Elden Ring

Arise now, ye Tarnished. Ye dead, who yet live. The call of long-lost grace speaks to us all. Hoarah Loux, chieftan of the badlands. The ever-brilliant Goldmask. Fia, the Deathbed Companion. The loathsome Dung Eater. And Sir Gideon Ofnir, the All-knowing. And one other. Whom grace would again bless. A Tarnished of no renown. Cross the fog, to the Lands Between. To stand before the Elden Ring. And become the Elden Lord.

Elden Ring is an action RPG set around the Lands Between. The player plays as a maidenless Tarnished, an undead brought back to life in order of restoring the Elden Ring and claiming the title of Elden Lord in the face of the Shattering, a cataclysmic event that turned the Lands Between upside down, resulting in a civil war with no winner, and therefore left it without a ruling lord. The nameless Tarnished is advised by an individual known as Varré to go to to Stormveil, the castle of Godrick the Grafted, as the first step on his journey.

In terms of gameplay, Elden Ring is a Spiritual Successor to the Dark Souls series: the player determines his character's appearance and style of combat to then begin to explore a map with hostile enemies and friendly NPCs(who can turn un-friendly), with RPGs stats affecting what the player can and cannot do. One major difference however is that unlike the mostly linear Souls games, Elden Ring is a Wide Open Sandbox, with the player much more able to determine what to do next and what to do about the Shattering, with his alignment affecting the game's Multiple Endings.

Elden Ring was developed by From Software and published by Bandai-Namco in 2022. The news website Polygon reports on the involvement of George R. R. Martin in the story crafting of the game. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and Series S.

Directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, that also directed Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Published by From Software in Japan, and by Bandai Namco overseas.

• Abandoned Area: Many of the structures are falling apart into ruins.
• Abusive Parents: Marika. Oh god, Marika. She doesn't seem to have had a positive relationship with any of her kids aside from Godwyn (and even certain lore tidbits may or may not indicate that she played a part in his assassination). While her treatment of Mohg and Morgott stands out as especially awful (being Omens, she banished them to the sewers underneath the capital), one of the dead Demigods in a Walking Mausoleum is explicitly said to be her "unwanted child", and she's perfectly willing to let her surviving Demigod children die for failing to become candidates for the Elden Throne.
  • While he does seem to be genuinely fond of Nepheli, Gideon Ofnir isn't exactly a model adoptive father himself. He openly views her as a pawn to be exploited, and while he's disgusted with Seluvis for trying to turn her into one of his "puppets" (read: rape slaves), he won't actively intervene unless you encourage him to do so. He also disowns her for unknowingly killing the men he ordered to burn down the Albinauric Village and recover the Haligtree Medallion.
  • While this is only seen in cut content, Gostoc was supposed to be the son of Godrick (or so he'd claim). Considering how much Gostoc hates the guy for his awful treatment of him as a mere servant in the final game, being his son would certainly add a tragic element to him stomping and spitting on his corpse after his boss fight.
• Acrofatic: Veterans of previous FromSoftware games will likely know not to assume that big, fat enemies are sluggish punching bags, but new players will be startled to see a tubby ogre-like Omen rush them down and toss them aside like a ragdoll. The Omen-like Bloodfiends from the DLC are similarly obese and agile.
• Affably Evil: Sorceress Sellen is a ruthless serial killer who has done some seriously nasty things in the name of furthering her research... and yet, she's one of the friendliest characters in the game, and far more polite than her somewhat snooty demeanor would indicate.
• Agony of the Feet: The poor Fire Giant, whose crippled, rotting, infected foot is his weakness for the first half of his boss fight. During the phase transition, he breaks his entire leg and screams in agony before burning it and ripping the damn thing off.
• Ambiguously Human: Bloodhound Knights look like tall, lanky humans in knight armor, but they way they run around on all fours, track people by scent, and generally fight like feral animals suggests otherwise. Further muddying the waters are the similarities between them and the Demi-Human Chiefs, and the fact that a named Bloodhound Knight (Darriwil) has close ties to the Half-Wolf Blaidd.
• Anti-Villain: As relentlessly dark and cruel as this game's villains can be, they're not all a bunch of vile monsters.
  • As the current head of the fractured, broken Golden Order, Morgott is a cruel man who upholds its abusive policies, relentlessly hunts any Tarnished who hope to claim the seat of Elden Lord, and is consigned to let The Lands Between slip further into decay since he believes that trying to get past the thorns blocking the way into the Erdtree is pointless. But while he's far from a good man, he's still sympathetic thanks to the fact that he genuinely cares about maintaining order: he's fought off multiple invasions of the Royal Capital from would-be conquerors like Godrick and Radahn, refuses to contribute to the ongoing clusterfuck that is The Shattering, and is said to have been a good and just king as far as the citizens of Leyndell were concerned.
  • While a bloodthirsty conqueror responsible for a good chunk of the chaos surrounding The Shattering, Radahn was definitely one of the more honorable and even admirable demigods when he was still sound of mind. He was a bonafide Father to His Men, kind to his pet horse Leonard, and kept falling stars at bay with Gravity magic so horrific abominations like the Astels wouldn’t rampage across the Lands Between. While he's long since devolved into a feral animalistic berserker thanks to being infected by the Scarlet Rot, he's still remembered as an honorable man by those who served under him, and the fight against him is both a festival in his honor, and a long-deserved Mercy Kill so he can die with his dignity intact.
  • Unlike Morgott and Radahn, Malenia wasn't even evil from the start (at least before certain revelations in the DLC changed that), and was instead the benevolent twin sister of Miquella and a true believer in his plan to create the Haligtree and give sanctuary to those rejected by the Golden Order. And even though the Scarlet Rot infecting her from birth has long since warped her body and brain into that of a dangerous woman just barely clinging to what's left of her sanity, she's still lucid enough to hold on to her love for her brother and congratulate the Tarnished for a battle well-fought despite finally blossoming as the Goddess of Rot. It really speaks to her benevolence that even after Shadow of the Erdtree revealed that she was willing to lead an army to kill Radahn so Miquella could enthrall his soul and force him to become his consort after he went back on their childhood marriage promise, she still manages to stand out as one of the most morally sound demigods overall.
  • Miquella, despite intentionally discarding the traits that made him such a kind and loving figure in pursuit of godhood, still firmly believes in wanting to usher in an age of tenderness and compassion where all people are equal. The problem lies in the extremes he takes to make it happen, which includes abandoning his sanctuary for the oppressed to wither and rot away, murdering his half-brother and enslaving his soul to serve as his consort/warrior lord, and trying to brainwash as many people as possible into doing what he wants.
  • While your first impression of Messmer the Impaler isn't bound to be a good one due to... well, all the people impaled upon spikes you see in his men's territory, he's both quite the tragic and sympathetic figure, as well as, surprisingly, one of the least malicious Demigods overall. He's a Benevolent Boss and A Father to His Men, and the war crimes he committed against the Hornsent were done on Marika's orders, as she wanted him to attract the full brunt of their hatred and scorn before, in true Marika fashion, abandoning her son to fight a genocidal Forever War that has quite clearly taken a toll on him. And it certainly helps that the Hornsent manage to be an entire race of unapologetic Asshole Victims who committed unspeakable atrocities that Messmer is actively trying to undo - his fortress, the Shadow Keep, actually has a sick bay for the tortured Jar Innards and seems to be dedicated to trying to find a way to save them from the horrific fates inflicted upon them by the Hornsent.
• Apocalypse How: When the Elden Ring was broken, it was not good for the Lands Between. The cycle of life and death was thrown completely out of whack and thanks to most of Marika and Radagon's demigod children going insane and trying to make petty power grabs in order to become the next Elden Lord, the post-Shattering civil war directly or indirectly led to the ruination of civilization as a whole, save for a few tiny pockets here and there. And just in case that didn't sound bad enough, malicious outer gods and invading aliens are contributing to the chaos themselves.
• Arc Villain: The shard-bearers are basically the main villains of the regions that they're stationed in: Limgrave is in a state of decay due to Godrick's malicious abuse of power (not to mention that he and his men are actively hunting Tarnished like you), Rennala's heartbreak-induced insanity doomed Liurnia to its own decline, warriors are congregating in Caelid for a grand festival dedicated to performing a Mercy Kill on the insane Radahn, Rykard's mansion in Volcano Manor houses an assassin's guild dedicated to killing Tarnished so he can single out powerful people to eat and assimilate, and Morgott is the current king of the capital city of Leyndell and is protecting the Erdtree from any potential threats. If you want to factor in the Shard-bearer Superbosses, then there's Mohg using the Siofra River region as his dynasty's seat of power, while the Consecrated Snowfield/Haligtree is where Malenia is on the cusp of blooming into the Goddess of Rot.
• Asshole Victim: While the various "puppet" summons you can use are innocent people who have had their free will forcibly stripped from them, there's one satisfying exception: the Loathsome Dung Eater, if you choose to give him Seluvis' potion instead of Nepheli.
  • While Blaidd and Iji will die by the end of Ranni's questline, the same goes for Seluvis and Pidia, whose deaths you won't be mourning in the slightest.
  • As far as Leda is concerned, the Hornsent are an entire race of Asshole Victims, being victims of an ongoing genocide as revenge for the genocide they committed on Marika's people thousands of years ago. Between the torture, floggings, and horrific ways they transformed the Shamans, Leda all but says that they got what they deserved when Messmer and his men began slaughtering their way through the Land of Shadow.
• Assist Character: You can learn Summoning Ritual magic to call forth really cool ghost-like entities to help you in battles. Examples include a big, ghostly jellyfish, a pack of ghostly wolves, and the Mimic Tear, a ghostly doppelganger of your character.
• Asskicking Equals Authority: Becoming Elden Lord requires you to be the biggest badass in The Lands Between, capable of slaying all manner of horrifying monsters, peerless warriors, powerful Demigods, and a godlike creature that is vassal to The Greater Will itself. Godfrey, the first Elden Lord, says it best.

A crown is warranted with strength!

• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Some of the enemies tower over the player character, such as Trolls, Guardian Golems, and Starscourge Radahn. The Fire Giant is far bigger than any of them, with the Tarnished being barely any taller than his feet.
• Ax Crazy: Godrick the Grafted. If his castle-turned-slaughterhouse/cannibal larder full of dismembered limbs and mutilated corpses didn't clue you in, his maniacal laughter throughout his boss fight and willingness to dismember himself will.
  • A few Invaders are simply batshit insane beyond all reason, and attack anyone unfortunate enough to cross paths with them. Standouts are Anastasia Tarnished-Eater (the name says it all), Mad-Tongue Alberic (driven insane by the taunts he heard from other Roundtable Hold members), Festering Fingerprint/Roundtable Knight Vyke (making contact with the Three Fingers and Frenzied Flame drove him completely insane), and just about every Bloody Finger (bloodthirsty cultists dedicated to the Lord of Blood). Edgar the Revenger is a particularly tragic example because you meet him as a friendly NPC beforehand, and the death of his daughter causes him to manifest the Frenzied Flame and turn into a revenge-obsessed madman that butchers friend and foe alike.
    • The Lord of Blood that several of them are said to work for, Mohg? He's one of the cruelest, most vile characters in the game, to the point that his palace grounds are surrounded by literal lakes of blood spilled by his victims, and his obsessive crush on his younger half-brother led to him kidnapping and raping the boy while hoping to turn him into a vessel for the Outer God that he worships in a bid that was doomed to fail from the start. His gear's descriptions even go so far as to skip flowery dialogue or snarky subtext and outright call him a delusional madman. While Shadow of the Erdtree reveals that his crush on and treatment of Miquella are a result of being brainwashed into doing so, the same does not go for the rest of his villainy.
  • The Loathsome Dung Eater swings between acting coldly polite and screaming like a madman, with him outright smashing his head against his cell wall to the point of bloodying the bricks and howling threats of rape and murder to whoever can hear him. He genuinely believes that he's an Omen at heart, and wants to taint the very fabric of reality with the Elden Ring so he can spread the Omen Curse to the world at large so everyone can be as disgusting and horrifying as he is.
