Back in early 2022 I picked up a copy of Elden Ring on steam and played through it a couple times, trying out different builds and pursuing different quests each time. I can't recall exactly how I got the idea of doing challenge runs into my head, probably YouTube, but I decided to do a couple. First was a fist-weapon only run, which honestly was a blast and far easier than I thought it would be. Second was a level 1 run, so starting with the Wretch class and never leveling up. That proved to be a much much harder challenge. While there were certainly breaks, and a month-long vacation in the middle, it took me about 6 months to complete that run. After about the first third of the run, it occurred to me to record my boss fight attempts, partly for instant-reply to figure out where I'd screwed up, but also to share the successful attempts afterward. The /r/OneBros subreddit, a place where people post their wins in From Soft games with characters at minimum level, had no small part in encouraging me to keep at it. Some of the videos are straightforward recordings with minimal annotation, while others I used as exercises to practice my basic video editing skills. I've embedded the toughest fight below, but the whole playlist can be found here.