*SPOILERS*
I’m not sure how needed a spoiler tag is for Elden Ring now, but I’m slapping one on this post, anyway, because I’m going to talk about a late-game boss in some detail. She is widely accepted to be the hardest boss in the game, and she’s optional. All the hardest bosses in the FromSoft games are optional bosses. Well. That’s not exactly true. There is usually one boss mid-game who is a hard skills check. Ornstein & Smough in the original Dark Souls. Genichiro in Sekiro. Both of these are unavoidable. The first made my life miserable for a week. The latter, I have wiped him from my mind.
“You can’t beat Sekiro without learning how to deflect.” That’s the mantra about the game. My niece’s husband, when I said I never learned how to deflect, “I thought you couldn’t beat the game without learning how to deflect.” My response: “You can, but you’re not going to have a good time doing it.” I have long since given up on learning the main combat mechanism for any of these games. Parrying for the Souls games, viscerals for Bloodborne, and deflecting for Sekiro. I can’t do any of them, and believe me, I’ve tried. And tried. And tried. I devoted hours to parrying the Silver Knights in Anor Londo in the first Dark Souls. I got to the point where I could do it 75% of the time. That’s not nearly enough percentage, but it was as good as I could do.
In each DS game, the parry system is juuuuuust different enough to fuck me up. I didn’t even bother trying in the second and third game. Bloodborne? I gave up on the gun pretty quickly. Then I found the Augur of Ebrietas and that changed everything. You can use it at the cost of one bullet, just like the gun, and it shoots a tentacle out that staggers the enemy. Then, I can get the riposte just as if I had used a gun. For the Dark Souls, I just used Pyro and strength, mixing it up while ignoring that parrying even existed. Then came Sekiro. Oh, Sekiro. Once again, I tried. I spent so much time trying to master the deflect. I could not do it. Or rather, I could do it maybe 1 out of 4 times. I got it by accident from time to time, but not with any consistency. So I gave up and just grimly chunked down the health of each boss throughout the whole game.
Is this a fun way to play the game? Hell, no. Is it doable? Yes. I should know because I did it. No one believes me when I say that I did it that way, but I did. I never learned to deflect with any consistency and my god the Isshin fight took me f-o-r-e-v-e-r. Four phases. Me whittling away at his health. If I had to swig a…uh…gourd at all during the Genichiro phase of the fight, I let him kill me. Ten gourds plus a few other healing items for four phases is nowhere near enough.
When I finally beat Isshin, it was transcendental. No lie. I was floating out of my body and was in tears. But, unlike other bosses, I did not curse my head off as I beat him. I felt almost reverent and just quietly set down my controller. Would I be able to beat him again? Probably not.
I went back to Sekiro just before Elden Ring dropped. I tootled around for a bit before jumping into Owl (Father) on NG+ because I had the vague idea of getting the plat. After a few hours with only getting to his second phase twice or three times, I gave up. Could I have done it? Maybe. Did I want to? No. Let me rephrase that. I do want to, but I don’t want to put the effort into doing it.
Sekiro is the one game that has lost its luster over time. Let me be clear. this is an amazing game. I have always said that it’s probably one of their best-made games. It’s pristine with a strong vision. But, for the first time in a From game, you can only play it one way. It’s not an RPG. There is one weapon. The only choice you have is what to attach to your prosthetic arm, and that’s it. That’s not much at all.
One of my favorite things about the Souls games is that you can play them any way you want. Yes, you will find things much easier if you learn to parry, but you can beat the game without it. You can over-level your character. You can use any weapon you want from a variety of weapons as long as you have the stats for it. You can be a glass cannon or you can be a tank. You can use all the magicks you want, or you can be melee all the way. Or, like me, you can be a strengthcaster.
One thing I love about Elden Ring is that the parry is useful, I’m sure, but it’s incidental. You don’t need to learn it and it’s not even that much of a bonus. You can guard counter and jump attack, both of which are more than enough to make up for the fact that I can’t parry. I didn’t even bother trying to learn the parry in this game. In fact, I put on the ‘no effect’ ash of war on my shield so I could use the ash of war on my weapon without two-handing it.
In the discussion as to how accessible the games are, Sekiro is easily the least accessible. I would say Elden Ring is the most accessible because of the sheer amount of ways you can play it. If you want to summon for every boss, you can. If you want to use your Spirit Summons for every boss, you can as well (at least most of them. There are a few in the field where this might not be possible). If you want to shield up, tank up, and basically chop away at the boss’s health, you most certainly can do that.
And, if you want to be a strengthcaster who can use both a greatsword and magicks with ease, you can do that as well. That’s my M.O., even more so in my second playthrough than my first. I did use a greatsword in that playthrough, but the first one I found. And the most basic. I’m up to almost 40 in strength for my second character, which means I have a lot more variety in my choice of big person weapons.
Back to the one boss in Elden Ring I wanted to talk about. Malenia, the Blade of Miquella. She’s considered the hardest boss in the game by most people. The last couple days, I’ve been watching videos of people fighting against her because it’s funny. And because I wanted to see how they were fighting her. The vast majority of streamers choose to play without a shield and either dual-wielding or two-swording it, one in each hand. I have much more to say about it, but I’m running out of steam so I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll address it further in the next post.