  • Hoarah Loux, Chieftain of the Badlands, was a vicious, murderous, bloodthirsty brute before becoming Marika's consort and adopting the name of Godfrey. He suppressed his inherent bloodlust and became a respected elder statesman... by grafting Serosh, the Beast Regent, to himself as a sort of emotional inhibitor so that he could actually rule as lord and not pile up corpses at the drop of a hat. When you face off against him and get him down to half health, Godfrey kills Serosh, ditches his axe, and returns to his old identity of Hoarah Loux before fighting with renewed viciousness and brutality.
  • Despite seeming like a noble knight and the ideal follower of Kindly Miquella, Leda turns out to be a total psycho who Miquella has compelled into surpressing her murderous urges. When Miquella shatters his Great Rune in pursuit of godhood and breaks the mind control charm he placed on his followers, Leda quickly turns into a paranoid lunatic who shows a willingness to murder her compatriots out of a belief that they'll be a threat to Miquella's plans, and will kill them depending on the actions you take. She's also the Sole Survivor of her order of Needle Knights because she killed all of them due to this exact same paranoid mindset.
• Badass Adorable: Melina is an incredibly beautiful, soft-spoken young lady, and very kind and caring to boot. And if you summon her to help fight Morgott, she'll whip out a dagger and fight the ruling lord of Leyndell with a moveset shared with none other than the Black Knife Assassins.
• Badass Gay:
  • Female player characters are this by default, since part of the package of becoming Elden Lord is becoming Marika's consort (assuming it isn't a marriage of political convenience, that is,). Alternatively, they can become Ranni's consort, which is framed in a far more romantic light since doing so has you literally put a ring on her finger and accept a marriage gift.
  • Building off the above, Ranni is a Badass Bisexual due to being a successful Magnificent Bastard that seeks to usher in a new age of her own independent from the Golden Order's desires and falls deeply in love with male and female player characters alike.
  • General Radahn, one of the biggest badasses in a World of Badass, turns out to have been gay in Shadow of the Erdtree which reveals that he made a Childhood Marriage Promise with his half-brother Miquella, and becomes his consort upon his ascension to godhood.
• Badass Grandpa: Commanders O'Neil and Niall, a pair of elderly soldiers who are fought during Millicent's questline. Seemingly the King Mook equivalent to the Banished Knights, they fight you with a powerful arsenal of storm-based attacks and attempt to skewer you on the pointy end of their impressive battle standards, all while commanding ghostly knights that act as their equivalent to your Spirit Ashes. Even their boss arenas speak to just how tough these old men are: O'Neil is stationed in the heart of Caelid's Swamp of Aeonia and enduring the Scarlet Rot eating away at his body, while Niall is stationed at the Mountaintops of the Giants and guarding the medallion that opens the way to the Consecrated Snowfield.
  • Sir Ansbach, one of your most reliable allies in the DLC, is one of Mohg's Pureblood Knights and a powerful warrior who hasn't slowed down a single bit in his old age, despite what he repeatedly tells you. He's one of two people you can summon to help out with the DLC's final boss, and unlike Support Party Member Thiollier? He's actually capable of doing more than tickling Promised Consort Radahn due to his fighting style revolving around inflicting Blood Loss and cleaving massive chunks off of his life bar in spite of his tanky defenses.
• Badass Normal: Godfrey, the first Elden Lord, wasn't a god or demigod, but an ordinary human with obscene, superhuman strength. He was so strong that he could split the earth open with a swing of his axe, and slaughtered countless Fire Giants during their war with the Golden Order. To put into perspective just how impressive that feat is, when you fight the last remaining Fire Giant, his durability and inhuman strength make him a bonafide example of That One Boss - and he's a cripple with a bum leg. Godfrey killed hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of these things in peak condition and mowed them down as if they were mere cannon fodder.
• Bald of Awesome: Thops may not seem awesome at first glance, but he ends up creating a spell that nullifies most of the game's magic attacks (including Maliketh's Destined Death sword beams and the final boss's Elden Stars attack), and would go on to be the foundation of an entirely new conspectus at Raya Lucaria Academy! While he dies after creating it, it's one hell of a note for his life to end on, and judging by his corpse's body language, he died peacefully and happy.
• Bald of Evil: Patches makes yet another appearance in a FromSoftware game, this time being a bandit/merchant/assassin who is up to his usual tricks of kicking players off of cliffs and tricking them into nearly getting themselves killed with honeyed words and promises of riches beyond their wildest dreams.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Dryleaf Dane, one of Miquella's followers in the DLC, is a Badass Preacher who obsessed with honing his skills as a martial artist, and encourages the player to follow in his example. Whether you follow his questline or not, you'll get the ability to fight with his "Dryleaf Arts" yourself once you kill him and the rest of Leda's Miquella loyalists.
• Bare Your Midriff: The female Hero's starting armor has sort of a "barbarian Fur Bikini" sort of look going on. Nepheli Loux puts it to very good use.
• Bears are Bad News: Averted with normal bears, which are only a little more threatening than your average wild animal. But this is played oh-so-painfully straight with Runebears, gigantic, heavily-muscled bears with freakish, almost humanoid proportions that are some of the most dangerous boss-level enemies in the game. They're fast enough to keep pace with Torrent, insanely powerful, overwhelmingly aggressive, and capable of hitting you from a distance with weaponized roars. Oh, and there are subtle hints that these things are beginning to transform into dragons as well.
  • The rare Great Red Bears from Shadow of the Erdtree are red-maned Runebears that can use beast incantations on top of being even stronger than "normal" Runebears.
• Beef Gate: Certain important areas are guarded by enemies that are far stronger than anything else in the immediate area as a way to encourage the player to explore the game's open world and come back when they're stronger. A famous example would be the Troll that ambushes you on the way to Stormveil Castle.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Downplayed with The Loathsome Dung Eater. There's nothing even remotely funny about the guy, but his name and the hammy way it's spoken in the intro is bound to get all but the most mature players giggling. But once you actually meet him, it immediately becomes clear just what a vile, nasty piece of work he really is.
  • Second Generation Albinaurics are funny little potbellied frog guys... who can cartwheel up to you at high speed and smack you to the ground with their powerful clubs. The Albinaurics corrupted by Mohg are even worse, because the blood spikes they grow while cartwheeling turn them into extremely dangerous wheels of death that can kill you incredibly fast.
  • The Lamenter from the DLC is a... weird creature, resembling a scrawny Omen that is constantly laughing like a lunatic and sobbing profusely, and attacks by inflating his head and slamming you with it. He also summons clones of himself that, should you fail to kill them in time, will all "cry-laugh" in perfect unison, seemingly doing nothing other than annoying/amusing you... before you suddenly start cry-laughing so hard that you die on the spot.
• Big Bad: Not in a traditional sense, but Marika/Radagon can be considered the closest thing there is to one in the setting. Marika shattering the Elden Ring in order to free herself from the Greater Will's control is what caused this whole mess to begin with, and the abusive, draconian Golden Order that she founded is responsible for an untold amount of death and suffering, the consequences of which can still be felt to this day. And as for Radagon, he and the Elden Beast are the last obstacles you run into on your journey, and they fight to the death in order to keep you from ascending to the Elden Throne. Though of course, how much of it is Radagon’s will and how much of it is the Beast’s isn’t really elaborated on.
• Big Badass Wolf: Expect to see a few of these, every now and then.
  • The Red Wolf of Radagon, Elden Ring's resident Sif clone and a spell-slinging, sword-swinging wolf who attacks trespassers looking to break into Raya Lucaria. It’s not the only one of its kind, either: you can run into other Red Wolves later on that are even stronger than this one.
  • Blaidd is more of a wolfman than a proper wolf, but seeing as how he’s a hulking, muscular colossus that towers over the player, helps you fight General Radahn, and successfully kills an entire hit squad of Black Knife Assassins, he still fits the bill.
  • It’s not immediately obvious, but Beast Cleric Gurranq is one of these under his baggy, ragged robes. When you fight him during the endgame, he sheds his disguise and reveals his true self Maliketh the Black Blade: a terrifying, imposing wolfman who wields the power of Destined Death, and is so powerful that even the Demigods fear him.
  • And of course, the general rule of thumb for wolf enemies is that the bigger they are, the stronger they get. Normal wolves are only slightly annoying, "alpha" wolves are tougher and dangerous at lower levels, and the Consecrated Snowfield's Direwolves are full-on bosses in mook clothing who can be encountered with Albinauric Archers riding on them!
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Not too common in the base game, but there's still a few. Highlights include the Giant Ants mostly encountered underground, Giant Dragonflies encountered in many areas, and the Kindred of Rot, centipede-men who stalk the wilds of Caelid and worship the Scarlet Rot infesting the place.
  • The DLC adds a few more creepy bug enemies. Man Flies aren't bugs themselves, but Hornsent infected with a painful disease that mutates them into half Hornsent/half fly abominations that vomit deadly poison and utilize Zerg Rush tactics to overwhelm their foes. Spider-Scorpions also exist, and are every bit as freaky as you'd expect them to be. And finally, there's Romina, Saint of the Bud, a Hornsent worshipper of the Scarlet Rot whose devotion to it has mutated her into a massive centipede/scorpion woman with power over the Rot that rivals Malenia.
• Bigger Bad: As a rule, the Outer Gods are this due to being Eldritch Abominations that are never seen (in a corporeal form, at least), but have a very visible effect on the world and are responsible for a number of big conflicts. The Scarlet Rot eating away at Caelid and infecting Malenia, the Frenzied Flame spreading throughout The Lands Between and potentially destroying it and the Formless Mother worshipped by Mohg and his Bloody Finger servants are a few such examples.
  • Metyr, one of the superbosses you can fight in Shadow of the Erdtree is responsible for everything that went wrong in the base game. Marika going from a traumatized survivor of her village's destruction to a genocidal sociopath responsible for god knows how many atrocities? The shattering of the Elden Ring? Ranni's motivation for causing the Night of the Black Knives? It all ties back to her acting as the puppetmaster to her offspring, the Two Fingers, trying to act as vassals of the Greater Will without actually being in contact with it, ultimately paving the way for an unfathomable amount of pain and suffering.
• Big Screwed-Up Family: Marika's family tree, good god. Members include a psychopathic asshole who grafts people's body parts onto himself, a cult leader who participates in regular blood sacrifices and lusts after his half-brother, a blaspheming lunatic who wants to devour the gods... and plenty of people who have gone utterly batshit insane for one reason or another.
• Blade of Fearsome Size: There are plenty to be found! A common one favored by many players is a greatsword that looks like the spitting image of Guts' sword. Several gigantic opponents also wield equally gigantic swords, with the ones wielded by Radahn, the Magma Wyrms, and the Elden Beast being longer than the player is tall!
• Bleak Level: Quite a few of the game's major locations.
  • Caelid is likely to be the first one you'll visit, and boy does it make an impression. Walking into it from Limgrave will have the bright blue sky quickly shift to blood red, and the lush greenery is quickly replaced with barren ground, long-dead plants, and fleshy coral growths sprouting everywhere. Scarlet Rot has mutated many creatures into horrific abominations such as the T. Rex dogs and insanely oversized crows, and at the very heart of the region lies an entire Rot Swamp patrolled by the rotting, crazed survivors of Malenia's platoon left behind after her battle with Radahn so many years ago.
  • While Leyndell is a majestic, somber level with plenty of beauty in spite of its visible state of decay, the sewers beneath it are nightmarishly bleak. The meat of the area, the Subterannean Shunning Grounds, is a cramped and twisted maze of pipes and walkways where Omens are left to die as babies. Giant rats, Imps, blood cultists, Royal Revenants, and the goddamned Dung Eater also call this claustrophobic deathtrap home, but even they pale in comparison to the darkest aspect of this place. Even further beneath the sewers and city is the Frenzied Flame Proscription, a mass grave for tons of entombed Nomadic Merchants who have long since rotted away into mummified husks. The Three Fingers are locked behind a special door at the very bottom, ready to turn whoever finds them into the Lord of Frenzied Flame, a human-shaped can for an Eldritch Abomination that wants nothing more than to burn and extinguish everything in existence.
  • The Deeproot Depths. Godwyn's monstrous corpse has been spreading Deathroot across and beyond The Lands Between from this place, and has latched onto the roots of the Erdtree like some kind of tumorous growth. And unsurprisingly, his presence has turned his immediate surroundings into a rotting hellscape infested with ghostly knights and Deathblight-spewing basilisks. You're also constantly having to wade through filthy stagnant water as well.
