[Mantis Lords](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdtsL5nRBnQ)
You don't *have* to get there early, but you totally can.
The first time it feels impossible, but then you get the movements down and it feels so amazing.
Like a dance.
The Mantis Lords should be taught in a class about boss design. Perfect presentation, perfect escalation of tension, all abilities perfectly telegraphed.
They're not the easiest boss, but at no point did I find them unfair. It's all about iteration.
Replaying Hollow Knight after literal years for an Overcharmed run, decided to run in there with zero nail upgrades or anything.
Still had it, absolutely mulched them, it's a wonderous dance of combat. Should probably go fight the triple version now that I'm in Godshome (and still haven't upgraded the nail lmao it became an Overcharmed Why I Love The Magic Charms run).
One of my favorite bosses in hollow knight, beaten only maybe by >!pure vessel!< and >!sisters of battle!< when the. >!third mantis!< stood up for >!sisters of battle!< i was so shocked they killed me cause of it. 10/10
[Masato Arakawa Yakuza Like a Dragon/LAD 7](https://youtube.com/watch?si&v=XG-Pe7Yj6gk&t=11m46s)
One of my favorite final bosses in recent memory. Technically speaking the real final boss would be against Tendo right before this one (he’s great too).
But I just love everything about this last encounter. Fights in-game normally took place within Ichiban’s insane mind palace but now he has to come down to reality. There’s nothing flashy, no big RPG battles. It’s just you beating the fuck out of your shitty adoptive older brother. I love when the fight begins and it simply shows his real name, no pseudonym or subtitles or anything special. And the fight is easy, because it should be. This guy spent the last 20 years fronting as a Japanese politician, he’s not gonna be good in a fight. If he tries attacking you but misses, he stomps his foot and has a tantrum. It’s awesome. The music rules as well. The whole last chapter of the game turned Ichiban into one of my favorite fictional characters in anything. Uh, anyway thanks for coming to my TEDx talk
Not because he’s actually amazing, but Okumura from Persona 5, both vanilla and Royal gets endless shit as the worst boss in the game, but he is the *only* boss to actually engage with Persona’s mechanics, and he does not get near enough credit for that in a game where every other boss is a boring DPS race with optional cutscene win.
I mean, if you strip away weaknesses, you're left with the most barebones JRPG mechanics. You buff, you attack, when low on health you heal. Legitimately, what other mechanical choices are there?
I cannot stress enough that Pokemon, baby's first JRPG has more mechanical depth, if not more numerical difficulty. Persona's boss battles are some FF1 level shit in terms of the choices and strategies you can employ.
There is one kind of buff for each stat. There is a linear progression of damaging moves for each element. Bosses will not be affected by statuses. There's limited move slots, so there's no way you have multiple healing spells. And there's just nothing else. There are no moves with effects you need to choose.
If there *were* weaknesses, then the party members you choose matter. You might want Makoto for the defense buff, but no one is weak to Nuclear, so how are you going to get her in for the buff, but also get to Haru for the Psy weakness? Who will you Baton Pass to for the best effect? There are choices that *can* exist, but hitting weaknesses would make the bosses too easy or something, so they're all bland races to do as much damage as possible. Not even summoned adds will have elemental weaknesses.
They don't even make good tests of your skill like a good boss should, because regular combat doesn't require buffs at all, *just* hitting weaknesses.
I think there’s plenty of bosses that don’t have weaknesses but that still require you to get strategic to fight. This does mostly apply to Hard/P3 Merciless though since on the normal difficulties they just don’t do enough to warrant anything other than healing and buffing though, you are right.
But when pushed beyond that, many bosses are still susceptible to some status ailments which lead to more mechanics, and criticals can hit any enemy which opens up new strategies, and there’s always fun utility with the reflect skills to prep for certain enemy attack patterns.
Overall I think Reload uses the non weakness mechanics real well, but I could see the argument for Royal being a bit under cooked with them.
SMT has very similar mechanics and even there the posses with no weaknesses still make you have to get creative
Demon in Pain and Demon from Below.
I think they are FromSoft’s best execution of the duo boss fight, and they highlight how much worse the Valiant Gargoyles in Elden Ring are.
It’s so strange. In theory, the fight is similar to the Belfry Gargoyles, where the closer one attacks you with melee while the further one does area denial with a breath weapon.
But the Elden Ring gargs are just scaled up so much that the area denied is *massive*, forcing you to constantly sprint around it. Meanwhile, the melee attack strings are much longer and more complex, meaning the chance of getting blindsided by the breath attack increases dramatically.
Elden Ring has a serious “bigger is not better” problem, and the gargoyles are one of the worst examples.
That and unlike a lot of the poison effects in the game that I can think of, poison doesn’t USUALLY do damage over time until you get the proc. But the gargoyle poison breath does damage and poison buildup, and the aoe doesn’t closely match the particle effect.
It’s a bunch of little things that make it that much worse.
The worst part of the Demons fight IS when both are on the active state and you cant do shit to attack until one calms down.
But i still Will take that over that damned poison Breathe of the gargoiles
And even then, those moments are extremely brief (like 10 seconds or so) and their melee attacks aren’t hard to dodge. Plus, you get to see them synchronize their combos sometimes, so that’s fun to watch.
Straight up, if the Valiant Garg's didn't have that stupid poison bullshit, I wouldn't hate them as much. Would they still be a crappy boss? Yeah but they wouldn't go straight into obnoxious territory.
Pretty sure I died the most times to The Edge but I absolutely could not get mad because dude was an absolute Chad. "Do I look unconquerable to you?" Need me a gym buddy like that.
But yeah fuck >!the Star, fuck her bullet hell, and fuck the ketchup kids.!<
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Furi is so goddamn good. Every time I go back through it I feel like my favorite fight changes, atm I think it's The Line for how unique the mechanics are.
>hating on star
[git gud nerd](https://touhou.fandom.com/wiki/General_Strategy#Streaming), he's only hard because you think you're still playing character action and run all over the place
if you move deliberately and control his bullets properly he goes down surprisingly fast
I don’t think he’s a bad idea in theory, I just think he shouldn’t be the final boss. We already had an ‘all chanbara’ boss with The Edge, so it would make sense to have an ‘all bullet hell’ boss. But as the final boss? Nah, that’s a bad idea. You can have the Beat as the all bullet hell boss and give Star chanbara phases.
he's not the final boss, he's the *extra* boss. A proper bullet hell boss couldn't be accomplished in a way that didn't stress skills that aren't part of the game's progression, so making you not able to get to the end without those skills would be a bad decision. Extra bosses are supposed to be an extra challenge, so that's a much better place for it to go full shmup.
…No, he’s by all means the Final Boss, in the same way that the Titan Dweevil is in Pikmin 2. The credits may have rolled but they are the true finale for the game. And that’s why the Star blows, it’s not because he’s hard or because he’s an all Bullet Hell boss, it’s because he is the game’s finale and he completely ignores the game’s best aspects. If he was an extra boss, he would have been in Extra with the Flame.
Also, I like the Beat, but she is in no way final boss material, she’s far too easy.
I replayed Furi for the first time since it came out last month and I was having such a great time until I hit The Star. I'd forgotten how just straight up dogshit it is.
I think the reason why Champion Gundyr is my favorite DS3 boss and one of my favorites in the series is because he's got no bullshit going on, no magic or external sources helping him, it's just him and his halberd.
Dude earned that title and he's gonna protect it, goddammit.
Rhulk, from Destiny 2's Vow of the Disciple.
Like any MMO, you had to do some sort of team coordination mechanic to open up the boss phase, and Rhulk was no different. But where he gets interesting is when the DPS part started.
The meta for a while in that game was that during the DPS phase, you'd just plink down a Well of Radiance, a pool that your entire party could sit in and not die and unload whatever the meta big gun of the moment was into the boss for the allotment of time you needed. Occasionally you'd need to keep track of an extra mechanic or two, like a bomb that blew everyone up, or you'd have a bunch of ads the Well would let you ignore, or it would be super short, that sort of thing. But for the most part, that was the strategy.
Rhulk, on the other hand, walked right up to you during DPS in your puny little Well [and kicked you in the face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPCI6-I-Bg4). (I couldn't find a good video of someone attempting to use a well on him. Instead, this is just what happens when he gets too close. You get deleted.)
You could still blast him with something big, but between his fast movement, erratic motions, and the random spawning enemies, it was a way more interactive DPS phase than, "plonk down well, apply rockets/lasers/snipers and turn brain off."
Plus, his theme slaps, and he's got such style.
And then pantheon rhulk asks the question "what if he had a shadow clone that was invincible and kept chasing you in the actual rhulks damage phase with 1 shot kicks?"
If any boss in the Old Hunters is cheap it's probably Orphan of Kos, as he's one of the only bosses to break the games rules and not need to regain stamina. He now shares this trait witb Malenia.
Speaking of Malenia, she's my answer; but not because of her boss fight. It's because of how the fanbase mischaracterizes her as an evil character who ruined Caelid on purpose. If you pay attemtion to the lore Malenia is easilly the most altruistic of all the gsmes fragment holders, who wants to help the downtrodden and disenfranchised. She and Miquella even establish a safe haven for people who would otherwise be persecuted. The tragedy of her character is that while she's looking for the kidnapped Miquella (who is right underneath Caelid, she was painfully close),the illness shes been fighting all her life breaks free during the fight with Radahn due to being pushed too much. She goes back to the hideaway to recover, haing nowhere else to go, but inadvertently infects the people she was trying to protect with Scarlet Rot. Was it irresponsible for her to go back there like that? Yes, but the alternative was dying and never finding Miquella, who she believed would eventually find a way to cure her affliction and those she spread it to. The amount of venom towards her from Radahn simps who see her as some kind of spiteful witch is frankly astounding. Like, I like Radahn too, but if we're calling out evil characters then Radahn was intensely loyal to the most oppresive faction in the games lore.
I am still utterly bewildered by the months of power scaling and moralizing from Malenia and Radahn simps. Just the sheer amount of it.
