Elden Ring / Tropes A to E

Tropes for Elden Ring
Tropes A to E | Tropes F to N | Tropes O to Z

A

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The max possible level in this game is a whopping 713 - upon reaching level 713, the player would have raised all attributes to 99, thus becoming unable to further level up. Trying to reach this level would be a torturous endeavour, because by the time the player hits level 320, each level-up would require over 1,000,000 runes, which will eventually skyrocket into 8,000,000 once you hit Level 700. If 84 is reached for all stats, it's essentially the half-way point, rune-wise. Beating the game on a first run will likely only require a level of between 120 to 150, though even that is substantially higher than From Software's previous titles, which tend to have sub-100 level endgame requirements.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Subterranean Shunning Grounds are a vast sewer system under Leyndell, the Royal Capital, where the people used to toss all kinds of unwanted creatures, notably the Omens. It is a dark maze-like place inhabited by tough monsters, and the Tarnished will even find themselves walking on huge pipes over bottomless pits.
• Absurdly Long Wait: After defeating Morgott and discovering the Erdtree is preventing anyone from becoming the Elden Lord, the Two Fingers begin to consult the Greater Will about this. Finger Reader Enia notes "thousands or tens of thousands of moons must pass" before they are finished, and while this might be a drop in a bucket for her, the player probably cannot wait for that long.
• Accidental Innuendo: To get himself unstuck, Alexander jovially requests that you "give him a good smack from the rear with something nice and big!"
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Irina says that her father "secreted [her] out of the castle"; secreted here being a verbal form of 'secret' meaning 'transported in secret', but Irina's voice actress pronounces the word like the… biological meaning of 'secrete'.
• Action Bomb: Certain enemies may explode on death, or blow themselves up as a suicide attack. Also, you can be this by putting the Ruptured Crystal Tear into your Physick, making you explode shortly after drinking it. This does more damage to enemies than it does to you, letting you survive with enough HP.
• A Dog Named "Perro": One of the companions of Ranni the Witch is Blaidd the Half-Wolf. His name is the Welsh word for wolf.
• Aerith and Bob: In classic FromSoftware and George R. R. Martin fashion, you have pretty ordinary Western names sprinkled in among a cast of more fantastical names. Just among the humans, you have characters like Sir Gideon Ofnir, Nepheli Loux, Brother Corhyn, and Diallos coexisting with dudes named Kenneth and Edgar. This even extends to the demigods, where you have characters with names like Mohg, Morgott, Radahn, and Radagon in the same pantheon as characters with somewhat exotic but still real names like Godfrey and Godrick.
• A.I. Breaker: Many enemies are programmed to automatically dodge ranged attacks and spells. However, they dodge upon the projectile being launched, not when they are about to be hit by it. Casting a spell with good homing capability at a long range, one that moves slow enough, or one that fires on a delay will result in them dodging empty air and then not caring as the spell smacks them in the face. There are also certain spells that the AI is programmed to not react to, such as the aptly named "invisibility" sorceries as well as Lightning Spear (but only when uncharged, they will still dodge a charged one).
• Alien Kudzu: Glintstone, the crystalline mineral originating from fallen stars, converts things around itself into more glintstone.
• Alien Sky: Zigzagged. The sky of the Lands Between is seemingly ordinary, until the player defeats Starscourge Radahn, who was blocking the stars and moon from being completely visible. Afterwards, the night sky is filled with millions of stars and a gargantuan moon, which from the player's perspective, would make the sky more normal. In-universe, however, the stars define destiny and fate, and allowing the stars to move freely again enables people to follow their own fate rather than that defined by the Golden Order.
  • The sky in the Dream of the Death Prince, Lichdragon Fortissax's boss arena, is a weird, warbling pus-white color with pockmarks and streaks of blood-red throughout it. What makes it weirder is this area is underground, or is a dream representation of an underground area.
  • All but one of the non-default endings change the sky slightly; the Age of the Duskborn ending turns it to a dark grey with ashen rain, the Age of Order ending turns it a bright gold, and the Blessing of Despair ending turns it a putrid brown with pustules/pockmarks like the Seedbed Curse throughout. ^note The skybox texture in the Blessing of Despair ending is partially shared with the skybox texture used in the Dream of the Death Prince.
  • The Lord of Frenzied Flame ending turns the sky a vivid and garish bright purple-yellow mix, much like the Frenzied Flame itself. However, the biggest change is the gargantuan vortex of Frenzied Flame dominating the sky, rising from a massive column of the insanity-spewing fire issuing from the burnt-out stump of the Erdtree.
  • Sky over the Moonlight Altar plateau has two moons - one bright and one dark.
• All Trolls Are Different: The trolls of Elden Ring are another ancient, sentient species who make the hills and mountains in the Lands Between their home. Appearance wise, they really go with the "different", having emaciated, stretched-out skin, vaguely sunflower looking manes of hair, and, most notably, their organs are exposed, but are giant and noted to be excellent blacksmiths. Trolls have a mixed reputation; they are horribly mistreated and enslaved in some parts Marika's Empire, they are used in the Demigods armies as living siege engines, Smash Mook, and beasts of burden, often being seen pulling guarded supply caravans (with giant chains impaled into their torsos). In others, like the Fiefdom of Caria, trolls are shown to command high respect, and knightly trolls are encountered. In terms of gameplay they come in many flavors, ranging from Frenzied Trolls, who wear hooded cloaks and cast Frenzied Flame incantations; the aforementioned Troll Knights, elite warriors of the Carian Army knighted and wearing upsized Carian Knight helmets, who can cast magic; and the Trolls in the snowy Mountaintops of the Giants, who are covered in yeti-like white fur and can cast Giantsflame incantations.
  • In terms of lore, Trolls are said to be the last descendants of the Fire Giants and were "spawned" by them atop their mountains. It's not until you visit those very mountains you encounter primeval trolls, which are the unchanged ancestors of the modern lineage. Covered in thick, white fur, they look vaguely like Yetis, and still command the fell flame of their masters. There's also a hidden sword which details the trolls betrayed the Giants during their war with the Empire.
• Alt Itis: Zigzagged.
  • There's a lot of weapons and skills to try out and the game's designed such that in a normal playthrough you won't be able to use everything you find. A player would be encouraged to create multiple characters to experience different playstyles and different progression paths. However, full character respec is available once the player beats Queen Rennala. A respec token called a Larval Tear is required, and though they can't be farmed, there are a plentiful number of them in each playthrough (roughly fifteen). And if that still isn't enough for you, you can always just back up your save file before using one (either the old-fashioned way on PC or by uploading to the cloud on console).
  • Rather than dropping loot upon death, Demigod and Legend bosses drop a Remembrance. This can then be exchanged for one of two choices of loot at Roundtable Hold (or sold for a substantial amount). While this means you have to pick one at the exclusion of the other, the Wandering Mausoleums found throughout the game can duplicate Remembrances, letting you take both. Do note that there are fewer Wandering Mausoleums than Remembrances, so you won't be able to get absolutely everything. You also can't get two of the same Remembrance item in one playthrough, so if you want to dual-wield one of the boss weapons, you're out of luck until New Game Plus (with the exception of Radahn's swords, which are a paired weapon).
  • Barring manipulation of your save game from outside the game, it will take a minimum of three playthroughs to unlock every achievement/trophy, with Elden Lord/ Frenzied Flame/ Ranni being mutually exclusive. That said, these are the only achievements that conflict with each other; a completionist can do everything else in a single run.
• Ambiguously Human: Just about everyone. There are explicit Half-Human Hybrid and Rubber-Forehead Alien races in the Lands Between like the giantkin, Draconians, Alabaster/Onyx Lords, and Numen, as well as various types of mutants and godly-influenced beings thanks to the various Outer Gods and magical experiments. Some characters appear entirely human, but with others it's hard to tell whether some aspects like great size, odd proportions, or off-putting skin textures are evidence of them being weird humans, mutants, divinities, or bearing nonhuman ancestry.
  • To give just one example, the Commoners are all about six and a half feet tall and have gangly limbs, tiny heads, and chalk-white skin, looking quite different from the player and other NPCs with similar proportions (like Foot Soldiers, Nobles, and other Tarnished). Are they a nonhuman underclass like the Misbegotten? Humans with scant nonhuman ancestry? A Human Subspecies? Normal exceptionally tall humans who have had their bodies warped by the Cosmic Keystone being broken? Who knows. Their internal AI name is RuneSlave, which paired with their inhuman appearance could imply they're a distinct Slave Race.
  • A lot of the generic boss-level enemies like Cleanrot Knights, Night's Cavalry, Crucible Knights, and Tree Sentinels are 8-9 feet tall and never take off their armor. Since each of them are elites associated with a particular divinity, it's possible their sizes are results of Super-Empowering (we see that this can increase someone's size, most notably by Godfrey being 13 feet tall due to being an Elden Lord), but that's never stated and other explanations exist. The ambiguity extends to named bosses in a similar size range like Loretta and Ordovis. The Black Knives would be another example, but they explicitly have nonhuman (Numen) ancestry. The generic Lordsworn Knight enemies also cut it pretty close by being nearly seven and a half feet tall, and even all the of the Lordsworn Soldiers are close to seven, though as implausible as it is that every knight is around the size of Shaquille O'Neal, it's not impossible for a human. Some item descriptions (such as the Vulgar Militia set and the 1.0 version of the Page Set) imply that nobles in the Lands Between are just naturally bigger than other people, as small frames are said to be a sign of low rank (also implied the Foot Soldier < Soldier < Knight < special knight hierarchy in the game's armies); but the game never really explains why. It's also inconsistent on this point, e.g. Kenneth Haight is the player's size yet is the heir to Limgrave, and Edgar as the commander of Castle Morne outranks all the soldiers and knights there who dwarf him. Making this even weirder is that in some cases, powerful and massive characters will have visibly shrunken after they died, such as Godrick's severed head being the size of a normal human's, and Morgott's corpse having shrunken and lost its horns.
  • Commanders O'Neil and Niall are also fully armored but have their visors open, exposing their faces and allowing you to see that they look human... yet they're still nine feet tall and incredibly strong (even by the standards of a world where everyone can become superhuman through constant battle) for some inexplicable reason. They're implied to be related (they look identical, and "O'Neil" literally means "descendant of Niall") but we don't see anyone else like them who's not a demigod. They can also somehow raise the spirits of the dead to fight alongside them without use of a Spirit-Calling Bell. Presumably they're the same kind of being as the above-mentioned Night's Cavalry and such, but that just brings back the question of what they are.
  • This can even extend to your own character; the robust character creator allows the player to go to incredible extremes, and it's not outright stated that the player character is necessarily human - just Tarnished. Adding to the confusion is that your selected background doesn't actually have to correspond to your physical appearance, and said backgrounds can result in you looking a lot different than other characters with the same background (e.g. people with the northerner background are still much smaller than the Kaiden Sellswords).
• Ambiguous Ending: In true FromSoft fashion most of the endings are left open enough for the players to fill in the details, but the ending we're given the least details about is The Age of Fracture, the default ending of the game if you don't use any Mending Runes, don't take Ranni as your consort and don't take in the Frenzied Flame. It plays out like the other Elden Lord endings: the player character repairs the Elden Ring, restores Marika's body, and sits on the throne of Elden Lord; however, unlike the Elden Lord endings obtained through Mending Runes, we're given no clue on what life in this age will be. The only concrete thing that can be seen is that the Erdtree lost its golden shine, implying the end of the Golden Order and/or a degradation of the Erdtree's powers, the rest is up to the player to fill in.
• Ambiguous Gender: Aside from the big one of Radagon and Marika actually being the same person, there's also St. Trina, a character associated with most of the sleep-inducing items in the game. The lore says some people thought they were a girl, others thought they were a boy, but they mysteriously disappeared before a conclusive answer could be found. Given both groups were 100% sure in their assertions, it's possible there were some Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder shenanigans going on.
• Ambiguous Situation: General Radahn and Malenia's climactic battle that ended in Caelid becoming a rotting hellscape. While it definitely occurred during or even possibly at the height of the Shattering, why it happened in the first place and whether the fight came about as a response to Miquella's kidnapping is unclear.
• And the Adventure Continues: In the Age of Stars ending, Ranni plans to leave the setting of Elden Ring and travel "amongst the stars" while taking the Tarnished along for the ride.
• Anchors Away: The reward for defeating the boss of Morne Tunnel is the Rusted Anchor, a Greataxe-type weapon that deals Pierce damage. It is notably the highest Pierce damage weapon in the game, making it deal devastating counter hits to attacking enemies.
• Animal Motifs: Most have strong associations with certain animals:
  • Godfrey, naturally, is a lion via his relationship with Serosh and his Hercules Expy.
  • Godwyn didn’t personally embody one, but he was strongly associated with dragons through his accomplishments in the previous war, earning their friendship and loyalty. Since dying, his mutated body has taken on characteristics of aquatic animals, with a mermaid’s tail, webbed fingers and arms, and a head appearing to be inside a clam.
  • Godrick, and his subsequent "creations" like the Grafted Scion, symbolize spiders, though lions feature prominently on his heraldry in attempted emulation of his far more accomplished and heroic ancestor Godfrey.
  • Radagon, Rennala, and Ranni have their wolves, either literally or through their association with the moon. Radagon's Red Wolf is one of the few living proofs remaining of Radagon's and Rennala's past marriage, while Ranni has Blaidd. Wolves also patrol areas of interest to Raya Lucaria. The Albinaurics ride their wolves to battle, and their last leader, Loretta, was a Carian knight before she left her post.
  • Radahn, with his tusks and brutal fighting style, encapsulates what's so terrifying about war elephants in Real Life: big, strong, fast, and tanky. Radahn also purposefully modeled himself after Godfrey's lion motif.
  • While it's easy to associate Rykard with his God-Devouring Serpent, his final form actually resembles centipedes much more. This relation hits harder when one considers what centipedes symbolize in Japanese culture as uncleanliness and defilement.
  • Miquella and Malenia, the twin prodigies, are of pupae and butterflies, respectively. Mohg's machinations transformed Miquella from his eternal childhood form into something else, while Malenia's wings are formed of Scarlet Rot butterflies. Fittingly, his Haligtree is filled with cocoons attaching themselves to various branches (while he's currently in the process of breaking out of his own), while she forces herself to "blossom" when using her Goddess of Rot form in combat.
  • Morgott and Mohg, the Omen twins, have horns greatly resembling goats and rams. The former doesn't really embody what those animals represent in popular culture, but Mohg certainly does.
  • Melina and you, as potential Finger Maiden and Elden Lord, are represented by Torrent — both relentless people who'll soldier on to achieve your goals regardless of the obstacles.
  • The Elden Beast is unique in this list as a representative of a cryptid: the Loch Ness monster.
  • Meteor-borne creatures mimic the life found near their landing point, but the Fallingstar Beasts and Naturalborns especially resemble the lifecycle of an antlion. The freshly landed Fallingstars look like larvae with huge jaws that live in the craters they've created, and the oldest specimens are dragonfly-like colossi.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • For the first time since Dark Souls, leveling can happen at any site of grace, the game's resting points, instead of having to warp back to the Hub Level to talk to your FromSoft standard-issue mysterious female companion.
  • Stakes of Marika act as respawn points which lack the other functions of a site of grace, and are usually placed right before bosses, eliminating the need for the traditional "runback". The game is also fairly generous with sites of grace, with the vast majority of bosses having one very close by.
  • Defeating certain enemy groups in the world replenishes flasks, reducing the need for backtracking to a previous site of grace to resupply. It's also a handy way of figuring out it's safe enough to focus on looting an area. There are also Teardrop Scarabs. Depending on whether they're red or blue ones, they can also refill the respective flasks.
  • If you killed a boss but they also managed to kill you at the same time, then as long as the "Enemy Felled" messages pop up before you have to reload — which, for all but a rare few bosses, happens mere seconds after death — it will still count as slain and will not require another fight, and the Runes from that enemy is added to the Runes you dropped on death.
  • Certain sites of grace have a flare of light visible in the world and on the map pointing to the next Site on the critical path, providing an instant answer to Now, Where Was I Going Again? after going off the beaten path to explore.
  • While in the Roundtable Hold, the game prevents the use of any offensive actions until leaving. This basically means all NPCs inside the hub cannot be aggroed or killed (either accidentally or intentionally), preventing a lock out of completing their side quests or purchasing items from them. The same can't be said for those who aren't in a safe area.
    • NPC merchants who die, either from sidequest events or by your own hand, will yield a Bell Bearing that can be given to the Twin Maiden Husks in the Roundtable Hold, which adds their inventory to theirs. This keeps you from being permanently locked out from merchant stock (although if a merchant would update their stock after completing a sidequest and you kill them before that, you're stuck with their original stock).
