Hilarious Elden Ring Strat to Dodge Malenia's Attacks Still…

Summary

An Elden Ring player discovered a hilarious emote strategy for evading Malenia's attacks.
Fans continue to enjoy Elden Ring's rich lore, creating fan art of both characters and locations.
Discovering new gameplay tactics keeps Elden Ring engaging for players, even years after its release.

A lucky Elden Ring player inadvertently verified that a hilarious-looking strategy involving emotes to avoid attacks from Malenia, Blade of Miquella still works. As one of the toughest boss characters in Elden Ring, Malenia has terrorized the game's huge player base with her sweeping sword strikes and challenging attack patterns.

Even three years after its release, Elden Ring continues to fascinate new players, thanks to its blend of the challenging combat and gameplay from developer FromSoftware's Souls series and open-world exploration. Players old and new quickly grow to love the history of the Lands Between, Elden Ring's original setting, making fan art not just of the game's characters but of its locations. FromSoftware and publisher Bandai Namco have also not slept on keeping Elden Ring at the top of the news cycle, thanks to the release of major expansions like Shadow of the Erdtree and the upcoming multiplayer spin-off, Elden Ring Nightreign. As a result, new players are still exploring the game years after its arrival.

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Elden Ring Nightreign will surely have a gauntlet of grueling bosses, but players will probably still have help in some form against its toughest one.

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By J. Scott Thurlow

One of those new players is Reddit user wildstargazer, who discovered while playing the game for the first time that using the Elden Ring Balled Up gesture caused most of Malenia's attacks to miss completely. They demonstrated with a shared video clip, in which the player curled up with the gesture, causing every hit in Malenia's first-phase slash combo to miss. After almost a minute of fruitlessly slashing the air above the character, Malenia finally connects with a jumping downward slash, hitting them and transitioning to her grab-and-throw move.

Useful Elden Ring Gesture Cheese Continues to Help Players Fighting Malenia

Explaining how they stumbled upon the hilarious Elden Ring strategy, wildstargazer said that they were playing the game the first time with their boyfriend in co-op. In order to preserve the new game experience for wildstargazer, the boyfriend would emote to commit suicide when they died to a boss rather than finish it off themselves. During the Malenia fight, they attempted the same move, only to realize that the Balled Up gesture causes the player's hit box to shrink just below the strike zone for most of Malenia's fearsome horizontal strokes.

Amused Elden Ring players in the subreddit congratulated the pair on discovering a funny strategy, making jokes about how the Balled Up emote reflects the feelings of most players during the Malenia fight. Others pointed out that wildstargazer may be making a mistake playing Elden Ring in co-op. Since bosses have increased health when faced in multiplayer, wildstargazer's boyfriend may be making the game harder by being present during the fight. Additionally, they also mentioned that Malenia specifically can be a difficult boss to tackle with friends due to her health-restoration gimmicks.

However players choose to tackle Elden Ring's stiffest challenges, the game's sense of variety is clearly still effective despite the game being fairly well-known. One can only hope that future FromSoftware projects like Elden Ring Nightreign preserve that sense of discovery and wonder.