Transcript for:
Souls Series Boss Ranking Lecture

when someone asks you what you spent your year doing you might say oh I was working or I was going to school getting my degree or I got married or something along those lines but you know what I'm going to tell people I spent a year playing and beating every single Souls boss from demon souls to Elden ring so that's what today is going to be we're ranking every single Souls boss ever so Demon Souls Dark Souls 1 Dark Souls 2 dark souls 3 bloodborne SEO and Elden ring all of these bosses are going to be ranked now I do say every Souls boss but with a couple exceptions we're not going to be doing bloodborne chalice dungeon bosses and searo side bosses and for Elden ring I'm going to do most of the main bosses Andor important ones but obviously not every single boss in Elden ring there's just too many but this video has been well over a year in the making so I hope you guys enjoy before we get started just drop a like that's all I ask and if you want to subscribe that would be greatly appreciated from software is practically renowned for having the best boss design of any video game franchise practically ever and while there are a lot of amazing ones there are some uh not so good ones too because of how many there are they're hard to rank side by side quality speaking so more or less they're going to be bunched up into different groups of quality and so I think that's the best way to go about it with that being said kids you know grab a snack grab an Estus and uh get cozy around the bonfire cuz this is going to be a long one before we can start with our actual list at the worst boss in Dark Souls we need to get a few of the anomaly bosses out of the way and what that means is bosses that don't really fit into any other category other than just their own so for example the old monk from Demon Souls is a fight that if you're playing online is going to be a PVP fight and if you're playing offline is a PVE but against a like humanoid character this boss isn't really able to be ranked by the same standards as everything else because your experience is almost entirely determined by the player and build that you happen to play against in this PVP scenario unless you're talking offline I think in Demon Souls it's an okay addition someone who doesn't really care that much much about the PVP stuff in Dark Souls that's not really why I play Souls games this fight is not one of my favorites like it's fine or whatever but I would never personally go out of my way to do this fight and if you play against the offline bot of it it is just absurdly easy so I can take it or leave it not really able to be ranked against everything else so it's a bit of an anomaly next is actually another fight from Demon Souls which is maiden australa and this is again an anomaly it's a bit of a weird one because the actual fight is just garl Vinland who is kind of like her protector and if you manage to kill him you can simply walk up to the maiden and she will um you know do the job herself so it's not really a fight this is more of a story boss and that's fine it's just not exactly fair to rank this among everything else next is halflight Spear of the church from Dark Souls 3 and I'm not exactly sure what from software's obsession with these like forced PVP encounters are and I think this iteration is personally better than the old monk in Demon Souls although not by much again it's entirely dependent on your build and the opponent's build and their skill and all that like there's no consistent uh experience that you're going to have player to player which is why it's unranked same deal with old monk however if you play offline you play against a bot instead of a sweaty nerd with a Cheeto dust controller and I can't say I ever agree with forcing PVP into the main like campaign of Dark Souls and this kind of violates that rule for me so it's not great but again it's an anomaly one and not really easy to R with everything else but with those anomalies out of the way it's time to get into the real list and I considered putting the first one here in the anomaly list but then I thought n that like this is going straight in the bad the Bed of Chaos is taking our list as the worst boss in all of souls this is an unpolished unfinished piece of garbage to say that this fight is too hard or it's easy is not even a useful way to go because it's not really a fight at all this is a platforming segment in which you have to hit a couple of different like like critical zones all while avoiding a sinking platform and stage and you can even be pushed into things and it's just not a well-designed fight at all if you even want to call it that you can one and done this and be done with it or it can take you a billion tries either way it's not a satisfying boss to beat I can understand what they were going for but again Dark Souls in the way that it controls and handles and especially its emphasis on combat just works so counterintuitive to this it's not meant to be a platformer and bet of chaos really shows how clunky the movement can be I think if this were done in a more modern context it could be a bit better especially with a dedicated Jun button that like Elden ring has for example but in Dark Souls 1 and the very limited move set and and like potential you have with your movement it's just not good man it's easily the worst Souls boss this boss I'm sure is the reason that a lot of people are bald these days next in the extremely bad is Covetous Demon from Dark Souls 2 which it I don't even know why this fight is in the game fat Alber of Dark Souls this slug this thing has almost no moves it's not a real threat at all it's more or less a 30 second distraction from you continuing on in the level design it doesn't even really need to be here I avoided just outright beating this thing up in the game play cuz I wanted it to last longer for the video it's an actual joke I understand for this boss and probably many others in the list that there are lower explanations why some bosses suck or are bad or designed it the way that they are but in this case I'm not giving them an excuse this is just not a good fight in terms of Boss rankings this is easily one of the lowest of the low and it's very unmemorable to say the least the BET of chaos is at least memorable this is not ah would you look at that yet another Dark Souls 2 boss being mid it couldn't be the ancient dragon in DS2 is perhaps the worst dragon fight of any Souls game it's so bad for a number of reasons number one it's dummy Health pool is outright foul number two it's very limited move set kind of makes this fight feel very monotonous and repetitive very very easy to abuse AI not a great Arena if I'm being honest and it's just not a very well thought out or executed fight that does not play nice with the camera either almost everything is wrong about it other than its presentation I think like it's actual you know look and feel of and like the concept is cool it's just not a fun or engaging fight I literally had to speed this footage up because of how monotonous and repetitive this fight can really get it took me a couple of tries but once you figure out that it only has like two or three moves you need to avoid in position yourself in a very key spot then this fight is just very easily abused and I don't think that from software really had this one dialed in very much the ancient dragon really encapsulates dark souls 2's biggest flaw which is its quantity over quality approach if you can't look at ancient dragon compared to something like Madar later on in Dark Souls 3 and say that one is objectively just much better than the other then you might need to get your eyes checked because buddy I got some news for you the only thing I feel like they could have done to make this fight more enjoyable is to actually uninstall the game after you've completed this boss that's about it while we're on the topic of Bad Dragon fights one of the only really bad bosses in Dark Souls 3 in my opinion is the ancient wyvern and it's almost the same idea as the ancient dragon uh almost same move set to be honest uh this one is a little more intricate but not too much uh it's a bit more reactable and readable and you can do this fight just by hacking away at it if you want to however and this is what they should have done with the ancient Dragon they gave you an out if you don't want to do the fight like this you can jump off of this like kind of cliff and then do a plunge attack on it basically instantly melting the boss and that is your oneway ticket out of this if you don't want to just sit here for 10 minutes and smacking away at this thing it's not a great experience because it wasn't in Dark Souls 2 and I'm very surprised they even attempted it in DS3 it's not a good fight in this game nonetheless still even though they gave you a gimmick in order to skip the boss essentially and it's not that all Dragon fights are bad or I have you know a preference against them because there is another dragon in Dark Souls I that's one of the best bosses ever I'm sure a lot of you know which one I'm talking about however the ancient wyvern is just not it it doesn't play nice with the camera the arena it's on is really bad as well even probably worse than the ancient dragons uh Arena like it's horrendous man obviously this one is meant for you to do the gimmick but if you don't it's kind of miserable so bad boss next is yet another giant boss that does not play nice with the camera whatsoever this is amigdala from bloodborne and it's a really cool looking fight man I love the design of this enemy so much and it appears throughout the game if you play bloodborne and you know exactly where it is and stuff like that you you see it a lot but it's fight it could have been a lot better than it was executed you're supposed to hit amigdala either in the arms or the head to deal Max damage but realistically I found like the most easy and safe Strat is just to stay under it and Dodge legs until you kill it it just doesn't seem like this fight was necessarily the most polished or thought out thing and they they wanted to just have this enemy that was clearly made for different parts of the game but they wanted to use it as a boss so they kind of just slapped it in and pasted it in this thing it's it's okay it's not as miserable as the ancient dragon or wyvern because it doesn't have an absurd Health pool but it also has a little bit more different uh moves going on so it's it's a little more interesting uh I just cannot say it's honestly a very good fight in bloodborne great concept don't get me wrong but very very flubbed execution I wasn't sure if I was going to put this one here cuz it's more less a side boss but the Blazing bull is the only really bad boss in SRO I think it does not correspond or gel well with seo's combat systems whatsoever I don't think that this fight is necessarily that fun or even teaches you very valuable lessons and it's not a like a satisfying fight to get good at like something like a ganito or ising is I understand nerds on the internet will say that the lesson the Blazing bull is supposed to teach you is to use the firecrackers and stuff and like I get that but for ing a player's hand into using a certain kind of equipment to make a fight really easy or chees is just not really my preferred play style or way to go especially this early on in the game you encounter it quite early and it's just not very fun I don't like this boss but that's the only I mean spoilers a lot of the secro bosses are god tier so if anything was going to appear down here it needs to be this one next is Celestial Emissary from bloodborne I don't really have anything to say about it it's just one of those giant things with the blue heads but it's a big one that's quite literally it it's got a couple of Minions that chase you around but it's hardly a boss if you could call it that although it technically does meet the requirements of a boss fight so I suppose I'll let it slide but it's pretty bad after that we have the godkin duo from Elden ring which is orstein and Smo if they were cringe this uh is probably like the worst fight in Elden ring uh if I'm being honest like as far as main bosses go this is not good it takes all of the concepts of what makes Duo fights work and throws them out the window now you can fight the Goda Noble and the Apostle on their own encounters and you would think that they would have mostly different behavior when putting them together they pretty much act like you're solo fighting them in their own encounters but you just slap them into the same room also not to mention they pull from the same health bar and so if you happen to kill both of them at the same time before they respawn nothing happens like you don't get extra rewarded for it you don't get some kind of bonus for playing really well and op imizing and stuff you kind of just have this awkward downtime where literally no one is in the field nobody's fighting and you just have to wait for another one to respawn and it's incredibly incredibly bad I know this fight is very chees you can summon or you can use sleep pots there's a million ways to get around this fight if you're really hard stuck on it but if you want to just actually you know play it straight through without using any of these ways to kind of abuse it then it's probably one of the most unbalanced and in congruent fights in all of souls games and for for Elden ring standards it's kind of impressive how bad it actually is I was I was shocked to be real this is not even godkin Duo this is orstein and SM at home it's like kind of embarrassing how wrong they get this fight and for making it mostly a mandatory boss it's just not acceptable next is actually a bloodborne DLC fight which is the living failures AKA The Story Of My Life I don't know how they got my likeness into this game but anyways uh this fight is they said hey I heard y'all like Celestial emissary so here's 18 of them the only redeeming factors I'm going to give this fight is its Banger soundtrack like the music's phenomenal topnotch it's sad it's wasted on a pathetic joke fight like this and they have this kind of interesting gimmick move where these meteors and stars while very similar to ROM's fight a little bit later on which I'm sure is kind of just copy pasted from that but it's just not a very inspired fight it feels a bit filler kind of tacked on into the DLC and doesn't really need to be in this package of fights this one might surprise you and it pains me to put it so low but see the scalas in Dark Souls 1 is not a good fight for a couple of reasons other than its visual presentation which is top tier its arena is really bad and its actual design is not so good either this is the epitome of Dark Souls I not being able to get finished on time and them having to cut Corners I mean everything about the boss's move set just feels like it shouldn't be here it constantly Clips through the arena in the walls it just doesn't look it looks like a mod like for being a polished you know from software game it looks like a beta version or like a work in progress of a boss that it doesn't have that final level of Polish where it's like okay this is the end result it's missing something and again it has so much amazing wasted potential which is why it's so painful to put it so low it plays a little nicer with the camera than most giant dragon bosses but that isn't really saying much in this case uh I just think it's held back by frankly a lack of the game being done there's no polish on this and that takes away from an otherwise very memorable and amazing encounter heading over to Demon Souls we have true king alance which is after you beat like basically the last main boss of the game uh this is its true form which is just a giant pathetic slug that has two moves that will not kill you like it's a story boss you know I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's some kind of mechanical or intellectual Masterpiece it's not it's a boss that you smack to death for the purpose of the theme and the ACT ual wrapping up of the story but otherwise it's a kind of like Hollow way to end the game on I feel like I understand why they did it but I like bosses that end with a really really memorable encounter and this one is just not it even though it was the first Souls game and perhaps they wanted to try out this as an experiment I don't think it really worked out too well next we're heading back to Dark Souls 1 and this is going to be the ceaseless discharge which is not a meme uh it's I mean well the name is not a meme but the the fight itself is there's a way to instantly skip it and knock all of its health or you can actually just flat out do the fight and smack it dead it has one move basically uh essentially one giant arm slam and that's really all not really much to say about it uh I don't think this fight is necessarily that polished or finished either I think it's meant to like encounter once and then you figure out the gimmick and then you just skip it but the good news is ceaseless discharge is pretty much our final boss that I would put in like probably honestly bottom of the barrel tier moving up just a little bit in the world and going to the pretty bad tier wait actually I lied there's one more really bad one I want to talk about the king of binas himself the caer demon it's not even the actual enemy I have any problem with at all the two dogs that appear in here are more of a threat than the actual main villain and monster here in this situation and the stupid layout of the Arena I don't know why there's just a random staircase here it's very boxed in odd Corners it just doesn't really make any sense and I understand that they needed to put a boss here but I can't really get a grasp on why it was designed the way that it was it will never be a good or high tier fight for me even though the actual mechanics of said boss are not bad at all it's all the surrounding circumstances that make this one annoying anyways now we can actually move up a little higher on this totem pole of bosses this one is going to be the good old Guardian Dragon I'm sorry Guardian Dragon uh I almost said ancient dragon I do put this a slight step above the previous dragons we had only because they don't have ridiculous Health pools it has a few more interesting moves than those and it's a more short and sweet fight right like it's not this entire like 10 to 15 minute debacle every single time you're pretty much in and out it's a little more flashy although you can tell this fight is still clearly not done either it was a huge step in the right direction for Dragon fights no pun intended uh but you can tell that they still really had to stretch this to its absolute limits and they copy paste it endlessly throughout the rest of this this next section you could say that this fight Was preparing you to how to deal with these but I don't think it really accomplishes that whatsoever I think all it does is make this fight in this cage a lot less memorable than it otherwise should be because now there's just a billion of them on the mountains and that's that the one thing I will give it credit for is it Arena actually feels like it plays nice with this boss's move set and it makes the camera feel a hell of a lot better too so I mean that's a giant Plus in my opinion it definitely scores some points for me and prevents it from being bottom tier I don't even know where to put this one uh ladies and gentlemen Len Zin is a bad boss and if you know you know it's not even the actual boss themselves or you know the two of them that I dislike they're just two of the king's pets and they're completely fine I actually really like them Ava is great which we'll get to later but the the gimmick of this boss is that once you get the first one to a certain like kind of below half Health then the second one joins the fight that's cool completely fine I I actually really like it and their move sets beautiful but the thing that's not okay is the run back to this boss and I know we're not really talking about runbacks in this video but this one is so exceptional that it's important to mention it's takes over 5 minutes to run from the bonfire back to the boss it's absolutely absurd and it makes an otherwise pretty fun or decent encounter in Dark Souls I completely painful and foul the entire frigid outskirts is a downright disaster and putting l and Zin so far away from the bonfire makes this one not even worth playing in my opinion it's if you've played Ava the king's pet and then this is just the same fight but two of them that's quite literally the entire premise so I can't put this anywhere above like pretty bad surprise surprise another DS2 boss being mid uh the grave robbers you know honestly hard to say if if I can even classify this as a main boss but they have a giant health bar so I suppose we're going to do it it's three different kinds of archetypes of NPCs that you might find throughout the game but there's you know three of them all at once and this fight is meant to be played Co-op like this is quite literally built for the co-op area of Dark Souls and obviously you can do it with friend and it's a lot easier but you can also do the solo it's just that each and every single NPC or grave robber has a very different you know move set equipment and so on and you have to just kind of exploit their vulnerabilities and weaknesses and more or less just survive in the arena until you can slowly we wear away at their health and you know find openings and such I actually really do like the different archetypes and the implementation of these grave robbers I just think it's kind of a wasted potential for what could have been a cool boss in this area and setting I I don't think this would have necessarily