Elden Ring legend completes ludicrous ‘all Malenia’ challenge run that replaced every enemy with the game’s hardest boss
All hail the conquering hero. Iconic Elden Ring boss-fight artist and our gamer of the year for 2022 (opens in new tab) Let Me Solo Her has completed what must, surely, be his greatest challenge of all time. He’s finished the modded run of the game he began last month (opens in new tab) in which every single enemy—from the lowliest rat to the Elden Beast—was replaced with Malenia, the game’s toughest boss.
Fighting Malenia is nothing new to LMSH. The legendary player made his name in the Elden Ring community by helping other players overcome her, manifesting like some kind of jar-clad angel of death to lay waste to the boss thousands of times (opens in new tab). But that was just one Malenia. The Malenia. You’d imagine even he would struggle with a roiling sea of angry Melaniae.
Took about 10 hours and probably more deaths than I’d like to admit but I finally finished the Everything is Malenia Run! It was as fun as it was painful… No leveling vigor was a mistake ;-; #ELDENRING pic.twitter.com/VKUI5wb4auApril 26, 2023
Apparently not! Over the course of ten (10!) hours and “probably more deaths” than he’d care to admit, LMSH made mincemeat of Malenia mode, defeating Elden Malenia—the mod’s version of Elden Ring’s last boss—on his first attempt during his fifth and final stream last Tuesday.
LMSH made things even harder for himself by imposing a rule that forbade him from levelling up Vigor, Elden Ring’s HP-governing stat, and by only wearing his now-famous costume of a jar on his head and no other armour at all. That meant he had to play pretty much flawlessly to stand any chance of progressing, evading every attack from every Malenia across the entire game. While other players have gotten through an “all Malenia” run (opens in new tab) of Elden Ring before, I’m not sure any of them made it quite as absurdly difficult for themselves as LMSH.
If anything, the run was tougher on LMSH’s computer than it was on the man himself. Kotaku (opens in new tab) notes that his RTX 4080-equipped rig was prone to choking on the mod, finding itself unable to handle the pressure of rendering so many resplendent Malenias at once. During his third stream (opens in new tab), he had to knock his settings down to potato mode to keep the stream going.
If you fancy taking on the challenge yourself, you can do it using the Elden Ring Item and Enemy Randomiser mod (opens in new tab). But if you just want to tag along for the ride, you can find all five of Let Me Solo Her’s Elden Ring but Everything is Malenia streams over on his YouTube channel (opens in new tab). Most of them clock in at around two hours or so, but the final one—mostly a succession of boss fights—only lasted around 55 minutes. “Sorry the stream was pretty short,” LMSH told viewers at its conclusion, “But, uh, I didn’t expect it to be that easy”.
