What Joseph Anderson Got Wrong About Elden Ring

To make and Anderson joke, if Joseph hadn’t made his video the title of this video would’ve been “Strength Purist 3 DAYS of Malenia Mald”. If you liked this video please consider sharing it with a friend, I am so tired of the greater discussion about these games constantly bogged down because of all the BS information that is constantly being spread about them.
If you think this is objective criticism of Elden Ring than you have brain rot from watching too many long form video essayist critics. Objective criticism of art is idiotic. I can only give you my opinion and explain why I feel that way. Someone can hate Waterfowl for being obtuse and someone can simultaneously love it for feeling badass to dodge. I am not here to say ER is objectively better than souls, that is my opinion. What my problem is, is when one party starts bitching that the game doesn't catering specifically to them and also bases that opinion on misinfo. You can not like Margit, or any boss, without having to invent some BS excuse that he has undodgeable frame traps or he input reads your attacks. It keeps people from trying these games. All I can do is point out misinfo and give my two cents. It is up to the individual to decide where they draw the line of how they want to play, how much time they think is worth putting into the game, and finding their own balance of fair and fun in this game... and that's the fucking beauty of it.
I have 2 reasons for doing this challenge run. One is that I miss challenge running a lot and two is that I know some comments will devolve into “whatabout dis attack or this boss” so I not only want to beat the bosses at low level, but I want to style on them to show people how fun and consistent they are if you really learn them.
Thank you to the Souls community for helping me making this long form video essay. I have been working on this video for almost 5 months and I am going to f**king bed now. All in all was about 400 hours of just editing, nvm the 30 page script I rewrote 3 times and the research, fact checking, and testing. I know I explained flawless running, and then used the term “flawless” interchangeably with “hitless,” my bad for the confusion.
I will caveat that mrBorkD and GinoMachino both mention in their descriptions that they have gripes with some of Melania’s design choices and wish she had a bit more polish, but ultimately find her a fun fight. This is very similar to most complaints levied at Lady Maria. Swagapagos Turtle also makes it clear that he fundamentally disagrees with the decision to allow Malenia to animation cancel and would prefer that no boss should be able to do it, even in this niche way. Kudos to him for his testing.
#eldenring #darksouls3 #sekiro
My Sekiro Vid: • Breaking the Mold | Se...
Come chill with the fam: / lupineos
KZbinrs & Videos Used:
Joseph Anderson - • Elden Ring - A Shatter...
• Bloodborne - Chalice D...
• Dark Souls 3 Critique
NathanSavageDamage - • [World's First] Radago...
SilverBullet993 - • Nice Memes
Doodhandvlee - • Lady Maria BL4 NG+6 No...
mrBorkD - • Elden Ring - Malenia, ...
GinoMachino - • HOW TO FIGHT MALENIA W...
ZeeVoke - • Amazing Elden Ring Det...
Mo0k - • Demon's Souls Remake :...
• Flame Spit is Fun - El...
Zullie The Witch - • Elden Ring - Teaching ...
• It puts the flaw in fl...
Swagapagos Turtle - • Malenia doesn't play b...
ZeroLenny - • Elden Ring BUT with a ...
Oroboro - • Bloodhound's Step is F...
Th3 toed sloth - • Elden ring cheater mee...
Holloweed420 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0teq...
Sajam - • "Scrub" is not a Skill...
Guides:
Maliketh - docs.google.com/document/d/15...
Pontiff Sulyvahn - docs.google.com/document/d/1Y...
As a bonus guide, mrBorkD has spent as much time as I did on this video just to make a hitless Malenia guide so check it out:
docs.google.com/document/d/1Q...
Timestamps:
0:00 Grab a snack
2:30 Rage Gaming and Terminology
4:52 Halcyon Hollow
7:17 No More Turn-Based Combat
10:54 Real Risk/Reward
13:45 Combo Extendo
18:36 (Un)Avoidable Damage
32:49 Unfair ≠ Boring
40:39 I Talk Too Much
43:26 Malenia Montage
46:31 Foreword Before We Talk Nitpicks
48:12 Google Gamer
51:31 More tools = less viability?
53:02 Sekiro Stan
1:00:31 Dungeon Dividends
1:06:56 Ruin Arcs
1:09:01 Shinobi Shenanigans
1:10:34 Malenia Posture Mechanic
1:12:40 What Are Your Hands For?
1:13:51 Chadahn
1:15:20 Pokemon Souls
1:21:48 Addressing the Allegations
1:23:07 Let's Wrap This Up
1:25:37 Idk How to End This

[@loopine]

Final Stray Thoughts and some Common Responses People always refer to the rally system in Bloodborne and praise it for enabling the player to be aggressive and have more fun. I don't think this playstyle is exclusive to bloodborne though, you can play this aggressive and absorb some hits as long as you level hp properly. The rally system only taught you to play aggro, it didn't unlock this playstyle. This is the distinction imo. Souls games have struggled in the past to teach the player how they should play, the game can give you all the tools in the world but most people just won’t use them unless they’re subtly forced to. Just look at shields being overly easy to crutch on in souls or the spirit emblems keeping players from experimenting with prosthetic combos more. Also Joseph complains that we don't have the resources to keep up with the faster enemies but neglects to mention that endurance regenerates faster than ever now, even turbo regening when you crouch or just click crouch for half a second. I would say you could make the arguement to defend waterfowl dance if you want to but yea it's definitely an insane and polarizing attack. I can guarantee most people will have a hell of a time ever trying to figure out a roll dodge for it and probably never will on their own. For me this meant crutching on bloodhound step on my blind playthrough, then seeing Ongbal dodge it with light roll and going "oh thats how you do it" and then doing the roll dodge ever since. Even when I go into boss fights strictly to observe and take notes there is a slim chance that I think I would've ever figured out the up close dodge on my own, even though bloodhound helped me figure out the direction I should be dodging. The thing is though, now that I know how to dodge waterfowl I fuckin love it, it's so satisfying to get the up close dodge and feels so baller when you space the first string and only use one single roll to dodge the whole combo and make it look effortless. My problem with waterfowl is that it's so fun to dodge, but learning how is an absolute bitch to figure out and usually will mean players reaching for a crutch and not getting that cool moment of figuring out a solution for the craziest attack they have ever seen. In this regard waterfowl is too hard, but I don't want them to change it now at this point. Just to further clarify my opinion on Malenia specifically I would argue she is fair but she is definitely far from the funnest boss in ER imo. My problem with her is the flow of the fight is weird with her just stringing together standalone attacks rather than having longer combos and flowcharts like Morgott for example. She was anecdotally my lightbulb moment for changing my mentality and approach to this game's combat though and I had all the days of footage of me fighting her so that's why she ended up being a focus of the video. Another idea for dungeon rewards after some heated drunk discord debates was that we could have themed dungeons so you know what type of reward you could expect. An example would be a crystal cave for a sorcery as the main reward. That way if you are making a mage build you know it will be worthwhile to do. The problem is that a strength build would have zero motivation to do it except for minor rewards and runes. Instead of theming the dungeons then, we could add questlines and rumors to the npcs so they could point you in the right direction. Sellen could give you some gossip or a treasure map that leads to a dungeon with a high level spell. This would also help fill out some more npc questlines in a refreshingly non-cryptic way. As long as we avoid the fetch quest trap. For the dungeon rewards being unique I could also mention that if you find a spell or weapon that you want to try you can easily re-spec to try it out and it's way easier than in ds3 and completely nonexistent in Bloodborne. Idk if there are just this many Dark Souls 1 boomers or what but it puzzles me as to why so many diehard Souls fans have such an aversion to actual rpg mechanics/systems, such as item crafting. Also wtf is this hand wringing about the hitless players. All these nerds who never bother to challenge run souls games, and have no idea what it's even like, whining that it needs to be fun while hitless so we should make it easier. Save the scrub sympathy and go try and hitless dark souls 3 right now and see just how miserable and janky it really is. Dark Soap pointed out to me that Great Runes don't carry over into ng+. Idk why this slipped my mind but yea. IF you want to do a lifesteal build then you could Blasphemous Blade, God Devourer Serpent Curved Sword, and Taker's Cameo, but this would only give hp on kills and not vs bosses. Godskin swaddling cloth talisman does give you hp on successive attacks though so there's that. Sucks but ah well. I'll reiterate that I wish there were more great runes like the Melania Rune that give playstyle altering properties. Again I still believe you can play like you might in bloodborne even without a rally system. Also I have yet to see footage but apparently elden stars and Radahn meteor can happen multiple times in one fight. I have yet to see this in ng+5 even after I stopped leveling at 125 so anecdotally I'm going to say for most people you will almost always see these attacks just once, and both are easy to dodge anyways if you know what to do (just Google the elden stars dodge already my god I even show it in the vid). Godskin nobles Belly Wog (Noble Prescence) seems to have been solved by hitless runners and you can run backwards out of it. Still unsure if its 100% consistent but check out a fellow challenge runner and ask them about it. There are some no roll runs of this boss out there. To the nerds who can only hyperfixate on one thing at a time yes, From tiptoeing the line between fair and unfair with a couple enemies out of hundreds in a game can be good game design. Stop pretending like they did it for every single boss and enemy. Yes I know many hitless runners have a laundry list of complaints about a few of the bosses, mostly Malenia since she is guilty of the most jank. For 99.5% of the playerbase they will not have their overall enjoyment of the entire game compromised because a few attack or hitboxes are not 100% perfectly clean, and I know this because it has existed in every souls game to date and people are now saying those were their favorites of all time, even when they too were unbalanced af on launch. I don't see people complaining that "malenias double swipe can be undodgeable into it in certain situations when you are on higher elevation," instead you see people saying Margit has undodgeable frame traps. Just because there are a handful of attacks that exist in this game out of hundreds that aren't cleanly perfect 100% of the time due to unintended bugs like projectiles getting hung up on terrain, doesn't mean that From suddenly shit their pants and forgot how to balance games. If you are a hitless runner than yes unfortunately you will have to play around bosses to mitigate certain moves because there is rng in the sense that an attack might bug out and end your run, but for the layman they will never even notice these issues most of the time. It's the same shit as when I showed Silverbullet getting killed by an invisible attack in his Lady Maria run while Joseph is there praising her balance while being able to sweep the jank under the rug. I am aware that hitless runs are not a great indicator of how good or fair a boss is, but it is instructive because majority of the complaints I see are just this attack or that attack is undodgeable when they are sorely mistaken and just need to learn how to dodge it. I can see why my desire to spotlight many of these under-watched creators came across as me using hitless runs as proof that bosses are perfectly fine the way they are already. There IS a myriad of legitimate problems with this game like all the rest, but once again the greater conversation about these games lost because scrubs are too busy spreading misinfo and muddying the water. There are still fucking redditors that to this very day claim that they forget to turn on poise in ds3. To the babbies saying I'm view hungry I started on this video when I had 50 subs and I just wanted to make it to share with my friends in the invader community so I wouldn't have to talk about the same shit over and over every single time we argued about Anderson's video on discord, with every person remembering what he said totally differently. I had to make my own timestamps for his video and takes notes over 5 watches just to even figure out his concrete stance on anything specific so I can understand how people end up misremembering and imprinting their own bias onto his analysis, given the wishy washy and perma-sidetracked nature of long form essays. Clip farming for ez gotcha's is one thing, but I really needed to make sure we are somewhat on the same page here at least. One last complaint about sekiro, who are all these guys coming out of the woodwork to say how much they love sekiro in order to then complain about Elden Ring. Where the fuck were all these fans when the game was getting lambasted for being an ultrahard, over-tuned, repetitive grind of L1 spam. Posers smh. I’ve noticed a huge wave of newcomers to sekiro lately and its been fantastic, but I think people forget just how much that game got shit on the year it released. I’m honestly shocked it got GOTY considering how many game journalists had to beat it with cheats. Lastly, to all the kind folks commenting things along the lines of "Good job on the video man but but I still agree with Joseph," thank you but please give yourself some credit. You can feel that Elden Ring isnt fun or fair enough and dislike it, you don't have to agree with either me or Joseph.

[@shawnmarcum8078]

Souls fans don't really like it when they experiment. Look at the worst souls bosses. Or levels which have experiments in them such as the bell dudes in Undead Crypt in Ds2 or the Depths in Ds1. They don't really know what they want and when they can't experiment things will remain the same. It can become stagnant and people will get bored. If they do new things and it doesn't turn out well (look at most of the shit in Dark Souls 2 as an example) then people won't buy it because it's not the same thing. People have no idea what they want. Zelda fans are just like that as well because Nintendo wants to experiment. God people are so stupid sometimes.

[@lucideclair6690]

I'm just curious, what are hitless runners saying about the bosses in Elden Ring? where can I find their thoughts? I would be curious to know what someone like Ongbal thinks about Elden Ring bosses, b/c I found his fights against them very entertaining

[@loopine]

@@lucideclair6690 look thru this comment section and see Swagopagos, mrBorkD, and NathanSavageDamages comments. Also most hitless runners give their opinions on bosses the description of their videos where they do things like hitless and base level runs

[@lucideclair6690]

@@loopine gotcha thanks

[@deogracias9869]

I've been thinking about all this since Elden Rings released, thanks for calling out all the assholes with impossible standards.

[@mkrazcal]

Wake Up Babe, another niche, underrated youtuber just dropped

[@Mechpilot0790]

Had me at the intro music honestly

[@AC-hj9tv]

Thanks for waking me up ♥

[@CarlNiemi]

And then dropped a second time, I just randomly got this recommended to me

[@diamondhamster4320]

What is so niche and underrated by being a contrarian to a popular and overrated KZbinr???

[@yourdad5799]

​@@diamondhamster4320 whoose side are you on?

[@ianszabo2079]

One of the funniest things I heard early on about this game from Zero Punctuation was that jump attacks make the game infinitely more easy - I have to give him credit for realizing how profound a change it was

[@CODA96]

And infinitely more ridiculous seeing greatsword users jump around like in super mario because its simply faster than normal R1.

[@KABLAMMATS]

​@@CODA96 crouch R1 enter the scene

[@jowoel5073]

bro i was abusing the shit out of jump attacks on my first playthrough

[@flamingmanure]

@@CODA96 after factoring in recovery times, no, jumping attack greatswords is nowhere near faster than R1, they are quite slower, leave you much more vulnerable for longer, and takes much more stamina to perform. the one thing elden ring taught me is that you should use all the attacks, ashes, heavys and lights, jumping heavys and lights etc etc for example, some of godfreys moves start too fast to heavy jump attack with a greatsword, but leaves you just enough time to dodge out if you use a light jumping attack, this applies to so many enemies factoring in so many weapon classes. ER as a whole is laughably more complex than past games barring sekiro.

[@flamingmanure]

@@jowoel5073 and you probably got abused right back more than you shouldve if you always spammed jumping, trick is to use all the attacks depending on the boss/enemy.

[@littlebluewolfie]

Malenia clicked for me when I understood that she flinched super easy and I could even knock her out of combos. Basically: I lost respect and started bullying that woman

[@ISesseriI]

It makes it even more funny how Joseph had such trouble considering str builds are horrifically strong, especially against her. I was telling someone I had so much trouble with her my first kill and he said he simply used dual wield colossal weapons and just did jumping attacks, and didn't even know why I had so much trouble to begin with.

