In the last post, I talked about how the second half of Elden Ring was not as good as the first half (overall). I stopped at the Mountaintops of Giants, but I’m not done with it yet. There will be SPOILERS for the second half of the game, including bosses.
The boss of this area is aan important one because once you beat him and go forward, you can’t go back to Leyndell Royal Capital and there are ending s that can be locked out at this point. It’s an impressive moment, and one that was lost on me because I was immediately one-shot by the boss.
I can’t do a boss if I can get one-shot. I cannot be flawless in a boss fight. Granted, I was low on Vigor at this point, probably 25 at best, but a boss really shouldn’t be allowed to one-shot a character. It should be coded so that you can have a sliver and survive. I understand that I should have upped my Vigor to at least 30, but if a game is touting that you can play it any way you want, well, that’s very glass-cannony for me.
This boss is the Fire Giant. He is a giant and he uses fire. This means that it’s really hard to target him because he’s so large. His weak point is his aankle (one in specific, but I don’t remember which). It’s really hard to target his ankle and keep his upper body in view. I have peryiphery issues so there’s that as well.
More to the point, this boss has 42,363 HP. That’s the most of any boss in the game. The last boss (which is actually two bosses) has 22,000 HP or so. The first half of that boss fight (a whole different boss) has 13,500 or so. So together, they have roughly 35,5000 HP. Still approximately 8,000 HP less than the Fire Giant.
One of the things that annoys me about FromSoft is how by the end of the game (and/or in the DLCs), they tend to buy their own press. In Elden Ring, the whole game is well-balanced with a nod towards newbies. Then, once we hit the Mountaintops of the Giants, it’s as if they said to the fanbois, “You made it this far? Here you go.”
Let’s back up a step. The soldiers in Leyndell are fucking annoying. With my first character, they could almost one-shot me, and they had ridiculous poise. And lightning. And there were just groups of them when there was no need for that.
To be fair, in Dark Souls III, the soldiers in the last area were ridiculous, too, but it was easy to ignore them. You just ran by them and did the ‘I can’t see you’ dance. Or, if you’re me, you do Hidden Body/Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring and they won’t even notice you.