Elden Ring Nightreign finally let me get revenge against two bosses that nearly ruined my original Elden Ring playthrough, and victory has never felt sweeter

When I think back to Elden Ring, there were plenty of standout bosses, but plenty more that faded into the background – just another conquest on my way to becoming the Elden Lord. But two in particular were such thorns in my side that I can still picture them clearly, the frustration I felt as I tried over and over to defeat them once again rising like bile in my throat. In the end, I gave up on both of them – until Elden Ring Nightreign offered me a chance at revenge.

The first time my friends and I defeated Tricephalos, we returned to the Roundtable to find a warning that the world around Limveld had shifted. Instead of the portion of the map we were familiar with, a fiery crater offered new places to explore and new bosses to defeat. The run was a resounding success, not only because we were able to defeat Gaping Jaw on our very first attempt, but because it brought me back into the orbit of not just one, but both of the bosses that had caused me such pain in my Elden Ring playthrough.

Stolen Valor

The first of those was the Valiant Gargoyle fight. Having made my way right to the end of the eternal city of Nokron, I was keen not to have to retrace my steps. Until now, I'd made my way through The Lands Between without many significant holdups. There are plenty of fights, both story-critical and optional, in the early hours of the game that are intended as substantial roadblocks, but even the worst of those were comfortably conquered within a dozen attempts. As I faced down the Gargoyle for the first time, I assumed that this would be no different.

Clearly, I was wrong. Perhaps a single Gargoyle wouldn't have been too great a foe, but the unceasing onslaught that started after the second one arrived meant I never got close to finishing the fight. I stuck with this entirely optional fight for far too long – I told you I didn't want to come back to Nokron until I was done – but eventually I gave in and headed back to a more gentle difficulty curve.

Much later, I had fought my way through Caelid and Liurnia, and was closing in on Volcano Manor. Stepping onto the Spirit Spring I hoped would bring me to the top of Mt Gelmir and open up my path to the manor, I was greeted instead by a crater occupied by a Full-Grown Fallingstar Beast. Landing in what was immediately one of the most atmospheric moments of my entire playthrough so far, I immediately took the fight to the boss, not realizing that this was another optional encounter, and that the path I was looking for led away to my right, allowing me to completely skip past my crater-dwelling foe.

This time, I actually did come close, but for whatever reason I could never quite cinch the fight. I put the blame primarily on my Dexterity-focused build and my Pierce weapon that was blunted against the beast's solid hide, but my personal stubbornness was also a factor. Eventually, having failed several dozen times, I took the advice of a friend and skipped the fight. Ironically, the actual story boss dwelling in the manor gave me nothing like the trouble that his alien guard dog had – Rykard went down on my second attempt.

The fact that I never actually beat these two bosses still hurts to this day, but I was too traumatized to return to them after I was done with Elden Ring. So it was deeply satisfying to come across a Valiant Gargoyle in Elden Ring Nightreign's burning crater. The tables had turned, and this time it was me pulling up on the right side of an unfair fight, two friends at my side while the second gargoyle was nowhere to be found. My trio clobbered him into a fine mist within minutes, before sprinting deeper into the crater to find more bosses to defeat.

Beast Mode

Imagine my surprise, then, when the very next boss we came across was a Full-Grown Fallingstar Beast. This time, their crater was a little larger, but once again they failed to stand up against the combined onslaught of three different fighters - as it happens, the blunt force trauma inflicted by my friend's dual hammer Raider build was a little more effective than my Mimic Tear's pitiful jabs. Out of nowhere, I'd defeated both of the bosses that had stopped my otherwise successful Elden Ring runthrough in its tracks, flipping the script on the duo that had threatened to derail my entire experience in The Lands Between.

As we rushed on from the Sites of Grace that appeared where my foes had fallen – in what would prove to be a Night Lord-felling run – I couldn't help but feel a deep wave of satisfaction. Obviously, felling two Nightreign field bosses with a pair of allies by my side was not the same kind of achievement that beating them unaided in Elden Ring would have been.

But however desperate I'd been to beat them before, I'd failed to do it, and now I'd not only contributed to their defeat, but dispatched both of them, easily, within moments of each other. A weird coincidence of Nightreign's enemy placement had aligned to give me a more personally-satisfying pair of kills than almost any I've found anywhere else in the game, and had finally laid my biggest Elden Ring regret to rest.

Elden Ring Nightreign duos mode should have been the perfect update, but it's lacking both the challenge and the chaos that make the base game so good.