[@stephenm707]

The main problem is still the water fowl dance but even still the way she gets staggered is completely random. She usually always stagger after she jumps to the left but there’s no consistency to how she is staggered out of an attack. Some times on the same move she’ll get staggered other times she’ll just poise through your attack. I felt like all the poise breaks and staggers you could do against bosses felt cheap and dumb throughout the game, they also feel super random especially because they for some reason didn’t add a stagger meter to bosses.

[@tony_tonelg]

@@ISesseriI strength was dog shit on release

[@alanthe2]

I beat Mogh’s second phase yesterday with serpent bow and serpent arrows and kukri because I’m not great at dodging around the blood flame. I’m playing a character using as many of the mechanics in the game as I can making heavy use of crafting. It absolutely the most fun I’ve had with this game. Limitations are a fun challenge but if someone’s self imposed limitations are annoying them, then it’s not the game at fault.

[@Shad0wmoses]

the thing is, self imposed limitations can highlight glaring flaws or issues within the game that would have otherwise been an after thought because you have enough health to not care. things like the camera spazzing out when theres gigantic bosses having mobility equivalent to small ninjas. things like lockon remaining active when godskin noble is rolling in circles around pillars, then last second decides to toggle off at the last second and fuck up your positioning. in an effort to won up their previous games, the bosses get jammed all these different movesets that they were already redlining with in ds3 with the sister friede fight. valiant gargoyles is a boss that not only fucks with the camera alot so you have to free aim..but when u free aim you have to go back and forth between 2 of them. to add insult to injury they made it so the things spew poison mist that is barely readable in your peripherals because it blends in with the blue/greenish water. i still have alot of fun with the game but theres so many things where i felt they just decided to throw everything into a design but the kitchen sink.

[@alanthe2]

@@Shad0wmoses I won’t argue you with you about Valiant Gargoyles, that fight is dogshit if you’re trying to beat them solo even when you’re levelled appropriately. The poison makes those two needlessly overtuned. That said, I broadly agree with the points made in the video. I’ll summon Bernahl for Godskin Duo and not think twice about it but if a player wants to strictly play through it solo, then have patience with the process, discover a better strategy and learn it or stop complaining because ultimately, the mechanics are there in game to use and you do it to yourself.

[@theresnothinghere1745]

@moses " self imposed limitations can highlight glaring flaws or issues within the game" If those flaws are the result of self imposed limitations and something you wouldn't expect to see in otherwise normal gameplay, no. If the flaw is only an issue when you go out of your way to ignore game elements then its not some glaring issue as its already been addressed in the game. Valiant Gargoyles camera handling and readability are not a self imposed flaw, it happens as a result of normal gameplay even if you decide to summon, its a flaw in the game. Joseph not using tools or ashes of wars at all and complaining about his limited capability to act against bosses is a self imposed flaw, as having done so would have solved his issue (more poise to trade hits, more defense to trade at a better advantage, more acess to attacks that can interupt enemies and deal more poise damage).

[@rasmachris94]

This is the conclusion I came to and why I agree with the assessment that he's a scrub. Not only does he complain about everything under the sun rather than mechanics in the game itself. But then proceeds to say he will not use very legitimate strategies for beating the boss or interrupting annoying mechanics that he cant overcome. Like, what do you want? You said it was too hard with your build because you cant find attack windows - people give you explicit tips to make attack windows and you still complain calling it boring... Literally no pleasing these kinds of people. I'm just going to assume that he doesnt like souls games when he doesnt have a baby safe window. At that point, just use a sword and board if you want to play it safe.

[@alanthe2]

@@rasmachris94 Yeah, I mean, I’ve been fighting Mohg all week and I used to really struggle against him but with the DLC due I’ve beaten him with three of my characters and I’ve been co-opping to help others too. He’s still tough, but now I understand where the openings are. So why not just use the mechanics available and then build up the challenge by removing them incrementally rather than going in cold and expecting to power through? It’s a bit mad to be honest.

[@dogemaester]

"I'm so good at this fight but I've never beaten it", resonates with my soul.

[@connor7329]

“this fight isn’t even fucking hard - easy piece of shit” - the one time i get lucky after getting plowed by the same boss all day

[@BigFatSoul]

If you were good at the fight you would have beaten it. It’s the way how it works…

[@DarkSoapp]

you get malenias greatrune extremely lategame and can only use it on like 4 main bosses and it doesnt carry over to ng+ so the being able to play like bloodborne point is not entirely true aside from that great video

[@loopine]

Yea fair enough. I replay these games quite a lot so I don't mind if I use it in new game plus. But yea basically you aren't using it on your first playthrough Edit: oh wait it doesn't carry over wtf? That's lame af then. That's so bizarre like I definitely knew that but it just completely slipped my mind. I suppose you would have to do a blasphemous blade and God Devourer Serpent Curved Sword build with Takers Cameo then.

[@aceoffires1032]

Well granted you can actually skip a lot of exploring and straight up kill Morgott, get to the Mountaintops and the two medallion halves and fight Malenia even before you fight Godrick but through natural progression and first playthrough no you won't be able to get until late game

[@loopine]

@@aceoffires1032 I wonder if they could've made a really obscure questline to get to malenia early somehow so you could get the rune early if you are a God at her. Like beat Mohg and can use Miquella to teleport to haligtree depths

[@aceoffires1032]

@@loopine that would be interesting, especially since people never use the gate to get to Mohgwyn in the first place and go through Varre's quest line, it would several hours earlier, it would work, least in theory

[@saweendra8690]

@@loopine you can do lot better great stars, godskin apostle cloth talismen first heals a tiny bit every hit other heal with consecutive hits, have icon shield and blessed dew tailsmen, plus takers cameo or better assassins crimson talismen since its a great hammer can do posie break easily . put bestial vitality and a have the heal over time physick and the heal with damage physick in the mix and can have one of the most annoying to kill builds ever. plus put wild strikes on the great stars .

[@sorath1396]

Whenever Malenia uses that move where she grabs you, throws up in the air, and impales you, I'm never even mad. That move is cool as shit.

[@nox6497]

Ooh, that one deals big damage. But thankfully she gives you a good telegraph showing you her hand. A little wave, if you will.

[@legodude9]

A wave goodbye.

[@evangelicae_rationis]

@@nox6497Yeah, that’s what supposed to happen if you get literally impaled, big damage.

[@putinstea]

Is it cool as shit the third time too?

[@anonisnoone6125]

Thankfully it's really easy to dodge. Unlike that bs waterfowl move.

[@makaleadam]

What I have come to realize after finishing my first playthrough in Elden Ring is that you can and should be aggressive with bosses, and being aggressive will reward you. Hesitation is literally defeat.

[@incius8341]

playing Sekiro made Elden Ring much easier to pick up.

[@enman009]

For real, Sekiro unlocks a new eye into Bloodborne and Elden Ring. Aggressiveness, regardless of build, is the way to go.

[@Modie]

Quite the opposite actually. Because most bosses have long hit strings with only very few allowing you to use your own attacks, the bosses incentivise you to stay away and only roll in at the last attack of their hit string. There is literally no benefit to you being aggressive and learning to dodge the whole hit string in a lot of cases. And if you say that being agressive means that you should trade a hit here and there, then my question would be what the point of these animations is to begin with. In both ways, the animations are fluff you are supposed to ignore. I don't think that is the intention.

[@sandrotsirghiladze8852]

​@@incius8341for real and the opposite was true for me as well.

[@clunkye8053]

@@Modie why is bro trying to spread misinformation 💀

[@pastorofmuppets4552]

A wise final boss once said “Hesitation is Defeat.”

[@ducktape-3470]

Still struggling with him. Peak Video Game Finale Boss.

[@Hary_Half-Mast]

He shall forever be the best old man boss

[@lorenzo8208]

Hesitation is the feet

[@aishaali9771]

@@lorenzo8208 I inhaled the rice I was eating and had a choking fit while cry-laughing. So thank you for that x

[@SpecShadow]

"There is a fine line between consideration and hesitation, the former is wisdom, the latter is fear" - Izaro

[@spookyjohn6543]

"Hmm yes, i will click this video about someone i've never heard of."

[@willharcus110]

Joseph Anderson is a legend and I love him but he does have some silly takes on the soulsborne series

[@Slender_Man_186]

@willharcus110 as a Souls vet his takes regarding Elden Ring’s are entirely right, the infinite stamina is straight bullshit and their movesets are over tuned as fuck, mainly with too many combos that seamlessly flow into the next leaving no opening, or combos have extended variants that are impossible to tell apart from their normal versions until it’s too late to take advantage of any opening that was created.

[@angelamengualcortinas3614]

​@@Slender_Man_186his takes about ER are far from entirely right. I really like Joseph, i think his videos are fun and provide an interesting view-point, and ER's video is not outside of that, but he also says blatantly wrong things, like ER bosses encouraging a pasive playstile. On the contrary, once you learn to strafe some attacks and use properly jump attacks you can be super aggressive with the bosses. Seriously, i started off agreeing with him since i didn't understand what the game wanted from me in my first playthough, but after replaying the game some more and experimenting with my kit... No, he was wrong on that. And yeah, I'm a souls vet too.

[@skoop4477]

@@Slender_Man_186these kinds of takes just baffle me because i think "did we play the same game?"

[@PositronCannon]

@@angelamengualcortinas3614 Exact same experience here. If I'd watched Joseph's video back when the game launched I would have totally agreed with him, but now after actually learning how the combat works in ER, not so much.

[@Swirly1000x]

One of my favourite things about Elden Ring combat is the way that enemies don't just let you hit them in a pseudo turn based fashion. Elden Ring was my first Souls game, and it was insanely tough for me first playthrough, but everytime I beat a boss I felt triumph because it felt like the bosses genuinely wanted to stop me. When I fought Radagon and Elden Beast, it genuinely felt like they wanted to defeat me and stop me from becoming Elden Lord. They didn't pull any punches or wait for 3 hours so I could hit them. They just fought me, desperately doing everything in their power to stop the Tarnished from becoming Elden Lord, to keep that triumph from me. So when I did prevail, it felt like more of a victory, because I really felt like the bosses were giving it their all and I had to win not by taking advantage of specific openings, but by outsmarting them and creating my own openings. And even though I'm a lot better at the game now, I still get that feeling each playthrough.

[@shinyhydreigon7257]

Yep exactly, going back to DS3 or earlier games it feels so jarring having a massive knight or monster fighting to the death just sitting there just long enough for the player to get an attack in before going back to moving just as they were. Furthermore to your point the bosses really have a sense of desperation to them, my personal favorite being Morgott with his never ending combo's, and especially his Phase 2.5 combo. Fun stuff.

[@gibbs5720]

Yes!! I finished the game a few days ago, it was so good. The only boss I didn't beat was Malenia, and I'm trying now. Is so hard, I died so many times. But I'm feeling good now, I'm at a point where I've learned all of her phase one, now it's more about mechanical consistency. When you get in the rhythm of the fight it feels so awesome, is like a dance. You feel really, really powerful when you start to hit more than she hits you. The sensation of learning how to defeat a boss is something really special.

[@glatykoffi6672]

​@@shinyhydreigon7257 It's because bosses there simulated stamina.

[@aderz3619]

One of the boss which emphasizes this "not letting you win" the most, I think, is the crucible knight. If you attack them they will have their shield to protect themselves and will counterattack, and most of the time their attacks just don't f*** stop. It's even more relevant in phase 2. When you think you can attack they surprise you with their tails. They are very hard but I love these bosses. (Parrying them with a shield is something even funnier)

[@aderz3619]

Another one I thought of is the godskin, the slim one. Whenever you're far and want to heal he'll throw a fireball at you. That's maybe "not fair" but concretely it makes far more sense.

[@kaptainkoffee9074]

I am very late but a minor thing I found while fighting Pontiff in DS3. If your playing pure mage, the invisibility spell hidden body will for some reason break agro completely as long as it's maintained... which will allow to spam long range spells and absolutely delete him without breaking a sweat. I haven't tried it on any other bosses but it was fucking hilarious. I only found out because I used hidden body to get passed the knights without having to roll. I got far away from Pontiff in the fight at one point and the dude just let me fuck his day up it was probably the funniest glitch/tech I've ever encountered in Dark Souls.

[@TheSilvantor]

That's very interesting actually. I suspect it only works on Pontiff and it might be for a very specific reason: he stands there and only starts walking when you get closer. Maybe it has something to do with how that works. Generally, bosses in Souls games have infinite aggro range, apart from cases like this.

[@treasurewuji8740]

My mimic and I just locked mogh in this back hand slash😂 without cornering him. Fucking funny

[@Amalgam03]

I find that Malenia’s first phase, she’s extremely passive and lore walks at you, watching you fully charge an R2 and get staggered, and the moment she senses fear in the player she becomes hyper aggressive and relentlessly attacks.

[@loopine]

That's a good way to put it

[@mr.seraphom8522]

"Oh, You're Approaching Me?"

[@Quicksilver_Cookie]

She's actually super passive in first phase period. She is one of the very few bosses that lets you just run away and heal, buff, swap weapons for as long as you want. She just defaults to this slow walk when you're not attacking. She mostly just retaliates, or becomes aggressive if you stick close to her. It's a fight where player 100% dictates the pace. You can disengage from her pretty easily, and she will very rarely chase you.

[@WokeandProud]

​​​@@Quicksilver_CookieLorewise it shows how cocky she is in her absolute belief that you stand no chance against her she becomes hyper aggressive in her second phase because now she realizes you're basically another Radahn.

[@Optimatum]

@@WokeandProud also she's blind and can't figure out where you are unless you move...

[@MainTopmastStaysail]

The real annoying attack with Rykard is the delayed earthquake he does in phase 1. It looks like it could be jumpable but isn't, lasts a little too long to roll and is a little too wide to run through unless you're pre-running. You kinda have to just position so he doesn't use it.

[@loopine]

The way to dodge that is also how you dodge melania's first flurry of waterfowl (even if you are close). You sprint away and then do a sprinting jump when the attack comes (for Rykard you run to the side). I also found an alternative dodge that involves jumping onto the corpse piles. kzbin.info/www/bejne/hZK4gpKFirCgnpo Also, you can just block it, even at RL1 with an unupgraded Serpent Hunter and no armor. But yea, it's probably still the most f*cked attack in the game tbh besides maybe ancestral regal spirit roll.

[@Hayden-qj1lo]

@@loopinedude you’re def getting my sub, most people wouldn’t reply let alone actually give good advice!

[@Sohelanthropus]

Just use a shield or run away

[@treasurewuji8740]

@@Sohelanthropusfuck. Does that mean I can block the earth one from godrick too?

[@evangelicae_rationis]

I still don’t understand how to dodge that, so i just tank it 😂

[@blummie1215]

theres a huge difference between saying that elden ring in particular has apects to its bosses that make them less enjoyable than other Fromsoft games and saying they're terrible on the whole or they're all good, you just don't get it. There are parts of fights that I feel give cheap damage, but that doesn't sour my experience of the whole encounter. As an example, I hate Godrick's whirlwind because it can randomly punish you for properly punishing his own whiff (And I mean after only getting 1 hit on him. not being greedy). But on the whole, I still think the fight is fun and overall fair, its just that one bit I don't enjoy facing, even if it "makes sense" from certain game design perspectives. There's also shit like Margit's 7 decade long windup that feels weird and unnatural compared to literally any other game in existence. But that fight is still fun, and has plenty of moments I enjoy, so those problems only make up about 25% of my experience. Its important to realize that yeah, you can always adapt to what a boss is doing, but there can still be issues with a fight thats a good experience on the whole. Just because I know how to deal with Waterfowl, doesn't mean that I have to like that it was included and have no real issues with it

[@arosbastion7052]

nah, the game from fire giant to the end is just dogshit lmao

[@skdeathxlife]

@@arosbastion7052 It's really not, last few bosses were some of the best in the game

[@janefkrbtt]

​​@@skdeathxlife I think this disagreement comes from what ppl enjoy in these games. I've always hated fighting big stuff. dragons, giants, giant blobs of hitbox. and once you get to fire giant almost all of the rest of the bosses are huge. and if you don't mind or enjoy those fights than it doesn't even matter. but to me or op here, that shit kinda stinky.