  • Just reading the name "Lake of Rot" makes it clear that whatever it's referring to, it isn't going to be pretty. And sure enough, the "lake" is a truly massive, subterranean expanse of Scarlet Rot stretching out as far as the eye can see. The bright red Rot-tainted water makes it feel like you're wading through the depths of Hell itself, and you may as well be since you're trying to keep the Rot from slowly killing you while dodging Basilisks who ambush you from the waters and surviving a gauntlet of Kindred of Rot immediately after reaching dry land.
  • The Jagged Peak and Abyssal Woods, the domains of two of the DLC's three superbosses, are desolate wastelands in and of themselves. The Jagged Peak is a dangerous, treacherous, storm-battered mountain where orange magma-infused lightning constantly rains from the sky, ferocious dragons lie in wait to attack anyone who tries to make it to the top, and culminates in a fight against the dragon equivalent to Satan, who has decorated his territory on the already barren mountain with the corpses of his own kin. The Abyssal Woods, meanwhile, is a vast, foggy, mostly-empty swamp tainted by the maddening touch of the Frenzied Flame, and is actively patrolled by Humanoid Abominations that you're forced to hide from since fighting back is impossible. Aside from them, the only living creatures around are animals that have been twisted by the Flame, the brutal and merciless Hornsent Inquisitors that are trying and failing to contain it, and a seemingly harmless old man who, due to enduring thousands of years of constant agony, becomes a Lord of Frenzied Flame mid-battle!
• Body Horror: There’s plenty to go around!
  • Godrick the Grafted, lord of Stormveil Castle, has a freakishly gargantuan body with tons of twitchy arms and grasping hands attached to it. Once you get him to half health, he cuts one of his own hands off and then rips the head off a dragon's corpse before grafting it on his wounded arm. The dragon’s head comes back to life, and turns into what's basically an organic flamethrower. Killing him reveals that aside from his head and part of his torso, his body is almost entirely skin, muscle, and limbs grafted from countless people, both willing and unwilling.
  • Margit the Fell Omen/Morgott the Omen King and Mohg, Lord of Blood, have discolored skin and nasty, sharp, gnarled horns protruding from their heads. Mohg in particular has one growing out of one of his eyes (though it doesn't really seem to cause him any trouble). This extends to all their fellow Omens, who are spurned and hated by society because of their deformities. Many Omens can be seen with bloody stumps where their horns should be thanks to having them cut off when they were babies, which is noted to usually be fatal.
  • Praetor Rykard. You thought Godrick was uncomfortable to look at? This guy's body has been fused to the God-Devouring Serpent in a truly disgusting manner: with his face seemingly plastered on its throat while his arms jut awkwardly off its body. He also stores his sword in the serpents throat, and reaches inside to pull it out.
  • Trolls, who have a gigantic cavity seemingly torn right out of their stomachs. It doesn't seem to cause them any pain, but it doesn't make it any less disgusting to behold.
  • You'll run into plenty of instances of this when visiting Caelid. You legitimately can't throw a stone without hitting something that's been horribly mutated by Scarlet Rot: you've got dogs with overly huge heads and overly small forelegs that look more like T. Rexes than any sort of canine, crows with gargantuan bodies that make it hard for them to fly, people whose bodies have been overtaken by disgusting fungal growths, a humongous dragon who's so heavily infected with Scarlet Rot that she's rooted to the ground... and capping it all off is Radahn, the shardbearer boss of the region. While he doesn't look outright disgusting, his feet have been rotted off in the aftermath of his battle with the Scarlet Rot-spewing Malenia.
  • As a consequence of messing with the gargantuan, bloated... thing that looks disturbingly similar to Godwyn's corpse underneath Stormveil Castle, Rogier ends up with painful black thorns growing out of his legs. They're Deathroot branches, and are slowly rotting him to death from the inside.
  • Speaking of Godwyn? While he died looking like an attractive, hunky pretty boy, he's been mutated into something truly alien and horrific. His face is bloated and looks as if it's partially melting off his body, his eyes are wide and milky-looking, he seems to have lost his mouth while his nose migrated up to his forehead (alternatively, his face has somehow turned upside down), and what used to be luscious golden locks of hair now look like strands of rotten plants. Also? Tons of Deathroot briars are growing from his corpse much like they did out of Rogier’s legs.
  • The last Fire Giant has definitely seen better days. One of his legs is horribly rotted and gangrenous-looking, and is held in place with a brace made of hair and bones. You break the brace, and then the leg itself over the course of his boss fight. And once his leg breaks, he rips it off his body and sacrifices it to the Fell God worshipped by his people. And that leads to a new type of Body Horror...
    • There's a second, bigger face on his body, and it awakens when he sacrifices his leg! Boasting a huge nose, a nasty-looking mouth, and an unsettling cyclopean eye, it empowers his fire attacks and breathes jets of fire of its own, and makes for quite the creepy appearance.
  • Several enemies that inflict Bleed are infected with nasty-looking bloody blisters, most notably the Blistered Strays and the Blistered Giant Crows hanging out around Mohgwyn Palace.
  • Marika's crucifixion inside the Erdtree has left her in a truly sorry state. The once beautiful goddess is literally crumbling away like aged stone, and the missing gash on the right side of her body makes her look like a partially-broken statue. When she's freed and turns into Radagon, he loses the entire right half of his torso, including his arm, off-camera, and only darkness and the Elden Ring itself can be seen inside as opposed to any blood, bone, or organs.
  • At first glance, Messmer looks the part of a handsome pretty boy, but upon closer observation it's clear that his anatomy's a bit messed up, what with his weird posture, proportions, and vague hunchback. Naturally, once he unleashes the Base Serpent and removes Marika's seal, he reveals a pale, sickly-looking body with massive, gaping holes that the serpent inhabiting his body can slither through. His left eye, once housing said seal, is now an empty gaping hole that, if you looks closely, has several tiny serpents writhing inside of it.
  • The Jar Innards encountered in Shadow of the Erdtree's various dungeons are not the cute, almost cuddly Living Jars from the base game. They're bloated, swollen masses of flesh that look like living tumors, yet are still recognizably human in the worst possible way since all that nasty, raw flesh is attached to humanoid bodies that are far too disproportionately small to carry them around. It turns out that these poor people are Shamans, a peaceful people who were tortured and transformed into these horrific mounds of flesh by the Hornsent for what amount to a sense of self-righteous elitism and religious fanaticism.
• Boring but Practical: An unfortunate part of playing as a caster of any kind. The best incantations and sorceries are often the simplistic ones that merely have you fire/lob a projectile at your enemies, like Blackflame, Glintstone Pebble, Night Comet, and Lightning Spear. Their cast time is minimal, their damage output is great, and they don't take too much MP to use.
• Bottomless Pit: Plenty! It goes without saying that any player messages encouraging you to jump into them can safely be ignored.
• Brawn Hilda Redmane Freyja from the DLC, in the sense that she's a muscular warrior woman with a face that only a mother could love. In terms of personality though, she's incredibly polite and has quite the lovely voice, too.
• Byronic Hero: Morgott, by virtue of being the only active demigod who isn’t insane or power hungry. Despite being a victim of prejudice for being born an Omen, he fights tirelessly to uphold the Golden Order and keep the empire from completely falling apart. He scorns his siblings for their treachery, and is said to have done a fairly good job at running Leyndell despite its state of decay. However, he's also a grim, brooding zealot who upholds the more abusive aspects of the Order and is stubborn in his refusal to allow a Tarnished to take the seat of Elden Lord.
• The Caligula: Not that any of the current ruling Demigods (aside from Morgott and Messmer) are bastions of sanity, but Godrick's the best fit for this trope. Poorly thought-out warmongering has left him having to rely on criminals and mercenaries making up the bulk of his fighting force, and he's an especially awful tyrant who mutilates and tortures his subjects partially for fun, partially to empower himself with their stolen limbs. His willingness to chop off his own arm and graft a dragon’s head onto it also shows that he isn't exactly a bastion of sanity by any stretch of the definition. Neither does his constant maniacal laughter during his boss fight.
• Character Customization: Right at the start of the game, you create your Tarnished from scratch and can make them look however you want. If you aren't satisfied with how they look, you can always check the mirror in the Roundtable Hold or visit Rennala to change their appearance.
• Combat Medic: Perfumers, who use their aromatics to heal and shield their allies while attacking you with burning powder.
• Combat Pragmatist: Quite a few characters fight in such a manner, but you, the player, can potentially be the dirtiest fighter of them all. Killing enemies through stealth, launching sneak attacks against unsuspecting foes, getting out of a boss's attacking range and slowly killing them from a distance, forcing bosses to bleed out or succumb to Scarlet Rot, summoning human players and spectral allies... in the quest to become the Elden Lord, no tactic is off limits (despite what the "Stop Having Fun!" Guys would have you believe).
• Convection, Schmonvection: You can stand right next to boiling magma and be perfectly fine. Hell, even if you jump directly into it, you slowly take damage and can easily wade your way through it so long as you have the means to keep your health topped off!
• Cool Old Guy: Master Hewg, the gruff, elderly Misbegotten blacksmith with a heart of gold, as well as Iji, fellow blacksmith and perhaps the friendliest Troll you'll ever meet. Finger Reader Enia also proves to be a Cool Old Lady when she encourages you to seek out the Giants' Fire and burn down the Erdtree, Cardinal Sin be damned, so you can fulfill your purpose and become Elden Lord.
  • Ansbach from the DLC, however, has them all soundly beaten out in this department. Despite his loyalty to Mohg, he holds no ill will towards you for killing his lord, and is nothing but polite and helpful to you over the course of your adventure in the Land of Shadow. He's also really good in a fight.
• Cool Sword: Tons! You've got your Guts-style heap of raw iron, swords made out of cursed blood, swords made from crystal (forged from a fallen star!), swords made from moonbeams, swords made out of a bunch of other swords... and of course, several katanas for players that are in touch with their inner weeb.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: You can summon other players to help you fight your way through dungeons and take on bosses, as well as have them protect you from invading players.
• Crapsack World: The intro makes it clear that things haven’t been going well since the Elden Ring broke. The land has totally gone to shit in the aftermath of The Shattering, with numerous power-hungry Demigods tearing the land apart in a never-ending power struggle while monsters, rogue sorcerers, and the undead run amok. Most of the world is a ruined, decaying shell of its former self while an entire region has been turned into an uninhabitable wasteland tainted by Scarlet Rot, a virulent disease that doubles as an eldritch biohazard. And that's not all! You’ve got several Eldritch Abominations trying to twist the world to their liking, and Aliens have been invading as well!
• Curb Stomp Battle: Is very likely to happen to the player during the tutorial. Seeing as how you're a freshly-created Tarnished taking on a Grafted Scion, it's likely to go about as well as you'd expect. But if you can defeat it, you get a really good sword and shield way early than you would otherwise (though you'll have to deliberately kill yourself to actually start the game).
• Cute Witch: Ranni is an adorable young lady with a soft, soothing voice, a big white witch's hat, and a bit of a Tsundere side to her. And during the climax of her questline, she puts her soul in an adorably tiny version of her doll body!
• Dark Is Evil: While light not being good is a recurring thing in this game, there are still plenty of instances of this trope in effect.
  • The Night's Cavalry, which may as well be lawyer-friendly Nazgul. Men in black armor riding atop creepy hooded black horses, they stalk certain roads at night and will relentlessly chase down and kill any Tarnished that they see. Interestingly, they work for one of the least evil Demigods: Anti Villain Morgott.
  • Another night-exclusive boss, the Bell-Bearing Hunter, wears creepy barbed armor and stalks merchants and certain instructors in hopes of killing them and stealing their bell-bearings. Your first encounter with him is bound to be quite the Jump Scare, with him emerging from the darkness and immediately attacking you when you're simply on a nighttime shopping run.
  • The Black Knife assassins, a band of ruthless killers in black cloaks and armor that go after their targets with nasty-looking ebony-colored knives imbued with Destined Death. They're the ones behind the Night of the Black Knives and their murder of Godwyn triggered The Shattering, the grief-fueled disappearance of Marika, and Godwyn's horrific transformation into The Prince of Death.
