Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is a staggering expansion, not only for its massive size—it's about as big as half of the original map—but for all the ways it challenges the assumptions I had about the nature of its world, coming from the main campaign, and the limits of an open world narrative.
Shadow of the Erdtree's storytelling is so masterfully embedded into the fabric of everything you see and do that it's practically elemental.
The gnarled tree at the center of the Land of Shadow, a shrouded counterpart to the golden plains of the Lands Between, anchors you to the anguish of SotE, inescapable no matter where you go.
Razed by the Golden Order long before your Tarnished shows up, the Land of Shadow is an ancient, festering wound that won't heal.
In the first major dungeon, a blind old woman—who mirrors the Finger Reader crone that proclaims you Elden Lord in the original game—calls you a villain and asks if the years of bloodshed weren't enough.
Even if you don't consider yourself an oppressor, to her, being a graced-touched Tarnished makes you complicit in the atrocities committed by Messmer, and by extension, the Golden Order.
She returns later to awaken SotE's first major boss, a group of dancers wearing a ceremonial lion costume. The fight against this swirling mass of hair and horns is more overwhelming than some of the Elden Ring's late-game battles. The room is showered in lightning and icicles, setting a precedent for every major fight to come.
A dual-wielding sorcerer who attacks with a fury no boss in the base game could match. An old dragon rises into the sky and blankets the arena in apocalyptic storms. Even against minor bosses in SotE's dungeons, the spectacle is as dazzling as it is terrifying. Knights will sprout wings and lift off into the air, completely changing the dynamic of a fight, and when the largest bosses prepare for a room-clearing attack, the music will drop out and return a moment later with an entirely different mood. FromSoft repeatedly bends the typical crescendo of a boss fight to communicate something new about your opponent, whether that's a monstrous transformation or the fleeting energy of an opponent who has already lost.
Bosses aren't just a test of your skill and ability to react in SotE: They're short narrative arcs that can embolden the thrill of victory or completely hollow it out.
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