    • NPCs killed via any other means are typically not flagged as dead, so reloading the area brings them back and prevents side quests from being Unwinnable by Mistake.
  • The starting stamina pool, regardless of the start picked, is very large. This is to help make using the new mobility options much easier, as jump attacks and guard counters use large amounts of stamina. Stamina also only drains if enemies are nearby and have been provoked, meaning running between large parts of the map without pause is entirely possible. Or more likely, riding Torrent through areas, since he also consumes stamina whenever he sprints.
  • Weapons in this game don't have durability, meaning there's no need to worry about repairing them at all.
  • The affinity of any non-unique weapon can be changed at any time through an equipped Ashes of War, negating the need to find a specific smithing item to change it.
  • Before tough encounters with multiple foes, there will usually be at least one lone enemy wandering around by themselves some distance away, giving an opportunity to first practice against that opponent and learn their patterns.
  • If the idea of getting invaded from the previous Dark Souls entries has turned you off from playing online, fret not — as long as you're playing without co-op, you'll never get invaded unless you use a specific key item to opt in to PVP. (And if you do get invaded while playing co-op, well, you'll always outnumber the invader.)
  • Wandering Mausoleums can duplicate any legendary remembrances, meaning it's possible to get a certain boss's alternative weapon without going into New Game Plus yet.
  • Within the map, the player can bring up a handy list menu of every Site of Grace with a single button press. In that menu another button press acts as a hotkey to warp to the Hub Level, allowing the Tarnished to do so nigh-instantly from regular gameplay.
  • Fall damage has been drastically reduced compared to previous titles. The player takes no damage from a generous distance, though beyond that it goes from "no damage" to "deadly fall" very quickly.^note You take no damage from any fall up to 16m, while anything 20m or over is fatal. And even if you do take a lethal fall, your runes will be left on the ledge you fell from, rather than forcing you to find some way to climb all the way down to where you actually died.
  • If your attack animation causes the character to take a step forward, the game does its best to never let that move you off a ledge with a lethal fall.
  • Stuck offline? No summon signs where you are? Just flat out hate other players? You can now summon NPCs to help you fight for just about every boss battle via the Spirit Calling Bell and Spirit Ashes. While not as smart as human players, most of them make up for it by being extremely durable at minimum.
  • Any runes lost from dying in an Evergaol will be placed outside, allowing you to retrieve them without having to challenge the boss again.
  • In the Dark Souls games, you needed to have a certain amount of Intelligence before the Sorcery merchants would even acknowledge you, much less open their shop to you. Here, every NPC who sells Sorceries will open their inventory to you immediately, with no Intelligence prerequisite (though some will still take the chance to call you a moron if your intelligence is too low).
  • If you've exceeded the maximum number of a particular item you can carry, any additional items of that type you loot will automatically be placed in your item chest to be retrieved or used at your leisure. If you manage to meet the limit your chest can hold of that item, any additional pickups after that get converted to runes.
    • Furthermore, stopping to rest at a site of grace will automatically top up your inventory from the items stored in your chest.
  • Smithing Stones and Somber Smithing Stones can be purchased from the Roundtable Hold once you've found the right Bell Bearing, and are relatively inexpensive for the points in the game you find said bearings. This means you no longer need to worry about spending a limited quantity of materials to fully upgrade weapons, and are free to experiment. In addition, while they aren't so common you're swimming in them, stones of almost all levels can be farmed from enemies as drops, and one of the first patches even increased the frequency at which they drop.
  • There are more Golden Seeds to find than you are able to spend on additional flask charges (your charges max out at 14 total, regardless of which flask you allocate them to), so you don't have to overly concern yourself with not finding enough saplings or killing all of the Tree Spirits to fully upgrade your flasks. Similarly, you'll discover more Stonesword Keys than gates requiring them, so you don't have to go too far out of the way to scrounge up every single one.
  • With Patch 1.03, the current location of most NPCs you've met will appear on the world map. If you want to continue their quest line but forget where they were, a quick scan over the map should answer your question. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell you where they have moved to if they change location, which fails to resolve the Guide Dang It! nature of many NPC side quests.
  • At a certain point of his quest Gurranq will become aggressive and stop teaching spells until you beat sense back into him. It's a brutal fight even for endgame characters, and in case you can't beat him, he'll calm down after killing you several times.
  • So you used your Furlcalling Finger Remedy to enter multiplayer, but alas, no summon markers from other players? Threat of invasion too much to bear? Never fear! Just "use" another one and the game will ask if you wish to nullify the Remedy. Saying yes will restore your spent one, meaning you didn't waste any.
  • Patch 1.05 made it so that any bell bearing given to the Twin Maiden Husks that isn't from a dead NPC persists between NG+ cycles, so you no longer have to go and get them every time.
  • Patch 1.06 added an alternative method of completing Varré's quest which requires invading and defeating a new NPC, meaning it's now possible to complete the quest offline. However, this ends up introducing a whole new set of frustrations since Varré's dialogue wasn't updated to tell you this, so if you didn't read the patch notes you may not even know this method was ever added in the first place, and even if you did, the invasion sign does not get marked on the map like those of your Volcano Manor invasion targets, so good luck finding it without looking up where it is.
• Anti-Grinding: Downplayed. As with most other FromSoft Souls games, the required amount to level up increases the higher your level goes. While you can easily finish the game at around Level 120 or so, the level cap is 713. Once you're in the ballpark of Level 300 or so, however, you'll need to start grinding for over a million runes, which makes reaching max level a lengthy if not torturous endeavor. Its even worse when you are within arms reach of the level cap as the number of runes needed to level up reaches the ludicrous amount of 8 million. Good luck.
• Anyone Can Die: As is tradition, one cannot assume any given NPC will survive to the very end of the story if you follow their storyline. Many, if not most, will likely die by the end of their storyline, often off-screen.
• Arc Symbol: There are many in this game.
  • Arms and fingers play a prominent part in the lore, with one of the most prominent examples being the Two Fingers.
  • Rings and Arcs. All of the rune items (including the Great Runes dropped by the shardbearers) are circular in some regard, and the Rune Arc is a curved line which appears in many places such as Stakes of Marika, the various crucifixes dotting the Lands Between, and in a lot of the symbolism and architecture of the world. The six Divine Towers in the world are arranged in a ring-like pattern around the map. The Elden Ring itself is the cosmological force that binds the world together, and is represented by a quartet of interposed rings which make a three-way Venn Diagram with a single circle in their center, bracketed by a pair of Rune Arcs.
  • Precious metals, notably gold and silver. Nearly everything associated with Grace and the Erdtree is tinged gold, with silver also being a common color and metal. The abstract but very real “logic” and laws of the world imposed by Queen Marika is known as the Golden Order. The Tarnished are explicitly called such because they are rejected by the Erdtree and the Golden Order. Silver is heavily associated with the moon and stars, which are aligned as allies with the Greater Will, as well as the city of Nokron, which makes use of silver in its mimics.
  • Corpses and funerary elements like coffins, catacombs, and gravestones are a very common motif in areas where the Golden Order rules. The process of Erdtree Burial is very important in the Golden Order, as the souls of the dead will eventually be drawn to the Erdtree to be reborn. For this reason a lot of effort is clearly made to show proper death rites, and graveyards are everywhere in the Lands Between. Corpse wax, in particular, is a commonly-used material, as the various Finger items used for multiplayer are made from corpse wax, the Valiant Gargoyles are fused together using it, and in Leyndell it is used to seal the doors of abandoned buildings.
  • Each major area has unique iconography to differentiate it from the other continents. Usually, these act as a visual link between the resident lord and the land they control.
    • Limgrave: Desolation, nature, and ruin. There is no true lord of Limgrave, and as a result the region consists of open plains, verdant forests, and a few scattered ruins and small encampments with maddened soldiers, emaciated nobles, and peasants trying to salvage the ancient remains of fallen temples.
    • Stormveil: Limbs, chimeras, and blowing stormwind. The former two relate to Godrick's practice of "grafting" (read: shoving body parts onto himself), while the last one is part of the Stormveil Knights method of combat, where they use powerful wind magic to attack at range and rapidly move around.
    • Liurnia: Glintstone, flowing water, and puppetry. Raya Lucaria, the Legacy Dungeon of this zone, is the head of Glintstone Sorceries in the Lands Between and sits above a drained lakebed. As for puppets, Ranni is a master of puppetry, while Rennala's "imperfect" scholars behave with an unnerving simplicity akin to fleshy marionettes. The whole area is also patrolled by countless hostile contraptions.
    • The Underground: Stars, Old Magic, and Advanced Ancient Acropolis. Siofra and Mohgwyn Palace is lit by glowing lights akin to stars, while the deepest parts of the underground contain an honest-to-god alien in Astel. Siofra's Ancient Men worship the forces of nature, in particular venerating a creature called the "Ancestor Spirit" as their god. Meanwhile, Ainsel is composed of the ancient city of Nokstella, which is a long-destroyed civilization mostly populated by cultists, and a third ancient city sits at the bottom of the Deeproot Depths.
    • Caelid: Disease, insanity, and the remnants of warfare. All three of these symbols are intimately tied to General Radahn, who was infected with the Scarlet Rot and driven to madness as a result. He now wanders his boss area, feasting on the corpses of his former comrades. The rest of Caelid is one of the most war-torn places in the game, befitting of the legendary battle between Radahn and Malenia.
    • Mt. Gelmir: Lava, familial relations, torture equipment, and cannibalism. The Volcano Manor which sits upon the open crater of Mt. Gelmir is a place of torture and suffering due to Rykard's attempts at becoming the Lord of Blasphemy. At the same time, the Volcano Manor has a surprising camaraderie between its members, with Tanith, Bernahl, Patches, and Rya all having some measure of affection between each other. The path to the manor goes through the remnants of a starving army devouring each other, its Recusant knights hunt other Tarnished for sport and loot, Rykard gets eaten by the Serpent to obtain his power, devours countless other people as a Lord — and gets eaten by Tanith after he falls.
    • Mountaintop of the Giants: Emptiness, snow, and death. Barring a few well-spread-out enemies, the mountain is a massive tomb for the entire Giant race, with their only survivor cursed to live forever when the rest of his people perished fighting Marika's Empire. The place is covered in a faint snowfall, which is fitting for the tragedy of the giants and Melina's imminent sacrifice.
    • Crumbling Farum Azula: Dragons, crumbling stone, and vicious tornadoes. Farum Azula was a civilization which managed to survive from before the Age of the Erdtree which has been forced into obscurity and is slowly falling apart from years of desolation. It is primarily filled with ancient stone dragons, who ride the winds around the tornadoes holding the palace together. Fittingly, its true (and somewhat secret) boss is an enormous ancient dragon who is himself crumbling.
    • Leyndell, Royal Capital, and Capital of Ash: Golden light, regal architecture, and tree branches. Fitting as the place closest to the Erdtree, Leyndell is bathed in an eternal golden light and incorporates gold into much of the architecture. The upper parts of the royal palace are snaked with roots from the Erdtree, visually demonstrating how spiritually close Marika and her subjects are to the giant plant. When the Erdtree is set ablaze, the place becomes bathed in ash, showing how the player has destroyed the Golden Order and defied the will of Marika to become Elden Lord.
• Arc Villain: Each major area has their own associated antagonist who is the source of their ills, whether directly or indirectly:
  • Godrick the Grafted is this for Limgrave, as he sends his men hunting the region for Tarnished to drag back to his keep at Stormveil Castle for grafting. The first boss fought shares his epithet of "Grafted", and the basic enemy of the area are soldiers of Godrick. Several NPCs also note that outside of his mutilation tendencies, Godrick also tended to be something of a petty, oppressive tyrant.
  • Queen Rennala is this for Liurnia, though curiously, her great villainous sin is one born of inaction — despite being The Archmage, she sealed herself and her disciples within her sorcerous academy of Raya Lucaria once the Shattering began to save herself, doing nothing to protect the region from the oncoming devastation. Ranni, her daughter, serves as the Man Behind the Man.
  • General Radahn and his army rule over the rot-scarred wasteland of Caelid. His demesne, Redmane Castle, sits to the south and is preparing for a "festival" of some kind, while the eastern and northern parts of the continent are positively lousy with scarlet rot. And in an interesting twist, Radahn isn't responsible for any of these problems — the scarlet rot is Malenia's doing, while the Radahn Festival his troops are preparing for is an armed contingent to kill him for good, since he becomes a zombified monster — and even then they're doing it with the utmost respect for the guy.
  • The Altus Plateau has Morgott the Grace-Given, who rules the capital city of Leyndell and guards the Erdtree from would-be trespassers, though it's revealed that the Erdtree itself is outright preventing any Tarnished from becoming the Third Elden Lord.
  • Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, rules Mt. Gelmir from his Volcano Manor. He's revealed to have been mutated into a ginormous monstrosity known as the "God-Devouring Serpent", forcing the Tarnished to put him down.
  • The Lord of Blood, Mohg, is this for the hidden Mohgwyn Palace area, but his minions and projections also harry you throughout other areas in pursuit of their missions.
  • The northern area of the landmass, the Mountaintops of the Giants, throws a curveball into the equation: there is no Arc Villain here. Instead, the Tarnished and Melina come here so she can perform a Heroic Sacrifice to set the Erdtree ablaze and destroy the holy vines protecting Queen Marika's body. The closest thing to a villain is the Fire Giant, and he's more of a Necessary Evil for being in the way of Melina's sacrificial rite. One can easily argue that the Arc Villain of the Mountaintops is in fact Marika, who had the giants wiped out in a holy war against the flame kept by the giants.
  • Crumbling Farum Azula, much like the Mountaintops, has Maliketh and Dragonlord Placidusax, and neither are truly villainous. Placidusax is content to reside in its arena and will only attack when you approach it, while Maliketh is only doing his duty to protect Destined Death.
• Arc Words: Several.
  • "The flame of ambition", mostly from Margit, but also mentioned by a few other characters — specifically to remark on what ambition can do to people, including the player Tarnished.
  • "I am Nepheli Loux. Warrior." is what Nepheli repeatedly affirms throughout her questline. Doing this questline has the potential to make a very cool endgame moment even more resonant when Godfrey enters his second phase, revealing himself to be her ancestor, "Hoarah Loux, WARRIOR!!!"
  • "Let chaos take the world" serves as the Catchphrase of those who follow the Frenzied Flame.
• Armor Is Useless: This trope has been heavily zigzagged now that PvE and PvP scaling is separate as of patch 1.07.
  • In old versions of the game, keeping with Souls tradition, while armor did provide some stat benefits, it usually wasn't enough to really matter. Using talismans, or simply leveling, was usually a much easier and more convenient way to get the stat boosts you needed. You could easily complete the game in whatever armor you started out in, and a stat-based approach to armor was usually unnecessary unless you're running a challenge build and really need to squeeze some extra points in. Players tended to seek out armor for its alternative use — Fashion Souls.
  • As of patch 1.07, this is an aversion for PvE. Poise has been drastically increased throughout the board on all armor sets; light armor is mainly still just for resistances and fashion, but medium armor offers very good hit absorption and decent stagger resistance from basic enemies, and heavy sets outright let you tank hits and poise-through attacks. That being said, light rolling was also buffed, so whether the player wants to sacrifice the surprisingly powerful light roll for the ability to resist staggers is up to the build.
  • The PvP meta on the other hand, is much more muddled. Armor has been buffed with poise and absorption, but so has poise damage for weapons, meaning armor in general is much less effective at warding off player blows than it is for mobs. With all the various build up effects and powerful potential with all the different builds, armor, while somewhat useful, is still at the back of most invaders' minds.
• Armor of Invincibility: The Fingerprint Stone Shield stands out as the greatshield with the highest Guard Boost and highest all-around damage reduction, meaning while you're using it for guarding, you can tank a lot of hits with very little stamina reduction. The drawback to it is its enormous Strength requirement and massive weight, which is understandable seeing as you're hauling a giant stone slab.
• Assist Character: Summoning player and NPC helpers remains a significant gameplay mechanic as with FromSoft's previous games, but Elden Ring ups the ante with the Spirit-Calling Bell, which allows you to summon the enemies encountered throughout the game as your allies as long as you have their requisite Spirit Ashes. Many ashes even summon multiple spirits at once! Some ashes are less useful than others, but their enormous variety gives you plenty of flexibility. There are limits, though: you can only summon spirits in certain locations (usually boss arenas or areas with lots of enemies), you can only use one ash at a time and summon them once per battle, and summoning usually takes a big chunk out of your FP bar. The strongest summons can't be used at all if you don't have enough FP to begin with. They also start out fairly weak unless upgraded, which requires special items and an NPC shopkeeper — though unless you're using the Reknowned Spirit Ashes, which summon Elite Mooks and mini-bosses (some of which are infamous as Game Breakers), they're not really meant to be serious damage-dealers anyways, but rather as your tanks, distractions, and inflicters of status effects.
