Welcome to a new series of Bosswatch! With this series I like to examine the various boss encounters of the Souls series, which I generally consider to be the highlight, and discuss the design behind them and the strategies involved with their defeat. The ingenuity of the meticulous design that accompanies this series is always at its most evident with these bosses, at a stark contrast to the often shoehorned-in nature of the modern boss fight.
If you've yet to jump into Dark Souls III and would prefer its centerpiece struggles to maintain an air of mystique, or simply want to read more rantings of a wayward soul who has embraced the abyss many times before, by all means check out the previous two times I brought this series out of mothballs:
- Dark Souls II Bosswatch (Parts One, Two and Three)
- Bloodborne Bosswatch (Parts One and Two)
Please keep in mind also that I've yet to get much further than the last boss fight on this list (though I did fight the next guy, and he is a doozy), so please keep spoilers to a minimum in the comments. This also goes for NPCs, lore stuff and other informational tidbits coming up. Discussion about the bosses here, though, are absolutely welcome as long as you don't go overboard with the overshadowing.
Cemetery of Ash
This cheerful place is where your character wakes up, and pretty much resembles a lot of other opening sections in Souls games. Actually, it kind of does a half-and-half thing with that, as if to prepare the player for what's to come: the first half resembles a sheltered waterlogged shrine that resembles the first Firelink Shrine of Dark Souls, while the second half is more like DSII's Majula in that it's situated on a cliff, allowing you to take in a vista that includes a number of locations you'll eventually visit, and the bright daylight is a welcome change to the dark and dingy locations that invariably make up the rest of the game (at least, what I've seen so far, though some other places are plenty sunny as well).
The game throws you into the deep end too: the hooded hollows around here aren't particularly tough, but they're fast and there's a lot of them and they all pack various weapons, necessitating some consideration for how you approach them - a recurring theme with the humanoid enemies in the game, who will frequently switch up their tactics to suit the weapons they wield. There's also a giant crystal lizard in one of the side passages; a pissed off older sibling of the speedy little guys who'd rather run off cliffs with their treasures than let you have them. Just like the Ogre behind the waterfall in DSII, this is one of those early game challenges for the particularly daring.
Iudex Gundyr
Dark Souls III continues its "beginners are chumps" running start with the knight boss Iudex Gundyr, who sits inert in the center of his boss arena located just before the Firelink Shrine waiting for the player to pull out the coiled sword - an important artifact necessary for the game's fast travel system - pinning him in place. Of course, there's no way I would know any of that Firelink or fast travel stuff; what I did know is that I couldn't pass through this area, the only area in this linear introductory zone, without first activating the ominous crouched figure and bracing for a battle. So that's what I did.
Iudex fights like a halberd black knight from the original Dark Souls, taking full advantage of his massive reach over you and having a few tricks to deter anyone trying to move around him to flank his side after he thrusts. Once you know to look for those nasty shoulder charges though, the first form isn't so tough. It's when he drops to half health and suddenly adopts a large serpent-like growth out of his head like an even more messed up Las Plagas zombie that he suddenly becomes a greater threat, and this is where it took me a while to get around the new attacks and unpredictable nature of this accursed form. Its reach is even longer than before, and what's more is that when you get close to Iudex, who was already fairly tall, you can no longer see far enough up to observe what the snake head is doing. In addition, the snake-like appendage also had a skeletal arm of its own, which was able to stretch out and swipe you if you were too busy watching the snake or Iudex's halberd. I'd encounter a few more enemies like this in the game - all of whom simply appear to be normal enemies until you get close - and I generally found it to be a good idea to get the hell out of there when it revealed itself. Well, unless I had some fire-based weaponry handy, since they don't seem to like burning much.
Anyway, it's been a while since I've encountered a "baptism of fire" boss in one of these games: the type that you can't prepare for, because you haven't unlocked the means to buy new gear or level up or even try a different path for a while, and I'm glad Iudex didn't stonewall me completely. Certainly the toughest boss I'd face for a while.
High Wall of Lothric
A recurring theme for the early areas of any Souls games, where you enter a medieval urban district seemingly moments after an enormous battle that has taken the lives of countless knights and left the local buildings in various states of disarray.
The undead remnants cling to what they have left by charging at you, and there's a great variation of humanoid enemies here, from emaciated peasants to sneaky rogues to armored knights with a great deal of martial prowess at their command. Plenty of skeletal dogs too. I didn't care for the dogs.