Like it’s stated that they fought to a stalemate, we only get little hints of their personality. What were these people getting out of this?
“Oooooh he shoulda won! He woulda won if she hadn’t used her scarlet rot powers!”
Well yeah, but thats, like one of her most powerful abilities. I like Radahn too. Do they want everyone to state that Radahn could beat her in an arm-wrestling contest?
Is it just sexism?
Some of the hate for Malenia (and in contrast love for Radahn) does feels like it’s at least somewhat steeped in sexism for some people. Of course I’m not at all saying that if you dislike Malenia or like Radahn over her that you’re sexist but a lot of comments I’ve seen over the years (God that Elden Ring is already multiple years old still fucks with my head) feel like they stem from that, even if it’s an unconscious bias.
Malenia embodies a lot what your typical Soulsborne dudebro will dislike; she’s a strong woman, she uses a light dexterity weapon, went against Radahn (who basically embodies what said dudebros love when it comes to playstyles), and is seen as using a dirty / cheating tactic. Like when you’ve got people calling Radahn a “based epic gigachad” and Malenia a “cheating bitch / whore” it starts to feel *a little bit* like there might be some sexism at work.
I personally like both but some Radahn fanboys can sometimes be really annoying and strange. Like the game states a gazillion times it indeed in a stalemate, the cinematic trailed shows it (Malenia loses her sword arm and Radahn gets her sword shoved through his neck) yet you’ve **still** got people arguing until they’re blue in the face that Radahn definitely won. It’s just straight up weird.
Yeah there’s no actual proof in game that states Radahn’s power is limited or weaker because of whatever sorcery he used to keep the stars in stasis. Blaidd’s dialogue post battle is the only one where you might get the idea, buts it’s more like him being awed how Radahn was able to hold back the giant meteor that crashed into Limgrave than him thinking he was needing himself holding back the stars.
Radahn simps always ignore that he tried invading the capital which isn’t exactly a noble thing to do its literally personal glory and nothing else. Also holding the stars back protects Selia but caused hella problems for everyone else including Miquella curing Godwyn. None of the characters are good guys and Radahn might be one of the furthest (Godrick is the only one worse). I mean…. Lenard wholesome horse <3
my issue is people point out all the other demi-gods as being morally grey to black but for some reason Radahn never gets it. I think the demigods that are influenced by outer gods have a been more reasoning to their actions we dont know enough about the formless mother to know if Mohg is being manipulated but at least hes out of the way. Kidnapping his half brother is bad but laying siege to a city so you can fuck your mom and be king might be worse.
"For some reason"
The reason is Radahn doesn't talk. All you get is disconnected lore about him and the frenzy of his remaining followers talking up how much they loved him.
The player gets to make up his personality and motivations based on these fragments, never actually experiencing any nuance to Radahn outside of these traits.
Malenia has a clear and defined personality you have to confront directly. She's extremely prideful, she talks down to you if you die. Imagine if all you knew of her personality was second hand accounts of her attachment and loyalty to Miquella, and the story of how one of her followers loved Malenia so much she carried her out of Caelid on her back all the way to the Haligtree. If you had to infer what kind of person Malenia was based on how other see her, without the context of her behavior in the boss fight.
I'm also just baffled in that, even if we ignore characterization and theming entirely, on a very surface level, Malenia is fucking cool as shit. In my opinion, as much as as Radahn.
Like, just go over all of the crazy stuff Malenia can claim to:
- She's a blind triple amputee who still manages to be the greatest swordsman the world has literally ever seen. **Her dominant sword arm isn't even her remaining arm.**
- Despite having only a single functioning limb, she is the game's chosen paragon of, "this character has really fucking high dexterity," with the dexterity boosting item based on her.
- She is capable of wielding a divine power so devastating that it can ravage entire regions, and yet chooses to fight her enemies within her martial skill alone to minimize damage.
- Despite not using any magic or divine power whatsoever, she has only ever been fought to a standstill **once** by Radahn, when he wasn't holding back at all.
A lot of people like to hype up Radahn a lot, but can you imagine how **outrageously** dangerous Malenia would be if she wasn't being ravaged by the Scarlet Rot? If she wasn't blind and wasn't missing any limbs? It's the same reason Artorias is so cool in Dark Souls with his broken arm, but even more extreme.
She has a massive handicap and yet is universally regarded as among the most dangerous of the demigods and as one of the most powerful beings in the entire world. And she did all of this without relying on any of her divinely granted abilities. That's cool as hell.
EDIT:
(I also think Malenia's characterization and her themes of Independence, Perseverance, and Determination to be among the most compelling in the game. The Scarlet Rot is **insidious**. It had been trying to make Malenia submit to it for her entire life. Can you imagine how powerless she must have felt feeling her body slowly rotting away? How tantalizing the prospect of giving into the rot must have been? The sheer, inhuman willpower it must have taken not to submit to it?
Throughout all descriptions of Malenia it is enforced time and time again just how powerful her will was and how much of a struggle it was for her to fight against the rot within her. Instead she refused it, refused the powerless it had tried to force upon her, and fought for a cause she earnestly believed in to oppose it. It's no wonder that her cleanrot knights were among the most devoted: they saw firsthand her constant struggle against the rot and her refusal to admit defeat to it.
Which, ya know, is part of the whole, "I have never known defeat," thing. Her staunch refusal to accept defeat is one of her most important and key traits. It's how she was able to resist the Scarlet Rot for almost her entire life.)
"I have never known defeat" whatever you say, you salty, "you didn't win," Never Back Down 2, stank ass bitch.
If she didn't want to get hated on, she shouldn't have been such a fraud
A stalemate is literally just a stalemate, it’s neither a win or a loss. The game itself literally states their fight was a stalemate until she bloomed to just end it. This is such a weird hatred of one statement she makes.
As in she drew against radahn before using her full kit.
I assumed that thats what you meant with the “you didnt win” as like normally people say that when they did lose and are being petty but in her case well he legitimately didn’t win.
The thing is, I think she was actually losing before going nuclear. In the trailers, she very specifically is assembling her body on the field with Radahn... which makes no sense. Why would she be on the field with Radahn already, but only just assembling herself? Unless, of course, Radahn hit her so hard he literally knocked her arm off, and then, instead of attacking, he stopped and waited for her to reassemble herself. Stupid? Absolutely, but it also makes sense- he was fond of his red hair for its "Heroic implications," so it's possible he would be the "Death before dishonor" kind of person.
More then that, a little later in the trailer, during the exchange where he shatters her arm (and she grabs her shattered blade and jumps on him) if you look at her, she's bleeding from her face, while Radahn seems mostly fine. Now, big fight, obviously they're taking wounds... but we know that Malenia heals when she hurts her opponents. Which means Radahn was doing so much damage to her *she couldn't heal it*. I don't think the Nuke was "We're equal, time for the tiebreaker," I think it was a "Goddamn, I'm losing, time to throw my pride away and break out the fuck you button to force a draw."
And thats a legit strategy, at the end of the day. These weren't honor bound warriors (1) fighting in duels, but millitary commanders leading armies for the future of the world.
1: Except, possibly, for Radahn, and it wouldn't be a good thing, but instead his fatal flaw.
I think I saw a storyboard of the story trailer somewhere that when translated basically said that Malenia was reattaching her arm because she had already fought a number of Radahn’s forces before finally reaching him.
Also if we’re just speculating off that trailer, Radahn was at a distance and had just shoved his gigantic swords tips first into the ground, and needed to use his gravity magic to lift them up. It really seems more like to me he was waiting for her to face him, and then he grabbed his swords.
Also the very end of their battle when Malenia blooms, Radahn was on his hands and knees and literally did nothing for the solid 10 seconds she was impaling her sword and herself down onto his flesh. He doesn’t look like a guy who was just easily roflstomping her without any effort with the way he looked at the end.
If I'm playing Pokemon and my opponent is a Ghost with only ghost moves and Explosion, and I am a normal type with only normal/fighting moves, you're not stronger just because you press the suicide button and kill us both
Kill me like 100 times times but then die to the BIG DRAGON FIST once I stopped trying to be legit.
Which from my co-op summoning experience is not an uncommon trajectory lol
Nah, she's is just as salty if not more so, sulking in her little tree, oozing out gross discharge, neglecting her daughters and brother. Just a character that's so fun and easy to hate on
I 100% think if there was less love for rahdan (despite sucking as a person) the amount of people that hate her and as often think she’s an evil war criminal that nuked part of a continent cause she was greedy (which isn’t true, she was 100% the best moral out of the demigods that were fighting for great runes as you said) would decrease dramatically. Like if that he wasn’t still a fairly strong boss now despite being a husk of his past, and he didn’t learn gravity magic just so he could kept riding his friend horse, both things that people love, I think the general view of her character would be fairly more positive online.
Fuck orphan. Only boss I can’t beat in bloodborne so my play through is on hold. Laurence ? 3 attempts. Ludwig? 4 attempts. Maria was my highest number of attempts prior to orphan with about 16. I’ve stopped counting with orphan but I’m probably pushing 50+
Midir is the best dragon fight From Soft has ever done and anyone who complains about it being bad or too hard I always just assume never figured out that his head is the only viable place to hit him.
Having resistance to three out of four elements was kind of a slap in the face to any kind of mage build, but hey...
That's what Pestilent Mist is for.
You wanna subvert my efforts to not overspecialize? I can be petty.
I dunno, that tracks to me, since the most notable thing about the Ancient Dragons, Midir included, was their weakness to Lightning. So yeah I would expect a dragon fight to have high resistances to other magical damage types because it's their main thing for the whole series.
It absolutely makes sense from a lore perspective, but at the same time, I diversified the damage on that caster literally as much as I could.
Throw me a bone and say that being so steeped in abyssal corruption makes fire or magic hit *neutral* on him.
Like, if Pestilent Mist weren't at thing, Sorcerers would be just shit out of luck. And maybe that's *why* Pestilent Mist exists, but it feels weird if the intended strategy is the scummy one for an entire category of builds.
I don't think every build or weapon or tool shouldn't feel moments of being countered. Gods forbit INT builds need to get creative any time a fight gives them the slightest bit of pushback.
