Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree’s bosses are so good that players want to fight them again, and I completely get it.
I didn’t know who would stump players when I was playing the DLC for review, I could only make predictions based on my own experiences. Rellana and Messmer were pushovers, but then the expansion launched and everyone ran into a wall when fighting them. I’d love to go back and face both of them again with a different build and try something that requires more thought than bashing them with a stick so I can feel that same insurmountable challenge that so many of you did.
The only way to do that right now is to either help another player as a summon or start over again in New Game Plus or with a new save file, which means fighting my way to Elden Ring’s endgame so that I can access the DLC again. That’s a huge commitment just for a rematch.
What’s really annoying is that Dark Souls 2 solved this problem ten years ago. It added a brand-new item, the Bonfire Aesthetic, which you can burn at a—you guessed it—bonfire! Doing so increases that area’s New Game Plus ranking by one, which means that bosses respawn and the item pool resets, but everything’s a smidge more difficult. Once you enter New Game Plus for real, those individual areas go up again, forever keeping them more difficult than the rest of the game.
Dark Souls 2 asks you to defeat four lords to gain enough power to enter Drangleic Castle, but with Bonfire Aesthetics, you can just beat the same lord four times to get the same results.
It’s a fun trade-off that means you can access New Game Plus exclusive items on your first playthrough, farm huge numbers of souls for more levels (granted you have the skill), and replay your favourite areas without having to go through the entire game again. For whatever reason, FromSoftware abandoned the concept in all future Soulsborne games.
Elden Ring is full of Soulsborne item equivalents, from its not-Estus Flask to its not-Prism Stones to its not-Homeward Bones, so it wouldn’t be out of place. You could kindle them at a Site of Grace and increase that region’s difficulty, or it could be limited to a boss arena’s Site of Grace, reloading only that enemy. Given that Elden Ring is open world, that might be the cleaner route.
Fans have suggested implementing something like the Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice boss rush mode or even PvE rematches in the colosseum, but Bonfire Aesthetics were a more organically interwoven part of the game world. It allowed you to directly influence your surroundings and up the ante at your discretion, which came with huge rewards but major consequences you’d have to grapple with further down the line. It gave more agency to players, and given how much Elden Ring pulls from Dark Souls 2 all these years later, it’s a shame that it left behind such a novel idea that completely reinvigorated the New Game Plus system.
