Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Messmer Has Some Company Now, Plus Ymir and The Creepiest Place So Far in the DLC

 Well, I blundered into one of the two Remembrance Bosses I took down today, and died, being unprepared to face down Gaius. However, I did go in somewhat ready for Metyr, Mother of Fingers, but I did manage to die once to each of these bosses.

Metyr is technically the first of three boss-like encounters that end the somewhat short quest chain for Count Ymir. Ymir appears to be some kind of Carian-type, occupying a cathedral that can only be reached by some careful platforming down through the Moorth Ruins (I actually got to said ruins a while ago but assumed I could only access the building at the bottom of its pit some other way - turns out that it's the route to get to a whole lot of out-of-the-way places, and you just have to trust that some of the rocks jutting out of the walls of the pit are horizontal enough to let you land on them).

K, let's go into spoiler mode:

So, finding Ymir, he appears very friendly, though he's a skeptic of Marika and the Fingers' entire project for the world. He sends you out to a couple of far-flung locations to ring a bell in a number of "finger monuments," which are basically giant canyons that look like massive fingerprints that are also filled with stone columns that look very much like fingers and, of course, have a lot of Fingercreeper foes.

One of these is a relatively long journey around the Cerulean Coast (itself requiring some exploration from the Scadu Altus and down through a river below the Gravesite Plains). The other requires finding one of I think three or four back doors to the Shadow Keep.

Notably, very nearby the second finger canyon area is the Village of the Shamans, which appears to be Marika's original hometown - a beautiful but abandoned area in which you can find an incantation called Minor Erdtree (which Melina can cast in the Morgott fight) and a talisman made of Marika's hair that provides significant Holy resistance.

This is presumably one of the really "big finds" in the whole DLC. The implications here regarding the Numen and Marika's true nature are all really curious - I do think it's notable that the Cerulean Coast is covered by massive Stone Coffins (which look very much like tall ships) that are definitely portrayed on the tops of the steles in the Siofra River area. It's possible that Marika's ancestors arrived there and that the village was built by Numen descendants, but as usual, the exact sequence of events evades me.

Anyway, this area also becomes relevant to another thing later in Ymir's questline (or rather after its conclusion,) so we'll put a pin in it.

Ymir is guarded by Jolán (just going to write it as Jolan because I'm a lazy English speaker who doesn't like having to worry about accents,) who wears Night Armor and is basically one of your classic "I'm not here to make friends" NPCs.

As you ring more finger-bells, Ymir can sell you more "Finger Sorceries" that I'm sure I'll play around with on my all-in-Intelligence character when I take him here. With two rung, though, he gives you a third map that seems to point to the cathedral itself. Reloading the area will see him disappear, and you can hit a button on his throne that will reveal a ladder.

Oh, and before I forget: Ymir is probably the individual portrayed in the hourglass item you use to flip the tower in eastern Liurnia. He at least wears the same headpiece.

Anyway, when you descend beneath the cathedral, you find yourself in another "finger area," though this is kind of like one big squiggly finger with pillars around you. You get invaded by Night Blade Anna (whom we'll talk about in a bit) and get some new beast-claws off of her (notably, she and Jolan seem to have similar magic to the Night Sorceries found in both Sellia and the hidden tower in Altus Plateau,) and at the end of this sort of underground causeway/giant finger, the third bell can be found.

Ringing it puts you in an arena where you can face Metyr, Mother of Fingers. Like Placidusax and Rykard, you'll be able to summon a spirit ash and do all your buffs in the room before getting close enough to aggro her.

The room is reminiscent of the one you find Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos in Bloodborne, and I don't think that's accidental. The main distinction, though, is the base of countless finger-pillars sticking from the ceiling.

Metyr is maybe the most alien-looking creature in all of Elden Ring (putting Astel to shame). She is, evidently, the creator of both the Fingercreepers and the Two Fingers (and perhaps the Three Fingers). Basically, imagine about eight fingers on each side as bug-like legs, a giant thumb for a head, and two intertwined fingers as a tail that hold an orb of cosmic... force between them like the glintstone in a sorcerer's staff.

