Well, I've defeated Starscourge Radahn, the massive warrior on a tragically normal-sized horse. While he's one of the great demigod bosses, Radahn's "legacy dungeon" is not really a dungeon - or at least not in such a way that requires you to gradually navigate it until you come to some epic boss battle. Instead, you just portal in and find a group of champions waiting for the Radahn Festival - a grand melee in which everyone comes together to fight the ancient champion.
The fight's arena is massive - the enormous desert that makes up the eastern third or so of Caelid is basically just one large boss room. Once you talk to the festival barker dude in the castle, the way opens to an elevator down to a portal that takes you into the boss arena.
There, Radahn will shoot these massive gravity arrows at you that basically one-shot you and are tough to dodge. While I'm just a shrimpy sorcerer, having a shield that at least blocks a decent amount of magic damage allowed me to tank the hits with only a sixth or so of my health, giving me time for what is the key to this fight:
There are tons of little summoning signs here that you can use to summon NPCs. While you need to put the hurt on the boss to beat him, that's going to be one of two jobs. The other is to summon these guys to fight for you. These include Blaidd, the werewolf-like knight, and Iron Alexander, the friendly pot-person. The NPCs basically replace any spirit summons you'd use for other fights, but they play the role of tanking Radahn while you go in for hits.
I'm playing a Sorcerer, so I would typically run up toward Radahn, summoning the first few NPCs while blocking the arrows, and then once he started with other (still ranged) attacks, I'd hop on Torrent so I could dodge them and then get in close enough that he switches to melee attacks. Then, it's a pattern of dodging attacks, summoning more NPCs (even if one dies, you can find other signs to summon them again) and then chipping away at his health with Rock Sling or other spells. He has nasty attacks, so I can only imagine what this will be like on a melee character. As a ranged one, you basically just need to worry about some of his big cone-attacks and one where he slams down and launches some gravity-beams at you (a good Torrent-sprint perpendicular to his attack should let you dodge them).
Radahn's defeat causes a massive shooting star to fall in Limgrave - I have yet to investigate, but I did finally get Ranni the Witch to show up at her tower and was able to start her quests (she tells you to investigate the crash site).
I also beat the Draconic Tree Sentinel, which is one of those fights I felt like I had come close to beating about three million times before I finally took him down. This opened up the Eastern Rampart of Leyndell, and I've been able to get into the capital city.
Here, I get a very Ringed City vibe, mainly in that it feels like there's an utterly massive stretch between sites of lost grace. The first enemies you encounter are some top-tier From Soft design - these odd trumpeters with spherical bodies and spherical headdresses that use their horns/trumpets as bludgeons or cast weird bubble-spells with them. These guys aren't actually terribly hard to kill, and while I still haven't been able to find the next site of grace, just going back and forth and killing enemies here has been a pretty hefty source of Runes - I think I leveled up like ten levels today.
Also, it was here that Melina took her leave of me - I still don't know what her deal is at all.
The open-world nature of Elden Ring means I'm almost surely not doing everything in the order that the designers expected. For instance, I killed a tree avatar in northern Caelid and got 90k runes at a level where I needed like 23k to level up - it was one of those fights where as long as I didn't get greedy, I just had to constantly circle the boss (also, hilariously, the fight starts in an area that is dense with large pots and trees, but by the end, the boss had cleared a wide-open field).
I might finally be graduating from the Meteorite Staff, as I have Lusat's and Azur's Glintstone Staves - while I don't have them upgraded enough to have a higher Spell Buff than the Meteorite Staff (I think I need Somber Smithing Stone 5 or 6 for each) I believe the broader bonus on Lusat's that makes spells cost more FP to do more damage might make up for it. That being said, I still use Rock Sling as my favorite boss-killing spell, and so Meteorite makes sense for that.
Also, a note on Ranni: she seems to have kind of a sinister vibe going on, but this is From Soft, so I can never really know for sure if the "darker" ending is every the "evil" ending. I think Demon's Souls might be the only one with a really clear good or evil option. I'm given to understand Elden Ring has something like 7 or 8 endings, so who knows.
I certainly don't think I've got a strong handle on the lore yet - I think I might just have to wait for VaatiVidya and the like to compile everything. There's so very much to this world, and I think for now I'm really just focused on getting my character strong enough to make it through all the challenges.
My experience has been that the game has fewer points of real frustration than earlier Souls-like games. My roommate, who has always bounced off of Dark Souls or Bloodborne after a single play session, has actually seemed to get into this one. I know there's been some discourse on whether Elden Ring is too hard to draw in new players to this type of game, but I think there has been a marked lowering of the difficulty - it's not that they made it easy, they just made it less crushingly difficult. And that might actually be the result of the open world. You really can just move past things and go elsewhere. Between that and the Spirit Ashes, I think there are a lot of pressure valves here.
Again, though, I don't really get worked up when other people don't like the things I do. I'm glad that From Soft gets to make these games - the video game equivalent of... I don't know, abstract art? Surrealism? I think that the topic of difficulty often gets bogged down in a sort of toxically-masculine dick-measuring contest, but whatever you think of the game's combat, I feel like these games engage with difficulty also in terms of narrative and even game systems. Is that insane? Or will Hidetaka Miyazaki be looked back upon as the James Joyce of video games?
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