[@skdeathxlife]

@@janefkrbtt I agree with op I'm talking to the guy who said the game is shit after the fire giant (Also hate the dragons the only good one was placidusax)

[@janefkrbtt]

@@skdeathxlife 🤝

[@user-dj1xq4yd6g]

Dude, this video has made really interested in playing Elden Ring again because I know that I will be even better next time and have more fun. I always say that these games are about confidence and what From does really well is scare you as a new player in every game. The absolute biggest factor that determines boss difficulty for me is whether or not I have beaten it before, the biggest knowledge check is not what the boss is strong or weak to or its moveset. It is that it is beatable. It's not that I get better at the game, I just get more confident with the game and dare do things I otherwise wouldn't dare to do. I remember the first time I beat Kalameet. He was impossible to me, but then during a run something just clicked. He did a side swipe attack and it was just like I saw something I hadn't seen before, and I instantly knew that I would beat him. It was like I awoke my sharingan or something, and I knew that he was easy. Never had problems with him after that.

[@shinyhydreigon7257]

"what From does really well is scare you as a new player in every game" 100% When DS1 came out it was praised by some but many claimed it was "artificial difficulty", similarly when DS3 came out Midir and Nameless King were hailed as the hardest bosses in gaming, and hard for the sake of being hard. Same with Sekiro, being called a rhythm game that you just remember the same tricky timings that are unintuitive for difficultys sake. We know these are all untrue. Like you said Fromsoft is so good at truly instilling fear in the player, and making bosses that seem impossible. At first. But if you embrace losing, embrace death, you can keep trying to beat it, learning new tricks every attempt, seeing things you didnt see before, eventually it is beatable. I think the reason ERs claims of artificial difficulty have been so loud is because it had been so long since we got a new Fromsoft game, and players forgot what it is like to lose. Players got the idea in their heads that they were good at these games, that they were "Souls Vets" and shouldn't be scared of bosses, but more importantly they shoudnt be dying, again and again. When you let yourself fail, you unlock your true strengths.

[@ronthorn3]

@@shinyhydreigon7257beautifully said.

[@themambawarrior2290]

56:46 Fun fact: Pontiff was originally supposed to be the final boss, and his arena was originally for a boss version of the Fire Witch (the tall guys that shoot fire earlier in the city). Given both his original intended placement and his importance in the lore/story, it makes sense that he has a complicated and difficult moveset.

[@loopine]

That is definitely some valuable context, thank you

[@firepenguin38]

Everyone says pontiff was hard. He's not. I thought Aldrich and dancer were loads harder but that's what's good about souls. We all can debate out hardest or easiest bosses

[@errorcringyname4044]

​@@firepenguin38totally agree pontiff was a joke. Dancer was a pain.

[@xslite300]

​@@firepenguin38Aldrich 💀

[@firepenguin38]

@@errorcringyname4044 Aldrich was a real ass. Dancer wasn't really so hard but much as I tried to telegraph her she still seemed to one up me lol. She's my most hated main Game boss. I literally did not like the fights. I enjoyed Aldrich tho although had me about to rage quit a couple times lol

[@meh2285]

I think the issue most people have with Elden Ring's difficulty is that there isn't much of a middle ground in terms of challenge. Based on your build, certain bosses either require a ridiculous amount of effort to beat, or can be trivialized via summons and magic. Compared to previous games in the series, builds offer less of a skill curve, where people of low, adverage, and advanced skill can play through the game with suitable builds to their skill level. This results in people of adverage skill either getting frustrated with their build's high difficulty or getting board from playing an overpowered build because it's too easy, without a clear middle ground.

[@loopine]

Yea i agree its more polarizing. It's likely a side effect of the arms race From finds itself in to keep make harder games each time they make a game similar to dark souls, since if they just made another batch of ds3 bosses I guarantee it would be a ds2 situation where everyone just complains that it's way too easy to the point where the devs say "Fuck you" and give us Scholar of the First Sin edition. I guess the compromise they decided they had to make bosses even harder but also introduce some new mechanics to help along the players that need it.

[@stolensentience]

@@loopine still no excuse for not making a tighter, more focused game that allows a more solid learning curve

[@cybercyrus6402]

@@loopine i think their approach def is what made it so controversial. like in theory this idea of give players a ton of tools to make the game easier, and then more experienced players can simply not use those tools sounds amazing. Even in the previous games this is basically the point of sl1 runs, they remove the entire rpg part of the game basically to create a higher challenge. the difference is soul level 1 changes very little of the basics of the game. The overall experience is simply just, you do less damage, and can take less hits. Compare that to elden ring, what's the difference between using all the tools available, or sticking to a only rolling melee weapon build where you try to dodge every attack and get hits in when you can. Using spirit summons alone can trivialize fights, removing any need to really engage with a bosses full mechanics since they can just deaggro and focus your summon giving you tons of time to heal. There is some fun to be found playing with spirit summons esp if you find the game super hard without them, but unlike in previous games the normal way you're expected to play the game is one of the least fun ways to play the game. whereas the what i would consider most fun way to play the game feels like i'm doing a soul level 1 run even though i'm doing a normal run where i'm even a bit overleveled if anything. You could argue that spirit summons could be considered in the same tier as spellcasting from previous games, which can allow you to ignore engaging with bosses mechanics, but the difference is there's still a choice there and a "normal" difficulty if you will. What is elden rings "normal difficulty"? Not every boss was this way but man, bosses like malenia took me as long as it takes me to do a no-hit sl1 boss. I don't mind because i love SL 1 runs, but if i didn't man i would not like this game. It feels like there's no middle ground between what is basically a cheesing a boss, and getting shit stomped by them until you know them better than your own family. Overall though, i love elden ring and agree with most of your points. It's frustrated me that there's loads of youtubers complaining about bosses when the main bosses mostly felt great. The game has loads of flaws, but the main bosses imo are not one of them.

[@loubloom1941]

@@stolensentience that doesn't really mean anything, you're mad you had a hard time with the game and are making an excuse as to why. There is a proper learning curve in ER its just steeper.

[@loubloom1941]

All of their games are like this to an extent. Where a certain build can trivialize some bosses and make some tougher. It's been around since demons souls. ER just gives far more options. There doesn't need to be some vague "middleground" in these games because you can create your own "middleground" type of build, even in ER. It's just that many bosses are noticeably tougher. Anyone can play through elden ring with any build, at any skill level. It just takes patience. Fact.

[@michaelp4387]

Although I find this video more insightful than anything I've seen so far on the mechanics and ideas of elden ring and probably the rest of dark souls, I still find it somewhat uncomfortable to be called a nerd or scrub simply because I haven't experimented with every possible move in every possible scenario.

[@loopine]

I mean you don't have to try everything. Its more like I rolled right and got hit, next time I will roll left. Oh that worked, now I know how to dodge that attack forever. That's it. You can go above and beyond and try to optimize it with a spaced charged R2 later if you want to get better/fancy so that adds to replayability. Not understanding every facet of the game or having every attack memorized does not make you a scrub. You can even say I don't like having to learn these bosses and I hate this game because its too tedious to learn the bosses. What a scrub would say is "this game is badly designed and the developers forgot how to design bosses" or " boss attacks are undodgeable and my build is completely unviable" simply because you're salty that you whiffed a jumping attack in neutral and got punished for it.

[@michaelp4387]

@@loopine Sure, I never would have known that some of what seems like a long boss combo is punishable in the middle of their action if not for your video, which by the way I very much appreciate. I think that's how the players get the impression that "the boss never stops", and "it's unfair".

[@goosechucker2154]

@@loopine I'm pretty sure jumping attacks had the fastest recovery animation out of all heavy weapon attacks at the time he played it. I imagine he was salty over being punished for jumping attacks because he was using a hell of a lot of them.

[@greibert1447]

@@loopine Ah yes, makes perfect sense with Waterfowl dance close up.

[@ducasse8473]

​@@michaelp4387the issue isn't the fact that they have a long combo. You can just run away from most long comboes or figure out how to dodge through most long comboes. The issue is the fact that you can't interact with this long combo. You can only dodge it or parry it(but then you cant use your swcondary cool weapon or a magic thing).

[@marchmelloow]

13:25 From what I've heard, Joseph played all through Armored Core 6 with one build and _refused_ to switch his build, despite hating the game for it. His chat even told him to switch and he still refused. Joseph truly just doesn't want to learn how to play games, but still thinks he's justified in complaining about it.

[@theresnothinghere1745]

That's pretty much it, ER and AC6 both fundementally are about exploring the game's mechanical variety. This is why ER gives so much build tools as a reward, its asking you to consider them. Refusing to engage with that to any extent (especially in AC6 where its much much more prevelant than in ER) is fundementally no different than trying a challenge run on your first playthrough only to complain about the challenge itself.

[@marchmelloow]

​@@theresnothinghere1745 It's kind of the same situation as duels and honor invasions: From didn't make the game with the idea that players would use invasions for anything other than to practically cosplay patches, but players decided to do them anyways; and From didn't give the player a massive amount of weapons, items, and spells with the idea that players would pick a "build" and play with just that for the whole game. "Build? What's a build? I just gave players tools to win fights." Because of how long the game is, I changed up my build after each area to try everything, since every area felt like it was basically an entire game, so it felt natural to change my build against certain bosses. For example, I used the Mist Raven skill for most of the game after I got it, but had to change it for bosses like Malenia that use combos that are bad for the single attack dodge ability.

[@apophis7712]

I know Joseph isn't dumb enough to play through the entire game using just the starter AC, but if he starts making shit up about Armored Core, he better be ready for the pushback from people who actually think

[@themosin1852]

I can understand getting upset about elden ring kinda forcing you to change between rock paper scissor builds, because respeccing is done with a finite resource. But in the AC series, the game is made to be played with different mechs between some missions. It forces you to diversify and have different builds for different missions. Don't hate the game for making you throw out scissor and paper when all you wanna do is throw rock out and you get punished for it.

[@Jakster840]

You fighting Malenia and screaming into the mic was way funnier than I anticipated it being.

[@loopine]

Nobody fucks with uncle Lupine when he's been drinking, that includes fictional bosses

[@Jakster840]

@@loopine dude idk how you play something like this while drinking that much. I become way too sloppy and then quit and go play DRG. either way, it was fucking hilarious and I need to catch a stream of yours.

[@loopine]

@@Jakster840 I just did Fire giant, Commander Niall, Astel, and Godskin Noble with an unupgraded zweihander at RL1 with No Aux or Armor pretty hammered not too long ago lol I need some beers so I don't get bored on 30 minute attempts

[@h.s6352]

You make a lot of good points, but I will never accept the close range Waterfowl Dance dodge to be a good argument in defense of the move. Running in a circle under Malenia and switching direction at the last frame of her start up animation IS NOT an intended mechanic, it's counterintuitive and most certainly not a dodge. You're just confusing her AI targeting to miss you in a way which isn't intended. Waterfowl Dance IS MEANT to never miss you in close range, and just because speed/challenge runners found a stupid way to glitch it, doesn't mean it's a well thought out or designed move. The intended design for the move is to force players to run away, and sure enough if you have enough space it's not that hard to survive, but this still creates moments where she can bust the move out while you're recovering from an animation or approaching her, and that means playing outside of the move's range is preferable, and that makes it boring and extremely passive. It would have been good if you could stagger her out of the move using a jumping R2; the window is already narrow as it is and this way the player has to make the correct call quickly, run towards her and stagger or run away and dodge. That is an engaging way to do it which encourages aggression and rewards player experimentation with the mechanics of the game. But no, WFD is left in its current state as the stupidest least intuitive move to deal with in the entire Soulsborne subgenre.

[@loopine]

I've seen this argument a lot and I don't get it at all tbh. IMO they obviously knew about the close range dodge, they tested so many variations of this move and redesigned it and clearly and insane amount of dev time went into just this one move. Why would they want to force you to run away when its clearly not possible in all situations?

[@h.s6352]

​@@loopine No way to know why they would want anything but the only alternative to running away is an exploit that messes with her AI targeting to make her miss you. This is not a game mechanic or technique which is introduced in Elden Ring or taught to the player. Running under Malenia in a circle is not something that builds on or compliments any gameplay mechanics or systems that are introduced or explained to the player. It's literally just a an AI targeting trick. It's the kind of thing you should reasonably only expect challenge and speed runners (the people whose job is to break the game) to know. Since the end goal is surviving the attack and winning this is "fine" but it still stands to reason to say: WFD's intended design seems to encourage passivity. Players just found a silly way around it.

[@loopine]

@@h.s6352 You say its an exploit, I say it's an intended dodge. Guess we can only hope for an interview

[@DarkLordToturials]

@@loopine Maybe they just fucked up, wouldn't be the first time haha

[@Slender_Man_186]

@@loopine I don’t see how you can say From knew about the close range dodge, it’s so random it’s like something that was discovered during a Tool Assisted Speedrun.

[@thedigitalodyssey1103]

When he said "woowoowoowoo woo woo woowoo"... I felt that

[@notslimshady2943]

Hit trading in Elden Ring, especially in late game, isn’t all that applicable because of bosses long combos you can get locked in to and their damage. You try to hit trade with a late game boss, they WILL kill you fast. There needs to be a mechanic that the player can take advantage of, posture breaking doesn’t happen as often and seems to happen whenever the game feels like it. Bloodbornes DLC boss Orphan of Kos is a perfect example. You’re meant to trade hits with that boss, you are meant to match his aggression and it works because of the rally system and quickstep dodge. If you take too much damage you can quickly heal and get back in the fight. Sekiro also works withan aggressive playstyle because of the deflection and posture mechanic Elden Ring just has “dodge attack” when the bosses are as aggressive as Bloodborne and Sekiro bosses. If Elden Ring had another option that allows the player to avoid damage or better trade, it would be better

[@loopine]

Hard disagree

[@enman009]

Hit trading can work in ER if you build your character properly, but it is NOT a main gameplay style like Bloodborne, which is a completely different game philosophy with different enemies. You can be aggressive with ER enemies because many of their attacks can miss if you position yourself properly, or if you gain distance and then attack in certain moments. If you want a hit trade focused character, you need one of four Dragoncrest Shield talisman, a colossal that can give you great hyper armor, a talisman that gives you health on subsequent attacks, alongside any strong Ash of War. However, doing hit trade with less than 60 Vigor and none of the above? That's not plausible nor a mandatory way to play.