Vordt of the Boreal Valley
Named in honor of the Swedish Chef, Vordt Vordt Vordt's your classic quadruped Souls fight, which meant the old strategies still worked: get in behind it or underneath its legs to be shielded from half of its attacks. It reminded me a bit of the Darkbeast Paarl fight from Bloodborne - and despite this being a Souls sequel, expect most of my comparisons to be Bloodborne related since I only played it eight months ago - as the beast appeared metallic and skeletal-like, and throbbed with an energy that I believe was more chill-inducing than electrical. That would make sense, given the "boreal valley" appellation, which I can assume is another location in this game (in fact, I fought a tough creature like it in the subsequent area which dropped a sword of the Boreal Valley, which also had ice powers, so the chances are good I'm going to bump into a frozen location at some point).
Anyway, this was one of those rare cases that the boss didn't have much in the way of big surprises and I managed to beat it in one go. It actually felt more like a tutorial fight than Iudex did, though perhaps that's not the right term. "Veteran advantage fight", perhaps, since it was a foe that could be easily beaten by those familiar with the series and its previous boss designs. After about a dozen of these giant dog bosses between Souls and Bloodborne, there's not a whole lot of guesswork needed.
The Bloodborne comparisons continue: the mythology around the Boreal knights, as I would soon discover from the boss soul items, involve knights giving in to bestial urges and turning into immense, berserk hound-like creatures. That's why this particular dog was fully armored and swung a mace around in its hand; it was still vaguely humanish, even when it was leaping around on all fours. This lycanthrophy was also the fate of the Healing Church members in Yharnam, who invariably turned into big dogs as soon as you got near them. I half expect the next one I bump into to be Louis Tully. Actually, I'll probably have to fight a Slor too. Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!
Undead Settlement
Quickly moving from a large population center (or used to be) to the rustic outskirts village beneath, the undead settlement is a confusing maze of hovels and bridges and rooftops that actually felt more like the Forbidden Woods area of Bloodborne, especially in the way it sort of loops back into itself at various height levels. It was an interesting area to explore, at least.
The enemies here are all undead serfs with pitchforks and the like, albeit particularly tall undead serfs, though I did meet a few of these unpleasant "evangelist" enemies that barrage you with magic as well a giant mace. I'd learn later that these were evangelists of the Cathedral of the Deep, which presumably sends out these corpulent messengers of their Deep Lord to acquire new converts. Perhaps worst of all were these basin-carrying brutes that thumped you with their tubs (and you don't get up again after that, regardless of what Chumbawamba might purport) before pulling out a nasty-looking woodsaw to hack you into furniture. When you have enemies that are both fast and able to shrug off most blows, it can be hard to avoid damage.
Curse-Rotted Greatwood
So this was an odd one. When I first encountered this boss, it was animating ever so slightly in a corner of a large courtyard with a whole mess of the villagers prostrate before it. The villagers became hostile when I got close, and after killing two or three of them the tree itself woke up and a hit bar appeared. Seems like ol' Exdeath over here was the deity of these people, or at least the closest approximation to one in their hollow-addled minds, and wasn't prepared to let me leaf alive for my trespasses. Maybe they were Branch Davidians?
The fight's a common enough one seen in Souls: the boss has a handful of weak points but is invulnerable everywhere else, so the goal is to focus on the weak points and the rare opportunities to hit same. Some of these were on the ends of limbs, which required that the boss stay still long enough for me to hit them - it was very fond of a butt stomp technique that caused it to raise its arms and feet, and did it over and over whether I was in its line of sight or not. The weakpoints appeared to be monstrous eggs tucked away in its branches like nests, which were just about obvious enough from up close to prevent too much confusion. However, after removing all the obvious weakpoints and dropping the tree's health to just under half, which also caused the arena to collapse and drop us into a catacombs-like cave, I suddenly ran out of areas to attack. There were still eggs, but they were protected by brambles and impenetrable. I resorted to using my bow to see if I could hit any of the higher up ones, or the tree's fruit. The fruit, turns out, is what the tree uses for its bombardment attacks and isn't related to the boss's health bar. I eventually got worn down by its enormous sweeps to kill me, and I picked up a few more arrows and firebombs to prep for round 2. When round 2 occurred after a brief jog back to the boss room, the tree fought differently: it started with a massive rolling attack that knocked me on my back, and after taking out a few of its weakpoints a gigantic hand appeared out of its abdomen that was far more human than the branch-like limbs I'd seen so far. What's more, the eggs I couldn't attack before were now vulnerable, and I managed to sweep up the remaining weakpoints I couldn't hit last time and finish the fight.
