Elden Ring Nightreign‘s rotating summer boss fight extravaganza just reached peak chaos. Libra Creature of Night, AKA Equilibrious Beast, is the game’s latest Everdark Sovereign, turning what was already arguably the hardest boss fight in the game into something even more punishing. But not in the way players expected. Instead of simply multiplying the difficulty of the original encounter, Libra returned with completely new mechanics that revolve around summoning an army of clones that swarm players in the fight. I love it. And I hate it.
One of the things I enjoy about FromSoftware’s weekly Everdark Sovereign updates is that they go live around 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday nights. Everyone logs into the game, goes about their usual runs, and runs into a brand new boss fight with no idea of what to expect. While it was relatively easy to muddle through recent boss fights with the right builds and the right amount of patience, Everdark Libra has been very different. His second phase begins early in the fight and revolves around summoning mirror images of the players facing him.
Sure, okay, a trio of invaders. Straightforward enough. But they’re surprisingly tanky and lethal, especially the Guardians and Wylders. Plus, not long after you defeat them, Libra summons even more. Then he starts pelting the battlefield with madness glyphs and projectiles. An added layer of bullet hell ensues. Confidence borne of dozens of back-to-back wins immediately shatters. Everyone starts running for their lives. They can barely survive the adds, let alone get chip damage here or there on Libra. Meanwhile, cryptic text keeps flashing across the screen as Libra performs different rituals. What does it mean? Oops, you’re already dead!
What makes this whole ordeal exhilarating instead of just a cheap summon gimmick is that there’s a method to the madness. It just requires you to approach the first couple of times fighting Everdark Libra like a researcher. It trains you to watch the battlefield carefully, analyzing cause and effect, poking and prodding his attack patterns for underlying vulnerabilities that can be exploited. You can feel the chaos change in real time if you’re a consummate lurker on the Nightreign subreddit.
So what’s actually going on in the fight? Players have been trained to mostly eschew Libra’s “deals” that give powerful buffs with unique and, in many cases, severe drawbacks. He offers them in the field during regular playthroughs and right before the beginning of his boss fight. In the Everdark version, however, he also starts enforcing them in the middle of the fight, whether you like it or not. You might get infinite flask heals that decrease your level each time or the passive frenzied fire attacks that also build up your own madness meter.
Success in the fight requires constant awareness of which rituals are in effect. “Preaches Madness” imbues all attacks with madness, which can be used to break Libra as well (madness is one of his weaknesses). NPCs can get summoned almost every minute, but “Incites a Riot” will lead them to start fighting one another or even attack Libra. The longer into the fight you get, the more all of these effects begin stacking. And that’s before Libra uses one of his attacks to partition the battlefield with lines that punish the player when crossed.
How do you win? Like in most FromSoftware fights, with a combination of patience and practice, which people with over a hundred hours in Nightreign aren’t accustomed to doing anymore. We’ve mastered the game, after all. We should be able to brute-force through any fight on skill and instincts alone. “You’ll need to completely rewire your brain from standard, rushed play,” one player noted on the subreddit. Everdark Libra isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. This also requires players to approach how they normally do their daytime runs differently. More focus on stamina and buffs that help with swarms of enemies rather than upgrades aimed at bursting down a single target as quickly as possible.
Players are split on whether the whole thing is genius or junk. Some love all of the complex moving pieces colliding into one frantic mess. Others hate fighting NPCs. “I want to fight Libra,” wrote one fan. “Not clones. I want a crazy grand attack. Not whatever that wet fart was.” I can sympathize! My favorite Nightreign fights by far are the ones that focus almost exclusively on the nuts and bolts of managing enemy aggro and frame-perfect dodging. The original Libra fight and Everdark Gaping Jaw both excelled at that.
Eventually, winning those fights felt great, even if getting up to that point was sometimes a frustrating slog against my own limits. Everdark Libra is the opposite. Defeating him won’t feel like overcoming some great obstacle. But the experience of “solving” the fight and trying to find a way through all of the chaos more than makes up for it.