been the optimal way to go but that's just me moving over to Dark Souls 1 we have the Four Kings and I'm going to die on this hill this is a fantastic phenomenal concept for a boss fight but a very very poor execution and like the concept is insane you jump into the the abyss and you're fighting just these four entities and you can't let them stack up or else they will usually snuff you out and overwhelm you the problem I have with this fight is that I think it actually takes away from all of the lessons that Dark Souls so far has been trying to convey about its combat which is like finding with punish opportunities exploiting vulnerabilities and like end lag windows and stuff like that I think this is more of a DPS race and that's how it's optimally played I cannot honestly say that this fight is that fun to replay pretty much everyone just runs H's armor and then just smacks away at them the the and you tank hits you don't even really bother dodging that much it's not incredibly useful here and you need to get in close because they deal more damage the farther you are away so you're kind of meant to play like this from the get-go I just don't really think this fight is amazing other than its atmosphere and aesthetic quality which is incredibly unique uh the mechanics are underwhelming to say the least coming back to Dark Souls 2 we have prowling Magis uh and the congregation this is not a boss fight even though it's appearing in this video and it has a giant health bar this is not a boss this is a collection of enemies that happen to have a giant health bar at the bottom it's really not a boss and I don't know why Dark Souls II had this obsession with passing off these like just giant gank fights as a boss fight I would be more okay with these kind of gank fights if they were a little more memorable like if something uh unique happened then and made it stick out in my memory I might give these a bit more of a pass but it doesn't you kind of forget that this is a boss rather than just a a slightly chunkier than normal enemy and because they put a health bar at the bottom of the screen apparently automatically makes it a boss fight and it is in this game so I had to include it although it is pretty trash cutting back over to Dark Souls 1 is pin wheel probably the most memorable fight for being a meme in this game it was like the original meme as far as like easy bosses go again they put a health bar at the bottom of the screen but realistically it's a normal enemy that can duplicate itself which might catch you off guard for a second but as soon as you catch on you will delete it in two hits flat and the arena doesn't have anything interesting going on it's very small and also not to mention it just so happens to be the last checkpoint before like the worst area in the game if you're a tomb of the Giants enjoyer then uh pin wheel is probably like the beginning for you but hey I mean for everyone else may as well turn the game off after that we're going to come over to Demon Souls this is phenx which is basically the first main boss in the game uh outside of the tutorial fight this is your first real checkpoint I would say and I don't like this boss very much at least compared to what else is in Demon Souls matter of fact demon souls in particular the boss philosophy was a little bit more gimmicky as in they have one very specific way that you need to take them down or deal with them or even approach and Fink is no exception to the rule where you need to damage the center of it to deal the massive amount of damage that you can but it has a bunch of little tinier guards around it pretty much constantly protecting it you can cheese this with fire if you want to there's a lot of ways to get around this and make it absolutely trivial I just don't think it's a very good fight and uh for the opening of the game could have been maybe a little bit different in my opinion also let's not pretend that the name doesn't know exactly what it's doing continuing on the train of demon souls uh we have the dragon God and this fight I theoretically could have put at the beginning of the video in its own category but I want to put this here in its own thing it's not a great fight although you don't actually fight the main boss itself a whole lot this is a puzzle boss where you need to go find a couple of different things to shoot arrows into its side and then you finish it off at its head you don't actually you know combat this thing one-on-one really you have to meet a couple prerequisites and I can genuinely applaud from software in their first game being extremely experimental and attempting to create a sort of like stealth-based puzzle boss it's such a strange concept and for what it's worth it is memorable the first time around it's not like something you know similarly to these other fights where you walk in it's just a glorified pool of enemies that have a health bar this is an actual like cinematic fight that can actually be quite challenging and gratifying once you actually complete it I would like to see them maybe attempt this concept a little bit better in a more modern game because as is uh I I think that their first attempt was good but leaves a lot of room for improvement I think in something like Elden ring or even a future project we could see this concept really taken to the next level but it's very okay hard shift in games but very similar premise in terms of Boss design these are going to be the folding screen monkeys from searo and it's similar to Dragon God because it is a puzzle boss where you got to kind of play it a very particular way you're meeting certain prerequisites to beat the boss not necessarily an actual momentto moment duel so the way that this fight works is you have four different monkeys based on the original Japanese proverb of the sea no evil here no evil Etc you know monkeys and each monkey has a different attribute one can't see and it's blind one can't hear you know so you have to exploit these vulnerabilities and there's a very specific way to play it if you don't know what you're doing and you kind of fumble around in this it might be a pain in the ass to be honest but once you know exactly how it's done there's a very specific route you can do it's like one of the easiest fights ever I don't really give this fight a whole lot of credit for its difficulty but I think the concept and its design is quite unique I just don't think it's like uh it's not a I'm not going to go out of my way to replay it it's not also really what seos combat is made for and I feel like it's kind of just shoehorn then even though it is really a main boss next is uh bloodborne's ROM the vacuous spider I have beef with this thing not I don't really have anything against spiders or nothing and it's actually very similar to uh fallinks from Demon Souls uh I would say the difference is at least in that fight the thing will be kind of aggressive and you can load into this fight you can just stand there and as long as you don't kind of get past like the first phase like soft phase this this thing will never actually touch you the spiders will genuinely never approach and you have to play this like Bob and weave play style the entire time that I just find incredibly tedious I do like some things about it and I feel like it is more interesting than fallinks and a few of these other you know bait and punish bosses but I cannot say I have ever delighted or looked forward to fighting this boss in repeat playthroughs it's like an actual SLO next boss is almost the exact opposite of a SLO I think it's over before it even Begins the Old Iron King in Dark Souls 2 has a very impressive setup and look and I love the atmosphere around this this could have been such an amazing fight but not only does its visuals and mechanics kind of hold it back in terms of what like the actual boss is capable of working through the entire like Iron Keep to end up at this boss should feel a lot more Grand and like a finale and it just doesn't I think conceptually this had the potential to be dark souls 2's maybe coolest fight in the game or at least a top five but in its execution you can tell that this suffered from a lack of time and budget and ends up being like honestly one of the most underwhelming fights in Souls games period it's like actually kind of sad anticlimactic doesn't even come close of what's supposed to be one of these like great Souls of the game you're like oh uh like that's it next is going to be a Dark Souls 3 boss it's been a minute since we've had one on here but uh this is osiros the consumed King and I have to say the more I play against this boss the less I actually like it which is usually the opposite typically the more I play against a boss and learn it and understand it the more I enjoy it but with this fight I think the more I play it the more I'm beginning to grow tired of it he's actually kind of the opposite of like malakith or uh lwig from bloodborn where like he starts out very animalistic and once you get into certain Health he becomes uh you know on all four course he uses a weapon and fights more chival ristic this is the opposite he starts with the weapon and then after a certain uh limit on his health he then becomes a lot more uh Primal and he gets on all fours and starts kind of going crazy it's a neat concept I just cannot say that it's one of my favorite fights ever now buckle up fellas cuz we got a few Dark Souls 2 bosses to cover now we have the Executioner Chariot next and this is yes a puzzle boss but also a real boss to a degree the way this works is you have this open loop room which you need to kill witches or necromancers that will constantly be Reviving these skeletons eventually you make your way to the back of the room where you can close the gate on this Chariot that is constantly looping and trying to deal damage and outright kill you and once slamming the gate shut you will then be able to finally deal damage after knocking The Executioner's Chariot down I think the actual Chariot boss is completely fine you even find it as a regular enemy later in the game I don't have much problem with it but my problem just like Len Zin is the run back to this is horrible for a not very entertaining boss whatsoever again can't really say I look forward to doing this one it's not particularly hard once you understand the gimmick but if you're going in blind it's going to take you one or two tries before you really can understand you know what the hell is happening I think a small change that could have made this fight a bit better was number one shorten the run back but also have these knucker mancers and skeletons maybe a few regular enemies along the way so that you kind of learn to deal with this as you get into the fight would have been a really nice little hint to convey the player to look out for that as they get in here instead of just kind of doing gotcha moments next up continuing in Dark Souls 2 is the skeleton Lords and again not really a boss fight I don't like even putting it in the traditional definition of one it is a collection or cluster of enemies that happens to have a health bar very similar to the prowling Mages and in the church boys but these guys are a little different I I would say that this fight definitely gets a few more points for me because it doesn't feel as pathetic as the church one the pin wheel like the the the r rolling skeletons are back from Dark Souls I there's a just a sheer number of enemies that kind of can be intimidating at first so at least for presentation it scores a couple points and I think uh it's a lot more visually interesting than that last fight but again cluster of enemies not really a boss I don't have much to say about it other than that we seem to be on a bit of a streak right now a trend is being followed and continuing in Dark Souls 2 is going to be the Royal Rat Vanguard which I think I can understand the concept of what they wanted to do with this fight right you walk into this underground catacomb and all of a sudden you're trapped in this room you're getting swarmed by rats it's supposed to be like this frantic hectic feeling thing where you're trying to find a way out the way this fight works is you need to kill a couple of rats and then eventually one with a health bar is going to spawn which is actually the Royal Rat Vanguard and it's only denoted by a slight TFT of black hair on the top of its head and it moves around a little bit differently compared to the other ones maybe it's a little bit bigger but otherwise it's not like super noticeably different and you have to kill this one in order to beat the fight otherwise you're killing rats endlessly I just don't think this fight is that fun I don't think it captures the feel that they intended it to have dark Sun gwindel from DS1 is such a weird fight it's kind of optional like it's sort of a secret fight uh that you have to do something very specific in order to access it in the game so while it's not a Mainstay boss it does have a few interesting properties not all of them I can say I love it's one almost infinite hallway and you essentially just chase him down as he throws attack you he's only got three different moves though two of them can be blocked by just hiding behind the pillars and then one of them you actually have to roll or Dodge out of the way I can't say that this fight is honestly awesome uh it's like pretty much a oneandone and you're like okay I did that I'm done with it now there's there's not much to like learn here there's not much to uh talk about other than that the coolest thing about the fight is not the fight itself it's accessing it and also its presentation and atmosphere and visuals are certainly unique but that's essentially all the praise I can give it other than that it's mid uh and speaking of mid next is going to be melash host of The Nightmare from bloodborne I The more I've played this fight the lower it actually gets ranked for me I was initially fairly positive on it at first or at least neutral on it but the more I play it the more I dislike it and the reason is there's just too much gimmick stuff going on and I know gimmick gets thrown around a lot but this is an actual like proper song and dance ritual you have to do to even engage with the fight so you start out you walk through the fog wall and you need to chase him down through a series of hallways in order to pin him in this room right here and once you do you can kind of slap him up as as long as you want to then after a little while he'll leave and then he does the same thing he walks through another mirror you chase him down a little bit again to get him to the second room where you can then proceed to slap him up once more my main problem with this fight is like sure it's kind of entertaining and fun to learn how the stupid gimmick works the first time around you know it's a it's a funny little prank that he pulls and haha we got it but once you know the gimmick it becomes way less entertaining to do it feels like a chore it's very tedious his actual move set is not that complicated he has like two moves if that and that's really maybe three moves but other than that it's not a very engaging fight and it's gimmick gets old really really fast afterwards we got the fire giant from Elden ring and this is again one of my least favorite fights in the game although I cannot say it's like an outright bottom of the barrel it's really not it's okay for what it is and it has a couple of interesting things going on number one the giant you can pretty much stay under him the entire time with torrent and you are virtually safe as long as you know where to position its first phase is mostly straightforward its second phase is like if you get hit by one move it's pretty much over all of his moves are slow they have incredibly long wind ups they're extremely telegraphed but they are devastating and if again if you do get hit it's basically game over I don't know if I love these kinds of bosses where you're pretty much camping out this giant entity and just kind of doing chip damage until it finally reaches zero it's a little bit tedious in my opinion although it does have a couple interesting mechanics where if you do somehow score a posture break on the fire giant which is definitely doable you can get massive damage if you punish the Giant Eye that's on the front of it so there's a little bit you can do in order to speed up this fight and it's not a complete SLO uh if you play it a few different ways but I don't know its move set is not that interesting its visuals are cool the first time around and like its presentation is neat or whatever but it's not one of the best fights in the game not not by a long shot but it's good next is going to be the one reborn from bloodborne and if we were ranking bosses sheerly on their atmosphere their visuals and their presentation this boss would honestly be maybe a top three for me ever however that's not exactly the parameters we're ranking on today and the one reborn other than it's amazing presentation and just like sheer atmosphere does not hold up mechanically and it it fight is uh way less than Stellar when you actually play it so this is a great one essentially reborn of human body parts and it's just this giant amalgamation of stuff that you can kind of beat up obviously it makes sense that it's not the most powerful thing because it's a fraud Etc but still I don't think that the fight necessarily lives up to its expectation there's also these witches around the arena that can buff it and it's very similar to Tower Knight and Demon Souls which we'll get to later where you need to kind of deal with those first before you can actually fight the main boss but you know other than that there isn't a whole lot to say about the one reborn other than it's a very underwhelming mechanical fight but an amazing visual presentation and atmosphere probably one of my favorite in Souls ever so next is actually another amazing presentation boss and great atmosphere but very uh let's say underwhelming mechanics this is going to be high Lord wooler from Dark Souls 3 which I can understand putting this boss in the point of the game that they did but I honestly cannot say that I look forward to doing this one basically the only way you'll die in this fight is by the instakill smoke that will kind of just appear randomly or maybe a few skeleton boys that might catch you off guard but you got to destroy these rings on its uh wrists and it takes it down its Health in third so he got to destroy all three and then that's the end of the fight there really isn't much to it other than that and again even for a like presentation SL atmosphere boss I think it's good but I also don't think it's awesome in that respect either it's one of the most forgettable fights in the game in my opinion and uh I cannot say that I have that much fun with it although it's okay it exists I suppose so next we have uh dirty Colossus which is what they used to call me back in college uh you know how in cartoons they draw like a a stinky person with lines and a bunch of flies around them that is quite literally what is going on with this boss and otherwise it's one of the most like unremarkable uh least memorable bosses ever it's got a couple it's got like four or five moves they're all very easily avoidable it's very simple to take down with melee and it's incredibly weak to Magic and fire so any build is going to be more than viable against this I think this is one of those pushover bosses you get in Demon Souls that aren't really supposed to stump you for too long kind of a confidence booster if you will because like other than it's somewhat interesting presentation there really isn't much else to mention here it's not an outright bad boss like it's not offensive in any way so I can't really put it bottom tier but it's just very uninteresting next is another fight I don't particularly love and again it's a Dark Souls 3 boss even though it does have a pretty stellar lineup this is one of the weaker ones I suppose this could be considered an optional fight unless you don't want to actually be able to have the ability to use you know uh uh boss souls for weapons or equipment or whatever you got to beat the curse rer Greatwood if you're going to do that but the cool thing about this fight is that eventually he breaks through the floor you can't just simply run up to this thing and start smacking away at it wherever it has these like pus filled like orbs on it and these are the weak points in which they're only vulnerable there and after getting it to about half Health you will fall to the floor into a brand new Arena this is a little bit more cramped and dangerous and it also gets a little bit of different moves down here too I can't say the curse roded Greatwood is really even that fun to fight it's more like you kind of have to do it it's like a chore a little bit and I other than it's Unique visuals there's nothing special about this fight mechanically and I don't really like playing against it that much I often praise Dark Souls II for having probably like the best boss lineup in terms of batting average it doesn't have my favorite bosses ever in all of souls but it it doesn't really miss too much but if I had to say the curse Rod of Greatwood is going to be a Miss now good news because this next boss is pretty much the last one in what I'm going to consider in the category of slightly below average these are the witches of hemwick I don't really like this fight a whole lot and it can definitely vary depending on a variety of factors the most important one being your level of insight and these can determine basically the amount of creatures uh that are in this besides the witches themselves a lot of people claim that if you go into this fight with no Insight then any of the