This past April Fools’ Day, a player REALLY broke the Elden Ring island in record time, not even taking a single hit and taking no damage from any source.
Streamer Seki only took nearly 3 hours to finish Elden Ring, and saved the entire playing progress on the stream. In a Twitter post boasting of his achievements, Seki confidently asserted his achievement was “first in the world”. Someone pointed out that streamer GinoMachino completed the game in a similar way on March 13, but Seki corrected Kotaku that the two ways of playing had many differences.
“HOTUnhit/Damage play is more difficult than normal hit play, where the player can’t take any damage from the environment, like falling from a height or getting poisoned,’ explained Seki. “This increases the difficulty a lot, as I can’t take advantage of buffs like Red-Feathered Branchsword, which increase my damage when health is low.“.
This means that Seki didn’t take any damage from any source. Whenever Seki’s character jumps off a slightly high cliff or gets poisoned from a swamp, he has to start over. Elden Ring is inherently difficult, not taking damage from an unfriendly fantasy world makes Elden Ring close to “impossible”.
But Seki proved how far human endurance and ingenuity are.
Seki practiced more than 130 hours to achieve a remarkable achievement. Talking to Kotaku, he said that the hardest challenge in the game is the final boss Elden Beast. That is, an attempt to break the island “No hit / No damage” can completely fail right near the finish line.
Elden Beast possesses a skill that is very difficult to dodge, which is Elden Stars. The easiest way to avoid taking damage from this move is to knock the boss down before it finishes casting. According to Seki, it took him dozens of hours of practice to master the Elden Beast fight.
Seki didn’t want to stop yet. He plans to attempt another record: not taking any hits, and hitting all the big bosses in the Elden Ring. The fantasy world is filled with bosses that have special story meaning, and will drop a special “remembrance”, which can be exchanged for a large amount of runes (the in-game currency) or special items. Mr. Seki thinks that is the real test.
The Elden Ring speedrun community (try to clear the island as quickly as possible) has not reached its peak yet. In the near future, veteran gamers will also find special gameplay, the most effective clearing routes, or tactics that no one has thought of.
Meanwhile, there are still a number of gamers who have not passed the game’s first big challenge.