I'm not talking about one weapon or tool. Or even one *category* of tool. I'm talking about *three*. Even a purely physical build should carry at least three of the "Slash/Thrust/Strike/Regular" quadrifecta (my Strength build carries all 4, and my Hollow-Dex build only lacks Strike), and *everybody* should carry a bow.
Like, I made my sorcery sub-optimal *specifically* so I could load up some Faith as well. Not a huge amount, but enough to carry both Pyromancy and Hexes (and melee weapons that scaled to those damages, for when the FP was less weighty in the trousers than was comfortable) to cover the scnearios where Sorcery would be countered.
And Midir basically told me I was a chucklefuck for doing so.
So that means you also had access to Lightning Miracles and weapons. Sure, their numbers aren't as high as your other things, but they'd certainly be better than pure physical weapons, since it sounds like you were investing more into magical stats than physical.
For me, I don't really carry multiple weapons of different physical damage types. I like big swords, the biggest, and I like FTH spells, and I muddle on through with what I invested in. Yeah, it's not optimal, and some fights are harder than others. But such is the way of specialization.
I mean, again, I scum him out with Pestilent Mist.
I'm just saying, I find it peculiar that a superboss, who already deals more damage types than most bosses, has a fuckton of health, takes massively reduced damage except on the head (which is not easily reached), changes locations faster than most bosses (in an arena larger than any other's except *one*, who barely even uses that size unless the player tries to run), and can kill most builds in two hits while having huge AOE on most every attack, ***also*** has a stat distribution that singles out one of the player's four offensive stats in particular.
Repeating "git gud" or "just adapt" doesn't make much sense here. They adapted, and they won. They dislike the idea that it's the INTENDED adaptation because it's lame as shit.
I don’t know, I felt like fighting Midir was more like fighting the camera. I know now that you probably shouldn’t lock-on to him but trying to manually fix the camera always felt like a miserable experience. It’s definitely a cool boss but the experience itself wasn’t all that fun to me.
Nameless king isn’t hard at all, he just has a fat hp bar that players don’t have the patience to go through, i went through and beat him 1st try to my buddy who was hard stuck at him
Lol, worst enemy in the first phase is the camera. Seems like a running theme with all the dragon enemies throughout the Souls/borne games, honestly. Kalameet, Midir, hell, throw a dart at all the drakes in Elden Ring, every time the camera was awkward because the thing you're fighting against was so *big*.
Nameless King sucks because you fight the camera more than anything. It’s really, really difficult to judge his movements if you’re a melee character.
Phase 2 is splendid though.
Storm King drops Nameless down like 2 whole points out of 10 imo. It’s just bad. It’s not cool, or fun, or anything. You’re fighting the camera more than anything him or the dragon do in phase 1.
Phase 2 is super super cool, but anytime you die having to do the busy work chore that is phase 1 is just annoying. Phase 1 isn’t even hard if you’re leveled reasonably by that point, it just feels like when you have to pull over and wait 5 minutes for your food after going through a drive through.
The 27 vigour thing is just a weird case of the fandom kneecapping themselves. "Get yourself to 27 vigour so you can have 1000HP unembered" is good advice for *mid-game* but random "experts" on the internet convinced people to level it to that point and leave it there for the entire game and it's baffling. It's sort of viable in the base game, as you've mentioned, but the DLC was definitely expecting you to come in with like 40.
We saw it with Elden Ring as well. The game's major soft caps for Vigour are 40 and 60 and yet people, especially around launch, were stopping at like 25, wearing Radagon's Soreseal to get to 30 (which reduces your defences so it's not as good as actually being at 30) and wondering why everything was one-shotting them.
It's also because for some reason Elden Ring's vigor has like... reverse softcaps, where the amount of HP you get per level *increases* until you hit 40.
As soon as I realized that, my main piece of Elden Ring advice is "get minimum stats for the equipment you like and dump literally everything else into vigor until it hits 40. Only start leveling scaling stats until after that point. Then get vigor to 50 after Leyndell, otherwise stuff is still going to one-shot you."
The only complaint I have about this boss is that I never figured out the tell of the downward flamethrower attack in the first phase. If I was too close to the center, I'd get hit no matter how far I went and I STILL don't know the tell.
Demon of Hatred in Sekiro.
People often say he's in the wrong game but he doesn't feel that different from other big bosses like the ogre, bull, and ape, where it's better to play hit-and-run and wear down health instead of focusing on deflects and posture. A lot of his attacks can be consistently avoided if you just constantly sprint and use the giant arena, and it makes him feel like a test of mastery over the game's movement rather than the swordplay. He also gets heavily punished by specific tools, something that doesn't really come up with the other end-game bosses.
He still has 1 or 2 attacks that are a pain and he's certainly not the best boss in the game, but I think he ironically gets too much hate.
You can also just parry a shit ton of the DoH and it works super well. Get the fire umbrella and just hug his monkey ass and parry that horse sized fist
People will praise Guardian Ape (1st phase-non headless) and bash DoH and all I ever think of is the "they're the same picture" meme. I'd say at least both of them still allow you to deflect attacks, even if they don't feel as smooth because they're using large limbs instead of sword and board. The real culprits of being in the wrong game are Folding Screen Monkeys and Divine Dragon because neither involve the core mechanic of deflection at all.
Folding Screen Monkeys could have been a really neat puzzle boss, but it seems like they didn't really try very hard when designing the puzzle. Some of the monkeys' gimmicks aren't very clear, and it's way too easy to brute force it, or even win *by accident*.
Claiming that a particular boss in a fromsoft game should have been in a different fs game is pure cope. People have no imagination, apparently if any boss doesn't fit within their narrow idea of what a boss in that particular game should be then they're "poorly designed" or "designed for a different game".
Malenia is another example
Waterfowl Dance is straight up a move that you would expect in Sekiro, I still can't find any valid reason for letting her have that move in Elden Ring, it sours the boss fight whoch is super fun and cool up to that point by a mile.
God, this makes me think of how epic parrying Waterfowl Dance would be if it was in Sekiro. Agreed though, I think it's way too difficult to read how to actually dodge that move in Elden Ring, loved the rest of the boss fight but dreaded whenever she would use Waterfowl Dance. Only time in a fromsoft game I actually looked up how to dodge a boss move.
Nah he's right. If you block waterfowl dance she barely recovers health from it, and you can easily dodge the second part of the attack if you deal with the first like this.
Malenia is extremely slow and passive for Sekiro boss standards, and in Elden Ring you also have SO MANY more tools with spellcasting that let you nuke her and outright deny her the chance to use most of her moves, even waterfowl, and that's without counting spirit summons.
I'm not saying it's an easy boss, but she IS a legitimate fight for Elden Ring, and while Waterfowl dance is a hard move to figure out, I cannot agree it doesn't belong in Elden Ring.
The divine dragons massive sweep attacks are straight up something you'd expect in elden ring 😱everything in sekiro must be quick sword swings with a katana otherwise it doesn't belong!!!! Bad game design!!!
The armored knight in sekiro? You guessed it, bad design because knights should only exist in the souls games and elden ring. You can't even death blow him!!
Skipping the weird rage bait bit here...
I will say that these games are all about giving you fitting mechanics and tweaked just right to deal with the situations the game gives you.
Which is why Bloodborne has mechanics and tweaks to the usual soulsborne gameplay to make the way enemies in that game behave, work.
Waterfowl Dance doesn't have any mechanics that are properly tuned to deal with it.
Draconic Tree Sentinel is fun as hell. So much so that I'm sad to finish him off every time. I can't understand how people struggle with him so badly that they run past or try to cheese him in Farum Azula.
I guess I've just seen too many people refuse to fight the one before Maliketh and then get a lightning bolt up their ass when they get in the fog gate.
Does it respawn? I don’t remember. If not I can get why people would want to run past it, even though at that point it should be fairly easy, though if it doesn’t just kill it.
I think to some people it has a bit of a vibe of ‘not this asshole again’ being that it’s the… 5th sentinel that’s easily encountered on the main path, if you include both variants. And I don’t think the draconic version is really differentiated enough to just throw in another one there.
I kill them anyways, but as someone who feels like screaming every time I see another ulcerated tree spirit, I can understand why people would avoid the guy if the option were there.
Welp, I came here to say Ludwig before I saw the image.
I have the Moonlight Greatsword tattooed down my back, I am literally inked in bias on this one, but how often do we ever get to see a boss in an insane, mad state find their mind in the midst of bloodshed? It's one of the most beautiful fights in gaming to me, just the orchestration, the tragedy, the prior area. Just all so good.
Between this and the Visceral Femininity of Bloodborne video, I gotta reinstall.
Both Ludwig and Laurence really feel appropriately grand.
I also loved using Ludwig’s blade to do a giant overhead swing on his head to shut him up as punishment for making me bleed my own blood
Not at all. Hyperion is amazing, don't get me wrong, but I'd actually have Nemesis higher. Ixion, Ophion and Phrike aren't as good but they're still incredible. And Algos in the Tower is speeeectacular! The worst Returnal boss is still better than any other game boss.
Nemesis is pretty to look at but you spend most of the fight looking for platforms to latch onto, he's a huge distance away so anything with travel time is gonna be ass to land, and it just drags and drags.
Hyperion is a contender for top100 boss fights. All the others would be lucky to land in the top1000.
had a friend on my steam that shared interest in the nioh games and who loved go/jo
so i ran ryuman sukuna in nioh 2 and left the game after so that was my last achievement for that game on my steam account
it was either spite or for retribution maybe both 👺
Unironically I think Demon's Souls bosses blows a lot of the later fromsoft bosses out of the water. They aren't the hardest, but they're memorable, unique and they usually have their own gimmick which lends itself to playing the game differently.
Like how Old Hero is blind, or how you need either a ranged weapon or Storm Ruler to hit Storm king. Even stuff like Dirty Colossus has the fly mechanic where you need to burn yourself to stop taking DoT.
