Elden Ring - It barely still exists

With less hard evidence to reference, there's a lot of room for speculation but little room for certainty. It's easy to guess what the Umibozu might have been like, but it'll be hard to know how close those guesses might be. Here's to hoping the DLC brings it all around.

Song used: Village Ruins - King's Field IV OST

[ZullietheWitch]

The mockups for the unused horses and Umibozu are mostly just me playing around with the fact I found the model size values in Elden Ring forever ago. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how big the Umibozu would've been, or even how giant the HorseGiant was. Knowing FromSoftware, the real model for Umibozu could be significantly weirder than anything you'd expect from the regular depictions of it, even with how diverse some of them actually get.

[Mongtard]

Imagine if the Umibozu wasn’t a boss, but something that you would see in the distance destroying a ship every now and then

[zypher]

The idea of a giant regular man just emerging from the ocean is terrifying

[nowhereman]

Having a giant dude just standing out there menacingly staring at you would add a whole lotta atmosphere to this game.

[shiningjoot]

The thing about this model that really scares me are the eyes, seeing this motionless, humanoid figure with those eyes is really uncanny

[sanesanchezs]

I've always been afraid of shores in game, because I always pictured an easter egg where a huge monster comes up from the depths to kill you. This concept was probably started by things like the fish in Jak and Daxter to keep you from venturing too far into the sea.

[bombbasher]

I’m imagining a Midir situation

where you look out to the coast and see this thing staring at you before going back under the ocean

[GameDevYal]

For some context, the reason why Umibozu are usually depicted as humanoids is because they're the vengeful spirits of monks that drowned, and presumably became so large because they had more spiritual strength. They're almost always depicted as pitch-black because their body is made from thunderclouds (which might be why they usually appear only during bad storms).

[gutar]

I wouldn't be surprised if Godwyn's body was originally meant to be this Umibozu

[BackwardsPancake]

I find the seas of Elden Ring particularly fascinating, because of how little we know about them. There's a bunch of references to people coming across the sea, and I can't help but wonder what those places are like and what's going on there - Are they affected by the shattering too?

I guess it also ties in to the bigger mystery of how we're completely missing the context for the name "The lands between" - "between" what, exactly?

[robertjr]

My biggest dissappintment as a big elden ring lover is that they never capatalized on the water. In each souls game i always like to periodically stare at the ocean and speculate what horrific things must exist there, we got a good taste of that in bloodborne with orphan of Kos. I was expecting something big with the water, coming into elden ring they teased me so bad with the map ever since the game dropped and i started searching and seeing the map expand the more i felt certain that we would get something i was especially hoping for a monster or a ship, may be a ship crash id have loved a teleporter that takes me way out onto one if the boats for something even if its just a dungeon ir something i feel so upset seeing this video and knowing they definitely thought about giving it to me

[iamthenightshift]

I can't quite put my finger on it, but for some reason this huge, barebones, untextured, humanoid model, just standing there in the water, feels so much creepier than anything that actually made it in the game. And there are some scary things in the game.

[frostious]

Umibozu has matbins called 'seaweed' and 'tentacle' among the few files that remain for it, so it most likely was a sea creature of some sort, even if "umibozu" wasn't literal.

[JoyeuseVT]

So, odd speculation: the only way to escape an Umibōzu in folklore is to give it a "bottomless barrel" and leave.
In the old map layout for Elden Ring as you showed at 1:12, the area looks vaguely familiar to the Dragon Communion Church, with the Umibōzu there

If you check the Elden Ring map in that exact area, there's a barrel just floating there where the creature used to be.

[DogKacique]

I feel a humanoid-shaped featureless void like that is more terrifying than the actual boss would be

[theincursion]

elden ring needed a mysterious giant shadow man sitting ominously in the distant waters

[CuriousLumenwood]

The concept of a giant, dark humanoid rising up out of the water is not something I knew I was afraid of but now that I’m aware of it it’s TERRIFYING

[level]

It was a real missed opportunity to not place it as a boss hidden behind Castle Morne.

Fighting a featureless black giant with empty white eyes on a tiny half-submerged island as it tries to drag you into the sea would be scarier then anything in Bloodborne.

[TheCrewExpendable]

"Giant being in/approaching from the sea" was also something that was cut from DS2. Perhaps this concept will make an appearance in a future game or DLC.

Third time's a charm

[tysaylorphoto]

It would make sense if it was a waterside fight. There is a huge beach area to the west of limgrave that serves little to no purpose outside of housing a bunch of undead dudes and a bunch of driftwood and an item.