No way was too far to finally arrive at the ultimate challenge after an arduous climb over the huge roots of the Halig tree.
The awe of veteran video gamers predicted an oversized beast - at least a twelve-headed dragon or a fire giant, shaking the earth underfoot and controller in hand.
Wrong thought.
The red-haired Valkyrie is barely two meters tall and is considered the heaviest of all heavy opponents in “Elden Ring”, she can spit big sounds.
"I am Malenia, the blade of Miquella.
And I've never experienced defeat."
Patrick Schlereth
Editor on duty at FAZ.NET.
Follow I follow
She inflicts all the more defeats on those who dare to stand in her way.
She casually uses her nastiest trick: Each of her devastating hits gives her back a good chunk of her life energy.
Whoever sends them onto the boards with their last ounce of strength only makes them really mad.
The Valkyrie becomes the goddess of rot, growing angelic wings and infecting her pitiable foe with a very nasty form of scarlet rot.
Why all the effort at all?
Even now, at this moment, hundreds of video gamers in Germany are probably stuck in the fight against Malenia.
In online forums, people outdo each other with times, how many attempts were necessary, dozens of hours of play are not uncommon.
The lady is said to be particularly sensitive to bleeding damage, one reads in the community, but your own hit-and-run character is not geared towards that.
So he travels across the country to Raya Lucaria's academy to redistribute his character attributes to the Queen of the Full Moon and sacrifice a precious larva tear for it - less strength, more skill: if it doesn't work with the sledgehammer, then maybe with the katana.
But why all the effort at all?
Why not just saddle the horse and move on?
Malenia doesn't stop travelers, the main story of "Elden Ring" takes place somewhere else - and is difficult enough to tie the player to the screen for more than 100 hours even without the optional boss fight against the Valkyrie.
The developers deliberately did without a pause function, as well as a selectable level of difficulty.
Anyone who plays should take the game seriously, internalize their rules and perfect their own fighting style. Above all, they should: suffer, suffer and suffer again.
Two weeks after its release at the end of February, "Elden Ring" has already sold twelve million copies around the world, surpassing many a blockbuster title.
For comparison: The predecessor in spirit, "Dark Souls 3", needed four years for ten million sales.
With "Elden Ring" the development studio From Software has managed to create an absolute mega hit - and with a game that seems more than bulky at first glance.
Pretty much everything is demanded of even experienced gamblers, also because the game doesn't bother to explain anything.
In Germany, almost half of the population gambles
The games industry has recently trimmed its customers more and more to the fact that video games are primarily there to relax.
In the numerous offshoots of "Assassin's Creed" you only hold down two buttons to propel the main character to parkour feats above the rooftops of historic cities.
In "Spider Man" you swing from skyscraper to skyscraper through Manhattan, which looks really cool, but demands little from the player.
And in Far Cry, when the firefights get too chaotic, you just turn on auto aim assist.
Die-hard video gamers have been whining for years that gaming has become too easy, but they're clearly outnumbered by casual gamers.
In Germany, almost half of the population now gambles, with smartphone games, i.e. “casual gaming” par excellence, accounting for the largest market share.
The fact that gambling has finally arrived in the mainstream is not yet reflected in the social discussion, but in the production logic of the industry: new titles are increasingly being thrown onto the market in a half-finished state ("Cyberpunk 2077" or "Dying Light 2" ), confuse the sheer size of the game world with complexity (like “Dying Light 2” or “Assassin's Creed Valhalla”) or don't dare