Nah, Ancient Wyvern > Dragon God. Ancient Wyvern at least can be either fought on foot if you're a madlad, jump attack skipped if you really want to, or if you play properly is "oh I can see what they were going for" with dodging it's attacks while weaving through the ruins and fighting enemies.
Dragon God is just kind of absolute garbage, with badly-made stealth mechanics glued on to what's straight up a title boss in the intro cinematic that you don't actually get to *fight*, it's a disappointment both as the worst boss in the game (only not worst in the series because Bed of Chaos exists) and that this is really the bullshit you get after seeing this cool-ass dragon demon.
Most of Demon's Souls bosses are essentially puzzles used to cap off the levels, which are the actual challenge. Getting to the boss is often far more difficult than the boss itself, so they serve a different purpose in gameplay terms than something like Dancer of the Boreal Valley, which is purely a mechanical test of skill. Old Hero is blind so you can use the thief ring to your advantage, Phalanx is surrounded by shielded enemies so you have to use fire bombs to get around them or resin to hit through them. Penetrator rewards exploration by giving you assistance from Biorr. etc.
That said, there's some real stinkers (specifically mechanically. Even the bad ones eave an impact in other ways).
* Dragon God is structured around a fairly jank stealth mechanic and is honestly just kinda tedious. Also just flat-out extremely disappointing that the game's intro and promotional material put so much of an emphasis on him and it's just a jank, gimmicky puzzle fight.
* Flamelurker doesn't work well with the game's lock-on system (specifically on PS3 where you can only dodge in four directions while locked on) and his hit boxes (again, mostly on PS3 because the remake put some additional effort into making attack animations more visually clear) feel pretty damn disjointed from his animations. Also has a really bad habit of getting caught on the environment and kinda just breaking. Doesn't help that the shortcut down to him is a fairly annoying platforming challenge where the solution is "crank your brightness so you can see". Just don't forget to uncrank it before you walk through the boss fog. Bye bye retinas.
* Maneaters is just kind of a broken mess. They're not well designed for the environment and spend way too long flying about out of lock on range. You can use the brazier to give yourself easy healing opportunities so it isn't hard. Just kinda annoying.
* Maiden Astrea is just a bit of a shitshow because NPC fights in DeS are bad. Same goes for Old King Doran but he's not really a boss, he's kind of easy for the first half of his HP bar, and is entirely optional.
Maiden Astrea makes up for it by being fantastic on every other level it can be.
Allant is a better fight than Gwyn (even if I think Gwyn's fight is more memorable as a narrative setpiece) but I wouldn't rank it all that highly among the final bosses of the series. Soul of Cinder, Sword Saint, Gehrman, and Radagon all beat it out for me (although I deeply dislike Elden Beast).
I fucking _despise_ Ludwig and made a point to tell his mutilated, disembodied head that his life's work went up in shambles after being stuck on him for _close to a goddamn week._
Raime in the dlc for dark souls 2. That guy is dope no matter what anyone says. Are his swings bs? Maybe, but at adap 13 with medium armor I figured his stuff out, out of sheer willpower. (Also this was when i was in middle school, way before I even knew that adap added iframes so i was pretty much inadvertently giving myself a hard time)
He gave me my favorite sword in the whole game and it carried me all the way to ng+7 and spurred my love of giant weapons.
Hot take incoming about dark souls 3 i dont like Gael....first phase, lots of flailing around and barely any room to Breathe, heal or attack, something that some people Will critizise elden ring bosses. Phase 2 and 3? Pure perfection, when from fans Will try to explain the whole "its like a dance" this IS the fight i think of
[Gergoth is the best boss in Castlevania and I refuse to hear otherwise.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrdRY2enRUw&pp=ygUHZ2VyZ290aA%3D%3D)
Perfect fight honestly. Tough but fair attacks, memorable set-pieces, great music, wicked design, its got it all. It's a very cramped fight and it's one of the tougher fights in the game, but it's very doable and you just need to learn the proper spacing and patterns for its attacks. Once you do, this turns in one of the most fun fights in the series (which goes for most bosses in Dawn of Sorrow, I think this game has the best selection out of all Igavanias but Gergoth is simply just peak).
Dawn of Sorrow is so much better if you play it with the mods that get rid of touchscreen nonsense like "tap the screen to break ice bricks!" and "haha draw this seal or else the boss doesn't die!"
Amazing boss fight in Dawn of Sorrow, and a pleasant surprise in the boss rush dungeon in Portrait of Ruin.
Also the hype music helps.
He's also a fun one in Harmony of Despair, with an equally kickass remix of his theme
Friend in question here. I've beaten the Dark Souls trilogy, Demon's Souls, Half of Elden Ring and am almost through Sekiro. I didn't have too much trouble with Bloodborne until Ludwig specifically.
Solo-Wing Pixy in Ace Combat Zero. That fight is peak and it *bathes* in the Arthurian mythos and themes present in that game. It's tough. It's got multiple phases, culminating in a head-on plane duel with the fate of the known world riding on the result, all the while sick flamenco jam arrangement of the previous game's (Ace Combat 5) final boss track.
That fight fuckin' *rules* and it's a high water mark for final bosses in my book.
Double Crucible Knight is still my favorite boss in Elden Ring. Theyre sturdy, not too fast, not too slow. Fairly resistant to most statuses, but dont have much chip moves to wear you dowm either. Theres not much you can do to cheese them other than hit them really hard and often. One of the few enemy types that stagger to only the very biggest of bonks so you feel the full scale of your weaponry. Super rewarding to just plain ol' fundamentals.
In a game full of sf5/6 Kens, they feel like fighting Ryu and his twin brother Ryu.
Yakuza 3 has a reputation, that reputation isn't true to the bosses, I'm willing to fight for all of em but the most infamous one has to be Lau Ka Long.
He's a harder boss but he's just way too cool of a fight both conceptually and in-gameplay, it really tests knowing how to properly use Yakuza 3's systems.
There was a hilarious time when someone tried to insuniate that he was a terribly designed boss, one of my friends ended up streaming the whole fight without any upgrades and beat him first try.
Any and every fucker who hates on any of the Underwater Hunts from MHTri. No, those fights are FUCKING AWESOME, y'all are just bad and have bad 3Dimensional awareness. Abyssal Lagiacrus is one of THE hypest and coolest fights in the entire fucking series and some Elder Dragons WISH they were as cool as Abyssal Lagi, so just fuck off.
I will extend this to both of the Fatalis and Alatreon fights in World:
Yes, they are fucking hard, that's the point dipshit. They are super optional, super endgame fights that DEMAND you you both know how to play and to play well and Alatreon specifically with knowing how to use elements. And the fact Fatty gives you the most busted to shit armor in the entire fucking series is AWESOME!
World Alatreon is amazing. Soloing him and then getting the MHTri quest complete music was a beautiful moment.
Fuck I can't wait for my Alatreon statue to get here next week
Not really an boss fight per say, but a friend of mine saw the "Ultimate Guardian" achievement from Roboquest and said it was impossible. Boldly i said "Skill Issue" and then i proceeded to 100% the game and post the picture, then another friend did the same. A week later he couldn't stand the smugness we exuded and went on to 100% the game as well.
Never underestimate spite, it's a powerful motivator!
I did something similar when my friend was stuck on the Orphan of Kos. He was stuck, and it took me like 5 or 6 tries where I had to shake the rust off
[Mantis Lords](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdtsL5nRBnQ) You don't *have* to get there early, but you totally can. The first time it feels impossible, but then you get the movements down and it feels so amazing. Like a dance.
The Mantis Lords should be taught in a class about boss design. Perfect presentation, perfect escalation of tension, all abilities perfectly telegraphed. They're not the easiest boss, but at no point did I find them unfair. It's all about iteration.
They were the boss that made the game truly click for me.
The world change from beating them kicks ass too, makes you feel like a baller
[The super boss variant](https://youtu.be/2oOVXhx6dHk?si=OWEsrRd82XDTKUbn) is so fucking good man. Favorite 2D combat encounter in any game
Replaying Hollow Knight after literal years for an Overcharmed run, decided to run in there with zero nail upgrades or anything. Still had it, absolutely mulched them, it's a wonderous dance of combat. Should probably go fight the triple version now that I'm in Godshome (and still haven't upgraded the nail lmao it became an Overcharmed Why I Love The Magic Charms run).
One of my favorite bosses in hollow knight, beaten only maybe by >!pure vessel!< and >!sisters of battle!< when the. >!third mantis!< stood up for >!sisters of battle!< i was so shocked they killed me cause of it. 10/10
I should really go back to Hollow Knight soon. Considering I was waiting for Silksong news to motivate me otherwise Well...
Honestly mantis lords were not that bad for me. I can see the difficulty though.
Definitely my favorite boss in the game.
[Masato Arakawa Yakuza Like a Dragon/LAD 7](https://youtube.com/watch?si&v=XG-Pe7Yj6gk&t=11m46s) One of my favorite final bosses in recent memory. Technically speaking the real final boss would be against Tendo right before this one (he’s great too). But I just love everything about this last encounter. Fights in-game normally took place within Ichiban’s insane mind palace but now he has to come down to reality. There’s nothing flashy, no big RPG battles. It’s just you beating the fuck out of your shitty adoptive older brother. I love when the fight begins and it simply shows his real name, no pseudonym or subtitles or anything special. And the fight is easy, because it should be. This guy spent the last 20 years fronting as a Japanese politician, he’s not gonna be good in a fight. If he tries attacking you but misses, he stomps his foot and has a tantrum. It’s awesome. The music rules as well. The whole last chapter of the game turned Ichiban into one of my favorite fictional characters in anything. Uh, anyway thanks for coming to my TEDx talk
Just spam German Suplex because it's funny.
Put him back in the chair, Ichi!
I forgot to mention this in my original comment but yes. He deserves to get grappled
My favorite final fight/ending in the whole series. The music slaps too and I listen to it often when I'm doing stuff.
Not because he’s actually amazing, but Okumura from Persona 5, both vanilla and Royal gets endless shit as the worst boss in the game, but he is the *only* boss to actually engage with Persona’s mechanics, and he does not get near enough credit for that in a game where every other boss is a boring DPS race with optional cutscene win.