Metyr wields, alternating, bright holy magic (though given her cosmic origins, this might be better understood as sunlight) and then dark gravity magic. At she's not a pushover by any means. Most horrifically, she can sometimes barf out of her... chest? Mouth? She can sometimes summon fingercreepers, though I found these went down pretty easily.

She does have some tough-to-dodge gravity and holy magic bursts. But with a second attempt, I was able to take her down.

While she is the true "boss" of this quest line (and I almost wonder if she's meant to be the kind of "tougher secret boss" in the vein of Laurence or Midir, though I was able to take her down in fewer attempts than Messmer,) when you return to the Cathedral, examining the throne a second time first summons Jolan to invade you, and then Ymir, no longer just "Count Ymir" but now styled as "Ymir, Mother of Fingers," puts many of his finger sorceries to use and also seems to have learned how to birth fingercreepers, and, more annoyingly, how to teleport, making you really have to chase him down.

When he's dead, you can find Jolan despairing at losing his guidance. Like Queelign (found in the prayer room in Shadow Keep's Church District, which you need to use the same path through the Moorth Ruins to get to) you can give her either the Iris of Grace or the Iris of Occultation. I had given the latter to Queelign (my Strength/Faith character could use his sword, potentially) and so I gave her the Iris of Grace, which gave me her spirit ashes (in both cases, Grace gives you their ashes while Occultation gives you their weapon. Jolan's weapon I believe scales exclusively with Dexterity, so I was happy to get her ashes).

But that's not all!

There's a path through the Shaman Village that leads you to a tower (that I think you can get to the base of from the same plateau as the cathedral) that, at its top, sees Night Blade Anna in kneeling, head-back "puppet" pose, like all of those ones controlled by Seluvis (whom, I'm pretty convinced, was actually Pidia's puppet all along).

Anyway, if you have Jolan's ashes, you can actually combine them (you don't lose the Jolan-on-her-own one) to get an ash that summons both Jolan and Anna, which I'm intending to try using on future boss fights because it seems badass (though I might need to start allocating another Cerulean Tear flask because it will drain me of all but like 3 FP).

Now, let's talk Gaius. Gaius was seen in some trailers, riding a boar. He's out the back door of the Shadow Keep, and is actually the barrier to the base of the massive structure that appears to collect the drippings of the Scadutree. Gaius uses a bunch of gravity magic, and frankly I think if I knew I was walking into a boss fight, I might have gotten him down on the first attempt. He uses a spear or maybe heavy thrusting sword that has some gravity-magic, and after getting some of his items, you learn that he was a friend and fellow student of Radahn's (along with another character named Gaea). Notably, you can get a helmet, gloves, and a chestpiece from Enia (or Enia's corpse, if you're at that stage of the base game) but not a legpiece. However, traveling past his room and up to the Scaudtree dew-collector, there's an albinauric wolfrider archer who you can take down to get the legs - and the description explains that the leg armor was made sort of as a mocking joke because Gaius was actually an albinauric, and as with many of them, his legs didn't work anyway (which is why he basically never dismounted his boar).

Here, I think there's a cool connection. There's been a longstanding theory that Loretta, fought as a phantom in Caria Manor and then for real at the Haligtree, is actually an albinauric. Both are never found unmounted.

We know that Radahn pursued gravity magic in order to allow him to continue to ride his beloved horse Leonard, despite the frail old steed being too old and far, far too small for him (again Radahn might be the most likable demigod). But might his desire to remain mounted have stemmed not only because he was a die-hard horseboy, but also done out of solidarity with his albinauric friends, who had no choice but to continue to ride?

Incidentally, if you do beat Gaius, be sure to go into that area beyond his fight, as you'll get a trinket that helps with archery, the aforementioned legpiece off the albinauric archer lady on the wolf, and then 5 freaking Scadutree Fragments around the basin under the big arch-tower. (I'm up to a +15 buff now, and wondering if I'm at the cap yet - given how little I've been struggling with fights, I feel like I must be ahead of the curve).

Now, I don't even feel like I played a ton today, but there's a third thing I've done, and that is that I've entered the scariest freaking place in the DLC so far.

After descending through the Darklight Catacombs - a catacomb-style mini-dungeon that feels anything but mini (I need to go back there because I think I missed the Death Knight armor set) and beating the boss, you emerge into the Abyssal Woods.

