Summary

• Promised Consort Radahn's final boss in Elden Ring DLC feels like an anticlimax, despite challenging difficulty and visual effects.
• The final boss missed opportunities to showcase unseen lore and unique vessel for Miquella's divine ascension, instead opting for fan service.
• Miquella remains an effective antagonist, highlighting the corrupting force of divinity and the player's futile quest for power.

After slaying Messmer, winding up through an ethereal floating city, and stumbling into a breathtaking skirmish involving almost every NPC from the DLC, the final boss of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree can’t help but feel like an anticlimax. The problem has nothing to do with difficulty – Promised Consort Radahn is absolutely challenging enough. He boasts a slab of a health bar and his second phase chucks out so much magical confetti that simply glimpsing his oncoming attacks can be tricky. Ultimately, though, he’s a lesser version of a boss players have already faced.

Starscourge Radahn is an important and spectacular fight in the base game. Promised Consort seemingly seeks to one-up the original boss by upping his difficulty and visual effects, but all this bombast misses the dramatic point of Radahn’s character. Miquella’s arc throughout the DLC is intriguing and deserves to be concluded during the final boss encounter, but considering Elden Ring’s extensive lore and setting, FromSoftware could have found a more unique vessel for the bratty Empyrean’s divine ascension.

Shadow Of The Erdtree’s Resurrected Radahn Fails To Live Up To His First Fight

Style Over Substance

Starscourge Radahn is perhaps the greatest of Elden Ring’s “event” bosses; attending the Radahn Festival, cresting the slope of an ancient battlefield with fellow competitors in tow, the absurd spectacle of the demigod on his tiny horse – the first Radahn fight is a superb moment from the base game that mixes bathos with awe to evoke a world exhausted by itself. Radahn embodies the petty splendor of the Lands Between. The Greater Will has fled, leaving gods, mortals, and monsters alike to scrabble around in the ruins of a lost golden age.

Like Isshin from Sekiro, Promised Consort Radahn is an example of one of FromSoftware’s favorite twists: turning back time on a previously weakened character to restore them to their deadly former glory. In Isshin’s case, this works for two reasons: firstly, the resurrection is a natural, if absurd, escalation of Genichiro’s desperate war for Ashina; and secondly, the fight is foreshadowed by Isshin’s presence and dialogue throughout the game. On the other hand, Consort Radahn adds little meaning to the narrative and appears practically from nowhere.

Aside from an easily missed line of dialogue from Ansbach and the Secret Rite Scroll item description, there isn’t much setting up Radahn as the secret final boss of Elden Ring. The revelation that Miquella is restoring the lord’s soul into Mohg’s body is fantasy schlock, and though it retroactively gives a reason for Malenia to fight Radahn, and for Mohg to covet Miquella, it also hurts the depth of these characters by reducing them to mere extensions of another character’s will. This poor set-up makes the Consort come off as a novelty twist, cheapening Radahn and Miquella as characters.

Bigger is not always better. And of the two fights, Promised Consort’s is certainly the biggest. In the original, the demigod trots mindlessly through a wasteland, whereas Consort Radahn is incredibly tough, determined, and powerstancing with swords akimbo. The stakes are quite literally cosmic. It’s cool – but runs no deeper than that. Elden Ring’s demigods are compelling because they’re so flawed, and without Marika and the Greater Will, they’re just children squabbling over their inheritance. Rejuvenating Radahn is an act of fan service that seems to wallow in an idea of perfect divinity that the game otherwise works so hard to tarnish.

Shadow Of The Erdtree’s Final Boss Was A Missed Opportunity To Showcase Unseen Lore

Showing Off An Outer God Could Make Or Break The Setting

Elden Ring’s Outer Gods are fundamental to the setting. Described by their devout as infallible, nigh-omnipotent entities that bestow magic and guidance upon the Lands Between, they are in truth fickle Lovecraftian aliens that are as prone to cruelty, selfishness, and infighting as any mortal or demigod. The Greater Will is not truly divine; it is a parasitic, colonial entity that leeches off the natural power of Elden Ring’s world and uses it to establish, or add to, its own empire. When this experiment is disrupted by the Shattering, it lashes out at Marika and flees back into the stars.

The poignancy of Elden Ring’s setting is owed in part to the fact that the Outer Gods are absent. However, considering that the final boss of Shadow of the Erdtree is potentially the last glimpse of the IP that players will ever get, it would’ve been the ideal opportunity to break from expectations and showcase an Outer God in all its terrible glory. Such a boss would’ve emphasized the player’s power curve, and put the futility of their quest for divine power into greater perspective.

Although the Greater Will is the most important Outer God in the setting, it’s so crucial to the nature of the Elden Ring and the Lands Between that introducing it during the DLC would have totally recontextualized and overshadowed the endings of the main game. A lesser Outer God, however, might have worked. The Formless Mother is an entity that dwells underground, and from which all blood magic is derived. Since Mohg is closely associated with this being, and it’s his body that Miquella eventually puppets, there was ample opportunity for the Mother to manifest during the final fight.

Aside from Mohg, it’s implied that the Bloodfiend enemies were once people who were transformed by the Formless Mother into the lumpy, controller-rumbling vampire creatures that appear in-game, hinting at the god’s presence in the Realm of Shadow. A fight with an Outer God, or at least some semblance of one, would’ve highlighted the smallness of the player’s and the demigods’ war-making, and felt appropriately climatic as a late-game challenge. Radahn is a narrative cul-de-sac, but through the Outer Gods, FromSoftware could’ve further developed the game’s ambiguous relationship with divinity.

FromSoftware Was Right To Include Miquella In The Final Boss Fight

An Unassuming Villain

Despite the game’s weak execution of its Radahn subplot, Miquella remains an effective antagonist. Established in the base game lore as a god of comion, the saintly protector of those spurned by Grace and the tyranny of the Golden Order, the DLC relates incrementally to the player the story of Miquella’s dehumanization as they ascend into a nebulous concept of godhood. The golden crosses strewn throughout the map each mark a place where the demi-god stripped themself of an essential human trait: their worldly flesh, their heart, their doubt, and, in the end, their love.

Just as the Hornsent “ward off thoughts of […] doubt” during their cruel religious practices, Miquella must excise their humanity in their quest for divinity and dominion. The irony, of course, is that Miquella seems to view godhood as a means of bringing about a utopian Age of Comion. The wispy being that players encounter during the final boss is blind to love and empathy, and thus pitifully incapable of realizing the comionate world they once envisioned. Divinity is synonymous with power in Elden Ring. In the DLC especially, it’s a corrupting force that’s hostile to human kindness.

Miquella is a fitting villain because their folly is that of the player's, who is similarly questing to claim a divine power in the form of the Elden Ring. Like Dark Souls’ futile decision to link or sever the First Flame, Elden Ring’s endings only perpetuate the suffering of its setting. Miquella mirrors the player’s failure to enact meaningful change, and it’s this narrative richness that makes Radahn stick out like such a banal sore thumb. Shadow of the Erdtree is a fabulous expansion, but for the sake of both Miquella and the player, it demands a better final boss.