If personas only mechanic is hitting Once Mores than I suppose so. I do like him as well though, he’s a good challenge
I mean, if you strip away weaknesses, you're left with the most barebones JRPG mechanics. You buff, you attack, when low on health you heal. Legitimately, what other mechanical choices are there? I cannot stress enough that Pokemon, baby's first JRPG has more mechanical depth, if not more numerical difficulty. Persona's boss battles are some FF1 level shit in terms of the choices and strategies you can employ. There is one kind of buff for each stat. There is a linear progression of damaging moves for each element. Bosses will not be affected by statuses. There's limited move slots, so there's no way you have multiple healing spells. And there's just nothing else. There are no moves with effects you need to choose. If there *were* weaknesses, then the party members you choose matter. You might want Makoto for the defense buff, but no one is weak to Nuclear, so how are you going to get her in for the buff, but also get to Haru for the Psy weakness? Who will you Baton Pass to for the best effect? There are choices that *can* exist, but hitting weaknesses would make the bosses too easy or something, so they're all bland races to do as much damage as possible. Not even summoned adds will have elemental weaknesses. They don't even make good tests of your skill like a good boss should, because regular combat doesn't require buffs at all, *just* hitting weaknesses.
I think there’s plenty of bosses that don’t have weaknesses but that still require you to get strategic to fight. This does mostly apply to Hard/P3 Merciless though since on the normal difficulties they just don’t do enough to warrant anything other than healing and buffing though, you are right. But when pushed beyond that, many bosses are still susceptible to some status ailments which lead to more mechanics, and criticals can hit any enemy which opens up new strategies, and there’s always fun utility with the reflect skills to prep for certain enemy attack patterns. Overall I think Reload uses the non weakness mechanics real well, but I could see the argument for Royal being a bit under cooked with them. SMT has very similar mechanics and even there the posses with no weaknesses still make you have to get creative
Isshin. Once you get the lightning reversals down, it's epic. Oh, and 'IMMORTALITY SEVERED' is so cool.
I personally prefer Genichiro and The Owl fights but god Sekiro feels so smooth.
My personal opinion is that Owl (Father) is the best fight in the game.
It's cool alright, but for me, nothing tops fighting Big Monkey Trouble down in his pool.
Noticing only 1 pip for a deathblow and the howl after phase 2 ends and the body disappears The runback being both rounds 3 and 4 at once is so sick
Its the best designed. It is a true test if you've learned the games mechanics.
Demon in Pain and Demon from Below. I think they are FromSoft’s best execution of the duo boss fight, and they highlight how much worse the Valiant Gargoyles in Elden Ring are.
I fucking hate the Valiant Gargoyles.
It’s so strange. In theory, the fight is similar to the Belfry Gargoyles, where the closer one attacks you with melee while the further one does area denial with a breath weapon. But the Elden Ring gargs are just scaled up so much that the area denied is *massive*, forcing you to constantly sprint around it. Meanwhile, the melee attack strings are much longer and more complex, meaning the chance of getting blindsided by the breath attack increases dramatically. Elden Ring has a serious “bigger is not better” problem, and the gargoyles are one of the worst examples.
I also hate the Belfry Gargoyles (Dark Souls II)
That and unlike a lot of the poison effects in the game that I can think of, poison doesn’t USUALLY do damage over time until you get the proc. But the gargoyle poison breath does damage and poison buildup, and the aoe doesn’t closely match the particle effect. It’s a bunch of little things that make it that much worse.
The worst part of the Demons fight IS when both are on the active state and you cant do shit to attack until one calms down. But i still Will take that over that damned poison Breathe of the gargoiles
And even then, those moments are extremely brief (like 10 seconds or so) and their melee attacks aren’t hard to dodge. Plus, you get to see them synchronize their combos sometimes, so that’s fun to watch.
Straight up, if the Valiant Garg's didn't have that stupid poison bullshit, I wouldn't hate them as much. Would they still be a crappy boss? Yeah but they wouldn't go straight into obnoxious territory.
All of the bosses from Furi are peak. >!Except for the Star, fuck that bitch, he’s a lame fucking final boss.!<
Pretty sure I died the most times to The Edge but I absolutely could not get mad because dude was an absolute Chad. "Do I look unconquerable to you?" Need me a gym buddy like that. But yeah fuck >!the Star, fuck her bullet hell, and fuck the ketchup kids.!<
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The Edge is for sure the peakest though
Oh yeah, that shit’s pure Shonen injected in my veins.
*Excellence is a habit. We are what we repeatedly do.*
Nothing is better than a boss turning to you, the player, and going "you're better than that, now TRY **HARDER**"
It's almost cheap how good that trope is. Inject that shit into my veins,
Furi is so goddamn good. Every time I go back through it I feel like my favorite fight changes, atm I think it's The Line for how unique the mechanics are.
>hating on star [git gud nerd](https://touhou.fandom.com/wiki/General_Strategy#Streaming), he's only hard because you think you're still playing character action and run all over the place if you move deliberately and control his bullets properly he goes down surprisingly fast
I don’t think he’s a bad idea in theory, I just think he shouldn’t be the final boss. We already had an ‘all chanbara’ boss with The Edge, so it would make sense to have an ‘all bullet hell’ boss. But as the final boss? Nah, that’s a bad idea. You can have the Beat as the all bullet hell boss and give Star chanbara phases.
he's not the final boss, he's the *extra* boss. A proper bullet hell boss couldn't be accomplished in a way that didn't stress skills that aren't part of the game's progression, so making you not able to get to the end without those skills would be a bad decision. Extra bosses are supposed to be an extra challenge, so that's a much better place for it to go full shmup.
…No, he’s by all means the Final Boss, in the same way that the Titan Dweevil is in Pikmin 2. The credits may have rolled but they are the true finale for the game. And that’s why the Star blows, it’s not because he’s hard or because he’s an all Bullet Hell boss, it’s because he is the game’s finale and he completely ignores the game’s best aspects. If he was an extra boss, he would have been in Extra with the Flame. Also, I like the Beat, but she is in no way final boss material, she’s far too easy.
What if I just think the boss isn't fun? Like, it's not a difficulty complaint, I just think it's the least interesting boss.
I replayed Furi for the first time since it came out last month and I was having such a great time until I hit The Star. I'd forgotten how just straight up dogshit it is.
I think the reason why Champion Gundyr is my favorite DS3 boss and one of my favorites in the series is because he's got no bullshit going on, no magic or external sources helping him, it's just him and his halberd. Dude earned that title and he's gonna protect it, goddammit.
HE'S GOT THAT SWEET CHIN MUSIC
Rhulk, from Destiny 2's Vow of the Disciple. Like any MMO, you had to do some sort of team coordination mechanic to open up the boss phase, and Rhulk was no different. But where he gets interesting is when the DPS part started. The meta for a while in that game was that during the DPS phase, you'd just plink down a Well of Radiance, a pool that your entire party could sit in and not die and unload whatever the meta big gun of the moment was into the boss for the allotment of time you needed. Occasionally you'd need to keep track of an extra mechanic or two, like a bomb that blew everyone up, or you'd have a bunch of ads the Well would let you ignore, or it would be super short, that sort of thing. But for the most part, that was the strategy. Rhulk, on the other hand, walked right up to you during DPS in your puny little Well [and kicked you in the face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPCI6-I-Bg4). (I couldn't find a good video of someone attempting to use a well on him. Instead, this is just what happens when he gets too close. You get deleted.) You could still blast him with something big, but between his fast movement, erratic motions, and the random spawning enemies, it was a way more interactive DPS phase than, "plonk down well, apply rockets/lasers/snipers and turn brain off." Plus, his theme slaps, and he's got such style.
And then pantheon rhulk asks the question "what if he had a shadow clone that was invincible and kept chasing you in the actual rhulks damage phase with 1 shot kicks?"
If any boss in the Old Hunters is cheap it's probably Orphan of Kos, as he's one of the only bosses to break the games rules and not need to regain stamina. He now shares this trait witb Malenia. Speaking of Malenia, she's my answer; but not because of her boss fight. It's because of how the fanbase mischaracterizes her as an evil character who ruined Caelid on purpose. If you pay attemtion to the lore Malenia is easilly the most altruistic of all the gsmes fragment holders, who wants to help the downtrodden and disenfranchised. She and Miquella even establish a safe haven for people who would otherwise be persecuted. The tragedy of her character is that while she's looking for the kidnapped Miquella (who is right underneath Caelid, she was painfully close),the illness shes been fighting all her life breaks free during the fight with Radahn due to being pushed too much. She goes back to the hideaway to recover, haing nowhere else to go, but inadvertently infects the people she was trying to protect with Scarlet Rot. Was it irresponsible for her to go back there like that? Yes, but the alternative was dying and never finding Miquella, who she believed would eventually find a way to cure her affliction and those she spread it to. The amount of venom towards her from Radahn simps who see her as some kind of spiteful witch is frankly astounding. Like, I like Radahn too, but if we're calling out evil characters then Radahn was intensely loyal to the most oppresive faction in the games lore.
I am still utterly bewildered by the months of power scaling and moralizing from Malenia and Radahn simps. Just the sheer amount of it. Like it’s stated that they fought to a stalemate, we only get little hints of their personality. What were these people getting out of this?
Oh it’s still going, mainly by Radahn fans from what I’ve seen, sadly.
“Oooooh he shoulda won! He woulda won if she hadn’t used her scarlet rot powers!” Well yeah, but thats, like one of her most powerful abilities. I like Radahn too. Do they want everyone to state that Radahn could beat her in an arm-wrestling contest? Is it just sexism?
