I'm flying off to New York in just a few days. And it just so happens that I have gotten to the final boss of Shadow of the Erdtree. Will I beat it before I leave?
Well, the reputation online is that the fight (which will remain undescribed until I put in a spoiler cut) is utterly brutal. I've seen some mentions of ways to help make it easier (such as using the big holy damage resistance trinket you can find in the Shaman Village) but I know that this is a FromSoft DLC final boss, and if the Orphan of Kos is any kind of precedent (the only such DLC final boss I've actually beaten, as I never got the DLC for Dark Souls and didn't even freaking try to take down Gael after feeling like I couldn't put a single scratch on Midir) this is going to be a tough one.
That being said, despite all the online protestations about difficulty, I've really found Shadow of the Erdtree to be supremely reasonable. There are some hard fights, for sure - my Darkmoon Greatsword build had a really hard time with the Death Knight in the Fog Rift catacomb, to the point where I kind of felt like I was dissociating while attempting again and again to take him down and genuinely felt like I was having a post-adrenaline-rush shakiness afterward (I don't think I played any more that day after that fight). But many of the expansion's headliner fights have gone down in one or two attempts for me - I think only Messmer took more than that, as I got him down on attempt number four, and then only Gaius and Metyr took me a second try (Gaius largely because I blundered into his boss arena without realizing I was entering one).
I mean, if you go into this expecting that you won't die at all, I wonder how you got through enough of Elden Ring to actually unlock the expansion in the first place.
That said, I also think that my experience has been atypical, apparently. I have a build that does giant chunks of damage in quick bursts, which seems to also help stagger monsters pretty easily, which always makes them easier to fight. Also, the health-regeneration of the Blasphemous Blade is really clutch - making the slow exploration of dungeons more manageable, and allowing you to get a pretty significant burst of healing when you use its Ash of War ability.
Spoilers Ahead
So, what I have done is gone through the Ancient Ruins of Rauh, a somewhat labyrinthine area that is also one of the prettiest in the games, if you ignore all the bloodfiends and pests. Near the final boss fight, I got attacked by the Hornsent (the NPC). I suspect this was the ordinary end of his questline given his comments at the end of the Messmer fight, where he basically said that he didn't want to see Miquella ascend to godhood because he feared the empyrean's millennium of compassion and kindness would cause him to give up on his desire for revenge.
One thing I'm not 100% clear on is whether our burning of the Sealing Tree is required for Miquella to approach the divine gate, or if he's already in Enir-Elim. I'd guess the former, so perhaps Hornsent is trying to stop us from progressing Miquella's plan, even if our ultimate goal is to stop Miquella as well.
Enir-Elim is a cool dungeon - it feels like it's perhaps a divine capital to the Hornsent in the same way that Leyndell is to the Golden Order, but I almost think it's something older and more ancient. Almost like Leyndell and Ephael were only trying to emulate the grandeur of Enir-Elim.
That said, though, it's also in disrepair - not burned like Belurat was, but crumbling (I did an insanely involved set of jumping puzzles to reach the Euporia twinblade, which I believe my build can manage and which sound super cool).
Anyway, much as I suspected when the trailer showed me this big group of mortal heroes assembling to follow Miquella's path, we have to fight a bunch of them. The good news is that I had done enough of Ansbach's and Thiollier's questlines that I had both of them backing me up, along with the Mimic Tear. I was able to carve through Leda's allies (Dane and Freyja) quickly enough that we weren't typically fighting more than one adversary at a time, so it was one of those quick and easy fights.
My understanding is that this fight can go a lot of different ways - I don't know what happens if you side with Leda against whomever you accuse (I didn't accuse anyone, so she picked Ansbach for us, but he seems like a chill dude and she seems like a crazy zealot, so I went with the old man).
Indeed, while Leda was always loyal to Miquella with or without the influence of his rune, the longer we go through the plot of the expansion, the crazier she seems. And I feel like that's one of if not, arguably, the major theme of Elden Ring: that these religious systems might present a really appealing message - a world of abundance and freedom from death, or a world of kindness and compassion where former enemies are united in friendship and love - but the means by which they seek to achieve these utopian designs create, instead, dystopias.
Indeed, the cruelties of the Hornsent culture seem to have emboldened Marika to respond with cruelty, ever assured that she was the good guy, and that they were the bad guys, and any tyrannical oppression was justified to see the evil powers-that-be defeated and her vision imposed upon the world.
When we enter the Lands of Shadow, the first several Miquella Crosses mark locations where he left parts of his body. That's... you know, pretty weird on a mundane human level, but you can kind of get behind it given that we're talking about a guy who's intending to transcend flesh and become a god.
But as we get farther, we see that he's also leaving behind more emotional components of himself - his hesitation, his love (in the form of St. Trina,) and, in Enir-Elim, his fear.
Doubt and hesitation and fear are all things that traditional heroic narratives encourage us to set aside and overcome. But they also serve a purpose - they can encourage us to reconsider our actions, to act rationally and potentially find a better path forward.
Miquella seeks to rid as much as he can of what links him to Marika and the crimes she committed. But doing so also seems to rob him of his humanity (such as a demigod possesses humanity).
I think the craziest thing in all of this story is the fact that Mohg has received this big redemption in the eyes of the playerbase. I'm a little more hesitant to just swap him from "bad guy" to "good guy," given that neither Hidetaka Miyazaki nor George R. R. Martin seem particularly interested in such simplistic categories, but it does seem that what at first seemed some kind of creepily incestuous narrative of Mohg kidnapping Miquella now seems to have had the tables turned, where it was Mohg who was being forcibly manipulated instead.
Ansbach, who appears to be a fairly honorable man, served Mohg. I really wonder, then, what Mohg was like outside of Miquella's influence. Was he actually pretty cool?
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