other Shadow monsters do not appear in this fight although when I did this they still appeared so I'm not really sure exactly how to make that happen I would just say that this fight uh can be relatively inconsistent and the witches can also revive each other so the trick is to kill them within a rapid you know time succession you've got to eliminate one and quickly eliminate the other before they're able to you know revive one another otherwise they'll just do it infinitely cool concept I just think it can get a little repetitive and it's not that fun otherwise let's go back in time a bit to Dark Souls 1 near the end of the game in lost isth the centipede demon is a great idea like this hellish centipede would be one of the coolest fights conceptually as a monster but again it's at this point in the game where it was clearly just like not ready this boss genuinely does not even look finished the arena you play it in is really scuffed and there's not even that much playable space it's constantly clipping through the walls its uh move set is very simplistic it's just not a great fight to be honest like it's fun enough when you play it for the first time but you realize how uh like repetitive it gets and just unfinished the monster itself looks when paying close attention let's stay on this game and talk about the G ing dragon in Dark Souls I with another amazing visual presentation and I love the look and design of this boss it's phenomenal what I don't love however is the boss's move set I find it to be a little bit uh simplistic and just kind of repetitive for a boss of this nature I do like the fact that you can cut its tail off and get a weapon and it completely eliminates one of its most powerful moves which is awesome it's a great thing to know if you're going into this fight and you have to be struggling with it or whatever if it didn't have these very unique visuals and its designed being something out of an actual like horror book I don't think that this fight would be memorable whatsoever let's move over to Royal Rat Authority in Dark Souls 2 which again I feel is a more below average fight this begins off with a couple of rats before the actual main boss shows up that try to make you toxic before you even fight the main giant rat although as for him he's basically great grey wolf sift from Dark Souls I if he were mid the thing is the whole area that you know this boss appears in is actually made for PVP anyways so they kind of just slapped this together and you can tell that that's like one of the only reasons this fight is even in the game they had to have some kind of boss that justifies this area's existence in Dark Souls II other than being a PVP centered Arena so they kind of just made a giant rat with the mechanics of cth and said you're done let's give a little bit of a mention to leechmonger I don't have that much to say about this fight it's kind of like dirty Colossus honestly copy pasted but instead of like dirt and and flies around it it's leeches it's the same idea just a little bit less mobile I also don't love the arena it's in again you have like a small amount of space to work with there's some water in it and a pointless amount of stairs around this area I'm not going to lie I actually totally forgot this boss was a thing until I was making my list in order to rank these I was like what the hell is a leechmonger I had to go and look at it again cuz I don't even remember fighting it so very unmemorable but I suppose it is a demon Soul's boss let's move over and talk about dark beast parl from bloodborne it it's a fight that again I think has a little bit of the same issues as uh a blood starved Beast with its animations being a little wonky but it is really cool having like a seemingly random patch of gravel turn into an actual boss fight it's a hella unique uh like presentation and setup and intro and it is cool having like an electric charged Beast although that's pretty much as far as the positives go for me you can't Parry it which which kind of sucks and it doesn't have a ton of moves honestly although the ones that it does have are pretty cool and fairly devastating so you have to watch out and and be careful but it's an okay boss I just can't say that I love it all right so we're also going to knock these two out right now the Dragon Rider plus the Twin Dragon Riders in Dark Souls 2 the first one is in Hy's Tower of flame and this fight is the other alternate tutorial boss if you don't fight the last giant first then you'll probably encounter this one it does appear here as a regular enemy at some point later in the game near King Vendrick which is you know you know how I feel about that it can kind of annoy me but they also reuse it again in the Twin Dragon Riders fight and this is also in drag light castle and it's the exact same mechanics roughly speaking there's one that has a bit of a different skin and one of them's got a couple ranged attacks but I believe it has far less Health than the other one uh I almost again this is another fight that I kind of forgot even happened because it's over so quickly and it's just there's not much much to remember about it to be honest if you're noticing a pattern here that a lot of these mid ass fights are from Dark Souls I well that's kind of uh that's that that was their whole thing that there's a lot of fights in the game you know there's a a huge number of them but most of them are not very good and I feel nothing exemplifies that midy better than the belfrey Gargoyles specifically in Dark Souls I because this is a fight that in DS1 works really well but they completely throw the formula out the window introducing large number of these gargoyles that can appear at the same time I believe up to five total which completely breaks the arena and the flow and the layout of this fight changes the Rhythm entirely and making everything that worked about the original uh fall flat on its face I don't like this one in Dark Souls 2 that much although it does have enough DNA from that original fight to not make it totally awful it's more an example of Dark Souls I as a whole where they looked at the original Dark Souls game and said hey let's try and recreate that without really understanding what made it work and like that's that's literally what this fight is all about it's trying to be dark souls I without understanding why that fight actually works it was designed in a very specific way with you know a very particular Arena and a specific number of enemies that make this function it just doesn't work in this game and I I don't know what they were thinking it's not good let's switch gears a little bit and talk about Moonlight Butterfly in Dark Souls I it's one of those fights that madebe go wo what is this thing like it it catches you so off guard from its design to its presentation it doesn't necessarily feel like it belongs in this game which makes it that much more fascinating but its mechanics are really dull and boring it's a fight that's almost entirely ranged meaning if you are playing a melee build almost the only punish options you'll have are when the butterfly lands for a short period of time on the railing otherwise you got to throw stuff at it or use spells or whatever it does not feel like the Moonlight Butterfly is a finished or completed boss the Polish isn't necessarily there and I can't say I agree with its design either it's a fight that you'll get through very quickly once you understand it and know how to fight it it's just a little bit too slow and and boring for my liking I don't enjoy fighting the Moonlight Butterfly anymore just because it doesn't really work for me and my pace and what I enjoy something else that doesn't really work for me is the Demon of Song in Dark Souls 2 it's not even the boss that I mostly dislike it's in the worst area of the game The Demon of Song is how you cap off the shrine of aana which is the most stressful annoying and janky area that Dark Souls I has ever concocted and this fight the only thing fun going on with it is it becomes invulnerable and it puts this little Hood over its face you can punish it as it's opening or as it's closing but not while it's shut and it has maybe two or three moves to its name uh it's something that you're probably not going to ever die on to be honest like it's very very easy but I appreciate it little gimmick it's just not very fun at all so everything prior was a boss that I consider really bad or below average or even slightly below average now we get to the point where there's a lot of like middle of the road bosses that aren't necessarily great but they're not terrible either and we're going to start with the Fool's Idol from demon souls and it's worth talking about how this functions for just a second because it is very gimmicky although I think it's a a fun gimmicky boss to some degree the Fool's Idol is just a boss that kind of teleports around the room and has these trap circles on the ground if you step into them you get shocked and sets you up for another attack and you'll most likely take a lot of damage and she'll teleport to another location after taking a certain amount of damage from the player and worse yet she will multiply herself and killing the dup duplicates do not hurt her own health bar but the cool trick to this fight is that if you're paying attention you'll notice that the real Fool's Idol has a lot brighter magic than the duplicates so there's a tell right away of which one you should be going for you need to kind of remember where these circles are as they're not visible unless you step into them and knowing where you can and cannot walk can be a little bit of a tricky Affair sometimes but it's definitely not too hard once you understand the gimmick the really annoying part is there's some guy that's up in like a closet and if you don't kill him first he will infinitely revive this boss and it's cruel to a point of almost unfairness I would say if you're going into this game blind there's almost no way you know about that so I think that might be taking it a little too far but chances are if you're going in blind and don't know much about this game you're going to be doing this fight at least twice next up is going to be Champions grav tender and the Great Wolf and I would say that this fight could do without the actual grav tender I think he's kind of a pointless addition in this fight even though it kind of makes it more interesting Dynamic when there's two different enemies on the battlefield but he's very easy to kill and shouldn't present you with too much trouble the Great Wolf definitely can I feel like it's certainly like fighting CF in Dark Souls 1 uh very similar concept I just don't feel like it's quite as well done here and it's not nearly as memorable in my opinion and I I think it's like solid but it's the worst fight of this particular DLC that's for sure everyone's favorite giant moose fight is the Regal ancestor spirit in Elden ring one of the few bosses that can legitimately heal itself during the fight and this one deserves to because it's not particularly dangerous its moves aren't as devastating as maybe you would expect it to be and this fight is certainly more about the spectacle than anything it makes me really appreciate how just fascinating and gorgeous Elden Rings visuals and art can be but its mechanics are nothing to really scoff at either it's a pretty damn solid fight and it's something that I enjoy doing on every single playthrough the downside is it can be kind of annoying for melee based builds because it spends a lot of time teleporting around the arena and jumping up in the air and so if you don't have much tools to deal with that kind of play then you need to wait for its Windows when it does actually become grounded again if you want you can more or less just wait it out and let the boss approach you instead which it certainly will it'll just take a little while a little bit of patience in this fight goes a long way but otherwise I think it's a pretty good boss I like it a lot not one of my favorites in Elden ring but is certainly a memorable one no matter the case so if we're talking about bosses with good visuals and presentation I mean the Regal ancestor Spirit does great but also vicer Amelia and bloodborne I would say is just on the level this fight is pretty good uh I like it a lot and I think it's the first uh maybe real tutorial boss that shows you a different kind of play style father gascoin always gets credit for being the first like main tutorial boss and that's true and it teaches you that you can stay and be aggressive during the entire fight Vicor Amelia is the first boss in bloodborne that forces you to adopt a different kind of play style and I think that's very interesting she can also heal herself just like the ancestor Spirit as well there's a few different versions of the Beast archetype fight in bloodborne specifically and I think Vicor Amelia is a very good one it's a good representation of it it's not my favorite personally but I think it's a good way to open the game as it does and it's in a good placement you can also use fire or you can use summons for this if Vicor is giving you particularly a hard time I think this boss stumped a lot of people when the game first came out because it does force you to play so different up to what the game has taught you thus far if I had a slight criticism for this boss I'm going to say that her like effect and what I mean is like all of the little entrails and just all the fur on her really obscure what this boss is doing I don't even know what move startups are happening half the time because I physically can't see and I think that if the you know character design were a little more clean and I could actually see what the hell is happening a lot of the time I would you know have far less issues with this I think the design kind of holds it back just from a visual perspective but it's not a massive deal it's just a slight annoyance I would say next up is going to be a gimmick boss from Dark Souls 3 which is yorm the Giant and I say gimmick boss not necessarily because it has like a a [ __ ] move or whatever it's just because there is a particular weapon at the back of the Arena that you're supposed to Ed against it so you either find that out and use it your first time or you go back and upgrade it and then figure it out later whatever but basically this thing will knock it over deal tons of damage and allow it to become vulnerable otherwise you can use a regular weapon against the arm it's just going to take you absolutely forever you are clearly meant and designed to use this weapon in the fight although if you really want to you know push your build you can use other stuff as well it's just not really built for that I can't say this is my favorite kind of gimmick fight in which they give you a weapon to take care of it I think it's one of the weaker implementations even compared to stuff like Demon Souls which we'll get to but it's okay it's fine again very very average but while we're on the topic of giant uh let's talk about the last giant from Dark Souls 2 now this game DS2 does not really have a tutorial boss similarly to basically every other game to some extent has a boss that you fight really near the opening this is not the case you can fight the last giant first and I feel like most players do it's probably the easiest one to start with and it's very very simple it's got only a handful of moves and uses a giant stick as a weapon uh that's very easy to avoid I don't think this boss plays as nice with the camera as maybe it should for an opening boss of this nature but it's not like an outright defensive or terrible boss either it's pretty average it's like the definition of average I would say and while we're here we may as well talk about the second time you fight this boss which is the giant lord inside of the memory it's the exact same character it's like the same giant although this time it you know it's supposed to be more in his prime he's more active he's got a weapon he has a little bit more active moves health is feels about the same I would say greatly depends on your build and your level and everything but it's practically the same fight there isn't much real difference between these these two bosses and they play pretty much one in the same let's shift over to Demon Souls now and talk about the adjudicator so again as I said earlier almost every boss in Demon Souls has a gimmick or otherwise a very specific weakness this is encapsulated no better than the adjudicator's two weak points that you need to hit in order to deal damage you can't do any damage to its body as in like the actual like main chunk of it you have to damage this Cleaver that's wedged inside his stomach to move it around and cause blood loss Etc and when it does you de deal enough damage it'll fall over and then you have to smack the Golden Bird on top of its head in order to deal real damage to the boss I think the adjudicator is fun I actually don't really have much of a problem with this at all I think it's entertaining I think the arena is pretty bad for it to be honest it's a very small compact space down here with a bunch of pointless stairs and like Ledges maybe for magic builds or whatever I don't really know I I think the arena is kind of bad for this particular boss but I understand maybe why it is the case otherwise it's it's okay and I do have some some fun with this one next we've got blood starved beast from bloodborne and I talked about Beast fights a little bit with Vicor Amelia but the thing I really like about this one is the fact that it's a beast fight that is actually parryable using your gun and I I think that one of the downsides of a lot of the Beast fights in bloodborne is the fact that it kind of nullifies that entire mechanic it doesn't gel as well with bloodborne systems as I feel like they could blood starved Beast is the exception to that rule though and I think this fight's a lot of fun what I don't really prefer or in hindsight I feel is a bit of a drawback its animations especially in 30fps for this boss in particular can feel and look really janky it's perfectly parryable but it moving so erratic and kind of like sloppy makes this fight feel very unpredictable which does add a certain element of tension to it for sure I will give it that it's a it's a definitely intense fight that will raise your blood pressure and I like it it's good not one of the best but it's all right all right you know what we're going to go ahead and knock these three out at the same time because I don't want to talk about these three different bosses and pretend that they're meaningfully different because they're not we have the Asylum Demon the stray demon and Demon fire sage in Dark Souls 1 so the first one is the opening tutorial boss which I feel is one of the best tutorial bosses that Souls has ever had it's excellently set up but the thing is they do repeat this boss quite frequently the second one is an optional boss when you return to the uh Asylum and you fight the stray demon underground this fight is a lot more intricate it's got an expanded move set and it has a ton more Health this can be a slightly challenging fight if you're not expecting it and I think it's probably the best iteration of this boss it feels like it's actually been leveled up it feels like it's matched you as you've progressed through your journey and gotten more powerful and so on it actually feels like a good matchup this battle with the stray demon feels like the you know encounter You Were Meant to have against this monster the first one was just a setup but that was the real fight now demon fire Sage gets reused later in the game uh actually near the end and there is no difference in move set really or in any properties of the demon fire Sage versus the stray demon they are a literally copypaste of one another with a slightly different skin and they know it's copy paced because they were having trouble finishing the game on time so they had to kind of make do but these bosses are good it's just that they you fight them a lot and it gets a little repetitive not going to lie next is going to be everyone's favorite pushover the iron golem from s Fortress in Dark Souls 1 I like the concept of this fight right this big hunking giant tank of armor that seems impossible to take down until you realize you can knock it over and deal either tons of damage or just outright make it fall off the map it's a it's a cool idea I don't think its execution is awesome in this game but I can very much see the vision of what they were going for and I think it's kind of fun now to piggy back off of that I want to talk about the armored Warrior from SEO because it's basically the exact same idea just done in a way that I really like the Iron Golem can either be killed outright just by dealing damage to it or it can be virtually insta- killed by pushing it off the cliff the armored warrior in Seco however has to be killed by making it fall off the bridge otherwise you can land as many death blows on it as you want and deal as much chip damage as you like it will never go down until you actually do push it off but the way it's done is actually so amazing and I I think this is like well it's not a main boss I think it's worth talking about in this context now I want to add a slight caveat to what I said earlier about vicer Amelia's boss fight and talk about the cleric Beast for a moment which is the real true first main boss Beast that you'll fight in bloodborne I guess my point was vicoria I think does a better job at making you employ different strategies against it the cleric Beast is good and I think he teaches that to some degree but I also feel as being a beginner boss a lot of people kind of just fumbled through this one and got lucky