Elden Ring Beaten on One Switch 2 Charge, With Two Deaths at the Final Boss

I set myself a challenge with Elden Ring on Switch 2 that was never supposed to come down to the final hit of the final boss with the console about to die in my hands. I love Elden Ring an unhealthy amount. I have beaten it on different consoles and different PCs, and when I am actually trying to go fast I can normally finish the base game in around 3 to 4 hours. So when it finally came to Switch 2, one question would not leave me alone: could I start at 100 percent battery and beat the entire game, no DLC, in handheld, before the Switch shut itself off? Because that was not enough on its own, I also wanted to do the whole run without dying.

I did not even own the Switch 2 version yet, so I went out and bought it

Instead of ordering the game from home like I normally would, I got permission to film inside a MediaMarkt, found Elden Ring, bought it, and brought it home to put the cartridge into a Nintendo handheld. I still find that ridiculous. There was also a control problem waiting for me. I normally play with four back paddles and years of muscle memory I do not even think about anymore, and the Switch does not have any of that. So I would be slower, the controls would feel different, and the game runs at a much lower frame rate than I am used to, all while the entire run sat on a battery timer.

The stock battery could not do it, so I gambled on an aftermarket one from China

Before wasting three hours finding out the battery could not do it, I needed numbers. I charged the Switch fully, played Elden Ring for exactly 30 minutes, and checked the drain. The stock battery used 24 percent in that window, which was not going to work against a 3 to 4 hour run. So I opened the Switch, pulled the original battery, and installed an aftermarket one bought online that supposedly held more capacity. I ran the same 30 minute test again. It used 22 percent. Projected out, that was a little over two hours, and I genuinely thought this challenge might not work because the battery was telling me no.

I stripped almost every setting to squeeze out extra minutes

From there things got, in my words, increasingly stupid. Airplane mode on, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth dead, HDR gone, rumble gone, volume basically nothing, auto brightness off, even the in-game blood turned off. The setting that mattered most was the screen. I turned the brightness down and down until I could no longer see the game properly, and my camera had to shoot at ISO 16,000 just to see what I was doing. So I made brightness into a resource instead of a fixed setting: near zero while riding through areas I had done a hundred times, brought back up just enough for boss fights. That version of the test used 18 percent in 30 minutes, which projected to roughly 2 hours and 47 minutes. My fast runs normally take 3 to 4 hours, so the math still said I should lose, which meant I just had to be faster, including keeping the camera as still as possible while traveling.

Margit nearly ended the deathless run before it started

The opening of the run was a robbery. I raced across the map grabbing health upgrades, teleport points, upgrade materials, and the items needed to unlock a large part of the map later, then killed a massive dragon that, with one specific item equipped, handed me almost 100,000 runes ridiculously early. Margit should have been an easy fight I barely think about anymore, but on Switch some of my usual dodges did not land the way muscle memory expected, and I ended up close to dead before somehow surviving and killing him. Godrick went the opposite way, an easy kill interrupted only by a real mosquito attacking me mid fight, and his defeat gave me a buff of extra stamina, mana, health and stats across the board as long as I stayed alive.

I lost the deathless run to my own distraction, not to a boss

After more map clearing to turn my weapon into something unfair, I reached an optional boss I was genuinely nervous about, one who could take almost my entire health bar in a single hit. I beat him at full health with my heart actually racing. Then, minutes later, while trying to reach the best early farming area, I took the wrong path, triggered a fight I never needed to have, and died. The deathless challenge ended right there. I was frustrated because it was not a hard boss that beat me, it was me watching the battery and thinking about how things would come across instead of the game. With deathless gone, there was no point dwelling on it, so I farmed back my runes, grabbed one more damage buff, and pushed on to Starscourge Radahn, killing him so fast this time that he never got to launch his famous meteor attack, which meant no wasted battery on a second phase.

The battery held far longer than the tests predicted, until the mountaintops hit hard

Another boss went down using the safest strategy I knew, and checking the battery at 2 hours and 50 minutes in showed 35 percent remaining, far better than the 30 minute test had predicted. Boss after boss fell until I reached the capital and destroyed Morgott with 25 percent left, a quarter of the battery still in the tank with that much of the game already cleared. That was when my mindset shifted from seeing how far I could get to genuinely believing I could finish the game. Then the mountaintops of the giants hit, and the battery started disappearing much faster, dropping to 17 percent. I do not know if that was the area being heavier to render, the battery curve, the aftermarket battery reporting strangely, or some mix of all three, but I knew there was still a scary amount of Elden Ring left.

I stopped playing normally and just ran past anything the game did not force me to fight

From 17 percent on, everything became about speed. I sprinted to the Godskin Duo and put both of them to sleep to execute them one after another rather than fight properly. By the time I needed to teleport back to level up my weapon before Maliketh, I was down to 9 percent, and from there it was no exploring, no optional fights, no unnecessary movement, running past anything I did not have to kill. At 6 percent, with two real bosses left, I had one of the cleanest Maliketh fights I have ever played, taking zero hits. Gideon fell in three hits at 4 percent. Then the fight after that went badly, with movement that looked hitched making it impossible to tell if an attack was actually delayed or just the image, and I died. Second attempt, at 3 percent, I got him.

The final boss arrived with the battery screaming 1 percent, and I died twice before the last kill

I ran straight for the final boss door when the Switch popped up a warning that the battery was about to die. No prep, no checking my build, just buff, door, go. Radagon went down fast, then Elden Beast appeared with the battery at 1 percent and another shutdown warning on screen. I was destroying him, his health dropping and dropping, until I was staring at him with basically no health left on either side, needing one hit. He hit me first. I died. The Switch was still alive, so I went back in, and on the second attempt Radagon killed me before I even reached Elden Beast. On the third attempt, with the buff from the great rune gone and nothing left to save me if I messed up again, I killed Elden Beast and reached the credits with the battery still reading 1 percent.

The 1 percent that would not die turned out to be a battery meter problem

Instead of answering my question, finishing the game raised a new one: what was actually happening with that last 1 percent, because it did not feel like 1 percent at all. I charged the Switch again, recreated the exact same setup, brought it back down to 1 percent, and timed how long it stayed alive while claiming it was about to shut down. The result explained a lot: with the aftermarket battery installed, that final percentage clearly was not behaving like a normal reading, so the final fight was not the console surviving on some microscopic drop of power after all. That makes the ending funnier to me, since I spent the entire final stretch convinced it could die at any second.

I did beat Elden Ring in the one charge challenge I set out to do. I replaced the battery, stripped away nearly every setting I could, played with the screen so dark my camera needed ISO 16,000, changed how I played around the frame rate, and pushed all the way to a final boss fight with the battery meter screaming 1 percent, dying twice before finally killing Elden Beast before the Switch gave up. After spending hours playing a game like this on a handheld, I started wondering something bigger: if a Nintendo handheld can do this, how much do I actually still need my PlayStation 5?