Two big red flags: the first is that you can see frenzy-yellow fingerprints on the cliffs around the woods. The second is that when you go about fifty feet into the woods, you'll be dismounted from Torrent. If you try to summon him, it'll say that he refuses the call because he's too frightened to come.

This is one of those moments where the sterility of the UI messages describing a place so frightening that your courageous spectral steed refuses to go there just enhances the horror. And honestly, if it weren't for that aura of dread, the place would kind of look just like a big swampy forest with massive trees. (And the water isn't even poisonous, as I truly expected from Miyazaki.)

Then you start seeing the messages:

Some of those more square-shaped messages left perhaps by Leda (though I imagine she's pissed at me since I sided with Ansbach against her) appear in the woods. And they say things like "If it sees you, you're already dead." "Combat is not an option."

Cue the next bit of FromSoft-veteran horror - I find a crafting material item called a Winter Lantern Fly.

If you haven't played Bloodborne, Winter Lanterns are arguably the most terrifying monsters in the game - a horrific abomination that has the body of a woman (or rather, the body of the Plain Doll, who levels you up in the Hunter's Dream) and a head that is like a massive dome of eyes and bodyparts and claws and mouths (and seems to be made out of the kindly if creepy little "Messengers" who help you in that game). These flies have a bulbous body that glows with that frenzy-yellow color.

And then you start to see the big ones.

Without a known name, I'm going to call these enemies Winter Lanterns as well, as they're also creatures of utter eldritch horror - a humanoid body, but with a head that has swollen to be nearly as big as the emaciated body, a kind of organic cage holding a glowing frenzy-yellow orb.

And the messages aren't wrong: if they see you, they will shoot frenzied magic at you, and if you ever get hit by it, you are frozen in place while they grab you and then blast your mind with frenzy, not stopping until you're dead.

Thus, to traverse big swaths of the Abyssal Wood, you're forced into playing the stealth game (will be very curious to see if sorcery that turns you invisible will work here). There's a lot of tall grass near any of these foes, so the only way to get past them is to basically start playing Assassin's Creed (er, at least the older games. The most recent I've played was Black Flag). The cruelest part is that in the middle of several of these patches of grass are some kind of plant with fruit or seed pods that glow very much like the heads of the Winter Lanterns, and if you bump into them, it will alert the nearest Lantern, meaning you're just dead.

Slow and steady is the order of the day here - if you stay in the grass and remain crouched, the monsters won't see you, so just watch for their patterns and make sure that they'll be facing away from you the whole time you're out in the open making for the next patch of grass.

At the end of this gauntlet (I think there are three seconds of Lanterns I had to get past) you arrive at a manor house that has, arrayed in front of it, several kneeling corpses whose heads look like they've fallen off or exploded, a single jutting crystal coming out of each of their mouths the color of the frenzied flame (from a distance, they look like a bunch of crows).

Entering the Manse, its master, Midra, warns you to turn back, that only horror and madness await you here. Naturally, in real life I'd just warp back to Roundtable Hold and hug my knees and rock back and forth for about a hundred years, but my character is a lot braver/more reckless.

Other than revealing an illusory wall in the main room, I haven't done much since arriving in the manor (my roommate got home and I yielded the TV to him). However, I think one thing that is notable is that there's one of those white ghosts that always begin their silent dialogue with "..." But in this case, the ghost seems to truly be aware of us, and addresses us directly.

Yeah, I think it's time to go through a spooky mansion right out of a Lovecraft story. (Given that Midra appears to be the guy in the first trailer who seems to be pulling his own head off, I think we're in for an utter horror show.)

Anyway, I'm totally blown away by how utterly massive this DLC is. I think there are probably fewer mini-dungeons than in the base game, but I think that's fine - the emphasis really feels like it has been placed on the unique content, and so it really feels like we're being given something that could have been counted as its own whole sequel if it weren't for how jaw-droppingly enormous the base game was. I mean, I suspect that if you compared the size of Shadow of the Erdtree in terms of overall "stuff to do" and things to see, it probably beats Dark Souls III, or is at least comparable in scope. All that for 40 dollars!

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