Returned to this for the first time since launch. I was going to anyway, but a change of platforms necessitated starting from scratch to reach the DLC... and unfortunately I'm not the kind of player who enjoys or is built for taking games like this selectively, so an all-encompassing playthrough was what it would be; it's why this game is not one for my replay books thanks to its bloated scale, unlike most of its predecessors. Approaching the DLC with that baseline mentality, it lasted over 60 hours for me, so at this point I'm extremely glad murmurs from within From have signaled that Elden Ring is as far as they will or can push the scale of their projects. Here's hoping.
Aside from those logistics, I very much enjoyed this DLC and think it far outstrips whatever the base game has to offer; if there was a way to have a ready-made character base enter the DLC at will, then going forward it would be all I wanted Elden Ring to be on revisits. All the monotonous drudgery of the main game in its environmental and encounter design is, if not altogether nullified, then severely reduced through much more topographically and, crucially in my mind, more thematically interesting world design than the rigid expanses and border transitions of Yellow Zone, Blue Zone, Red Zone or White Zone in the main game could ever illustrate. Verticality has a purpose and a presence in a macro-sense for charting the space allotted, and junction points can exist as seemingly nondescript little nooks instead of grand passages. The way the spread-out-too-thin nature of the main game necessitated, as open world works nearly always do, pulling from a template of repeating Activity Spots that became rote for that fact is not really a concern here because the more literally layered, denser map design sensibility in play only rarely demands simply filling out space, lending the vast majority of the experience a bespoke quality. The aforementioned biome theming of the base game also did most of the heavy lifting for the visuality of those extremely large spaces and left a blended-together impression in its wake; for essentially treating the entirety of the map in the DLC as a single contiguous space with less defined borders, the aesthetic for each segment of it has to be more detail-oriented in its expression, and effectively more striking as a result, leading to more engaging exploration in the moment and more invested recollections after the fact. For qualitative, descriptive analogies, you could put it: Shadow of the Erdtree is to Elden Ring as King's Field II is to King's Field III--for those unfamiliar, that is the utmost praise.
As far as weaponry, I used Reduvia exclusively through the base game, and felt the experience was extremely simplified in execution because of it; a bleed-infused projectile that can be launched repeatedly for very little FP made spacing much less of a concern, and allows for circumventing many of the execution-heavy combo strings enemies and bosses might throw your way; it's what I ended up doing all the way up to the DLC's final boss, which at first felt ridiculous but then turned out just fine after figuring out that for just this one fight, summoning NPCs and thus inflating the boss's health pool was a detriment rather than an advantage.
The way to play and contend with From's increasingly overdone boss design sense in their most gigantic game to date was to reduce the demands of my own execution as much as possible; I will do punch runs or whatever else in shorter games, but not here. Reduvia was one way, and new favourites from the DLC had other spins on it: the perfume bottle weapon class was instantly appealing thanks to its flashy style alone (stuck with the fire variety for pure DEX-scaling; technically poison would've been ideal for the arcane build but poison as a status effect in this game never feels worth it) but its uniquely lingering hitboxes interact with the combat engine in a novel way that can really trivialize things if used properly; the same goes for the Rolling Sparks skill that again allows one to stay out of harm's way while exploding everything in front of them for high damage. The other weapon I adored was the Dancing Blade of Ranah, which I pulled out any time I just wanted to hold L2 to see health bars melt; if there's a large target that's not employing constant pressure, dancing them to death is often the quickest way to do it. It didn't hurt that as someone who has no interest in the armour side of the attire selection in these games, the associated set was just the kind of battlefield dress I was looking for, and wore to the end. These were the tools that allowed me to essentially skip most bosses for how strong they are in the relative power curve; I don't know what Messmer can even do except die. Elden Ring isn't my ideal for how I like these games to be designed on the combat end of them, but the one boon of its ludicrous scale is that by the end of it you can be just as if not more overpowered as the opposition is.
