Topic: Soulsborne Series Thread

@JoyBoy yeah that attack sucks. I checked online and it says you shouls be able to run in opposite direction for the first two "movements", and then dodge towards her for the next two. But it never works for me. I try running but she never has a problem catching up to me. You're right though - it is a very Sekiro like move. I can almost picture deflecting the blows lol. My most recent strategy involved a suped-up greatsword and a +10 mimic tear but i'm barely doing any better than what i was before. I think i might re-spec and try a bleed katana build with the mimic tear. I already tried it once solo and no luck, but who knows? I feel like if/when i do beat her it will be somewhat up to chance and not because i developed my skill.

I do like the game - i just dont like some of the creative choices. Other DS games have reused bosses and it never bothered me much, but when every dragon is basically the same fight what was once awe inspiring becomes mundane. Matter-of-fact there are very few boss fights in the game that arent repeated, and that just sucks. But we'll see how i feel when i try to go back to DS1 and i don't have the QOL improvements Elden Ring provides.

I had to re-spec for her. In the end I settled on dual-wielding the Rivers of Blood and Nagakiba maxed out with a Mimic Tear doing the same. Try and lure her into the corners that you start near and then she doesn't tend to dodge and you can whail on her, stunning her and causing bleed. The second phase is the toughest and for me in the end it came down to luck when she launched herself at my still alive Mimic Tear, giving me just enough time to once again do as much damage as possible to kill her whilst the Scarlet Rot was building up on me.

@Losermagnet I noticed her guard breaks quite easily. So I'm smashing her with a hammer lol.

I can dodge all her attacks, it's really that funky one that is the problem. The only way I've ever been able to run away from that move is by guessing she is going to use it(usually around a certain HP).

We'll see, I'll give it a few more tries tomorrow and then I'll explore some other areas and probably go to the Elden lordy.

All I remember when I started was that I couldn't really beat those knights in front of a keep, but at the same time I went with the wrong class, and had to switch to Vagabond.

I'm surprised to report i beat Malenia. I re-speced and that didnt work, so i changed back and equipped the heaviest armor i could (which wasnt much better than what i had on) and i lucked out. My mimic tear survived the whole battle and that helped immensely. Part of the trick was to equip the silver tear mask talisman prior to summoning the mimic and then quickly equip something else. That way he would draw Malenia's aggro. It didn't always work but it when it did it really helped.

Are there any endings that require you to beat Malenia? If there are please let me know because i'm not sure i want to do that again. Ever.

@VoidofLight dude i remember that lol. In retrospect the thought of your character clubbin' in their undies is pretty funny. Did you find it much easier after changing classes?

@Losermagnet I found it easier, since there was a shield to block attacks. I'll probably go back to a wretch class eventually.

@Losermagnet None of the 'achievement endings' require you to beat her. I think there might be a slight insignificant change if you do beat her during the playthrough but I'm not sure about that. She seems to be entirely optional.

I agree entirely with you on the opinions of the game and the opinion on Malenia. I think she is an awful boss fight and one of the many poorly designed bosses in the game. She has awful telegraphing, you can barely tell what you're supposed to even do with some of her attacks. The Sword Dance move is one of the worst moves in this entire series. It looks goofy and it gives the player no information how to counter it. I liked the idea of a boss regenerating health but I wish it was attached to a better boss fight than hers.

The one boss fight I genuinely enjoyed was the Berserk dog. Everything else I either forgot by now (I did finish the game some time ago) or just remember hating. Even the boss that I liked had to be attached to the second, final, final boss of the game which is also yet another 'one of the worst' for the series.

Two phase bosses, bosses with multiple enemies, bosses with constant debuff effects and bosses with abhorrent amount of health, bosses with ridiculous auto-tracking, wonky hitboxes, spammy movesets and worst of all - bosses which don't even fit on your screen is all artificial difficulty to me. It was heavily criticised when Dark Souls 2 came out and it should be criticised here.

Unfortunately the fanbase of these games think Miyazaki is flawless and can do no wrong so it's impossible to explain to people that this game felt more like a chore by the end moreso than anything I've played in recent years, especially in comparison to previous games from the same team. Bigger doesn't mean better and this time I wish they went for a smaller world with much more focus on quality.

Most of the people at work who have played this game keep telling me how impressive the scale of the world is but unfortunately the quality of the content within that same world doesn't live up.

To stretch the game out and make it seem bigger than it actually is, instead of items we now have flowers and rocks that can craft items!! Amazing, right?! The weapons are pretty much the exact same as the previous games with the same movesets but now we made a few more re-skins and spread them all out evenly around the world. The enemies are all the same as previous games too but hold on, we re-skinned them as well and copy and pasted them everywhere!! Some of them even have boss health attached to them for no apparent reason and we put them into dungeons where they absolutely have no reason to be because we need our game to seem like it has so much more content than it actually does!

As I've said before, in Zelda this worked for me because there was so much more to do in that game than just run around and swing a sword for 100 hours. There were actually impressive treasure hunts, there were quests and questlines which you could actually follow, there was a bunch of physics based gameplay stuff which you could do, there was cooking, I could go on.