• Astral Projection: In the Lands Between, most individuals have two forms; their body and their spirit. Bloody Fingers, Recusants (and by extension, the player), Loretta, Godfrey, Morgott, Millicent, and the Loathsome Dung-Eater can all astrally project their spirits. These spirits are essentially independent (albeit weaker) clones, with wills that can conflict with their physical body like with Millicent or the Dung-Eater.
• Astrologer: One of the starting classes. Within the setting, destiny really is encoded in the heavens, and ancient astrologers studying the stars would eventually discover the secrets of Glintstone Sorcery. It makes sense, with Glintstones, being fragments of stars fallen to earth. They eventually give rise to the Academy of Raya Lucaria and various schools of Glintstone Sorcery. Due to events in the past, Starscourge Radan "arrested the movements of the heavens" after winning a victory against the stars. Details are a bit vague as to what he defeated and how, but he stopped the stars from moving, which consequently stopped everyone's fate from coming true. This lead to astrologers becoming a rare thing if not vanishing entirely, but with his defeat and the renewed movement of the stars, the world comes full circle with Glintstone Sorcerers now rediscovering astrology.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: With the right weapon and build, and in very small doses, this can be a viable strategy. If your character is strong enough and has an appropriately powerful weapon, you can basically wail away at even powerful enemies and stun lock them so they're unable to hit back without any concern on your end for defense or maneuvering. It can turn potentially tricky encounters into trivially easy ones. Get the timing wrong or miss an attack, however, and you put yourself in a bad place.
• Author Appeal: According to an interview, Miyazaki greatly enjoys making poisonous swamp areas^note which, given his reputation as a Trolling Creator, make of that what you will, which has been a staple of previous titles he's directed. Elden Ring has multiple poisonous swamps for this exact reason. In an interview after the release, Miyazaki went so far as to say he "can't help himself", even though he knows just about every player hates them.
  • The turtles. Turtles were the only pets G.R.R.M was allowed to have a child, and the stories he would put them in were the start of his writing career. Especially noticeable is Miriel, Pastor of Vows, a giant sapient turtle who is one of the most benevolent beings in the entire game and wears a pope-like hat that hints at his forgiving nature.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Quality infusion increase the scaling of a weapon's Strength AND Dexterity, unlike Heavy and Keen which raise one at the cost of the other. However, in practice, very few weapons benefit from being Quality, as it lowers the base damage the most out of any infusions (and with no elemental addition to compensate) and the scaling bonus is relatively small, only a benefit if you've invested a lot of levels into those two stats. The result is a case of Master of None whereas specializing in Strength or Dexterity gives out a much higher damage output.
  • A lot of the more advanced incantation attacks look great, but suffer from a long wind-up and poor range which exposes you to interruption, and underwhelming damage which doesn't justify their steep cost. This was addressed in the 1.04 patch, which gave a lot of these incantations a faster casting speed, faster recovery, lower cost, and temporary poise boost so that you are less likely to get interrupted.

B

• Badass Army: Due to the heavy increase in flavor text from past Souls games, as well as factioned armies in the game world, it has lead to a massive increase in distinguished forces of soldiers.
  • First are the Redmanes; the pride and joy of General Radahn. Some of the most hardened Lordsworn, they distinguished themselves in the Shattering, fighting and winning countless battles valiantly for the Demigod Prince and managed to stalemate the might of Malenia's "undefeatable" Cleanrot Legion in the province-spanning Battle of Caelid. After Malenia unleashed the rot upon Caelid, they further showed their bravery by refusing to retreat, rallying without their leader and decided to commit an army-wide Heroic Sacrifice to protect the Lands Between from the rot by commiting themselves to the position, with tales of soldiers being driven to the brink of despair and then burning their crests, before charging foward once more. In the modern day, the rot has been quarantined to Caelid thanks to their skill in arms, and a mass adoption of Kill It with Fire tactics; such as a core of elite Fire Chariots acting like proto-type Tanks. It's even a saying In-Universe that they know no weakness.
  • Malenia's army, the Cleanrot Legion obtained battlefield success during the Shattering rivaled only by Morgott's, even though she had to project power across the length of nearly the entire continent to do anything (while Morgott was mostly defensive), and she had the smallest and newest fief to work with (a collection of outcasts in a city-tree). They marched across the whole Lands Between, campaigning through Liurnia, Limgrave, and Caelid, the latter against the aforementioned Redmanes in battles ranging from Sellia to the Wailing Dunes, and went undefeated in every single one. In v 1.0 of the game, their armor mentions that they were "considered the strongest [soldiers] in the Shattering", and in subsequent versions, the slightly changed flavor text instead says that they are "renowned for their undefeated campaign in the Shattering." This bears out in gameplay as the Lordsworn and Cleanrots at the Haligtree are the strongest generic human opponents in the game, with sky-high stats paired with prowess in Holy incantations. On top of their combat prowess their lore also paints them as very devoted to Miquella and Malenia.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The game has two endings where the black-morality characters unambiguously prevail.
  • First is the "Lord of Frenzied Flame Ending” in which the Tarnished allies with the Frenzied Flame to become its lord. After Marika and the Elden Beast both die, the Frenzied Flame's power is unleashed upon the entire world, burning it and gradually everyone to ashes, ensuring no one else will be born to suffer life – therefore embracing antinatalism and its natural conclusion taken to extremes that turns the world into a lifeless wasteland. If Melina is still alive, who was willing to sacrifice herself because she believed life was beautiful and the world was worth fighting for despite all the pain, she promises to find the Tarnished and slay them with Destined Death, which can defeat their Resurrective Immortality (in the lore at least). Unfortunately it's small comfort for the ones who are already dead, and while you are technically avenging the Merchant Caravan who summoned the Frenzied Flame to the Lands Between in retaliation for being buried alive, it’s possible many of the merchants would be horrified at the devastation wrought by their desire for revenge if they could see the end result.
  • Then there is the "Blessing of Despair Ending". The Dung Eater is afflicted with his own Seedbed Curse, which is exactly what he wanted because he's obsessed with suffering, and creates the Mending Rune of the Fell Curse which can defile the Elden Ring itself. The Tarnished uses it and condemns everyone who will ever live from then on to suffer eternally, even after death, following the Dung Eater’s belief that if everyone and Order itself if defiled then defilement no longer exists since it’s merely the status quo now. From there, the Tarnished takes over as an Evil Overlord who reigns over a land of misery and horror where everybody suffers.
• Bag of Spilling: Most items carry over to New Game Plus, but Great Runes do not. This is especially tragic for Malenia's Great Rune, which adds an interesting gameplay change (emphasis on aggressively counterattacking a la Bloodborne) but can only be obtained at the very end of the game.
  • Played with by Memory Stones, which come with the player to New Game Plus, but all those claimed in a previous playthrough won't appear in subsequent ones.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss:
  • In Murkwater Cave, a small dungeon with a few random bandits holed up in it, you'll notice a wall of light off a branching path. Instead of a boss fight, there's an empty room with a single chest in it... and when the chest is looted of its rather mediocre clothes, Patches calls out the Tarnished on robbing him and then becomes said boss fight. When his health bar gets about halfway down, he starts groveling and begging for his life. In upholding tradition, sparing Patches' life and forgiving him turns him into a merchant who shows up in a few locales.
  • He also continues his tradition of trying to murder the player character in various ways, ranging from a teleporter-trap treasure chest he implies is full of good loot, to kicking you off cliffs, getting you eaten and teleported by an animated torture device, and getting you to join the Volcano Manor. All while remaining cheerful, friendly, and never taking it personally.
  • If you get too near one small army camp in a lake in Limgrave, your battle with the occupants will be abruptly preempted by the lake's namesake, a dragon, divebombing in to crush it. Flying Dragon Agheel is a powerful boss that poses much more of a threat than the soldiers it crushes. This can occur in Altus Plateau as well, this time with an Ulcerated Tree Spirit.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy:
  • A lot of characters (like Goldmask) wear so little that the camera can be angled to see their crotches and chests, revealing that no one has any genitals and none of the women have nipples. Camera angling isn't even needed for some characters like Morgott, Malenia, and Marika. Same goes for all the animals. Presumably, this is non-diegetic censorship, as in From's previous games. Malenia at least has the excuse that her naughty bits have molded over due to the Scarlet Rot. She is drawn with visible nipples in the artbook... but Marika, interestingly, isn't.
  • A lot of the literal mountains of naked corpses around the Lands Between (most often seen in castles, such as Redmane and Morne) are fresh enough for you to notice that the common people of the Lands Between don't have genitals either.
• Barred from the Afterlife: One of the most abominable acts the Dung Eater inflicts upon the world is inflicting a curse upon his victims which blocks their souls from returning to the Erdtree when they die. And if you follow his questline, during the ending, you can inflict this curse upon the entire land, cursing all souls for the rest of time.
• Bat Out of Hell: Giant Bats the size of humans are of the enemy types found in the overworld, using Sonic Screams and grab attacks which can inflict Bleed. Due to the day/night cycle, their behaviour also changes depending on the time of day, with the Bats found sleeping at various places during the day, but being found actively roaming the areas at night, hunting down the Tarnished if spotted.
• Bears Are Bad News: Regular bears in the Lands Between hit hard, but are otherwise a Downplayed example compared to the rest of the world. The actual one would be the Runebears, which are not only massive (they are roughly the size of elephants), but they're Lightning Bruisers as well, being large, fast, and having staggering health pools and damage potential with their fangs and claw. They can also roar out a projectile if the Tarnished is far enough. The frozen mountains are also filled with polar species of the Runebears, who are even more deadly than their forest cousins.
• Beef Gate: Played With. A good indicator you have wandered into an area you're not supposed to be in yet is when you go to hit a Mook and do no damage while they take you out in a single hit. That said, bosses very rarely block you from progressing forward; Stormveil Castle, for instance, might seem like it's blocking the way into Liurnia of the Lakes, but you can actually just go around, and Caelid is even easier to wander into. There are also traps and fast travel gates which can teleport you to very high level areas. So in the end, it's the toughness of the mobs which is your best indicator for whether you should stay and fight or get out of Dodge.
  • The Bestial Sanctum is located at the far end of Caelid, heavily guarded to encourage either finding the portal in Limgrave or having D mark said portal on your map. To go there by foot means heading through Dragonbarrow, navigating around numerous dragons dotting the area, then crossing one of two paths — one guarded by Elder Dragon Greyoll and another littered with poison traps and guarded by heavy-hitting Vulgar Militia. Then you have to face the Black Blade Kindred guarding the gate. The portal, on the other hand, bypasses all of this.
• Beneath the Earth: The Lands Between is full of hidden catacombs, caves, and crystal mines the Tarnished can stumble upon, most of them even having a Boss at the bottom of it. Furthermore, some places are their own little world beneath the earth, such as Nokron, the Eternal City, which has a sky full of stars (actually glowing glintstone ores) despite being underground.
  • The Siofra and Ainsel Rivers that are connected to their respective Eternal Cities, Nokron and Nokstella, also expand on the explorable undergound sections of the world. Going deeper into the Ainsel River leads you down to the Lake of Rot, which is implied to be the sealing ground of the Scarlet Rot's outer god.
  • The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds, which serve as the sewers to the capital city of Leyndell, can lead even further underground, to the point where a secret passageway through the Frenzied Flame Proscription, itself a hidden area deep underneath the bottom of the sewers, leads to the Deeproot Depths, the source of the aforementioned rivers and the beginning of the Erdtree's network of roots spreading through the Lands Between, on top of being home to a third, nameless Eternal City.
• BFG: Ballistas can fire massive bolts and can pack an even bigger punch than greatbows. The Hand Ballista is an oversized crossbow, and the Jar Cannon is quite literally a handheld cannon.
• BFS: In FromSoftware tradition, with some tweaks.
  • There is now a brand new weapon category called Colossal Weapons, encompassing all kinds of weapons that are Ultra Greatsword-sized or bigger but aren't swords: Giant axes, giant hammers, a giant halberd, and even the latest incarnation of the Pizza Cutter. Notably, the Great Club has been moved into this category.
  • Ultra Greatswords have been renamed Colossal Swords to match the above category. Besides the somewhat misleadingly named "Greatsword", which has been notably remodeled to better resemble a certain Black Swordsman's heap of raw iron, one notable Colossal Sword is the Grafted Greatsword, which is basically a colossal sword made up of smaller swords, as if the Iron Throne was wieldable. Considering George R.R. Martin himself was the writer for the game's lore, that might not be a coincidence.
  • And, of course, we still have the "regular" Greatswords, Greataxes, and Greathammers, which aren't slouches in this department. For example, the Blasphemous Blade is not only very large (but reasonably sized for a two-handed sword), it's coated in living writhing blood and gore, presumably adding to the weight; and the Rusted Anchor is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Starscourge Radahn's Greatswords are larger than the Tarnished, and while wielded by Radahn, they're absolutely massive, and the mad general is gigantic.
  • The Nagakiba, from Yura's questline, translates to "long fang", and it shows — this katana is about as long as the Tarnished is tall!
• Big Badass Battle Sequence:
  • In the story trailer, a massive host of humans and trolls are seen laying siege to a fortress surrounding the Erdtree underneath a red sky. In-game, this is revealed as the Siege of Leyndell, where Godrick the Grafted attempted to seize the royal capital and was promptly crushed by the forces of Morgott the Omen King. The defeat was so catastrophic for Godrick's side that even hundreds of years later, he's still holed up in Stormveil Castle ruling over an army of sellswords and criminals.
  • The Starscourge Radahn boss fight has the Tarnished summon a large number of NPCs to engage in one epic battle against the massive rotting general. It's commonly hailed as one of the coolest moments in the game, though the player can choose to forgo this and fight Radahn one-on-one.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The underground has massive caverns filled with human-sized ants, usually feasting in their colonies. They come in soldier and worker variants. There are also the Souls-standard giant crabs, huge poisonous slugs (which also come in a flaming variant), giant dragonflies (which actually look more like dobsonflies), huge land-dwelling lobsters, and large non-aggressive dung beetles which drop valuables if killed.
• Big Bad Ensemble: While the game doesn't really have one story-spanning antagonist, several villainous factions and leaders of said factions are vying for the fate of the Lands Between:
  • The two of the most malicious Demigods, Praetor Rykard and Mohh the Lord of Blood, definetly count. The former has turned himself into an Animalistic Abomination in an attempt to become powerful enough to devour the gods, driving him into hedonistic and hunger-driven immortal being who dreams of devouring the world itself, while Mohg is a mad Satanic Archetype who leads a cult of serial killers and brainwashed slaves, is attempting to ascend to god-hood by attempting to corrupt his half-brother Miquella and take him as his divine consort. Either of them would fit as the big bads of any other RPG, but here they're mere optional stepping stones for the Tarnished and Big Bad Wannabes (altough Rykard far less so than Mohg).
  • The Outer God of Frenzied Flame, alongside its Mouth of Sauron the Three Fingers and its apostle Shabriri, are attempting to create a lord that will scour the world of all life and fuse it back into one in an Assimilation Plot - however, unlike the other antagonists, they actually require the player character to help them.
  • The God of Scarlet Rot is an unseen Outer God who seeks to spread its malevolent disease throughout the Lands Between and consume everything and everyone - ironically, its chosen vessel, Malenia, is not this trope at all, as she has no ambitions or desire to become the Goddess of Rot or claim the Elden Ring for herself. However, she's still a dangerous ticking time bomb, as her sheer presence passively spreads the Rot (as can be seen in the Haligtree) and it's only a matter of time until she loses herself.
  • Marika is the cause of the shattering of the Elden Ring, and everything that followed, and though she remains unfought, her 'husband'/other half Radagon is also responsible for sealing the Erdtree and preventing anyone from becoming Elden Lord, which forces the Tarnished to unleash Destined Death to open a path to Marika.
• Big Fancy Castle: Some of the most notable strongholds in the world were once elegant sprawling castles with breathtaking sceneries and where life was visibly luxurious before the Shattering. Examples include Stormveil Castle, Godrick the Grafted's hold, or the Raya Lucaria Academy, which is used as a place for learning sorcery.
• Big Fancy House: Caria Manor and Volcano Manor, which both split the difference between "mansion" and "castle". The former is so utterly enormous its backyard is big enough to hold three wizard towers (and a guard dragon). It should surprise no one that the owners of the house are royalty.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The song certain harpies can be heard singing is in Latin, and it's a lamentation on the ruined state of the Lands Between, asking the gods why they would allow this to happen.
