Shadow of the Erdtree is great, except when it's not
It's the bosses. I'm talking about the bosses.
Back in '97, me and my friends would get together to bloody some noses in the year's hottest fighting game. No, not Bushido Blade or Tekken 3—I'm talking about War Gods on the Nintendo 64. For some reason—a weekend rental, or whatever—it was the game we had access to, so we committed serious time to a title that's otherwise best left forgotten. War Gods was not good, and neither were we.
One of us was particularly bad, but... he also won most of the matches that weekend.
While the rest of us spent our time testing out different fighters, learning special moves, trying to get down timing for blocking vs. attacking, understanding our opponents's movesets, feeling the rhythm of combat—you know, the usual things you focus on when you want to get better at beating a tough opponent—our other friend just vibed while smashing piping hot pizza pockets.
Screenshots: MobyGames
He had very little experience with fighting games, no fundamental understanding of the core principles that defined the genre since Street Fighter II, and just sorta... went for it. He'd press aggressively, without any semblance of patience, and just wildly mash the face buttons, resulting in a barrage of random attacks that usually resulted in victory. Where the rest of us were trying to play by the rules, he just ignored everything and his relentless attacks usually ended with victory.
This has always stuck with me as an example of how systems can be broken when people don't follow fundamental principles that define the original experience. Whether its a bad faith (or just bad) player, or a designer changing the rules as they push the bar for "challenge," social code and player expectations often shape an experience even if the fundamentals aren't necessarily enforced by the game engine. So, in this case, my friend could just mash his way to victory, and none of use (in all our 13 year old brilliance) could figure out a reliable way to counter his technique before the game was due back at the rental store.
Now, this approach doesn't work in every fighting game, but War Gods was a bad fighting game.
Open World Excellence
Shadow of the Erdtree, From Software's 2024 DLC for Elden Ring, is a masterclass in open world design. One could argue that regions like Cerulean Coast and Abyssal Woods are empty of major content, which is a fair criticism (that can also be applied to later regions in the base game), but the otherwise dense world design embraces verticality in a way that makes these flatter open areas feel overly large in comparison. The entire overworld feels like a puzzle slowly pieced together as the player discovers how all the various regions are linked together in a strikingly non-linear (and non-Euclidean) fashion. It's ambitious, and mostly nails its attempt.
It's a joy to explore the world, and there's a surprising number of areas that speak to a beauty rarely found in the base game. I've often argued that the most important aspect for a secondary world fantasy to nail is a sense that the world you're fighting to save is worth saving, and that was difficult to see in Elden Ring. Shadow of the Erdtree, however, is stuffed with gorgeous areas, such as the aforementioned Cerulean Coast, or the Shaman Village (above) that help players understand the beauty that's been lost.
Of equal importance, the player is rewarded to exploration. Whether its a new weapon or armour, spirit ashes, spells, or Scadutree Fragments (a new currency used to level up in the DLC's standalone map), heading off the beaten path often feels worthwhile. You get stronger just for exploring.
In all these ways, Shadow of the Erdtree just feels like Elden Ring But More. The way From Software was able to take the smaller, tighter formula of their earlier games and expand it into an open world experience with Elden Ring is nothing short of magical, and Shadow of the Erdtree proves they're still honing their craft when it comes to world design, visual splendour, and their trademark approach to storytelling and character. In many ways, it feels like they've taken Elden Ring and then smashed and smooshed it back down into the size of their previous games.
Except one thing: the bosses.
You're on your own, kid
Several years ago, I bounced off Dark Souls 2 because I couldn't wrap my head around a difficulty level that demanded the player approach exploration and combat with methodical patience and focus. It wasn't the spastic difficulty of, like, Battletoads on the NES, or 7th Saga's tipped scales in the English release, but something that hinged on the psychological terror of a predator hunting its prey. It was intense focus and smarts. It rewarded patience and punished reactionary panic. It was so new to me that my brain just couldn't grok around how to progress without feeling like every death was a failure. I put it down, frustrated, and wrote off the series.
In a lot of ways, this is reminiscent of my early attempts to read my favourite book trilogy: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams. Having grown up on pulpy epic fantasy like Terry Brooks and R.A. Salvatore, I had a specific set of expectations ingrained in me and Williams's meandering trilogy threw many of those out the window in favour of a more patient and methodical deconstruction of the ideas I'd internalized as a young reader. I bounced off the series again and again, and it wasn't until I'd discovered and enjoyed similar writers like Robin Hobb and George R.R. Martin, and began to understand that epic fantasy could be many things, that the series finally clicked with me.
Aidan Moher
Fast forward to Spring 2022, and the upcoming release of Elden Ring was more or less off my radar because of my experience with Dark Souls 2. I was curious, but ultimately figured the game wasn't for me. In the final hour, though, when the night was darkest, I caved and bought the game digitally because of a) the hype, and b) George R.R. Martin's involvement. I expected to play 10 hours, see if I could suss out Martin's contributions, bop around until I hit a difficulty wall, and then get back to whatever else I was playing at the time.
