Elden Ring: Crystalian (Raya Lucaria Crystal Tunnel) Boss Fight

As you probably know, bosses in Elden Ring are divided into three tiers. From lowest to highest: Field Bosses, Greater Enemy Bosses and finally Demigods and Legends.

Crystalian is in the lowest tier, Field Bosses, and is the main boss of the Raya Lucaria Crystal Tunnel dungeon. Defeating this boss is optional in the sense that you don’t need to in order to advance the main story of the game, but it drops the Smithing-Stone Miner’s Bell-Bearing, which makes the two first tiers of smithing stones purchasable from the Twin Maiden Husks vendor at Roundtable Hold when you hand it in, so if you like to upgrade many weapons, you are going to want this.

The fight against the Crystalian is fairly simple once you figure out how it works. As you can clearly see in the video, it took me a little while, but perhaps you’re faster. Or at least you’ll know how after watching this video.

Crystalians are very tough and takes very little damage, which can easily break your confidence and make you question if it’s feasible at all to defeat it with conventional weaponry. That’s why you’ll see me running around in circles in the beginning of the fight, that’s my go-to when I don’t know what to do ;-)

As it turns out, once you’ve hit the boss a few times, it will kneel down for a couple of seconds, at which point it’s very vulnerable and takes increased damage. Even after it stands back up, it will take a lot more damage than previously, making it much easier to make progress on depleting its health bar.

I used jumping heavy attacks a lot against it because I thought that was the only way to damage it, but as it happens, the speed of them matches quite well with the boss’s attacks for a good rhythm. They also help break its attacks and I even got it to kneel down a second time.

Crystalians come in several varieties from what I understand, and this particular one is armed with a nasty circular saw-like throwing blade of some sort. The boss will also occasionally float up into the air and spin around, doing heavy damage if you’re too close. Its attack patterns are fairly slow and not too difficult to avoid, so once you figure out how to do some damage in return, the fight becomes fairly easy.