[@markopusic8258]

I believe Elden Ring lacks a bit of polish with its difficulty, mainly because damage ramps up to absolutely ridiculous degrees by the time you reach Mountaintops, and also some bosses because of various complaints, be it poor visual clarity because of the camera with Fortissax and Lansseax, ganks made of mobs that aren't specifically crafted to work as a gank because it increases the likelyhood of facing pattern overlap, which is still as frustrating as it was with Lud&Zallen in DS2, or other specific issues. However, I very much think the evolution of the combat was the right direction for Elden Ring. I've malded countless times during my 5 or 6 playthroughs, but the idea of shifting the "turn based combat" from the previous games into a semi-endless flurry of attacks you have to break apart to find exploitable gaps for counters, yes, I'm all about that, it adds a new layer of complexity to boss design that makes for a refreshing experience.

[@personunknown4573]

Agree 100% and I can’t even fault Fromsoft cause it’s the first time they attempted this change I feel like dlc or new games that attempt this kinda of Risk/Reward fighting will be better implemented

[@apophis7712]

Tbh, the difficulty spike didn't phase me that much. It felt just like Bloodborne after killing Rom and DS3 after Dancer

[@primary_magic1227]

The problem is that this works when facing a single enemy, but lots of times there are more than one on screen, making it an endless flurry of attacks you cant do anything about, except run away and spam ranged attacks.

[@tony_tonelg]

@@personunknown4573 sekiro already did this and did it infinitely better

[@illusive-mike]

I think the big difference from Sekiro in terms of the flexibility of evasive options (i-frame rolls, jumping, low-profiling, walking) is that Sekiro communicates very clearly what to use in any given situation. You jump the sweeps, Mikiri the thrusts, jump and return the lightning, dodge the slams. And all of these attacks have a special telegraph in the form of a danger symbol, because you're supposed to just parry the other attacks without hesitation, since Hesitation is Defeat. When the ape throws a huge... boulder at you and you're bad at dodging you can just block it with your dinky katana, and the worst it will do is stagger you for a few seconds and deny you one punish opportunity. Elden Ring gives you all of the options, but none of the help. Since there's no general rule of "everything but these things can and should be parried" there's no universal callout for attacks that allow/require different evasion options, so even to somebody who has beat and enjoyed Sekiro it could become somewhat unclear how to evade certain attacks that shouldn't just be i-frame rolled. Just from this video, I wouldn't expect to jump Morgott's tail because it is so big, nor the Beast's AoE attack because it looks so tall, and low-profiling wouldn't even occur to me. Between this and the lack of an in-game explanation of posture breaking, Elden Ring has a lot of depth but doesn't communicate it very well. This complicates the problem of learning the bosses and gittin' gud, all while leaving a pile of "easy mode" options on the table. Basically, Sekiro adds a lot of options and guides a "bad player" through them. Elden Ring dumps the same options on you and expects you to figure out how to use them with no guidance and little indication they're there at all. All while having some of the strongest magic in all of FromSoft's games and the Spirit Ash system both presented much more prominently. Edit: also, the temptation argument leads to a diametrically opposite conclusion on the "easy mode" question for me. Because right now, the tools to make the game easy are all readily available to the point where scrubs may end up with takes like "is it all designed around me using this obvious stuff?" Shunting some of these features into a clearly labeled easy mode would make it more obvious: no, we designed the game to be beaten normally with these fundamental tools, git gud at using them. It would, if anything, reduce the temptation, because popping the Mimic wouldn't be as simple and immediately accessible as just equipping it in a slot and using it.

[@duckdodgers1953]

Marge should have been a blocker for the rest of the game and tuned for a +0 weapon, solo only, base level player like in DS3 Giving away all those overpowered ways of beating the game with exploration means people reach the endgame not having learned anything about the combat. Then, when even the overpowered shit isn't enough to steam roll everything there's an abyss between what the player is capable of and what the game asks of them Someone who did it "the hard way" is much more likely to have a smoother difficulty curve (even if the absolute values of the difficulty are higher) simply because they couldn't mindlessly roflstomp 95% of the game

[@bbluva20]

I have to disagree, you have all the tools necessary to avoid damage or block/parry like you said (and some spells give even more defensive options), so the impetus is on the player to chose what tactic is best. Sure, some enemy attacks can be a little unclear at first glance, but this is an insignificant hurdle with one or two attempts to see what works. A huge problem that you (and most players) don’t realize, is that leveling up your Vigor as your most important stat, will give you these chances to learn and make mistakes. I roll my eyes when players get one-shot to almost any attack that isn’t some huge grab attack or massive explosion. You should always be able to recover and immediately heal, as I’ve realized that there are almost zero circumstances where and enemy will not give you enough time to reset and heal, especially attacks that knock you down, giving you even more i-frames,

[@illusive-mike]

@@bbluva20 You're coming at this from the perspective of a knowledgeable player and thus miss the point: the path from "noob" to "knowledgeable player" is the problem. To use the Beast's attack as a specific example, a player who knows well how each of their evasive options works would know to check if that attack is jumpable. A scrub who got along without jumping wouldn't, and the game does little to teach you about the lower body intangibility that makes jumping a better evasive option than it looks. It's absolutely a skill issue, but also a skill gain issue. And I get it that lots of people don't realize the one true meta that is Vigor (itself something of an issue), but I would note that I didn't in fact get one-shot by weak attacks. Oceiros had shotted me enough times in DS3 that I did learn the value of a healthy health bar. That doesn't change the nature of unknown unknowns: if you don't realize you have a tool that you can try, you won't try it and learn that it works. And to be clear, again, it's fine if the game is so obtuse that it's hard to learn how to learn it. It's much worse when the options to not learn it and still progress are all over the place and not properly segregated. A common take I've seen on Margit is that he teaches you to turn around, go explore the world, and come back when you're stronger. That's not a good thing in my opinion, it incentivizes scrubs (like myself) not learning the game properly and just bulldozing it with all the power given to them in the name of "accessibility".

[@enman009]

@@bbluva20 Thank you. When you don't know the game of course you're gonna make mistakes. Sekiro fans can't say the nailed every stealth encounters nor the spirits bossfights on the first go (the less we talk about Ape's screaming or Demon of Hatred, the better).

[@bbluva20]

@@illusive-mike I’d again argue that you’re looking at it from an overly critical “noob” perspective. The reason why leveling Vigor is so important, is because you WILL get hit a lot. If you level nothing but Vigor, and run straight to Margit, you could reliably beat him without having to go back first and explore. It’s all about having enough health to mitigate mistakes.

[@spacesloth9529]

I'm pretty sure when you use a rune arc before Godrick, it functions just like an ember. And I think the the rune arc tutorial message is referring to getting the benefit of a great rune as opposed to the straight health boost you get when one isn't equipped.

[@loopine]

Good point

[@whiskeysour1179]

We already knew that "no skill" was your favorite spell Boomroasted

[@sufferingmp4102]

A small problem that goes a long way is just rolling backwards away from attacks. Rolling into attacks and then using your roll as a way to position for a punish is a really important aspect of Elden Ring and especially slow strength weapons. Sure you might get hit but it’s okay to take risks, especially when the pros to playing aggressive are crazy good.

[@loopine]

Yea I think most people know on some level that it is more fun and engaging to roll into bosses and be aggressive, and is more optimal. I think that in ER with combo mixups and the faster pace they were met with way more resistance to rolling in than ever before and were taken aback and just went back to rolling away. Def takes wayyy longer to truly learn a shardbearer boss in this game first time around

[@huckmart2017]

The problem with that is that so many bosses punish that behaviour by putting you in 50/50 mixups or just straight up punishing you for trying to be aggressive like with margits daggers.

[@rickysanchez42084]

Okay now make this comment after playing more than 22% of the game

[@sufferingmp4102]

@@rickysanchez42084 Respond to this comment after getting good

[@astrotecn]

@@huckmart2017 in my experience margit daggers werent undogeable with smaller weapons like longswords. I mean if you wanna carry heavier weapons then sure, it is expected that you need to play more carefully man

[@lorenfulghum2393]

I'm a game dev currently working on a souls-like project, and i program these types of AI every day. They are running on behavior trees, which are basically flowcharts of tons of little decisions. At each point it looks at the current state of the game, such as its own HP & stamina, and things like the distance and angle to the player, whether the player is currently attacking, rolling, blocking, jumping etc. You can get a lot of unexpected "emergent" behavior from these, meaning you are going to see a lot of variety from bosses. Their main priority is going to be to attack. So you sometimes end up with these kind of "perfect storm" situations where all the variables line up to give the boss a brutal attack window to just go berserk. And not every player is going to encounter all the same behaviors as all the other players. It entirely depends on the way the player moves around and interacts with the AI.

[@mdd4296]

You can easily moderate the pace with aggression cooldown.

[@thegk-verse4216]

Please don't do estus = fireball

[@-Nihilus-]

@@thegk-verse4216 fr that shit is so annoying

[@astrotecn]

@@thegk-verse4216 or estus = literally canceling animation to fuck your shit up with a giant rapier

[@izshen]

I wish developers would spend a little more time explaining these types of things so that people would understand it more. I am also a developer working on a hollow knight / souls like type game, and I understand dude. Honestly, I wouldn’t want my bosses either way. Lol punish these plebs.

[@alvaro1379]

i dont get how he can complain about my boy radagon

[@jacobtroupe6086]

Nothing has ever hurt me more than "Do you see how good I am at this fight?! And I've never beaten it?!"

[@powercore2000]

You've got a good perspective to counter some of Jospeh's arguments, there are more fun ways to engage with Elden Rings systems, but I think Josephs vid is a very good indication of Elden Ring not communicating these intentions to the player on how to play this differently from a traditionally souls game. Posture is an important mechanic for fighting bosses, why regress from Sekrio, the game that inspired the idea and not include the bar? Some attacks have to be jumped to be avoided, but we don't have the indicator of jump vs roll anymore. Hit trading and unavoidable damage were things pretty heavily designed around before, but now they're much more common. A person coming in fresh from the other games has no way to know if that was by design, or if they're messing up the execution. Elden ring bosses in general are a lot more sophisticated with direction based, and conditional attacks, but learning those conditions can feel very obtuse, and even punishing when playing on your own. Especially since most bosses have punishes, and roll catches built in now. Combo branch points, like you mentioned, are good examples. When you know the difference, you can easily manipulate boss, but learning that difference is really hard when playing alone. Visually combo branch points look like, and can end up feeling like fake punish windows that trap you into thinking you can follow up just to get punished for trying to engage. If there were more visual tells for what a branch point vs a punish window looks like, that would probably help avoid the extreme passive play style because a player cant tell when they can or cant attack safely. Positioning when rolling was important on quite a few attacks in previous games, but it is essential for most of the bosses in Elden Ring and their attacks, but again, the game never explicitly tells you this fact. So a player who has sloppy roll position will probably find it hard to find out where they are relative to the enemy is why a combo can feel infinite, or that the boss "randomly" took another swing. As opposed to an older souls titles where you can tell your dodge timing is what got you hit, and if you correct it, you could get by most of the time. Overall I probably agree with Joseph's video more than yours, but I'm glad to have fleshed out my thoughts more with your points. EDIT: Spelling and grammar

[@loopine]

That's all I could ever ask for, I just want people to a little critical thinking and self reflection for themselves. Figure out your own stance on the game rather than just use a video essay as your entire opinion on something

[@ubermaster134]

This captures ny experience with Elden ring perfectly

[@hombreg1]

I mean, I get your point, but it's kinda limiting to think that a non-souls series game must have similar mechanics to a souls series game, just because that's what people expect, after playing a relatively different game series. No one tells us to fight horseback battles and we still do. So, with that in mind, it'd seem silly not to recognise that most complaints about a game that is remarkable for lacking gameplay telegraphs, are in fact from players unwilling to engage with the tools the game provides in creative forms, whilst expecting the same type of telegraphing the game makes a point of not having.

[@powercore2000]

@@hombreg1 Elden Ring looks and feels, and kind of advertises itself as a form of Souls Series game (the magic system, combat system, all of the visual souls game references). If the wanted, they could have changed/overhauled things to make them distinctly different, like bloodborne and Sekrio did. Things like the Sekrio telegraph's I mentioned earlier would have been a good communication of this intention. But they didn't do those things, so it makes sense that people would expect what looks like a new form of souls game, to follow certain base line design principles that defined souls games up that point. Elden Ring isn't wrong for trying these new things, but it should have done a better job communicating these new things to players, and setting their expectations on what this game does differently from other souls games. If player's can play Elden Ring like a normal souls game, and brute force that into working 80%, but have it be crushingly unfun the last 20% of the game, that's a design issue, not a player issue.

[@ferms547]

I agree, Elden Rings complex boss design is not random nor bad. But it’s different. And From Softwares problem with Elden Ring is not telling you how to counter these especially since you have to think that extra step compared to the Dark Souls games all the while it looks similar at first glance.

[@SirGrimLockSmithVIII]

I still stand by the notion that Malenia's Waterfowl Dance is too unfair in how it's executed and that it makes her boss fight so stress-inducing in the worst way that I never feel satisfied when I do manage to beat her. Im honestly fine with all the other boss fights in Elden Ring that piss people off: Mohg, Maliketh, Fire Giant, Radagon, even Elden Beast, but Malenia is just too much for my wee little goblin brain.

[@andyy6481]

try using freezing pot when shes up in the air.

[@irishkat8451]

Just sprint away from the first combo then dodge behind the second. It works every time. Edit: also freeze pot her

[@bubalfred260]

It's definitely not unfair considering it's dodgable, luckily melania is optional so if you don't want to put in the time to improve then you don't have to

[@thegreycrusader]

@@bubalfred260 yeah its dodgable, but barely. In my first playthrough I died well over 150 times to her. And it's not like I was underleveled or had bad gear. I was RL 135 with a maxed out Blasphemous Blade rocking 40 str 35 dex and 50 faith as well as 40 vigor and decent armor. I didn't want to use the mimic tear because it would make the fight easy af (I eventually ended up using it just to finally put her behind me, but I didn't enjoy the fight as much) I got good with fight too, using jump attacks, posture breaking, healing off the Blasphemous Blade and spamming the special attack to knock her down, but her Waterfowl dance always ended up killing me or nearly killing me. It has a very short wind-up, and unless you've practiced like LMSH then dodging her attack (flawlessly) is VERY difficult. I don't have a problem with waterfowl itself or even her healing mechanic. It's the fact she has both that pisses me off. If either one of those were taken out of the boss fight it would make her much more fair. I don't even know if there's a good lore reason as to why she's even able to heal on hit, like, that's never explained.

[@bubalfred260]

@@thegreycrusader If you don't like her or think she's a shitty boss that's fine, everybody has bosses in the souls series they don't like, but if your saying the boss is "unfair" because you couldn't beat her or you didn't have fun then that's just straight up false lol. She is extremely difficult, that's why she's optional, if you feel fighting her is ruining your enjoyment of the game then you don't have to fight her at all, that's completely fine. But the fact remains that every single one of her attacks are dodgable and avoidable if you put the time and effort into learning it, so she's not unfair at all

[@gu3z185]

The way some people describe the way they're going through the game, it's as if every single boss they're fighting is just an upscaled version of a Royal Revenant

[@t3tsuyaguy1]

I'm kind of surprised to learn that anyone waits for the boss to finish their entire combo before striking, after fighting Margit the Fell. I feel like 80% of the damage I do while fighting him is done in between his super slow combos.

[@danielsniff6405]

I swear, i got most of my damage in by baiting his sword dash. Doesnt work after he breaks out the hammer, tho.

