With how difficult players are finding the Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, it shouldn't be a surprise that the final boss is a whole new level of pain. While some players are finding new ways to take it on, one player just got lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it).
Spoilers for Shadow of the Erdtree's final boss below.
Player Gneurshk_ uploaded a video of their showdown with the final boss to Elden Ring's subreddit with the caption, "What the f*ck?! I was robbed of the fight!!!" They had managed to get Promised Consort Radahn down to about two-thirds of his health, and apparently, that was all they needed. After nearly killing Gneurshk_, Radahn celebrated by phasing into the wall and disappearing completely. You can still see some attacks firing, but a couple of seconds go by and then he just dies.
When I first saw this, my initial thoughts were just how lucky this player was, imagining getting a free pass to beat one of the hardest bosses in the DLC. But then I thought about how I'd actually feel if this had happened to me. Imagine putting your all into the DLC, fighting all the infuriating minor bosses, and progressing along the story only for the satisfaction of winning the last fight to be taken from you.
"I was enjoying it too," Gneurshk_ says. "I wasn't even getting angry—I thought it was a fun fight." As soon as Promised Consort Radahn dies, you can see that Gneurshk_ receives the remembrance, and the game also saves. This means that if they wanted to fight the final boss again by themselves, they'd either need to do a NG+, start again on a fresh save, or reload earlier Steam cloud saves and replace the current save with them. There's always helping other players take on Promised Consort Radahn in a "Let Me Solo Her" fashion, but I'm not sure there was enough time for Gneurshk_ to learn his moveset.
Plenty of other players feel for Gneurshk_, agreeing how frustrating the whole situation is, with some even saying that they'd try and prolong other fights on purpose just so they could enjoy them for longer. "I kinda started dying on purpose in the Margit fight, and I was still disappointed how I've beaten Malekith because of bleed proc," one player says in the replies.
Although if you did want to speed through the DLC, another Elden Ring player put together an incredibly helpful map. This Scadutree Blessing map reveals how to get all the Scadutree Fragments without having to fight anyone scary enough to have their own remembrance.
Until FromSoftware adds an arcade boss replay feature (which isn't out of the question, as Sekiro has a similar option), racing past irrelevant bosses to get back to the ones you want to take on is probably the safest, if most time-consuming, bet.