  • While Rykard's associated with the fiery red and orange of boiling magma, he's also associated with the black-scaled God-Devouring Serpent, and has even merged with it thanks to a truly horrific Fusion Dance. Further associating him with darkness is the blackened ground of his boss chamber... which is made entirely out of the burnt corpses of his many victims... or at least, the ones he didn't simply devour.
  • Mohg, the Lord of Blood, wears a pimped out set of black robes, looks like Satan himself, and leads a cult of serial killers that shed blood in the name of their Outer God, the Formless Mother.
  • While he dresses in fiery red, genocidal war criminal Messmer the Impaler's base of operations is the Shadow Keep, a massive black castle that is every bit as dangerous to explore as it looks. The crimson Messmerfire he wields also has a prominent black tinge to it thanks to the Abyssal Serpent living in his body.
  • Bayle the Dread is covered head-to-toe in black scales and looks like Satan himself in dragon form. Unsurprisingly, he's by far the most vicious and brutal of his kind in both the base game and its DLC.
• Death Mountain: Mount Gelmir is pretty much Elden Ring's take on the recurring Zelda locale of the same name. It's a dangerous, craggy, volcanic mountain home to all sorts of nasty critters. Some of its many inhabitants include resident Serial Killer Elemer of the Briar aka the Bell-Bearing Hunter, Deathblight-spewing Basilisks, traumatized soldiers driven mad by the Frenzied Flame, a bunch of Tarnished-hunting assassins, and Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy and the God-Devouring Serpent that he serves.
  • Shadow of the Erdtree has its own equivalent, the Jagged Peak. Home to Bayle the Dread, it's a bleak and dangerous mountain littered with the corpses of lesser dragons (while the survivors, naturally, are tough as nails) and battered by ferocious wind and lightning storms. Said lightning, by the way, is a fiery orange due to being infused with Bayle's magma breath.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Two bosses, Battlemage Hugues and Perfumer Tricia, are obtained as Spirit Ashes after their respective boss fights, allowing you to summon them to help you in battle after you've kicked their asses. This trope is also technically in play for a few other summons, but indirectly: defeating Black Knife Alecto, Demi-Human Swordsmaster Onze, Curseblade Labirith will reward you with corresponding Spirit Ashes, but said Ashes have their own identity (Black Knife Tiche is Alecto's daughter, Demi-Human Swordsman Yosh is Onze's apprentice, and Curseblade Meera is a friend of Labirith's).
  • You can also get Spirit Ashes for Fire Knight Queelign and Swordhand of Night Jolan after defeating them, but the method of getting them to join you isn't all that intuitive (you need to give them an Iris of Grace, an insanely rare consumable item that you can very well use before realizing just how important they are, making them Lost Forever if you aren't careful).
• Degraded Boss: Certain bosses are encountered later in the game as (tough) enemies: Royal Revenants, Crucible Knights, Guardian Golems, Cleanrot Knights, Dragons, Crystallians... however, the biggest standout example is probably the Beastman of Farum Azula. One of the earliest bosses you can fight, whose dungeon is within spitting distance of your starting point, turns out to be a stray Mook from the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. And he's one of the weaker types of Beastmen, too!
• Depraved Bisexual: Seluvis and his cohort/potential puppet master Pidia. Seluvis roofies people with potions that rob them of their free will and reduces them to helpless puppets that he can rape at his leisure, and his secret hideout has multiple women and a handful of men strewn about. Pidia also helps himself to these puppets every now and then, seeing as how he's murdered by several male puppets that he alludes to having molested in the past, as well as possessing a few of Seluvis' favorite female puppets in his inventory when they kill him.
• Depraved Dwarf: The Vulgar Militia, a battalion of tiny little humanoids. They're vicious, psychotically violent little pests, and are prone to laughing maniacally when attacking you.
• Depraved Homosexual: Mohg. While his sexuality isn't discussed in depth, he's shown to have a creepy crush on his half-brother Miquella, who he kidnapped and is said to have raped while trying to transform him into his goddess' vessel. Oh, and as if he wasn’t a big enough creep already? Miquella is also stuck with the eternal body of a child.
  • However, Shadow of the Erdtree turns this on its head by revealing that this trope doesn't actually apply to Mohg, who was compelled to be obsessed with Miquella by the "kid" himself. It does, however, apply to Miquella, who fell in love with his noble-hearted half brother Radahn and developed a violent, possessive crush on him that led to him getting his sister Malenia to kill him as part of his plan to resurrect Radahn as his loyal consort and the lord of the dynasty he wants to usher in.
• Dirty Coward: Godrick the Grafted is said to be one by Lord Kenneth Haight, who tells you about the time he picked a fight with Malenia only to beg for mercy when she kicked his ass, as well as the time he snuck out of Leyndell during The Shattering while disguised as a civilian woman after a power play gone horribly wrong. Interestingly, he never shows an ounce of cowardice while fighting you, not even when he dies.
  • Who else but Patches? When you first meet him, he attacks you for "stealing" from him and fights in the most cowardly way possible (skewering you with a spear while hiding behind a greatshield and forcing you to keep your distance with poison mist attacks), only to beg for mercy once you've gotten him down to half health. And as per usual, he tries to get you killed by feeding you bad advice or tempting you with treasures, only to nervously play it off as a prank gone wrong when you survive and come after his sorry ass.
  • If he truly is Seluvis, then Pidia also counts as an example of this trope. While speaking through the body of an enthralled, powerful sorcerer, he's free to act as dickish and condescending as he wants since he's at no risk of grievous bodily harm. But when the Tarnished he's been treating like an idiot unexpectedly finds his little hidey hole, he plays the part of the groveling, bootlicking servant since that safety net has suddenly vanished.
• Disc One Final Dungeon: Leyndell, the Royal Capital. Being the Golden Order's seat of power and home of the Erdtree and the Elden Throne, you'd expect it to be the last stop on your journey to becoming the Elden Lord. But revelations after Morgott's boss fight reveals that things aren't quite going to be so simple...
• Disc One Nuke: Since it's a very open-ended game with a massive world to explore, savvy players with enough know-how can become insanely OP in no time flat.
  • The Reduvia is a hilariously overpowered dagger that can be obtained the second you leave the Stranded Graveyard and head east a bit. Deep into Lake Agheel is Bloody Finger Nerijus, a powerful and dangerous Invader who can kill you really quickly, but is one of very few Invaders you get backup against in the form of Yura, who can carry the fight himself. Let Yura kill Nerijus and you're rewarded with his dagger, which has insanely low stat requirements and can fire low-cost beams of blood magic that quickly build up Blood Loss, come out even faster, and can be spammed to high heaven. To a dedicated Arcane player it's an outright Game Breaker since its damage (and the speed at which Blood Loss triggers) is tied to your Arcane stat.
  • You want a powerful Blood Loss effect to be applied to your other blades? Then head to Fort Haight and kill the resident Godrick Knight, because he'll give you the Bloody Slash ash of war. When equipped and used, it coats your sword in blood magic and fires off a bloody sword beam that travels way farther than you'd think and deals a shit-ton of damage even without triggering Blood Loss.
  • And rounding out the trio of early Blood Loss weapons is the Bloodhound's Fang, a Great Curved Sword obtained from killing Bloodhound Knight Darriwil, who can be encountered near Lake Agheel. He's a tough fight on paper, being a Lightning Bruiser who is insanely mobile, aggressive, and capable of killing you in a couple of hits. However, exploring the Mistwood and talking to resident friendly wolfman Blaidd will allow you to summon him as a cooperator for the Darriwil fight. And much like Yura, he can practically solo the fight by himself, which nets you a powerful weapon that hits insanely hard for being available so early in the game, inflicts Blood Loss at a fast rate, and has Bloodhound's Finesse for its Ash of War, which lets you get in a single big hit and immediately get out of danger via backflip.
  • The Fanged Imp Spirit Ashes can be your starting keepsake, and good god. Between their agility, ability to trigger Blood Loss, surprising durability, and there being two of them to keep aggro off of you, and you've already won multiple boss fights thanks to these handy little guys. Even if you don't start with them, you can easily get them if you're willing to hot-foot it to Liurnia (which, contrary to popular belief, is not gated off by Godrick) and find the hidden merchant selling them on the outskirts of Raya Lucaria Academy.
  • If you didn't start with the Imps, then the Lone Wolf Spirit Ashes will be your first summon, and they're only marginally less effective. You get three wolves to throw at your enemies, and while they have all the tools that make wolf enemies dangeorus (Zerg Rush tactics, agility, numbers, stunlocking), they do not suffer from the Glass Cannon drawback once you start leveling them up. The same applies to other early-game Mooks you get as Ashes, such as the Godrick Soldiers, Demi-Humans, and Skeleton Militia (the latter of which won't even die when their health hits zero, but only if you keep the enemies/boss from attacking their bones while they're regenerating).
  • The Spirit Jellyfish isn't as aggressive or relentless as the other Ashes mentioned here, but she's very tanky and can reliably poison your enemies with jets of venom from a safe distance away. Her damage output isn't high, but that doesn't matter when she can slowly chip away at a boss's health bar while you're busy dodging their attacks, or letting her take a few hits while you recover and buff/re-buff yourself.
  • Banished Knights Oleg and Engvall are stupidly powerful to the point that they're considered to be among the most broken and overpowered summons in the game, yet both of them are available the second you start the game. Engvall is the easier of the two to grab, since the dungeon he's in, Murkwater Catacombs, is an easy Noob Cave with an equally easy Grave Warden Duelist boss at the end. Oleg, however, requires you to endure the hellish death course known as the Fringefolk Hero's Grave, which is right at your starting point, but very clearly meant to be saved for much, much later. You need quite a bit of MP to summon them, but that's the only drawback because otherwise, they're vicious Lightning Bruisers with powerful wind attacks, with Oleg especially effective at dealing tons of damage while Engvall specializes in staggering and poise-breaking your opponents.
  • The Rotten Stray Ashes require you to make a trip to Caelid and desperately run past all the Demonic Spiders looking to make mincemeat out of you, but doing so rewards you with what is basically a variant of the Stray Wolves that trades numbers (1 dog vs 3 wolves) for the ability to inflict the deadly Scarlet Rot status on your enemies, with very few bosses resisting it in the early stages of the game.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Astrologers specialize in this type of magic, since Glintstone Sorceries have you fire chunks of fallen stars at your opponents (and given that they're gems that come in various shades of blue, they're a Gemstone Assault-flavored take on this trope). Gravity Sorceries are more a more traditional take on this trope since you're firing meteors and rocks at your enemies, same with certain Beast Incantations like Bestial Sling and Stone of Gurranq.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Or in the case of Shadow of the Erdtree, a Hornsent named "Hornsent". He's one of the Followers of Miquella and an important recurring NPC who, for some reason, has no proper name and instead goes by the name of his people.
• Downloadable Content: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was released in 2024, and takes the player to the Land of Shadow, where they learn about Marika's origins and search for Miquella, whose soul resides there thanks to whatever it was that Mohg did to his body.
• Dracolich: Ghostflame Dragons, a type of undead dragon encountered in the Land of Shadow that breathe jets of deadly Ghostflame.
• Draconic Demon:
  • Fortissax, the Lichdragon. While he isn't an evil dragon despite his terrifying appearance, his mind and body have been tainted by the Rune of Death due to remaining in close proximity with Godwyn's corpse for so long. By the time you meet him at the final part of Fia's questline, he's little more than a violent, feral, demonic-looking animal lashing out at you in a misguided attempt at protecting his old friend.
  • Magma Wyrms such as Makar and Theodorix invoke this imagery thanks to their backstory. Like Fafnir of Norse mythology, they were transformed into grotesque, magma-spewing beasts due to eating the hearts of dragons and being forcibly transformed into the creatures that they hunted.
  • The above two examples, however, have nothing on Bayle the Dread from Shadow of the Erdtree. He's basically dragon Satan: black scales, red eyes, ram horns and all. Jagged Peak, his seat of power, is also a hellish Mordor-style wasteland battered by severe storms and littered with the corpses of his dead kindred. And while almost every dragon encountered in the game wants to kill you the second they lay eyes on you, he's specifically noted to be a cruel, power hungry beast who kills his own kind for fun.