[@michaelstahl2967]

Sekiro got me addicted to "NO HESITATION!" and staying up in the boss's face at all times, it was hard to go back to this style of play. Not necessarily worse just different.

[@augmentedsquirrel394]

I had a similar issue when I started Sekiro and just how different it was to Dark Souls.

[@mdd4296]

Then the Elden Ring Reforged mod is for you

[@tsunamie1015]

Staying in the bosses face and being aggressive is exactly what you want to do in Elden Ring. A lot of the boss moves reward you for rolling into them with openings and safety from follow ups while rolling away gets punished. This is especially true for Malenia and the Fire Giant.

[@bbluva20]

I stay up close to pretty much all enemies and bosses all the time in Elden Ring, and constantly attack in dodge like in Sekiro.

[@flamingmanure]

@@tsunamie1015 its hilarious how many souls veterans need to be told to get gud and stop rolling backwards.

[@TykonBlue]

Elden Rang is actually one of the easier fromsoft games with all the tools they give you. But it can absolutely be the hardest if you make it that way.

[@aarong1092]

After my first playthrough with no summons and a strength/faith build, I can confirm that Elden Ring is definitely the hardest game in the series when played this way. However, bring out the summons and some bleed and the game is a cakewalk.

[@brianleal87]

No one chooses to make their experience more miserable in a game they're playing for the first time in a game without difficulty settings...

[@jeremesmith9266]

Agreed.

[@schmietwechdeschiet4340]

Every Soulsborne gamer ever: [insert game] is actually the easiest! lmao

[@wildmoose3979]

True, I literally 3 shot radagon just by maxing out a blasphemous blade and leveling strength to 90 with my ritual sword talisman and physique

[@dougallen5734]

The pure joy and relief felt on that first Melenia kill is a universal experience in Elden Ring

[@FlashmanVC]

I just finally figured out how to actually beat Godrick without just tanking damage on my third playthrough. When he does the fire breath attack you just get behind him and you have like 10 seconds to go to town on him

[@russiandrago821]

The ONLY boss I vehemently hate in Elden Ring is the Godskin Duo. Fighting either of them 1v1 can be pretty fun and rewarding, but the Godskin Duo feels like they were thrown together without making any changes to synergies their movesets. The biggest issue is the arena size and Noble’s rolly polly move in his second phase. The roll itself seems easy enough to understand however sometimes he can roll over the broken pillars which should be able to shield you and, as many people have posted videos of, can literally animation cancel mid roll to attack and in the next few frames start rolling again. The past 3-4 times I’ve fought them Noble has has killed me because of the animation cancel. The Apostle is not too bad in the Duo fight though if only because he’s somewhat more passive than the Noble.

[@loopine]

I am absolutely dreading this boss on the RL1+0 Zwei only run

[@bbluva20]

I beat them first try, with a light build, using Malenia’s Blade. It was my first playthrough, so I was a bit overleveled, but still, not that challenging. What helped is that I’ve done dozens of summons for them where you fight one or the other, or even the actual Duo fight. It’s really nothing compared to say Ornstein and Smough, or the Throne Watcher and Defender, or even Ariamis and Sister Friede.

[@maestro_nik]

Well, Brandon Sanderson likes the Godskin Duo.

[@asturias0267]

What are your thoughts on the twin gargoyles or triple rot crystalarians? I think both of those fights suck major ass.

[@lordcommissarspartan]

Use Sleep on them

[@beatrixpendragon]

I have never played a single soulsborne games before elden ring, and my husband was really sure i would drop the game before godrick. but here i am. 200 hours in on my first playthrough, exploring as much ad i can, powerleveling whenever needed, learning through the experiences of the community. I am running a strength + faith build and i have been enjoying myself immensely. I like the specificity of buiilding because i can only focus on what i can really use. I got slapped around by bosses, including Mohg, but each death I learned and got bolder. This has been the best gaming experience i have had so far and it was totally worth what i paid for, it gave back to me in spades.

[@bbluva20]

Yeah! Go for it! You should always level as much as you can your first playthrough of anything. You have no frame of reference for how hard or easy certain things should be, so there’s no reason to not try just plowing through, and maybe noting where certain areas are maybe meant to be played earlier or later for another round with another character. I was like level 250 when I finished the game and I could have easily gone higher. I know now I can reliably beat the game at a lower level, but that’s just hindsight. So don’t listen to others saying you should play the game this way or that way, because they could be dead wrong until you personally know for yourself.

[@jeremygrant1325]

Similar here, first souls game, loving it, have a hard time reading move sets though so I tend to just ham my way through most of the time after dying a few dozen times... Hah

[@spookzer16]

I too am running strength faith build. You've good taste!

[@beatrixpendragon]

@@bbluva20 definitely taking my time with this one. I try to discover as much locations, get gear that would work well with my build, etc. I'm at 195 now and I'm sure i can make a victory lap to the end but there's so much more given that I haven't completed the mountaintops area. I'm just adventuring through it 😊

[@beatrixpendragon]

@@spookzer16 thank you fellow STR+FAI tarnished we are people of culture 👌

[@ediblepigz]

I’m late to this video but the point about turn based combat really gave me perspective into why I struggle with some fights in elden ring. Really gotta try and work on that

[@lynnlantern7513]

Hearing that point made me completely re-evaluate how I played the game and made it so much more fun for me. Just hearing that I cannot wait around for my opening caused my third eye to open and make me actually kick the bosses ass in

[@awkwardllama0509]

When I first started playing the Souls series, I treated it like exposure therapy for anger management. Playing like this forced me to take deep, contolled breaths and pick apart enemies' attacks and reactions while taking stock of what I had and could do. People that expect these games to play like any other have a fundamental misunderstanding of the souls series.

[@MortonFMurphy]

The most fun I have had with Elden Rings bosses has been the times I had learned to be more aggressive rather than passive. Some of the more annoying bosses had become my favorites from the feeling I got from not only learning their fight but aggressively winning it.

[@loopine]

Same, I was shocked when I a 10 minute long malenia fight became a 60 second phase 1 when I threw caution to the wind and went ham on her going for posture breaks

[@ThereWhereWeAreNot]

I remember when I finally experienced this feeling during Champion Gundyr fight that this little space in his combos is a great opportunity to deal 1 hit and thus deal damage to the boss more consistently. He immediately became one of my favourite bosses just because he was the first one who kinda leveled up my souls game in terms of aggresivness during a fight. In Elden Ring this shit of WAITING just runied so much fun for me, especially with these skiils like Godric's winds that he casts without any preparation, Rykard's explosive floor (actually A LOT of enemies in the game have this explosive floor ability), etc. I believe they could've do so much more with all of the fights and we know it because of how DS 3 bosses were great and stil distinctive from each other. In Elden Ring it feels more like a step back than forward. Trying to make bosses less predictive with delayed attacks and 15 attacks in row definitely isn't the best way to make a fight harder

[@enman009]

Agree 100%. Bosses in ER rewards positioning and aggressiveness. Malekith now takes me less than 5 min, and he used to be my Malenia. Nowdays, barely any boss/mini boss presets any harm.

[@mingQWERTY]

People will say that the bosses just won't stop comboing when they are always dodging away from the boss trying to avoid taking damage. Take Morgott for example, if you stay close to him and actually decides to engage the boss, he'll be forced to do other things instead of infinitely comboing you. This is even better with a heavier weapon because you can posture break him much more frequently so instead of him not giving you time to breathe, it's now the other way around. It's designed to make you actually fight the boss

[@frettchen1498]

Have you played sekiro? You might likd it.

[@stephjjb]

Regarding the "get-off me bro" attacks, I know for a fact The Old demon King from DS3 has like three or four moves that he will spam in close range that are really hard to react to, despite that the boss is arguably one of the easiest from that game

[@TheKillaShow]

So thats like one boss?

[@stephjjb]

@@TheKillaShow no that's just the one that I remembered immediately off the top of my head he mentions more in the video, so please do not try to strawman my observation into an argument against his points

[@danielantony1882]

That is simply not true.

[@stephjjb]

@@danielantony1882 what do you mean it's not true? He has the hammer slam attack where he slams The Hammer down directly under his feet and the combustion move where he makes a magma ball and explodes it right in front of him. Both of these attacks he will only use if you are under his feet because that is where he is weakest.

[@WildBandit300]

Some bosses and enemies do have anti-spam attacks/moves to keep you in your toes in previous games, but ER is the only one so far were even the most basic of mooks have frame 12 wakeups like they were fighting game characters. I find it infuriating that enemies get those sort of moves, designed specifically for you to lure them out (wait) or play passive against them to prevent damage (more waiting). Does it lead to deaths, significant drain of resources or even some sort of threatening situation? Not really no, its just aggravating for the sake of being so. Maybe the game isn't intended to be played without sitting at a bonfire throughout a whole legacy dungeon anymore, but I can't say I'm happy with that.

[@SomeRedDude93]

Getting through Malenia as a str/fth build was the greatest feeling, died a lot, but it was a fun fight.

[@hodes7562]

Thank you for this video, after watching Joseph Anderson's video on Elden ring my opinion of the game was so much more negative, you open my mind on this so much. You really need to play this game like a new IP not just like dark souls, same thing happend wirh sekiro if you approach it like another dark souls you are gonna have bad time.

[@gottdashochstewesen4902]

Pretty good video, especially the editing, my main problem with alot of the attacks in ER is that figuring out how to avoid them is often unreasonable. Examples: inconsistancys with which attacks can be jumped over, delayed attacks(they arent that bad because often there is still a bit of a telegraph when the attck will come) and figuring out that you have to make a circle for waterfowl dance. The position based combo extensions are also never explained, so a lot of players will think its just random.

[@loopine]

Truuue. I think souls games have always struggled to teach players how to play the game honestly. And yea I could not figure out hardly any attacks to jump in my first playthrough, I never started to experiment until second playthrough. There is a lot of inconsistency in the readability. The big moment for me was Maliketh's beast claw, the lingering hitbox is ridiculous if you roll but it's easy to jump even if the particle goes thru your legs (The way jumping works is it makes your lower half invincible).

[@sirrealism7300]

With the new light roll you can pretty much dodge anything at the cost of damage negation... waterfowl dance is a joke now.

[@loopine]

@@dvamg I did learn the Maliketh fight hitless on my own for this video. Took like 3 hours. You can do it if you put your mind to it and learn the full fight, I just knew that is was worth the effort so I was motivated while most people just think Oh this is broken what's the point, guess I'll just hittrade with Jumping L1s. And yea totally, these games have always struggled to teach the player the way they are supposed to fight, like I say in my pinned comment. There are legitimate problems with the game and that's why it is sickening that we are talking about bullshit like this when we should be addressing things like input dropping. Oh and like I said the community effort thing I guess is subjective but looking at the challenge runner and invader communities that sprung up because of it, I am super grateful. Stos charity fundraiser that he put on for the tiny little twitch invader community raised in the top 10 of all events put on by that charity on twitch in 3 days and absolutely smashed their yearly goal with just our one event.

[@nhan27.]

@@loopine i know that this essay vides they always seem misinformation most of the time about about the game like recently i watched neverknowbests who bring ranni quest as been difficult to do even though it the most easier to follow compared to other quest in the game i saw a couple peoples on the comments even point that out too or blaidd where he been only friendly if you buy an gesture from a merchant which kind untrue

[@loopine]

@@dvamg why does anyone join the scrub camp? It's because it is easier to come up with an excuse and blame a mythical line of code and give up, rather than be realistic about your skill and knowledge level, accept it, and be open minded and learn to actually improve

[@redanwrong]

"Melenia taught me" good thing she isn't one of the last bosses then, and probably the last boss most people will finish in the game.

[@loopine]

Was more of an anecdote but ok

[@liquidreality472]

NG+

[@redanwrong]

@@liquidreality472 doesn't really matter, beating the other bosses will be the more helpful and relevant thing to beating them again.

[@enman009]

NG+ and new playthroughs exist. Or you can use the RPG tools to make it easier.

[@TheRPGFox]

46:25 That zoidberg edit on Malenia DESTROYED me man, lol. Great edit and solid video essay so far. I actually recently went through the game having an extremely similar experience where I hated most boss fights until I understood posture damage and jumping attacks. I proceeded to stream a playthrough of the game completely solo to learn all the bosses again on a dex build and had a fucking blast doing it. It was such a fun experience. I think the only times I really got salty on a boss was entirely on Elden Beast being annoying as shit and possibly fire giant. Gave me a newfound respect for Niall, Godrick, and Morgot. Maliketh and Radagon were easily my favorite fights in the game. Easily. They were so fun, even if they were kicking my teeth in the whole time. 10/10 would git gud again.

[@cam-the-bassist]

In the souls games, I've always played more reactive, just act instinctively to what happens as opposed to learning the bosses moves, windows etc. The doggedness of the elden ring bosses, while sometimes being frustrating, makes this approach really fun and rewarding for me personally.

[@Woombi]

Pretty good points and video but I think it’s pretty safe to say with the astel boss fight… come on. It may not have ruined it for you but for many players including myself, the one in the cave completely ruined the sanctity of the first one. The entire trek to get to that fight is just building up more and more what happened to the land underneath the lands between having you wonder what possibly could have wrecked this place and made it look like an underworld version of space. With the turnout/payoff being a cosmic horror something looking like it came straight out of bloodborne, with a super unique fight, boss arena, and lore behind it. The other astel is in a cave near an area associated with frenzy just… because? It’s really insulting imo and I guess this argument is pretty subjective but I think there’s cases where reused content is good such as the night’s cavalry, or the godskins but I really feel like if there is no established reason why fromsoft should reuse content then it feels like they are just putting it in to fill gaps in content based upon how much content they had to fill because they created to big of a map. I’m not complaining the map is too big but it really feels like fromsoft bit off more than they could chew. I’ll accept three versions of asylum demon because one was optional but a pretty damn important part of elden ring is fighting the tree asylum demons and there’s so many it doesn’t feel like an engaging boss fight anymore, it feels like a chore.

[@primarydominant]

lmao

[@certainhell]

"insulting" hahahaha

[@earic2499]

Interesting to hear people bring this up point about Astel up so much, because it's a non-issue in my own experience. I personally see the Consecrated Snowfield as an endgame area that you should be doing last anyways. There are two realistic possibilities following this logic: 1) You've already progressed through Ranni's questline and accessed the first Astel through Lake of Rot 2) You're already at an endgame level that would melt the first Astel fight and you're not backtracking to it. You either find the first proper Astel fight when you should fight it or you don't. The second Astel fight is a re-match, and if not then you already missed out on the real initial encounter. I don't necessarily want to say this is the player's fault for routing badly, as Elden Ring encourages you to tackle objectives in a player-determined order, but it seems odd to critique the game for reusing an encounter that it's somewhat reliably assuming you've already done. Perhaps one way to improve this would be by outright requiring some kind of item from dropped from the first time you encounter the boss, ensuring you don't play in the "wrong order." Also before anybody calls me a Fromsoft dick rider, I think the Concentrated Snowfield is a trash area anyways. Additionally, yeah the reuse of Astel is fucking lazy from a lore perspective imo. That and the Godrick reskin are the only two times that I think the game goes slightly overboard with the boss recycling. However, within the context of the game's huge boss pool, these seem like super trivial gripes.

