We're way past the difficulty curve and Elden Ring is being beaten in every possible way. Players are speedrunning it, beating it without leveling, only using their fists, taking no hits, and every other possible permutation and combination you can think of. Almost eight months since its launch, it's going to take something special to stand out among these feats, and YouTuber ymfah may have just managed that.
Many of you may already be familiar with ymfah's channel, where they showcase some truly unique runs of FromSoftware and Bethesda games, like beating Dark Souls 3 without walking, beating Bloodborne with items only, and beating Fallout 4 without any equipment. Not just that, these videos also act as guides, as ymfah lists down every step they take as subtitles, with some nice music in the background.
Their latest video/guide is about how you can beat Elden Ring without talking to any optional NPCs. You may think this sounds easy, that you'll just miss out on a couple of side quests and vendors, righ? Wrong. ymfah states that they will only talk to NPCs that are absolutely required to progress the main story, but they also show us early on in the video that talking to Melina is actually optional. And if you don't want to talk to Melina, there's no resting, no leveling up, no Torrent, no Roundtable Hold, no Smithing Master Hewg, and no Roderika to upgrade your Summons. Sound easy now?
After showing us how to effectively skip Melina, ymfah begins to make their way around Limgrave, in order to find items, weapons, and armour that will help balance the scales a bit. Even though they missed out on so much, they had a foolproof plan on how to arm up, merely by scavenging things across The Lands Between. They specifically knew where to go and what items to get in order to prepare for their first major hurdle, Margit, the Fell Omen.
Despite losing access to so many options, their scavenging was enough to lay the Fell Omen flat with only a few hits of the Flame of the Redmanes Ash of War, along with a few other item buffs. The entire video is 54 minutes long and goes back and forth until the Elden Beast is slain.