• Draconic Divinity: Unlike their Lesser cousins, Ancient Dragons are awe-inspiring, hauntingly beautiful creatures with golden flesh and pristine white scales. Hailing from a time before the Golden Order, they command dignity and respect with their might and holy-looking appearances and were, in fact, worshipped by members of the Golden Order when Godwyn convinced Marika to welcome them into the fold. Dragonlord Placidussax, the oldest and mightiest of their kind, was Elden Lord before even Godfrey, breathes divine golden flames, and can casually warp time and weather with his mere existence. While not a god himself (in fact, he's fruitlessly trying to reestablish contact with the long-gone god of the dragons), you’d be forgiven for mistaking him for one.
• Dual Boss: Plenty of these exist, and they tend to be annoying more often than not. Notable ones include the Leonine Misbegotten/Crucible Knight team in charge of Redmane Castle, the Crucible Knight duo fought in the Auriza Hero's Grave, The Valiant Gargoyles blocking the way to the Deeproot Depths, and most aggravatingly, the Godskin Duo encountered in Farum Azula.
• Duel Boss: Bosses encountered in Evergaols are the only ones where you aren't allowed to summon your Spirit Ashes or request another player's help. It's you and the boss fighting one-on-one in a fight to the death in an inescapable arena, not unlike a steel cage match in pro wrestling.
• Easy Level Trick: If you’re running into trouble in certain areas/boss fights, there’s usually some hilariously stupid way to get yourself out of trouble.
  • In general, you can trick a surprising amount of bosses into killing themselves as long as there's a steep enough drop around them. Potential victims (many of them some flavor of That One Boss) include Preceptor Miriam, Starscourge Radahn, the Valiant Gargoyle duo, several Crucible Knights (including Crucible Knight Siluria), several Red Wolves, and Flying Dragon Greyll.
  • The Tree Sentinel patrolling the starting area is a hell of a Beef Gate and is very clearly not intended to be fought by new players. But as soon as you've gotten Torrent, a decent ranged weapon, or in the case of an Int-based player, a decent amount of flasks allocated towards Cerulean Tears and a good ranged Spirit Ash (such as the Noble Sorcerer), there's a conveniently placed ancient ruin that you can camp on top of where you can safely whittle him down from far away while he can barely do anything about you. It's not completely foolproof since he can occasionally leap up there after you, and spellcasters can have their spells deflected back at them with his shield, but in the case of the former, you can easily jump off, have him chase you down, and jump back up there while in the latter case, you simply have to play cautiously.
    • Speaking of Tree Sentinels? The Draconic Tree Sentinels blocking off the Royal Capital and Maliketh's boss chamber in Farum Azula are notorious for being even more dangerous than the garden variety Sentinels. But they can be cheesed even harder thanks to having a hilariously stupid weak spot: if you creep up behind them and continuously spew Poison Mist, they'll gradually lose health and die without ever turning around and aggroing. The one on the Altus Plateau is a lot easier to do this to, but even the one in Farum Azula can be cheesed once you get behind his spawning point, save and quit the game, and reload.
  • Greyoll, the gigantic Scarlet Rot-infected Dragon slumbering in North Caelid has an interesting, challenging mechanic in her boss fight where she'll call her children for help if you attack her, meaning that you need to kill them one on one since their deaths will remove chunks of her massive health bar, and don't lead to all of them rushing and gang-stomping you. But of course, you can just flip the table, sneak over to one of her back legs, and slowly hack her to death without having to deal with her offspring since they can't find you there for whatever reason.
  • The Mimic Tear bosses in Nokron and the entrance to the Consecrated Snowfield are tough, tricky Mirror Bosses who copy your loadout down to the smallest detail: armor, weapons, incantations, talismans, items, etc. However, they only copy what you bring into battle, and never adjust their equipment if you change it while fighting. So if you want to turn them into a Zero Effort Boss? Go into battle naked, equip some armor and a weapon after they're done copying you, and laugh all the way to the bank.
  • By themselves, Erdtree Burial Watchdogs are some of the game's easier bosses. But when they're backed up by obnoxious, slippery little Imps or an extra Watchdog, they're a much bigger threat. Thankfully, tossing a few Crystal Darts at them will cause them to go berserk and attack the enemies helping them out, which gives you some much-needed breathing room.
• Eldritch Abomination: Quite a few of these, mostly in the form of the Outer Gods that figure into the game's background lore.
  • The Scarlet Rot is a sentient, malicious disease that infects and corrupts everything it touches. Its presence in Caelid has left the place a borderline uninhabitable wasteland full of dangerous mutated creatures and enthralled servants that fanatically worship it, and despite being given the Sealed Evil in a Can treatment, its "can", the Lake of Rot, got its name from the literal lake of Scarlet Rot leaking outward. While it's most hostile to organic life, it can also infect creatures made entirely out of crystal as well as Great Runes, AKA metaphysical concepts. And the Rot somehow infected Malenia in the womb and selected her as its "champion" without simultaneously infecting Miquella, her twin brother.
  • The Formless Mother, despite her name, has a form that can somehow be wounded and encourages her followers to do so since Blood Oath incantations involve reaching into her and spilling her blood. She lives beyond space and time, meaning that the act of wounding her involves breaching dimensions to do so.
  • The Frenzied Flame was called into the Lands Between by the pleas of thousands of entombed, suffering nomads who quite literally wanted the world to burn as revenge for their cruel treatment, and manifested as a sentient, maddening flame that indiscriminately scorches everything it touches and drives those who so much as look at it insane. It wants to destroy the concept of life itself and burn the world until it's nothing but a charred husk, and it can do exactly that if you choose to meet the Three Fingers, its Mouth of Sauron, and take in the Frenzied Flame.
  • The Fell God worshipped by the Fire Giants is said to live within all the Giants and indeed: it manifests as a creepy cyclopean face on the giants' bodies, and has dominion over an undying flame that is so powerful that it can potentially burn the mighty Erdtree to the ground, and has a corruptive presence that turned the Fire Monks watching over it into violent, zealous cultists that worship it.
  • The Dark Moon is a literal cosmic horror that lives in the far reaches of space, and passively sends meteors and stars carrying Alien Kudzu and actual aliens falling to The Lands Between. It doesn’t seem to be actively malevolent, however, and the Glintstones that fall to Earth have been put to work as useful tools and sorceries by all sorts of people.
    • And speaking of aliens? Astel and its progeny are Eldritch Abominations themselves. They’re horrible to behold, boasting freaky bodies that vaguely resemble a titanic dobsonfly made out of miniature asteroids and planets, and boast creepy human limbs and a human skull with nasty pincers and a single piercing eye peeking out from inside the forehead.
  • The Two Fingers are literally two fingers... or rather, grotesque creatures of divine origin that happen to look like two-fingered hands, and are basically the Greater Will's equivalent to angels. They look like immobile hunks of flesh, but are impossible to kill without special weapons created for that specific purpose and are so insanely strong that even with one of said special weapons, Ranni's attack on her own pair of Fingers is a Mutual Kill that she only comes back from through a carefully laid gambit on her end). How they fight isn't exactly known, but judging by the weapons created by them (the Cipher Pata and Coded Sword), it seems to be through a weaponized language of light.
    • Naturally, this trope applies to the creature that birthed them: Metyr, Mother of Fingers. Described as the Greater Will's brilliantly gleaming daughter, she came to The Lands Between on a falling star before even the Elden Beast and looks like a surreal, grotesque, yet almost hauntingly beautiful mess of fingers and hands shaped vaguely like some sort of pregnant creature straight out of David Cronenberg's nightmares. She's the Mother of a Thousand Young to both the Two Fingers and Fingercreepers (quite possibly the Three Fingers as well, and has powers associated with black holes of all things. It's hard to tell if you even kill her at the end of her boss fight, since upon losing her health, she's promptly swallowed up by a black hole instead of vanishing in a cloud of dust.
  • The game's Final Boss is the Elden Beast, an alien creature sent to The Lands Between on a meteor just like Metyr as a vassal of the Greater Will, and looks even weirder than her, since it appears to be a sentient supercluster with traits vaguely related to dragons, amoeba, sea slugs, and humans, of all things. It's the original form of the Elden Ring, making it the laws of reality itself given life, and upon being summoned from Radagon's broken body, immediately envelops the battlefield in nebula that seem to transport both it and the player to a massive pool of ankle-deep water in the middle of a forest of Erdtrees.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Tends to show up every now and then. Gideon Ofnir, for example, is ruthless in his pursuit of knowledge to the point of being willing to burn down a village and slaughter its inhabitants, but even he is disgusted by Preceptor Seluvis. Then there's Big Boggart, a self-confessed thief and thug, who is genuinely terrified of the Dung Eater and the horrific way he curses and kills people. Even Mohg helping Morgott seal away the Frenzied Flame could be an example of this, though it could also be pure pragmatism on his part since the Flame scorching the world will leave him without a world to conquer.
• Fantastic Racism: Basically the Golden Order's official policy. If you aren't a human, then you can eat shit and die. Omens? They get locked away in the sewers or killed outright by state-sponsored Omen hunters. Misbegotten? They're kept as slaves to use and abuse as their masters see fit. But the Albinaurics seem to have it the worst of all: it seems that everyone, and not just the Golden Order, hates these poor guys. Gideon Ofnir, a Tarnished commanding his own network of minions, has their village burned to the ground and its inhabitants slaughtered en masse in hopes of getting them to surrender some useful information. Volcano Manor and Castle Sol are also home to crazed Albinaurics that have been tortured into insanity for no real reason other than petty cruelty.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Lands Between seems to be inspired by various European cultures. The Golden Order, for example, is basically a mish-mash of multiple powerful historic empires and kingdoms: Ancient Rome, the Byzantine Empire, and the Celtic Kingdoms. Meanwhile, you have the Kingdom of Caria with its clear inspiration of the real life kingdom of the same name (mainly rooted in their connection to sorcery and the moon, which the real kingdom's patron goddess Hecate held domain over), as well as the Misbegotten and Demi-Human barbarians who seem to pull inspiration from the various barbarian tribes that ran rampant through Rome during its fall.
  • As for other cultures, the Land of Reeds is basically the setting's equivalent to Feudal Japan, complete with samurai. There are also the Nomadic Merchants, who are basically fantasy gypsies (up to being flat-out-called Red Eyed Gypsies in the game's data).
• Fat Bastard: Most examples, interestingly enough, invoke the image of one (Godskin Nobles, Flame Prelates) with fat-looking robes/armor without actually being fat (though this is hardly new territory, as Executioner Smough would show you). However, the stout, ogre-like Omens and Bloodfiends still count as proper examples since they’re every bit as tubby as they are ornery and dangerous, as are the fat Hornsent Inquisitors.
• Faux Affably Evil: Shabriri is this trope incarnate. He's charismatic, polite, and so well-spoken that you might be willing to overlook the fact that he's turned your dead buddy Yura into a meat puppet to talk to you through. But considering the fact that he's a batshit insane Omnicidal Maniac and just might have been responsible for the near-genocide of the nomadic merchants, there’s a damn good reason why he’s one of history's most reviled figures.
  • Mohg, likewise, is your textbook manipulative cult leader and welcomes you like a friend when you enter his chambers for his boss fight. Immediately afterwards, he shows his true colors as a violent, insane Yandere who refuses to let anyone take away Miquella, who he's been molesting for god knows how long.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The big reveal that Marika is Radagon is telegraphed quite far in advance, though only in a way that becomes apparent in hindsight thanks to the bizarre and unclear nature of said reveal.
    • Ranni, Rykard, and Radahn are all considered demigods even though they're Marika's stepchildren. While this could be interpreted as show of generosity on Marika's part, it's a covert way of telling you upfront that they are her children, in a sense.
    • Godrick owns an item called the Mimic Veil, an item that lets you disguise yourself as anything, and used it to escape the royal capital while disguised as a civilian woman. The Veil's description off-handedly refers to it as "Marika's Mischief", which is a cheeky reference to Marika's own Gender Bender escapades.
    • One of Marika's "spoken echoes" relayed to you from Melina has her blatantly refer to Radagon "becoming her" and "her other half", though it's worded in a way that doesn't quite indicate that she's being literal.
