I’m playing Elden Ring again, which means I’m writing about Elden Ring again. I’m trying out a different play style – I don’t think I’ve done a sorcery run before, so I’m trying that – and I’m going for a different ending. I’m trying to beat Mohg the Omen for the first time as well – I’ve found him before, I remember seeing him under Leyndell, and I’ve beaten Mohg, Lord of Blood, because that’s how you get into the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, but I don’t think I’ve beaten the version in the basement.

As I’m fighting Mohg – as he’s beating the shit out of me – I’m struck by the different modes of writing about Elden Ring. Mohg attacks with trident and blood magic. His trident attacks are held for a little longer than you expect. If you roll in anticipation when he pulls his arm back to swing, you’ll get clipped. He holds the attack for a moment. There are three or four blood magic attacks – he’ll create a rain of blood around himself, damaging anyone close to him; he’ll shoot out blood in a horizontal arc in front of him; he’ll shoot the same blood in a straight line forwards, and he’s got a blood claw melee attack that explodes into a fireball. For the arc of blood, you roll forward, and it usually goes over you. The line of blood you just need to get out of the way, and the rain of blood and melee attacks you need to keep your distance. I’ve got the Lone Wolves and Banished Knight Engvall alternating as my main summons – Engvall is a melee spirit, and he has enough health to distract the boss while I whittle it down from a distance, while the wolves are summoned as a group of three, which can confuse the AI with all the different attackers. Mohg is a problem for both of those strategies: he’s got enough health that he can ruin Engvall and move on to me, and he uses area attacks like the rain of blood that hit all the wolves at once. I’m also playing with quite low health, which means that I die if I take a couple hits – one hit, in some cases – and Mohg has 40% resistance to all my spells.

The thing about combat in Elden Ring (and really all the Dark Souls games) is that any fight is technically winnable with any build. You can kill Mohg as a first-level character in your underpants, as long as you don’t get hit and you keep doing a little bit of damage over time. The ability to avoid damage is arguably more important than the ability to deal damage. In that sense, there are really two aspects to combat in Elden Ring: you can optimise your build to do as much damage as possible, and you can improve your understanding of the enemy combat style to avoid taking damage. Each method relieves pressure on the other. If you’re doing more damage, you don’t need to fight as long, and if you’re better at staying alive, you’ve got more opportunities to deal damage. With the first-level character in the video linked above, he’s doing maybe 100 damage each hit. Mohg has 14,000 health, so the player has to hit Mohg 140 times to kill him. By comparison, if I’m doing roughly 600 damage a hit with my spells, I only need to hit Mohg 24 times to kill him. Obviously there are other complicating factors – for example, the summons will deal damage and bring that number down, and if you’ve got enough health to take a couple of hits, you can heal and continue the fight, meaning one mistake doesn’t necessarily make you start over. You can also chain attacks in sequences, which would bring down the number of required attack opportunities – you know, you can tinker with the numbers in different ways, but all of the arcane mathematical trickery pales against the principle that if you don’t take damage, you don’t die.

So my build’s not the best for this fight, which maybe raises the difficulty a little – it raises the amount of time I have to stay alive – and my low health means that if I make a mistake, I usually have to start over. My spell choices are reasonably limited. Most of them are best used in other situations. There are spells for crowd control (Glintstone Arc) and for enemies with shields (Ambush Shard), neither of which apply here. Glintstone Pebble is a standard low-damage fast cast, and Star Shower is a reasonable damage dealer but fairly slow. One option is Rock Sling, where you tear boulders out of the ground and hurl them at your opponent. It’s slow to cast, so I have to be sure Mohg’s not going to throw blood at me while I’m casting, but it does physical damage, so it dodges the magic resistance, and it stuns Mohg if it hits him often enough to break his guard – meaning I can sneak in and deal a couple thousand damage with a critical attack.

Mohg the Omen is found under Leyndell, the capital city in Elden Ring. Leyndell is associated with gold, faith, and order, with civilisation. It’s associated with the edifice of Christendom, with the hierarchy of the church in medieval Europe – with monarchy, but also with unthinking obedience and discrimination. We see that discrimination in the treatment of the Omens – normal people born with mutations, usually horned, and shunned by society. Omens are often killed as infants, but when they’re born to nobles, they’re hidden away underground. Mohg is one of those high-born Omens, and thus you find him in the sewers under Leyndell, in the Subterranean Shunning Grounds. The connotations of the sewer reinforce Leyndell’s repressive nature. The sewers are concealed architecture, taboo, unclean, but also still part of the city. Omens are similarly integrated into the city – they’re not pushed outside of it. They have a place within the hierarchy of the Golden Order as subordinated beings. They are the cursed, the scapegoats, making up part of a binary pair of light and dark, pure and impure, clean and dirty. They are contained, locked away, controlled by the hierarchy of the Golden Order and not allowed to roam freely outside of its control.

Thus symbols of the Golden Order are thus found throughout the sewers. The entrance to Mohg’s boss fight has pillars and arch, evoking sunlight and the celestial hierarchy of the Golden Order. The branches and trunk of the Erdtree loom over Leyndell; underground, we find its roots. There’s an obvious gendering to this pair: the phallic Erdtree spreads seeds across the land, planting minor Erdtrees in the receptive soil of the earth. The Shunning Grounds is enclosed, protected, a womb-space, aligned with Mohg’s use of blood magic. It’s not quite as simple as Father Sky and Mother Earth – there’s some gender-fuckery going on with Queen Marika as leader of the Golden Order – but there is a gendered charge that deepens the connection between these two areas. The grandeur of Leyndell is built on – literally built on top of – its oppressed and discarded. They are integrated into its worldview rather than pushed outside of it. Mohg himself has a Satanic aspect, with his horned goat head – within the classical Christian iconography, he is a form of the devil. He is evil within the system rather than alien to it – that is, he’s Satan rather than Set, or some figure from some other cosmology.

And I guess what’s interesting here is that these two modes of talking about Mohg have almost nothing to do with each other. The combat stuff and the symbolism – they’re both part of Elden Ring, but they feel sometimes irreconcilable. It’s hard to find points of overlap, bend them towards each other. Mohg the Omen doesn’t speak. He doesn’t talk to you when you enter his lair – he just sort of beats the shit out of you, and when you kill him, there’s not immediately any explanation of who he was or what he was doing. He’s just gone, and his lair is empty, and you’re left sort of thinking – what the fuck was that? Combat and the broader narrative interpretation sit almost at right angles to each other. I’ve written before about areas of overlap in these types of games – the pairing of place and place in Dark Souls 3 – but they are rare moments of connection. There’s often not much contact between making sense of an enemy AI and making sense of the narrative – except maybe for the shared interpretive demand. Elden Ring demands interpretation. It expects you to figure out why a fight is going wrong – change how you’re behaving so you can stay alive for longer. You have to figure out Mohg’s attack patterns – and once you’ve figured that out, once you’ve beaten him, you’re left with the feeling that you still don’t quite understand. There is an eerie silence in Elden Ring after you clear a level. It becomes like a museum, or a ruin. The life’s gone out of it. You’ve beaten it, but you haven’t really made sense of it – you’ve just figured out enough to get by. The interpretive demand lingers.