From no-hit runs to no-attack runs, an impressive variety of Elden Ring challenge runs have clogged the front page of YouTube for the past few months.
And while we previously ranked our favorites, one streamer recently outdid himself by trying to beat the game by one-shotting as many bosses as he could.
Working hard, or hardly working? —
Streamer and YouTuber Bushy stitched together a 50-minute video that explores his journey to one-shot every major boss in the Lands Between, and it makes for some pretty entertaining viewing. While this is far from the first time that someone has tried this approach in a FromSoftware game, the sheer ridiculous variety of buffs in Elden Ring — as well as the massively inflated health bars of late game bosses — makes this far more difficult than you might expect.
Ultimately, Bushy had to lay down some fairly generous ground rules to make the feat doable to begin with. Crucially, he defined a boss's phase change as a unique attack that changes their moveset. So, for example, Radahn's iconic meteor attack counts as a phase change, whereas Margit's second phase of additional attacks doesn't.
Close enough —
Bushy was able to defeat almost every boss in the game using an increasingly laborious combination of buffs, talismans, and armor. His basic strategy involved using a powerful Ash of War on the Giant-Crusher hammer. As the video progresses, he ends up having to do wild things like poison himself to get every possible bit of damage.
Unfortunately, while Bushy beat the first phase of the final boss with his entire pharmacy of buffs, in his opinion, it's currently impossible to beat both of its phases in one shot. You just have to use too many resources on the first phase. However, he came very close, so watch it anyway. Currently, Bushy is trying to beat the game without using a single site of grace, so we'll let you know if he pulls that one off, too.