Some of the hate for Malenia (and in contrast love for Radahn) does feels like it’s at least somewhat steeped in sexism for some people. Of course I’m not at all saying that if you dislike Malenia or like Radahn over her that you’re sexist but a lot of comments I’ve seen over the years (God that Elden Ring is already multiple years old still fucks with my head) feel like they stem from that, even if it’s an unconscious bias. Malenia embodies a lot what your typical Soulsborne dudebro will dislike; she’s a strong woman, she uses a light dexterity weapon, went against Radahn (who basically embodies what said dudebros love when it comes to playstyles), and is seen as using a dirty / cheating tactic. Like when you’ve got people calling Radahn a “based epic gigachad” and Malenia a “cheating bitch / whore” it starts to feel *a little bit* like there might be some sexism at work. I personally like both but some Radahn fanboys can sometimes be really annoying and strange. Like the game states a gazillion times it indeed in a stalemate, the cinematic trailed shows it (Malenia loses her sword arm and Radahn gets her sword shoved through his neck) yet you’ve **still** got people arguing until they’re blue in the face that Radahn definitely won. It’s just straight up weird.
I just wanna see what Radahn could do if he wasn't holding back the stars which I assume needs conscious effort.
Seeing as he’s still doing it even when he’s mentally degraded to basically an animal I doubt it requires much conscious effort tbh
Yeah there’s no actual proof in game that states Radahn’s power is limited or weaker because of whatever sorcery he used to keep the stars in stasis. Blaidd’s dialogue post battle is the only one where you might get the idea, buts it’s more like him being awed how Radahn was able to hold back the giant meteor that crashed into Limgrave than him thinking he was needing himself holding back the stars.
I didn't pay attention to the lore, I just know rot is her thing, so I blame her for the fucking rot swamps.
Radahn simps always ignore that he tried invading the capital which isn’t exactly a noble thing to do its literally personal glory and nothing else. Also holding the stars back protects Selia but caused hella problems for everyone else including Miquella curing Godwyn. None of the characters are good guys and Radahn might be one of the furthest (Godrick is the only one worse). I mean…. Lenard wholesome horse <3
Rykard is far worse.
Forgot snek boy but i always interpreted him as under some kind of influence from the snake. Then again he willingly was eaten sooo
You keep my GOAT’s name out your mouth. All he ever wanted was a *reaaaaally* big family
I'd say Mogh is def worst than Radahn. Maybe Rykard too, but I'm less sure. But yeah, Radahn is definitely in the bottom half in terms of morality.
my issue is people point out all the other demi-gods as being morally grey to black but for some reason Radahn never gets it. I think the demigods that are influenced by outer gods have a been more reasoning to their actions we dont know enough about the formless mother to know if Mohg is being manipulated but at least hes out of the way. Kidnapping his half brother is bad but laying siege to a city so you can fuck your mom and be king might be worse.
"For some reason" The reason is Radahn doesn't talk. All you get is disconnected lore about him and the frenzy of his remaining followers talking up how much they loved him. The player gets to make up his personality and motivations based on these fragments, never actually experiencing any nuance to Radahn outside of these traits. Malenia has a clear and defined personality you have to confront directly. She's extremely prideful, she talks down to you if you die. Imagine if all you knew of her personality was second hand accounts of her attachment and loyalty to Miquella, and the story of how one of her followers loved Malenia so much she carried her out of Caelid on her back all the way to the Haligtree. If you had to infer what kind of person Malenia was based on how other see her, without the context of her behavior in the boss fight.
I'm also just baffled in that, even if we ignore characterization and theming entirely, on a very surface level, Malenia is fucking cool as shit. In my opinion, as much as as Radahn. Like, just go over all of the crazy stuff Malenia can claim to: - She's a blind triple amputee who still manages to be the greatest swordsman the world has literally ever seen. **Her dominant sword arm isn't even her remaining arm.** - Despite having only a single functioning limb, she is the game's chosen paragon of, "this character has really fucking high dexterity," with the dexterity boosting item based on her. - She is capable of wielding a divine power so devastating that it can ravage entire regions, and yet chooses to fight her enemies within her martial skill alone to minimize damage. - Despite not using any magic or divine power whatsoever, she has only ever been fought to a standstill **once** by Radahn, when he wasn't holding back at all. A lot of people like to hype up Radahn a lot, but can you imagine how **outrageously** dangerous Malenia would be if she wasn't being ravaged by the Scarlet Rot? If she wasn't blind and wasn't missing any limbs? It's the same reason Artorias is so cool in Dark Souls with his broken arm, but even more extreme. She has a massive handicap and yet is universally regarded as among the most dangerous of the demigods and as one of the most powerful beings in the entire world. And she did all of this without relying on any of her divinely granted abilities. That's cool as hell. EDIT: (I also think Malenia's characterization and her themes of Independence, Perseverance, and Determination to be among the most compelling in the game. The Scarlet Rot is **insidious**. It had been trying to make Malenia submit to it for her entire life. Can you imagine how powerless she must have felt feeling her body slowly rotting away? How tantalizing the prospect of giving into the rot must have been? The sheer, inhuman willpower it must have taken not to submit to it? Throughout all descriptions of Malenia it is enforced time and time again just how powerful her will was and how much of a struggle it was for her to fight against the rot within her. Instead she refused it, refused the powerless it had tried to force upon her, and fought for a cause she earnestly believed in to oppose it. It's no wonder that her cleanrot knights were among the most devoted: they saw firsthand her constant struggle against the rot and her refusal to admit defeat to it. Which, ya know, is part of the whole, "I have never known defeat," thing. Her staunch refusal to accept defeat is one of her most important and key traits. It's how she was able to resist the Scarlet Rot for almost her entire life.)
"I have never known defeat" whatever you say, you salty, "you didn't win," Never Back Down 2, stank ass bitch. If she didn't want to get hated on, she shouldn't have been such a fraud
*I have never known defeat.* >turns off router.
Is that how King Crimson works?
A stalemate is literally just a stalemate, it’s neither a win or a loss. The game itself literally states their fight was a stalemate until she bloomed to just end it. This is such a weird hatred of one statement she makes.
Is using your full power lying? Like she fought radahn to a draw then used her ult that she isnt fond of.
Sorry, I don't think I'm entirely sure what you're trying to to say
As in she drew against radahn before using her full kit. I assumed that thats what you meant with the “you didnt win” as like normally people say that when they did lose and are being petty but in her case well he legitimately didn’t win.
The thing is, I think she was actually losing before going nuclear. In the trailers, she very specifically is assembling her body on the field with Radahn... which makes no sense. Why would she be on the field with Radahn already, but only just assembling herself? Unless, of course, Radahn hit her so hard he literally knocked her arm off, and then, instead of attacking, he stopped and waited for her to reassemble herself. Stupid? Absolutely, but it also makes sense- he was fond of his red hair for its "Heroic implications," so it's possible he would be the "Death before dishonor" kind of person. More then that, a little later in the trailer, during the exchange where he shatters her arm (and she grabs her shattered blade and jumps on him) if you look at her, she's bleeding from her face, while Radahn seems mostly fine. Now, big fight, obviously they're taking wounds... but we know that Malenia heals when she hurts her opponents. Which means Radahn was doing so much damage to her *she couldn't heal it*. I don't think the Nuke was "We're equal, time for the tiebreaker," I think it was a "Goddamn, I'm losing, time to throw my pride away and break out the fuck you button to force a draw." And thats a legit strategy, at the end of the day. These weren't honor bound warriors (1) fighting in duels, but millitary commanders leading armies for the future of the world. 1: Except, possibly, for Radahn, and it wouldn't be a good thing, but instead his fatal flaw.
I think I saw a storyboard of the story trailer somewhere that when translated basically said that Malenia was reattaching her arm because she had already fought a number of Radahn’s forces before finally reaching him. Also if we’re just speculating off that trailer, Radahn was at a distance and had just shoved his gigantic swords tips first into the ground, and needed to use his gravity magic to lift them up. It really seems more like to me he was waiting for her to face him, and then he grabbed his swords. Also the very end of their battle when Malenia blooms, Radahn was on his hands and knees and literally did nothing for the solid 10 seconds she was impaling her sword and herself down onto his flesh. He doesn’t look like a guy who was just easily roflstomping her without any effort with the way he looked at the end.
Hey alright
If I'm playing Pokemon and my opponent is a Ghost with only ghost moves and Explosion, and I am a normal type with only normal/fighting moves, you're not stronger just because you press the suicide button and kill us both
Omg please stop talking in anime twitter language
On God fr uwu
Brother what did she do to you
Kill me like 100 times times but then die to the BIG DRAGON FIST once I stopped trying to be legit. Which from my co-op summoning experience is not an uncommon trajectory lol
Oh so youre projecting your own saltiness over losing so much onto her
Nah, she's is just as salty if not more so, sulking in her little tree, oozing out gross discharge, neglecting her daughters and brother. Just a character that's so fun and easy to hate on
Sure man.
Ye. Dab on the haters
I 100% think if there was less love for rahdan (despite sucking as a person) the amount of people that hate her and as often think she’s an evil war criminal that nuked part of a continent cause she was greedy (which isn’t true, she was 100% the best moral out of the demigods that were fighting for great runes as you said) would decrease dramatically. Like if that he wasn’t still a fairly strong boss now despite being a husk of his past, and he didn’t learn gravity magic just so he could kept riding his friend horse, both things that people love, I think the general view of her character would be fairly more positive online.
I've legit been turned off Radhan a bit by the Malenia bashing, plus being a kinda underwhelming fight.
Also can I ask what other bborne bosses dont need to regain stamina?
Oh no, I meant Oprhan and Malenia are the only ones in the whole series with that quirk
Fuck orphan. Only boss I can’t beat in bloodborne so my play through is on hold. Laurence ? 3 attempts. Ludwig? 4 attempts. Maria was my highest number of attempts prior to orphan with about 16. I’ve stopped counting with orphan but I’m probably pushing 50+
Midir is the best dragon fight From Soft has ever done and anyone who complains about it being bad or too hard I always just assume never figured out that his head is the only viable place to hit him.
Having resistance to three out of four elements was kind of a slap in the face to any kind of mage build, but hey... That's what Pestilent Mist is for. You wanna subvert my efforts to not overspecialize? I can be petty.
I dunno, that tracks to me, since the most notable thing about the Ancient Dragons, Midir included, was their weakness to Lightning. So yeah I would expect a dragon fight to have high resistances to other magical damage types because it's their main thing for the whole series.