  • Mohg counts down in Latin during his boss fight as he applies his ring curse to the player, and when he later activates it, he chants "Nihil, nihil, nihil!", which means "Nothing, nothing, nothing!"
• Bittersweet Ending: All endings save for the "Blessing of Despair" and "Lord of Frenzied Flame" endings, which involve you spreading a damning curse preventing anyone from reincarnating ever again and burning down the whole world, respectively, are Bittersweet but somewhat weighted towards the sweet end, as the would-be Elden Lord has a lot of work cut out for them. They succeed in taking the throne, but the state of the Lands Between is hardly in the best of conditions and will likely take generations to repair and repopulate, much less fix. And that is to say nothing of Caelid, which is still a rotting, infected hellscape. But, based on the story's own narrative and ignoring speculation, they succeeded in their main goal, brought justice to the Demigods, and personally killed almost every evil in the land. The only reason it isn't a complete happy ending is because it happens in a Crapsack World and most of the Tarnished's friends died to get there.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Shouldn't come as a surprise considering the creators responsible, but it's even more pronounced in this game than in previous Souls titles. Most of the principal players in the main conflict are, at worst, well intentioned extremists who feel they're doing the right thing, or fallen heroes who no longer have the capacity for reason. However, the game also features a number of characters, most notably Godrick, Mohg, Rykard, Seluvis, and the^note LOATHSOME Dung Eater, who are genuinely just wretchedly evil figures with no redeeming qualities.^note And even in the Dung Eater's case it's more that his philosophy runs on Blue-and-Orange Morality that sees the state of being cursed as a blessing, and that if everyone is cursed then no one will be. It's abominable, but runs on its own internally consistent logic rather than just For the Evulz.
• Black Magic: Both of the magic schools tied to the Arcane stat draw power from extremely dangerous sources and and are frowned upon by the inhabitants of the Lands Between. Interestingly enough, it's also connected to the Albinaurics and to item discovery.
  • Dragon Communion Incantations revolve around transforming the caster into various types of Dragon in order to wield their abilities in battle. This is achieved by hunting down Dragons (who are all fully sentient beings with their own desires) and then ripping out their hearts and devouring them to claim their power. This practice has a very high chance of turning the mage into a monstrous faux-dragon called a Magma Wyrm, savage monsters with power over lava that attack all living beings in sight. Dragons, naturally, absolutely hate the practice, and Decaying Ezykes is also called the Dragon Communion Revenger because he attacks people who partake in it.
  • Blood Oath Incantations originate from a dangerous cult known as the Bloody Fingers, a roving band of Serial Killers led by a mysterious "Lord of Blood" that worships the shedding of blood. The cult is powered by carving into the veins of the Formless Mother; a sadomasochistic God of Evil who groomed the cult's leader from childhood to spread the use of her magic to better satisfy her yearning for suffering, both her own and that of the cult's many victims.
  • Sellen's helm, the Witch's Glintstone Crown, increases both Intelligence and Arcane. While Sellen herself doesn't do anything with the Arcane stat, the Arcane bonus serves as emphasis on the danger of the Primeval Current she studies, which has a tendency to turn people into living hunks of glintstone.
• Bleak Level: It's a FromSoftware game, so there's a lot of potential candidates. In general though, expect anywhere tainted by Scarlet Rot to be this.
  • The Lake of Rot is an utterly hellish, empty expanse of Rot infested sludge that glows with a dull red light. The rot is so absurdly inimical to life that there are hardly even any enemies in here except for basilisks, a Dragonkin Soldier, and for some reason a single Ancestral Follower. Since Torrent is unavailable down here, you have to cross the Lake yourself, and are more or less guaranteed to lose tons of health to the Rot unless you stack as many resistance boosting items as you possibly can. It's actually a relief to cross to the temple on the other side where you can progress through a normal level and fight Kindred of Rot again.
  • The lower reaches of Elphael, Brace of the Haligtree. While the upper part of the city is worn down but preserves an opulent beauty similar to Leyndell, the inner part of the tree has been hollowed out and corroded by the Rot emanating from Malenia. The regular Lordsworn soldiers and Cleanrot Knights you've been fighting increasingly get replaced by the loathsome Kindred of Rot, who can actively be seen spawning from rot pools lower down in the area. If you've been following Millicent's questline, this is the area where she chooses to die. Once you get past all of that, you have to deal with Malenia, who is so difficult in herself you might forget the rest of the dungeon.
  • The Frenzied Flame Proscription comes at the end of the Subterranean Shunning Grounds, and if anything it makes the preceding dungeon look like a Green Hill Zone. It's essentially a giant pit filled with hundreds upon hundreds of Nomadic Merchants who were Buried Alive for supposed heresy. There are very few enemies in here; only a few still living Merchants who attack using Frenzy spells, which can be extremely deadly considering the tight spaces you need to dodge them in. The real danger comes from the level design itself. It is one enormous pit that must be traversed via a series of near pixel perfect jumps in a very wide, dark space. This part is considered deadlier than most of the actual bosses in the game; playing offline is nearly a necessity, since the sheer number of player bloodstains tends to obscure the platforms you need to jump on to progress. Add to that the overpowering atmosphere of death and decay, all soundtracked by a lonely string piece played diegetically by one of the mad Merchants in the tomb, and it's one of the darkest places to ever appear in a Fromsoft game.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: While better than past Soulsborne translations, the English localization has some that caused major misconceptions:
  • The noun 'Greattree' appears in some translation and made some players think for a long time (and some still do) that the Greattree was something different from the Erdtree and precedent to it. In reality, the 'Greattree' doesn't exist, it's a mistranslation of "大樹根", which can be more accurately read as 'great roots'- that is to say, the roots of the Erdtree.
  • In the English localization, the scene where Ranni explains her plan does a poor job of translating the Japanese text into English, making her come across as more callous, cruel, and ambivalent than in the original Japanese dialogue.
• Blind Seer: The Prophet's Blindfold item. Its description states it belonged to a group of prophets who were exiled for their prophecies, and who believed eyesight was useless to those "who know the true path".
  • Lightseeker Hyetta is a blind pilgrim/seer. She can see lost grace that directs her to her believed destiny but only after consuming Shabriri "Grapes"; unbeknownst to her (but known to everybody else), they're actually human eyeballs.
• Blood Magic:
  • Several examples. The "Briars of Sin" sorcery damages the user, but creates a large field of bloody thorn bushes around them. The "Bloodflame Blade" incantation derives itself from the Lord of Blood, as does the Reduvia dagger's Blood Blade skill and the additional Bloody Slash skill.
  • Glintstone sorcery is this in a very broad sense. Glintstone is said to be "the amber of the cosmos"; note that amber is fossilized resin, which serves a roughly similar function as blood clots do for animals, and several weapons, such as the Fallingstar Beast Jaw and Wing of Astel, are fashioned out of star spawn body parts, making it likely that these weapons' magical properties come directly from space monster blood, with no fossilization needed. Red Glintstones (which are used for Thorn sorceries) cut to the chase and are created directly from human blood.
• Body Horror: Even more so than past From games...
  • Godrick the Grafted has dozens of human arms attached to his back, some of which have more than five fingers on them. Besides that, he has pale, rotting skin, disgusting teeth, and many of the fingers on his body are misshapen. In his second phase, he attaches a severed dragon's head to his left arm (before that, he lopped said arm off to make room, basically jammed it in place, and the head reanimates with a scream). Godrick himself was a tiny old man; most of his mass consists of the grafted limbs from people he tortured, making him practically a living, self-inflicted Flesh Golem.
  • Godefroy, one of Godrick's ancestors, is also a giant ball of stolen limbs, having been among the first to undertake the grafting process.
  • Godskin Nobles and Apostles, followers of the late Gloam-Eyed Queen who was known for flaying demigods, are draped in clothes stitched together from the skin of those demigods in the hopes that it would empower them.
  • Godwyn is an extremely unfortunate victim of this. In the story trailer, his freshly-killed corpse has something rippling under his skin, probably the Rune of Death itself. Then there's what happened to his body postmortem. His skin is blackened and rotting, his limbs have become stretched and merged with the roots of the Erdtree so it's hard to tell where he ends and it begins, his face has become flattened as if it has melted, and his head seems to have twisted itself 180° (compared to its position in the story trailer).
  • The right half of Morgott's face is covered in gnarled horns and tusks, and he has a warped tail.
  • Just like Morgott, Mohg has grown dozens of gnarled horns on his head, as well as tusks protruding from his mouth. If you look closely, one of the horns is going directly into his left eye.
  • Radagon's body has been terribly mutilated by the time the Tarnished finds him. His skin is very visibly cracking apart as he moves, and large chunks of his body look like they've simply crumbled away, crudely replaced by a shadowy substance generated from the Elden Ring. His torso, in particular, is so badly damaged that it exposes the inside of his chest cavity, where his organs should be — and they're missing. It gets worse after his defeat, the Elden Beast deforms his corpse into a sword it uses to fight the Tarnished.
  • Rykard, dear Greater Will. His transformation has left his body as a giant snake with long, peeling gashes along the scales, out of which writhe masses of tiny, blackened crimson arms and snake tongues (stated to be the souls of his many victims forever trapped in eternal agony as part of his 'family'). His real face is on the underside of the snake's neck: it's huge and flat, with no ears, bloodshot yellow eyes, and stretched out, ashen skin, with encrusted scales forming his crown, jowls, and beard. He's got two 'main' arms and legs (with too many fingers and toes) sticking out of some of the peeled slices on his scales, jostling for space as they crowd out the miniature arms.
• Body Motifs: The game has a huge focus on arms, hands, and fingers; arms and hands generally represent (divine) power, authority, and strength, while fingers generally are associated with marriage, betrothals, and (divine) influence.
  • Multiple bosses are shown to have numerous arms or Artificial Limbs, most notably the tutorial Hopeless Boss Fight Grafted Scion and Godrick the Grafted, one of the demigods. The former is a spider-like creature with multiple arms as limbs, while the latter has several arms of different shapes and sizes all over his torso. Godrick even cuts off his left arm partway through his boss fight to attach a dragon's head to it. The point of attachment looks fleshy, covered in tumor-esque spots, and looks very unnatural overall. Godrick, who suffers from an Inferiority Superiority Complex for being among the weakest of his demigod family, particularly sees grafting as a way to gain strength and power in order to properly emulate his ancestor, Godfrey. Another one of Godrick's ancestors, Godefroy, was noted to be among the first who underwent grafting and was imprisoned in the Golden Lineage Evergaol for it.
  • The Two Fingers are the chosen emissaries of the Greater Will, and their presence represent its great influence across the Lands Between. The fact that only one of them survives represents how the Greater Will's influence/presence is waning.
  • Molten fingerprints appear on everything related to the Frenzied Flame, from weapons and armor to seared ruins in the Frenzied Flame ending.
  • While hands get extra focus, legs tend to get removed in some way or another. The First-Generation Albinaurics can't use their legs, the Juvenile Scholars can't either, Radahn's feet have rotted off, the Fire Giant loses a leg during its fight, and both of Malenia's legs are prosethetic.
  • In addition to hands, the game uses the corpses of gods as a recurring motif. The Mausoleums contain the decapitated heads of minor demigods, the Godskin Cult murders the families of gods and skins them to make armor, Alexander steals a piece of Radahn's corpse in the hope that Radahn's spirit will bless him, Tanith can be found feeding on Rykard's head after his defeat (though he's hinted to be still somewhat alive), the Kindred of Rot worship at a Shrine where a dagger made from the avatar of their god is hidden, every Divine Tower has a dead Two Fingers, Godwyn's soulless body has mutated into an Eldritch Abomination that mindlessly spreads Death, Ranni's horribly mutilated body is where the Cursemark of Death is found, the Elden Beast wields a sword made from Radagon's corpse, and the game ends with the Tarnished standing before Queen Marika's shattered stone body.
• Body of Bodies: Any boss with the epithet "Grafted" is likely to be this:
  • The Grafted Scion faced immediately after the introductory cinematic looks like a spider made up of arms.
  • Godrick the Grafted technically has his original body as the main one, but he has so many limbs grafted to him, the new additions make up the vast majority of his mass.
• Book Ends: The beginning of the game is narrated by a man saying "The fallen leaves tell a story...", proceeding to give background information and what has happened by the time the Tarnished arrives in the Lands Between. In the Elden Lord ending and its variants, the narrator repeats his opening line, this time stating how "our seed" will look back and recall the age ushered by the new Elden Lord.
  • A musical version: the first thing heard when starting the game is the main theme of the game, particularly the piano notes at the beginning, followed by the bombastic arrangement. Fast forward to the Final Boss, the main theme will triumphally come back in a Boss Remix form but with a reversed order: the bombastic arrangement will play against Radagon of the Golden Order and the transition to the Elden Beast will incoporate the piano notes from the beginning of the main theme. In short, the game starts and ends with its main theme.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Most basic weaponry you start the game with have a decent enough moveset you can use all the way to the end of the game, and you can upgrade or customize them to your liking. Special weapons have fancier effects and skills, but are usually locked behind bosses and dungeons and/or have stat requirements which need a few levels to unlock. The longsword and broadsword are the epitome of this trope among starter equipment, as they have a good balance of attack speed, range, and damage, on top of a useful guard-breaking default skill.
  • Straight Swords in general like the aforementioned longsword and broadsword are the kings of this trope as they not only enjoy Jack of All Stats status, but can be customized with a very large number of Ashes of War to allow for more specialized uses. They also have one of the best Guard Counter attacks in the game which makes them great for the iconic "sword and board" setup.
  • The humble Morning Star is one of the first weapons you can find, has Str and Dex requirements low enough that any character build can make use of it, is a Hammer weapon which makes it great for breaking enemies' posture, and natively causes Bleed buildup. You'll find other weapons more optimized for specific builds or playstyles, but it's hard to beat this one for sheer versatility.
  • The Beast Crest Heater Shield can be obtained off a chest in a camp in east Limgrave, and its 100% physical damage prevention, low weight, and low Strength requirements makes for a solid choice for defense for players who don't already start with a medium shield in tow. The Brass Shield has a similar distinction, as it can be obtained off any of the numerous soldiers found in the game and has the best Guard Boost (meaning less stamina consumed for blocking) among medium shields, but its higher Strength requirement and high weight make it awkward to use until the player's had sufficient Strength and Endurance investment.
  • The Spirit Jellyfish summon, which can be obtained before facing Margit. It's incredibly slow, can be easily interrupted, and its only attack is a weak projectile that builds up poison. But it has an obscenely large health pool and is dirt cheap to summon at 31 FP, making it a common go-to for many players as a meat shield in boss encounters to take aggro and soak up hits. Also, in the event it successfully poisons a boss, you now have the option to just run and dodge letting the poison do all the work and not have to worry about dying for that infamous "One more hit" which has killed many a player.
  • The "No Skill" Ash of War omits any skill to an off-hand shield or torch. This means that your skill button will use your main hand's weapon skill while you still can defend yourself with your shield or maintain the light radius of your torch.
  • The Green Turtle Talisman imparts increased stamina regeneration. It's not as fancy as increased damage or increased defense, but when you're wielding heavy weaponry that drains high stamina per swing, or are chasing down elusive bosses in giant arenas, it gives you the breathing room to get more attacks in when it counts.
  • Glintstone Pebble, and its quicker, cheaper variant, Swift Glintstone Shard. While there are heaps of sorcery spells in this game which are flashy and incredibly powerful, these spells, which simply toss a small magic projectile with each use, are very useful even towards the endgame and can make jokes out of many of the early-game bosses and enemies. Better still, the Astrologer class starts with the Glintstone Pebble sorcery, giving them a lofty advantage from the get-go.
  • Another spell the Astrologer begins with, the Glintstone Arc, is even more practical than the Glintstone Pebble. The latter can be replaced with multiple other spells later on when you have more FP to spend, such as the Greater Glintstone Pebble, Glintstone Icecrag, Rock Sling, etc, but the Glintstone Arc remains worth having on your spell list even in the late game, as it shoots out a wide slash of magic which penetrates through enemies and travels a rather large distance, growing wider as it travels. Thus, it can be used on crowds of enemies to put out a lot of damage to a crowd of enemies for a rather cheap cost compared to other AoE spells.
  • For spellcaster players who get annoyed at some enemies dodging their Glintstone Pebbles, go to Selia while you're in Caelid to pick up Rock Sling, and do Gowry's sidequest so he starts selling Night Shard to you. It's basically a mixture of Glintstone Pebble and Swift Glintstone Shard (can fire quickly like the latter but can be charged up to fire like the former) but with slightly less damage, and with one crucial difference — as long as you cast it once without doing a combo-casting, enemies will rarely evade it, even bosses who are known to evade projectiles. In Selia, you can also acquire Night Comet, which basically is a stronger version but requires some more intelligence investment to use. In general, Night-class spells have some substantial mileage, especially Enternal Darkness, which basically is a hard counter to enemy casters for fifteen seconds.