[@Woombi]

@@earic2499 I think that’s a pretty reasonable response, I never even considered looking at it from a gameplay perspective because like you said your pretty much set up for the fight and it’s just a rematch. I always was just outright offended at the reuse of him because he’s a cool established boss and the entirety of the boss fight and everything surrounding it feels earned. It’s like if Oceiros from ds3 was just in the game at a later optional point for filler. Like I know it’s not a perfect example but you can understand what I’m trying to get at. It just takes away from the original fight and makes him feel like less of an established character. I feel like the less pushback we give to fromsoft the more they will do it too. It could get to a point where main bosses would be repeated(which before you think, yes I understand godrick is, it’s just some would say no because his copy is hard to find and he’s TECHNICALLY not a required boss to beat the game). Like how much impact would the abyss watchers have if you just kept seeing them? Not in any different interesting ways, it’s just the same boss fight and MAYBE a slight cosmetic change or they add a few more different options in they’re movesets. It eventually crumbles the original feelings and moments you have when playing these games at least in my opinion. I agree that from the lore perspective it’s bad and from a gameplay perspective it can be good, but what l’m asking is if you take it all away and just think about what your feeling in the moment I think most people would probably agree it sucks.

[@dark-lord-itachi-gojoofthe6166]

As it was said previously, only godrick fight (didn't understand what I was fighting at the moment for the 1st time) And for the Astel fight in the snowfield cave, I knew He was somewhere thete but I was like "Oh well idc, it's just a rematch" but when I found him it was very "mehhhh It would have been better to have only one astel" For the tree avatar I don't see the problem (some of them have new moves) because in a lore perspective it's logic to have one in front of each trees

[@velraven8944]

Btw the royal remnants are trivial when you just use a healing incantation or the maiden puppet's healing, healing directly transfers to damage with them, with most healing incants instantly poise breaking them, and blessings heal over time acting like poison to them, I might even test warming stones as well, point is if you use heal as soon as they start crawling out of the ground, you can one shot them

[@loopine]

Yea it's a neat game knowledge check

[@velraven8944]

@@loopine Also a really neat lore thing, cus it's like the healing is trying to mend the bodies, which revenants being bodies mashed together would instead tear it apart. I actually discovered the mechanic on the hunch of "wouldn't it be cool if" and it actually worked, I was almost as stunned as the revenant was

[@a_level_70_elite_raccoon]

The Subscriber / Views ratio is criminal on this. Takes a lot of work to make a video this long, I'll be damned if I can remember half of it, but it was pretty fun of it. Some stray ideas to fire off: The reused bosses/dungeons argument never quite sat right with me. Like, sure, the Erdtree avatar is pretty much just Asylum Demon, but moreso than anytime before we're dealing with a singular Empire than the remainders of scattered and ruined kingdoms. Liurnia and Caelid have different aesthetics and histories, but ultimately they were still conquered by Marika, so it makes sense that the funerary rites/customs and details of the dungeons would look similar. Germany, France, and other European countries have vastly different cultures, but all the cathedrals and mausoleums they built are all similar because they shared a religion, and in many cases belonged to a single empire for large stretches of time. So when I get to the end of one of the hero's graves and the boss *isn't* a Watchdog Statue, it feels weird. Although I've played a lot of DnD in my life, and I've had DM's that stick by the randomized tables for encounter generation, so I've fought 14 camels in a swamp before, so idk. My introduction to the souls series was almost exclusively co-op based, my friend was replaying all of them in the lead-up to Elden Ring, so I tagged along. Played the same build in every game: a cleric with a longsword and a shield, I wasn't very 'passive', per se, just that I felt like I needed way more healing than usual to make it past some sections. It wasn't really until the end of DS2, middle of DS3 that I started to get more comfortable and dropped the shield for a two-hander, but I always kept a full suite of healing spells in stock because that's just who I was and it made taking on bosses together with my friend easier because I could keep us topped up. I never finished Bloodborne; I like the cosmic horror concept and enjoy watching videos about it, but the in-game sound design was just very *squicky* and I didn't enjoy it. Elden Ring started out much the same as the other ones, but I transitioned from the sword+shield into more of an archer/support build. I used a ton of cracked pots and throwing knives, I was crafting everything and anything because the game really let me off the leash and said "go experiment." My build was a real mess, with 30 points in nearly everything but Int because I wanted to try every spell and weapon I picked up. I eventually settled back into comfort as a "holy archer" with high Dex and Faith, but found the game challenging while also accommodating. I learned very quickly about jump shots and dodge shots, using those to work around punish windows, and most of the time I wasn't firing from halfway across the arena, I was within 10 feet of the boss and always kept a melee weapon on me as a fallback. Elden Ring seemed like it wanted me to engage with ALL the mechanics as opposed to the others which seemed like it was very easy to fall into a very settled build which is what seems to be Anderson's major failure. And now I've gone back and played Ds2 and Ds3 by myself, and I've tried that "rogue"-ish type build and found that having a bow on hand makes some sections of the games extraordinarily easy/less tense and is a very viable playstyle. I think I used a shield a few times because I couldn't get the timings down on some attacks, so I chose to soak the damage rather than i-frame it, but the game didn't slap me on the wrist for it. I was just using the tools available.

[@Communistgunmc]

This might just be me but I dont think you need to be in the top 1% of players at the game to reach a conclusion about what the game experience is like to the avg person

[@trhtkk]

After a lot of of attempts. The first phase of Malenia's fight definitely became one of my favorite fights in the game. Though I do think one of the main problems with her is how inconsistent she is, with her being able to do things like canceling her stagger animations to dodge/block your attack. And while I did use a greatshield to block the first part of the waterfowl I think the main problem with the circle around dodge is that it's something you can't really figure out on your own, as opposed to her other attacks that are hard to dodge, but can be figured out by trial and error.

[@poutineausyropderable7108]

Yeah. If she was consistent and Waterfowl had more time to run away, then a lot of people would have her as their favorite boss. You'd be ultra aggressive. Constantly trying to stagger her and use the fact that she is a humanoid with limited mass and poise. Or, she could have just been Lady Tomoe in the DLC that they scrapped and still be a loved boss in a game where the player can addapt to her inconsistency. Maybe make her even crazier and have even more animation cancel.

[@lvl99paint]

I initially agreed with Joseph Anderson's video when I first watched it and after my first playthrough of elden ring, but over time as I played more I realised I had fallen into the same trap I fell in when I first played Sekiro. Dark Souls had conditioned me so completely into the passive playstyle of "roll, punish" that I was just instinctively doing it. In Sekiro it took me a couple of hours to realise this. In Elden Ring, it took me over 100 hours to realise because mechanically its quite similar to Souls. You CAN play it like Dark Souls but it's very difficult and really boring! So I just assumed the bosses were very difficult and really boring. The problem I think is that the game doesn't do a very good job teaching the player the fundamentals of the reworked combat system in the way Sekiro did. Like you're told what posture breaks are, but their importance isnt really emphasised. The game seems more like it wants to steer you into finding RPG solutions to bosses like Summoning, Spirit Ashes, Spells, Levels, Gear etc rather than teaching fundamentals: be aggressive, attack the boss IN their animations, use positioning, go for posture breaks. There's a reason so many people like me agreed with JA's video when it came out, if you're playing elden ring like Souls - you're gonna have a bad time - but the game doesn't communicate that to you clearly enough imo. I think it's just a communication issue.

[@loopine]

Yea imo the first playthrough is always the most miserable. From has always struggled to some degree to teach the player how to play with their hands off approach to varying degrees. The biggest examples would be making shields a huge crutch in dark souls 1 and the the emblem economy discouraging people from experimenting with prosthetic and combat art combos in sekiro

[@nutwit1630]

H bomberguy's play conditioning rears its beautiful head yet again

[@OtherDAS]

Thanks, that's some useful advice. (Far better than the "git gud" BS. If you are at the Melania fight you already "got good") This was my first Souls game and I went sword and board for my first play through... nd had pretty much assumed that roll and get 1 hit in was what you needed to do for the high level bosses. I'll give it a try. (And having to do roll instead of Block making my armor, shield and high poise useless does P me off!)

[@fishnutz5196]

The reason people play like dark souls is because besides the jump mechanic, the combat, speed and animations of the character is identical to ds3

[@OtherDAS]

Okay, tried being more aggressive... and got punished for it. Still, Godfrey might not have been the time to try that out.

[@cadenceanubis1041]

That was great editing with the in the hall of the mountain king deaths.

[@JohnTheodore]

Put yourself in the shoes of anyone else in the room. That's why rage gaming is a bad thing.

[@Gusto3791]

The minute I realized I could nerf the heck out of waterfowl by blocking the first round and then rolling through the rest, Malenia got so much easier.

[@lordanonimmo7699]

Thats probably the intended way,the fight seems designed for you to get hit but being able to do more damage than she heals and if you were able to more easily dodge everything it would be very different and just like Maliketh.

[@leftovernoise]

Yeah I never understood the problem. I'm not even good at the game but like, there is a block button, even with a 2hand big boi sword

[@beatrixpendragon]

I mostly observed when she does the jump. It's telegraphed so you know it's gonna happen. I remove lock on and run/roll away. I manage to escape it with minimal deduction to HP.

[@giusepperesponte8077]

The main problem is that blocking is lame.

[@enman009]

@@giusepperesponte8077 is only lame if you don't have an upgraded shield and low stamina. Shields are broken in this game, like most builds, and there's even an ash of war that makes invincible for a second or two.

[@rofibhoi9788]

I do disagree with Joseph in a lot of areas. But I do realize what he means. A lot of boss fights just don't flow very well in this game like they do in DS3 or ESPECIALLY Sekiro. Jump-evasions are not that clearly taught in this game since a lot of attacks that look like they don't hit you when you jump will still hit you and there are not many swipe attacks that incentivize jump attacks. Another problem is that bosses actually can attack for too long. Maliketh can just fly around a lot and stay out of reach. Malenia on her 2nd phase can have follow up a combo with waterfoul, then follow it up with clone attack, and then follow that up with another combo. And all you do when a boss attacks is evasion spam. This can make the fight boring. Yeah, bosses do have clear openings. But I think clear openings should've been more of a normal way to deal damage while the mid combo openings you have to find to really destroy bosses should've been more of an advanced level thing.

[@zzodysseuszz]

I don’t. Every aspect of the game is objectively unfair. Sure, it’s not devil may cry 1 levels of unfair. I may not find it fun, but I do say unrelated to its fairness. I don’t find it fun bc it’s boring and easy, with no substantial reason to actually explore anything. But fairness? You would be dishonest to claim it is fair. It’s like spider man (2018) it’s objectively unfair but also kinda addicting. Tho fun is subjective, fairness isn’t. Also fairness is unrelated to difficult. Spider man on the hardest difficulty is still mindlessly easy, but it’s even more unfair than the easier difficulties.

[@clankymocha]

@@zzodysseuszz "fair" is subjective by definition. I actually find it much more dishonest to call 99% of ER anything but fair, but that's just my opinion.

[@Marco1995Mega]

@Rofi Bhoi Did we watch the same video? The whole point of this video was to prove that evasion spam and passive play are NOT the only responses to bosses attacking for a long time, that there are a number of ways to get hits in between attacks, or prevent them from going into overly long combos with good positioning that does NOT require the player to just run away or stand around passively. He wasn't disagreeing with Anderson when he stated that bosses can attack for a very long time, that wasn't the issue. The issue was that Anderson's, and a lot of other people's, response to that is to just keep moving away and wait, rather than proactively finding the openings and punishable windows in boss patterns, and exploiting them (no cheese or meta-build shit, just pure melee). I know because I also found MANY openings in bosses like Morgott and Maliketh while in the middle of their attack chains, exploitable even with a colossal weapons, and/or using the posture mechanic to stop them, or deliberately baiting the boss AI into using favorable attacks with good positioning, or using good positioning to prevent them from using their combo follow ups while allowing me to still whack at them. His main criticism basically boiled down to that Anderson and others just tried to play it like more DS3 and got frustrated when the game punished them for it, and rather than adapting, experimenting, and practicing with the bosses, they just gave up and decided the fights were boring and it was all the game's fault. The scrub mentality, as he said. I'm sorry, but your comment also just parrots what Anderson said without adding anything of substance or value, in a video that offers strong evidence against his claims no less and a reason to try practice more with these bosses.

[@petrrut8544]

Did you actually watch the video?

[@rofibhoi9788]

@@Marco1995Mega I did mention in my comment that the "Clear openings" thing should've been a more viable thing to rely on during a boss fights at a basic level. Whilst the playstyle the creator is talking about should've been a more advanced layer of the game. Not spamming evasion during long boss attack chains is also a very build specific or requires advanced level of play. I do not agree with Joseph in a lot of areas like combo extentions and undodgeable attacks. Plus I mostly disagree on the overall review by Joseph.

[@Austin-gj7zj]

I was NOT ready for the pro wrestling segment at the end. What a fucking legend

[@HeyTarnished]

I often keep coming back to this video & laugh at how some of the Souls “vets” were so ridiculously wrong about Elden Ring’s bosses & the overall game, game is so “It’s just an open-world Dark Souls” that it made many of them cry that it’s not like Dark Souls, go figure…☠️ In actual fact, Elden Ring is FromSoft’s biggest departure since Demon’s Souls (excluding Sekiro, it’s a different game).

[@ashyrae]

I'm just here for the mald.

[@robbieclark1784]

People will say "The boss attacks for 10 minutes straight!" and actually seem to have convinced themselves that's true and base disliking a boss on this.

[@rickysanchez42084]

And you'll make a comment after not facing any of the bosses in a way that'd lead you to a similar comment

[@robbieclark1784]

​@@rickysanchez42084 I don't understand what you're trying to say.

[@36shadowboy]

The only ones I think that’s even slightly true for are like Maliketh and Godfrey, but they were designed to make it very possible to hit them during their combos.

[@Bigsmoke-zg2ko]

Maliketh, Godfrey, Margit, morgot, melania, skinny godskin. All these bosses never really stop attacking

[@36shadowboy]

@@Bigsmoke-zg2ko i think literally every one of Margits hammer attacks and jump has a large wind down. So large you can literally do a whole charge attack right next to them. Every one of Godfreys stomp attacks might as well just be them standing still because you just jump attack, even with the rapier which had an awful jump attack you rip him to shreds.

[@FLCLhenry]

THE PILLOWS / FLCL SOUNDTRACK IN THE AUDIO OMGGGGGGGGGG I LOVE YOU

[@imperielgenecist1317]

I’ll say I really enjoy malenia’s first phase, but her second is where I begin having problems with the way she is designed. First, the clear telegraphing is basically gone because now any movement she makes shakes particle effects everywhere that obscure her, most attacks she does now also have similar effects that make it harder to tell what she’s doing, and there’s very little telegraphing for her new rot based attacks like the flower or the clone attack, with the exception of the Aeonia nuke which is pretty well done. 2, she feels overstuffed/over designed in her second phase. She doesn’t just have healing anymore, she also does scarlet rot. She doesn’t just have one super attack in the form of water fowl, she has basically three, and the tell for waterfowl becomes muddled with the other attacks where she floats. It makes what was such a wonderfully simple but fun first phase into an absolute slog because she suddenly has all these extra things she absolutely didn’t need. I’m not going to advocate removing any of it, because that’s stupid. All I will ask for is turning down the particle effects and making the tells of certain moves more intuitive. Example of a good tell: her arm sparking before a large combo or the aeonia nuke. Bad tell: water fowl and the rot flower explosion both starting with an almost identical startup float animation.