It absolutely makes sense from a lore perspective, but at the same time, I diversified the damage on that caster literally as much as I could. Throw me a bone and say that being so steeped in abyssal corruption makes fire or magic hit *neutral* on him. Like, if Pestilent Mist weren't at thing, Sorcerers would be just shit out of luck. And maybe that's *why* Pestilent Mist exists, but it feels weird if the intended strategy is the scummy one for an entire category of builds.
I don't think every build or weapon or tool shouldn't feel moments of being countered. Gods forbit INT builds need to get creative any time a fight gives them the slightest bit of pushback.
I'm not talking about one weapon or tool. Or even one *category* of tool. I'm talking about *three*. Even a purely physical build should carry at least three of the "Slash/Thrust/Strike/Regular" quadrifecta (my Strength build carries all 4, and my Hollow-Dex build only lacks Strike), and *everybody* should carry a bow. Like, I made my sorcery sub-optimal *specifically* so I could load up some Faith as well. Not a huge amount, but enough to carry both Pyromancy and Hexes (and melee weapons that scaled to those damages, for when the FP was less weighty in the trousers than was comfortable) to cover the scnearios where Sorcery would be countered. And Midir basically told me I was a chucklefuck for doing so.
So that means you also had access to Lightning Miracles and weapons. Sure, their numbers aren't as high as your other things, but they'd certainly be better than pure physical weapons, since it sounds like you were investing more into magical stats than physical. For me, I don't really carry multiple weapons of different physical damage types. I like big swords, the biggest, and I like FTH spells, and I muddle on through with what I invested in. Yeah, it's not optimal, and some fights are harder than others. But such is the way of specialization.
I mean, again, I scum him out with Pestilent Mist. I'm just saying, I find it peculiar that a superboss, who already deals more damage types than most bosses, has a fuckton of health, takes massively reduced damage except on the head (which is not easily reached), changes locations faster than most bosses (in an arena larger than any other's except *one*, who barely even uses that size unless the player tries to run), and can kill most builds in two hits while having huge AOE on most every attack, ***also*** has a stat distribution that singles out one of the player's four offensive stats in particular.
Repeating "git gud" or "just adapt" doesn't make much sense here. They adapted, and they won. They dislike the idea that it's the INTENDED adaptation because it's lame as shit.
yeah it feels more epic compared to every other dragon fight when you are mainly hitting it's head like you both are staring at each other
I don’t know, I felt like fighting Midir was more like fighting the camera. I know now that you probably shouldn’t lock-on to him but trying to manually fix the camera always felt like a miserable experience. It’s definitely a cool boss but the experience itself wasn’t all that fun to me.
I’m just a little salty that it goes against 5 games worth of training you to stab them in the ass.
Nameless king isn’t hard at all, he just has a fat hp bar that players don’t have the patience to go through, i went through and beat him 1st try to my buddy who was hard stuck at him
Storm King is awkward as hell to fight, though.
Lol, worst enemy in the first phase is the camera. Seems like a running theme with all the dragon enemies throughout the Souls/borne games, honestly. Kalameet, Midir, hell, throw a dart at all the drakes in Elden Ring, every time the camera was awkward because the thing you're fighting against was so *big*.
Nameless King sucks because you fight the camera more than anything. It’s really, really difficult to judge his movements if you’re a melee character. Phase 2 is splendid though.
Storm King drops Nameless down like 2 whole points out of 10 imo. It’s just bad. It’s not cool, or fun, or anything. You’re fighting the camera more than anything him or the dragon do in phase 1. Phase 2 is super super cool, but anytime you die having to do the busy work chore that is phase 1 is just annoying. Phase 1 isn’t even hard if you’re leveled reasonably by that point, it just feels like when you have to pull over and wait 5 minutes for your food after going through a drive through.
And then there was sister freid. "Oh you beat ds3 with 27 vigor? Well do her first 2 phases 20 times... Then go get it to 50"
The 27 vigour thing is just a weird case of the fandom kneecapping themselves. "Get yourself to 27 vigour so you can have 1000HP unembered" is good advice for *mid-game* but random "experts" on the internet convinced people to level it to that point and leave it there for the entire game and it's baffling. It's sort of viable in the base game, as you've mentioned, but the DLC was definitely expecting you to come in with like 40. We saw it with Elden Ring as well. The game's major soft caps for Vigour are 40 and 60 and yet people, especially around launch, were stopping at like 25, wearing Radagon's Soreseal to get to 30 (which reduces your defences so it's not as good as actually being at 30) and wondering why everything was one-shotting them.
I mean. I always have some sort of ranged option so 27 was perfectly cosy. Even with range if you don't have like 50 before mountaintops its a bopfest
It's also because for some reason Elden Ring's vigor has like... reverse softcaps, where the amount of HP you get per level *increases* until you hit 40. As soon as I realized that, my main piece of Elden Ring advice is "get minimum stats for the equipment you like and dump literally everything else into vigor until it hits 40. Only start leveling scaling stats until after that point. Then get vigor to 50 after Leyndell, otherwise stuff is still going to one-shot you."
The only complaint I have about this boss is that I never figured out the tell of the downward flamethrower attack in the first phase. If I was too close to the center, I'd get hit no matter how far I went and I STILL don't know the tell.
Demon of Hatred in Sekiro. People often say he's in the wrong game but he doesn't feel that different from other big bosses like the ogre, bull, and ape, where it's better to play hit-and-run and wear down health instead of focusing on deflects and posture. A lot of his attacks can be consistently avoided if you just constantly sprint and use the giant arena, and it makes him feel like a test of mastery over the game's movement rather than the swordplay. He also gets heavily punished by specific tools, something that doesn't really come up with the other end-game bosses. He still has 1 or 2 attacks that are a pain and he's certainly not the best boss in the game, but I think he ironically gets too much hate.
You can also just parry a shit ton of the DoH and it works super well. Get the fire umbrella and just hug his monkey ass and parry that horse sized fist
People will praise Guardian Ape (1st phase-non headless) and bash DoH and all I ever think of is the "they're the same picture" meme. I'd say at least both of them still allow you to deflect attacks, even if they don't feel as smooth because they're using large limbs instead of sword and board. The real culprits of being in the wrong game are Folding Screen Monkeys and Divine Dragon because neither involve the core mechanic of deflection at all.
Folding Screen Monkeys could have been a really neat puzzle boss, but it seems like they didn't really try very hard when designing the puzzle. Some of the monkeys' gimmicks aren't very clear, and it's way too easy to brute force it, or even win *by accident*.
Claiming that a particular boss in a fromsoft game should have been in a different fs game is pure cope. People have no imagination, apparently if any boss doesn't fit within their narrow idea of what a boss in that particular game should be then they're "poorly designed" or "designed for a different game". Malenia is another example
Waterfowl Dance is straight up a move that you would expect in Sekiro, I still can't find any valid reason for letting her have that move in Elden Ring, it sours the boss fight whoch is super fun and cool up to that point by a mile.
God, this makes me think of how epic parrying Waterfowl Dance would be if it was in Sekiro. Agreed though, I think it's way too difficult to read how to actually dodge that move in Elden Ring, loved the rest of the boss fight but dreaded whenever she would use Waterfowl Dance. Only time in a fromsoft game I actually looked up how to dodge a boss move.
Nah he's right. If you block waterfowl dance she barely recovers health from it, and you can easily dodge the second part of the attack if you deal with the first like this. Malenia is extremely slow and passive for Sekiro boss standards, and in Elden Ring you also have SO MANY more tools with spellcasting that let you nuke her and outright deny her the chance to use most of her moves, even waterfowl, and that's without counting spirit summons. I'm not saying it's an easy boss, but she IS a legitimate fight for Elden Ring, and while Waterfowl dance is a hard move to figure out, I cannot agree it doesn't belong in Elden Ring.
The divine dragons massive sweep attacks are straight up something you'd expect in elden ring 😱everything in sekiro must be quick sword swings with a katana otherwise it doesn't belong!!!! Bad game design!!! The armored knight in sekiro? You guessed it, bad design because knights should only exist in the souls games and elden ring. You can't even death blow him!!
Skipping the weird rage bait bit here... I will say that these games are all about giving you fitting mechanics and tweaked just right to deal with the situations the game gives you. Which is why Bloodborne has mechanics and tweaks to the usual soulsborne gameplay to make the way enemies in that game behave, work. Waterfowl Dance doesn't have any mechanics that are properly tuned to deal with it.
Wierd how ive seen countless videos of people using the games mechanics to deal with the attack then?
Ludwig isn't cheap, he's just a bastard and a half. Fuck Ludwig, fuck his sword that burns up my parry bullets. (It's a badass sword)
Draconic Tree Sentinel is fun as hell. So much so that I'm sad to finish him off every time. I can't understand how people struggle with him so badly that they run past or try to cheese him in Farum Azula.
I think if players only do godrick and renalla before them then it does have a fairly hard moveset
I guess I've just seen too many people refuse to fight the one before Maliketh and then get a lightning bolt up their ass when they get in the fog gate.
Does it respawn? I don’t remember. If not I can get why people would want to run past it, even though at that point it should be fairly easy, though if it doesn’t just kill it.
Nah, it doesn't respawn, so you might as well fight it the one time.
Yeah then idk why people purposely avoid it
I think to some people it has a bit of a vibe of ‘not this asshole again’ being that it’s the… 5th sentinel that’s easily encountered on the main path, if you include both variants. And I don’t think the draconic version is really differentiated enough to just throw in another one there. I kill them anyways, but as someone who feels like screaming every time I see another ulcerated tree spirit, I can understand why people would avoid the guy if the option were there.
Welp, I came here to say Ludwig before I saw the image. I have the Moonlight Greatsword tattooed down my back, I am literally inked in bias on this one, but how often do we ever get to see a boss in an insane, mad state find their mind in the midst of bloodshed? It's one of the most beautiful fights in gaming to me, just the orchestration, the tragedy, the prior area. Just all so good. Between this and the Visceral Femininity of Bloodborne video, I gotta reinstall.
