Elden Ring's Dragons Are Spectacular To Look At, But Unengaging To Fight
Agheel, the first dragon boss, is a tough and memorable fight for the early game, but he can be dispatched easily enough once the player learns to stay on Torrent and make use of hit-and-run tactics to focus on the dragon’s ankles. As a one-off, the boss would make for a spectacular, if fairly mindless, encounter. Unfortunately, Agheel has rather an extended family, and they all seem to have been copying his moves.
From Smarag in Liurnia to Caelid’s foul-breathed Ekzykes, every dragon boss outside a legacy dungeon in Elden Ring has an almost identical moveset. Some have a couple of unique AoEs, or might chuck in an extra swipe here and there, but generally speaking, the same simplistic tactics that worked for Agheel also work for the rest of his kin. All their attacks, except for the tail flick, charged AoEs, and any aerial bombardments, can be circumvented by running behind the Dragons and smacking their legs.
Shadow Of The Erdtree’s Ghostflame Dragons Are Tougher In All The Wrong Ways
Shadow Of The Erdtree’s Ghostflame Dragons are naturally tougher than their cousins in the Lands Between, but their ballooning health bars and damage outputs only exacerbate the predictability of their movesets. The bosses become mind-numbing tests of endurance in which a single misstep can result in death. The DLC has faced a lot of criticism for its difficulty, much of which is unfair, but when a boss is both high-stakes and boring, it becomes the worst of chores. Their new Ghostflame attacks may be a novelty at first, but they're not different enough from their base-game counterparts to really stand out in Shadow of the Erdtree.
Shadow Of The Erdtree’s open-world is more dynamic than the Lands Between, and that extends to the environments in which the player encounters its dragons. Two of the four bosses are already tussling with soldiers or other dragons when the player stumbles across them, adding a well-needed element of unpredictability to their fights. The mobs are welcome, but ultimately they fail to make the dragons themselves actually fun to fight – the additional combatants are just something else to whack at on the way to the next ankle.
The Strain Of A Repeated Boss Type
If any developer knows how to design a good dragon boss, it’s FromSoftware. Midir from Dark Souls 3, Divine Dragon from Sekiro, and Elden Ring’s Dragonlord Placidusax are all incredible and varied fights. Even Shadow of the Erdtree excels with its own Bayle the Dread. The problem here isn’t really to do with dragons – it’s to do with the strain that a repeated boss type can put on a bad moveset. If FromSoftware wants to make another open-world game in the vein of Elden Ring, it ought first to learn from the failure of these bosses.
The real problem is that the dragon Boss Fights in Elden Ring are just too repetitive. They all have the same basic moveset, which means that the player can use the same tactics to defeat them. This makes the fights very predictable and boring.
