Elden Ring: Crystalians (Academy Crystal Cave) 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.

The Crystalians are in the lowest tier, Field Bosses, and are the main bosses of the Academy Crystal Cave dungeon. As with most lesser bosses in Elden Ring, defeating these two are optional in the sense that you do not need to in order to progress the main story of the game. These two Crystalian bosses will have to be fought together, so while there are two of them, it’s really only one boss fight. Double the fun.

Crystalians are humanoid creatures made of crystal. Because of that, they are extremely tough, but evidently also a bit brittle, as they will take increased damage after taking enough hits to break their stance.

If you’ve never fought a Crystalian boss before, you may be somewhat discouraged by the tiny amount of damage they take when you start attacking them. What you need to do is stance break them once, as after doing so they will take significantly more damage from your attacks and not be very difficult to defeat. I found that using two-handed heavy jumping attacks was quite effective at stance breaking them with a few hits. You can see that the stance break has happened when they kneel down the first time – at this point, they’re also extra vulnerable for critical hits until they stand up again.

The two Crystalian bosses in this fight look similar but are quite different opponents. One is wielding a spear and the other a staff, so as you may have guessed, one is a melee fighter, and the other is a sorcerer type. I’m not really sure if there’s an optional order to kill them in, but since I’m melee myself, I opted to take out the spear guy first, as he seemed to be the most aggressive and easiest to get close to.

There are a couple of large pillars in the room that you can try to keep between yourself and the staff-wielding Crystalian in order to shield yourself from some of his magic while you dispose of his spear-wielding counterpart. He doesn’t move around very quickly, and I overall didn’t find it to be a huge problem to focus the spear guy down first, just be mindful of where the staff guy is at all times as he has some rather devastating spells that you don’t want hitting you in the neck while your back is turned.

While the spear-wielding boss is a fairly straightforward melee fight, the staff-wielding one takes a bit more care, because he dishes out a lot of damage with his spells. Fortunately, most of them take a while to charge up, so if you manage to position him close to a pillar, you can take cover behind that. It’s also a good idea to try to attack him from behind, as that will also keep you safe from some of his spells.

You can also summon help from Spirit Ashes for this fight. For some reason I always forget to do so unless I really struggle in a fight, probably because I’m a Dark Souls veteran and summons were much less available in those games, so I’m just not in the habit of using them, but for a fight like this where you need to handle multiple opponents, having some help to keep the attention of one would probably have made the fight a lot easier.

I’m also a bit hesitant to use Spirit Ashes too much, because they’re not always available. Knowing who made this game, I have a vision of the future featuring me facing a very, very difficult boss and not being allowed to summon. At that point, it would really suck to be too used to relying on this help and then having to get by without it. But on the other hand, it’s silly to not use all tools at one’s disposal in any given situation.