Underneath my yellow skin

Shadow of the Erdtree, a review

I’m ready to give my definitive (but probably not last) review of Shadow of the Erdtree (FromSoft), the DLC for Elden Ring. I have beaten it twice, once by beating every boss with only my spirit ash–

*SPOILER WARNING*

Mimic Tear. Let’s face it. My spirit ash is 99% of the time Mini-Me. It’s funny because a friend from the RKG Discord uses Tiche. Her Mini-Me is too squishy ‘coz she’s pure caster. I have enough strength to make my Mimic Tear hearty, and I don’t know what I would do without Mini-Me.

In my second playthrough, I was such a chonk-a-bonk. And I summoned all over the place. Well, not really. Just the late game because I was done with it.

Side note: I am trying to get all of the S-tier and A-tier weapons in the base game for my first character before going into NG+. There’s one that is hard to get because you have to farm an enemy that only shows up in very limited places, and usually there is a lot of bullshit to get to the enemy. And there is only one at a time. So you kill the one and then have to respawn to do it again. I did it once, then died trying to get to it again (twice in two different ways). I decided it wasn’t worth it, but was nearly there so did it one more time. I got it, which made me chuckle.

I don’t know why I’m doing all this because I will never use any of these weapons. I can’t even use the last item I mentioned because I’m short on strength. Three I think? Here’s the sad thing. I ran through the DLC with my first character and did not use many of the weapons. I think maybe one. I mained two weapons from the base game, both which I maxed out. At least, I’m pretty sure. One of them, the Blasphemous Blade, is definitely at +10. The other, the Great Omenkiller Cleaver is at least +24 if not +25.

I’m a caster. I don’t need a great melee weapon, really. I mained the Lordsworn’s Greatsword the whole base game–and you find that in a chest in the (probably) first ruin you find. One of the reasons I’ve decided to bring my first character into NG+is because I missed several incantations in the DLC, which irritates me to no end. Also, there’s a weapon that I missed and can no longer get in NG, which also irks me. I’m not a completionist, but knowing that theer are things out there that I could have bothers me. Especially as the weapon I’m missing from the base game is a faith-based weapon. And in a section I went into, but just didn’t open a random door.

I’m going to talk about the positives and the negatives in no particular order. I mentioned most of the negatives in my previous posts, so I’ll just quickly renumerate some of them. The reuse of bosses from the main game, especially the THREE Ghostflame Dragons. Yes, the fact that they breathe ghostflames makes them different for that one aspect, but that’s all that is new about them. They’re fairly easy to take care of except the fucking one by the soldier encampment. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s so annoying. They’re fighting the dragon as they should be, but there are two of the Blacksteel Greathammer guys on horseback who, once they catch sight of you, will not leave you alone. And there are Black Knights who are archers who also will not leave you the fuck alone.


I can’t tell you how much I cursed them and briskly reminded them that they had something else they really needed to worry about–namely, a big fuck-off dragon who was destroying absolutely everything around it. Hello! I am but a peon in that whole fight.

This was a minor gripe with the DLC: the amount of aggro I drew was ridiculous. I honestly feel like FromSoft lessened the aggro that the spirit ash took (at least the Mimic Tear. Which, let’s face it, is the only spirit ash I use on the regular) and also made the spirit ash more tethered to me, the player. It used to be that I could run off in one direction and the Mimic Tear would just continue fighting. In the DLC, if I ran too far, Mimic would come trotting after me.

I want to give big ups to the level design. FromSoft gets praised for this all the time (rightly so), and they kicked it up a hundred notches for the DLC. It’s elegant. It’s delicate. It’s mind-blowing. In the base game, there was not as much of the interconnectivity that From is known for, in part because of the open world setting. The legacy dungeons were more elaborate and like their other games, but it wasn’t to the level that they achieved in previous games. I think it’s partly because they wanted to be friendlier to newbs and had more Sites of Graces (Bonfires) than they would have had otherwise.

The level design in the DLC is a work of art. It made me gasp, and it made me tear up in relief when I found a shortcut. I marveled at how intricate it was without being precious. I felt like a genius when I was able to figure certain environmental puzzles for myself beacuse I usually have to look up the solution.

The environments were varied even more than in the base game. In the Fighting Cowboy review I included, he mentioned that the base game environments are pretty standard for a From game. You have your snow environment, your green environment, your rot (poison) environment, etc. It was well done, but I agree that there weren’t many areas that surprised me or amazed me. Crumbling Farum Azula (or Crumbling Fara Mazula as I call it. Or Crumbly Land as Rory from RKG calls it) was one such place. It’s seems like it’s in a place that’s not in our time or dimension. It has an ageless quality to it and yet, it feels heavy with history as well.

In the DLC, there are several places that don’t look like other FromSoft areas. There’s a very blue flowers area and avery red flowers area. Both of them are stunning, and way more color than we usually get from FromSoft. Even the areas that are like other ones, such as Belurat Settlement still feel fresh and new. And then there’s the Abyssal Woods. In it, there are the singular worst enemies in the game–the Aging Untouchables. When you get to the area, there are messages from the devs warrning you to not let them see you. (Not the devs, obviously, but some unknown enemy.) If you try to call Torrent, you can’t. There’s a note saying he’s too scared to come to you.

I have things that make it nearly impossible for enemies to see and/or hear me. I thought that would help. Except, there are bells in the bushes. Bells I could not see very well. I would trip over them and the enemies would come rushing towards me. The Aging Untouchables are like the Wintern Lanterns from Bloodborne. Those inflicted frenzy on you whereas these inflict madness. You can’t hurt them–unless you parry them as they try to inflict madness on you. Then, you can attack them for about a second before they go back to being invulnerable.

If you know how I feel about parrying, you probably know how I feel about this. I hate it. I can’t do it with any consistency. Having to parry is about the worst thing you could ask me to do in a game. It didn’t help that there were two of them fairly close to each other so if I couldn’t quickly finish one off then the other one was on me. This was in my first playthrough. I upped my focus as much as I could to bolster myself against the madness, but I just did not do enough damage to them (and had pretty low poise). I did manage to parry them, finally (the window is fairly generous), but I had to do it more than once per enemy.

Oh, I gave up on the sneaking around because I kept setting off the bells, plus it took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to creep by one. Which made it not scary at all (as it was supposed to be) because I just wanted it to be done. It’s funny how people talk about how scary this section was, and I did not feel scared at all. I just hated the whole situation.

Second time through, it was much easier because I had enough damage that I could just beat them down quickly after the parry. I had enough poise not to be staggered by them and just whaled on them until they died. I still hated the area, but it sure is gorgeous (yellow and orange flowers).

More tomorrow.

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