The StunLock

Melania is an example of intentional, malicious design within video games that FromSoftware has previously never stepped into on purpose: Anti-interaction mechanics shake hands with both unintuitive animations and a two-phase, poorly balanced heal fest that punishes players for not cheesing what is obviously a boss designed for players to fight using tools they generally do not have access to.

With the design of The Blade of Miquella, it becomes apparent to anyone half-paying attention that the boss was intended to be a parry against the supposed FromSoft player who relishes in criticizing the Soulsborne series for being too easy.

Ultimately, Melania is designed to punish players for fighting her while simultaneously representing what is arguably the most obnoxiously incorrect aspect of FromSoftware’s reputation: that players play their games because they are “hard”.

To be specific about each of those points;

Anti-Interaction Mechanics

Waterfowl Dance single-handedly takes what is an otherwise decent duelist fight and destroys it with a threat to anyone who intends to trade with Melania. The move can be easily dodged provided the player has created enough distance to run from the first half of Waterfowl’s engagement. The second half can be dodged with good timing and decent positioning.

This effectively means that once Melania is within Waterfowl range, the player is forced into playing slow, safe, and at a distance in between trades that begets a Boss fight that is thrice as long as it needs to be. Or, in other words, the player is tasked with not interacting with the boss at all.

Of course, this problem can be sidestepped by googling methods to cheese the Boss, which is another way of saying that the player can simply refuse to interact with Melania in an entirely different way.

Waterfowl dance deserves to be talked about more all on its own, but for now, let’s summarize this section by pointing out that Melania consistently punishes players for interacting with her in a consistent fray of engagement, whether through one-tap, unavoidable abilities like Waterfowl, or through her healing mechanics which punish players for playing defensively (with a shield), even when not taking damage.

Unintuitive Animations

The nature of a well-designed boss fight in FromSoft games is often elusive. Finding the ingredients that make a player enjoy their time with a boss and laying them out as a well-defined equation is next to impossible, but the overall theme associated with such an encounter includes the following:

• Punishable attacks
• A setting that enhances the fight instead of hindering it
• An excellent soundtrack
• Pleasing visuals
• An Intuitive and Understandable Moveset

That last point, an intuitive and understandable moveset, is particularly important for understanding Melania’s failure as a boss. Melania’s moveset is not a moveset that can be understood in the first attempt to contest her.

In general, her moveset tries players’ patience for a number of hours before they google solutions on how to counter it. Waterfowl Dance, in particular, represents the worst of FromSoftware’s boss design:

Worth noting that after the evasion shown above, Melania decided, seemingly randomly, to not get staggered by a Zweihander two-handed R2 jump attack. Whether or not she’ll react this way seems to be completely inconsistent.

At a glance, the move appears to be one of positional import. A wise player of skill who dies to this move will immediately think that they need to test Waterfowl Dance with different positions and iFrames.

What this player will come to find rather quickly is that Waterfowl Dance is designed to hyper-track the player’s position to an exact degree on the first, most distance-covering portion of the move. This means that so long as you position yourself near the boss, you will be punished by being chunked for your HP or killed, while Melania heals herself significantly. The only way to counter this while close to the boss is either by making use of specific ashes of war to cheese Melania or by rolling the dice on her AI by running in circles around her in hopes she tracks just behind the player at close range, allowing for an escape from the first portion of the move.

It’s important to note that even for the best of Elden Ring players, that latter solution is generally considered inconsistent and too dangerous to employ during runs you’d rather just secure using another method.

So, for players who aren’t trying to cheese Melania or defeat her by dice rolling, the only option left is to trade with her at opportune times while playing far enough away from her position to be able to run away from Waterfowl Dance.

The fact that FromSoftware felt it was necessary to force players into choosing between cheesing The Blade of Miquella and running from her speaks volumes about how the developers feel about the difficulty in their games: they are so focused on it that, in some cases, they forget that they also need to make their game fun to play.

Remember, this is a two-part problem. The fact that Waterfowl Dance enables a pro-cheese mentality is just one-half of the issue. The other half, the title of this section, is that this move cannot be understood without hours upon hours of in-game failures and study or by using a third-party resource to provide an explanation as to why the player cannot seem to figure out the move.

The animation of Waterfowl, in just the first phase, is unintuitive, chaotic, and doesn’t suggest to the player that there is no way to beat it using conventional methods because why would there be a duelist boss fight that asks you to not stand and fight? When Melania is sent into her second phase, this chaos is only increased with her animations becoming obscured underneath the hue of red Scarlet Rott which flies in every which way, preventing the untrained eye from ever being sure what threat is coming.

Melania doesn’t punish players for not paying attention, Melania punishes players for assuming that she would be fairly designed.

FromSoftware Games and Their Reputation for being “Hard”

What makes a FromSoftware game a FromSoftware game? Broodish environments? iFrame combat? Character progression and memorable boss fights? All of these things, yes.

But how quickly can these facets (and others) become more tedious to talk about than is worthwhile when the average video game player can be sold on the idea that these games are “hard”?

And they are, indeed, hard, but if you take a close look at, say, Dark Souls 1, you’ll come to find that being hard was never the point of FromSoftware’s design philosophy. That aspect of their gameplay was definitely a product of intentional enemy design and player tools, but it wasn’t the main selling point of their games. In fact, the idea that some players might be playing Dark Souls back in the 2010’s with the sole idea that the game should be punitive probably led a lot of players to ignore common tell-tale signs that they were under-leveled, under-geared, or otherwise in the wrong area of the game because they assumed it was just part of the “difficulty”.

That selling technique truly began in Dark Souls 2, when the devs realized they could say “Dark Souls difficult!” to advertise their game and sell infinitely more copies than they otherwise would have.

Inadvertently, this created an environment where all of the aspects of FromSoftware’s design that weren’t difficulty-oriented became increasingly minuscule in importance compared to the holy grail that is “gaem hard”.

And with Melania, we can see this philosophy come to light: the player is being given a boss fight for which there are no consistent tools to defeat. Whether or not this is FromSoftware’s proverbial middle finger to players who drone on and on about the Soulsborne games being “too easy” or the inverse, a hard stance being taken against players who constantly complain about there not being a difficulty slider, isn’t very clear.

What is clear is that, regardless of their true intentions, FromSoftware is beginning to believe the vocal minority when it comes to why their games are played, and are inadvertently playing to their tune and, ultimately, creating less engaging, lower quality products as a result.

GLHF,
-E