[@loopine]

I don't 100% agree but I will sat she is probably one of my least favorite shardbearer boss and yea it's so weird that she is the goddess of rot but you will never get rotted because her damage is so high she just kills you outright

[@Ghorda9]

you can counter scarlet aeonia and the start of waterfowl the same way.

[@sainterasmus4545]

At 11:14 you hit Malenia, stagger her to which she immediately hits you again, followed by you hitting her with a follow up from the Zweihander. In the time it took for you to hit her with two attacks she manages to stagger and counter attack, that's some bullshit imo. She should get hit, stagger and then dodge away from your next attack, just like it is in PvP. That's the problem with colossal weapons, the bosses simply move to damned fast for that class. Imagine in PvP if everytime you hit someone they could just immediately hit you back before you could attack again. That would be ridiculous. If you hit you should have the advantage and the other party should be forced to dodge. I'd understand if Malenia was some sort of giant knight wearing chunks of a tank for armor, but she is clearly supposed to be the fast agile type of boss that staggers when hit instead of tanking it. Instead she just staggers and immediately follows it up with a counter attack. Wtf is the point of even giving her a stagger animation if she isn't even gonna be staggered. This is less of an issue if you're using anything faster than the colossal weapons, because then you're fast enough to stagger her enough to actually force her to dodge, or your recovery is fast enough that you can roll out of the way of the counter attack. It seems like you're keenly aware that the zweihander is subpar for this boss fight, and for some reason you find enjoyment from trial and error gameplay, but a lot of players feel it's bullshit that their favorite weapon class is made utterly useless against the late game bosses and enemies of Elden that are simply too fast for colossal weapons. Personally I don't think that makes someone a scrub, if anything it's poor game design to more or less force players to stop using the weapon they've been using throughout the game because the developers didn't think anyone would be using any of the dozen or so colossal types of weapons they painstakingly modeled and created for their game.

[@Nivomandasrail]

There are dozens of bosses in the game where colossal weapons work extremely well, or are even the best option. There are bosses where spells are the best option, and there are bosses that dodge every spell you throw (like Malenia). In a game that gives you this many different play styles with so many different bosses, I think it's completely acceptable for a few bosses to counter your playstyle and force you to adapt. Also, there are plenty of situations in pvp where your opponent will have more poise than you, meaning they don't get staggered and you can't stay close to them. Poise has always been an important part of PvP in souls games because of this. Those situations force you to play differently or even pull out a different weapon with more range. This is all intentionally designed to make you adapt and learn the game more thoroughly. If you want to brute force the game using 1 specific weapon or playstyle you can do it, but you'll have a harder time. It's your choice.

[@sainterasmus4545]

@@Nivomandasrail Absolutely, but there is a difference between adapting and having to change your character from a strength build to a sorcerer build, one is good game design and the other is awful. Pretty hard to immerse yourself into the game when your character is going from barbarian to wizard every time the developers failed to account for the speed of a weapon class. It would seem that From agrees with me since patches post launch has included a lot of general speed increases for the slower weapons of the game. Also, even if they hadn't released the patches, what is the point of creating dozens of colossal weapons, if they aren't gonna be used by anyone apart from masochists, in the endgame, which is coincidentally the part of the game where you finally have a high enough strength/endurance level to wield the colossal class effectively. Prior to the patches "adapting" meant the only realistic way for most players to beat bosses like Malenia with a colossal sword, was to use nothing but the crouch poke. That's hardly fun or rewarding for anyone, it seems more like using an exploit than actually fighting the boss.

[@mechamahou8467]

@@sainterasmus4545 none of this matters to the toxic "git gud" crowd. There is no such thing as bad game design. Just bad players.... until they don't get their way of course lol.

[@nahuel3433]

Why are you even comparing a boss fight with PvP. Is this was PvP she would've died from a few swings or would've ran away and crossed the fog gate before you can get to her, this isn't PvP. Different standards.

[@nahuel3433]

@@sainterasmus4545 Also there are plenty of fast moving strength weapons. It doesn't have to be a colossal weapon for your build to be strength, you can just get some fist weapons and have some of the fastest strength based weapons in the game or some inbetweens like clubs. So pretending its between colossal and respec of your build into a sorcerer is just wrong.

[@RottenHeretic]

It took me a long ass time to finally switch from a passive playstyle to a complete monkey aggressor, it took me exactly until a fight with Astel. In which I raged, and said FUCK IT, I'm gonna just run at him, and it worked, dodging between attacks and weaving in a few hits, made me realize, that there are no "safe" times during fights, It's a fight.

[@AgentYellowWang]

yea when i realize it feel so much more like a fight than previous game and actually fun not just wait boss to be idle but attack with him while dodging instead.

[@RottenHeretic]

@@AgentYellowWang Yeah, I really don't get why people get hung up over the fact that the combat feels different than other souls games. I think it's great, and there's plenty of other things wrong with the game. Like torrent killing me from a 3foot tall fall.

[@ghuff4694]

Crucible knights are what taught me pretty early on with “dodge, attack attack attack, dodge..dodge, attack attack attack attack”

[@noobeternal9718]

To the risk of looking like a bot I'm going to paste a comment I already made on another thread. TL;DR to save yall some time: I acknowledge that ER bosses become more fun and feel more fair the more knowledge of their moveset and muscle memory you build, but for me it's not nearly as satisfying as what Sekiro accomplished with it's combat system and boss design. Here goes my full (very subjective) point of view: In my personal experience mastering Sekiro's combat has been miles better, more enticing and way more rewarding than Elden Ring's (ER from now on). You can make great arguments defending ER's boss design but for me the same applies better for Sekiro. Late game ER was a chore and everything felt just like gotcha difficulty meant to screw you and force you to memorize unintuitive patterns that don't transfer to becoming a better player, just better against a particular boss or area. In Sekiro each brickwall that I had to overcome made me a better Shinobi/Swordsman within the combat system of the game, each new main boss suffles/adds things and messes with your muscle memory a little but overall they build upon previous bosses. In ER ring I felt like each boss was just resorting to weird arbitrary timings, poor telegraphs and nearly unreactable attacks in order to get me in a cheap way, in Sekiro I felt each boss was a severe teacher trying to make me into a better player, I was getting absolutely smoked but I could clearly see why and how to get better. In ER you can learn a boss patterns to the point of playing more aggressive if you will but that requires some insane skill and effort, otherwise you have to play very passive because of how obscure their safe openings are. In Sekiro you can clearly see when and how to be aggressive, and with enough skill you'll not just play aggressive but also absolutely dominate the boss, become the boss yourself and earn the power fantasy. Anyways, that's just my two cents on the controversy. ER is a great game, likely a masterpiece in world and level design, and incredible playstyle variety, that's where it's strengths lie and that's why you should play Elden Ring. Sekiro is much more streamlined with bland semi/open world and levels, but on the flip side the bestest combat experience, it's not even a contest IMO.

[@yellowsaurus4895]

​@@RottenHeretic probably has to do with the fact that the game very much looks and feels like big dark souls, i mean you cant really fault them for expecting it to play a certain way when such fundamental things as the player animations have straight up been copy and pasted over. Also it never really emphasized that being aggressive is the optimal playstyle like Sekiro did, imo

[@Er404ChannelNotFound]

Fun fact Elden Stars was actually nerfed at some point to be slower on speed and tracking. It's completely avoidable by just running in circles. The main challenge from it is to avoid it while also keeping track of what Elden Beast is doing.

[@eastward98]

I do admit, when I watched his (mr anderson's) video, I left it feeling kind of bleak and unsure if I should pick the game up myself since he said it was unfair and boring. This gives me hope again!

[@Khalid-yx7bv]

Not gonna lie I really think a lot of people saw the 'reused' animations from Dark Souls 3 and just instinctively tried to play Elden Ring like Dark Souls 4 only for it to well...not be that. And yeah, you can get through a lot of the early and mid game playing it like Dark Souls but the late game is definitely going to punish you for it

[@sirrealism7300]

That's not it. Most of the people complaining about the game are new players that got aboard the george rr hype train, probably kids without the mental faculties to beat the game (like how i was when i played dark souls 1)... or middle aged fantasy nerds who don't really play videogames besides occasional CoD with their kids... and they get salty and say its unfair when they just don't understand that they need to go BALLS DEEP into game mechanics to really master the game. Learning how to play elden ring is like learning how to play D&D, not many people got the stamina for it and give up.

[@Romb772]

@@sirrealism7300 Nah, newcomer players just summon and call it a day. It's the so called "veterans" who fail to adapt and complain about the game.

[@WojtekGoose]

I mean, I think that's more the game's fault then? If playing the game like a Dark Souls 4 works for 80% of the game then is it the players' fault? If the game wants you to play it in a certain way then it should teach you that early on.

[@PaintBottle]

This might just be why I personally had rought time at later game. During previous titles it has been easier to adapt to the differences since the games overall play different and the early game adapts you to it but ER felt and played like Dark Souls for very long. I feel like only boss that tried to teach you the difference was Margit and after that there is rather long period before next boss who's combo chains have so noticable variation. I honestly hated Margit at first playthrough because his combochains were so hard to read where most of the early/mid game bosses only change their combos after entering phase 2 or their combos stopped or extended depending on player positioning where margit could on top of that start a different chain/finisher. If more bosses tried to teach a player this idea it would likely be easier to adapt to the game overrall. It's also rather easy to forget the lessons the game tries to teach you due to potentially high amounts of exploration and easy dungeon bosses again feel like Dark Souls. ER is the first From title for me where it took finishing the whole game and analyzing my frustrations and disappointments with it to finally accept it as it's own thing instead of one of the previous titles and it feels extremely weird that it took so long. Usually it takes me 1-3 bosses or areas to do that. Not basing the problem solely on the game since it's also on to player to learn by experimentation and to analyse your errors but having so much of the game build on DS3 animations on top of having mostly same game design choises combat and noncombat wise present surely doesn't help to disconnect some of us from past games.

[@J-manli]

If the early and mid game can be played like a typical Souls game, with the late game punishing typical Souls play style, I argue that’s actually the game’s fault for NOT encouraging the “ER play style” in the early game. Sekiro and Bloodborne managed to teach their players how to play their unique styles very early on then added more complexity to that style over time. If ER enables one playstyle in the early and mid game, but punishes said playstyle in its late game, that tells me that the devs didn’t design a cohesive gameplay progression.

[@isthisajojoreference]

What do you mean you can just play Elden Ring with the rally system? My guy you literally have to beat the hardest boss in the game to unlock it, that's not equivalent to it being a core mechanic and you know it.

[@loopine]

Yea that statement was a miss, totally forgot the great runes dont carry into ng+. Can still do great stars with godskin swaddling cloth and wild strikes or prelate charge if you reallyyyy want to. There's other lifesteal but it's mostly heals on kill rather than on hit.

[@isthisajojoreference]

@@loopine I think even in NG+ that's a non feature for most people. The context Joe was using it in was that it was an aid that allowed the bosses to be "less fair" so if you've already gotten good enough to beat the game once that crutch is kinda pointless. Also most people don't even bother NG+ in these games. Elden Ring might be different for that tho because of how tedious it would be to start from scratch each time. You made a lot of good points in this video but even with other forms of life steal in the game it's still not an equivalent to rallying because it's not a core mechanic that the game is designed around.

[@loopine]

@@isthisajojoreference yea I address most of this in the pinned comment a little but ignoring the malenia rune I think people over-conflate the rally system in bloodborne. The rally system taught you to be aggressive (something these games always struggle to do) rather than enabled that playstyle. You can just play like that in souls and er and it was something I tried to get at in the "Real risk/Reward" segment where instead of rallying they used posture to incentivize this playstyle, although again it isn't taught to the player super well and it took until beating my head against malenia for two days to throw caution to the wind and play like this. Ironically I got the idea from watching mimic tear fight her and he stance broke her like 3 times. And I wouldn't say most people don't touch ng+ but I can see why a lot of people wouldn't bother and would rather make a new character

[@isthisajojoreference]

@@loopine That's hilarious, Mimic Tear senpai op!

[@Nicolas-L-F]

this guy wanting the game to just be whatever he wants it to be and not enforce anything, at that point just make a game yourself or daydream about it, why even have strict systems at that point

[@coraline2770]

I really had to channel my agression i learned from Bloodborn and elden ring became a whole diffrent game after that

[@Achromix]

Holy shit he used the Made in Abyss ost, I actually was like "wait a second, I've heard this before..."

[@loopine]

God tier ost

[@elijahcastillo7679]

I found it interesting that you mentioned that there were east ways to deal with a bunch of enemies I found to be scary but mentioned the revenants being something that terrified you. They were some of the easiest enemies for me. I’d heal to damage and stun them and then just do it again. It really shows how different play styles can have different perceptions of enemies

[@tigerfalco]

Thats just because they're weak to holy damage. I literally killed one by popping a heal while hiding behind something until it bled to death.

[@fishnutz5196]

You can literally always spawn kill them too since they can be damaged for the whole 3seconds they spawn

[@enman009]

The thing is that the Revenant suck at attacking sideways or moving laterally. In fact, time your dodge right and they'll miss most attacks. Revenants are pathetically vulnerable for that, but most people, for some reason, still want to dodge backwards or spam roll.

[@flamingmanure]

for melee builds, u can just jump over them before they start their combo and AOW their butts while they attack the wind infront of them for 10 seconds, not only that they have shit posture and it breaks easily, sometimes it does that "stop hanging around behind me" sweeping attack but that is also heavy jumpable! seriously each time souls vets bitch about an enemy u just know they just panic rolled backwards and R1 spammed, malenias water fowl excluded.

[@pievancl5457]

⁠@@enman009it’s so frustrating to watch people never pick up on the sideways roll for revenants. In fact, so many of the enemies are designed with a roll catch and I’ve watched countless hours of veterans playing the game never adjusting to this new information. It’s painful to watch.

[@worldscoolestperson7672]

One complaint I hold true for ER is the quest system. I totally understand why they would want to keep it cryptic on the first playthrough, but on NG+? Dude just give me a dang quest tab, seriously. At LEAST for any quests I already beat in a prior playthrough, don’t make me pull up a friggin’ wikia for every NPC the whole time so I don’t lose track of some random step and ruin the whole thing while juggling all these objectives. That’s just arbitrary busywork outside the actual game. Imagine playing Majora’s Mask without the Bombers’ Notebook. That’s what it’s like.

[@faecervine]

"If he's not having fun, he's playing the game wrong by his own definition" That is simply not true. Just because having fun means playing right, doesn't mean not having fun is playing wrong. The purpose of the first statement is to declare that it doesn't matter how the game gets played, it matters that you enjoy the game, which is correct. If you enjoy adapting your playstyle to what the game asks of you, cool! Good job, have fun. If you enjoy what earlier games ask of you and would like to enjoy what this game has to offer through the lens of how earlier games, that's not a wrong way to play the game either, and expressing a desire for there to be a way to do that is not wrong. Hence, it being fine to use whatever modifications you desire to make the game fit within what you desire out of it. It's your game, play it how you want.

[@chaing-kai-shek2862]

What earlier games? There is only 1 Elden Ring.

