It's done. Three months and 173 hours later I've finally defeated Malenia, the hardest boss in Elden Ring and subsequently collected all of the achievements in the game. There's 42 of them and every single one is a memorable achievement. This is a game that will go down in time as one of the best games I've ever played. From Software outdid themselves with this one.
General thoughts...
What I really loved about collecting all of the achievements in Elden Ring is the fact that all achievements are very reasonable. There's no grindy or RNG based achievements just the hardcore gamers will ever get. The only thing you need to do to get them is play the game thoroughly. You do however have to be very thorough to get them all but in my opinion that's quite a reasonable thing when it comes to collecting achievements in a game.
To me these are important things to even attempt getting all of the achievements in a video game.
The hardest achievements...
What I consider the hardest achievements in Elden Ring are the Legendary Ashen Remains, Legendary Sorceries and Incantations, Legendary Taslimans as well as Legendary Armaments achievements. These achievement names pretty much sums up what you have to do. Collect all the legendary items in the game.
The reason why I put these as the hardest achievements comes from the sheer size of the game and the fact that these items are hidden in all the far corners of the world. If you turned left somewhere instead of right and didn't backtrack to see if that one room had anything in it you might have missed out on a legendary item. Unless you go back immediately it's pretty much guaranteed that you won't have any idea where the remaining items might be at the end of the game when you want to mop up the rest of your achievements.
I was quite rewarded for my thoroughness with these achievements. At the end of the game I hadn't unlocked any of these achievements but due to me being quite systematic in marking the places I hadn't explored I ended up unlocking them within a few hours of exploring.
These achievements sit in the top 6 achievements collected by the least amount of people. There's only two achievements with less collection rate than these. That's the achievement for finishing with the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending and the achievement you get for collecting all of the achievements.
My favorite achievement...
I won't let this segment take up a lot of space as I've kinda written about it already. I just didn't know that it would end up being my favorite achievement at the time.
My favorite achievement to collect was definitely the Age of the Stars achievement which you unlock when getting the Ranni ending. I've already mentioned this ending and how good it was in this post: Glontstone has forsaken the Elden Ring in favor of a Maiden. This ending cinematic was one of the coolest I've ever seen in a From Software game.
The last achievement...
The last achievement I collected was one that really tested my sanity. Defeating Shardbearer Malenia. Blade of Miquella. She who has never known defeat.
This is without a doubt the hardest boss in the game. Most people even rank her as the hardest boss fight across all of the From Software games combined. That's a pretty bold statements seeing as we've seen the likes of Darkeater Midir and the Orphan of Kos in earlier games. Despite all of this 32.4% of all players has defeated her and collected the achievement.
This most likely comes from the fact that you can summon other players to help with the fight. There's even a living legend in the game called "Let Me Solo Her" that's been soloing her for people. He became such a legend that several people created the same character to help people solo her. You'll now find several summon signs outside her boss room from several characters called Let Me Solo Her. I've seen him myself.
I didn't summon him though. I was dead set on completing this game and boss fight all by my lonesome like I've done with all the other From Software games. I have no idea how many attempts I needed to defeat Malenia but it was a lot. I beat my head against her wall for so long that I even decided to go beat the game two more times and collect all other achievements before attempting her again.
In the end though I managed to find a way that worked for me. Despite people saying that using Spirit Summons for this boss fight is a bad idea because she heals herself when she deals damage I still did it. I used my Mimic Tear. With some skills and decent buffs we managed to beat her first phase to a pulp pretty consistently. By the end I went into second phase pretty consistently with 10-14 healing potions.
I eventually learned how to perfectly dodge her flower bomb at the beginning of second phase and also that you can run it at the end of it without taking damage while getting a full combo off on her. After a lot of attempts I eventually learned to read her phase two attacks as well and managed to dodge her pretty well.
My heart was racing so bad at the moment of this screenshot below. Her health that low while I still had 5 healing potions left...
A lot of sweat, heartbeats and two healing potions later I managed to land that last and final hit. That moment of immense glory and relief is depicted below.
Your strength, extraordinary...
And so it came to be that I collected all the achievements in Elden Ring. This now thrones up there as one of my biggest achievements in gaming. Right next to defeating the Lich King in World of Warcraft while he was still current content as well as collecting all of the achievements in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
This was done after spending 110 hours on my main character and a total of 173 hours on the game in total. I would have easily spent a 100 more if that's what it would take.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.