and maybe maybe didn't really know exactly what made this boss work or how they properly got through it it's not as hard as vicoria not by a long shot but it's fun and it's a good fight and not to mention the soundtrack is absolutely Sinister it's so good the the presentation and visuals of this fight are Unforgettable and the cleric Beast I think people really associate with bloodborne as a game it's one of the most identifiable creatures in this entire series and more specifically bloodborne as a whole next let's talk about Elden ring and more specifically renala Queen of the full moon this boss fight has a very interesting structure firstly it starts out in a really distinct way where in order to deal damage to the main boss you first need to knock out this giant yellow shield and you do that by killing three of these special glowing um crawling things on the ground only then can you break the shield and actually make rala herself vulnerable once you kill her in this phase you then go over to phase two in which everything completely changes including the room you're in and the entire environment she also starts using her own moves instead and it's here you find out that renala is actually a filthy casual herself because she uses summons and so you know I I don't even want to hear it this this fight is uh it's different as a plus I can't say this fight ever gets really repetitive or anything because the phases switch up fairly fast they're both really different and the creatures that she summons are what seems completely random so you could get an entire Dragon to spawn like I did or you can get like the most pathetic creature in the game to spawn it's completely RNG as far as I can tell and that will definitely determine your experience to some degree but I think it's a pretty interesting fight let's move back over to Dark Souls 2 and talk about the pursuer honestly one of my favorite fights in Dark Souls 2 despite being quite simple it only appears once as an actual boss encounter in which you can use these ballistas in the arena to completely melt it and not even really take the fight but it also appears at various points in the game when you're kind of just doing your own things throughout the level design although it doesn't appear as a boss it doesn't have a giant health bar or anything but the pursuer is your classic sword and shield opponent it's got a nice Rhythm to its fight and it just is very intuitive and it makes sense I like the pursuer a lot to be honest up next let's talk about the Taurus demon from Dark Souls 1 which outside of the tutorial boss with the Asylum this is going to be your first real like main checkpoint boss and it's interesting because the arena is quite strange it's this small you know very compact bridge but but you are able to do plunge attacks from the opening like how you were taught earlier I do find it interesting that a lot of the bosses in early game of Dark Souls 1 really teach you to do this plunging attack method for dealing with them but then they pretty much completely nullify that strategy uh at a lot of the later Parts in the game in the middle and especially near the end that just doesn't really become a viable option anymore so it's strange that this is taught so early on but it's just one of those Dark Souls 1 behaviors let's move over to Dark Souls 2 and Scorpion is najka who is the chaos which quog at home which you know we'll get to that in a second it's a boss I like a lot more but it's very clearly trying to emulate that I don't think scorpion is Notch cut quite gets there mechanically but I think her visuals are awesome and no not the way you're thinking one of the biggest differences between her and the fight she's based off of is NAA can actually travel under the sand temporarily becoming invulnerable and repositioning to maybe set up a strike that you're not expecting it's a really cool mechanic that I don't think many bosses even utilize in Souls games it's a very rare one to come across and I also think it can be kind of a difficult one to get right because you can only track her movement through these like faint dust you know smoke piles they're actually kind of low-key uh and it's a fun little gimmick to the fight that I think really separates it from its original counterpart she doesn't move quite as gracefully or rhythmically as uh chaos witch does but it's again kind of like the the generic you know cheaply done version of that fight which I suppose is maybe better than nothing but I don't really know it's fine it's a pretty good fight to be honest heading over to Dark Souls 3 let's talk about the crystal Sage which I think on paper is an extremely easy fight and most practically should be depending on the build you're using I feel like the variety of your experience is almost entirely dependent on that your build will almost entirely determine your experience and some can be a nightmare to use against these it's very similar to the Fool's Idol where you know the crystal stage will duplicate itself and you've got to track down the real one which can be tricky business sometimes and while I don't think this B gives people nearly as much trouble as many others in Dark Souls 3 and certainly not as much as fool's Idol probably gave people in Demon Souls I do think it's a good way to refine that idea and formula getting rid of those like annoying ass traps on the ground right next to the points where you ideally want to deal damage to them is huge and you know making the bosses maybe have a bit more health and powerful moves is a good trade-off I like Crystal sage and I do think it's a Perfection on a formula to some degree all right so this is going to be a little different we're going to get a bit of a two for one here we have Alia scholar of the first sin from Dark Souls 2 and then Moon presence from bloodborne and the reason I'm putting two bosses from separate games together is because functionally they are kind of the same in a lot of ways while they have slightly different moves you actually set them up or encounter them in almost an identical way so throughout the game of Dark Souls 2 you might encounter Alia and if you talk to him enough and you know do his little Quest and speak to him throughout the game he will appear as the actual final boss at the end of the game there's a few of from software's where you need to make very intricate and specific deliberate choices throughout the game to encounter an extra final boss when you get to the very end otherwise you may not get the ending that you wanted and you may miss out on some content Alia was added with the scholar of the first sin Edition obviously hence the name but I don't think many people are dying to this fight it's not you know regarded as one of the best fights in Souls it's a story boss at the end of the day that is there for essentially narrative reasons only and it's the same deal with moon Pres in bloodborne once again the situation is you need to make very specific choices in order to encounter Moon presence after the game's like real final boss but this is more or less a story boss while it still can kill you it's got a very limited move set and it's there for you to kind of just beat it up and finish the game I like both of them in terms of their presentation but I can't say they're the most fun bosses to actually play against if I had to pick one I think I still like Moon presence more all right uh I don't know if this controversial uh I'm I'm I'm sick of pretending that the arm armor spider isn't at least a pretty decent boss I feel like I've seen the armor spider ranked a lot lower than maybe it should be and obviously it's personal preference and taste but I really like what the armor spider represents and a lot of its move set what I don't really care for is moves that force you to the back of arena for a certain amount of time before you can approach again stuff like that can be a little obnoxious where you know you kind of have to deal damage in phases and that's fine but it has moves that are like perfectly reactable and as far as I can tell most builds in the game are and play styles for that matter will be viable against it and it's a fun and fair fight once you get the Rhythm and it clicks I think it's probably one of the better fights in Demon Souls so we've just left the realm of bosses that I would say are pretty average you know they're good or they're passable or they're decent they're not you know really stand out one way or another now we're entering the realm of slightly above average or something that I would consider to have at least one property or attribute that is exceptional that really sets them apart and that I like about them and start us off in this category we have the corrupted monk from SEO just the regular one not the true which we'll get to later the differences between these two are mostly just in Death Blow marks and stuff like that but also this is in this like Phantom or ghost form and so I feel this version encourages to use something like lapis just to wear down its health bar instead of trying to break its posture meter which is very difficult because the corrupted monk she has some of the fastest recovering posture in the entire game but her move set can you know definitely make that that posture bar add up if you know how to read and respond to it the rhythm is set right away and it's probably one of the most fun to get good at and learn I also feel the corrupted monk shows that SEO bosses don't need to be insanely fast-paced for them to be fun this fight is fairly fast but not you know aggressively quick and it strikes the proper balance between you know wanting to get good at parrying and learning to break posture but also wearing away at health bars and you know getting in chip damage while you can it's a great learning tool as well now staying on SEO here the next fight is another two for one let's talk about the headless ape and the guardian ape so this boss you encounter quite a few times and I guess I mean you have to fight both versions it's very strange so you fight the guardian ape he's just a normal giant monkey you kill him once in this encounter and you think he's dead only for him to revive himself and then become the Headless ape after he like cuts his own head off with his sword necklace and then the caterpillar takes over his body and starts fighting very different he starts using a weapon and it's an entirely different move set now now now after this encounter you do fight it another one in the caves The Headless ape this fight I think is technically optional although not really if you go a certain path in the game so we'll talk about it regardless but it's two of the Apes now one of them is already headless and then the other one is the normal Guardian ape with about half the move set of the original Guardian ape if you're still following so I say I like the solo encounter here a lot more that you're seeing it's a much better introduction and the Shinobi execution switch up will pretty much get anybody you know playing your first time around and nobody saw that coming and then the one where you fight two of them is a little sloppier the Arena's not quite as good and having to fight the second monkey with like a little bit less health and not as many moves just feels kind of Ganky for no reason in a game where gank fights Don't Really Work Well to begin with I know I'm kind of ranking them together but they are very different fights in some way and while they're not my favorite they're certainly better in a bubble than like I don't know like 60% of what's on this list list so I can't hate it too much it's just not a fight that I look forward to playing in Seco all the time compared to some other bosses which we're going to get to much later in the video moving on though next is going to be the looking glass knight from Dark Souls 2 and to be totally Frank like he's just your basic sword and shield opponent and I honestly don't feel as if it's one of the better ones it's not super standout for that reason although this fight is kind of like rala from Elden ring where his most interesting property is he can actually spawn someone else into the fight and if you're playing offline it will be an NPC that he brings in but if you're playing online he can actually summon in real players to fight with him and more importantly the real players given the right build can actually heal the boss this can be extremely frustrating and totally Breaks the Rules of Engagement of Souls boss fights in general and introducing a PVP element to what is otherwise a PVE centered game and boss fight can get really really messy and so I'm not saying it's the best implementation here nor is the Looking Glass Knight one of the best bosses ever but it's very interesting and it's Unique and I think I have a lot of fun playing against it as well I would describe the Looking Glass Knight as a slightly above average boss in Dark Souls I think he has an amazing look and presentation as well an unforgettable encounter if you will staying with the theme of Dark Souls 2 next is the flexile sentury which I know this is not the most complicated or difficult fight in the game and it does appear as a mini boss quite a lot here and so if you know how to deal with it in its boss encounter it becomes very easy later on but the thing is the flex is centry is so cool it has two different sides and therefore weapons and move sets and it can flip around and do different kinds of combos with those different sides as well as having some very rare moves that only come out during very specific conditions I feel like the amount of move Mix-Ups I've seen from the flex is Century are like honestly Champion gun deer level to be real it's such an interesting boss that is very replayable and I have a great time fighting him what I don't have a great time with however is trecking through the goddamn Tomb of the Giants to get to a slightly above average boss which is gravel Lord Neato and despite all the gankin of this fight I still think it's pretty fun and engaging and I like the actual boss design a ton it's one of the best visual bosses in Dark Souls I and I don't hate its mechanics either it's kind of like a just a a a slower moving sword opponent but most of its damage output actually comes from its minions and most of the distraction what you have to deal with and why you can't just instantly delete this boss is because you will get swarmed very quickly uh at basically all times during this fight I do feel the actual fight in a bubble is consistently above average but I have to dock points for the terrible area that it's in it's really hard for me to separate the Run backs and or area that is associated with that boss with the actual fight itself because I love Neato but I hate the Tomb of the Giants and that's the case for a few of these bosses we're going to get to because I'm not exactly sure where to rank them otherwise and speaking of which let's go ahead and let's just get to it I mean oh you all knew it was coming eventually I mean the war flashbacks just started but the Smelter Demon and then the blue Smelter Demon in the DLC we're going to knock these two out at the same time because it should be illegal like whoever made this should go to jail to make a fight that's actually so good behind the worst runbacks in like all of souls games both of them consistently have terrible runback routes it's actually unbelievable how such a good fight like a really high tier or top tier fight for Dark Souls I gets muddied because of the awful way to get back to it it's just like I cannot get over it but the thing is these demons are mostly the same in terms of their move set but they're a bit different in terms of range uh I believe Frame data and most of the timings on their attacks as well but otherwise it's the same deal you can't just like use the same approach against one or the the other because their timings are slightly different and will catch you off guard other than the good Rhythm they have in their fight if you get too close they have fire that's burning in their bellies so that you will passively take damage if you're too close so it's a bit of a trade-off when you should actually go approach and punish and when you should stay back and let them kind of cook and do their thing literally outstanding boss design but muddied by an absolutely pitiful and embarrassing runback system taking a pretty hard shift in tone and pace and direction is going to be crossbreed Priscilla in Dark Souls 1 located inside the painted world she is the main boss of this area but what's really interesting is you walk into this fight and nothing will happen unless you swing first and engage otherwise she'll just stand there and give you dialogue once you do engage she'll become invisible and you can only hear her or just see little Footprints walking around in the snow to know where she's at and her move set feels like it's kind of the version one of sister Freda in Dark Souls 3 in that DLC which we'll get to in a little bit but it feels like you know very ins spired off of Priscilla I think she's a great boss and despite the gimmick of turning invisible which could be hella annoying if handled incorrectly I think it's done fine here and I actually quite like this fight from its unique presentation to its actual move set it's not a hard boss you won't struggle on this one too much but it is fun and entertaining and I like how it's done next up we've got godric the grafted from Elden ring a boss I really like it's not even by a long shot the most powerful or the hardest boss in the game but it's placement is very interesting and important obviously you know in the lore it's the weakest of the demigods which makes sense why he's not the strongest thing ever but you know lore reasons aside his actual placement where he is in the game is excellent because after marget I think is going to be a tough boss for most you know brand new players and godric is a bit of like a confidence boost or it introduces a few new mechanics but is easily defeated enough where you do feel like you're getting better at the game and you're actually improving you can see that with each run you play of godri and I think it's genius not to mention he gets a few different moves during phase two and this all keeps the fight fresh fun and interesting throughout the whole thing again I can't say he's my favorite boss nor is he even close to my favorite boss in Elden ring in particular but he is good like it's a fair fight and it's fun sometimes it makes me wonder how different the reception of Elden ring at launch could have been if godric had been the opening boss instead of marget who knows it's an interesting thought experiment but I do think godric is a slightly above average boss all things considered in Souls games next is going to be a very different kind of boss but one I still thoroughly enjoy nevertheless it is a gimmick boss in the sense that you get a weapon specifically to do this fight this is fighting against the Storm King in Demon Souls this giant stingray that flies around the arena and it has a couple of Minions that you also need to take out with this what I like is you're not just fighting the main bad guy there's just enough smaller enemies flying around where you kind of have to you know multitask and deal with those too and it's only vulnerable at certain Windows it flies sometimes out of range where you need to wait for another vulnerable window or opening before you can punish again I love the presentation the weapons really fun and obviously not an extremely difficult fight once again most of the bosses that give you weapon in the arena to use very rarely are but I feel this is a good version of of doing that and you know later like this was demon souls in in later games there's ones that I just don't feel quite live up to as well as Storm King did it there is one more I think does it the best but we haven't gotten to that yet I think Storm King is a pretty above average boss in Demon Souls despite it being uh a little bit you know unorthodox so this next boss I almost called him dragon slayer orstein but then I remember nerds on Reddit were going to be like bro it's not actually orstein dude he's just some guy wearing the armor shut up I know it's not exactly orstein but it's for all intensive purposes the same kind of boss just without the other part that makes that fight so unique and work as well as it does now don't get me wrong I think uh old dragon slayer does hold up on his own um just as a mechanical boss which is more which it's less of a compliment to Dark Souls I and more to show the integrity and mechanics of of the bosses in Dark Souls I actually all you have to do is strafe right and win the game but he's a fun boss nonetheless so next is going to be a boss from Dark Souls I which I think is very solid but not in the top of the lineup of that game uh this is going to be vort of the boreo valley which is pretty much the first main boss going to fight after the tutorial boss of udx Gunder and I think he's great and he can be pretty damn dangerous and the only things I really don't love about this boss are because of its placement in the game being so early on I feel like introducing the frostbite mechanic in no other way really other than this kind of makes players confused like I bet so many firsttime players were getting beat up by vort and getting hit by frostbite having absolutely no clue what it was actually doing to their character and how to counter play it as well but still despite that I think he's a very Dynamic boss I could even do without the frostbite mechanic entirely and I still think this fight would work on its own he's a lot of fun and I do see him as an above average fight in general I also feel his mechanics mirror Osos uh the