Elden Ring Nightreign’s Most Hyped Feature Is Also Its Weakest

Summary

Elden Ring Nightreign’s returning Dark Souls bosses are mostly a letdown.
Returning Dark Souls bosses like Nameless King and Dancer work well, providing a nostalgic experience, but the other four are lackluster.
If a Dark Souls 1 or Dark Souls 2 boss appears, players are more likely to be more annoyed than they are excited because of their dated mechanics, especially on repeat runs when the nostalgia wears off.

In many ways, Elden Ring Nightreign is a bit of an homage to FromSoftware’s past, reviving and recontextualizing some features that have been missing from its games for some time. Its daring combination of Roguelike and Soulslike genres is a pretty rare experiment, but one that has paid off, making for an incredibly memorable game that doesn’t sit in Elden Ring’s shadow, but compliments it.

These reintroduced features were central to Elden Ring Nightreign’s marketing too, with certain Nightfarer’s shown to be taking inspiration or wholly reusing animations from prior titles, such as Executor’s deflection. But one of the most hyped, headline-grabbing features was the direct porting of Dark Souls content to the game, a first for FromSoftware, as the company has sought to keep its IPs separate from one another. Unfortunately, while the skins may be a welcome sight, the same can’t be said for all the bosses, and as the hype dies down, it’s clear to see that something isn’t working.

All Equilibrious Beast Deals Explained - Elden Ring Nightreign

Elden Ring Nightreign: All Equilibrious Beast Deals, Explained

Libra is a generous beast that offers some interesting deals before starting the fight.

Nightreign’s Returning Dark Souls Bosses Are Its Weakest Feature

It’s really disappointing to say this, but Nightreign’s returning Dark Souls bosses just aren’t great. When the Nameless King swooped down in the first gameplay trailer, it got almost everyone excited, and for the most part, rightly so. FromSoftware rarely takes an opportunity to look backwards, often setting up its future projects with small hints in its current releases. So to see not just a Dark Souls reference, but an explicitly included enemy, felt like being acknowledged as a long-standing fan.

Dark Souls 3’s Returning Bosses Are, Unsurprisingly, the Best

And in the case of the Nameless King in Nightreign, it worked. His fight transfers pretty seamlessly to Nightreign, as does the Dancer of the Boreal Valley. While they are a little bit slow by Elden Ring standards, their mechanics and movesets work well enough; they are able to react dynamically to the Nightfarers attacking them from any angle, and the extra attention given to making some of their moves hit more players is an excellent touch. While they aren’t on the same level as other bosses in complexity terms, perhaps that’s a good thing, and Dark Souls 3’s returning bosses are a fun, nostalgic inclusion.

The Older Souls Bosses Just Don’t Work

The same, however, cannot be said for the rest. Even the Smelter Demon, whose fight aligns better with Elden Ring than Freja, for example, is far too simple. The new moves they received are welcome, but not enough to fix what doesn’t work at its core. The problem is that these are bosses built for a different time, with different design philosophies underpinning them. They’re too slow, and seemingly unreactive. Gaping Dragon is more of a walking obstacle than a boss, its lumbering charges and strange leaps into the air characteristic of a time when Souls games were slow, uncertain things, completely unfit for Elden Ring’s pacing. Centipede Demon has the same problem, too often just standing still or leaping high, to the point where it seems to exist as a damage sponge and not much else.

The choice of which bosses made a return was very peculiar, too. Instead of fan-favorites like Ornstein and Smough, FromSoftware brought arguably some of the worst, least suitable foes back from Dark Souls 1, and Dark Souls 2 didn’t fare much better. Seeing them the first time around is pretty cool, but the fight falls apart the moment it starts, and getting a Dark Souls boss can, four out of six times, make for a worse experience than just another Elden Ring boss. It’s still a nice touch, and being able to cut off the tail of the Gaping Dragon for rewards is a fun reference, but most of the game’s Dark Souls bosses were better behind the glass than they are in the hand.