The tree wasn't a challenge whatsoever; if anything, the villager mobs around it during the first stage of the fight were causing me more problems, sort of like the bugs around Rom the Vacuous Spider in BB or the spiders with The Duke's Dear Freja in DS2. The fact that the first fight either apparently glitched out, or only caused more weakpoints to appear after that special rolling attack the boss didn't do once in the ten minutes I spent fighting it the first time, made it a little unsatisfying.
The guy's design was a bit run-of-the-mill in most respects. Essentially a giant rotting tree with arms and legs, the sheer bulk of it meant that it could barely lift its trunk-like center mass with its stubby arms, so it spent most of the fight in an odd upright crawling position. The only freaky thing about the fight is that aforementioned monster arm it suddenly grows from deep within, indicating that the "curse-rot" had infected it from the inside out. I sort of wonder if it wasn't just a regular tree, then, with something utterly unholy growing inside of it.
Path of Sacrifices
The requisite open forested area. As with the forests that came before it, woe betide anyone who wanders in too deep without a clear escape route. Alongside even more tall zombies now with pointed sticks for chargin', we have very loud frenzied creatures with a crosses on their backs, some indomitable and extremely fast giant crabs that I wasn't a fan of, more hooded enemies from the opening area but now accompanied with sorcery-flinging ringleaders, and a not inconsiderable number of hostile NPCs with their own strategies to learn. I'll admit to dying a lot here, if only because I was trying to comb the place for valuables and got frequently waylaid having to retrace my steps to where I last got clobbered by something large and angry, usually contending with a mixture of the above on the way.
The path actually splits here - one towards the area's boss, and the other towards a venomous swamp. You better believe I put off visiting the latter for as long as possible.
Crystal Sage
Here we have another old chestnut: the teleporting, cloning, magic-user boss, first encountered as the Fool's Idol all the way back in Demon's Souls. The Crystal Sage pops up far from where you enter its arena and starts laying on the sorceries tout de suite: regular soul arrows, the soul arrows that hover above the character's head in groups until someone's in range, a larger and more tenacious homing shot, and one that shot along the ground like a power geyser. They're all fairly powerful if you're not equipped to mitigate magic damage, and even the Sage's physical attack has a magic tinge to it that will cut through shields with low resistance. However, despite teleporting and reappearing around the arena after a few hits - leaving a few crystal mines that are easy enough to avoid - there's not much to the fight, as you can easily reach the boss before he casts anything and interrupt him with how incredibly easy it is to stunlock anyone in this game. However, as if to respond to this specious sense of security, the battle suddenly takes a sinister turn around the halfway health mark.
This is the point where the clones show up, and the fight is curious because it would appear to present these clones as a puzzle - can you figure out which is the real one? - but in reality is more like a hurried struggle for survival as you suddenly have four or five times as much magic being flung your way from all directions, making it far harder to find cover and pick the right moment to make an approach. Instead, you have to eliminate as many of the clones as possible - even though you know that they're not part of the fight - before whacking the real one a few times to make any progress. If you try going for the real one first using your keen powers of deduction, you'll get hit in the back with four greater soul arrows, since the clones aren't just for show. In a sense, it's like the boss fight was designed to trip up those who try to be smart about picking out the right opponent. Fortunately, after the second one of these clone waves, the guy stops teleporting or producing any more copies (or he did for me) and it was simple enough to finish him off.
The design for this guy was kind of neat: he didn't look human, unlike the undead sorcerers you'd met so far, and more closely resembled a wraith that had possessed a giant wizard hat. Sort of like this guy. I guess this was some of commentary on how the sorcerer hats have been getting bigger and bigger in each game? There's even the option to buy the same enormous hat for a steep 10k souls from the Firelink merchant afterwards.
Cathedral of the Deep
A graveyard located around the base of the titular massive place of worship, Cathedral laid on the body horror early and often with its emaciated and endlessly respawning pale zombies. Many of these zombies had been taken over by the maggots feeding on them, creating various humanoid hybrids of writhing mounds of icky bugs. What's worse is that, upon hitting you, the maggots would stick around and cause the bleeding effect until you figured out a way to remove them (not for the first time, fire solves everything). Inside the church were immense giants, more evangelists, moody dark bishops who silently sent fireballs your way and some more tough armored foes who used miracles - the series' equivalent to cleric spells - to make themselves even more formidable.
