Elden Ring DLC: Radahn, Consort of Miquella + Ending

This fight is garbage. It's harder than Malenia for all the wrong reasons. At least Malenia, other than Waterfowl (which isn't even that bad), was a fair and fun fight to learn.

What sucks is that this fight could be one of the best fights in Elden Ring, and yet because of a few issues that are, I would say, easily fixable, it's one of the worst. Even one detrimental issue can bring down an entire boss, that's why Commander Gaius is such a terrible fight despite me thinking everything aside from his barely dodgable charge attack is fine.

Miquella's goldilocks ass hair in Phase 2 covering almost every angle of the boss is terrible for starters. You just can't see. Combine that with the holy AoE aftershocks on every single melee attack, and you get an overstimulating, overtuned mess. Combine that with the undodgable triple slash, if you play with a medium roll (light load is also impossible) build without parrying or any other method, you will always get hit by at least one of the attacks in that combo, and therefore in Phase 2 chances are you get pinballed into the holy AoE explosion and need I even say how many runs of mine ended to pure bad luck like this when I previously had a good rhythm going.

Improve visibility and fix that one attack, and this boss is already a lot better.

The ending is also kinda lame to me. Radahn coming back is cool and all and I guess it makes sense why buuut yeah idk how I feel, there's not really any conclusion to anything they built up. Unless they make another DLC (they won't) this is a disappointing way to end off Elden Ring

The DLC overall was good. Bayle was the peak of it. Some bosses were amazing, others were not at all unfortunately. Overworld exploration was good but sometimes really empty, areas all looked really nice, but I felt the navigation was unintuitive. The verticality of the entire map meant that looking at it barely helps for getting to some areas, as there are a lot of points where you have to go through a cave or dungeon to get somewhere (ahem Rauh Map Fragment). Scadutree fragments seem like a good leveling system but their locations are so unintuitive that I used a guide. They are not like prayer beads from Sekiro where most of their locations are in places you'd expect. I used a guide. And to put into perspective how necessary they were for me on NG+4, I fought Radahn with 20 blessings, the max. Could not have done it without a guide (there's one fragment that I got last that is literally an out of bounds parkour route like wtf).

So yeah good DLC but not as good as I was expecting. I still took around 60+ hours to finish it all which shows the sheer scale of it but I can't say it lived up to the hype to the fullest extent.