The optional boss Malenia has quickly become known as the hardest boss in Elden Ring, a game that has been taking the top spot as FromSoftware's most difficult title. However, a rare glitch has caused the boss to be completely unbeatable, no matter how much damage the Edlen Ring player manages to pile onto her.
According to the original post to the Elden Ring subreddit, many highly skilled players have specifically been running into this bug whenever trying to send Malenia into her second phase with a specific attack. While this might not exactly be something that every player will run into, it is repeatable by players who are specifically skilled with the parry system.
In the video, the player can be seen skillfully taking on Malenia, using Elden Ring's parrying mechanic to deflect most attacks and open the boss up for powerful critical hits. However, when the player should be cleaning out her remaining HP and sending Malenia into her second phase as Goddess of Rot, the boss refused to transition. This meant that no matter how many times the player managed to land the critical hits, the boss would never die or move on to the next part of the fight.
According to comments from other players, this isn't entirely uncommon for the players who enjoy making their way through FromSoftware's games utilizing mostly the parry system. The assumption among players is that this immortality is the result of a failsafe to stop a separate bug that would immediately drain her health when transitioning to the second phase. This means that finishing off multi-phase bosses in Elden Ring with critical hits after performing a stance break might be impossible due to this workaround from the secondary bug. As a result, a parry-only run of the game runs into several issues as these transitioning bosses like Malenia can essentially stop all forward progress.
Some players have reported being able to still trigger the phase transition when getting a critical while attacking with a weapon that has a status effect like bleed or frostbite on it. This can then cause the bug that makes the second phase finish immediately, though it does require a certain amount of preparation before jumping into the fight. Fortunately, this immortality effect doesn't appear to be caused by a regular hit, meaning that Elden Ring's Malenia isn't unfairly bugged outside of a parry-only challenge run or another specific build in the same vein.
Elden Ring is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.