An Elden Ring player suffered an utterly unjustified death in a fight with Maliketh, and Black Blade left an understandable sour taste in their mouths. Elden Ring is no stranger to heartbreaking clips of tragic failures, but they’re more often the result of player greed than representative of the game’s injustice.
A FromSoftware veteran might suspect that a moment in a game like Bloodborne, Sekiro, or Elden’s Ring is downright unfair. Games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne actually coined the phrase “challenging but fair,” and the community can get very defensive, pointing out mistakes players make. To its credit, this often happens, with some Defiler unaware of certain Elden Ring mechanics, such as gear loadouts, subsequent fat rolls, or being relentlessly hunted down by bosses for refusing to confront them head-on. Sometimes, however, impassioned cries of injustice are perfectly valid responses.
A video posted by PalpitationWitty8195 on Reddit captures one of these moments, showing a fiasco at the hands of Maliketh that was in no way their fault. The two sparred near the edge of the arena, and Maliketh’s second period had arrived. Properly rolling out of Malekith’s ground-seismic sphere of influence, the Defiled quickly cast their Glintblade Phalanx Ash of War, seeing four enchanted blades hover above them. Maliketh then enters what could become Destined Death’s animation, stabbing his weapon into the ground and filling the surrounding area with countless blades.
The player seems to correctly recognize this move and roll forward to avoid it, but the hovering Glintblades collide with Maliketh and stagger him, canceling the animation and leaving him in a state where he cannot move. Understandably, assuming he’s in a relatively safe position, Tarnished is no longer trying to avoid attacks that are no longer in motion and deliver the coup de grace. But either way, Maliketh’s Destined Death storm hits out of nowhere and instantly defeats the player.
Many of the comments sarcastically suggested that this was a skill issue, or that if one avoided Maliketh’s attacks, they would take less damage, a suggestion they will no doubt cherish next time they try. Maliketh’s Destined Death is an attack notoriously difficult to perfectly avoid unless the player knows a specific strategy, namely roll towards him and run over his legs. Not doing so means the player could be caught by the attack for at least a few frames, potentially fatal when paired with the health drain inflicted by his weapon.
Elden Ring is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.