  • Lightning Spear can be acquired early without too much trouble if you know where to go, has a modest faith cost, cheap enough on FP to use regularly, quick to cast even when charged, functional range, and reasonable damage which will only get better as a faith build comes together. It will also be the bread and butter of characters favoring lightning incantations, because even if there are fancier lightning incantations, Lightning Spear's reliability means it is rarely a bad incantation to use.
  • Rock Sling is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. You throw rocks at your opponents with magic. However, it is a very valuable spell for the entire game. For starters, it's rather strong, especially considering how cheap it is to cast. Due to being blunt damage, it has high stagger, allowing you to stun bosses with relative ease for ripostes. Its delayed launch after casting means it confuses enemy AI (as enemies who can dodge when you cast spells do so during the initial cast. For most spells, this means the actual spell will go sailing to their side, but due to Rock Sling's delay, it'll fly straight at them and they won't do a thing). It has heavy tracking and range compared to most spells. And due to how it casts, it can be used to attack at angles which would otherwise be hard to impossible to do (such as an enemy on a platform directly below you). About the only real flaws it has are it can be awkward to use in tight areas (rocks hitting walls and breaking as such), and it locks you in place for a moment during casting, but neither issue is a deal-breaker, especially considering all the pros the spell has. On top of this, one of the best early-game staffs, the Meteorite Staff, boosts the power of gravity sorceries, which Rock Sling is.
  • Barricade Shield, which is dropped by a Night's Cavalry enemy in the Weeping Peninsula south of the starting area (or the default skill of the Great Turtle Shell in the same area). When used, it buffs the Guard Boost of your shield substantially, making it so enemy attacks deplete far less stamina when they connect with your shield, and makes it more likely the boss attacks will bounce off the shield. Not only does this make you far safer from dangerous boss combos, it also opens up the window to do Guard Counters more frequently and break enemies' posture for critical hits. It also has a very low FP cost, meaning it doesn't require any Mind investment to get multiple casts out of it, and it has a very quick animation which itself counts as a block, meaning unlike many other weapon arts and spells, casting it is very safe.
  • Bloodhound's Step, dropped by a Night's Cavalry in Dragonbarrow, is a fast dodge that covers a fairly long distance, gives you invincibility frames, has a fairly low FP cost, can be used in rapid succession, and can be applied to almost any type of weapon. All of these qualities make it an extremely versatile offensive and defensive tool for basically any melee build, both in PVE and especially PVP, functioning as both a gap closer and a get out of jail free card for sticky situations, that can be used repeatedly even with little to no investment in the Mind stat. Of note, it's one of the most frequently recommended tools to deal with Superboss Malenia's devastating Waterfowl Dance attack (normally an exceptionally difficult and unforgiving move to dodge, especially if she initiates it while you're at melee range). Its only real downside is that the Night's Cavalry that drops it is in a lategame area and is appropriately high level, so it can take a while before most players are strong enough to be able to defeat it (although it's fairly easy to get it to defeat itself by jumping off a cliff). Patch 1.06 gave it a heavy Nerf, drastically reducing its effectiveness when spammed repeatedly.
  • The Miséricorde is a dagger that can be found in the first legacy dungeon. While it's a dagger, it also has the highest crit multiplier in the game at 140 — enough to outdamage practically any other weapon upgraded to the same level. Its potential becomes greater once it's equipped with Flame of the Redmanes, which deals high posture damage. With both, you have a weapon that can break posture quick and deal high critical hits all on its own.
  • Godrick's Great Rune has the most basic effect of all the Great Runes: +5 to all attributes. Getting that kind of bonus compared to the other Great Runes isn't flashy, but the player basically gets the equivalent of 40 free levels as long as they don't die, which, when combined with how easy getting it is compared to the others, makes it overall one of the best Great Rune effects, especially when you consider how you can combine Talismans to boost things like your stats or HP. Its only downside is that at very high levels (which will take a long time to achieve), the benefits drop off due to Diminishing Returns for Balance on stats, but by that point you'd have found other Great Runes to give better bonuses.
    • While we're on the topic, Radahn and Morgott's Great Runes are also quite effective for their simplicity; Radahn's gives a flat percentage bonus to your HP, FP, and Stamina, and Morgott's gives a larger percentage bonus to just your HP. While Godrick's Great Rune is great for low-level Tarnished who need the stat bump to make the best use of their equipment or cover for their deficiencies while they're getting their main build stats leveled up properly, these are meant to effectively replace it once you hit mid-to-late game since their percentage increase isn't affected by Diminishing Returns for Balance, and in fact gets better the higher your base stats are for those are. Every build is going to make use of HP and Stamina, and even for dedicated melee builds with no flashy Weapon Arts having some extra FP in a pinch doesn't hurt, so these Great Runes are easy to justify using no matter what your play style.
  • A merchant in the Weeping Peninsula (the second area most players will go to) sells a lantern. When activated, it will make the player character shed a modest amount of light. It requires no cost to use, never runs out, and doesn't take up an equipment slot (meaning it also doesn't add to the character's load calculation). While it creates less light than a torch or consumable, the fact that it's so free to use will make it a valuable tool throughout the rest of the game.
  • The Pike. Has the longest range of any weapon aside from whips, and it can be paired with a shield to allow poking from behind, and if the player is feeling bold enough, has the widest range for Guard Counters. Not exactly the most exciting, but it's very likely to last the player throughout the game, and it can be obtained as early as Stormveil Castle to boot.
  • Misbegotten weaponry consists mostly of hunks of iron crudely hammered into the vague shape of whatever kind of weapon it's supposed to be. They also all have excellent scaling and are some of the strongest weapons in their respective classes, particularly the Iron Greatsword, which maintains a high Strength scaling even with a Blood or Cold infusion and will still hit decently hard without needing to rely mostly on the status effect to do significant damage (although farming for one is a bit unpleasant).
  • The Putrid Corpses summon does basically nothing but stand there and sometimes let out a chime that draws enemy aggro... but it summons four corpses; when fully upgraded, they have over 11k hit points each, which is enough to stall most bosses for as long as a Glass Cannon character needs to win.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • The first major boss, Margit the Fell Omen, is considered to be a major hurdle to step over. You can technically skip him with an alt path, but there is a way to alleviate some of his difficulty if you wish to progress into Stormveil Castle. Exploring Limgrave, you will eventually find Murkwater Cave, where you'll enter combat with a fellow tarnished named Patches. He'll surrender if you bring him down to half health, at which point he'll become a shopkeeper for you to access. Among his wares is an item called "Margit's Shackle," which you can use against Margit to stun him up twice during his first phase. You can also get the shackle by killing Patches and bringing his Bell Bearing to the Twin Maiden Husks. Margit's Shackle also affects Morgott the Omen King, since Margit is a projection of Morgott's.
  • The Optional Boss Mohg, Lord of Blood has a Shackle that can stun him up to twice during his first phase; you can find it at the bottom of the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds, guarded by two Giant Crayfish. This Shackle also works on Mohg, the Omen, another Optional Boss that bars the way to the Three Fingers in the deepest part of the Shunning-Grounds.
  • There is a Crystal Tear called the Purifying Crystal Tear that is dropped by Eleonora if you defeat her at the Second Church of Marika in Atlas Plateau. Using it during Mohg, the Omen's boss battle will negate the Blood Loss curse that he places on you during the fight, preventing you from taking large amounts of damage.
  • The Mimic Tear is a Mirror Boss that copies your equipment and spells. As such, if you were to enter the arena without any equipment or spells and then reequip them during the fight, it can turn the boss into a Curb-Stomp Battle.
• Boss Bonanza / Boss Rush
  • Not counting the Omenkiller and Miranda Bloom you can find in the Perfumer's Grotto just by the side of the road leading up to Leyendell's Outer Wall Perimeter, the area still offers you fights against a Runebear if you try to sneak into the area on the left side of the main road, a Fallingstar Beast if you try to sneak in on the right side of the main road, a rematch against two Erdtree Sentinels at the end of the main road, a fight against a Valiant Gargoyle, a rematch against Margit, and finally a Draconic Tree Sentinel. If you get there at night, you may also run into the Bell Bearing Hunter and a Deathbird. It's easily the most boss-dense stretch in the entire game.
  • The last stretch of the game is effectively one of these starting with Maliketh, the Black Blade. Once you beat him and Destined Death gets unbound you are teleported from Farum Azula to the now ash-smothered Leyndell which, in its outer reaches has both a Gargoyle and three Ulcerated Tree Spirits lurking about as Field Bosses, as well as the critical path consisting of a quartet of boss fights with Gideon, Godfrey, Radagon, and finally the Elden Beast as the second phase of Radagon's fight.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Royal Revenant, a large (think Grafted Scion but long instead of wide) thing with multiple arms that spews poison from its mouth, has massive, wide, rapid attacks, and can crawl through the ground faster than Torrent can run. On top of his boss-level toughness and the fact that, due to not technically being a boss, he respawns, he's a consistent problem no matter where you meet him.
• Boss-Only Level: If you just follow the obvious path forward at least, the Ashen Capital of Leyndell, the game's final dungeon, is just a series of bosses. First Gideon in the area you fought Godfrey's phantom, then Godfrey in the flesh where you fought Morgott, and then finally the sequential fights of Radagon followed by the Elden Beast. Aside from those four, there's a triple fight against the recurring Ulcerated Tree Spirit minibosses, and a single Valiant Gargoyle miniboss. There are otherwise no enemies in the level. You're also dumped into this location immediately after defeating Maliketh, with an optional Draconic Tree Sentinel right outside his fog wall; so in the intended order, you end the game by fighting 5 bosses and 5 minibosses in a row with no regular enemies to break them up.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Melania's Great Rune. The earliest it's possible to obtain it is immediately before the Mountaintops of the Giants, meaning that the game has at most that biome and two dungeons (Crumbling Farum Azula and Leyndell, Ashen Capital) left undone. Unlike most late-game items, Great Runes do not carry over to New Game Plus.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • Some of FromSoftware's games, like the Dark Souls trilogy, usually end on a pyrrhic cost, a situation too ambiguous to properly judge, or straight-up terrible note. Elden Ring features a number of endings where the Tarnished brought catastrophic damage to the Lands Between, but the other endings appear to conclude things on a bright note to greater or lesser degrees.
  • Gameplay-wise, it's instinctive to some players to roll through the trademarked From Software's poison swamps to go faster, but doing it here will cover you with poison, creating a lingering buildup of its effects. This is more of a concern for situations where you cannot use Torrent to ride over them.
  • In past FromSoftware Souls-like RPG games, the DLC's usually involved time travel shenanigans (Dark Souls and Dark Souls II's DLC saw you being hurled into the past via Manus and the Giant's Heart respectively and the climax of Dark Souls III's Ringed City DLC sees you being flung into the far future) of some kind. In previews and developer interviews for the upcoming Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, time travel is not involved as the Land of Shadow is a physical realm connected to the Lands Between, but is otherwise separate and requires you using Miquella's cadavier as a gateway to enter it.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Some of the levels in Elden Ring are completely optional and often hidden, requiring the player to complete some sort of quest or acquire a special item in order to reach them. For instance, there is the Lake of Rot, a very large lake of scarlet rot even more toxic than Caelid, or Elphael, Brace of the Haligtree, a hidden fortress at the base of the Haligtree full of lordsworn soldiers and powerful creatures at the service of Miquella.
  • The Haligtree gets extra credit for being hidden behind a completely different Brutal Bonus Level. In order to reach it, one must hunt down two halves of a special medallion that lets them turn the Grand Lift of Rold and descend into the Consecrated Snowfield. Once there, the player must reach the far end of the zone, contesting with weather that limits visibility, powerful Albinauric archers, the final appearance of the Tarnished Eater invader, and a Walking Mausoleum that fires artillery salvos as they approach. Once there, they must complete a unique Evergaol based around solving a puzzle while more Albinauric archers and invisible Black Knife Assassins try to stop them. Only then will the path to the Haligtree open to them.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The swamp of Aeonia in the middle of Caelid is a large swampy area infected with the scarlet rot. It is hard to traverse due to the tough enemies roaming there, the rotting water slowing you and inflicting you with the rot status effect, and there even are large bubbles of gas popping in the middle of the water.
  • Mogwyn Palace is this, except it's blood instead of Scarlet Rot.
  • The Lake of Rot is a ruin submerged in a lake of infected blood. There's even a waterfall you can ride over in a coffin!
• Bubble Gun: The Envoy's Horn series of weapons can shoot bubbles which deal damage.
• But Thou Must!: Just in case you were thinking you could just attack and potentially kill whoever it is that's offering the Frenzied Flame to you as you could with any other NPC tied to a particular ending, you can't. You must inherit the Frenzied Flame once you open the door to the Three Fingers.

C

• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": In keeping with the Souls games and Bloodborne, outside of health and stats, everything in this game has a different name than most other games; more than a few are even different than previous games by From Software. Instead of Magic/Mana Points, you have Focus Points, the hybrid monentary experience are called Runes, Incantations replace Miracles and Pyromancy of the Souls games, encompassing both holy and dark variants of the same magic as well, even the check points with the Stakes of Marika complimenting the Sites of Grace, and many more small or larger differences. All of which tie into the game's lore and narrative in various ways.
• Cast from Hit Points: Unlike other ashes, the mimic tear depletes hit points instead of focus points. It's a big chunk of health, too, so bringing out the mimic usually means you're chugging a flask of crimson tears immediately afterwards. It's not too prohibitive a cost, especially if you've been gathering your golden seeds and buffing the number of flasks available to you.
• Cast from Sanity: Madness-inducing incantations carry a drawback of also causing a bit of Madness buildup on its user. If you overuse them, you too will be inflicted with Madness, and it can even interrupt your casting animation.
• Central Theme:
  • Loyalty. The game constantly hammers you over the head in saying that undying loyalty is a vice, not a virtue.
    • Maliketh was devoted to his sister Marika and did whatever she wanted or needed. She betrayed him the minute it best served her interest. Whether that was because of her own designs or the Greater Will controlling her, is unknown, but Maliketh paid the price for it either way.
    • Morgott is loyal to the Erdtree. The same Erdtree which made omens such as himself outcasts and lesser beings, taking and taking, but never giving anything back but misery.
    • Godfrey was devoted to Marika and she stripped him of his Elden Lord title when it was more convenient for her to use him as a Tarnished.
  • Falsehood. Everybody and their grandmothers seem to have multiple identities the Tarnished has to uncover, not to mention their hidden agendas behind hidden agendas. To name a few:
    • From the opening cinematic: Hoarah Loux, Chieftain of the Badlands a.k.a. Godfrey, the First Elden Lord; Sir Gideon Ofnir, the All-Knowing a.k.a. "The All-Hearing Brute", the one who massacres the Albinauric Village... and finally, the Wham Line and ultimate reveal: Queen Marika the Eternal a.k.a. Radagon of the Golden Order, her second husband.
    • Renna, the Snow Witch a.k.a. Lunar Princess Ranni, her student.
    • Margit, the Fell Omen a.k.a. Morgott, the Omen King. Similarly, Mohg, the Omen a.k.a. Mohg, Lord of Blood.
    • Preceptor Seluvis a.k.a. Pidia the Carian Servant, as the one who truly controls the already-dead Seluvis's body as a puppet.
    • Sorceress Sellen a.k.a. Sellen the Graven Witch, Raya Lucaria's outcast.
    • Rya the Scout a.k.a. Zorayas the Half-Serpent.
    • Some bosses switch identities as phase changes in their fights; you have the God-Devouring Serpent awakening as Praetor Rykard, Gurranq, Beast Clergyman passing the Godzilla Threshold and using his power as Maliketh, Shadowbound Beast to Marika and bearer of the Rune of Death, and Malenia, Blade of Miquella unleashing her rotten birthright to become Malenia, Goddess of Rot.
  • Ambition, and the incredible and often horrific lengths people are driven to in the hopes of seeing theirs achieved.
    • All of Marika's children were great soldiers, sorcerers, or politicians in their own ways, and much was expected of most of them (barring those who got Unpersoned). Once the Elden Ring was shattered, each of them tried to to claim their throne through various methods and for different reasons, leading the Lands Between to suffer from the wars they all waged against each other over political or ideological differences they couldn't reconcile.
    • Several of the demigods as well as their supporters also tried to completely shirk the duties they had been given and the roles in Marika's empire they were expected to play, and are treated as opportunistic schemers at best or outright monsters at worst for refusing to play the hand they were dealt and live up to their duties and expectations.
