Elden Ring - Leonine Misbegotten - Review

Leonine Misbegotten is the one of few bosses I had to keep coming back to but only due to the technical issues I was having with the controller inputs. Whenever I needed to dodge or run, my character would just stand there and I had stamina but nothing would happen. Now I've had this occur in other boss fights however due to the aggressiveness of this fight it occurred more often. I tried many different methods to bypass the error but in the end I had to cross my fingers and hope for the best. I did however find a few tiny manipulation tactics to reduce the amount of malfunctions.

I just want to say that this is the prettiest arena I've seen so far. It reminds me of Bloodborne but on the beach without Orphan of KOS and a tombstone sprinkle of Father Gascoigne and Shadow of Yharnam. The music is whatever again. The boss model reminds me of the Chimera from God of War 3 and the move set is very similar to Slave Knight Gael and Artorias. One small thing that I thought was weird, whenever you get killed the boss runs straight to the fog gate. I tried exploring this a little bit but found nothing so perhaps it's just a positioning overlook from the developers.

There are a lot of openings considering the speed of my weapon with only a few attacks being red zones. My favorite attack to respond at was a double dash sweeping attack which was very satisfying to evade through. One attack in particular that was a huge tease consisted of the boss jumping straight up and slamming down, this was a red zone due to the quick recovery time and usually follows up with the same attack which catches you in the blast wave. I did get caught a few times in the roar attack but considering the button malfunction I let it slide because I needed to move on. Another issue I had was an idling issue that isn't uncommon in the From Software games where a boss will just do nothing for uncomfortably long moments. This is especially jarring when you're in the heat of battle ready for another attack yet nothing happens unless you wait or get close to the boss. I will touch on idling more with Margit, the Fell Omen.

Well I may have disliked this boss in the beginning but I came out loving it after finding what i-frames worked which is what commonly happens to me. I wish I didn't experience the malfunctions that are still present in the fight because it did discourage me some especially that it was beyond my control.