The subtitle for this post is: And the four bosses I recently fought. In the last post, I ended by bitching about the Furnace Golems. Oh, here is your standard
*SPOILER WARNING*
In the RKG Discord, someone was asking how to get to a portion of the map I thought I had been to. Turns out, I hadn’t. I was mistaking it for another area, which is easy to do in this game, especially the DLC. There are so many areas that are piled on top of each other and that you can access in a different way. No matter how thorough I am, I am going to miss something. At any rate, people in the Discord were being very helpful. I found the ladder they mentioned and realized I had actually gone down it. I found the painting that was there and was a bit puzzled why FromSoft had made such an elaborate area for something that simple.
Well, I found out. There were messages near a wall, which instantly made me realize that there was a hidden wall. Which there was. Right behind it was a Site of Grace, then a graveyard of Furncae Golems. I got at least five if not more Furnace Visages. I only mention this because of where I ended the last post. I didn’t mind the light grinding I did for the Furnace Visages, though. It didn’t take long to farm five or so of them. I basically got one per every run, two runs at most. Of course, there was a living Furnace Golem at the end of the graveyard, and I peaced out of there.
I want to talk about the four bosses I’ve fought in the last few days. Two of them were storyline/Remembrance bosses and two were sidequest bosses–but one of them was a Remembrance boss as well. Let’s tackle the latter two first (as they are a packaged deal).
I’m going to go over the entire questline, but briefly. You talk to Count Ymir and he gives you a map to a ruin. It’s a very vague map. I actually found the second ruin first and then went back to talk to him. He gave me a map to the second ruin and I stumbled around until I found the first one. Which I could have found earlier, but missed it.
Side note: He has a bodyguard of sorts, Swordhand of Night Jolan who leans against a pillar nearby. She is clad in all black with the sickest armor in the game. She has a sister, Anna, and that becomes relevant later. Also, outside the church in which Ymir sits (in what is obviously some part of the Carian Manor in the past), there is a graveyard. In that graveyard, there is one specific grave of a child, Yuri. I just watched a video I have included below in which they show all the dialogues about this child.
I had made the mistake of assuming that it was an actual child, especially since Ymir said something about being careful because he was underfoot. I assumed ‘he’ was the child–at least in Ymir’s mind. To put it kindly, I assumed that Ymir was talking about a child who wasn’t really there, but Ymir thought was there.I can be too linear in my thinking sometimes.
The video I included explains what is happening. It doesn’t explain who Yuri is, though. I have to admit that I thought Yuri would be another boss, maybe the main boss of this questline. I think that’s an understandable assumption to make. Before I found the grave, I thought it might be a young Radahn with time being convoluted and all that. The video I included explains who the kid is, kind of, and why Ymir is so obsessed with him, kind of, but it really didn’t pay off in the end for me.
I think this is my issue with Ymir’s questline in general. It was hyped up to be so much more than it actually turned out to be. Yes, it was interesting from a lore perspective because the boss at the end was Metyr, Mother of Fingers. The last ruin you needed to find was under the church in which Ymir sits. On your way, you get invaded by Swordhand Night Anna–Jolan’s sister.
Side note: I just found out something really amazing when I was Googling Anna to get her title right. If you finish Ymir’s storyline and do what I did with Jolan (whicgh gives you Jolan’s spirit ash), you can then do something to join Anna’s ashes with Jolan’s. I don’t know how someone figured this out, but you have to go to a different area to jump down onto the balcony of a rise to find Anna’s puuppet body. When you examine it, it asks if you want to join Anna’s ashes to Jolan. Once you do that, you can remove her as well.
That is so cool! But, major props to that person who figured it out. I’m guessing if you give Jolan a different item (to get her sword), then you can’t do this bit. The lengths to which FromSoft will go in order to tie things together and supply the player with rewards such as this almost makes up for the frustrating bits to their games.
I’m still reeling from the last bit I just wrote about. But back to the bosses.
I hated the Metyr fight–not going to lie. Not because of the fight itself, exactly, but because of the arena .And because of the fact that the boss can attack you from above–which is such a problem with my spatial issues. I could not see where the attacks were coming from–which was fucking frustrating. The fight reminded me a lot of the Astel Naturalborn of the Void boss fight, which also made me miserable. In that case, it was because I could be one-shot by their attacks. I was past 18 Vigor, but probably only around 25 ar so. That was such a miserable experience, I did not ever want to repeat it.
I have the worst time when I have to fight anything that isn’t anchored in the space in which we fight. That’s one reason I hate the final boss of Elden Ring. I just cannot pinpoint where its attacks are coming from, and I can’t gauge how to avoid them.
Caveat: I am overleveled at this point. Or rather, I have 60 Vigor, which means I can take a few hits. This has made all the difference in the world. Honestly. I had a little bit of guilt about dumping 20 points into Vigor (taking them from Intelligence), but not any longer. As I have said several times, I don’t play these games any longer for the hard bosses. I was watching someone tackle one of the DLC bosses over and over and over again. He wasn’t using his spirit summon or the NPC summon. It was just him and the boss, mano a mano.
This is a boss I killed on my second try because I used my spirit ash and the NPC summon. I didn’t even get to see most of the boss’s moves or have to suffer the ramifications of them because I was far enough away not to have to worry too much about them. The boss moves are wild, by the way. So many and so varied. But I don’t need to see it in-game. I can appreciate it in videos, thank you very much.
Back to the Metyr fight. It felt very uninspired. Even as I watched her attacks from afar, they were just–meh. In the game, I mean. She can shoot a laser at you like Astel does. She can also hit you like a truck. Apparently, this is a very hard fight, which makes sense. You can’t get there in the first half of the DLC. Here is a video of Fextralife fighting her and giving tips. I saw someone say that this was Rom (from Bloodborne) done right. I really disagree with this assessment, but that’s neither here nor there.
It’s really interesting to watch this video because I don’t recall half of those attacks. He mentions about the last attack that you may never see it if you kill her quickly enough, which I’m pretty sure I did. Kill her quickly enough, I mean. I killed her on the second try, and the one death was to me getting stuck on her and not being able to see how I could roll out.
I am running long again. More tomorrow.