The Cathedral also brought back a personal favorite in Souls level design: one where you're making vertical progress rather than horizontal, with many shortcuts that involved opening a path to an elevator that took you back down to the first bonfire in the area. We last saw this with the Nightmare of Mensis in Bloodborne, but it's popped up in a few Souls games too.
Deacons of the Deep
Another old favorite, the mob boss. That is to say, bosses that require you to focus on a crowd of disposable enemies, rather than some mafiosi concerned about Valentine's Day. The Deacons are a collection of minor enemies that endlessly respawn, the only distinguishing aspect is that one of them is glowing with an eerie red energy. This energy is the real boss, as you might deduce, and for the first half of the fight you simply need to force your way through the throng to reach the enemy it is possessing and quickly eliminate them, causing damage to the red energy as it is forcibly ejected out of its dying host. This red flame will occasionally leave enemies of its own accord as well if the player takes too long, so time is of the essence.
In what is already becoming a trend for this game, at the 50% health point the fight changes. The red energy finds a permanent host in a frail-looking Pope type character called the Archdeacon - befitting the whole cathedral theme - and is flanked by a number of new enemies which, like the rest, respawn continually after dying. Reaching the correct enemy is now even harder with a larger amount of bodyshields in the way, and if Jean-Paul II is left alone too long he will start to gather dark energy from the praying minions around and throw it at the player, causing immense damage. Even if you hide behind the large monolith structure in the center of the arena, this ball of dark energy - one very reminiscent of those fired by the enemies of the Astoria DLC back in Dark Souls 1 - will find you regardless. It's imperative to disrupt this ritual, but it's also important to constantly cause damage to the frail red boss since it'll regenerate its health a lot too. It's an irritating fight, all told, but at least it offers something new to the "find the guy with the health bar in a crowd of lookalikes" dynamic that doesn't involve too much guesswork but still offers a moderate challenge.
Design-wise, this boss is eerie because it involves a whole crowd of people suddenly turning towards your direction and strolling unhurriedly towards you as soon as you enter the room. They look mostly like the rest of the undead in this area, though there seems to be even less color; each is a drab dark grey in complexion and dress, but for the piercing red eyes they all share. I simply assumed that red eyes meant a stronger foe, as that had been the case with the various red-eyed enemies I'd met so far in this game and the series as a whole, but I think this fight tried to contextualize this particular ocular condition as being touched by "the Abyss" in some form. Everything in the Cathedral of the Deep indicated some allegiance to darker forces, from the "dark" magic to the whole "of the deep" business. It's like a church built to honor Manus.
Farron's Keep
This would be the aforementioned poison swamp. It's not easy getting around, especially where parts of the swamp get deeper and it takes longer to move through it, but the goal here is to find three flame beacons and snuff out the light. That means that you need to become fairly well acquainted with this large, circular area. In the middle is a ladder up to a new area featuring an old wolf - part of a covenant loosely based on Sif, I'd imagine - and a tall bridge structure that seemed to tower over the rest of the game's geography and seemed far more ancient as a result. Up here was a mini-boss of sorts, the Stray Demon, which greatly resembled the recurring rotund demons of the first Dark Souls - the Asylum Demon, the Stray Demon (natch) and the Demon Firesage.
Back on the ground, we had all sorts of fun monsters like the venomous slugs of Blighttown, the oddly-horned Ghru creatures which resembled those found in the Artorias DLC, some large tree-like demons that looked and fought like the powerful Leshans of The Witcher 3, and our old friends the Basilisks, who took advantage of the torpid quagmires to hit our hero with a whole of curse gas before they could escape out of it. It wouldn't be Dark Souls without sludging through some gross poopwater with an omnipresent poison guage.
Abyss Watchers
The first Lord of Cinder, the four significant story bosses I've been told to defeat, is the collective Abyss Watchers. From what I've been able to tell thus far - recall from the lede, if you would, that this Bosswatch goes up almost immediately after its last discussed boss, which would be this one - is that these guys were meant to guard the way forward into the depths from those coming in (or perhaps, coming out) and belong to the same old wolf covenant I discovered earlier. I've also been able to determine that the power of a Cinder Lord was spread between them in the form of blood rituals, and given their Victorian monster hunter-like appearance I figure this was one big shout-out to Bloodborne - the whole hunter coalition and blood transfusions angle seems lifted wholesale from that game's gothic fantasy aspirations, though I also noticed a lot of allusions to Artorias too: their steadfast battle against the "abyss", their swirling greatsword fighting style and their allegiance to the first of their kind, the "wolf knight" - who may have been Knight Artorias himself. When you enter the room, the last two Abyss Watchers - of what was apparently close to a hundred, judging by all the identical corpses littering the ground - are fighting to the death, with one dying just as the other notices your presence. He takes up a practiced stance and strides towards you.