    • Morgott, the Omen King was the only one of Marika's children who tried to hold her empire together as she had decreed it be ruled, and though Leyndell is easily the most put together of the major settlements in the Lands Between, it is still stagnating due to its ruler's staunch refusal to even entertain another method of fixing things. Morgott is utterly bound by duty, even to the ends of the world, and refuses to compromise even to his death at the Tarnished's hands.
    • Several of the Tarnished in the Roundtable Hold feel bound to a higher calling and duty, which typically doesn't go particularly well for them when resolving their quest lines. The only ones who get anything resembling a happy ending to their quests (Roderika and Nepheli Loux) do so by finding a new purpose to dedicate themselves to rather than the one expected of them, and just about every other Tarnished of the Hold goes mad, dies, or tries to kill you and has to be put down by trying to fulfill their chosen duty, even if it can't be fulfilled or if they know doing so would kill them. Even Gideon Ofnir, the most dedicated to becoming Elden Lord, goes mad and tries to kill you when he finds Marika might not have intended for there to be another Elden Lord.
    • Queen Marika herself is revealed to have chosen to subvert the duty and expectations which were given to her by the Two Fingers and the Greater Will by Shattering the Elden Ring. While her motivations are not explored deeply in the game itself, the mere act and the mess which came following show the worst consequences when the leader — the God-Emperor of the land in this case — chose to abandon their duty in favor of their own goals.
    • Ultimately, even if the player becomes Elden Lord, doing so requires going against the Greater Will by burning a path through the Erdtree. Even when you are doing what is expected of the Tarnished, you are still refusing to succumb to expectation and the accepted way of things, which is what can ultimately save or destroy the world based solely on your dedication and perseverance.
  • Choices or rather just how little you truly have. The game presents a plethora of choices available to the player, but for the most part, much of the end result winds up being forced on the player regardless.
    • The Erdtree WILL reject you, and your only choice is to commit a cardinal sin by burning the Erdtree in order to enter. As shown in previous storylines, anytime someone goes against the Greater Will in any shape or form, the response is vicious. While the player does put down the Elden Beast by the endgame, it likely was not the only Outer God potentially pissed off by your actions...
    • On top of the above, in order to burn the Erdtree, you have to be able to provide some sort of fuel to feed the flames. Either you will have to allow your companion, Melina, to sacrifice herself by burning herself to fan the flames, or using the Frenzied Flames to do so yourself at the cost of alienating Melina and turning her against you for good, even if the intent was to save her life. No matter what, you will face the endgame by yourself...
    • Noted in the Tearjerker pages, even should you play it right, you will have the materials necessary to potentially save Malenia by using Miquella's Needle, which was constructed with the intentions of preventing her Scarlet Rot, but you can't. The only choice you have upon entering her boss room is to put her out of her misery.
    • Millicent's questline. You begin it by using the Alloyed-Gold Needle to save her from her Scarlet Rot (which shows how much the above totally sucks; Millicent's questline proves it CAN work), but by the completion of it, you either betray her to have her grief spawn a new Scarlet Bloom, or you save her from her sisters... but she removes the needle so that she can die on her own terms. Nothing you do can save her from this fate.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: The Jar Cannon is one of the rare medieval fantasy examples of this trope.
• Chaos Is Evil: The god of chaos, the Frenzied Flame, is probably the most evil Outer God. While it views itself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, its only goal is to destroy all life in order to reset the world to what it was like before the Greater Will formed life from the Primordial Crucible. If the player helps it succeed, it destroys the Erdtree and reduces the world to an endless ashy wasteland.
• Chekhov's Gun: If you stumble into a transporter trap in the Tower of Return, you'll get to a "Divine Bridge" Site of Grace in Leyndell way before you're expected to be there, and with no other visible way out. If you slip by or defeat the giant golem up there, you'll find an inactive waygate. This waygate becomes active much later in the game, and is the only path to the Isolated Divine Tower, where you activate Malenia's Great Rune.
  • An early game quest has you search for an imprint of a Black Knife, a Death-imbued scar that can render even gods mortal. After using Destined Death to carve a path into the Erdtree, you fight the Elden Beast branded with the same scar.
• Chosen One: The Outer Gods (including the Greater Will if it really is one) seem to like to pick a person to be their proxy rather than involve themselves directly. The Greater Will has Queen Marika, the Scarlet Rot has Malenia (despite her trying to escape it), the Formless Mother has Mogh, the Outer God of Death might have had the Gloam-Eyed Queen, and the Frenzied Flame has (potentially) The Tarnished.
• Citadel City: Leyndell, capital of the Lands Between and home of the Erdtree, is so well fortified that its walls have only ever been breached once in its whole history, and only then by Gransax, one of the largest dragons to ever exist. It was repeatedly besieged throughout the Shattering, but due to its stupidly defensible position, solid fortifications, and Morgott's able leadership, nobody was ever able to take it.
• Clue of Few Words: The only hint so as to how to get to the top of the Converted Tower in Liurnia of the Lakes is a one-word message that says "Erudition". You need to perform the "Erudition" gesture in front of the statue of Marika inside the tower.
• Colour Motif: Gold. The Elden Ring and the Erdtree's magic is all colored golden, the family of demigods who once ruled over the lands between were known as the Golden Order. Even the Graces are notably fonts of golden light which give players visual hints of their presence in an area by drawing in golden light from around them.
• Combat Pragmatist: More encouraged than in previous FromSoftware titles. Stealth and sneak attacks are entirely viable, the Tarnished can summon allies directly to assist them, and they can use Torrent to hit and run with impunity. Numerous nasty methods exist to defeat foes, including using sleeping poisons to render them helpless, and more than a few bosses can be hit with surprise attacks or special items to stun them. Whatever the method to win is entirely valid.
• Computers Are Fast: Many enemies dodge projectiles or attack a player healing with a flask when they aren't in the middle of another action. They react as soon as the projectile is spawned or the drinking animation starts, before a human could possibly visually identify the action.
• Controllable Helplessness: If the player has accepted the Frenzied Flame and not purged it, than at the end of the game, the only option when interacting with Queen Marika is 'Become the Lord of Frenzied Flame'. Things go downhill from there.
• Convection, Schmonvection: The entire Gelmir Volcano lives this trope. Standing near lava does nothing to you, and walking or rolling directly on it does damage, but very slowly and less than normal fire. This could be explained by lava working differently in-universe, considering an entire town was built on top of it.
• Converted into a Weapon:
  • The player first meets Latenna the Albinauric as an NPC involved in the early stages of the Haligtree Sidequest Sidestory. If the player shows her a certain key item, she will ask to be taken to the Consecrated Snowfield — and since she is paraplegic, like all first-generation Albinaurics, the only way for her to come along is as a Spirit Ash. Spirit Ashes are non-consumable items that allow the player to summon particular spirits for boss fights, so they are essentially automated weapons. While all Spirit Ashes are said to be the remains of creatures they represent, Latenna is unique in that she willingly takes her own life to become one, and also in that she has unique quest dialogue even after doing so.
  • After defeating the first stage of the Final Boss, Radagon turns into a sword wielded by the Elden Beast.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • A Quality enhancement makes a weapon scale equally between Strength and Dexterity at a large cost to its base damage. That means if you want to optimize it, you have to push both Strength and Dexterity at once, which demands twice as many stat points compared to sticking to Heavy (for Strength) or Keen (for Dexterity). Heavy and Keen also have a smaller base damage penalty than Quality. In addition, the number of weapons that can truly benefit from it is very small.
  • On the spellcasting side, there are a couple of staves that have equal scaling in Intelligence and Faith, but their sorcery scaling requires far more stat investment to become comparable to the staves that exclusively scale off Intelligence. They see use with caster builds that use both sorceries and incantations, but such builds run the risk of being Master of None.
• Cool Horse: Torrent, a horned "spirit-steed" who has chosen the Tarnished. It can teleport in and out when summoned and dismissed, can be used in combat, can Double Jump, and can jump extremely high with the apparent aid of upward wind currents.
• Corpse Land:
  • Much of Mount Gelmir is literally carpeted with dead bodies left over from the horrific battles between Rykard and Morgott's armies.
  • The Wailing Dunes were a major battleground in Malenia's invasion of Caelid, and to this day the desert is littered with unburied bodies and broken weapons. Radahn is fought there, and has evidently spent many years since his battle with Malenia roaming the wastes feeding on the corpses of friend and foe alike. Many were buried in the nearby War-Dead Catacombs, where their ghosts still ceaselessly fight each other despite the war having ended centuries ago. Alexander also makes good use of it to stuff himself full with the remains of stronger warriors.
  • The Mountaintops of the Giants are filled with the frozen corpses of the Fire Giants that Godfrey and his army killed. They're so large they actually appear on your map as landmarks.
• Corridor Cubbyhole Run: The Hero's Grave dungeons require the player to avoid giant stone chariots riding back and forth along a slope by ducking into safe spots. Some of these safe spots aren't very safe, either, with enemies in them. Several catacombs also feature tunnels with pillars spewing jets of flame or other nasty effects, requiring a swift dash to cover.
• The Corruption:
  • The Frenzied Flame is considered this, which should probably have been a given since its other name is "Flame of Chaos". Although the flame can be used by anyone with sufficient skill, it can potentially drive the user insane, and in more extreme cases, cause fire to burst from their very sockets. And it doesn't just have to be humans, ether; going to the Ailing Village in the Weeping Peninsula will have you encounter not just the local villagers afflicted by the Flames of Frenzy, but even the rats. The Tarnished Player Character is implied to be the only one capable of properly controlling the Frenzied Flame, but not even they are immune to its effects, as the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending shows them becoming a Humanoid Abomination whose mere existence causes the Lands Between to be encroached in fire.
  • The Scarlet Rot. Acting much like The Virus, the rot has infested the entirety of the Caelid fiefdom and corrupted everything from the land, the waters, the inhabitants (plants, animals, humans, Crystallians, and even Dragons), covering the sky with blood red clouds from the sheer corruption. The disease it inflicts makes living organisms rot and slowly fuse into the land itself, causing excruciating pain to body and mind, while the rotten land gives rise to creatures made out of rot itself, designed to spread the rot. It took the Redmane Knights using all the firepower they had to keep it from spreading out of Caelid.
• Cosmic Chess Game: Given various pieces of lore reveal the Greater Will and a number of abstract "outer gods" have been empowering different races and individuals since the ancient times until the present, it appears the Greater Will intends to have the Lands Between under the dominion of its Elden Ring bearer, and wants to erase the influences of certain outer gods from the land, who themselves are attempting to influence the state of affairs more or less subtly. It's to be noted they can also form 'alliances' so to speak, such as the one formed by Rennala and Radagon, two champions of different outer gods, getting married at the church of vows, relatively short-lived though it was.
• Cosmic Keystone: Two-fold;
  • The Elden Ring itself is the physical manifestation of the natural order of all things, and its fracturing drove most of the demigods to a greed-driven madness as they tried to salvage whatever power they could from it and ascend as the next Elden Lord. This mad dash for the fragments of the Elden Ring triggered a massive civil war and disrupted the natural cycle of life and death, as well as the knock-on effects the Shattering wars had, such as the release of the Scarlet Rot in Caelid and the creation of Those Who Live In Death.
  • Queen Marika herself is the keystone for the Elden Ring itself, as without her as its proxy, the Elden Ring wouldn't be able to set the rules of reality in the Lands Between. Her disappearance after the Elden Ring was fractured was just as much an inciting factor in the Shattering wars as the Elden Ring breaking was, since none of her demigod children could turn to her for guidance and, absent of her rule, tried to make a play for her throne, or otherwise tried to subvert the Golden Order she had been the incarnation of. In a rare twist on this trope, Marika is the one who broke the Elden Ring for reasons unknown, meaning one keystone was directly responsible for nearly destroying another keystone.
• Cosmic Motifs: The game makes heavy use of stars as motifs, and notably with 2 different connotations of the word. Much like in real life ancient history, the Lands Between’s inhabitants refer to all celestial objects in the heavens as “stars” — but meteors and comets are distinguished, being called “falling stars” and “shooting stars” to differentiate them with the distant stars which fill up the universe. The distinction doesn’t end there; the falling stars are the source of Glintstones which Carian Royal Family and Raya Lucaria Academy studied, as well as the origin of alien creatures like Alabaster or Onyx Lords, all of which are connected with the Dark Moon who guides Ranni; meanwhile, the distant stars are often associated with the Greater Will, who bestowed the Lands Between with the Elden Ring.
• Counter-Attack: The new Guard Counter mechanic, which after blocking an attack, pressing the charge attack button will initiate one. Besides the actual damage, it will also cause heavy posture damage, staggering most common enemies for a critical hit.
• Creating Life: The underground Eternal Cities had various projects centered around creating life. The Mimic Tear (a silver slime that can copy the appearance and abilities of others) in particular was their attempt to forge their own Lord.
• Creator Thumbprint: George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is known for the frequency of discussion and series terms involving hands and hand-related imagery. Sure enough, hands crop up as a major theme in this game as well, what with the Finger Maidens, multiple finger items, and numerous monsters with extra arms.
  • Just Before the End dark fantasy settings, references to Norse Mythology, and Alliterative Families are features of both Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin's most famous works, so naturally they show up here as well.
• Crapsack World: With FromSoftware and George R. R. Martin behind it, both creators who are notorious for it, it shouldn't come as a surprise. The Lands Between is one of the darkest and most twisted fantasy worlds put in fiction. The cosmic force behind the world's very logic and principles has been destroyed, throwing the world into disarray. Most of the land is consumed by an endless Forever War fought by a group of Physical Gods who have gone mad with power and corruption, which has resulted in total breakdown of society, most common folk have been driven mad or killed, the world is littered in Body Horror infused nightmares, and that's not even getting into the nameless horrors lurking beneath the world. The Lands Between are filled with decaying ruins, consumed cities, and an endless number of monsters trying to kill you.
• Credits Medley: The ending theme features a medley of four boss themes, each of which marks a major milestone in the Tarnished's journey: Godrick the Grafted, Morgott the Omen King, Beast Clergyman/Maliketh the Black Blade, and the Elden Beast.
• Crutch Character: The Samurai is widely considered the best starting class in the game. It has a similar stat spread to the Vagabond (the equivalent of Dark Souls III's Knight, widely considered the best starting class in that game due to having the most optimized spread), a decent set of medium armor, and above all, an Uchigatana. Katanas are one of the best weapon classes in the game, combining big damage with innate bleed (which is a Game-Breaker all on its own), and the Uchigatana is one of the best in that class. While anyone can go pick up an Uchi within 5 minutes of starting the game if they know where to look, that's the only one they'll get in that playthrough. The fact that you start with one means that you can go pick up the one that's sitting in the world and dual-wield them right off the bat without needing to wait until New Game Plus like everyone else. Just get some Ashes of War that grant the Keen affinity for better Dex scaling and you'll be all set for the entire game. The downside of this, of course, is that you won't feel much of a sense of character progression since you pretty much already have the best stuff you can get. The only real ways to improve upon what you already have are to switch to either Cold affinity (build both frostbite and bleed at the same time) or Occult affinity (damage and bleed buildup both scale with Arcane, will require a respec) once you're able to do so, maybe swap out one of your katanas for the almighty Rivers of Blood once you get that, and maybe get some heavier armor.
• Cutting the Knot: You can do this with two of the Mage Towers in the game, skipping the puzzles that would normally be required to enter them.
  • The Converted Tower in Liurnia requires you to perform a specific gesture to make a ladder appear, and to learn that gesture you must first complete an NPC's sidequest. However, the tower is surrounded by a crumbling wall that can easily be climbed, then you can Double Jump with Torrent from the wall up to the second floor of the tower where the ladder would have taken you.
  • Lenne's Rise in Caelid is a bit of an odd case. Ostensibly, there is a puzzle that must be completed in order to lower the magical barrier blocking you from entering the tower, just like the rest. However, the imp statue in front of the tower that would tell you about the puzzle is broken, and you can't read it. Since reading the statue is what normally triggers the puzzle to activate, there's no way to solve it, and your only option is to use the nearby spiritspring to launch yourself up to the second floor balcony. Even if you go down to the entrance from the inside and kill the enemy there, the barrier does not come down, and the inside of the entrance is overgrown with crystals, so taking the barrier down wouldn't get you inside anyway. A rare case where cutting the knot is actually the intended solution!

D

• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • Instead of just clicking Triangle or Y to two-hand a weapon like past Souls games, here you must hold down Triangle/Y, then click the light attack button for your weapon. Triangle/Y is only used, by itself, for enabling the HUD overlay, and picking up items/interacting with stuff. This goes against not only the Souls games, but also Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which used X/Square as the interact button.