    • The foreshadowing goes all the way back to the game's prerelease trailers! Not only does it foreshadow that Marika was the one who shattered the Elden Ring, but the (back then) unknown person hammering at the ring shifts between a feminine and masculine figure, portraying Marika destroying the Ring and Radagon trying to put it back together.
  • While definitely a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere, the existence of the Elden Beast is foreshadowed by way of the Elden Stars' description talking about how a beast that arrived on a falling star eventually turning into the Elden Ring. Yeah, it's an item description for an incantation way, way off the beaten path (and in perhaps the least likely place in relation to the Beast, but it's something.
  • The fact that a Black Blade Kindred guards the Beast Sanctum's front door may as well be a big neon sign saying "Yo, Gurranq is actually Maliketh!" Ditto for the Vulgar Militia that use Bestial Incantations and Destined Death attacks stationed nearby.
  • If you want to see a truly impressive display of foreshadowing, take a good look at the horizon once you step out of the Stranded Graveyard the next time you start a new game. The Giant's Forge is right there in the distance, and not exactly hidden from view. Right from the start, long before you ever set foot in Leyndell, your ultimate goal is not only to become Elden Lord, but to burn the thorns blocking access into the Erdtree and unseal Destined Death.
  • And speaking of the thorns, take a look at the sigil they project. That's not any random pattern, it's the array of crossed spikes portrayed in many statues of Radagon!
• Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: Change "flea" to "weird sea slug-dragon thing" and that's the final boss in a nutshell. Marika turning into Radagon, while startling and out of nowhere if you haven't completed Goldmask's quest or paid attention to a missable bit of dialogue from Melina, still has a decent amount of foreshadowing, and you're still fighting an important character hyped up by the narrative. Now compare that to the Elden Beast, an Eldritch Abomination space slug thing that suddenly comes out of nowhere, turns Radagon into a sword, and fights you in an Erdtree forest. Unless you found a specific incantation off the beaten path of the Deeproot Depths (itself an optional, out-of-the-way location if you aren't following Fia's questline) and read its description, you won't have any idea it even exists. But even then, nothing in that description even remotely indicates that it's going to be important to the story or attack you after defeating Radagon.
• God Is Evil: While they all seem to subscribe to Blue and Orange Morality as opposed to anything even remotely human, the Outer Gods tend to skew towards being incredibly dangerous and malicious. Between the God of Rot trying to infect the world with its corruptive diseases, the Frenzied Flame being an Omnicidal Maniac, the Formless Mother's love of blood sacrifices, and The Prince of Death basically acting as a corruptive cancer cell with absolutely no trace of Godwyn’s original personality remaining, it’s amazing that The Lands Between isn't even more fucked up than it already is.
  • Marika, the queen of The Lands Between and the god worshipped by the Golden Order. While much of her motivations and personality are left up to Alternative Character Interpretation, it’s very clear that she wasn’t exactly nice. Under her command, the Golden Order has been responsible for multiple counts of genocide and has committed unspeakable atrocities against those who aren't considered "Grace-given". She's also the reason why The Lands Between is such a shithole to begin with, since her shattering of the Elden Ring is what led to everything going wrong.
• Gonk: Omens and Misbegotten are incredibly ugly creatures by default. While their prejudice at the hands of the Golden Order stems from them being "heretical beings" (Misbegotten for being visibly tied to the Primordial Crucible, Omens for their connection to a Hornsent curse), their appearances certainly don't help.
• The Goomba: Commoners and Nobles aren't dangerous in the slightest, just being weak, withered old men who are easy to kill and in certain encounters, will actually flee from you and cower in fear. Out of enemies that are actually dangerous, there are the generic Lordsworn Footsoldiers and Soldiers who can mess you up if they ambush you from around a corner/fling things at you from above or gang up on you, but are otherwise easily killed by players with the slightest idea of what they’re doing. Even the kamikaze Haligtree soldiers aren't much more dangerous than your average Lordsworn.
• Green Hill Zone: Limgrave, the territory you start the game in. While it's declining just as badly as the rest of The Lands Between, it's still the safest zone in the game, and boasts sprawling fields of greenery, lush forests, and fairly easy dungeons and enemies to ease new players into the game.
• Grumpy Old Man: Margit the Fell Omen/Morgott the Omen King definitely fits the bill looks-wise, though being one of Marika's demigod children makes it hard to tell if he fits the bill properly since none of his siblings, even his own twin, don't look elderly in the slightest. He's a long-lived, dour, haggard-looking Omen with gray hair and raggedy robes who fights by smacking people around with his gigantic walking stick. For a more proper example, there's Hewg, the crotchety old Misbegotten blacksmith in the Roundtable Hold.
• Hailfire Peaks: The Altus Plateau, home of the Erdtree and the royal capital of Leyndell, is primarily a forested plateau with golden foliage and a permanent autumn theme. A good chunk of it, however, consists of the harsh and rugged volcanic terrain of Mt. Gelmir.
• Hair of Gold: Marika and Godwyn's most striking features were easily their long, flowing locks of golden hair, which emphasized their divinity and beauty. Even when the former's been crucified and imprisoned for god knows how long with most of her body crumbling away, and the latter mutating into a horrific Eldritch Abomination, their blonde hair still persists in spite of everything else.
  • Likewise, it's probably no coincidence that most of this game's most benevolent (or at least, friendly) NPCs are blondes themselves, such as Roderika the spirit tuner, nobleman Kenneth Haight, and the Affably Evil Rya of Volcano Manor who is so friendly that she nearly borders on Obliviously Evil. Even Fia, who is a ruthless, insane necrophiliac, has the noble goal of wanting to uplift the undead and stop their persecution.
• Hate Sink: Preceptor Seluvis. Despite being your ally if you decide to work with Ranni, he's a detestable, sneering slug of a man who treats you like you're mentally handicapped, and turns women into helpless puppets that he can rape at his leisure. You'll be rooting for him to meet a bad end for the entirety of Ranni's questline, which is exactly what happens to him, thankfully.
  • The Loathsome Dung Eater, likewise, is hands-down the most disgusting and depraved person you can get a Mending Rune from, and very clearly not someone you're supposed to like. He's obsessed with murder, torture, rape, and defiling people at a spiritual level, and everyone who talks about him hates and/or fears him. Basically, think Wyald, but in a Fromsoft game.
• Horrifying the Horror: You'd think it would be impossible to scare the Dung Eater, since he takes it pretty well when you best him in combat, and is willing to die a horrible, agonizing death in order to birth his Mending Rune of the Fell Curse. But if you hold on to Seluvis' Potion, keep Ranni's quest in stasis until you've at least gotten to Leyndell, and roofie him when he asks for Seedbed Curses, the last emotion he displays before losing control of his body and becoming your obedient puppet is muted, whimpering terror.
• Horror Hunger: Gurranq has an undying, painful hunger for Deathroot gnawing at the pit of his gut. He sounds like he's in constant pain, even when he scarfs down any of the cursed plants you find for him, and despite the fact that they seem to be driving him mad to the point of suddenly attacking you out of nowhere, he has no choice but to keep eating them in hopes of sating his appetite and atoning for an unknown "sin".
• Humanoid Abomination: In a game where some of the highest powers are cosmic horrors straight out of the pages of Lovecraft, it's only natural that a few of these show up as well.
  • The Godskins, the followers of the Gloam-Eyed Queen. While they definitely look human, they're also unnaturally tall, insanely pale, and have weird-looking eyes and even weirder proportions that can change at will due to their Rubber Man physiology. They also wield the god-killing Blackflame, a truly dangerous and unholy flame that is a weakened version of none other than Destined Death itself.
  • Malenia is technically one, being a Demigod chosen by the Scarlet Rot to be its vessel when she was in the womb. She becomes a proper example before the second phase of her boss fight when she blooms into the Goddess of Rot. She's still recognizably human, but she's now sporting creepy-looking wings made of Scarlet Rot butterflies that, when combined with her nudity, attractive physique, and Rot-induced deformities, make her look like a twisted take on a biblical angel.
  • The Tarnished can potentially become one by embracing the Three Fingers and taking in the Frenzied Flame. Beating the game without using Miquella's Needle to purge the Flame will result in you screaming and fainting right after killing the Elden Beast, only to have you head explode into a roaring, horrific mass of yellow fire as you're transformed into The Lord of Frenzied Flame. Having lost control of your body, you're little more than a meat puppet for an Omnicidal Maniac of an Outer God that quickly burns the entire world into a lifeless, desolate wasteland.
    • And Shadow of the Erdtree shows that you're not the only candidate for "lordship". Bonus Boss Midra turns into a Lord of Frenzied Flame himself thanks to enduring thousands of years of constant agony that allowed the Flame to take hold in his body, and he proves to be an insanely powerful opponent with overwhelming strength and hauntingly graceful movements.
• Humans Are Bastards: Not the case overall, but the human-centric Golden Order was (and still is) oppressive and awful to non-human races. Omens, for example, are either banished to the royal capital's sewers, hunted by dedicated state-sponsored killers, or are conscripted as Smash Mooks kept under lock and key. Then there are Misbegotten, who are enslaved and abused, and Albinaurics, who are often tortured and murdered for the pettiest of reasons.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Ranni is fairly unapologetic about all the evil things she does in order to free herself from her Two Fingers' influence and bring about The Age of the Stars: orchestrating the Night of the Black Knives and her own stepbrother's murder, triggering The Shattering, abandoning all her loved ones... there's no cost too great for what she believes is the greater good.
• Interface Screw: There are areas in both the Mountaintops of the Giants and Consecrated Snowfield that are perpetually battered by a raging blizzard. Your vision is greatly diminished in these areas, and you can't see more than a few feet in front of you. So naturally, you'll quickly find yourself menaced by dangerous enemies while grappling with your gimped vision.
• Interface Spoiler: If you're riding Torrent somewhere and are suddenly forced to dismount him? Prepare yourself, because an NPC invader is about to attack you.
  • Likewise, player messages can spoil a number of things for you if you play online. In most cases it isn't a problem because said "spoilers" are often warnings for enemy ambushes and/or jumpscares, hidden passages, and helpful guides for finding very out of the way, valuable items. However, it's not uncommon to see messages plastered around certain characters that spoil the outcome of their quest. For example, at any given time, you can usually find anywhere from 2 to 4 messages surrounding Gideon saying "Visions of betrayal..." and "Likely wicked sort".
• Interspecies Romance: Vyke, former contender for the Elden Throne, is said to have been in a romantic relationship with Lansseax, an Ancient Dragon. Other lore tidbits indicate that while Vyke was her favorite, Lansseax had many human paramours, and human/dragon relations seem to have been a facet of the Golden Order's dragon cult.
• Jerkass: Preceptor Seluvis is a total dick who looks down on everyone around him and is so unlikable that even Nice Guy Gentle Giant Blaidd can't stand him. Gideon Ofnir also walks a fine line between this trope and Jerk With a Heart of Gold; he's incredibly rude and hostile when you first visit the Roundtable Hold since he believes you're just another Tarnished who wants to use it as a shelter while not actually working to become Elden Lord, but warms up to you once you've killed Godrick. A shame he's still a dick to Nepheli, though.
• Jump Scare: It's far from uncommon to suddenly have an enemy lunge at you from around the corner or behind some rubble and knock you flat on your ass, and no matter how often it happens it never gets less startling. Imps in particular are probably the most frequent offenders, since they infest many of the game’s Catacombs and favor ambush tactics, since they're small, fragile little critters.
  • Likewise, you'll quickly learn to associate lone towers and enemy encampments with catapults, ballistas, and other artillery thanks to how often they'll plug you with a startling, loud projectile right the hell out of nowhere when you approach.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Indeed! Katanas are generally the best DEX-oriented weapons, as well as some of the game's strongest weapons overall. Dual-wielding katanas is a strategy preferred by many players thanks to their speed, size, strength, and many of them causing the hilariously overpowered Bleed status effect on your enemies.
• Killed Off For Real: In true FromSoftware fashion, this is the fate of many friendly NPCs you meet throughout the game. Assuming you simply don't murder them in cold blood, that is.
  • Irina of Morne is murdered by a Misbegotten, judging by the cleaver planted in the ground next to her corpse. What makes it tragic is that she dies twice over: Hyetta, the weird entity who puppets her corpse after her death, dies herself once you sear her with the Flame of Frenzy.
