'I hope Miyazaki is proud of me': After 325 deaths and a 7-hour bossfight slog, streamer fulfils prophecy and beats Shadow of the Erdtree with a dance pad
The guilty set has, it turns out, got rhythm.
You know, I'd heard that Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC was hard. Mind-bendingly hard. Discourse-ignitingly hard. So hard that even the most stalwart of players, the ones who have truly gitten gud, were running into problems.
But now someone's beat the entire thing on a DDR dance pad, so clearly you're all just a bunch of whiners. This thing's easy as hell, a statement I feel supremely confident making based on the four (4) hours I have spent in the base game in my entire life.
The hero in question is streamer MissMikkaa (via VG247), and let's be honest: It was really only a matter of time. Not only is beating FromSoft games with dance pads a time-honoured tradition, MissMikkaa herself has a long and storied career when it comes to clowning on Miyazaki's toughest bosses in all sorts of unlikely ways: using an acoustic guitar, one-handed, getting her dog to give it a shot (alright, that one was accidental). Heck, she even made Malenia look like a chump two years ago using the dance pad method.
Alright, to be fair, it wasn't exactly a cakewalk. In the tweet announcing her triumph, MissMikka revealed that taking down Erdtree's final boss—the tenacious Radahn—had taken her "52 tries and 7 hours of dance-padding (my feet hurt)." You can see her final moment of victory in a Twitch clip below.
In total, Erdtree took MissMikka a full seven days to complete and entailed 325 total deaths, a full 69 of which were due to gravity. As for what she hopes to get out of her week-long trial, MissMikkaa says only one thing: "I hope Miyazaki is proud of me."
Given that Miyazaki is on record as saying "I absolutely suck at videogames," I'm gonna go ahead and guess that not only is the Elden Ring director proud, he's as flabbergasted as the rest of us mere mortals that anyone's managed to overcome the game using such unorthodox methods.
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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.
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