Elden Ring’s director’s favorite boss is also the most hated by player

Much of the identity of FromSoftware games is their bosses. From Demon’s Souls onward, the boom of their games is always linked to the faces that try to stop our progress. Hidetaka Miyazaki, main creative of the series, is clear about which boss is his favorite in Elden Ring: and its exactly the one that players hate the most.

Hidetaka Miyazaki chooses his favorite Elden Ring boss and explains the reasons

Miyazaki’s favorite boss is Starscourge Radahn. The creative didn’t choose it because of how memorable the encounter is on an audiovisual level, but because of everything behind the character until the confrontation. He refers to the entire section of the Radahn Festival, a moment of communion with some of the side NPCs that have the most weight throughout the adventure.

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“As an individual character he is quite attractive, and I really like the situation at the Radahn Festival. There is a feeling of festivity and exuberance, but also a unique nuance of loneliness and sadness,” he said in an interview granted to Xbox Wire Japan shortly after the game was published.

Miyazaki is right: everything that surrounds the boss conveys sadness and loneliness. His appearance in Elden Ring, already maddened by everything he has experienced during the war in the Lands Between, seems to draw a character who wishes that someone would end his life.

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The details make the difference. Under his immense figure, Leonard is found, the mount that has accompanied him throughout his life. Even in moments where madness engulfs him, the horse remains faithful to his master. In practice, Leonard’s presence serves as a trick for the developers.The horse is placed under the player’s position in the moments before Radahn falls as a meteorite. In this way the developers move the boss to where it has to fall.

Its spectacular packaging somewhat hides the problems that players have with this encounter. Radahn is quite hated because of how different it is at a gameplay level compared to the rest of the huge bosses we can find. Part of this comes because it begins as a kind of meta-boss, that is, associated with a mechanic to defeat it. In this case they are the summons of the Festival’s allies, who walk along the beach towards it from the moment we summon them. On the other hand, some combinations of attacks that can cause instakill are also annoying. Over the months it has received many patches that have tweaked the experience, but it is still far from perfect.