  • Castellan Edgar, the father of Irina, goes mad with grief over his daughter's death and invades you if you get close to his shack in the woods, forcing you to kill him in self-defense.
  • If you don't decide to help Jerren protect Renalla and kill her, Sorceress Sellen... technically lives! But in the worst way possible.
  • Boc the Seamster will survive his questline if you tell him he's beautiful via a special Prattling Pate... but if you give him a Larval Tear so he can be "reborn", he'll turn into a human and die shortly afterwards thanks to the flaw in Rennala's rebirthing process.
  • Sorcerer Thops dies shortly after returning to Raya Lucaria and resuming his studies. While the academy is hostile territory and his desk is uncomfortably close to shambling hordes of Putrid Corpses, his death seems to have been a peaceful one brought on by overwork or complications related to studying the Primeval Current as opposed to anything violent.
  • Blaidd, tragically, goes insane when his loyalty to Ranni comes into conflict with his duty to murder her on behalf of her Two Fingers, forcing you to put him down Old Yeller style.
  • Iji will die fighting a killsquad of Black Knife Assassins if you tell him about Blaidd's fate.
  • Preceptor Seluvis is, at the very least, brain-dead judging by the state of his body (which is posed like one of his many "puppets"). But if you believe that he's simply a vessel for Pidia to control, he's dead for real since Pidia is butchered by several puppets that he molested.
  • Sorcerer Rogier dies a slow and painful death, with Deathroot brambles tearing through his legs and rotting him away from the inside. Tragically and heartwarmingly, he never, ever stops being a helpful Nice Guy despite the awful pain he's in.
  • D, who has likely helped you fight several bosses at the point of his death, is butchered by Fia. And even worse, it's your fault he dies since it's a result of you "returning" a knife to him on Fia's behalf.
  • Yura, in spite of his skill-at-arms, is cut down by Eleonora, a particularly powerful and dangerous Bloody Finger that he has a history with.
  • Alexander, Warrior Jar, sustains fatal wounds all the way back during the Radahn Festival but manages to keep trucking along until he somehow, in some way, makes it to fucking Farum Azula, and fights you in hopes of dying a true warrior's death.
  • Diallos Hoslow dies shortly after becoming Potentate of Jarburg due to succumbing to wounds sustained while trying and failing to protect most of the friendly Living Jars from Jar Poachers. When you find him bleeding out on the ground, you can either let this tragic failure of a man die happy believing he protected his subjects, or kick him while he's down by bluntly telling him that he fucked up.
  • Old Albus doesn't survive his first conversation with you, thanks to him succumbing to the flaws in his Albinauric anatomy. The same happens to his fellow Albinauric Latenna, but she lives on as a set of Spirit Ashes that let you summon her as a companion on the battlefield.
  • Enia, who encourages you to set the Erdtree on fire so you can burn away the thorns blocking entry to its core, randomly dies once the deed is done. For some reason.
  • Millicent is doomed to die no matter what you do during her sidequest: either you betray her, or she chooses to die by giving up the enchanted needle keeping the Scarlet Rot from killing her so you can return it to Malenia.
  • Goldmask, Fia, and the Loathsome Dung Eater will all die at the end of their respective quest chains. Presumably, birthing a Mending Rune is so taxing that people simply can't survive it, but Goldmask's corpse is left in a way suggests he was potentially murdered by a crazed Brother Corhyn, who hasn't taken his questioning of the Golden Order well to say the least.
  • Gideon Ofnir seems to Go Mad from the Revelation upon learning Marika's true intent for causing The Shattering and attacks you in a despair-driven funk out of the belief that becoming Elden Lord is an impossible task and that no one, not even him, will ever be fit for the throne.
• Lady and Knight: Lady Tanith, the face of Volcano Manor and consort of Praetor Rykard, is always seen with a hulking Crucible Knight silently watching over her throne. If you kill her after killing Rykard, her knight immediately invades you in order to avenge his liege lady.
• Lady of War: If you're playing as a female Tarnished, you can be as graceful as a butterfly while fighting your way to the seat of Elden Lord. But as for canonical examples?
  • Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon. Or at least, she was one in her prime: she's a shut-in who has lost her grip on reality and hides away deep in Raya Lucaria Academy nowadays, but in her prime she was a peerless sorceress and managed to defeat Radagon, the Elden Lord before you, in single combat. An illusory enchantment that Ranni left behind to protect her gives you a glimpse of her in her prime, and she's an elegant, dignified combatant who can kill you with a single blast of Comet Azur, and will glide around the battlefield while blasting you with Glintstone Sorceries and summoning the occassional wolf pack, troll, or even dragon to keep you at bay.
  • Rennala's sister in the DLC, Rellana, is just as graceful and deadly as her sister, only she prefers swordplay to sorcery. Even when she supercharges her twin blades with powerful Messmerfire and Glintstone magic, the massive AoE blasts that follow do nothing to detract from her regal demeanor.
• Lethal Lava Land: Unsurprisingly, Volcano Manor is surrounded by lava that serves as hostile terrain for you to platform your way across as you make your way to Rykard's chamber.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Rennala, the queen of Caria, has long since lost her grasp on reality and lives a life of seclusion locked away deep in Raya Lucaria Academy, completely unaware that the local sorcerers have long since turned against her while she obsessively births and rebirths the juvenile scholars she has adopted as her children with her deeply flawed resurrection rituals.
• Mage Tower: Towers constructed by Carian sorcerers can be found throughout The Lands Between, with a majority of them being in their homeland of Liurnia. You can usually find either Memory Stones (which increase the amount of sorceries and incantations you can use), powerful sorceries, or talismans in them, though not without solving a puzzle to gain entry beforehand.
• Maniac Monkeys: Demi-Humans, which are violent, screeching chimp-like goblins who turn outright psychotic at night. However, this only applies to the rank-and-file enemies: the Demi-Human Chiefs and Queens are far more dog-like than their weaker brethren, though the Demi-Human Swordmasters introduced in Shadow of the Erdtree are insanely powerful versions of the weak little chimps.
• Mega Manning: Done via the Remembrance system, which allows you to redeem a special item taken from certain bosses (every single shard-bearing Demigod, as well as several other important characters like the last Fire Giant and the Regal Ancestor Spirit) and exchange them for sorceries, incantations, ashes of war, and weapons that let you use certain powerful attacks of theirs.
• Mister Seahorse: Count Yuri from the DLC aspires to be a mother. Not a father, but a mother capable of birthing life despite being (and identifying as) male. He gets his wish at the end of the DLC, where he gains the ability to give birth to Fingercreepers through an opening in his body after stealing some of Metyr's power.
• Nintendo Hard: Can be a bit difficult compared to most action role playing games, though fairly standard in terms of FromSoftware's "Soulslike" games. No matter how much health you have or how well-armored you are, getting hit will take a significant chunk of your health away, and rushing into a group of even weak enemies and flailing around wildly will lead to a swift and humiliating death. Your health and magic-restoring items are small in number and using them forces you into a slow "recovery" state, and upgrades that give them extra charges and healing power are few and far between. Oh, and every time you die, you drop all of the experience points that you're currently carrying, and you're forced to physically pick them back up yourself - assuming you don't die on the way and lose them forever, of course.
• The Not Love Interest: Melina is your constant companion through your adventure, and speaks tenderly towards you while taking your hands when helping you level up at certain Sites of Grace. She's incredibly fond of you and you're likely to feel the same, but there's no way to romance her since depending on your actions, she'll either sacrifice herself to burn the thorns blocking off the Erdtree, or vow to kill you for taking in the Frenzied Flame and selfishly, knowingly becoming an existential threat to The Lands Between.
• One-Hit Kill: Mercifully rare, but this can still happen to you in a few places.
  • In general, you really, really, really don't want Deathblight to build up. If it does, you're impaled on the spot by Deathroot branches and die regardless of how much health you have.
  • If you're evil/stupid/curious enough to try and get Ranni to drink Seluvis' draught, she will become disgusted with you and order you to leave her tower. Unless you absolve yourself of your sins at the Church of Vows, repeated attempts at talking to Ranni will eventually lead to her just instantly killing you on the spot.
  • Astel, Stars of Darkness is despised for its infamous grab attack. While not technically a single attack since it takes several bites out of you before slamming you into the ground, its sky-high damage output coupled with your inability to free yourself from its grasp means that even with high vigor and a topped-off life bar, getting snatched up is a death sentence.
• Our Gods Are Greater: While traditional "Capital G" gods exist in the setting, the "god" worshipped by most people in The Lands Between is a human woman who ascended to godhood: Marika. She's far from omnipotent, but is still an incredibly powerful woman who was blessed by the Two Fingers and gave birth to a number of powerful Demigod children, with a select few being eligible candidates for replacing her as God should anything happen to her.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Bloodfiends, horrific monsters introduced in the DLC. They're hulking, violent brutes with fat guts and an appetite for the flesh of sentient beings - their own race included.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Demi-Humans seem to act as this game's stand in for Orcs, and are handled in a fairly interesting way. While they seem to be nothing more than savage marauders who want you dead the second they see you, they're repeatedly stated to have intelligence on par with humans, and that's no Informed Attribute: Boc the Seamster is a friendly Demi-Human and a tailor who learned his skills from his mother, also a Demi-Human. Kenneth Haight is also said to have good relations with the Demi-Humans, and employs them at his fort when you help retake it from Godrick's men. And the stronger variants of their race, the Demi-Human Queens and Swordmasters, have intricate knowledge of Glintstone sorcery (the former) and Carian swordplay (the latter) and are interested in solving the mysteries of the stars above.
• Our Trolls Are Different: This game's trolls are hulking Smash Mooks roughly the size of a house, and look like giants that have been flayed alive (which is no coincidence, since they're related to the long-dead Fire Giants). The Golden Order uses them for slave labor when they aren't killing them outright, and they can often be seen pulling funeral hearses around as if they're beasts of burden. They're treated much better in the Carian Kingdom, which recognizes the fact that they're intelligent beings by employing them as blacksmiths and knights, with Ranni's co-conspirator Iji being a very well-spoken Genius Bruiser with a soft, grandfatherly-sounding voice.
• Perverse Puppet: Marionette Soldiers, four-armed puppet enemies that are often seen quad-wielding swords General Grievous-style, or dual wielding spears and bows. While not scary, they're fairly relentless and threatening enemies, especially when they're close to dying.
  • For a different kind of "perverse", there's Seluvis' "puppets" (people who've had their free will forcibly stripped away instead of literal puppets).
• Purple Is Powerful: St. Trina, Miquella's other half and an important background character, is a dreamy, comely young lady heavily associated with powerful poisons and heavy sleep, and her plant-like body is various shades of incredibly vivid purple.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: A recurring color theme with some of the game's scariest villains: blood cultist Mohg, Omnicidal Maniac Rykard, and genocidal war criminal Messmer the Impaler are all associated with hellish deep red and void black. Interestingly though, Messmer is a lot more noble than his color scheme and brutality would imply, judging by the good relationships he has with his men and the infirmary he runs for the sickly, agonized Jar Innards in the Shadow Keep.
• Riddle for the Ages: This game has quite a few unsolved mysteries, and had even more before Shadow of the Erdtree shed light on them.
  • While we know exactly who shattered the Elden Ring, we don't know why Marika really did it in the first place. There's evidence for multiple theories, such as it being out of grief for Godwyn's murder, rebelling against the overly controlling and dogmatic Two Fingers, growing disenfranchised with the Golden Order, or simply wanting to get rid of the higher powers that normally hold her accountable, but there's no solid answer at the end of the day.
  • What is Melina's whole deal, anyway? Why is she "burned and bodiless", as she describes herself? Why does she have such a weird connection to Destined Death? Why does she have a single gloam-colored eye? Is she related to the long-dead Gloam-Eyed Queen of the Godskins, somehow? Despite being such an important character and your main traveling companion, she's frustratingly enigmatic.
  • Why was the Erdtree sealed off? Were Radagon and the Elden Beast working together, or had it already taken over his body when the seal was placed? Is it a desire to perserve the current order no matter the cost? Is it a justified fear of a corrupt Elden Lord sending the Lands Between further into hell (which is exactly what happens if you pursue the Dung Eater/Frenzied Flame endings)? Is it one last test for an aspiring lord to overcome? And on the Elden Beast's end, how much of this, if any, can be attributed to the Greater Will, and how much of it is what the Beast itself wants?
