Elden Ring: Golden Hippopotamus (Shadow Keep) Boss Fight (SOTE)

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.

Golden Hippopotamus is in the middle tier, Greater Enemy Bosses, and is found just inside the main entrance to the Shadow Keep. It is an optional boss in the sense that it is not required to defeat it in order to progress the main story of the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion.

As I ventured into the Shadow Keep, I was fully expecting a lot of sneaky and shady stuff going on in the namesake shadows. Nefarious plots afoot. Suspicious characters at every corner. Weird lumps in the stew served for dinner. Maybe some cheating, maybe some backstabbing, maybe even something nasty rubbed on the doorhandle to the bathroom.

What I didn’t expect was a huge, rampaging hippopotamus. I realize they’re considered among the most dangerous animals in the world, but they’re really not very shadow-like or sneaky. But maybe the shadow name refers to the huge shadow they cast when they block the sun. I mean, when a hippo’s shadow sits around the keep, it really sits around the keep. Yeah, that totally makes sense and so it must be true.

Anyway, after the huge menace managed to catch me by surprise – which is quite a feat for a hippo in itself – I decided to summon some assistance. I had two NPCs available for summoning, namely Redmane Freyja and Hornsent. I rarely summoned NPCs in the base game, but I often felt like I missed part of their story by not including them, so I’ve decided to summon them whenever they’re available in the expansion.

In a futile attempt to match the total weight of the enemy, I also called in Ancient Dragon Knight Kristoff for some tanking duties. I could probably have made just as good use of my usual sidekick, Black Knife Tiche, but Kristoff happened to be the one on quick-dial since he recently helped me dispose of a certain dragon patriarch, which finally appears to have ended the long-running plot of dragons everywhere making endless and elaborate plans focused around cooking and eating me in surprisingly imaginative ways.

But I digress. Even though I could talk about my troubles with dragons for hours, this encounter is about a huge, rampaging mammal, not about hungry flying lizards with a taste for my tender flesh.

This particular hippopotamus is somewhat special, as it appears to really be a mix of a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros, and a porcupine. I’m not sure exactly how that mix happened, but I’m starting to get an idea of what kind of sick and twisted parties they throw at this Shadow Keep.

The boss has a huge health pool and does take quite a while to kill. In the meantime, it will use its giant mouth to try to bite people, its nose horn to try to sting people, its back spikes to try to spike people, and its huge weight to try to crush people. It’s generally not great to be “people” around it, but fortunately I had three minions there to split the aggro. It’s also surprisingly fast and can quickly cover large distances, so be careful of that.

And now for the usual boring details about my character. I play as a mostly Dexterity build. My melee weapons are the Hand of Malenia and the Uchigatana with Keen affinity. I was level 207 and Scadutree Blessing 11 when this video was recorded, which I think is reasonable for this boss. I’m always looking for the sweet spot where it’s not mind-numbing easy mode, but also not so difficult that I will be stuck on the same boss for hours ;-)

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Fan art inspired by this boss fight

Anime-style fan art of the Tarnished in Black Knife armor facing the Golden Hippopotamus boss in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Click or tap the image for more information.

Anime-style fan art of the Tarnished in Black Knife armor seen from behind, facing the Golden Hippopotamus boss in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Click or tap the image for more information.

Dark fantasy fan art of the Tarnished in Black Knife armor facing the Golden Hippopotamus boss in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Click or tap the image for more information.

Dark fantasy fan art of the Tarnished in Black Knife armor confronting a massive horned hippopotamus-like boss with spiked back in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Click or tap the image for more information.

Realistic dark fantasy art of the Tarnished in Black Knife armor confronting a massive horned hippopotamus-like boss with spiked back in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Click or tap the image for more information.

Realistic dark fantasy art of the Tarnished in Black Knife armor confronting a colossal horned beast with spiked back in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Click or tap the image for more information.

Realistic isometric fantasy art of the Tarnished in Black Knife armor facing a massive horned beast with spiked back in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Click or tap the image for more information.

Further Reading

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• Elden Ring: Night's Cavalry (Gate Town Bridge) Boss Fight
• Elden Ring: Rugalea the Great Red Bear (Rauh Base) Boss Fight (SOTE)
• Elden Ring: Adan, Thief of Fire (Malefactor's Evergaol) Boss Fight