Thought i make this thread after what in my eyes is one of the laziest boss battles ever made in a from software game (see this thread as a vent off, off all your frustration battling these smucks). I am talking about Flaming bull probably one off the easiest bosses in Sekiro if you discovered the sprint button which i didn't ( it's holding B btw). This thing looks cools but that's it it just keeps on rushing you in a small area (also hates fire crackers) making you feel threatened at first, until you just sprint around it and this thing becomes a cake walk kinda reminded me of the Kapra Demon BS in Dark Souls 1 anyway this piece of "bull" takes the lead over the bed of chaos imo, if you got any other bad bosses like that dumb Jabba the Hut thing from DS2 feel free to post it here.

Generally in Souls games I think bosses that are twice your size are pretty annoying to fit as you either have to break lock-on and whiff a lot of attacks or contend with a camera that refuses to pull out making it sometimes impossible to see when the enemy is winding up for an attack. Most recently the horse rider boss at Asahina Gate was an example of this - not awful by any means but still I’d get too close and lose sight of what I was doing.

It’s actually quite disappointing that this many games in the same issues and annoyances persist. It was tiring in Bloodborne and at this point it’s just a shitty part of the experience I guess. I dunno how it doesn’t come up during playtesting but making games is hard as they say so who knows.

Also fighting bosses and mini-bosses surrounded by henchmen is fucking awful and Sekiro does it quite often.

@humanity: Yeah Sekiro is super guilty on making the game "harder" by dropping to much henchmen at a boss or a named warriors, as for the horse boss go i thought the boss was a enjoyable experience got him after 10 tries his hitbox was a bit faulty cause of him being that large didn't have to much problems with the camera but i tend to switch lock on lock off camera depending on the situation.

As a side note, after beating a few more bosses yesterday with the same strategy of "just run" I'm starting to wonder if this is a massive oversight in the design of the game. While dodging isn't super effective in this game you can run forever and I dare say you move even faster than if you're dodging. With many bosses eagerly doing grab and slam attacks that leave them open afterwards when you're not really in any danger you can just run around then run in, hit them and run away. Ofc there are bosses in limited spaces where this doesn't work, but it seems like an easy (although somewhat boring) way to circumvent a good handful of harder bosses.

And yes, after beating the bull after many failed attempts and discovering this tactic I also went "well, that was dumb". As for other dumb bosses.. let's just say there's actually several bosses in the game that involves a mechanic that might be the stupidest shit they've ever done.

I kinda felt like the bull was a firecracker tutorial, no?

@sahalarious:Kinda i took me a while for me getting the connection "giant beast" and bull and me going "oh".

The main true "lazy" design option is the reuse of a boss (with only minor tweaks if any). Which Sekiro maintains the tradition of doing at least once (tho i do believe it's optional)

"Bad" boss design gets incredibly subjective incredibly quickly.

(like the Bull for example, as it can be handled by either just sprinting, or plus firecrackers, or parrying/blocking surprisingly effectively too, all work fine, just that I know of; which imo actually makes it quite an alright boss all told, if a bit on the easy side for Sekiro specifically)

@tennmuerti: Of course it's all subjective but you can tell that they put more work in the Fat guy on a horse then the flaming bull. For instance the bull never kicked me once when i was pounding his "ass" when the horse kicked me from time to time (when i was standing behind it).

I think lazy From boss design is Huge Thing that just flails around and you just kinda gotta...get in there.

There is at least One of those in Sekiro and it's not as bad as usual but yeah.

@soulcake I guess I kinda didn't except much from him, coming right on the heels of a main boss fight. The bull is also a "miniboss" of a sort if I recall right, it's not got a big boss "soul" to upgrade with and is sandwiched very closely between the two major area bosses.

Also hey that reminds me, Sekiro uses (and reuses) those minibosses fairly frequently throughout, which can repeat, but i did find it refreshing of still having that "tough fight" combat challenge sprinkled through ought the game without having to rely on major boss battle set pieces, so from that perspective I think the minibosses were a success, for my money. (ironic when some of them kill you (me) more then a boss on the easy side, cough cough lol)

I like the big room full of miniboss+henchman because the miniboss obeys all the rules the little guys do which mean you can stealth attack that whole room and everyones just dead the boss is already down to a single lifebar.

It's honestly not a terrible version of a Predator encounter coming from a studio that has not done much of that style of play.

@soulcake: yah some of the bosses I thought would be fun to fight and master but when I have to sleuth my way around them for 10 minutes getting rid of their helpers, breaking line of sight, rinse and repeat - I just take my sloppy win and move on. For a moment there I thought that when you get those memories it would let you fight the bosses at will through a menu or something instead of it just being an upgrade currency..unless it’s not and I’ve wasted it?

Lazy boss design in From's wheelhouse is repeating a previous boss with a different elemental affinity or buff.

I love FromSoft, but it never seems like people care enough about how boilerplate some of their design has been over the years. The studio has visionary ideas, to be sure, but often trudges those ideas out game after game after game with very little to liven them up in new, unfamiliar ways.

I think that is the intention with souls games. Every boss has "a thing" you need to figure out. That is where the fun and sense of accomplishment for me comes from. Almost every boss, so far, was annoying and difficult until I figured out the trick and then they were super easy.