  • Just how are Marika and Radagon the same person anyway? Were they originally one person who split off a male part of herself, or two seperate people who eventually merged into one? The DLC seems to clarify this by revealing that Marika is from a whole race of people who can harmoniously meld into one another... only to muddy the waters by giving Miquella and St. Trina their own Marika/Radagon dynamic by making them separate parts of a single person.
• Rocket Punch: If you think Golem Smiths are purely slow, lumbering creatures that are only dangerous at close range, certain Golems will happily prove you wrong by way of a fist to your face, fired from halfway across the room.
• Sad Battle Music: A few boss themes certainly fit the bill.
  • The song that plays during the first phase of the Fire Giant's boss fight perfectly captures the tragedy of the whole ordeal. He's a living relic from a bygone era and the last of his kind, cursed by Queen Marika to watch over the Erdtree-burning flames of the Giants' Forge for all eternity with only the frozen corpses of his long-dead brethren for company. He's sick, ailing, and crippled, yet thanks to Marika's curse, he's compelled to fight you to the death in order to protect the Forge's flames, going so far as to tear off his own leg in order to do so.
  • The fight against Gurranq at the tail-end of the main story is set to an ominous, yet melancholy dirge that almost seems to be lamenting the fact that to restore order to the Lands Between, you have to betray the trust of a valued friend and kill him, since he's guarding the thing you need to burn the Erdtree's impenetrable thorns with. But that only applies to the first phase, the song that plays once he sheds his disguise and fights you as the legendary Maliketh is far more dramatic.
  • And of course, there's the final boss theme. Marika is long dead, and her tattered corpse has been repurposed into the weapon wielded by the Elden Beast, the last obstacle in your journey to claim the Elden Throne. Everything - the friends you've made and lost, all the demigods you've killed, the burning of the Erdtree - has all led to this: your duel to the death with the otherworldly vassal of the Greater Will itself, which this beautifully somber tune reflects.
• Schmuck Bait: In general, player messages are full of these. If you find messages near the edge of a cliff encouraging you to jump down, it's safe to assume that doing so will get you instantly killed. If a message is telling you to attack/roll into a wall to reveal a hidden pathway, that pathway probably isn't real. While thankfully less common, it's still not unheard of for a message to point you down a long path, promising treasure at the end, only to waste your time when you find out that there's nothing waiting for you there.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Summoning Patches to help fight Starscourge Radahn will lead to him putting in a token effort to help you and the rest of your summons fight the famed Red Lion, and then suddenly...

Patches has returned to his world.

• Screw Yourself: Miquella and Malenia are selfcest babies since Marika and Radagon, their parents, are the same person (albeit in a way that's very vague and confusing).
• Shockwave Stomp: A technique commonly used by characters associated with Lord Godfrey as well as Godfrey himself such as Crucible Knights and Messmer's Lordsworn soldiers. You can use one yourself as a potential Ash of War, and there are several elemental variants such as the Hoarfrost Stomp to choose from.
• Signature Colors: The various Lordsworn knights and soldiers wear colored surcoats associated with their respective regions. Godrick's knights are dressed in red and green, Liurnia's Knights of the Cuckoo wear red and blue, the Redmanes (unsurprisingly) favor red, Rykard's men wore black (back when he had Lordsworn), the knights of Leyndell wear yellow, and the Haligtree's troops wear a mix of white and gold. The mausoleum knights don't really seem to "have" a signature color until you pick up their surcoat, and see that when it isn't glowing in a weird ethereal hue, it's gray.
  • Messmer's signature color is, unsurprisingly, burning, fiery red, yet its only worn by the Fire Knights, the most powerful knights in his employ. His Lordsworn soldiers seem to favor dark green of all colors, and it should be fairly obvious which color his Black Knights wear.
• Stone Wall: Present in a few enemy types and their corresponding summons.
  • Crystalians. If you don't have a blunt weapon or some sort of way to quickly break through their defenses, you'll have to spend a lot of time battering these weird aliens and barely doing any damage until you finally crack their gemstone skin and start to really bring the pain. Thankfully, finding the Crystalian Spirit Ashes means that you get to use this insane durability to your advantage, and can have your buddy draw aggro while you either pepper your opponent from afar with projectile attacks, or simply heal/buff yourself before jumping directly into the fray.
    • The Golem Smiths from the DLC have the same sort of thing going on for them, though instead of having breakable skin that sends their sky-high defenses down the toilet, they need to be hit on their back-mounted gem. And much like the unnamed Crystalian, you can summon a Golem Smith of your own, Taylew, once you find his ashes, and put him to work as an amazing frontline tank.
  • The Greatshield Soldier ashes let you summon five Fallen Hawks Soldiers, all of which carry greatshields into battle. As enemies, they're nothing special aside from being damn-near impossible to hurt from the front. But as summons, they can take deadly hits like nobody's business, with casters and other ranged fighters benefiting from having a protective wall of minions to draw and juggle aggro with.
  • Miranda Blossoms are huge, bulky, immobile flowers with an unusually high amount of health. While very weak to fire, you'll still be chipping away at them for a while, even if you're doing nothing but hurling fireball after fireball at them.
• Technicolor Fire: This game sure loves its exotic fire colors! Along with standard red and orange fire, you've got your crimson Bloodflame, the god-killing Blackflame, ice-cold Ghostflame (coming in shades ranging from snow white to vivid blue), the purple sleep-inducing flames of St. Trina, the maddening yellow Frenzied Flame, and divine golden flames breathed by the Ulcerated Tree Spirits, Dragonlord Placidusax, and the Elden Beast.
• Token Heroic Orc: Present with a few friendly members of otherwise hostile races, mainly Misbegotten blacksmith Hewg, Troll blacksmith Iji, and Boc the Demi-Human seamster. This seems to be the case when you first meet Alexander, a friendly Living Jar, but it turns out that he's from a village full of friendly Living Jars such as his adorable nephew Jar-Bairn.
  • The DLC adds a few other examples in the Dragon Communion Priestess, aka Florissax, a friendly Ancient Dragon who helps you take down Bayle and can potentially join you as a Spirit Ash depending on the actions you take during her sidequest, as well as Moore, who is a Kindred of Rot underneath his armor, (or at least, he's supposed to be) and a member of the Forager Brood, a sect of friendly members of his species.
• Traveling Salesman: Merchant Kalé claims to be one, though he always stays in the Church of Elleh. However, datamining shows that he was supposed to be a traveler, and had a fairly fleshed out questline that involved meeting him at multiple places and concluding at the Frenzied Flame Proscription that was cut for whatever reason.
• Unholy Matrimony: Praetor Rykard and his consort Lady Tanith are united by genuine romantic love, a shared desire to destroy the Golden Order, and an obsession with devouring the very gods themselves.
• Unique Enemy:
  • A particularly infamous example would be a certain Guardian Golem in Caelid, way, way off the beaten path. When it activates (likely as a result of you trying to grab the Rune Arc it's guarding), it glows Glintstone Blue, and unleashes barrage after barrage of deadly blue lasers until it dies, or you die. It's the only golem of its kind, and its obscure hiding spot means that you're very unlikely to stumble upon it blind.
  • Chanting Winged Dames (the singing harpies) are fairly rare as it is, but even they have a special variant hidden among their ranks. One Winged Dame in the Ruin-Strewn Precipice is accompanied by a special white one who wears a golden headdress, and judging by the Cuckoo Glintstones and Rancorcall sorceries she fights you with, is likely a sorceress of some kind.
  • Among the many Giant Crabs you'll run into, only two can inflict Sleep on you. Likewise, there are two that can inflict Deathblight.
  • A single Omen in the Capital Outskirts commands a small group of unique Commoners, and all of them are capable of casting Fia's Mist, a Deathblight Incantation. While Commoners using spells is noteworthy enough, the spellcasting Omen especially stands out since most of its kind are brutish Smash Mooks. It's also the only Omen to wear a hood and a cloak.
  • Interestingly, two of these can be found among the ranks of Rykard's Man-Serpents. One of them is the only spellcaster of the bunch, and wears a distinct, gigantic rock-like egg on his head. The other wields a magma candlestick whip and has a bulging throat sac, peculiarities only seen with this particular Man-Serpent.
  • Blackflame Monks are way rarer than their already uncommon Fire Monk variants. There are three in the game total, with one blocking the way to Volcano Manor's Godskin Noble while the other two are camping out in Radahn's Divine Tower.
  • The horrifically powerful Divine Beast Warriors of Enir-Ilim come in three different flavors (thunder elemental, ice elemental, and wind elemental), and there's only four in the game. And even then, the Wind Warrior stands out as especially unique since, for whatever reason, he doesn't respawn when you kill him while the Ice and Thunder ones do.
  • High up within the Ruins of Rauh and standing on a rock is the Land of Shadow's sole Crucible Knight, Devonia. She's a unique one, too: she's the only hammer-wielding Crucible Knight in the game, she wears a special hammer-shaped helm, and she uses two Aspects of the Crucible (Bloom and an unnamed incantation that gives her centaur hooves) that are never used by any other Crucible Knight. Bafflingly enough, she's treated like a random enemy encounter instead of a boss, and never respawns once you kill her.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Shadow of the Erdtree reveals that for all her genocidal warmongering, manipulation, selfishness, and general sociopathy, Marika was once an innocent girl hailing from a beautiful, peaceful village in the hinterlands, only to be traumatized and warped into a hateful, vengeful monster by the Hornsent's horrific treatment of her people.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Farum Azula, a beautiful, yet eerie city reduced to crumbling ruins floating in the sky where the standard Mooks are Degraded Bosses (specifically Beastmen, like the one living in Groveside Cave), Ancient Dragons fly freely, and Destined Death has been sealed away, protected by Maliketh the Black Blade. While it's not the last stop on your journey, it's the final proper dungeon and has all the spectacle, atmosphere, and difficulty you'd expect from such a place.
• Wake Up Call Boss: Limgrave, the starting region, is home to an infamous pair of these.
  • The Tree Sentinel patrolling the road just outside of your starting point is meant to teach the player that picking a fight with every single enemy they see is a very bad idea. He'll wipe out most of your health bar with a single hit, is incredibly fast thanks to the horse he's riding on, and has some serious range on his attacks thanks to his massive halberd. You'll want to at least meet Melina and get Torrent from her to stand a chance, but even then, the Tree Sentinel isn't someone you want to fight until you've gotten a few more levels, flasks, and better equipment under your belt.
  • Margit the Fell Omen serves a very similar purpose to the Tree Sentinel: being an overwhelming opponent meant to gatekeep players who think they're bad enough to immediately take on Stormveil Castle before they've explored the rest of Limgrave. But even when you're adequately leveled and equipped, Margit takes this a step further than the Tree Sentinel - he teaches you the value of actually knowing how to fight. He's got a wide variety of attacks that he'll chain together in long combos, throwing knives to punish players who try to fight him from range, and attacks with a long wind-up period and good tracking that will punish you if you frantically roll like crazy instead of playing patiently and properly reacting to his movements.
  • Shadow of the Erdtree has a whopping three potential examples: the Divine Beast Dancing Lion, Rellana, and the Blackgaol Knight. They're complex foes that would be tough enough as endgame-level opponents in the base game, but as some of the earliest big bosses you can fight in the DLC, they teach newcomers a valuable lesson: explore the Land of Shadow and find Scadutree Fragments to power up with, or die.
• Warp Whistle: It is possible to fast travel to areas of lost grace, though this is sometimes disabled.
• Wham! Line:
  • "Marika is Radagon", a statement and game-changing revelation so startling that it causes the otherwise completely silent Goldmask to gasp in shock.
  • "Impenetrable thorns refuse all. None may enter the Erdtree."
• Wreaking Havok: Parts of the environment can be destroyed and fall apart. It's usually inconsequential bits and pieces like crates, barrels, and nondescript rubble, though bigger and stronger enemies can tear apart entire ruins to get to you.
• You Dirty Rat: Giant rats the size of dogs and bears are recurring enemies, and look every bit as mangy, filthy, and disgusting as you'd expect. And if that wasn't bad enough, a few have been twisted by the Frenzied Flame and can inflict Madness with their bites.