Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - A Disappointing Final Boss

After navigating through an ethereal floating city and engaging in breathtaking confrontations involving almost every NPC from the Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, the final boss doesn't quite deliver. While Promised Consort Radahn is challenging enough with a substantial health bar and a visually overwhelming second phase, the encounter ultimately fails to live up to the original Radahn fight from the base game.

The Significance of Starscourge Radahn

Starscourge Radahn is a crucial and spectacular boss in the base game. The fight takes place during the Radahn Festival, where players, along with fellow competitors, confront the demigod on his tiny horse on an ancient battlefield. This event blends bathos with awe, epitomizing the grandeur and exhaustion of the Lands Between. Radahn encapsulates the faded splendor of a world left in ruins by the departure of the Greater Will, leaving gods, mortals, and monsters scrambling for remnants of a lost golden era.

Shadow of the Erdtree’s Resurrected Radahn Falls Short

Emulating bosses like Isshin from Sekiro, Promised Consort Radahn typifies FromSoftware’s penchant for taking previously weakened characters and restoring them to their former glory. While Isshin’s resurrection naturally escalates Genichiro’s desperate war for Ashina, Promised Consort Radahn’s appearance feels less impactful and seems to lack sufficient narrative setup.

Lackluster Narrative Setup

Aside from an obscure line of dialogue from Ansbach and the Secret Rite Scroll item description, there is little to foreshadow Radahn as the final boss of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. The reveal that Miquella is restoring Radahn's soul into Mohg’s body comes across as a contrived twist. Though it retroactively justifies Malenia's battle with Radahn and Mohg's obsession with Miquella, it diminishes these characters by making them extensions of another's will. This underwhelming setup makes Consort Radahn's appearance feel like a novelty, undermining the depth of Radahn and Miquella as characters.

Style Over Substance

Although Promised Consort Radahn offers a grander spectacle with increased difficulty and visual effects, it lacks the thematic depth that made Starscourge Radahn memorable. While the original Radahn wanders a wasteland embodying the flawed nature of Elden Ring’s demigods, Consort Radahn aims for sheer grandeur without substance. Unlike the base game’s nuanced portrayal of demigods as flawed beings vying for control in the absence of the Greater Will, rejuvenating Radahn in the DLC veers towards fan service, promoting an idea of perfect divinity that the game otherwise challenges.

Missed Potential: Featuring an Outer God

Elden Ring’s Outer Gods play a fundamental role in the lore. These entities worshipped as infallible and near-omnipotent by their followers, are actually fickle, Lovecraftian beings capable of cruelty, selfishness, and internal strife. The Greater Will, for instance, is not genuinely divine but rather a parasitic entity exploiting Elden Ring’s natural power to expand its empire. Following the disruption caused by the Shattering, this entity retreats in anger and abandons Marika.

The poignancy of Elden Ring’s setting partly arises from the absence of the Outer Gods. However, given that the final boss of Shadow of the Erdtree might be the last significant encounter in the IP, this DLC could have been an ideal opportunity to break from tradition and present an Outer God in all its terrifying glory. Such a boss would not only amplify the challenge but also provide a greater perspective on the futility of the player's quest for divine power.

A Lesser Outer God as the Final Boss

While the Greater Will is central to Elden Ring’s lore, introducing it in the DLC could have overshadowed the endings of the main game. However, featuring a lesser Outer God might have worked seamlessly. For instance, the Formless Mother, an entity that dwells underground and from which all blood magic originates, closely associates with Mohg. Given that Miquella eventually puppets Mohg’s body, there was ample opportunity for the Formless Mother to manifest during the final fight.

Implications in the game suggest that the Bloodfiend enemies were once humans transformed by the Formless Mother into vampiric creatures, hinting at her presence in the Realm of Shadow. A confrontation with an Outer God or its influence would have highlighted the insignificance of the player’s and the demigods’ struggles, creating a more climactic late-game challenge. Unfortunately, Radahn’s inclusion serves as a narrative dead-end. Meanwhile, exploring the Outer Gods could have richly developed the game’s ambiguous relationship with divinity.

Inclusion of Miquella in the Final Fight

Despite the weak execution of the Radahn subplot, Miquella remains an effective antagonist. In the base game’s lore, Miquella is portrayed as a god of compassion and protector of those shunned by Grace and the Golden Order’s tyranny. The DLC reveals Miquella’s gradual dehumanization as they ascend into a nebulous concept of godhood. Golden crosses scattered throughout Elden Ring’s world mark places where Miquella stripped themselves of essential human traits: flesh, heart, doubt, and eventually, love.

Ironically, Miquella envisions godhood as a means to bring about a utopian Age of Compassion. Yet, in the final confrontation, the player encounters a being blind to love and empathy, pitifully incapable of realizing the compassionate world they once dreamed of. Divinity, in Elden Ring especially, is synonymous with power and is a corrupting force hostile to human kindness.

Miquella stands as a fitting villain because their folly mirrors the player’s pursuit of divine power in the form of the Elden Ring. Like the futile choices in Dark Souls to link or sever the First Flame, Elden Ring’s conclusions perpetuate the setting’s suffering. Miquella embodies the player’s failure to effect meaningful change, and this narrative richness highlights the inadequacy of Radahn as a banal final boss.

Conclusion: A Need for a More Fitting Finale

Although Shadow of the Erdtree impressively expands Elden Ring’s world, its final boss, Promised Consort Radahn, misses the opportunity to explore unseen lore and deliver a fitting climax. Both Miquella and the player deserved an encounter with a more compelling and thematically rich opponent that would reinforce the intricate narrative and lore of Elden Ring.