The lone Abyss Watcher fights like any other hostile NPC, albeit one that's a little taller than most and thus has a vicious long reach to keep an eye on. He's also capable of some Orstein-esque unexpectedly long lunging jabs, making it hard to judge a safe distance for a cheeky Estus sip. As could be feasibly expected by anyone who has played a Souls game before, he is soon joined by another Abyss Watcher and then a third in a group battle reminiscent of the three Ruin Sentinels fight in Dark Souls 2. The goal here, like in that fight, is to try a divide and conquer strategy of splitting one off and doing as much damage as possible to them before their back-up arrives. Curiously, the third Abyss Watcher to arrive has red eyes and draws the ire of the other two: they'll happily carve each other up and leave you alone until the red-eyed interloper is dealt with. This is another sign that the red eyes mean more than simply an upgraded enemy; that it's an indication that something darker has taken over, causing even these insane guardians to momentarily remember their duty in keeping the darkness beyond at bay. When all three are dead, the collected blood of the Lord of Cinder pools into one Watcher, and the real fight starts: the Watcher now has a flaming sword and a lot of damaging fire attacks to avoid, its previous whirling flourishes now accompanied by plumes of flame.
Design-wise, the fight's more interesting for what it reveals about the game's lore than the actual creature design, which - as I said - is mostly that of several identical larger-than-average humanoid NPC enemies in gear that is half trenchcoat-and-wide-brimmed Victorian hunter garb, of the like seen in such hit movies as that 2004 Van Helsing movie (or Vampire Hunter D, which is where I assume Miyazaki got the idea for the Bloodborne designs, since gritty gothic anime is kinda his whole aesthetic), and more serious armor. It's a familiar fight, and it's weird that the game chose to turn it into a big set-piece "Lord of Cinder" story boss, but I can't fault it too much for how cleverly it builds the lore without a single spoken word - what Souls frequently excels at.
And here's where I throw my credibility under a bus and ruin Bosswatch forever. Just outside the boss room is a summon sign. Now, since I'm not one to fork out a monthly fee for PlayStation Plus for god-knows what they might happen to make gratis that month, I've been blocked from all of the online stuff: no summons, no PVP, no helpful soapstone signs on the ground even. This summon sign, therefore, is one left by the designers for a specific NPC phantom buddy - one that teaches the player a gesture when he arrives. I've not been using a guide for the game, except where it concerns missables and the like - NPCs with plotlines to follow, gestures and spells you can miss, etc. I've never particularly cared for how Souls will allow you to irrevocably ruin one of its smaller ongoing stories through some easily missed detail or unintuitive decision, nor do consider it "essential" to the game's normally charming refusal to hold your hand at any point. Obfuscating menus and terminology is one thing - I enjoy puzzling that stuff out - but removing one the game's enjoyable optional narrative threads for an arbitrary missed trigger is something else entirely. Anyway, I bring this up because I only summoned the guy in for that gesture - I figured AI-controlled NPCs have never been particularly strong as companions, and I didn't imagine I'd beat such an important boss on the first try, so when I inevitably died I'd come back and try again without bringing in any assistance. Well, let me tell you, a second person helping you out - even a computer-controlled one - is incredibly handy in a fight that is built around overwhelming you with numbers. With my new buddy causing a distraction, I had zero trouble with this boss: I barely used half of my Estus Flasks, and my companion survived in good shape too. The regret isn't that I cheesed the boss fight; it's more that I didn't get to experience what it was like solo. Well, I guess that can wait for NG+, if I ever get around to it.
On that note, the first Lord of Cinder is probably a good spot to call this first episode of Dark Souls 3: Bosswatch. I'll be sure to keep you appraised on any of my future conflicts, warts and all, as well as focusing on how each seems to be keenly recalling the lore or strategies of those that came before. I've yet to determine if it's necessarily a good thing that a game can be so steeped in nostalgia for a series that has only been around for seven years, but I'm enjoying the game too much to really quibble about its over-familiarity.
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