  • Rather than being the interact button like previous Souls games, the X/A button is now for jumping, like in other games.
  • Instead of using a Site of Grace to fast travel like in previous games with bonfires and lanterns, fast travel can now be done through the map screen at nearly any time outside of combat, leading to some instances of players sitting down at a grace to fast travel when it isn't necessary.
  • When you reach the Liftside Chamber site of grace in Stormveil Castle, you will find an elevator shaft with the elevator at the top and you on the bottom. Your immediate instinct is to assume that trying to pull the lever will result in the classic "Contraption does not move" message and that you will be forced to take the dangerous, enemy-filled path all the way around and activate the elevator from the top to use as a shortcut, like you have probably seen a hundred times before across all of FromSoft's games, possibly including this one depending on what dungeons you've done so far. While you can do that, pulling the lever will in fact call the elevator down with no issues, providing you with a much easier path to the boss. However, you do miss out on some good loot and an NPC encounter that you would get if you took the dangerous path. The same elevator trick is repeated near the end of the game, only this time with the elevator at the bottom and you at the top, and since it's most likely been dozens of hours of playtime since the first time the game pulled this trick, you've probably long since forgotten about it and will probably fall for it again.
  • Upon a player's first sight of a Skeleton suddenly going back up, players accustomed to them in the Souls games might think that in order to permanently kill them, they either need to find and kill a nearby necromancer like in Dark Souls, or simply kill them a second time like in Dark Souls III. With the exception of a single catacomb dungeon in which you do need to kill necromancers DS1-style, in order to permanently kill skeletons this time around, you need to attack them during their resurrection. Related to this, while simply killing skeletons with a Divine or Blessed infused weapon would perma-kill them in the previous games, a Sacred infused weapon on its own will not do the trick in this game, and you must use specific spells, weapons, or Ashes of War that specifically say in the description that they stop skeletons from reviving.
  • In pretty much every game ever made that has both a Double Jump and Falling Damage, you can prevent fall damage by using the double jump just before you land. Of course, FromSoft are nowhere near that merciful, and Torrent's double jump will not save you from a horrible death. If the fall is high enough to deal damage or instantly kill you, then it will.
• Dare to Be Badass: One of the very first messages you'll ever see upon starting the game at the Chapel of Anticipation is:
  Though the path be broken and uncertain, claim your place as Elden Lord!
• Dark Is Evil: While the Elden Beast is primarily associated with light, it has a subtle connection to darkness as well. Radagon has an arm made of darkness, and the Elden Beast itself appears to be composed of darkness except for its glowing core.
• Dead Guy on Display: A lot of factions fancy crucifying, hanging, and stringing bodies near their domain. In the case of the crucified bodies, they come back to life at night to scream in agony.
• Deader than Dead: The Litany of Proper Death is meant to give proper death to those who keep resurrecting, now that the Golden Order is screwed up. Its effectiveness varies, though it can prevent the skeletons from coming back.
• Death Mountain:
  • Mount Gelmir is a mountainous, rather desolate area within the Altus Plateau which is full of hostile wildlife but also is the base of a few strong Demi-human foes.
  • The Mountaintop of Giants is an icy mountainous area situated at the highest altitudes of the Lands Between. It is notable for being the territory of the now extinct Fire Giants and it is said few even dared to venture there.
• Degraded Boss: Tons. Most boss enemies you find in early dungeons will likely show up elsewhere later, some as a regular enemy, some as another boss fight with a gimmick added. The player will even tend to encounter regular versions of some these enemies before fighting one as a boss. Some notable examples of this are Margit, who shows up again in the overworld in the Capital Outskirts, and Mohg, the Omen, who most players will likely find after his true self, Mohg, Lord of Blood. Examples of dungeon bosses that become generic respawning enemies later in the game include Farum Azula Beastmen, large Scaly Misbegotten, Pumpkin Heads, Demi-Human Chiefs, Trolls, Grave Warden Duelists, and Cleanrot Knights.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Every single masked or helmeted NPC has a detailed face, even if they're only viewable through datamining or modding the game to remove the helmet. They're not just randomly generated faces to have a filler, they're all hand-made: for example, White-Masked Varré has a Bloody Finger tattoo on his forehead and Sellen has a different face after inhabiting a puppet body despite never being able to properly see under their headgear to confirm this.
  • To make sure that the player does meet Melina while in Limgrave, she's set to appear at one of eight different sites of grace you rest at after touching three of them: the Church of Elleh, the Gatefront, Agheel Lake North, Agheel Lake South, the Seaside Ruins, the Bridge of Sacrifice, Stormhill Shack, and the Third Church of Marika. Each one has its own version of her introduction cutscene.
  • Normally, Margit the Fell Omen blocks the way to Stormveil Castle, but it is possible to kill his "true" counterpart, Morgott the Omen King, before fighting him. Should you do this, Margit will not appear in his usual spot, and you still get the Talisman pouch he would have dropped.
  • The "Age of the Stars" ending has a small, minor difference depending on whether you've triggered every dialogue option for a certain character and exhausted them. Whether you've exhausted her dialogue completely and finished her questline changes how Ranni refers to the Tarnished in her ending.
    (If Dialogue is not exhausted) "Well then. Shall we? My fair consort, eternal."
    (If Dialogue is exhausted) "Let us go together. My dear consort, eternal."
  • The "Lord of Frenzied Flame" ending plays out differently depending on where in the story you have met the Three Fingers. If you meet the Three Fingers while Melina is still accompanying you and still alive, she will leave the Tarnished in disgust and declare she will kill them the next time they meet; a promise she reaffirms after the Tarnished has set the Lands Between ablaze with the Frenzied Flame as she picks up Torrent's summoning ring from the ashes. If you meet the Three Fingers after Melina has sacrificed herself to burn down the Erdtree, the scene will not play out.
  • Whenever Nepheli is summonable for a boss, she also tends to be found in-person somewhere nearby. However, gone are the days when you could summon Knight Slayer Tsorig, drag him to his own physical body, and have the two duke it out. If you summon Nepheli, her physical body will simply disappear until her phantom is dismissed and the area is reloaded.
  • After obtaining one half of the Haligtree Secret Medallion, Ensha will sabotage your teleportation to Roundtable Hold and instead warp you to the Fortified Manor at Leyndell, where he attacks you. Normally, the door that leads to where the Two Fingers would normally be is closed, but if you visit the Fortified Manor in Leyndell and open the doors over there before Ensha's invasion, you can enter it normally as you would.
• Diegetic Character Creation: One of the bosses, Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon, is capable of granting others "rebirth" through the amber egg she cradles. If you defeat her, she becomes the game's respec vendor, allowing you to re-customize your character in both appearance and stat distribution. It's stated that others reborn through her magic usually come out flawed and short-lived, but the power of the Great Runes you carry let you survive the process. Respec enough times and she'll actually thank you for letting her do it. (The Player Headquarters also lets you alter your appearance at any time, but this gets no diegetic explanation).
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Strength builds can seem like a bit of a hard sell due to the lack of Bleed from Dexterity weapons or ranged options provided by Intelligence, Faith, and Arcane along with the generally more aggressive AI making the long wind-up times for strength weapons very punishing to use and require much greater understanding of a boss’ moveset to find good openings. However if you can adjust to the longer wind-up time per swing, strength weapons are capable of inflicting monstrous damage in a single swing while heavily damaging the enemy’s poise, knocking them down for a devastating riposte.
  • Like its predecessors, Parrying has a narrow timing window and short range, even with lighter shields or bucklers that offer the best parry timings. Some attacks can't be parried at all, either. But when you nail it, you not only interrupt the enemy's attack, but potentially also stagger them, giving you an opening for a Critical Hit or a window of safety to recover.
  • Dragon breath incantations have a very long casting time, taking a couple of seconds in which the player is stuck in place. However, once one compensates for the windup, they can be extremely powerful, especially to deal lots of damage to swarms of enemies. A particularly effective tactic is to sneak up on a group of enemies and use the breath attack to deal heavy damage to the whole group before starting a fight in earnest.
  • Horseback combat can trivialize some fights if you learn how to balance your movement with your limited attack angles and different attack animations, or use your additional mobility options and mount/dismount animation to compensate for your inability to dodge-roll. You'll need to do some weapon-switching footwork too to figure out how to cast spells from horseback.
  • The Raptor of the Mists skill enables evasion upon getting hit. If timed right, it can even dodge the dreaded Hero's Grave chariots. The only thing it won't dodge, however, are any status inflictions.
  • You can chain-cast spells and incantations, and certain combos will cause normally slow spells to have a significantly shorter windup. This does mean that you'll need to quickly cycle through your spells in between casting them, and the order at which you arrange your spells becomes very important for optimal casting speed.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: Not the game as a whole, which ends on a more or less straight happy ending, but a lot of NPC questlines involve this.
  • After helping her defeat her sisters, Millicent removes the Unalloyed Gold Needle keeping herself alive for basically no discernable reason. The item's changed description◊ plus the interaction you can have with Malenia's rebirth flower by putting the needle in it implies that Millicent wanted you to give it to Malenia instead, but she never actually tells you this.
  • The most blatant example of this has to be Thops' quest; after helping him get back into Raya Lucaria, he literally drops dead. Nothing in the game explains what happened to him, he's just suddenly dead for no reason. It's somewhat a Bittersweet Ending for his quest as he does finish his life's work, ensuring he'll be remembered as the great sorcerer he always wanted to be, but still.
  • By the end of Ranni's quest, every one of her allies except the player is murdered by the Black Knife Assassins or goes insane.
  • Miquella was somehow kidnapped by his evil half-brother. How Mogh managed to get past Malenia and the Haligtree's entire army is never explained.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In the past long before the era of the game, Maliketh the Black Blade defeated the Gloam-Eyed Queen, who had the full power of Destined Death, and took the Rune of Death for himself.
  • Similarly, long before the game began, Malenia's sword tutor defeated and imprisoned the Scarlet Rot in the Lake of Rot deep underground. Precisely how he managed to defeat and imprison a god as powerful and deadly as the Scarlet Rot is unclear, especially as there's no indication he was a demigod or god himself. But it is noted that a Blue Fairy helped him.
  • At the end of the game, the final obstacle to becoming Elden Lord is the Elden Beast, the Greater Will's most powerful servant in the Lands Between. Not only does the player kill the beast, but in doing so they defy the will of the setting's Top God.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: It's possible to cheat the Frenzied Flame, using it to save Melina but discarding it before it uses you to burn the world. This will not be easy; you have to follow Millicent's questline all the way to its end in the Brutal Bonus Level of the Haligtree (in the process dealing with a nasty Putrid Tree Spirit fight you can otherwise skip), choose to side with her over Gowry (resulting in a four-on-two invasion) to get the final state of the Unalloyed Gold Needle, and then beat Malenia to trade that for Miquella's Needle. Doing so will allow you to purge yourself of the flame... in Placidusax's well-hidden arena. After doing all that, you definitely deserve to save Melina's life, though she won't be happy with you because she doesn't know about the trick and really doesn't want the Frenzied Flame to win.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance:
  • Much like its predecessors, Elden Ring has thresholds for its stats where the bonuses per stat point decrease significantly. The soft caps of this game are notably higher than previous titles, plateauing after 60 for Vigor, Mind, and Endurance, and 80 for offensive stats. Lesser thresholds, where returns decrease but still maintain an appreciable bonus, are 40 for Vigor and Mind, 50 for Endurance and Arcane, and 60 for all other stats.
  • From the other direction, the number of Runes required to level up increases each time, as does the amount of the increase.
• Disc-One Nuke: Has its own page.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: Leyndell is the fallen capital, situated at the base of the Erdtree and the ultimate goal of your quest to become Elden Lord. Your journey through this location takes you to the throne room high above the city, guarded by Morgott, the Omen King. However, circumstances prevent you from finishing your quest, leading to the remaining third of the game as you journey into the unexplored regions of the continent.
• Disconnected Side Area: The Four Belfries at Liurnia contain portals to small areas disconnected from the rest of the world, two of which (in Siofra River and Farum Azula) offer a peek at the rest of the area they're in. The Moonlight Altar area of Liurnia is on a plateau too high to reach, and can only be accessed from an underground elevator found at the end of a completely different area.
• Dishing Out Dirt:
  • While Sorceries include the water, ice, and magma elements, the majority of Sorcery spells in Elden Ring are variations of crystal conjuring, cosmic rock formations, and meteor summoning, along with gravity powers. Some of these spells are also associated with beings actually made of crystal, who came from the depths of space.
  • Two of the Beast Incantations, Bestial Sling and Stone of Gurranq, are this. The former is a quick Short-Range Shotgun spray of sharp stone shards, while the latter is just a big rock hurled at the enemy.
• Divine Conflict: Queen Marika’s Empire has gone through at least 2 ancient wars with different primeval entities (the Dragons and then the Giants), and this is before the Shattering even kickstarted the civil war among Marika's children.
• Double Jump: Not the Tarnished, but Torrent is capable of double jumping, making traversal of terrain much easier than on foot.
• Double Tap: Skeletal enemies will fully revive in a few seconds after their health is depleted, unless you take a moment to smack their remains before they reform. It takes attacks that evoke "Proper Death" (e.g. the Sacred Blade skill and its buff, Litany of Proper Death, etc) to kill them outright.
• Downer Ending: The game features two of the most unsettling and unambiguously negative endings in FromSoft history:
  • The Lord of Chaos ending has the Tarnished turn into the manifestation of the Flame of Frenzy itself, burning the Erdtree completely and replacing it with a spiral of yellow flame that goes up to the sky, burning the Lands Between and wiping out all life. With the betrayal fully complete, Melina promises to seek out the Tarnished and grant them 'Destined Death'. A variant of the ending, should the player character encounter the Three Fingers after Melina's sacrifice, removes Melina's part in the ending cutscene, leaving the Lord of Chaos with nobody that can stop them.
  • The Blessing of Despair ending, a variant of the Elden Lord ending, has the Tarnished accept the Dung Eater's misanthropic ideology and use his Mending Rune on the Elden Ring, cursing all mankind and the land itself to a Fate Worse than Death that will spread from generation to generation. The narrator, who in other endings mostly sounds neutral, sounds actively terrified in this one.
• The Dreaded: The Three Fingers are spoken of nigh universally with vile hate and fear. It's not hard to see why, as if they are the source of the madness-inducing Frenzied Flame, which has decimated communities, takes over the brains of those who wield it with madness, and can become apocalyptically destructive if given the right host (that is, you).
• Driving Question: The biggest mystery of the game is finding who, or what, destroyed the Elden Ring and set both the Shattering and the events of the game into motion. You later learn the Rune of Death — or rather, a fragment of it — was stolen by Ranni, and then it was Queen Marika herself who destroyed the Elden Ring.
• Drone of Dread: The ambient soundtrack in Caelid consists mostly of deep, droning tones with "Psycho" Strings gliding over them.
• Dual Boss: Several of the side dungeons pit you against two strong enemies at once — sometimes it's two variants of the same enemy.
• Dual Wielding: There are two gameplay mechanics that enable this, from the Souls games.
  • Power stancing from Dark Souls II makes a comeback, where you can wield two weapons of the same type and strike with both of them in quick succession using your left-hand attack button.
  • Paired weapons from Dark Souls III also makes a return, albeit to a lesser extent. Two-handing a paired will equip the other half of the set for a special variant of powerstancing. Though it's mostly for fists and claws, there are two unique paired weapons that can be obtained.
• Dungeon Bypass: As Elden Ring is an open-world game, there are multiple ways around the Lands Between, giving the player plenty of options to bypass tough enemies or obstacles. Spiritjumps, stealth, magical gateways, and alternate pathways are all available, along with the ability to use Torrent to scale up the sides of cliffs in some places.
  • Redmane Castle in Caelid is an exceptionally difficult dungeon with a punishing Dual Boss fight at the end. However, if you've triggered the Radahn Festival to start, then the dungeon will be completely devoid of all enemies except for the two lions, since all of the soldiers are attending the festival. A sending gate out in front of the castle will even warp you directly to the end. Unfortunately, you do not get free rein of the castle in this state, since all of the doors will be closed and can't be opened, blocking you from getting any of the loot. You also can't fight the aforementioned Dual Boss since the festival is taking place in the boss arena. After defeating Radahn, you can talk to Jerren and then reload the area to put the castle back to normal, allowing you to explore it in full, get all the items, and fight the boss.
  • Volcano Manor offers assassination side quests. Complete three of them and you'll be allowed to teleport directly to the boss, skipping the dungeon entirely.
• Dwindling Party: In the early game, the Roundtable Hold is practically teeming with Tarnished and other travelers, but as they leave to progress towards their various goals, the Hold slowly dwindles until it's just Enia, Hewg, and Roderika.
