Streamer Miss Mikkaa has beaten Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree using a controller. Then, a dance pad. Now, she’s conquered the final boss while running two versions of the game on each controller, simultaneously.
She managed to do something similar with the base game soon after launch, and after a 4-day battle with the final boss, she repeated it with the DLC.
Miss Mikkaa says it took her a total of four days of non-stop attempts at defeating the final DLC boss. Her in-game time on this final boss alone was 14 hours, which is understandable considering she was splitting her attention across two versions of the game and constantly moving to control her character using a dance pad in one of them. The boss took 239 attempts, but the streamer has now bested it in what has to be the most difficult challenge run anyone has ever created for a FromSoftware title.
Dancing through the Shadowlands
The death count for Miss Mikkaa’s entire controller plus dance pad runs of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was 685 on both games, so a total of 1,370. 35% of these were from the final boss fights, 55 were humiliating deaths to gravity, and the streamer’s maximum heart rate throughout the entire experience was 166 BPM.
You can catch the whole series of stream VODS of these impressive runs over on Miss Mikkaa’s Twitch channel. She outlined her final builds from the run if you’re interested in replicating them to help you beat the boss yourself, once or twice. “Level 194 with 60 vigor, 54 endurance & strength, 40 faith, and 33 mind. I was using a Giant Crusher with Prayerful Strike. Talismans were: Crimson Seed Talisman +1, Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman, Shard of Alexander, and Golden Braid. I was using Holy Shrouded Cracked Tear and Opaline Hardtear in my flask.”
Shadow of the Erdtree differs greatly from not only Elden Ring but also every other FromSoftware game’s DLC in the way it shifts game mechanics. It requires you to effectively start again when it comes to levels, with enemies scaling to your character, and the only way to level up is by collecting a specific type of item in the DLC’s open world.
It’s impressive to me that players can finish Shadow of the Erdtree at all. It certainly looks like the ultimate Soulsborne challenge, but Miss Mikka has taken things up a notch. While we’ve seen streamers play the game using their minds and even motion capture technology to allow you to swing a real sword around, I don’t think much is going to top this particular run for a long time.