consumed King later in the game they have very similar designs I think Osos is probably a little bit of a worse version I think vort is is probably better to be honest but I still like both of them and I think they're great moving on we have the divine dragon from SEO it's not the most mechanically complex of bosses to be quite honest but as far as its visuals and presentation go that is what the point of it is it is a story boss but in a way that's done far more interesting as compared to something like uh you know Alia or Moon presence the them doing a story boss near the end of the game like this has such a grandio feeling and you can tell that this was like authored and curated to have this specific kind of look and feel I love it the gimmick is that you got to wait for these trees to start sparking with lightning and you got to grab that one throw it at the dragon and then deal damage to it it's a very simple premise but because SEO has a plethora of mechanically intricate bosses I think it's perfectly acceptable and fine to have more of a cinematic fight like Divine dragon and it's one of the best ones in all of souls to me next up is a boss I'm a bit conflicted on uh but I still do think overall I would consider an above average fight because it's trying to do something very different now this is the duk's deer Freya from dark Souls 2 and it is a little scuffed it's it's a little bit of Jank uh to be honest like it's not the most polished fight in the world if it had a bit more polish I think it has a lot of potential I think that it's kind of like doing the armor spider concept but without a lot of the moves that literally just force you to not play the game for a bit uh this one you can pretty much approach it in any way you want if you're not holding a torch then a lot of these smaller spiders will come after you and I don't love forcing you to use an item really to make this fight easier but overall I would say that that I really enjoy the concept of this one and it's execution with just a little bit more attention to detail I think I would really really thoroughly enjoy it next up we've got a boss from the Dark Souls 1 DLC this is going to be Sanctuary Guardian so this is by far the easiest boss in the artorius of the Abyss DLC but I I think it's meant to be this is the opener right into like you literally walk 10t to a fog wall and this is how the DLC opens so I don't think they want to make this boss insanely oppressive just to basically lock people out of all of the actual really good bosses behind this but I think it's you know honestly a fun fight on its own Sanctuary Guardian only has a handful of moves to deal with so it's not like the steepest learning curve on a boss but his moves come out insanely fast and they can often combo into one another so you have to be extremely careful if you get clipped by one obviously you might get hit by another three or four and then that could be the game so you have to be still pretty careful okay so for our next boss I have a little bit of a theory I want to explain L now in the development of Dark Souls 2 they ended up with having too many levels and too many different bosses they just didn't know what to do with and this was the first time in Souls we saw like a multi boss final boss so you have to fight the Throne Watcher and Defenders first and then later you fight in the Shandra and so it's my theory that either probably like the Throne Watchers and Defenders could have been maybe concept for an actual final boss but they had so many they're like we need to shove a few more in here and so technically if you do all of the true endings you get Throne Watcher and Defender followed by nandra Then followed by Alia scholar of the first sin you have a three four people boss fight at the end of this game that's kind of ridiculous but I do think the Throne Watcher and Defender are very good bosses not quite you know an orstein and SM Duo level but certainly better than you know a godkin Duo they're fine I think they're very good uh but they're not amazing they do have healing properties which can be a little bit tricky to deal with and they tend to always make a a offensive option and then immediately roll back afterwards so if you just outspace their offense and you can catch them rolling backwards for huge damage because they usually don't act out of it after a while they have very abusable AI you know to say all that and I think they're a lot of fun but they're just they're not awesome to me all right let's just get this one out of the way we have to talk about it great grey wolf Sith is the saddest fight in all of Dark Souls actually got me crying in the club uh she's just trying to protect her master's grave and the saddest mechanic for them to ever develop is once her health is low she'll just start limping around and actually really isn't able to throw out any moves it's a bit of a freebie fight I don't think it's actually going to be that difficult for most people but I love its presentation and it's a decent mechanical fight too it's also very clearly the blueprints for other fights in Souls like the Royal Rat Authority even I would say the champions gravetender in Dark Souls II or like the great grey wolf in that it's very clearly like the move set is based off of CIF uh originally in Dark Souls 1 excellent fight and very sad as well all right moving on we have sin the slumbering dragon from the Dark Souls 2 DLC now I'm going to be totally honest I have never really been the biggest fan of this fight although I can fully admit that is one of the better Dragon fights especially compared to a lot of the ones in Dark Souls 2 Ancient Dragon in this is not even a contest although there's a lot of things about Sin that I don't love uh particularly the mechanic where this stupid orange smoke breaks all of your equipment so if your weapon is not particularly durable you may end up going through multiple weapons to kill this thing for really no other reason other than to be annoying uh his move set is fine his hit boxes might be a little bit on the Jank side but it does feel like progress to some extent this is from software kind of getting a handle on what makes Dragon fights good they're getting better at it it's a bit of a smaller scale Dragon so it plays a bit nicer with the camera for the most part uh I just don't love the mechanic of Breaking Your Weapon durability I feel like it has absolutely no reason to you know be in this fight it's just a nuisance it's just annoying and I that that definitely holds it back for me otherwise it would pretty be a pretty damn High tier fight in my opinion it just doesn't quite get there for me in terms of uh its potential that it could have reached moving on to bloodborne we have eeta daughter of the cosmos which has again just like the one reborn one of the most interesting and cool presentations and even the way that you find it it's it's insane she is by far are one of the coolest looking bosses in any Souls game period but I cannot say her move set or her actual fight is you know anything really of note other than it's split into two phases in which phase one she can't really do anything at all phase two she gets a lot more dangerous and unpredictable and so this you know very chaotic energy really encapsulates what this boss is and you know the tone that it's going for it's definitely a better fight in bloodborne but not the best in terms of the other things it has to offer but as far as base game goes it's pretty good so next staying in the realm of Unforgettable presentations and visuals we have Estelle Natural Born of the Void now I'm going to talk about this fight specifically because there is another Estelle in a cave later on in Elden ring but this particular encounter when you're doing a ral's quest line is definitely the one to do because it's just so Unforgettable it feels like it's in the wrong game and certainly in the wrong World Estelle's move set can be a little bit difficult to deal with sometimes getting hit by its gravity slam can be absolutely devastating and infuriating Estelle also has a habit of teleporting around the arena a lot and the Arenas are huge whichever encounter you're fighting it in I love aelle so much I I think it's very different it's quite out of character for Elden Rings specifically like embri ettus still feels like it fits the theme and Aesthetics of bloodborne but uh Estelle is kind of just like a different animal man regardless of how you feel about about the fight in terms of its moves and mechanics I still do think it's an unforgettable looking boss and the encounter is something that will stick in your memory forever moving on to our next boss we have the ruined Sentinels from Dark Souls 2 somehow from software managed to make a very Ganky encounter not annoying or frustrating I mean this fight has three enemies and on paper that can be a recipe for complete disaster but somehow by the grace of of all that is Holy in this universe they managed to make a fight that actually still feels fun and not overwhelming in terms of how many enemies are you know on the field at once I think that has to do with the actual like Arena design it's technically divided into two floors so that you can use verticality to separate them and maybe take them oneon-one but also they have like virtually the same moves so you don't actually have to change your timings for anything everything can be dodged the same way I feel like this is a fight that honestly is simple but its blueprint should be what they work off of if they want to make an encounter with multiple enemies that isn't frustrating or feels like it's unfair in any kind of way I think it's actually great next up fellas we've got the tower knight from Demon Souls it's virtually the same layout as the one reborn in bloodborne which we talked about which amazing visual presentation I don't think this one is quite as aesthetically pleasing as that but I like the main boss a lot more it's the same premise where you have these different you know smaller ads and little enemies around that you need to take care of first but the thing with the tower Knight is the only way you're going to be dealing any kind of substan IAL damage is you need to knock it over and you can accomplish that by smacking the back of its Achilles heels to where it falls over and interestingly when it falls over it has like a a very devastating hitbox so I think a lot of people probably got trolled their first time fighting this where they feel like they got a knockdown only to immediately die right after I like it and I think it's a it's an entertaining boss for what it's worth the only real criticism I have is I could do without any of the smaller enemies around I think they're they don't actually add anything to this fight they're simp simply a nuisance and a bit of a chore to take care of before you start actually fighting the main boss which is the same case with the one reborn I could do without the witches all over the side in the peanut gallery you know watching but otherwise it's a fun fight all right so let's move over to Elden ring and talk about everybody's favorite initial roadblock marget the Fel Omen I feel like marget was like the face of the game for the first month when Elden ring came out certainly there were cooler bosses in the game but marget was the one that everybody was talking about because it was a giant roadblock to have here its placement it's technically not a tutorial boss because there is one that serves that purpose before this but for what it's worth this is your first like gloves off Main encounter margot's timings on his moves are also deliberately designed to be a little bit off so that it catches bad rolling habits it is literally designed to teach you that you cannot just Spam the roll button and beat every boss in this game I think this may be the best boss in like early tutorial Souls games that are teaching you the basics of positioning timings of rolling and so on like I and also he kind of does have a phase two so this boss has everything going on for it it's a great blueprint for the rest of the game I don't quite like him as much as his real counterpart which we will get to in a bit but it's an excellent fight and kind of brutal to have a this early for a for a beginner player but marget gets a definitely an a for me he's an awesome boss moving over to SEO pretty much a boss that's in the opposite position it's not an early or tutorial boss it's actually at the end of the game uh and this is you only encounter Emma the gentle blade when doing a very specific ending which is you know the shur ending basically the worst one in the game Emma's fine I don't think she's actually that difficult she's easy enough to learn and intuitively respond to I feel like in your first couple of tries but the thing that I cannot really get a grip on is that this boss is smaller than you and that really changes the dynamic of souls fights generally speaking bosses are bigger than you because well number one they're bosses and they're cooler that way but also specifically in this kind of game you need to be able to see what they're doing doing and I feel like if you're just like right on top of her the whole time it's hard to see what moves are starting up what's coming out sometimes you only know by the sound cues and I think the actual like physical design of this boss kind of holds it back a little bit but otherwise her moves are super fun to learn and I think it's excellent so big fan of Emma over here coincidentally next we've got another final boss uh this is Gwyn Lord of Cinder from Dark Souls 1 now this fight mechanically is underwhelming to be honest like he doesn't have that many moves and most of them that he does have are pretty easy to dodge and it's also completely chees if you parry obviously a lot of people know this but I think Gwyn you know a lot of people will say that there's a lore explanation why he's weak and why this fight sucks it's not like amazing but it's a decent enough final boss for how old this game is what they were capable of you know from a technology standpoint and what they could actually pull off with software and everything at the time it's still pretty impressive and I like Gwyn I don't love him he's not like fantastic but he's good Gwyn is the iconic birthplace of so many memes you know you got pln plin PL you know what I'm saying you got all that stuff he's cool he's fine I like Gwyn that's all I'm going to say about him while we're on the topic of Final Bosses let's talk about nandra she has an amazing entrance it's like crazy I I I love the way that is she is presented in this last encounter and her mechanics are uh definitely different she has these curse orbs that constantly you know exist and Float around her to prevent you from approaching you can destroy these or you can bait her out of the range and she'll just make new ones now the cool thing is it feels like they made Nashandra a better boss later in the DLC it's almost like they realized what they should have done with her and then made the boss that they envisioned from the start uh later on in paid content I think I like her more than Gwyn and they like people don't there's not like a pathetic lore excuse for why her fight sucks it's not it's not mechanically amazing but it isn't a joke necessarily either and she can have some incredibly annoying mechanics that you really permanently take away your health and stuff so that can be difficult to deal with you kind of want to one andone this fight if you can you don't want to spend any longer here than is necessary but it's not the best final boss we've ever had you know that's for sure but let's talk about the fight in the DLC that I feel Nashandra is probably trying to be uh this is Alana the squalet queen which I do think would have made a better final boss she has almost the exact same mechanics as nandra except she can summon an entirely whole ass other main boss plus you know little skeletons or other ads and she can teleport around the room and stuff I feel as if this would have made a more refined and Grand experience for you know ending off Dark Souls 2 and a lot of people probably didn't play this fight of all the people who played base game DS2 and never had the DLC but this is like literally just an improvement on that prior boss you could say it's recycled content you could say it's defining the formula either way I feel like this should have been in place of Nashandra in my opinion next up ladies and gentlemen is going to be Deens of the deep from Dark Souls 3 so this archetype of fight where it's like you have something in the center that you need to damage and a bunch of other little mobs and enemies that are protecting it as far as those fights go and the concepts of them I think this is the best one for a couple of reasons you can actually draw their aggression off of the main target they have moves that um will basically just out kill you if you don't stop them although that you know it has an incredibly incredibly telegraphed startup and you know it's happening they do this whole like ritual and they're just goofy guys in general I really like deacons of the deep I know it's not like the most awesome fight in the world or anything but I can't lie and say that it's not a lot of fun there's a lot to pay attention to you know a lot of micromanaging and multitasking I can fully empathize with the fact that it's probably difficult to get this concept of a fight and this archetype that's not annoying or feel feels you know unfair or tedious this fight the best praise I can give it is it's not tedious at all ROM and fallings to some degree can be depending on you know what you're doing but honestly if you just want to like move them around and draw their aggression you can basically do this however you want you don't even have to kill any of the smaller enemies if you don't want and you know it's just a silly little fight so now we are officially entering the realm of what I'm going to consider upper High tier or very good bosses this is where it starts to get interesting because these are some of the more standout bosses for good reasons in from software's catalog and to begin let's talk about the Maneater from Demon Souls one of the first ever like Duo gank fights in a Souls game period and without a doubt very clearly inspired the bfree Gargoyles which we'll get to in a little bit the only thing I don't particularly care for about these man eaters compared to the belfrey Gargoyles I think they work better with weapons I don't love their charge attacks here necessarily and their projectiles and range can be slightly frustrating to deal with if you have a melee build they can fly away and just become invulnerable to you for quite a while and their AI is also uh let's say pretty easily exploitable to be honest like it's not the most polished fight in the game even in the remake in terms of how the AI behaves but it's okay and I also don't love the arena as much as you know a game later on with the belfrey Gargoyles it's a little bit too skinny and I think the pacing can be slightly awkward but other than that it's a very exceptionally balanced Duo fight let's take a shift and move over to Dark Souls 3 the opening tutorial boss the boy my homie udx Gunder all right I love this guy he's an absolute Legend we play golf and we have dinner twice a month together but in all seriousness I think udx Gunder is awesome because he does so many things right this is how you open a Souls game in my opinion I think Elden ring did it very similarly with its opening boss uh but not quite as good as udx Gund Deere I also think that it shows you exploration is rewarded if you go and find the fire bombs so this is a good tool for new players but even if you're a veteran this is a fight that like hey this is what the game is going to be get used to it and for God's sake it even has a second phase for the like you're playing you've played the game for five minutes at this point and you're already dealing with this giant Abyss lizard that just comes out of the thing you know it's like it's wild I do feel udx Gunder is a near perfect tutorial boss for what the game is trying to show players he's absolutely incredible coming back over to Dark Souls 2 we have mytha the baneful queen not Mithra that's a different girl entirely Mitha the banful queen is an excellent boss in Dark Souls 2 because the arena is more of a boss than anything else so you walk in here and unless you do the thing where you burn this metal pipe that drains the poison in here you fight her in a poison pool that's just going to cause you to passively take damage you can perfectly well do the fight like this or you can drain it either way but if you don't she's going to passively recover HP from just existing in the pool it makes this fight a little more interesting it's kind of fun and her design is excellent I love the way she looks and her move set is pretty fantastic I would say the hit boxes can be a little bit wonky at times but otherwise I think she is very fun it could certainly do with a little more polish I would like to see this concept for a fight uh redone in a more modern game I think it could be one of the most memorable ones ever and I feel like I don't know this is one of the fights that makes me think of Dark Souls 2 it's very memorable and quite distinct in its own way next up we've got Dark Souls 3's uh the the classic himself Aldrich devour of the Gods and I love almost everything about the fight I like the arena takes place in and you know this is where you fought orstein and SM so long ago and I like his moves too the only thing I'm not a giant fan of is I don't think this boss very plays well with the camera and also the telegraphs for his moves and his startups can be a little weird uh