The Adventures of Peaches, Part Fifteen

[rynling]

I’ve been trying to beat Starscourge Radahn, the Totally Not Ganondorf™ boss of the Caelid region, for about two weeks now. The cheese method of beating him was nerfed in the third patch…

…which means, in normal people language, that the developers readjusted the boss’s immunity to a certain type of status-effect magic that would previously take him down in two or three shots during the most recent update to the game…

…right before I got to the point in the game where I could fight him, so I had figure out how to beat him by myself. I actually paid the $10 monthly subscription fee for online connectivity, thinking that I could summon other people to help me, but it didn’t work. Radahn just kills everyone.

In the end, I beat him by putting in the time to get massively overleveled. I turned Peaches into an absolute tank, which means that he can now equip heavy armor and survive one (1) hit from Radahn. I also gave his sword an ice affinity, which means that it scales with both strength and intelligence…

…or, in normal people language, that the weapon receives an attack bonus calculated according to the numeral value of the Strength and Intelligence stats of your character….

…and also inflicts the Frostbite status effect, which almost everything in the game is weak to. Aside from adding a bit of extra damage to attacks, what frostbite does is to lower defense and slow stamina regeneration, meaning that it slightly lengthens the time between enemy attacks. For an enemy like Radahn, who is absolutely relentless, this slight delay is the only way to survive unless you’re a god-tier player.

It's very cool to watch videos of skilled players beating Radahn single-handedly, but I’m happy with whatever works. For what it’s worth, the MVP in this fight was actually Peaches’ horse(?), Torrent. Honorable mention goes to my husband Alexander the literal giant walking jar, as well as my wife Ranni’s brother Blaidd, the giant wolf-man everyone is in love with. The gimmick of this fight is that you can summon a host of NPCs to help you, but these summons are very glitchy. The real credit goes to Torrent for enabling my cowardly hit-and-run tactics.

Anyway, now that I’ve beaten Radahn, I can wear his armor and run around in Totally Not Ganondorf™ cosplay myself. I suspect that Peaches is actually the villain of this game, so it’s not inappropriate.

Comments

[lassarina]

....I mean, a title of Starscourge does imply a certain amount of badassedness, but also, oof.

EDIT: Realized I forgot to say congrats! Well done.

[rynling]

It's an understatement to say that Elden Ring is a very difficult and punishing game.

Looking at the trophies on the PlayStation network, I'm surprised by how dedicated people are to playing it. Like, almost 80% of players defeated the first boss? I wouldn't have expected that. Given how popular Elden Ring is, I would have thought way more than 20% of people who bought the game would have played it for a few hours and then just given up.

I think this is probably a matter of a certain type of person self-selecting themselves to play the game, but Elden Ring is really beautiful. I wish it were more accessible.

[lassarina]

Elden Ring is the kind of thing I know I'd hate playing, and I play SMT games on purpose without turning the difficulty down. (I also don't turn it up, because Atlus employs a large staff of sadists and I don't need that in my life.) But I appreciate that there's an audience for it.