Shadow of the Erdtree’s greatest strength is that it’s more Elden Ring. On the contrary, Shadow of the Erdtree’s biggest weakness…is that it’s more Elden Ring.

Now listen, I adore Elden Ring; it’s my favorite open world experience in gaming and, despite the occasional hiccup or design direction choice I wasn’t stoked about, it delivered across almost every front and successfully translated one of my favorite gaming genres into a stage with scope and spectacle so large it genuinely belied belief at points. This aspect of Elden Ring was captured once again in the Shadow of the Erdtree, and dare I say it did an even better job of it than the base game. Visually, this is my favorite stuff FromSoftware has ever put out period; from the beautiful blue fields of the Cerulean Coast to the cinematic climb up the mountain to your eventual showdown with Bayle. Everything on display here is absolutely gorgeous, the art team behind everything in this DLC deserves all the praise in the world and more. The legacy dungeons were similarly captivating, and I don’t know how much of a ‘hot take’ this is but I’ve always really enjoyed the light platforming sections in these games and they were a ton of fun here. Scaling from floor to floor and making precarious leaps to crawl up the backside of a statue in the Shadowkeep’s storehouse was a big highlight of my play through. I always felt that exploring these areas was very rewarding too, since the DLC is stocked with new weapons and smithing stones with which to actually upgrade them. Everyone has extensively made fun of the sheer number of cookbooks you stumble upon, and I’m item crafting’s number one hater so in most cases I can understand this, but I actually found item crafting super useful? Being able to craft things like a consumable Golden Vow spell and the fruit that increases holy damage negation were immensely useful to me in my playthrough.

Of course, the most important point of exploration here are the Scadutree Fragments (Revered Spirit Ashes too, but I don’t use summons so this was much less important to me) which offer permanent stat increases related to damage dealt and incoming damage negated. I’m of two minds about this…in theory, I think it’s a fantastic idea and a good way to balance things given the extremely wide breadth of levels and builds you can come into the DLC with. They’re also certainly some of the most gratifying and immediately satisfying items to stumble upon in Souls history. On the other hand, I think they’re optional in name alone…they’re a straight up mandatory collectible if you don’t want to bash your head against a wall in frustration. By replacing conventional levels, they’ve funneled their progression system in a very specific direction which honestly kinda goes against the open world nature of the game? In the base game, if you get stuck, you’re encouraged to take multiple different approaches…any path that you take is going to help even out the curve because every little thing you do is going to contribute to progression meaningfully. In the DLC, after getting stuck, your option is pretty much…go to very specific areas and pray you find Scadutree fragments. This also isn’t to mention that a few of these fragments are so absurdly hidden that there’s genuinely no chance you’d ever stumble upon them without a guide. This is nothing new for Souls, but it feels unusually restrictive here especially when considering that there are no excess Scadu fragments like there were with seeds in the base game.

And then, there’s the boss fights. I was already very critical of Elden Ring’s design philosophy when it comes to its bosses - I am not a fan of every boss having these weirdly delayed attacks, the insistence on more and more complex movesets with fewer windows of attacks prolonging fights to a comical degree, the insistence on bosses having so much mobility that the act of simply keeping track of them is the most difficult part of the fight, etc. I say all of this as someone who values the boss encounters the most out of anything in these games, and I was hoping this was an area the DLC would clean up. The DLC did not remedy these issues, however, and instead decided to quadruple down on this front. Some of these bosses are just WAY too overjuiced man. I am immune to the “skill issue” retort as I did every encounter the game had to offer completely solo, no summons no spirits, and even did a few encounters like Rellana with 0 Scadutree blessings. Essentially, I am very qualified and justified to complain about how some of these bosses are designed. Rellana, for example, is one of the most frustrating bosses in Souls history. Absurdly long combo strings with piss poor intervals to attack, short combos that can turn into long combos on a dime with literally no time to react to the transition, a second phase that makes moves way too difficult to decipher with the thousands of particle effect explosions happening all around you because the boss is also moving at the speed of light squared, etc. The most miserable examples of this by far are Bayle and the Golden Hippo, who straight up have broken hitboxes and models so mobile and massive that the camera just occasionally decides to take a vacation and/or clip into the entirety of the boss. A good 20% of my deaths to these two bosses in particular was because I could not see anything that was happening in front of my face, it’s dreadful. Of course, this is still FromSoftware so of course there are still some amazing bosses in the mix too: Midra and Messmer are my favorite encounters in all of Elden Ring, and some of my favorites in this series as a whole (even if the latter isn’t necessarily completely immune to my earlier complaints, just much less so). Controversially, I even really like the final boss? The first phase is genuinely perfect and while the second phase does embody all of my earlier complaints, I feel like it’s really just a couple of attacks that take it to an unreasonable degree; if some of those second phase attacks were tweaked (which is almost certainly what’s going to happen) I would like the encounter more than I already do.

Overall, I really enjoyed Shadow of the Erdtree and it managed to scratch that Souls itch that nobody else other than FromSoft is able to scratch in the way that I need. Artistically one of the most impressive experiences I’ve ever had, and moment to moment gameplay was excellent and up to series standards even with some frustratingly overtuned bosses thrown into the mix.