#which won't happen if I lost half of them to this damn piece of wood 😭 like where ARE they at this point

[chronurgy]

So - I'm at the final boss of shadow of the erdtree. Spoilers below for everything up to that point, though nothing past it (as of yet! I'll get there!)

Starting with frame rate stuff - definitely still having some issues. Nothing so bad as the divine beast dancing lion fight but you really can watch things load in ahead of you. Never had this issue in the game, I think something must be fucked up somewhere in the code. I'm hoping they'll unfuck that soon

Overall impression - the dlc is beautiful. It really is! And it's huge, way bigger than you'd think just looking at the map.

But (yeah, here it comes)

It's empty. It's big and beautiful and empty. I love the cerulian coast, it's probably the most beautiful area in the entire game. It should've been half the size. There's just not all that much there. Same, if not more so, for charo's hidden grave. The abyssal woods is far, far too large for what it contains (esp since you don't get torrent!). The loot is super disappointing. Whoah great, another low tier smiting stone I won't use! Cool! I think they ought to have put a lot more thought into both the loot placement/density and makeup. There're a lot of cookbooks and maybe some people are enjoying that but I'm just deeply over crafting systems in games at this point.

As for the bosses - they're all beatable (well I'll see about the last one) but man are they aggressive. It just feels like the level of aggression has been massively dialed up and a lot of them are fucking flippy too which the camera fucking hates. Actually the biggest camera issue I had was with dryleaf Dane, I think because he was normal sized? It really really struggled to handle his fight to the point I genuinely think they can't keep using it any longer. It's just not capable. Some of the bosses cross the line from fun-difficult to obnoxious-difficult I think. But that's obviously a personal opinion. It just got to the point (for me!) where the combos were so long and chained and fast and the boss was flipping all over the damn arena that I wasn't enjoying the boss fight as a fun test of skill any longer, it was just something I had to endure so I could move on to something I would actually enjoy

The standout npcs are definitely ainsbach and ymir. Fun and interesting characters! I only wish we'd gotten to see more of them, if anything

Lore time! I don't know! I got no fucking idea! Um, miquella used mogh's dead body and summoned radahn's soul into it because he wanted radahn to be his elden lord? Why? I don't know. I think maybe radahn didn't want to? And that's why malenia came down to caelid to attack him specifically? He maybe turned miquella down and so miquella sent his sister to kill him so miquella could get his hands on radahn's soul to force him into it? Or malenia didn't like radahn making any sort of weird pact with her brother and went to kill him to stop it from happening? I'm. Uh. A little lost. I've heard there's a post final boss cutscene that explains some stuff (well "explains" some stuff) and I might give in and look on YouTube for it because I have zero idea about what the hell is going on

Oh one last thing - the flooded keep with something moving in the water and knocking over trees is a fucking fantastic set piece. They knocked that out of the park

Overall - good dlc. The map is really intricate and cool. I liked that they worked to shake up the catacombs. Loot is pretty disappointing, which does impact exploration a bit. Bosses feel a little over tuned. I wish they'd included more scadutree fragments than we needed to reach max level.