Warning, spoilers for Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree lie ahead.
A dataminer looks to have found some dialogue for Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree’s famously mute final boss that was cut by FromSoftware, leaving you to be battered without at least getting a nice hello before the deadly meteor showers start.
Yep, it turns out the extra bit of chatter from St Trina that Elden Ring sleuths found and restored last week isn’t the only thing kicking around in the DLC’s files cut content wise, there’s more stuff that Miyazaki and co ended up electing not to have its characters vocalise.
These latest lines relate to Promised Consort Radahn and were found by a Reddit user (thanks, TheGamer) who was in the process of trawling through the game’s japanese dialogue files in order to see of there were any noteworthy differences between those and the English versions.
Radahan, it seems, instead of being totally mute, would originally have said three lines: “I am Radahn”, “Born of red-maned Radagon, and Rennala of the Full Moon”, and finally “A lion bred for battle”. It’s certainly an interesting Tinder or Hinge bio, you’ve got to give the fella that.
“I know many disliked how Radahn was totally silent during the fight, but it seems FromSoftware originally planned to make him talk,” the dataminer said if their discovery, “I don’t know in which phase [they’d have played] or [if it would have been] during the cutscenes, but here the dialogues are.”
The big question of course is why the call was seemigly made to not have him say these rather innocuous – at least on the surface level – lines that don’t really do much to illuminate his character beyond what we already know from people on YouTube who’ve learned more lore than you could fit in Raya Lucaria’s grand library. If I had to guess, I’d probably say it’s something like what seem to be at play with the St Trina dialogue – FromSoft electing not to be quite as explicit in terms of its portrayal of events and how they tie together these diffrent characters as it could have been.
If you’re still battling your own way through Shadow of the Erdtree and need a bit of help just to reach the big final baddie, who’s already been beaten with a saxophone in case you haven’t seen, make sure to check out our huge array of guides that should be able to aid you regardless of what you need a hand with.