[@miss_bec]

Personally, the reason why I particularly can't stand Malenia is because she breaks a bunch of rules regarding stagger and recovery that every other humanoid boss (that I can remember) follow in the history of Souls games. There was an excellent breakdown by Swagapagos Turtle called "Malenia doesn't play by the rules" that covers it. Even though I was also using a pure strength colossal sword build (like you and Joseph Anderson which staggers her almost always, the couple times where it doesn't play by the rules was enough to trip me up and get me tilting, and that's just a spiral into a lost run. Also BHS nerf lmao, Lion's Claw users keep on winning.

[@soulssurvivor3455]

Fun fact a similar thing was said about the dancer in dark souls 3. She "broke the rule" about how boss patterns work. She has like half steps or something like that. Also fun fact she is now considered one of the easier bosses because she's actually not that difficult, and can be beaten with a +3 or 4 weapon. I imagine Malenia will be very similar in a few months to a year, then after the next fromsoft game comes out we'll all collectively forget how much shit was thrown at her and do it to a boss in that game while claiming Malenia is a perfectly reasonable boss and super fair. Seen this pattern dozens of times now.

[@JokerDoom]

@@soulssurvivor3455 she’s fair after you’ve memorized her attacks. But for most people learning her fight, she’s ridiculous. Waterfowl Dance is basically a one hit instant death if you get hit with any of it. In retrospect, of course she’s easy. She has a tiny health pool and her attacks are all easy to dodge if you know exactly where to stand. But I definitely think the process of learning the fight is what makes her badly designed above all else.

[@miss_bec]

@@soulssurvivor3455 The difference between Malenia and Dancer is that the dancer doesn't break existing rules, she invents a new foundation and applies the old rules to a new foundation. I'd argue the novelty of it is what trips up most people and one's inability to adapt to the new timing was definitely what made my brother unable to pass it, but I adapted after maybe a handful of deaths and caught wind of it really quickly. Dancer was novel for her unusual attack timings, and Malenia is novel because Miyazaki woke up one morning and decided he wanted to hurt a lot of people.

[@soulssurvivor3455]

@@miss_bec As I said dancer also broke rules, there's literally a video about it. But if I'm being honest I don't actually care if you agree about that. My point is that Melania is another in a long line of dancers, ornstein and smough, father gascoigne, and even in elden ring radahn was another; all bosses considered way too difficult and unfair. Melania is just another one that people will have different opinions about come a few months and by the time the next fromsoft game comes we'll all collectively agree that these bosses were actually fair and balanced and the new ones prove how fromsoft is slipping. So anyways what I'm trying to say is; git gud.

[@Sassy_Witch]

@@soulssurvivor3455 Nobody said that about the dancer. Thats literally the first time ever I've heard about that

[@batonnikus]

Posture breaking is crucial often times. Played with light armor with bloody helice and epe (and parrying shield, misericorde, dragon seal, halberd - hence light armor with med roll), I stunlocked 1st phase Malenia with mimic do death. Also, you want to be safe and 100% set on being melee prepare for challenge. For me it's pure silly not to use one of many range options (to stop posture heal and/or deal damage) available to any build.

[@nicko0904]

It's kind of funny to see people complain about pure strength being bad in Elden Ring. Because out of all of my 10 character builds the 3 strength builds had the easiest time against Malenia.

[@loopine]

Strength Builds are definitely the best build in the game

[@nicko0904]

@@loopine if I'm not mistaken they also have the most access to Ashes of War

[@loopine]

@@nicko0904 have access to the most and best options

[@goosechucker2154]

It was incredibly bad on release then had its animation times massively buffed some time after.

[@jacebeleren1703]

I started the game as a Dex build and then after 20 hours or so, after beating DS1 with a STR/FAITH build, i said fuck it, went back, made a Confessor in ER and im now rocking a 2-handed Zwei and some miracles like Electrify Armament and Lightning Spear, so much more fun!

[@merrja]

Top tier video mate, love it. However, what is the track at 43:27? I swear I've heard it before - and it's been bugging me for ages.

[@loopine]

Hacker by Death Grips

[@jfernandez7098]

I remember when i first fought mohg i just drank 3 spaced out flasks during his phase 2 transition and thought nothing of it and i beat him in that same attempt, I seriously never thought it was an issue people had with him

[@sk8rboi458]

same here. if you're really nerdy about it I think you can get away with just 2 flasks

[@manchifoo]

I, like many others, were new to souls games and holy shit that fight made me completely rethink how I play the game and I’m definitely better for it. It is the most memorable experience for me from Elden ring just for the struggle and complete shift and gameplay for me

[@TrueHylianKnight]

Honestly. It didn't even occur to me that this was something people would genuinely bitch about "Oh shit that's what the rings were for. Chug chug chug, okay it's over? Time to beat your assOH FUCK HE'S GOT WINGS"

[@maybeiamepic2263]

How many flasks did you have going into the fight? cause going in as a low level mage with less flasks and had to divert some to mana i was so fucking pissed when he pulled that out

[@jfernandez7098]

@@maybeiamepic2263 i was running a strength build so i had only health flasks lmao

[@PoetryStud]

Your video is: 1. Entertaining 2. Filled with a lot of good (even great) arguments about game mechanics, backed up with substantive evidence. 3. Done in what comes across as such a snobbishly preachey manner that it becomes the whole tone and framing of the video. I liked the video overall, but the third point is the one that sticks out to me the most, although it's obviously subjective. It really was entertaining and well done, so good luck with future videos as well.

[@loopine]

It was made being a direct response as framework to the video. Glad you still could enjoy it despite me being an asshole about it the whole time, most people would never sit through a video like this if they felt it was just a 'gotcha' type low brow response video. Thanks for the feedback

[@zeehero7280]

@@loopine You make some good points but, it changes almost nothing, elden ring still has a lot of badly designed bosses with problems that don't belong in any games boss, like having to fight the GODAMN FUCKING CAMERA and not boss. Doesn't make it a bad game no game is perfect.

[@loopine]

@@zeehero7280 All souls games bad camera. All souls games trash 😔

[@ilovecody7514]

@@zeehero7280 Turn lock on off if you are having camera problems. There you go, now the game is fixed and perfect.

[@Pollymacho]

I shared a simar perspective with Joeseph Anderson on boss design with Elden Ring. But I had a few comments recommending this video to check out. And I'm really impressed! There's a lot of information here I never considered, like baiting out combos and the posture system. And that Sekiro gameplay makes me want to experiment with prosthetics more often in fights than just the sword. This was great, thanks for making it!

[@flamingmanure]

in truth most ppl that have this opinion of elden ring bosses objectively fought bosses wrong, playing the game like its ds3 or bb, as in smashing just the R1 button without using other attacks and dodging in random directions, this will only get you killed. this game is quite abit more aggressive than alot of souls boomers tell themselves.

[@Luhiner]

@@flamingmanure still the elden beast is an awful fight

[@funnyvalentine6670]

@@Luhiner And Fire Giant

[@Punkadelic2112]

I think Joseph is an MMO player...

[@Seler213]

I don’t think you’ve mentioned how Malenia’s great rune heals based on hits rather than damage making it useless on heavy weapon builds. Don’t think it was pathed. I was so mad when I saw how little I can heal with the healing window disappearing after 1 or 2 hits of my Zweihander and barely healing any hp. Cool video tho. Just that rally system being in Elden Ring comment made me recall how angry that rune made me.

[@DogInatutu]

This whole discussion of “unfair difficult bosses” happens with every soulsborne release, I swear lol. You voiced many of my frustrations in this video better than I ever could, and I think thats worth a sub. Keep it up!

[@shrouls]

FR. Remeber when people called orphan of kos unfair? Or nameless king? Or midir? Or isshin? Same exact thing here. Some of criticisms for malenia are pretty fair but other than, elden beast and any gank fight they were fair and fun imo

[@buckyhurdle4776]

I remember when people thought Isshin was unfair

[@DogInatutu]

@@shrouls Absolutely. Orphan especially I remember, cause I had a brother who couldn’t beat them and was always saying he was a broken boss lol.

[@DogInatutu]

@@buckyhurdle4776 Isshin was such a good fight though, and honestly I remember so many being like “Sekiro needs an easy mode”. Good times.

[@nitrocoldbrew3039]

@Bucky Hurdle out of every death i had on isshin, not a single time did i believe it was some bullshit bug and not my own fault

[@sweet-nessu]

17:36 Joseph Anderson saying this to me is like him wanting to hit a target with a sword that he’s standing 20 feet away from. If you don’t want to be close, then you need a ranged attack.

[@user-mo6fx1jg1l]

I followed your advice my second time through Elden Ring, playing without spirit summons this time, & it was eye-opening. Made the boss fights soooooooo fun. Soloing Malenia took me 3 days and maybe 200 tries, but I ultimately did it by chaining together the circle spinning ash of war into charged heavies while she was standing back up & chasing her down for a jumping attack. With a big hammer, this 3-attack sequence would consistently break her stance, so I could just ragdoll her ass through phase one, even hitlessing the first phase a couple times. Now I'm trying out my first magic build in a souls game, playing as a spellsword with a hammer in my right hand, & I'm still able to play aggressively for stance break. The hammer does great stance damage, magic does at least some stance damage too, & dealing ANY damage prevents stance recovery, so I can keep the pressure on with spells before going in for melee openings. I'm having a blast.

[@loopine]

Glad to hear man. Morningstar has a goated one handed moveset for hammers too. I would recommend checking out RofotheGyrm's Bloodstar mage build.

[@user-mo6fx1jg1l]

Sounds like a good idea, I'm definitely having fun finally learning how magic works in these games & how to blend it with aggressive melee.@@loopine

[@jwilliam6743]

Three days and 200 tries?! I'm glad you're having fun and enjoyed it but that's not really a great show of balanced boss design. That's the kind of time that should be applied to mastering higher end game mechanics (think movement tech in doom eternal or high end combos on DMC), not beating a solitary boss with melee. Once again, not an insult to you man. More like questioning fromsoft for bad balance. No boss should take that long to beat.

[@loopine]

@@jwilliam6743 I was wasted drunk for two of those days and refused to use summons or shields. The third day when I was sober took me just over an hour, definitely less than 2 hours. Also the whole point was to make her the hardest boss they had ever made. She's fairly balanced and succeeds at being very hard, she's just not that fun. Still can be satisfying just to beat a boss that hard tho

[@jwilliam6743]

@@loopine she took me about three hours to beat with the solo greatsword on my last playthrough. Did not enjoy it to be honest. But I'm also convinced that fromsoft balanced the game around of ashes of war and summons with melee being super hard mode. I guess this is how magic users felt during BB and Sekiro. I'm fairly experienced at character action games in general (not just souls) so three hours is a ridiculous amount of time for one boss for me. But hey, if you're enjoying it, don't let my take bring you down.

[@alejandroramirez7876]

HOLY SHIT! Being a magic player I never noticed bosses react this way. I need to get on a melee build now and try playing this way!

[@cartistan2237]

By the time I beat Malenia for the first time, I had the fight analyzed down to a science after figuring out exactly where the least and most risky places to sneak in hits were in her strings, as well as the ez-bake freebie moves she had to get hits on. I could never figure out exactly how to cleanly dodge the first flurry of Waterfowl so I would play around that and space it out to be safe. Beating her was probably the greatest feeling I've ever had in a Souls game. My favorite Soulsborne boss by far

[@Huskified]

I beat her by using the shard spiral spell and had like 4 flasks left and killed her on my first try

[@madmanpecos]

I still have no idea how to fight her without summoning mimic tear or real people. Absolutely horrendous boss and I sincerely hope the devs never make a boss like her or Maliketh ever again

[@crow1460]

@@madmanpecos Maliketh is awesome! He's literally one of the most well balanced bosses in the game

[@madmanpecos]

@@crow1460 he either doesn’t stop attacking or he just jumps away when I run over to attack. The late game bosses deal way too much damage for how fast they attack

[@madmanpecos]

@@crow1460 also the destined death attack is completely unavoidable. I’ve tried running behind him and even trying to run away and there’s literally no way to avoid it. That attack is fucking bullshit and it doesn’t help that his hurt boxes are tiny and jumps around way too fucking much

[@Windrider784]

Somehow I never even thought of using bloodhound step to avoid the Waterfowl Cheapshot.

[@solaryon8711]

I've spent the last two days on Malenia and finally beat her with pure bastard sword and knight set with medium rolls. All the guides I looked up probably made this video pop up on my recommended, and I'm glad it did. I agree with everything you said. Elden Ring screams in your face all through Tree Sentinel and Margit to attack during boss combos. The entire game is quietly trying to teach you this lesson... then you get to Malenia who can be flinched and poise broken if you consistently punish her mid-combo. Malenia even has several combo enders with long recoveries where you can get a full charged heavy swing, in both phases. Waterfowl can be dodged outright at any distance with any build. I only full-dodged it once in all my hundreds of attempts, but damn it was more goosebumps to do the proper dodge than even beating her. That said, I can understand if not everyone wants to do hundreds of attempts on a boss just to learn the pixel-perfect waterfowl dodge positioning. I can only hope Fromsoft doesn't stop putting hard optional bosses in like Malenia, or change the way you're supposed to punish combos in the next souls game. After Elden Ring, it's going to be boring to go back to turn-based bosses.

[@JP12345]

Elden ring was my first Fromsoft game and also my first truly difficult game, I had never played anything like it before and had heard nothing but how hard it was Imagine my shock when I wasn't dying every second of the game and actually having fun with a video game for the first time in months The only attacks that I think are actually genuinely bullshit are the input reads (example being that sword jump that Melania does every time you heal)

[@cha0ss849]

idk why this hasn't got more views. This vid validated my feelings with the bosses in this game that I couldn't put words or evidence to and began to question after seeing some critiques of the game. Hopefully with time the community begin to understand this games combat more rather than accepting the narrative that its "unfair".

[@loopine]

Its the same as any souls game, the mechanics are obscure and opaque and it will take years of testing by the community to completely unpack it and demystify it all

[@TheGrunaldi]

@@loopine and is that ... a good design decision ? if in 5 years from now we will know what is exactly happening in Elden Ring (from the mechanics point of view) is it really better then if we know all that right away ?

[@loopine]

@@TheGrunaldi fuuuck no. My friend has spent months testing just trying to figure out how fucking downscaling works. Like did you know if you are RL1 you can summon like a RL 74 or something and they wont be downscaled? It would actually be easier to kidnap Miyazaki and demand that he release the poise modifiers. Imagine two people in a discord call. You level up on level at a time and keep finger severing and resummoning and checking your stats for days on end going up one level at a time, and then imagine doing it all again at every upgrade weapon level for regular smithing stones and then again for somber smithing stones

[@mechamahou8467]

Except you openly support and defended the fact that it's unfair. It isn't a narrative when you literally cosigned it. Or at least it isn't until you arbitrarily decide it is. What happened to "unfairness" adding "spice" to a playthrough? Which is the greatest example of shillling and cope ive ever seen outside of the Bethesda community. "Man I love intentionally bad game design. My favorite spice, like Skyrim glitches. " [Chef kiss]

[@vandalic8566]

@@mechamahou8467 fr

[@musacajelly2941]

Glad I'm not the only person that thought that video sucked. I was practically screaming at the screen every time Anderson called the game boring cause of how self inflicted that boredom was. "I can't believe how boring this game is with my hyper specific playstyle (thats boring in the other souls games too) while I refuse to interact with the other 80% of the game mechanics. This is like a WoW player complaining the game is boring because they only play Hunter and only use auto attack like they used to in Vanilla or a tetris player saying the game is too hard cause they shouldn't have to rotate their pieces.