other than that I think he's pretty fun for the most part he's one of the weaker bosses in Dark Souls I and by weaker I don't mean actual power I mean like compared to the L lineup I don't think he's one of the best designed I understand his placement in the game and the role he serves and I also do like the concept of him switching back and forth between two different Magics another boss that I really like does that too it makes for you know good visual presentation and adds a little bit of strategy to it as well aldri is fun not uh what I consider to be a god level boss but very solid regardless so next is a very interesting boss uh this is the old hero from Demon Souls it has one very specific gimmick which is this boss is blind and cannot physically see you but he can hear you move and can you know like feel your presence and so you have to be careful about how you move where you position and you know what Windows you choose to punish also there's a ring I believe that makes him a little bit less uh you know alert to your presence you can kind of add a bit of stealth this way and he's devastating if he knows where you are he can be relentless in his attacks and despite being a boss that quite literally cannot see you he does insane insanely well at tracking your movements which is really scary and it adds so much tension to this fight and uh I I don't know it's actually one of my favorite fights in Demon Souls I wish they would play with this idea a little bit more because I haven't really seen them you know work on this iteration for any other boss not that anything comes to mind to be honest but I think it's really great and very special for this game next up we've got the rotten from Dark Souls 2 there's nothing really intricate or you know crazy or complex going on with this boss it's straightforward but effective it's this giant glob of disgusting mess that has a huge Cleaver that's basically it and his Arena has a little bit of stage Hazard stuff like there's some fire in it so you need to be a little careful about that uh he has a few grab attacks I can catch you off guard but otherwise I just think he's a super straightforward and fun boss not trying to do too much not overly complicated just everything that makes a Souls boss interesting and he has some decent mixups I don't love the area he's found in but I like him mechanically and Visually and this presentation is topnotch it's Stellar big fan of the rotten over here absolute lad and going to invite him to my wedding honestly all right so let's get this fake ass belfrey Gargoyles from DS2 out of here and talk about the the real one this is where it's meant to be experienced the Bell Gargoyles in Dark Souls I is how this was balanced the enemies are a little bit bigger in scale in terms of their size but there's only two of them and that's very deliberate because of the Arena that it's put on that's how it was meant to be played and I think having slightly bigger yet less enemies makes this fight just play so much nicer you can manipulate the enemies where you know one can start up an attack leaving it vulnerable and then you can go and punish the other one for free it's like there's a lot of strategy to this one you can play it in a variety of ways you can do some tail cutting to get weapons if you want to it just baffles me how dark souls I looked at this and said yeah let's recreate it and they got it so so wrong like it's just a testament to how well balanced this fight is and as far as Duo go you know in terms of passive and aggressive States this should be the blueprint it's like a nearly perfect fight to me taking a pretty hard jump in game we have Elden beast from Elden ring which is the final boss in the base game here so Elden Beast is good but it's not like perfect and I can't say it's Flawless it's decent the problem with Elden Beast I think is it was very clearly meant to have torrent playable in this fight it was almost you know this amalgamation of quite literally throwing everything in the and sink at this giant Cosmic monster and to not have torrent is kind of a crime here thematically it would make a lot of sense but even mechanically the the arena is just too big to navigate it on foot especially with how much he teleports leading to very awkward pacing during the fight uh it's I don't think this was as polished as they wanted it to be and I can understand why it was released in this way it is a two-parter with another boss we'll talk about later which I like significantly more but while it's passable and I would even say very good it isn't perfect or Flawless and there are certainly a few things I would change with Elden beast but it's a fun like spectacle to end the game on you know for sure it's visually Unforgettable we can at least all agree on that I think moving on we have dancer of the Boreal Valley from Dark Souls 3 which I feel is a very unique and Unforgettable fight it can actually be encountered a couple of different ways you can fight this boss super early on in Dark Souls II if you do you know a very specific route or you can fight her directly after yorm the Giant in any case the dancer has two separate swords and has a very dance-like Rhythm to its move set and its uh actual Pace it'll start swinging its swords to the rhythm of the music and you need to pick your defensive options somewhat rhythmically as well it's kind of like a searo boss in some ways I actually like you could almost with a couple of tweaks drop dancer into that game and nobody would be none the wiser like it it's it kind of works like that so it feels different for Dark Souls I in a lot of ways but it still works with its mechanics and what that game is going for I think she's so much fun so coming over to Dark Souls 2 we have velat the Royal Eis which is kind of like the roadblock before what you really could consider entering the late game of DS2 this is like the final boss before you enter the last stage of the game and in a lot of ways when games do this it's supposed to be a pretty damn hard checkpoint that unless you're really prepared you shouldn't be able to get past vat's great but I don't think he's as powerful as he could be uh they they they nerfed him to some degree not like literally but they could have made him have a bit more health or maybe do a bit more damage or maybe make his moves even slightly faster he looks great and I think he you know is an awesome concept I just don't think he's quite as like scary as maybe he should be for this stage in the game The Arena doesn't necessarily complement this design either I mean these just tiny little pillars don't serve any function like sometimes you can use pillars in fights to avoid bosses you can use them tactically they're so small here they just get knocked over by him and maybe it's for just for visual sake I don't know but it may as well just be this open arena if you're going to do that I mean it's fine just to knock over stuff or whatever but it's a little lame once you realize the gimmick let's move on to our next boss dragon slayer armor from Dark Souls 3 honestly one of my favorites in the late game here now this fight has something interesting happening uh at the same time you have not only just this you know giant sword and shield boss that's very welld designed but you're also getting attacked from outside the arena and you might be tempted to say God that sounds terrible like why would you even like this boss it has a very smart tell where you can actually hear the startup of when these are coming and this completely changes the game if this were silent and you had to be looking around and you know lock off the boss to be paying attention when these are coming in I think it would completely ruin the fight and make it obnoxious but its implementation was so smart it's polished it's welld designed and I think it's a ton of fun moving on to Martyr legarias from bloodborne this is not a mandatory boss it's actually optional and more so than that it's in a secret area of the game that you really have to go out of your way to encounter but that on top of once you defeat martyr laras and you put on his crown another secret area opens up to you so just for the Mystique and atmosphere and you know intricacies alone just with that stuff he's already amazing but I like his move set a lot too and he's a fun boss to learn the only move I'm not a giant fan of is the like Flying Swords that are just kind of uh a little obnoxious I I don't love those but everything else I'm fine with he's got a giant spear it's so addicting trying to learn the Parry timings of these like it's so satisfying to play I I actually like really adore Mar laras it's just like kind of a shame that he's not a mandatory boss because I feel you know if people only played the bosses they need to they missed out on something pretty great he's he's excellent all right let's flip over to Elden in ring for a second and talk about what is from software's to date best weapon gimmick boss in my opinion you get the Great Serpent Hunter to fight Right Guard and my God it's just so damn satisfying to use this fight is just like so much fun that on top of the fact that it's two-phase the mechanics are nothing to scoff at even though it is a visual SL atmospheric boss the second phase is significantly more difficult to deal with because there multiple moves can be happening at the same time as he summon stuff phase one can be tricky but there's only one move in the opening phase that I dislike and that is the ground slam move that is unavoidable damage you know a lot of people said you can jump over it or you can like roll through I I've never seen anybody actually Dodge this move properly uh I don't think it's avoidable whatsoever so admittedly that docks a few points from my ranking but not enough to even take this out of upper height TI here for me like I just it's such a delight fighting reard I'll never get tired of it moving over to SEO for a moment drawing an Elden ring comparison we're going to talk about yobu masataka I think this fight is basically the uh marget equivalent in that game where it's not exactly like the tutorial boss it's not in the direct opening but it is the first gloves off bosses where it's like hey this is your gate checkpoint to the rest of the game this fight introduces you to the mechanics that you are going to encounter throughout the rest of serro and this is your like version one of dealing with that also it's worth noting that he's not massively aggressive and the reason for that I think is because you know this is supposed to give you some breathing room to decide if you want to heal or if you want to you know do something else or prepare your strategy for when he comes back you couldn't have a massively aggressive boss in this place otherwise I feel like it'd be too much for people but getting the lessons down of blocking and pairing and even using grapple if he gets far away enough are all excellently conveyed I think Yobo is like a super excellent tutorial fight even though it's not like an unofficial tutorial if you want to put it that way he's both the figurative and literal gatekeeper to the rest of what SEO offers staying on SEO for a moment we have the final boss in the shur ending and this is where you fight Isen I would say this fight is extremely different to the uh true version of him we'll get to that in a little bit and this one's fine I I do still think it's an entertaining boss for the most part but the reason it's hard is because there's like two moves you know like the the one mind move that is just insanely broken that is the one that is just going to you know make people be done with the game other than that if he didn't have that move this fight's not too bad I think he's a lot of fun and is just simply a textbook example of a upper High tier boss up next is one of my favorite bosses in Dark Souls 2 uh the Lost Center I think she is a ton of fun I would say that there is a little bit going on here with this fight where you can make it a bit more challenging so you can keep the room dark or you can light up the oil on either side of the Arena to make it more bright in here honestly it doesn't make that much of a difference in my opinion as long as you can still see the moves winding up and you know what's punishable and stuff it's not really that big of a deal but it's your simple like straightforward aggressive sword opponent a couple of her moves can combo into each other so you really don't want to get hit by anything if you can avoid it uh and also she definitely punishes more passive play I think the LW Center is a textbook example of a Dark Souls 2 boss done right this game doesn't have a lot of my favorite bosses but this is up there for sure so up next we have The Old Demon King from Dark Souls II which appears kind of as a mini boss earlier in the game before you encounter it in its main form here although I really do like this fight I think it's excellent It's your typical like you know giant demon wielding a weapon and it plays like that it's actually inspired similarly to another boss we haven't gotten to yet from Dark Souls 1 and in that DLC you probably know what I'm referring to and this one definitely has some different moves but is very clearly inspired off that blueprint I can't say I like it as much as its uh original counterpart I don't feel like its aggression is quite as intense uh it doesn't have that break neck Pace like its original counterpart does but despite all that I really like The Old Demon King and I would consider him like upper High tier of All Souls games in general and I like his Arena quite a lot you can maneuver in here and manipulate around specific moves in very interesting ways it's a highly thought out uh fight and I think they did an excellent job designing him it's wonderful moving back to Dark Souls 1 I've been alluding to her for a lot of this video uh and she's finally here chaos switch Quay log is one I've been wanting to talk about for a bit because I think it's like what you want out of a Dark Souls boss in so many ways now not including the runback which I don't particularly love the boss itself and its design from its visuals atmosphere presentation Arena and move set are all excellent you have the top half of her which moves very gracefully and methodically and calculating and then you have the spider that's kind of just moving around erratically and both of their you know move sets respectively have very clear startups and also you can tell what is happening if you pay attention to the animations it's just like textbook how you design a good boss fight even if this wasn't a Souls boss it would still work in general because it's just so well done it's actually one of my favorite bosses to go and replay even to this day you know a lot of the Dark Souls 1 bosses can be a little bit more simple compared to you know the complexity of the bosses in more modern day games like a SEO or Elden ring or something like that but this one really does still hold up I'm very pleased they used quog as a blueprint for many bosses in the series going forward because they should it's an excellent blueprint there's there's literally like almost nothing wrong on paper that I can point at other than the runback to be honest like that's the only thing that I'm not a giant fan of but everything else is is Stellar moving over to Dark Souls 3 we have one of the most interesting fights in the game the the abyss Watchers so in the first phase they sort of fight each other multiple Watchers spawn in and start fighting the main one and you can approach this where you can be aggressive the whole time and just kill everything you see or You Can Let them fight each other and wear out their health either way once you get to the second phase you have to fight the main one who will you know basically restore or take the power from the Fallen ones and use it for himself he becomes a lot more buffed and a lot more aggressive as well it's really about the momentto moment situation and picking the right either offensive or defensive option when the time is right uh it's just like an awesome escalation of tension and mechanics and the way the music heightens when you get to this stage of the boss fight is excellent the abyss Watchers are probably one of the most memorable fights in all of Souls and I'm not exactly sure why that is but how they manag to strike the balance between a good visual boss as well as an excellent mechanical boss cannot be understated so now we're going to transition a little bit to our top tier SL like excellent awesome some amazing bosses of the game this is not the highest tier I have these are bosses that are as good as they can possibly be without quite breaking into like the best of the best the cream of the crop the god level bosses in Souls but everything that's just at that level but not quite there kiing us off for this part of our list we have black dragon calam in Dark Souls 1 this is in the artorius of the Abyss DLC the way you access this fight is very interesting you got to talk to a couple of NPCs do a few different things it's not as straightforward as finding his Arena but it's absolutely worth going out of your way to do so I feel like this is the point where from software kind of figured out how to make giant dragon fights like this that number one are fun in terms of their moves it's got a great presentation but they also play nice with the camera for the most part it's not like incredibly irritating to track and get a hold of you can keep it in frame for the most part and actually know what you're fighting and you know what moves are happening stuff like it's awesome I I think they really nailed it with this one admittedly I will say the hit boxes aren't perfect they are really not on calam but that's okay this is version one of what is the best dragon fight in Souls which we haven't gotten to yet but uh for a version one man this is pretty solid and for Dark Souls 1 specifically this was really proof of concept for what they could do in the future I think is very inspiring next is going to be the general himself star Scourge redon interestingly this boss had to be nerfed very early on in Elden Ring's life cycle despite you also being able to summon tons and tons of NPCs to help you out in the fight General redon had to be tuned a little bit he has a couple of different phases and it's not as simple as Phase 1 and two he's got like phase 1.5 and then into phase two uh where he gets like a couple of different moves but not enough to be like an entirely different phase and then he actually has a real proper second phase which he can control gravity magic and he comes in with this meteor this fight is crazy now you can actually prevent this fight from entering Phase 2 if you deal enough damage here and use your NPCs optimally early on you can completely fight him solo as well that's very viable it's not too bad to do he's not as bad of a solo fight as you might imagine I think he looks a lot more threatening than he is now especially after the Nerf if it's not molia and if it's not Elden Beast or ragon I think redon is the face of Elden ring when it comes to boss fights specifically that's because of his insanely unique presentation the visuals the arena everything about it it's like a good cross between between having a mechanical boss but also being able to summon because that's always been the conundrum is like okay well you can have a boss that's visually entertaining and maybe this Grand spectacle and maybe you even have summons integrated into it but maybe it's not the most like actual entertaining experience and the most you know vigorous fight but redon I think really does strike that balance in a lot of ways I would absolutely consider him a top tier boss of the series no matter what moving on to bloodborne again we have Lawrence the first vicar this is in in the DLC of bloodborne and you actually fight him in the exact same Arena you fought Vicor Amelia in and in a lot of ways I think the fights are quite similar and I think Lawrence is probably what Amelia should have been there's not as much ambiguity with his animations and stuff and he even kind of has a first and second phase uh it's just a much more enjoyable fight to participate in in my opinion it's not a god tier boss I can't say but it is very very solid I don't have much to say about him because he kind of speaks for himself if you've played against Lawrence you know exactly like how this goes to me it's the Beast archetype of fight in bloodborne done at its best this is its Highest Potential it can reach and I think Lawrence really encapsulates that now we've got lady butterfly from searo so I've described there is a moment in every SEO player's life where the game clicked for you on your first playthrough and you know what I mean if you've played the game where all of the combat Concepts snap into place for me lady butterfly was where that happened and she is a very interesting boss on her own there's a couple of different mechanics that make her very different to a lot of SEO bosses namely that she can kind of jump in the air and you know put herself invulnerable to you unless you shoot her down with like a shuriken or something the only criticism I have for lady butterfly is actually leading up to her Arena you're set up to believe that her illusions that she makes in her second phase can only be defeated by using the snap seeds and you only get one of them it's a consumable that is not the case you don't even really need to engage with the illusions at all matter of fact you can skip them in her fight or more prevent them from spawning if you kind of just smother her and stay on top and do not let her push any buttons whatsoever this was the boss that made me realize okay I actually need to take control I