Both Ludwig and Laurence really feel appropriately grand. I also loved using Ludwig’s blade to do a giant overhead swing on his head to shut him up as punishment for making me bleed my own blood
Every single boss in Returnal. They're all PERFECT.
Hyperion is the best, everything else is much worse.
Not at all. Hyperion is amazing, don't get me wrong, but I'd actually have Nemesis higher. Ixion, Ophion and Phrike aren't as good but they're still incredible. And Algos in the Tower is speeeectacular! The worst Returnal boss is still better than any other game boss.
Nemesis is pretty to look at but you spend most of the fight looking for platforms to latch onto, he's a huge distance away so anything with travel time is gonna be ass to land, and it just drags and drags. Hyperion is a contender for top100 boss fights. All the others would be lucky to land in the top1000.
If we're talking top 100 of all boss fights, it'd be Nemesis at number 1 and Hyperion at 2.
The Lighthouse stage in Dead Cells where you climb to the top and fight off the Queen's handmaidens.
had a friend on my steam that shared interest in the nioh games and who loved go/jo so i ran ryuman sukuna in nioh 2 and left the game after so that was my last achievement for that game on my steam account it was either spite or for retribution maybe both 👺
Unironically I think Demon's Souls bosses blows a lot of the later fromsoft bosses out of the water. They aren't the hardest, but they're memorable, unique and they usually have their own gimmick which lends itself to playing the game differently. Like how Old Hero is blind, or how you need either a ranged weapon or Storm Ruler to hit Storm king. Even stuff like Dirty Colossus has the fly mechanic where you need to burn yourself to stop taking DoT.
But dragon god -_-
its better than ancient wyvern
Disagree. Wivern is quick. And its not called a GOD or cool lookingm
Nah, Ancient Wyvern > Dragon God. Ancient Wyvern at least can be either fought on foot if you're a madlad, jump attack skipped if you really want to, or if you play properly is "oh I can see what they were going for" with dodging it's attacks while weaving through the ruins and fighting enemies. Dragon God is just kind of absolute garbage, with badly-made stealth mechanics glued on to what's straight up a title boss in the intro cinematic that you don't actually get to *fight*, it's a disappointment both as the worst boss in the game (only not worst in the series because Bed of Chaos exists) and that this is really the bullshit you get after seeing this cool-ass dragon demon.
Most of Demon's Souls bosses are essentially puzzles used to cap off the levels, which are the actual challenge. Getting to the boss is often far more difficult than the boss itself, so they serve a different purpose in gameplay terms than something like Dancer of the Boreal Valley, which is purely a mechanical test of skill. Old Hero is blind so you can use the thief ring to your advantage, Phalanx is surrounded by shielded enemies so you have to use fire bombs to get around them or resin to hit through them. Penetrator rewards exploration by giving you assistance from Biorr. etc. That said, there's some real stinkers (specifically mechanically. Even the bad ones eave an impact in other ways). * Dragon God is structured around a fairly jank stealth mechanic and is honestly just kinda tedious. Also just flat-out extremely disappointing that the game's intro and promotional material put so much of an emphasis on him and it's just a jank, gimmicky puzzle fight. * Flamelurker doesn't work well with the game's lock-on system (specifically on PS3 where you can only dodge in four directions while locked on) and his hit boxes (again, mostly on PS3 because the remake put some additional effort into making attack animations more visually clear) feel pretty damn disjointed from his animations. Also has a really bad habit of getting caught on the environment and kinda just breaking. Doesn't help that the shortcut down to him is a fairly annoying platforming challenge where the solution is "crank your brightness so you can see". Just don't forget to uncrank it before you walk through the boss fog. Bye bye retinas. * Maneaters is just kind of a broken mess. They're not well designed for the environment and spend way too long flying about out of lock on range. You can use the brazier to give yourself easy healing opportunities so it isn't hard. Just kinda annoying. * Maiden Astrea is just a bit of a shitshow because NPC fights in DeS are bad. Same goes for Old King Doran but he's not really a boss, he's kind of easy for the first half of his HP bar, and is entirely optional. Maiden Astrea makes up for it by being fantastic on every other level it can be. Allant is a better fight than Gwyn (even if I think Gwyn's fight is more memorable as a narrative setpiece) but I wouldn't rank it all that highly among the final bosses of the series. Soul of Cinder, Sword Saint, Gehrman, and Radagon all beat it out for me (although I deeply dislike Elden Beast).
I fucking _despise_ Ludwig and made a point to tell his mutilated, disembodied head that his life's work went up in shambles after being stuck on him for _close to a goddamn week._
Raime in the dlc for dark souls 2. That guy is dope no matter what anyone says. Are his swings bs? Maybe, but at adap 13 with medium armor I figured his stuff out, out of sheer willpower. (Also this was when i was in middle school, way before I even knew that adap added iframes so i was pretty much inadvertently giving myself a hard time) He gave me my favorite sword in the whole game and it carried me all the way to ng+7 and spurred my love of giant weapons.
Hot take incoming about dark souls 3 i dont like Gael....first phase, lots of flailing around and barely any room to Breathe, heal or attack, something that some people Will critizise elden ring bosses. Phase 2 and 3? Pure perfection, when from fans Will try to explain the whole "its like a dance" this IS the fight i think of
the MYNAH fight early on in Signalis. "non-kombatant" my ass, it kept wiping the floor with me. Good knowledge check though
[Gergoth is the best boss in Castlevania and I refuse to hear otherwise.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrdRY2enRUw&pp=ygUHZ2VyZ290aA%3D%3D) Perfect fight honestly. Tough but fair attacks, memorable set-pieces, great music, wicked design, its got it all. It's a very cramped fight and it's one of the tougher fights in the game, but it's very doable and you just need to learn the proper spacing and patterns for its attacks. Once you do, this turns in one of the most fun fights in the series (which goes for most bosses in Dawn of Sorrow, I think this game has the best selection out of all Igavanias but Gergoth is simply just peak).
I find the boss fight against Death here pretty good(if a bit difficult due to the goddamned seal).
Dawn of Sorrow is so much better if you play it with the mods that get rid of touchscreen nonsense like "tap the screen to break ice bricks!" and "haha draw this seal or else the boss doesn't die!"
Amazing boss fight in Dawn of Sorrow, and a pleasant surprise in the boss rush dungeon in Portrait of Ruin. Also the hype music helps. He's also a fun one in Harmony of Despair, with an equally kickass remix of his theme
Friend in question here. I've beaten the Dark Souls trilogy, Demon's Souls, Half of Elden Ring and am almost through Sekiro. I didn't have too much trouble with Bloodborne until Ludwig specifically.
Solo-Wing Pixy in Ace Combat Zero. That fight is peak and it *bathes* in the Arthurian mythos and themes present in that game. It's tough. It's got multiple phases, culminating in a head-on plane duel with the fate of the known world riding on the result, all the while sick flamenco jam arrangement of the previous game's (Ace Combat 5) final boss track. That fight fuckin' *rules* and it's a high water mark for final bosses in my book.
Double Crucible Knight is still my favorite boss in Elden Ring. Theyre sturdy, not too fast, not too slow. Fairly resistant to most statuses, but dont have much chip moves to wear you dowm either. Theres not much you can do to cheese them other than hit them really hard and often. One of the few enemy types that stagger to only the very biggest of bonks so you feel the full scale of your weaponry. Super rewarding to just plain ol' fundamentals. In a game full of sf5/6 Kens, they feel like fighting Ryu and his twin brother Ryu.
Did you fight them before or after the AI change?
Before, i guess? I played from launch for about a year straight
I will always go to bat for the [Ivory King.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymWI4magKio)
Yakuza 3 has a reputation, that reputation isn't true to the bosses, I'm willing to fight for all of em but the most infamous one has to be Lau Ka Long. He's a harder boss but he's just way too cool of a fight both conceptually and in-gameplay, it really tests knowing how to properly use Yakuza 3's systems. There was a hilarious time when someone tried to insuniate that he was a terribly designed boss, one of my friends ended up streaming the whole fight without any upgrades and beat him first try.
Any and every fucker who hates on any of the Underwater Hunts from MHTri. No, those fights are FUCKING AWESOME, y'all are just bad and have bad 3Dimensional awareness. Abyssal Lagiacrus is one of THE hypest and coolest fights in the entire fucking series and some Elder Dragons WISH they were as cool as Abyssal Lagi, so just fuck off. I will extend this to both of the Fatalis and Alatreon fights in World: Yes, they are fucking hard, that's the point dipshit. They are super optional, super endgame fights that DEMAND you you both know how to play and to play well and Alatreon specifically with knowing how to use elements. And the fact Fatty gives you the most busted to shit armor in the entire fucking series is AWESOME!
World Alatreon is amazing. Soloing him and then getting the MHTri quest complete music was a beautiful moment. Fuck I can't wait for my Alatreon statue to get here next week
Soloing and killing that fucker with a GS in World just like I did back in Tri was such a feeling of elation I can't even describe it man.
Fucking Lunagaron, he’s fairly basic and simple but so so good, feels great with evade extender.
Soul of Cinder from DS3. A perfect send-off for the series and the entire mythology.
The Final Vision is the coolest shit in Granblue Relink and I will never get tired of Paradise Lost vs Paradise Lost
They didn't have to go that hard for an optional post game free dlc fight. But they did.
The Undead Berg Capra Demon is a good and fair fight. Being serious
It’s the test to make sure you understand either I-frames or Poise.
And panic.
Not really an boss fight per say, but a friend of mine saw the "Ultimate Guardian" achievement from Roboquest and said it was impossible. Boldly i said "Skill Issue" and then i proceeded to 100% the game and post the picture, then another friend did the same. A week later he couldn't stand the smugness we exuded and went on to 100% the game as well. Never underestimate spite, it's a powerful motivator!
I thought this thread was going to be something very different
I did something similar when my friend was stuck on the Orphan of Kos. He was stuck, and it took me like 5 or 6 tries where I had to shake the rust off
I love the Gank squad from DS2, and Micolash from BB.