• Dynamic Difficulty: Played with. While Soulsborne games have always supported multiple play styles, Elden Ring goes deep letting the player choose how difficult they want combat to be. Playing a heavy weapon melee character remains as difficult as it's ever been, requiring good reads on enemy telegraphs, proper timing for parries, and maintaining discipline to avoid queueing unwanted actions. There is no difficulty setting in the menus, but:
  • The layout of the starting classes will drastically affect the early game difficulty. The Wretch is an option for a more difficult experience, starting with fewer stats and only a club. The Bandit starts with a bow and the Astrologer and Prisoner each start with at least one ranged spell, making combat more forgiving. The Prophet and Confessor start with a heal spell for some extra padding, and the Confessor also gets a starting shield with 100% physical damage absorption for more cautious melee play.
  • One of the starting Keepsakes is a Golden Seed, meaning players who choose it can add an extra healing or Mana flask at the first Site of Grace they find.
  • Spirit Ashes can drastically reduce the difficulty of almost every boss fight in the game. They don't do much damage, but will soak damage and divert the boss's attention, giving the player a moment to replenish health, stamina, and FP or set up spells and Weapon Arts with a longer windup. Unlike summoning an NPC or another player for help, Spirit Ashes don't increase the boss's health pool. Only a handful of Superbosses like Evergaols and the Bell-Bearing Hunter bar you from using Spirit Ashes. In fact, some areas with unusually tough enemies will allow you to use Spirit Ashes, even though they don't contain a boss.
  • Torrent allows for more options in combat in areas where he's allowed. Torrent can't dodgeroll, but can run much faster than the Tarnished and has his own health pool. He makes hit-and-run tactics or even just running past a powerful enemy much more viable.

E

• Early Game Hell: In a slightly different way than the Souls games. The more expansive landscape means the gear is far more spread throughout, and as such, venturing out is encouraged. The base gear will eventually get replaced, but finding specific gear will take a while without aid. The open-world also invites far more danger to stumble on; facing a world boss who can kill in a single hit is very possible. Not only that, but opening the wrong chest can trigger a teleportation trap which dumps you into an area far beyond your level. To summarize: To prepare for bosses, is to explore the world first.
  • The classic Soulsborne issue remains. Newbies who don't understand the rhythm of combat or the danger posed by even the most basic enemies will find themselves dying a lot in the first few hours. Since death without recovering Runes will be common, they won't even be able to power level through it.
  • Which is not to mention that the classic Early Game Hell issue of every RPG is also present. Item selection will be limited in the early game, as is access to upgrades (players are limited to the forge at the Church of Elleh until they reach Roundtable Hold; it can only upgrade to +3, out of a maximum of +25). Upgrades in this game see far larger gains in stat scaling than in raw number increases... and the early game sees your stats the lowest they will ever be. In summation, the early game is when a player has the narrowest selection of only the weakest gear, with limited opportunity to improve said gear and a lack of the stats that makes those upgrades most effective.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: The two endings which can be considered bad endings, the Blessing of Despair and the Lord of Frenzied Flame, requires one to actively go out of their way to achieve them, to the point where they're practically secret endings. They're also highly telegraphed as being Bad News; getting the first requires you aid the Dung Eater, who's made it his life's work to defile everything he encounters and is quite proud of it, and the second requires you to go through a quest that involves feeding a girl human eyeballs, listening to Shabriri (who's repeatedly called the most hated man in history) while he cackles about chaos taking the world, having Melina outright beg you to knock it off, and go through with helping a force made very clear to be the Lands Between's Satanic Archetype. If you get either of these, either you haven't been reading or listening to anything, or you know exactly what you're getting into.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: This is a Spiritual Successor to Dark Souls, so you know your poor Tarnished is going to have to go through multiple different flavors of hell to fix the Elden Ring and restore the Lands Between to some semblance of order. But if you do it right, you're not just stopped at fixing what was already done; you can make it better. Using the Perfect Order and Death Prince mending runes will ensure that the Golden Order is restored without some of its obvious flaws; the former renders gods just as accountable as mortals, and the latter will integrate the Rune of Death into the order and end the persecution of Those Who Live In Death. The Age of Stars is ambiguous in how it will turn out, but Ranni just wants to allow mortals to choose their own fates, and the Tarnished gets to be Happily Married to her. If you're willing to go all the extra miles and get Miquella's Needle (which involves finishing Millicent's extremely long sidequest and then beating Malenia) you can make the endings even sweeter by sparing Melina, who would otherwise sacrifice herself to burn the Erdtree.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • Torrent's mobility allows the player to essentially pick their fights — a lot of supposed Beef Gates can be maneuvered around with careful platforming or can simply be rushed through to get to whatever they're guarding. For example, you can get the key to access Raya Lucaria by riding up to the island it's on, grabbing the key, and having Torrent leg it, rather than fighting the dragon.
  • Preceptor Miriam can be lured onto the starting elevator of her area and trapped on the bottom floor, where she seems to be unable to use her teleportation to get back up. This can even lead to her falling down the elevator shaft.
  • The Auriza Hero's Grave forces you to navigate around three chariots which deal incredibly high damage on collision, then raise an innocuous-looking pillar to cause a chariot to spawn out-of-position and cause all three chariots to collide with each other. Reaching this pillar involves dodging around these chariots and crossing very narrow beams situated over a deadly drop. However, you can avoid most of the chariot-dodging by using Mohg's or Margit's Shackle at a certain spot, which due to a developer oversight triggers the pillar you're supposed to raise even when you're nowhere near it, leading to the premature destruction of all the chariots and giving you (somewhat) risk-free rein for the rest of the level.
  • The Gelmir Hero's Grave also features instakill chariots, and the final stretch leading to the dungeon boss requires you to drop on top of a chariot and ride down the lava-filled ramp. Or you can spam Quickstep or Bloodhound Step to zip down this ramp, ducking into safe spots to avoid the chariot and healing off the lava damage.
• Eldritch Abomination: Quite a few. Much like in previous FromSoftware title Bloodborne, the Outer Gods pulling the strings of many factions in Elden Ring are Lovecraftian in scope, though their cosmic horror elements are downplayed quite a bit comparatively, and there are some non-divine entities of eldritch nature as well.
  • The Greater Will, the entity with by far the most influence over the Lands Between at the time of the game, is a being of unknown form and classification whose machinations are so grand as to be impossible to understand by the average living being. It desires to beget Life and Order in the Lands Between, and created the Erdtree to accomplish this, being the source of all individual life in the Lands Between (which draws the consternation of followers of the Frenzied Flame, who believe that in being responsible for all life, it is also responsible for all suffering). It cannot even communicate directly with the inhabitants of the Lands Between, instead speaking through interpreters which themselves require interpreters to do so. Said interpreters can apparently go tens of thousands of moon turns without communicating with the Greater Will, and consider this normal. The beings the Greater Will sends forth to violently enforce its Order, such as the Elden Beast, to kill the Tarnished, are even eldritch abominations in their own right. The game never confirms whether or not it is an Outer God, but there is some evidence it might be one or at least a similar being. (Namely, the only other being who is served by 'fingers' is one of the four beings who are explicitly called Outer Gods.)
  • The Frenzied Flame is a God of Chaos which communicates similarly to the Greater Will, through a solitary, sequestered Three Fingers which interacts directly with its most powerful adherents. It is much more Lovecraftian in nature, as it slowly drives those who use its magic to madness, and its ultimate goal within the Lands Between is to cause inescapable madness for all of its inhabitants as the land burns with its flame. And it actually pulls this off in one of the endings.
  • The Formless Mother is a mysterious being associated with blood and obsessed with creating wounds, and bleed damage (which appears to be achieved by coating a blade in blood before attacking, as if blood attracts other blood towards it) is implied to originate from her. Her associated demigod Mohg is grotesque and deformed, though how much of that is due to her influence and how much is due to him being born an Omen is left unclear.
  • Scarlet Rot is itself the manifestation of a plague-like Outer God which aims to spread across the land, corrupting all it touches and choking out all but the most resilient life, which it instead takes over and uses as pawns to spread itself further. Its lakes of rotting liquid and pustules of corruption coat Caelid.
  • Godwyn post-mortem has grown into one of these. Though his soul was killed, his body lives on where it was buried within the Deeproot Depths, growing and sprouting into the enormous and grotesque host of mold-like deathroot, a corrupting manifestation of the Rune of Death which spreads across the land similarly to Scarlet Rot, but underground. Large enough knots of the stuff even grow into the image of his melting face.
  • Malformed Stars, creatures from the heavens who descend upon the earth and nest in the deep caverns below. They are implied to be corrupted forms of a different enemy, the Fallingstar Beasts, and can thus cast incredibly powerful gravity magic. Describing their appearance is hard, but imagine a centipede with a human skull for a face, human arms for legs, a chain of celestial bodies for the trunk, and a barbed morning star-like tail. Oh, and a giant, ocean-blue eyeball sticking through the top part of its skull. You end up fighting one of these as a boss, Astel, if you continue to follow Ranni's questline into the deepest parts of Ainsel River.
• Eldritch Location: Any area influenced by one of the Outer Gods usually turns into one.
  • Caelid has been severely warped by the Scarlet Rot. Massive fungal growths resembling skulls dot the countryside, and it's the only region in the game where the Lands Between's normally realistic weather turns an eerie blood-red, implying the Rot somehow infected the sky.
  • The Lake of Rot is a giant underground pool of neon pink rot-inducing liquid, and much like Caelid, the few spots of dry land are also infested with fungal growths. Of course, that's to be expected, what with the God of Rot itself being sealed underneath the thing.
  • Liurna is a less obvious example of this. While the area looks mostly natural, nearly all of the plant life, and many people, have been affected by the presence of glintstone, which is growing in the region like a malignant tumor.
  • The underground Eternal Cities have no visible roof overhead and what appears to be a sky full of stars. Item descriptions say that the live under a false night sky.
• Elemental Tiers:
  • Lightning has a major advantage against enemies who are wet — either by standing in water or just by being outside while it's raining since it lowers Lightning resistance — and is mostly a reliable source of damage with not too many enemy types claiming high resistances. The main problematic enemies would be Ancient Dragons (who use a great deal of lightning attacks and boast high natural resistance) and rock-themed enemies like Gargoyles.
  • Magic tends to be the middle of the road and it has access to the frostbite status if you go down the “Cold” route instead of normal magic damage, giving it good versatility. Many enemies on the board aren’t particularly weak or resistant to it, making it a reliable source of damage, the notable exceptions being Rennala who has as much Magic reistance as the final boss has Holy resistance and certain magic based enemies like the Glintstone Dragons.
  • Fire is naturally weaker when used against wet opponents, which can make simple weather changes like the rain create potential problems. However, if you manage to soak an opponent with oil from a thrown Oil Pot, the next single instance of Fire damage will be increased by 50%, making some fire incantations potentially hit hard... if you can hit the opponent with both the oil and the attack, which can be difficult to do against mobile opponents. It also immediately ends the frostbite debuff of an enemy, returning its defenses to normal but also leaving it vulnerable to another round of frostbite status that will deal extra damage and lower the defenses once more. Altogether this elemental damage type is considered high risk and high reward, not stable but certainly can hit hard given the right circumstances, therefore middle of the pack.
    • The Godslayer Fire incantations deal percent damage based on the enemy’s health along with flat damage, and against certain enemies with high health they can potentially out-damage the other elements.
  • Holy is considered to be the least useful element in PvE, because after the Mountaintops of the Giants, all bosses have at least 40% Holy resistance, and two- Maliketh the Black Blade and the Final Boss- have 80%; so high, the game's wiki used to claim that Holy damage actually healed said Final Boss. Which isn't true, but it should give you an idea of how little damage that editor was likely doing to make them think that. The game's Brutal Bonus Level, the Haligtree, is also Holy-themed and teeming with Holy-resistant enemies. It's not nearly as bad in PvP (no player is going to be packing 80% Holy resistance after all) and therefore sees much more use there.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Malenia's Great Rune reduces the potency of healing flasks but gives the Tarnished a passive life drain ability after being damaged, similar to the rally mechanic from Bloodborne. However, the player can't access it until the end of the game, and Great Runes don't carry over to New Game Plus. If one doesn't want to do the bonus dungeons, then Morgott's great rune serves a similar purpose, as one can't get it before Leyndell and the only areas left are the Mountaintops of the Giants, Crumbling Farum Azula, and a Boss Rush in Leyndell, Ashen Capital.
• Embarrassing but Empowering Outfit: Some of the heaviest armor sets in the game offer fantastic protection but are really ugly. Lionel's armor set is the equivalent of the Catarina armor set from Dark Souls due to its massive pot belly, the Dung Eater's armor set looks like a turd, the Fire Prelate's armor set makes the user look incredibly obese, and the Bull-Goat set has two giant horns sticking out of the chest that your arms will clip through when two-handing a weapon.
• End of an Era: A major theme of the game is how characters in the setting deal with the end of the Age of the Erdtree and its Golden Order, as well as potential alternative solutions to the problem. The Two Fingers are, however, attempting to avert this by using the Tarnished to restore the previous Order. Which, as it turns out, is impossible in all endings, as the player Tarnished must slay the divine incarnation of the Golden Order itself to reach the Elden Ring in the first place. Even in the Age of Order ending, the only ending in which the Erdtree returns to its golden splendor, is a modified, fixed version of the Golden Order that goes beyond what the Greater Will envisioned, and in which the gods and demigods no longer rule unquestioned.
• Enemy Civil War:
  • Some enemies are programmed to aggro on to each other.
  • The entirety of the Shattering counts as this, with the various Demigod Generals and Lords vying for their mother's crown and control over the Empire, with their Legions warring against each other in massive battles. The Lands Between have been reduced to militarized territories patrolled by dwindling companies of soldiers who will still kill each other if given the opportunity, soldiers who look and fight quite similar, barring their army colours, tactics, and helmets.
  • The conflict striking Liurnia. At first it avoided the sheer nightmare war which is the Shattering by remaining neutral in the succession crisis (bar whatever soldiers from it followed a demigod out of Liurnia, like Jerren), but enormous pressure had been building up for decades between the Carian Royals and the academics of Raya Lucaria. All this finally became open warfare after Raya Lucaria deposed the Queen. The Academy had the mercenary Cuckoo army on its side as well as its own ranks, while the Carians had the Carian Knights, their own magic war machines like the puppet troops, and whatever soldiers were loyal to them (all of whom seem to be dead by the time of the game). In contrast to the mostly fizzled out Shattering, there's many locations in Liurnia which has groups of sorcerers (bolstering their numbers with summoned soldiers) duking it out with the Knights of the Cuckoo.
• Equipment Upgrade: As in the Souls games, weapon upgrade materials are scattered throughout the map in progressively higher tiers, and upgrading your weapons for additional damage is absolutely essential. Here, the upgrade materials are magical "Smithing Stones" that are expended in the process of the upgrade. They're mass-mined throughout the Lands Between, and the mines serve as one of the dungeon types. There are 25 tiers of upgrade per weapon, or 10 for unique weapons (upgraded with somber smithing stones). Flavor text notes offhandedly that the gold-tinted Smithing Stones mined near the Erdtree make stronger weapons than the plainer silver ones found in the southern regions, and that both are inferior to the white-tinted ones found in the northernmost regions. As the game follows a south-to-north progression (with the Bonus Dungeon Haligtree being the northernmost region in the game, and the starting zone of Limgrave being the second most southern) this also conveniently helps justify why all the enemies in later zones deal more damage (though only Lordsworn Soldiers and Knights actually drop the stones, all the enemies with weapons are presumably using them).
• Evil Gloating: The Exultation talimans are essentially evil gloating given a mechanical effect. They depict a Kindred of Rot and Mohg gloating about being able to spread their respective status effects (poison/rot and blood loss), and wearing them will allow you to get an attack buff whenever those status effects proc.
• Evil Pays Better: Though their purpose, base of operations, and leader are certainly malevolent, the rewards for doing the Volcano Manor questlines include some of the best and sleekest armor sets in the game and a very useful talisman.
• Exact Words: The Longtail Cat Talisman's description states it "renders the wearer immune to fall damage". This does not mean you won't die if you fall too far, because the game considers 'taking some level of fall damage' and 'falling to instant death' to be two separate things. There's a video that goes into depth, but the short of it is that before you reach a certain height threshold, the game calculates fall damage; after that, the game doesn't bother and just instantly kills you. Ever wonder why the talimsan is found on a corpse at the bottom of a pit?
• Eye Beam: The Frenzied Burst incantation lets you fire a long-range beam from your eyes that deals Fire damage, on top of inflicting Madness buildup on the target and yourself.