brendan mcleod

I finally finished SOTE yesterday. Putting these thoughts in a post for linkage elsewhere. Spoilers obviously.

1. I think base game Elden Ring is beautiful, and I think the DLC is as well. I really enjoyed how the DLC immediately pushes into new palettes and biomes that weren't seen in the base game - from the starting prairie area (how rare to say "I like their use of brown" but it really does work for me) to some of the much more outlandish later areas. I feel like the day-night transitions also have a lot more color shifts in the sky that look really great.
2. I found the DLC narratively disappointing. I liked the NPCs (and was fortunate enough to not break any of them outside of some minor stuff with Thiollier and Moore) and I liked the concept of the hornsent and their relationship with Marika, but the actual Miquella plot is a real letdown to me.
   • These games (Demon Souls/Dark Souls/Bloodborne/base Elden Ring) are obviously associated with ambiguity (though I think sometimes that is overblown, e.g. in the first Dark Souls), but after finishing this DLC, looking up stuff I missed, and reading some other people's comments, I genuinely do not know what Miquella needs from the Land of Shadow, what the connection is between Messmer's position in the Land of Shadow and Miquella's goals, or what the player's role in the Land of Shadow is. This is literally the central plot of the DLC, and I feel like I should not be in the dark about it. It kind of seems like Miquella just needs to walk through a hole in some rocks (a hole we are prevented from walking through not by some message about being unfit for godhood, but by a 5 foot rise of rock), which seems very silly.
   • I hated the suggestion some people made from the base game that Miquella charmed Mohg into kidnapping him, and I hate that it is directly brought up here. I would like to read this as denial on Ansbach's part, but I feel like the game leans pretty strongly toward this being true. (It also doesn't really make sense to me within the world of the fiction, because if Miquella can charm Mohg, why can't he just charm Radahn in the first place? If Miquella can charm demigods, why is there even any civil war among them at all? Can't Miquella just win automatically?)
   • I don't mind many of the things left confusing or ambiguous in the base game being unaddressed here (I would still very much like anything at all pointing me toward a specific interpretation of what Radagon actually is, but I understand that isn't directly relevant to this DLC), but the almost total lack of reference to the Albinaurics is pretty disappointing to me. So much of the story of Miquella in the base game centers on the Albinaurics' faith in him, and the absence of any elaboration one way or the other on that seems very odd.
   • Radahn's reappearance, while not entirely out of the blue, does strike me as strange and unsatisfying. I didn't expect to fight Miquella directly, so that's not my issue here; but Radahn feels like a rerun, not just of himself and Mohg but also of Dark Souls 3's Twin Princes. Part of this is certainly bound up with my opinions on the final boss as a gameplay experience (see below), but I also think, trying to set the actual fight aside, there's nothing interesting done with bringing Radahn back. I saw someone postulating an alternative final boss with Miquella resurrecting Godwyn's spirit in Mohg's body instead, and while obviously my imagination has less constraints than game development, I found that idea immediately more compelling in its storytelling potential than Radahn.
3. On the whole, I enjoyed the big setpiece fights of this DLC, with one extremely glaring (and unsurprising, given the reception I've now been reading) exception.
   • Bosses I liked:
     • Rellana is a fun reprise of some visuals I've really enjoyed before - I am one of those people who loves Artorias, Pontiff Sulyvahn, and Dancer of the Boreal Valley.
     • The Divine Beasts are incredible fights to look at. I feel like they would be a nightmare to actually parse as fights in melee, but fortunately I wasn't trying to do that.
     • Bayle is a great new dragon fight (although the other dragon fights, like those in the base game outside of Fortissax and Placidusax, feel too repetitive).
     • The Scadutree Avatar is a great new giant monster fight.
     • Leda & co. is the only good version of this kind of fight From has ever done. I really like Dryleaf Dane.
   • Bosses that didn't make much of an impression on my positively or negatively: Messmer, Romina, Metyr, Putrescent Knight. I do appreciate Romina for finally giving us a version of Scarlet Aeonia that is regularly usable though - I used it for basically all the bosses afterward, including many of the final base game bosses as I finished my replay.
   • The boss I thought absolutely sucked: Radahn.
     • On top of being narratively uninteresting, as I mentioned above, the fight feels like a remix of stuff we've seen before that doesn't evoke anything new from their combination. The only really unique part of the boss fight, I think, is Miquella's grab, which is a neat gimmick but not enough to overcome how much of a slog the fight is.
     • I think the most infuriating thing to me is that it feels straight up worse to bring in the story NPCs for the fight - your reward for having completed their quest lines and brought them to this climatic fight is that the fight gets much longer and harder (because they don't contribute damage to match the boss's increased EHP). It's a bizarre choice to me when in this very DLC there are multiple bosses that let you summon NPCs into them without affecting the boss, because the game wants you to use them! But here it feels like you are punished for doing so. (I must admit I also made this harder on myself because my replay character was a gimmick build centered on applying buffs and debuffs, using spirit ashes and NPC summons to do much of the damage.)
     • The boss is also one of those, common in these later games and especially their DLCs, that does extremely long combos of attacks with few and small opportunities to counter attack, which I find to be an uninteresting challenge.

Overall, I enjoyed most of my time with this DLC, because I like playing Elden Ring. I had had a desire to replay Elden Ring repeatedly since I first completed it and largely held off, because the base game is so damn big and I could not justify it to myself over doing many other things with my time. I said I would allow myself to do so when the DLC came out, and I did that (starting a few weeks before the actual DLC release, so I would be ready to go in when it dropped).

The base game is still largely good, and as I said, I really enjoyed exploring the new regions of the DLC just to see the beautiful, weird landscapes and the freaks that they were populated with. But having completed it, I feel very mixed about it; without a satisfying narrative to tie it all together - or even just an unsatisfying but compellingly confusing collection of narrative pieces to chew on and ponder, which is how I mostly feel about the base game - Shadow of the Erdtree ultimately feels like less than the sum of its parts.

ETA: Shoutouts to Jolan and Anna, who carried my spirit-focused build in the endgame when my Greatshield Lads were finally no longer able to do the job.