Elden Ring: Godrick the Grafted (Stormveil Castle) Boss Fight

As you may know, bosses in Elden Ring are divided into three tiers. From lowest to highest: Field Bosses, Greater Enemy Bosses and finally Demigods and Legends.

Godrick the Grafted is in the highest tier, Demigods, and is the end boss of Stormveil Castle and really the whole Limgrave region. You need to kill him to progress from Stormveil Castle into Liurnia, so unless you want to traverse some other much higher-level areas instead, this is probably the progression path you want to take.

Godrick is, as his name suggests, a giant mess of body parts that have been grafted onto him, like when grafting a tree that has several species of apples on it. Except that Godrick doesn’t bear delicious apples, he just wants to take your body parts and add them to his disgusting collection.

I had help from Nepheli Loux for this encounter. I had previously encountered her in a small house within the castle walls and she had asked me so dearly to let her help me kill the boss when I got to him. Not one to say no to letting others stand in the way of a beating for me, I happily obliged.

During phase one of the fight, Godrick jumps around a lot, tries to stomp on you and swings around a big axe. Nepheli attracts a lot of his attention and I must admit that it was nice to have someone else being on the receiving end of stomps and axe swings for once. Considering how many people are in this world, everybody else seems to usually conveniently be somewhere else when those are being handed out.

Phase two starts when Godrick loses his left lower arm at around 50% health. I guess for all the grafting he does, he’s not very good at it if his arm comes off so easily. But not one to be dissuaded by the loss of a single limb, Godrick quickly turns to the large dragon corpse beside him and then proceeds to graft the dragon’s head onto what’s left of his arm. So now he has a left arm that can breathe fire. Awesome.

I’m not going to get into the whole ridiculousness of Nepheli and myself apparently just standing idly by, while the boss performs what must be considered fairly complex surgery to boost his own attacks, instead of taking this golden opportunity to lay some pain on him. You know what, on second thought, I am going to get into it. It’s stupid. That’s right, I said it.

Phase two is somewhat harder than phase one. Not only does Godrick’s arm now perform a swooping fire breath attack, it bites too. Hard. He also does a jumping attack of some sort that causes a big explosion. So there is a lot more chaos in phase two and it becomes clearer and clearer that we should indeed have stabbed him hard and repeatedly while he was grafting the dragon head instead of playing fair and waiting for him to finish.

Nepheli managed to get herself killed just before the fight was over. I don’t know what happened, but it was definitely not because I was off in la-la land drinking all the Crimson Tears myself. Don’t worry, she revealed earlier that she is Tarnished too, so she’ll pop right up at the closest Site of Grace. If she remembered to activate it, that is. I can confirm that I met her again for a later boss that will be featured in another video, so she’s definitely not permanently dead here.

Finally, please don’t go grafting people’s body parts. It’s just rude and not a good look ;-)