Highlights
- Crystalian bosses in Elden Ring stand out due to their unique gimmick, offering a challenging and intimidating first encounter with seemingly insurmountable foes.
- The player must utilize Elden Ring's Stance Break mechanic to defeat Crystalians, as their defenses are initially high, resulting in chip damage from weapons.
- Later encounters with Crystalians introduce new challenges, such as managing multiple bosses and the addition of Lesser Crystalians, but the gimmick may overstay its welcome for some players.
With 165 boss encounters in Elden Ring, it takes a special type of enemy to stand out among such a robust crowd. However, the Crystalian bosses that can be found as early as Liurnia of the Lakes quickly make their mark as their unique gimmick empowers and intimidating first encounter with a seemingly insurmountable foe.
The FromSoftware boss roster isn't completely devoid of gimmick bosses, with at least one appearing in nearly every one of their Soulsborne titles, from Demon's Souls to Elden Ring. In the case of the Crystalian variants of bosses, though, these enemies manage to tick off the "gimmick" box while still managing to offer a meaningful fight before and after the specific way to take them down has been discovered.
Crystalians Show the Importance of Elden Ring's Stance Breaks
Challenging the Crystalians and passing through their gimmick requires the player to make the most out of Elden Ring's Stance Break mechanic that staggers enemies and bosses and opens them up for a riposte. For the Crystalian this is the only way to do any kind of consistent damage with most weapon types, at least at the start of the fight. This is because when players first fight the Crystalian, the boss' defenses are so high, that even maxed-level weapons will only manage to do chip damage, regardless of which version of the encounter is being faced off against.
Once the player breaks the Crystalian's stance, however, it not only opens the enemy up for a riposte, but it also cracks its crystal skin and attacks will suddenly start doing standard damage. In fact, once the Crystalian has been cracked, the damage from some of Elden Ring's stronger weapons becomes so significant as to recontextualize this "boss" creature down to being little more than a standard enemy. The result is a fight that seems nearly impossible at first, since no amount of swapping weapons or resetting builds can cause any real damage at first, before becoming shockingly simple as the encounter goes on.
Later Encounters Reset the Gimmick by Adding Additional Challenges
As is often the case with the wide variety of used and reused bosses in Elden Ring, FromSoftware didn't see it as enough to simply put the players up against one Crystalian boss, instead reiterating the fight multiple times. This elevates the single Crystalian into two sets of Crystalian Duo fights, along with an incredibly difficult Crystalian Trio encounter using variants infected with scarlet rot. All of these push the initial gimmick by including the need to manage more than one Crystalian at a time, while still managing to keep up enough pressure to break the guard of one before it can be killed.
The addition of Lesser Crystalians in later sections of the game also offers unique area encounters, as these enemies are difficult to run away from with their boss-level frequency of attacks and heavy aggro. However, by that time, the unique gimmick has unfortunately run its course and begins to overstay its welcome. That being said, a variant found in the Haligtree does manage to utilize Elden Ring's Spirit-Caller Snail boss as another lesser enemy to descent effect to make this area difficult to simply sprint through.
Considering that the entire start of what fans refer to as the Soulsborne series started with a handful of gimmick bosses in Demon's Souls, this type of encounter is clearly welcome in the FromSoftware boss design philosophy. So, on an initial playthrough of Elden Ring, the first time a player runs into a Crystalian is a novel encounter. The only issue that players might now have with the Crystalian is overuse, as any gimmick can easily outstay its welcome when repeated too often without too much change between iterations.
Elden Ring is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.