need to stay aggressive and I become the boss once you do that you can end it very fast and it's not nearly as intimidating as it seems at first playing passive or playing skittish or slow will just outright punish you and make this fight a brutal night nightmare I do feel like a lot of people also gave up on lady butterfly 2o because if you manage to stumble your way through gilu there's pretty much no way you're just going to Fumble your way through lady butterfly and uh I think everything from her presentation to her mechanics are all excellently done it's not my favorite boss in serro because that's a pretty damn High uh order to fill but I do think she's very very good nevertheless so coming back to bloodborne for just a moment this next one is going to be mergo's wet nurse which in some ways is a final boss not including the stuff back at the Hunter's dream this is the last like real entity crazy boss that you fight out in the wild and it does end on a bang I really enjoy this fight I love the arena the soundtrack is eerily quiet it's very strange and unsettling that's probably the best way to put this in general because this boss doesn't have a face it's like this faceless cloak all you hear is like a very faint Nursery sound and chime and then these blades whipping past your ear in the wind it's like great great design as far as like its actual mechanics and also its atmosphere goes at some point the arena will go dark and mergo's wet ners can also duplicate herself and they're very hard to see all you really need to do is run around to avoid the blades and you know not try to be too aggressive and you can avoid it just fine but it's a very very fun boss I'm a giant fan of this one and also not to mention when you kill this boss instead of getting the prey slaughtered you get Nightmare slain which is just like an unforgettable moment it only happens once in this game but when it does you'll remember that for the rest of your life it's amazing next up is going to be Champion Gunder from Dark Souls 3 now again we talked about udx earlier and I love him so much like it's an awesome boss but this is feels like what they wanted to do with the concept of udx in general and again it's very similar to Asylum Demon where it's like you know you fight it in the tutorial and it's fine it's got a very limited move set and it's not as powerful as it could be but then you fight the stray demon later on and it's at its full potential this is like an anime where you know you catch him at his Prime and like the The Showdown is incredible this boss is like honestly like so sick Champion Gund Deere is very popular for people to do soul level one runs against because it's like textbook how you want to learn a fight its mixups and like combo potential is actually unmatched by almost anything in the game it's one of the most uh let's say competent and also complex mechanical bosses ever you might say it's kind of corny for them to reuse the same boss in the same area as the tutorial but it's different enough to me where it justifies its existence I have no problem with Champion Gunder being in the game and as much as I love udic gundar and I think he's an awesome tutorial this is the real fight for sure feel like it's been a while since we've had anything from Demon Souls but this is going to be the flame lurker which is a surprisingly amazing boss to me uh it's very different compared to much of the lineup found in the game now a lot of the earlier Souls games Demon Souls Dark Souls one Etc the bosses are you know generally slower paced than they are now but I honestly feel like flame lurker belongs in something like Dark Souls 3 or Elden ring in terms of like the way its move set and how aggressive it is it appears totally out of place compared to the rest of the lineup in Demon Souls which in its own way can have some charm to it and it's actually one of my favorite fights in that entire game period so flame lurker has to be a top tier for me not a god tier and again seems like it would fit better in something like DS3 but you know who's to say for sure this next boss is admittedly kind of a weird one but still one that I like a lot and this is King Vendrick in Dark Souls 2 so the way this fight works is you need to collect giant souls which are obtained from defeating certain enemies and going into memories and collecting them and his health pool or his armor is going to be entirely determined by how many giant souls that you have on you if you have none you're basically never killing him if you have all of them I believe it kind of cuts his armor SL Health in half making it a lot more reasonable to fight as for him he's basically a Giant Cannon he will almost one-hot you with virtually any move and you need to kind of stick around to deal damage him because obviously he has a ton of health or armor depending on the giant souls I do find this insistence that Dark Souls 2 had where like some of the bosses have a prerequisite you need to meet before you can actually fight or deal damage to the boss to be a little irritating uh but Vendrick isn't too bad to be honest uh there's been far worse examples he's very different at least to say something positive and I actually quite like fighting him whenever I do play Dark Souls 2 which is not very often next up we have the penetrator from Demon Souls which is also what they used to call me in college now admittedly the penetrator compared to like sword opponents we have now in modern day Souls games is very simple he's got like two or three different moves and each variation of them there's not much mixup potential going on here although if you do get clipped by any move it's big damage and you will likely die uh I would say that despite being very simple compared to a lot of bosses we have these days it's still fun I really liked fighting him and it's very entertaining not the not an incredible like steep learning curve by any means you can pretty much download it on your first encounter that doesn't mean however it's not an enjoyable experience and it's also just fundamentally a good design for a boss they I again this is also the blueprints of what so many boss battles now we have in modern day Souls games have been based off of the Simplicity was key here in getting the designed correct up next we're going to Elden ring and this is going to be morgot the omen King which again so let's talk about that concept like the Asylum Demon becoming the stray demon or udx Gunder becoming Champion Gund deer the same case could be made for marget and then turning into morgot the omen King this boss is very different to Margot in a lot of ways where it feels as if he's reaching his full potential this is gloves off and everything is on the table here he has similar properties to marget where he uses the exact same weapons although a little bit more lethal this time also his timings can be a little bit off similarly to how they were in that original fight and also I would say that his combo game is a little too much to what I consider to be perfectly balanced I think this boss could be a little better if his combo game didn't feel like it was from a totally different game honestly it feels like a SEO boss sometimes morgot is a certified Masher he just does not stop pushing buttons and besides that it's my only real gripe with the fight other than that I think he's generally excellent so after that we have a boss in Dark Souls 3 that I really enjoy in the DLC it's not my favorite in that because damn the DLC for Dark Souls 3 is a high bar you know we'll just put it like that but anyways uh the demon in Prince the demon in pain and from below this is like a three-parter boss where you have a Duo at the beginning that kind of take a page out of the book of orstein and SM where depending on how who you kill first will kind of change your strategy and then the demon in the demon Prince becomes you know like the main Giga boss it's not a fight that most people are going to speed through or really melt because uh they all have a lot of Health this fight is a lot more of an endurance it's about picking your windows reserving your resources and being safe not really something you want to speed through or even attempt to because doing so will probably make you to make more mistakes and burn your precious resources but it's a fight that is incredibly entertaining it's a battle I will never forget and is easily one of the best fights in Dark Souls I period so coming up next is a very special fight at least to me anyways it's not a DLC it's in the base game this is going to be the shadows of yarum from bloodborne so what makes this fight so interesting you might ask at least to me I feel like what this has going on is the fact that like it's a gank fight that's not only balanced because they have damn near perfect aggressive and passive States for each one of them but they also kind of have a phase two or like a comeback mechanic when they get low Health but also it's a way to do a gank fight that's actually fun it's so good trying to learn the Parry timings of all of these and you know there's one that's like a lot more aggressive with the sword and there's one that uses magic and stays back a little bit admittedly when they start using their snake moves I don't love the whip that they get that's like incredibly long range and kind of like hard to see where it is and react to I'm not in love with that move and I think without that the fight would still work and it would play a lot better for it but also I feel this is one of the most replayable boss fights in Souls period and because it can go a variety of different ways and like just the replayability factor is kind of unmatched you can approach it very differently depending on who you kill first it totally Alters the dynamic of the rest of the fight and so on like it's awesome I actually couldn't give enough praise to the shadows of yum the only slight criticism I might have is I feel the Arena's a bit cluttery and there's just too much in the middle that you can get stuck on you can get trapped on especially when you're trying to maneuver around three different opponents that can be tricky business so if the arena was a bit more clean and maybe the you know level design wasn't doesn't trip you up as much it might go a bit smoother but that's like me really digging at the bottom of the barrel for something to complain about because otherwise I love this fight so much it's amazing up next is a very hidden secret boss in Dark Souls 2 and it's kind of a pain in the ass to access and get to very costly on your resources and you cannot run back very easily if you die so if you're going to approach the dark lurker you probably should beat it on your your first try otherwise your life is going to be a nightmare but I think it's one of the best bosses in Dark Souls 2 which is such a shame because it's hidden behind like some of the worst mechanics ever dark lurker can also replicate itself and will do throughout the fight so you have to deal with two of these very dangerous enemies this just the only thing I hate about this fight is getting back to it otherwise I have like a ton of fun playing it and I would do it more if it didn't cost me 40 years of my life to get back into the arena my grandkids are going to graduate college before I can get back into the arena after accidentally dying to dark lurker such a shame because it's in an awesome fight from an atmosphere Visual and mechanical perspective for real all right so let's talk about a very special boss this is the demon of hatred from SEO now I do feel this boss gets you know unfairly contextualized or it gets categorized wrong a lot of people say this is what would happen if you take a Dark Souls boss and just put it into SEO but I fundamentally disagree with that analysis for a couple of reasons I think it's fair to say that like the Beast fights in bloodborne you know don't necessarily gel that well with the game's overall mechanics but I cannot say the same for the demon of hatred and the reason for that is you use almost every combat fundamental mechanic to fight the demon of hatred and the more your proficient with them the more you can take care of it obviously the reason people draw like Souls boss comparisons is because you're not exactly trying to Parry this one you don't even really need to take down its posture meter it's very unlikely that you beat the demon of hatred through posture breaks you're more than likely going to wear it at its Health which is probably why that comparison gets made and I can understand that but all things considered I think the demon of hatred actually is a boss that's integrated almost perfectly with the mechanics that SEO is going for and I'm very impressed they managed to pull that off also this fight is not a Sprint either it is certainly a marathon where even if you push your aggression as much as you possibly can you still got to wear away at three death blow marks in a pretty giant health bar so it's it's not something it's not a quick encounter by any means it's not a lady butterfly exactly however I still very much enjoy the demon of hatred and I would be lying to you if I didn't say he was like a top tier boss in all of souls period going over to Elden ring for a second this is going to be dragon lord placu saxs so I also feel that this is from software really understanding the fundamentals and basics of what makes Dragon fights work I think they're really getting a grasp on it here surprisingly I can't say it's necessarily my favorite Dragon there's one other that it shares that spot with it's a very very close competition and if it's not my favorite dragon fight it's like very nearly there placu sax is easily the best dragon fight in Elden ring specifically and it has some Unforgettable moves from an atmosphere and visual perspective the presentation is unmatched it's a secret Arena like you can't get better than this and it's nuke move where it basically explodes the whole Arena the music drop out to silent for when it happens this boss can also disappear and teleport around the arena and attack you there's a lot going on with placu saxs it's not just like a normal dragon that you can get under and smack to death it has a lot of moves that cover its like ground level and if you're being close and doing melee stuff you're still not safe it's a boss you got to pay attention to the whole time the battle cannot really be done very quickly as it has a ton of health so it's everything I love in a dragon fight and really I hope they continue to prove on this formula in the future EAS the best dragon in Elden ring flat out now this is going to take us over to uh Old King alant from Demon Souls which is not only the final boss in the game but it's also the final boss from Demon Souls on my list I wouldn't think it's super controversial to say that old kingon is like the best momentto moment fight in Demon Souls he has the most intricate move set compared to a lot of the fights of his archetype now while yes compared to any other more modern-day Souls game Old King alant still seems very simple but I really feel he's simple yet effective old kingan is definitely more of a quaint boss uh especially to end your game off of and I don't think that's necessarily a problem for the context of this game considering the rest of the lineup that appears in its roster I think Old King alant is like stunning from a visual perspective his mechanics are super fun and his arena is Unforgettable as well I have almost nothing negative to say about it other than yeah sure maybe it's a little simple but that's about it and I would venture so far to say that that Gman the first hunter from bloodborne is very similar to the design philosophies That Make Old King alant so good this is the last boss in bloodborne if you didn't do the specific ending that includes Moon presence and Gman tests every single lesson that you've learned in bloodborne thus far and even despite knowing all those lessons he's going to really put him to the test I think he's a ton of fun gin gets much more dangerous when his health is low and he moves so quickly and so erratically that he can be very hard to predict and he has a super intimidating presence just based on his speed alone he can kind of match you you know you're used to you know being a hunter and being super quick most faster than every other boss but Gman matches you and it's crazy next we have one of my favorite fights in the Dark Souls 2 DLC unfortunately it's hidden by again possibly one of the worst runbacks that has ever been invented by a human being somebody who genuinely is a masochist and enjoys torture will thoroughly enjoy walking to Sir Allan then they will fighting him but I feel this is one of the standouts in Dark Souls I they definitely got it together a little bit more with the DLC I wish this could have been in the base game uh because it's one of my favorite fights in general it's got such a cool Rhythm to it but a neat little detail if you beat this boss completely without getting hit he will commit zuku at the end and it's an animation you only get by doing it Flawless which is really cool I feel like we don't see that a whole lot these days moving back over to Elden ring we have another excellent fight this is going to be Moog Lord of blood and it's so good now I feel the people who dislike this fight uh may not enjoy it for very valid reasons specifically the mechanic where he steals your life and replenishes his own in phase two and basically outright killing you unless you have the thing in the flask that prevents your health from draining too much that's fair and I I'm honestly not in love with that mechanic either you know forcing a very specific item in order to not get deleted in the boss fight it's not my favorite thing in the world either but in any case I still think his mechanics his presentation Arena and atmosphere more than makes up for it but also is technically an optional boss in Elden ring it is one of the remembrances so I feel it's worth doing even though it isn't one that you you know have to fight on a mandatory basis I love Mo I think he's a great man and I'll play this fight any day of the week staying with Elden ring here we next have probably the face of the game or otherwise the most iconic boss in Elden ring what is generally regarded as the hardest fight in this game period molia blade of Micha is absolutely no joke now the only reason I'm going to give molia top tier instead of god tier that's because I still to this day feel that from software went a little bit too far with her design I understand wanting to make an insanely hard boss but to me giving her both life steal and OCTA slash AKA waterfoul dance I just feel is a bit over the top I understand you have a lot of tools in Elden ring to deal with those things but in terms of fair Fair boss design that doesn't break the rules of its own game melenia cannot say that she actually you know fits in that mold this breaks the rules of every single you know boss and what they're allowed to do or should be allowed to do and I I I think that it's a little much in some areas I've always been of the opinion that molia would be fair if they gave her just waterfoul dance or just life steal giving her both is just simply over the top and also the fact that like shielding Her Moves still grants her life back even if you don't lose anything she still will retain some HP which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and I know it sounds like I'm just negative about melenia but that's not really the case I'm simply highlighting the very few flaws that she does have because they are big ones unfortunately but everything else like literally every single move all of the aspects of her design atmosphere and her Arena are genuinely perfect so there's a little bit that keeps her out of god tier but still it's like just Falls a tad bit short of it to me so let's take a bit of a shift in Direction and go to the Dark Souls 1 DLC with Manis father of the Abyss now when we were talking about The Old Demon King a while ago from Dark Souls 3 that was very clearly inspired from Manis the difference is and it's very interesting because Dark Souls 3i's combat is generally speaking a lot more fast-paced however Manis is more akin to a Dark Souls 3 kind of combat pacing than Old Demon King is I almost think that they should be switched Old Demon King should be in Dark Souls 1 and Manis should be in Dark Souls 3i because it's so so aggressive he works at a Breakneck pace and does not stop his moves are super fast and devastating and it's an amazing battle he'll do this thing where he Retreats into the dark and you can only see like the red glowing dots on the top of his like crown and horns and you may not have any idea what move is starting up or what he's actually cooking and it just feels like he moves way faster than he should be able to that's partly what makes this fight entertaining and fun however again for these demon fights I kind of wish they kept the very aggressive Breakneck pace for all of those because something about mana' Rhythm just doesn't get matched by any of these other demons they've developed so far so now we are officially entering the god tier bosses these are what I consider to be the top selection of from software's catalog battles that are almost Flawless and ones that I think certainly should be used as like the the selling points and what they develop bosses from here on out afterwards and to start us off here we're going to talk about sister Freda from Dark Souls 3 this is in the ashes of arendel DLC the thing is this fight has three very unique phases you fight her in her just normal human form at first and she's very similar to crossbreed Priscilla where she'll go invisible and then you know reappear