tucked away in a corner. It had been shown in some of the Closed Network Testing, but I had forgotten about it because there is just so much in this game.
I also looked up an NPC questline and followed it. I found yet another new place in the second area of the game plus a field boss who was highly reminiscent of the Capra Demon–replete with two mangy dogs. At least the arena was bigger than a postage stamp. The NPC questline intertwines with another (repugnant) NPC, and I do NOT want to do it the ‘right’ way.
I cannot believe how much content is crammed into this game–but in an organic way. I also can’t believe one games journalist finished the game in 89 hours (before embargo lifted). I’m closing in on that amount of time played and as I said, I just killed the second boss of the second legacy dungeon.
I’m trying not to get overwhelmed by all that there is to do, but it’s hard. The best I can do is just continue playing the game, savoring every step of the way.