Shadow Of The Erdtree is a truly awesome expansion to Elden Ring. If you enjoyed Elden Ring to any extent, you will surely love SotE because it is just more Elden Ring; just as uncompromising, just as massive, just as epic. They really played down how big this fuckin' thing is in the lead up to its release. Miyazaki was all like "it's the size of Limgrave!" bro it has 10 Remembrance Bosses, it's the size of Dark Souls! It is so big for a DLC, yet almost perfectly-sized as a piece of additional content. Just big enough to be exciting and explorative, but not big enough to be overwhelming and frustrating like the base game could be at times. And in that sense, Shadow Of The Erdtree - as good as it is, kinda just reinforced many of my gripes with the base game!

I think it's really cool that FromSoft tried the whole open world thing, and I think they did a really great job with it in Elden Ring. I also hope they never do it again.

Because I think an open world design fundamentally clashes with what makes FromSoft's games so good; combat. For me the satisfaction in FromSoft's combat comes from getting good at the fight, learning to recognise patterns and identify punish windows. But getting good at Elden Ring's bosses is only half the battle because sometimes - certainly moreso than any other Souls game, being good at the fight doesn't matter! Bosses in this game and especially this DLC (which is why I bring this up here) are overtuned to such an extent that it feels genuinely comical at times. This is NOT me complaining about difficulty, btw, I've beaten this game and every boss it has to offer (except the final boss) without NPC summons or using the Mimic Tear, I'm complaining about design.

Often, instead of getting good at the fight, what is more helpful is to go away and explore the open world and level up (or in the case of the DLC, find Scadutree Fragments) and then come back and melt the boss in 5 hits. This is good open world design because it encourages you to explore, but is it good Soulsborne design? No! I don't think so! I don't get anywhere near the same satisfaction from killing a boss in Elden Ring as I do in the Souls' games because I can never really know if it was my skill that made the difference or if I just won because I had the bigger number. And you can never really know if you're at the right level for a fight. You bash your head into the wall for 3 hours, go away, come back, win and think "well I guess I was always good enough?..." or "did I suddenly just get way better?..." you're just never really sure and it's not fun!

Yet, to allow for the player's ability to just run away and get stronger and come back, Elden Ring's bosses as I've said are designed in a way that is...Well, I'm gonna be very charitable here and use the word "Maximalist". They were pretty insane in the base game, but unfortunately Shadow Of The Erdtree doubles down on many of the things about Elden Ring's bosses that I didn't like - namely random punish windows. What I mean by this is when a boss does an attack and they SOMETIMES give you a punish window and SOMETIMES just randomly fuckin' attack or hell, do some apeshit 5-hit combo that kills you on the spot frames after. Margit and Morgott were prime offenders of this in the base game but in SotE it's like every boss. 2nd phase Rellana SOMETIMES leaves a gap after her forward-double-sword-swing and SOMETIMES just keeps going with a literal second combo right after. Bayle SOMETIMES lets you get some hits in after lunging his head forward but SOMETIMES swings his head twice more and SOMETIMES even jumps back and does a fuckin' breath attack after the 3rd swing as well! Don't even get me started on Bayle, man. There are so many permutations of combos built on what are sometimes punish windows in that 2nd phase alone that you could build a graph that stretches on forever.

Scadutree Avatar, Putrescent Knight, bosses that do this are the norm in SotE. There's some really great fights I love in here like Midra & Metyr but they're buried under this sea of random, insane, throw-shit-at-the-wall, go apeshit 24/7 lunacy. Again, I'm not complaining about difficulty. I've done everything except the final boss (and not even done many attempts yet), I'm complaining about design. Because in the opposite of the way Bloodborne incentivizes aggression, Elden Ring, in this way I think encourages you to play cowardly and defensive; i.e. the most boring way possible. Rellana just whiffed (or better, I dodged) a massive forward swing in my face in the 2nd phase. I should punish here. But I don't want to because I might literally die for it! Not because I didn't recognise a boss pattern, mind you, specifically because I did! Mixups and stuff like this existed in Souls games, don't get me wrong, but it is everywhere in Elden Ring and Shadow Of The Erdtree in particular and you die for getting hit by them way more often. It encourages you to play safe and slow and boring and by consequence, also makes the fights way more luck-based. You kinda just hope for a run where you're playing amazing and the boss happens to do a lot of the like, 1 or 2 moves that are both punishable and you know you can hit them for after. This was the only way I wound up beating Bayle. I played it perfectly, but also got lucky in that he did a lot of diving from the sky and the mouth grab attack - pretty much the only 2 attacks out of about 30 in that whole fight that are a guaranteed punish. That one successful attempt took like 10 minutes!

SO I have some beef with Elden Ring's boss design that Shadow Of The Erdtree doubles down on (and also does some crazy new shit entirely of its own, shoutout to Commander Gaius's charge attack, lmao) BUT it needs to be said that this is more Elden Ring, and Elden Ring is still good as hell. The world of the Shadow Realm is truly awesome, I think I like it more than anything in the base game? So many standout areas like the gorgeous Hinterlands and the incredibly creepy (if not occasionally unfun) Abyssal Woods. I wanna give a mention in particular to the Shadow Keep, though, which surely has to be the best legacy dungeon in all of Elden Ring (yes, I'd even put it above Raya Lucaria & Leyndell) and one of the best single sections of gameplay in any Fromsoft games. It's so beautifully crafted, so darkly atmospheric, so delightfully challenging and also connects to so many other areas in the game and back on itself in so many unexpected ways that it kinda blows my mind, it's just awesome. I also think SotE has my favorite OST of any Souls game or expansion. Usually the music doesn't hit for me like it seems to for others but god DAMN Bayle and Metyr have some of best Fromsoft boss themes ever but Midra's?? In that second phase?? That may be the most fucking evil a Soulsborne game has ever sounded. My new favourite song in From's catalogue, holy balls!!

It's more Elden Ring. It's also just way more than you could possibly have expected. The boss design still isn't good to me, the map NEEDS to convey verticality more effectively because it is basically impossible to figure out how to get to/from certain places just by looking at it and I know I and many others were actively very disoriented by its lack of vertical level display BUT it has an incredible world packed full of the kind of mindblowing secrets only From have the balls to implement, it has a treasure trove of options in terms of customisability and build variety (maybe the most of like, any game ever??) and its combat totally kicks ass when the boss doesn't jump you from frame 1 of entering the fog door and rip your throat out with a screen-covering 6-hit combo that ends with a fucking nuke