Imagine, after two grueling waves in Elden Ring Nightreign, you and a couple of comrades reach the boss at the end of the second night and take him head-on, with surprisingly good results. It’s nearing the halfway mark of its health, and before Crucible Knight goes into its aggressive secondary phase, another health bar populates on the screen. It’s the hungry, hungry Golden Hippopotamus here to ruin your hot streak.
There’s nothing more demoralizing than Golden Hippopotamus spawning in the middle of an Elden Ring Nightreign boss fight. The Golden Hippopotamus, a field boss who first appeared in the Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, is a massive hippo with the horn of a rhino and the ferocity of a pitbull. It only has three attacks — Hippo Bite, Hippo Rush, and Fanged Charge — but they’re all relentless, capitalizing on its speed and size to force players to continuously dodge. Especially tough is the charge attack, which sees players get chewed up and spit out in a long animation that results in devastating damage.
It hurts simply to see the Golden Hippopotamus appear, which is obviously not good for group morale. Suddenly, everyone is getting sloppy, all our vigor is gone, and now we’re forced to deal with a brand-new attack pattern from our original enemy, alongside a brand-new boss rampaging around us. Everything gets instantly harder, as if the game sensed things were a bit too easy for us and decided to throw a curveball — like The Director mechanic from Left 4 Dead or something.
Image: FromSoftware/Bandai Namco
This hippo stinks, and I don’t like him, but I’m also not alone. In fact, I’ve realized fans have been calling this abomination a nuisance since the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion (which, full disclosure, I did not get around to).
In his original form from Erdtree, the Golden Hippopotamus is a challenge for entirely different reasons than in Elden Ring Nightreign. For one thing, he greets players in a cramped room, one that doesn’t allot nearly enough square footage to gracefully fight a hippo-sized enemy and avoid all its big swinging attacks. For another, due to the tight space and erratic movement, the camera also becomes an enemy, as it wildly clips into walls and doesn’t focus too well on the locked-on boss. But most of all, the Golden Hippo’s moveset involves spawning golden quills from its back and shooting them at you like arrows. Turns out, in Erdtree, this hippo has more in common with a hedgehog or porcupine than a rhino or pitbull. (What’s worse is that other variants of Golden Hippo without golden incantations show up three more times throughout the DLC.)
“This is the only boss that doesn’t let you breathe, he always has you cornered,” one player said in a YouTube Short featuring a streamer’s showdown with the Golden Moo Deng in Shadow of the Erdtree. “Hated fighting this boss but felt so good finally beating it,” one player said in a comment. “Yeah, just beat the fat hippo at level 130, so annoying and I’ve seen 3 of them,” someone else vented.
Image: FromSoftware/Bandai Namco via Polygon
Meanwhile, in Nightreign, some have described Crucible Knight and Golden Hippopotamus as “the worst Day 2 boss.” There are even some who’ve expressed frustrations getting the duo after already defeating the Ancient Dragon boss, a difficult boss battle on its own. “After it dies, a NEW multi boss fight starts with Crucible Knight + the hippo?? You don’t get your revive bars reset, so it’s fucking brutal if you lost any on Ancient Dragon (which people will).”
Although players might come across a Golden Hippopotamus roaming Nightreign on its own, I’ve only ever seen it show up during my fights with the Crucible Knight. But if the tag-team champions of Nightreign were to ever show up for me after defeating an Ancient Dragon? I’m afraid I’d have to wish my friends good fortune and briskly run into the storm until I wound up back at Roundtable Hold.