In this game my experience stayed the same through the whole 150hrs of playtime and there were too little redeeming parts which made me feel like my time was spent well. The moment-to-moment "wows" or excitement were spread so thin on this massive landscape that it fell completely flat for me when in the original Dark Souls I could get the same amount of enjoyment and variety out of 10 hours. From memory, however, when I played Dark Souls or Bloodborne I didn't get annoyed at the game for being unfair nearly as much. In fact, I'd like to point out that up until this game this series was revered on being challenging but fair. Here that stigma entirely changes thanks to all I mentioned up above.

The crafting system is also very arbitrary and doesn't add anything to the game, except in previous games when you entered a swamp area full of poison usually the game would throw a few easy enemies at you which you could farm for poison alleviating items to prepare you for the upcoming challenge. Here, not only do you usually have to find multiple items which are scattered everywhere, but you also have to have the appropriate cookbook which, especially on a first playthrough, a player wouldn't know where to look for.

I'm sure for the average person who hasn't played a Souls game before this may seem amazing (although the difficulty and FromSoft's weird obscure design decisions will still gatekeep a lot of people) but as someone who went through the entire series this game stood as a 6/10 for me. It was just above average but most of the high points were directly from the games before this one. I don't believe I got anything new out of this game.

Man y’all already got too her? I’m planning to get all of the great ruins before I try the final boss let alone her.

Nice, @Losermagnet .... She's quite a lot more difficult than the 'final' boss, so if you haven't done him yet, he should be pretty easy

I've tried a couple of Souls games before with Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne but have found it hard to get into them because i come to roadblocks and just get fed up with being stuck. I absolutely love Elden Ring though as I have the freedom to go anywhere so i can just get away from tough situations until I can handle them later. I see Zelda Breath of The Wild and Elden Ring as being the best open worlds because you have to explore and you're not just following map markers (ie. Ubisoft) I've made significant progress for the first time in a Souls game and I'm really enjoying it

@Magonigal Glad you're enjoying it. Maybe after ER you'll be able to appreciate the other games as well.

@JoyBoy
Thanks, maybe i'll give DS3 a go after Elden Ring is finally completed

@Magonigal Thats whats so great about this game, and what made me want to try the others.

@Varkster yeah thats pretty much been by experience. I think it comes down to what i liked from the other Souls games and how that's represented in Elden Ring. The things i like are there - but more often than not they're compromised by other design choices. Eg:
-Bosses are often great until they repeat constantly
-Npc's are interesting but almost impossible to find naturally due to the open world.
-Build variety - if you like spells
-Catacombs! Very very similar to each other. (Almost feels like they were attempting a chalice dungeon-style feature).
-Crafting! Encourages you to wander aimlessley hoping to find that one item that lets you craft more preserving bolus' (or google it 😑).

Normally I dont look stuff up because i want to find it myself - but halfway through ER i gave up and decided that i'm gonna google instead of being bored and i'm gonna summon spirits instead of raging to a reskin. Fwiw I do enjoy the game a bit more, just not the way I'd prefer.

@Snatcher she was a beast! I'm about level 150 and i got lucky beating her. But in fairness I didnt really bother to learn attack patterns and the like. Abused the power of greatswords.

@BruceCM thats good to hear. Im gonna try and clean up all the bosses and I'm hoping they're not too easy, y'know? I fought the Twin Gargoyles WAY later than i should've and they went down like chumps.

@Magonigal Glad to hear you like it! Even though it wont be a favorite of mine I'm still happy to have it, and that its so well liked. How far have you gotten?

@JoyBoy any luck with Malenia? I can pretty confidently say she's the hardest Souls boss I've fought.

@Magonigal I would suggest Bloodborne if you have access to it, the theme and gameplay is different enough from Elden Ring so you won't be tired of it.

Elden Ring plays identical to Souls 3.

@Losermagnet I’m probably going to try scarlet on her, I have been doing a mix of faith and dex, and it’s been working out very well for me so far.

@Losermagnet
I have completed all of Limgrave, the Southern Peninsula and a bit of Caelid. Killed Margit on my first try which I was so proud of although I was very levelled up first. Exploring Liurnia now and thinking of trying Caria Manor before going to Raya Lucaria.

@Varkster
I think i'll try Dark Souls 3 first as its seems as though it's quite similar to Elden Ring but i own Bloodborne so maybe try that after. I really like the magic, ashes of war and summons in ER so would miss not having any of that stuff in the older games

@Magonigal Bloodborne won't have the focus on magic and special skills but it has much better and more elaborate/creative movesets for weapons. In my opinion it's a much better action game than Souls 3 and since you already own it, it wouldn't be a bad choice.

A warning for you before you start your DS3 playthrough is lower your expectations for weapon arts, they were much worse in DS3 than ER and were each bound to specific weapons. Most people deemed them unnecessary for the single player and mostly used them in multiplayer with wacky builds.

@Varkster
Thanks for the advice. Think i'll be on Elden Ring for quite a bit longer but i've been watching Youtube play-throughs of DS3 on Outside Xtra and Bloodborne on Eurogamer so hopefully that will help