But, I didn't hit that wall. Instead, due to the game's open world, any time I stumbled into something that felt too hard, I'd go off in a different direction for a dozen hours. I cleaned up the first few major bosses without difficulty, and realized that, huh, maybe the Souls series's reputation for "difficulty" was misunderstood. This wasn't difficulty for difficulty's sake, but challenge that respected the player as a problem solver. Maybe I did like Souls games.
150 hours later, I'd platinumed the game and beat its hardest boss after only about 30 minutes and a dozen attempts.
Afterwards, I went and explored more of the Souls series—particularly enjoying the Demon's Souls remake on PlayStation 5, and dabbling here and there in Bloodborne and Dark Souls. While I initially thought Elden Ring's difficulty might've been mitigated by its open world, I found that many of the skills I'd picked up in the Lands Between applied directly to the older games, too. More than that, I'd been trained on Elden Ring's faster, more aggressive bosses, which made the earliest games in the series stand out as more methodical and precise, and I cruised through Demon's Souls for the first time without any serious issue.
Bosses have always been a big talking point for the Souls series, but it reached a peak, perhaps, when Shadow of the Erdtree was released a few weeks ago and fans immediately and loudly pointed out that its bosses are HARD. Like, hard even by Souls standards, and a step above pretty much anything found in the base game outside of the infamously difficult secret boss, Melania. Worse, though, was that the bosses were hard in an unfun way, ratcheting up their difficulty in inorganic ways (like big health bars, high damage output, and speed far above and beyond what players were used to), rather than complex ways, and eschewing the series's reputation for difficult but ultimately fair and balanced fights.
And, man, having now wrapped up Shadow of the Erdtree, they were right. The bosses, with only a small handful of exceptions, pretty much all suck.
Big bad bosses
Now, let me get this out of the way. I beat Rellana on my first try, Messmer took maybe three, same with Gaius, and I beat the final boss—notoriously one of the hardest bosses From Software has ever designed—on my first real attempt. I didn't spend more than 20 minutes on any boss in the DLC. This isn't a skill issue. Elden Ring provides ample tools for players to mitigate difficulty walls, and I rarely ran into roadblocks during my 200 hours with the game. I'm not complaining because I need to "git gud," it's purely about enjoyable combat experiences.
Aidan MoherStarting with 2009's Demon's Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series, including its spiritual entries (Elden Ring and Sekiro), earned a reputation for unrelenting but fair difficulty. Instead of the quick and nimble characters players were used to controlling in action games like God of War or Devil May Cry, Demon's Souls put player in charge of a lumbering knight whose ultimate victory was built on smarts and strategy, rather than gymnastic controller feats. Similarly, Demon's Souls enemies, even it's bosses, were generally slower and more calculated than the overly aggressive sort players were used to from other third person action games of the time. In many ways, it adopted the feel of a rhythm game, rewarding a player who can read cues and hone in on enemy weaknesses. Miss a beat, and you'd feel the pain—despite the heavy armour, the player's knight could only survive a few hits—but there'd always be a moment to reset, to heal, and to reset your strategy.
As such, it was possible to learn the fight as it happened, adjusting on the fly, responding to new attacks added to the mix as the bosses's health dwindled. It's not uncommon for someone to find harrowing victory against Demon's Souls bosses on the first try because they were designed for learning as they happened, rather than through trial-and-error and dying over and over again. (One might notice how From Software has more or less eliminated long runbacks after you've died on a boss.) It was two combatants playing by the same rules, and when you lost you knew exactly why and which decisions let you down. It was like nothing else out there.
This sort of compelling, edge of your seat, and cerebral approach to combat defined the series early on, but with each subsequent release the bosses got faster, their attacks got wider and longer, the ability to instantaneously close space on the player became ubiquitous, almost all of them are now armed with large AOE attacks designed to negate the dodge roll mechanic that's been a core tool since the series began. Combat is no longer a trading of well-timed blows, a balance of exploiting openings and learning weakness, but an endurance race against ballooning health bars and fewer opportunities for the player to heal and reset in the face of increasingly aggressive bosses. They just don't give you space for anything other than reactive scrambling and chipping in for damage during minuscule defensive openings. It's like they're just mashing the attack button in War Gods over and over again. And it's not fun.
The series's best fights have always been the smaller, humanoid enemies that fight within the same rules as the player—but, by the end of Shadow of the Erdtree, and its egregiously bombastic final boss, it feels like any semblance of Demon's Souls original ethos is gone, replaced instead by bosses that feel like they'd be a better fit in Devil May Cry while the player is still wading through molasses with a limited moveset and an inadequate control scheme. It's been tenable up to this point, I still beat Shadow of the Erdtree without too much issue, but it's no longer fun. I don't look forward to the puzzle of defeating bosses, and just want to get through them as quickly as possible.
Elden Ring revamped the Souls formula by moving the traditionally closed-off series into an impressive open world—and Shadow of the Erdtree features some of the best open world design in the genre—but I'm left wondering where Souls combat goes from here. I'd love to see From Software reset and slow down—create boss encounters that are a series of intentional choices rather than frantic reactions. On the flip side, if the bosses keep getting faster, bigger, more aggressive, and further separated from the fundamental underpinnings of what made Demon's Souls so unique in the first place... it starts to feel like we're playing War Gods against my friend.
And War Gods is a bad game.
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