using her Scythe in phase two father arendel joins the battle and he'll start swinging this giant pot around that will you know pour flames all over the battlefield so it creates some stage Hazard stuff and you also have to kill and deal with both of them now and then after killing both of them it's still not over the marathon has only begun she turns into black flame sister Frida and this is where she's at her most lethal and dangerous and the rhythm of fight completely changes once again it's got a very specific rhythm in the first phase changes completely in phase two introduces some you know new Dynamics and then phase three is another switch up like you have to be on your toes the whole time easily regarded as one of the best fights in Souls games and seriously one of the best in Dark Souls II like it's damn near flawless I cannot think of anything in particular that I feel is like [ __ ] about this fight or that I would change and to me at least it completely compensates for an otherwise somewhat lackluster DLC pack I don't love ashes ofari Endo in terms of like level design and even the other bosses but sister Freda completely carries and without it it would be kind of a trash expansion pack if I'm being honest so thank God this boss is here all right next boss we got to talk about is is the fella himself father gascoin AKA Papa G aka Big Pimpin AKA there's a there's too many names for him father gascoin is the goat and I know is a very early game Boss but that doesn't change the fact to me that it's like one of the most perfectly designed bosses that I feel have ever been created for so many reasons not only in the context of bloodborne but of video games in general and there's a neat little trick where if you're struggling with this boss there's an item you know it's a little toy from his his child that will distract him in the fight that can make this a lot easier if you're having trouble dealing with it otherwise it teaches you all the lessons that you need to know about bloodborne period like gives you it arms you with the knowledge of everything that you need to be supplied with and the way it's executed is genuinely Flawless he kind of has three phases his initial form and then he gets his like axe that he kind of takes out in Phase 1.5 and then in the actual real Phase 2 he turns into the Beast and then you learn how to deal with a completely different enemy on the Fly you have to adapt to a totally different play style and while yes technically the Beast still is Parable and you can employ a lot of the same tactics it is a very different pace switch up and will definitely catch a lot of new and firsttime players off guard when uh you know playing the game so I think father gascoin is like honestly top-notch I can't think of really a better tutorial boss than him he's excellent so moving back over to Elden ring is a fight that's really grown on me lately and when Elden ring first came out I wasn't the biggest fan and I can't say that it's Flawless there's a few gripes that I have but overall the good certainly outweighs the bad Godfree first Elden Lord is a very enjoyable fight now I will say there are two things that hold it back specifically number one I feel the switch up to horu is at a weird time it's not at the halfway point like a lot of phase 2s uh open up at it's kind of like when you get them to you know 30% Health more or less it's not exactly the halfway point so it feels kind of weird for that I love Godfrey's move set so much more than horo I just don't have nearly as much fun fighting him in his second phase uh I don't know what it is I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I hate grab moves in Souls games particularly when bosses use them a lot and horu his entire game plan is based around getting grabs and like that stuff is just infuriating to me I would rather fight Godfrey's Axe and weapon all day every day than deal with horu rushdown grab moves it's just not really my favorite but otherwise the boss is like actually perfect furthermore last thing I would say is it feels a little bit strange going to this Arena again this is like the third time you fought here at this point but regardless I'm just finding things to complain about at this point because there really isn't much other flaws to speak of other than okay so next we're going to shift gears a little bit and head over to searo with the true corrupted Monk and this you know we talked about the original corrupted monk quite a while ago and while I really enjoy that fight I feel this one is far superior because not only does it have just a lot more Health there's more death blow markers it has a bit of more of an expanded move set the only thing I'm not in love with honestly is the arena I feel it's a little too skinny and I don't think it necessarily complements the aggressive and like mobile nature of the corrupted monk all that much otherwise since it now has three death blow dots instead of one you have three separate phases the second one can be skipped by Landing a sneak death blow off the tree that's inside the arena still don't know if this was intentional or not uh apparently you could do two death blow markers but they patched one of them so it does seem like this one is intentional either way though the true corrupted Monk Is No pushover and it was one of my favorite experiences in gaming learning exactly how to deal with this boss because I didn't feel like I got The Full Experience from the normal corrupted monk as you can just get through it by you know spamming it with lapis and stuff and wearing down its Health this one you don't really have that option as much so you're Force to learn its moves and its rhythms and its patterns one of my favorite experiences ever in video games and I'll always remember it heading back over to Elden ring for a second let's talk about Beast clergyman and malakith the Black Blade honestly some of my personal favorites I think maybe I'm a bit biased but I cannot help but love both phases of this technically it's the same boss obviously and Beast clergyman is significantly easier to deal with than malakith because he just gets absolutely op and broken in terms of his actual properties uh in his second phase but Beast clergyman is no pushover either he's extremely aggressive and plays a lot more Rush down where malakith kind of plays more acrobatic and uses the arena to his Advantage now the thing is malakith is a hard boss just objectively speaking I I understand you can learn the moves and you know get good and all that like sure but also it's definitely meant to be a lot harder than most of Elden Ring's catalog they even give you an item in the game called the Blasphemous claw if you're really having a hard time it's a hidden in the sewers in another area of the game that actually lets you parry his death blade that item single handedly makes this encounter a walk in the park now What's So Scary About his sword is that it has a health draining effect and it actually caps the max HP you can have temporarily so this is an extremely you know deadly and dangerous combo hence the death blade like it's actually insane um also his move set can be incredibly acrobatic meaning if you're playing a melee build it's not always you know in your option just to go and punish him you can't Camp underneath him or anything he flips around the arena a lot and even throws some projectiles as well as some big area of effect attack so he's pretty much got it all and again objectively a hard boss compared to the rest of Elden Ring's lineup his placement in the game is brilliant he is essentially the lock before the late game and again personally I would put him in my favorite top 10 bosses of souls games ever so I was trying to decide where to put him but I think I ultimately landed on Soul of Cinder being in the god tier level and now while he's not my favorite fight in you know of all of Dark Souls 3 or you know even of souls games he's very very excellent and when it comes to the Dark Souls Trilogy specifically I think without a shadow of a doubt he's the best final boss in terms of the base game he's better than Gwyn he's far better than nandra he even emulates a lot of those properties from those older games and older bosses his move set is supposed to be like the amalgamation of all of the different you know popular equipment and weapons and play Styles this means the soul of Cinder has access to virtually every single weapon or like property ever it can passively heal uh it can buff itself it has a second life which is not it's less of a phase two it's more just like hey I'm coming back but I'm literally better this time but with this huge variety of moves and abilities he has I think it all leads to the fact that this fight never becomes repetitive or boring despite playing very similarly to other bosses in the past he has a lot of gwyn's moves from Dark Souls I so despite the ReUse still manages to feel fresh and interesting and it keeps it engaging I'm a huge fan of Soul of Cinder while I would have put it maybe somewhere in possibly top tier and maybe not God for a couple of reasons I think this boss could actually do with being even a little bit harder than it is when all is said and done it makes me realize that soul of Cinder is the proper way to end the Dark Souls Trilogy specifically it's an unforgettable moment and you'll always remember the first time that you actually defeated him all right so let's move on back over to Saro and talk about great Shinobi out now you will fight this boss if you do any other ending other than shur and this is what happens immediately after if you choose to serve Al or choose to serve cro so in any case technically you do fight Al twice throughout the game but we're going to get to the other encounter later the great Shinobi version is him using a little bit more of his cheap and underhanded tactics compared to his other battle but that doesn't mean he's a pushover whatsoever the thing is he uses a lot of tactics like smoke that prevents you from he healing uh he'll also throw poison not to talk about story or lore too much but Al is very avoidant and he's kind of a coward hence him always jumping back after attacks and when he does this you can absolutely punish everything he does after because nothing has armor for that in fact you're actually encouraged to rush him down whenever he does that move where he backs up when he cowers in fear you have to be extra aggressive and not cower away as he does it's a storytelling moment that's very indicative of his character that also makes a lot of sense from a gameplay perspective and it's just good designed fundamentally as soon as you take away the first death blow Mark he's going to get on his knees and beg for his life this however is a trick it's a scam he's lying to you and you need to continue to attack in order to initiate this Phase 2 and start off in an advantage state in this phase two he actually acts a little bit different he employs poison and plays basically even more aggressive the interesting thing about Al as a character is he can do essentially anything that you can do he has access to your sword your tools and a bunch of like equipment that you might bring into a boss and it really gives you the feeling that in some sense he is trying to cheese you you are the boss in this you have the giant health bar and he's trying to do everything he can to take you down by any means necessary so it feels good to have a bit of a perspective change to some extent and it's one of my favorite bosses in all of souls games not only for its visuals its storytelling its actual mechanics like everything about it is actually perfect moving on to Dark Souls 1 once again we have orstein and Smo do I need to say anything that hasn't already been said about these two goats it's I think easily the best fight in all of Base game Dark Souls 1 it's genuinely without a shadow of a doubt Pitch Perfect it's what the godkin duo wish they could be so what makes or and SM so interesting well you have that Dynamic of you know one big fat ladin one smaller one that a lot of video games do as a typical Duo fight they also have nearly perfect pass passive and aggressive states where they don't feel overwhelming and they also don't feel like too much of a pushover either that on top of depending on who you kill first either orstein or SM they will adopt the other one's Soul into their own move set and it will completely change the dynamic and route of the fight so this is extremely replayable it can go a variety of ways and I think it never gets old it's like perfectly balanced I say perfectly balanced with a few caveats obviously some of ornstein's like insta teleport moves are kind of jam there's some weird and wonky hit boxes a lot of technical stuff that probably could be sorted out in a more modern day Souls game for what this is though specifically I still think it manages to make its way into god tier it's absolutely legendary and I feel it would be a crime against humanity if I didn't put the good old on inside of goat heading back over to Dark Souls 3 we have one of the most iconic fights in all of the game this is going to be dark eater Madar and it's interesting because the reason I'm going to rank Madar as the best dragon fight in all of souls even over placu sax is yes you know placu sax is a lot more Grand scale and epic he's got more moves and so on it's probably even more dangerous but I think madir is a better experience I would describe placu sax as a lot more of a passive boss that just has like giant ridiculous One-Shot moves and madir has a few of those too like some actual unbelievable stuff don't get me wrong they are very similar bosses in terms of their moves and framework but I really like kamadar a lot more of an active boss plac sigusch the height of its movement really is when it teleports and then flies around the arena kind of breaking the pace and flow of the fight I think if Mader just got up and flew around a lot then it would kind of destroy the pace that this is going for as well otherwise I think mider is like the quintessential dragon fight in Souls I don't know if they've ever really made an experience that has surpassed this yet and who knows if they ever will I think it's very very difficult to get a dragon fight correct especially in a Souls game where it's got to play nice with with the camera and all that but madir thankfully covers all of its bases and it's a ton of fun visually stunning atmospheric as hell and it's incredible getting to the bosses that are highest on my list this next one is going to be the infamous orphan of cause from bloodborne so this boss is quite controversial it's a battle that many people have many strong opinions on and myself included I think cause is not quite the best designed of the DLC which we'll get to but it is certainly the hardest the only downside that I have to this fight really or the only major criticism is its arena is honestly not well telegraphed because you can walk in the water a lot like you can go pretty far out there but it's not told to the player whatsoever it's very bad conveyance and the thing is in general water in Souls games has always meant death you are naturally not inclined to go towards that area of the map even though you can and it's kind of necessary because you need a lot of space and room to affect effectively fight orphan of cause I genuinely think if they just made a slight part in the cut scene where he walks in the water a bit to show you that maybe that's possible this would be a lot more tolerable because trying to fight it at the top of the beach honestly you're making it a lot harder on yourself than it really needs to be unless you just go and fight in the open water it's so much better but otherwise orphan of cause has a second phase switch up that's very brutal and challenging to deal with easily one of the hardest bosses in all of video games period Now ladies and gentlemen as for our final boss ever in Dark Souls 1 this is going to be Knight artorius of the DLC this is by far my favorite boss fight in Dark Souls 1 they made a sword boss that's aggressive and challenging enough and even has some interesting mechanics that you can exploit throughout the battle eventually Knight artorius will stop to try and buff himself and if you do it can get out of hand really fast because he takes less damage and he deals a lot more so you want to prevent this you can do this by either throwing things at him or just going and rushing up and catch catching the startup as he attempts to buff it's so much fun because it really makes you think about each decision you make you cannot Mash during this fight every single action you take needs to be very deliberate and again while artorius isn't necessarily a difficult fight by today's standards is still no pushover I mean compared to the rest of the roster on Dark Souls 1 they tend to be a little bit easier KN Knight artorius Stomps all of them out completely even still and it's very clear that the design philosophy when making night art torious really influenced almost every single one of the let's say traditionally good Souls bosses from there on out he's absolutely excellent and I would say damn near Perfect all right so you know it's not a crazy DLC or special boss or anything it's just a base game Dark Souls 3i boss but you already know the Vibes pontiff solivan is easily one of the greatest Dark Souls bosses that in every category it's challenging to a variety of play Styles and builds he'll duplicate himself throughout the fight so you have an entirely different entity to deal with that completely changes the dynamic the move set is perfect the music's insane like what like what can I say about the goat that hasn't already been said it's just so good it's like I just I just I think that it's a nightmare they really didn't have to cook like this for a Bas game Souls boss just in the middle of it's not even like a it's not even the final boss it's just in the middle of the game game it's so out of place has no reason going as hard as it does but we all love pontiff he's you know an actual Legend coming back over to bloodborne for a moment we have the other boss I was referring to uh who's very similar to cause I think cause is harder but I feel lady Maria is better she's a bit more intricate and has uh actually up to three phases going on in her fight that are all you know distinctly different and she has everything that makes bloodborne combat fun and enjoyable and encapsulates it all into this really neat package leading Maria is Max aggression she is just as agile as you the Hunter and it's really fun playing against somebody that has the same properties and dynamic as you she obviously gets more powerful through her blood magic throughout the fight and there's extremely rewarding but Tight parrying Windows if you know what you're doing it can make this fight a breeze if you understand the Rhythm and and properties of it I don't get tired of it man I would play this fight every day of my life if I could it's just a pain because you got to play through living failures in order to get here first which you know honestly I could do without let's move on on over to Dark Souls 3 and talk about the nameless King statistically speaking it looks like the nameless King is the most difficult boss in terms of completion rates this doesn't include any of the DLC but in base game DS3 the nameless King has the lowest completion rate and I think that's for a lot of reasons it has technically two phases in which you fight the king of the storm where he's you know on his thing and then this isn't the part that's a problem though I feel like nameless King Phase 2 is not only excellently designed but it isir fairly difficult and I think it's a ton of fun in retrospect nameless King is by no means one of the hardest Souls boss ever but at the time and especially for the context of the game that it's in it is certainly up there I would say it's one of the more difficult bosses uh in Dark Souls I it's definitely build dependent to some extent and it's also somewhat buffered by the fact that you have to do the phase one over and over again in order to get here to the actual nameless King but he's no pushover whatsoever and I think he actually has like some of the most fun I've ever had in a dark souls 3i boss playing against him he's great now let's talk about our final boss from Dark Souls 2 this is the last one we have on our list and in my opinion is the best boss in all of this game including the Bas and DLC I love the fum Knight I think he very much resembles Knight artorius and is all of the attributes and aspects that I love about that boss encounter but takes it to the next level artorius is like a boss where you can prevent him from buffing and becoming more powerful the fum Knight will kind of just do whatever he wants and you have to deal with it the only thing I'm not in love with is there's this prerequisite where you need these like smelter shards to destroy these regenerating Health pools around his Arena otherwise he can be an absolute nightmare to deal with once you destroy those it becomes a very traditional you know sword fight and I think just realistically speaking is one of the best designed and is some of the best that Dark Souls 2 has to offer I don't make it a secret that I'm not in love with most of the bosses from this game but a lot of them are fairly hyped here and I would say if there is going to be something that's god tier from Dark Souls I inarguably I feel like the fum Knight at least has to be a contender and for me he's one of my favorites getting to as well our final boss from the Elden ring list is going to be ragon of the golden order now keep in mind again he's not the hardest boss I would say melenia and even malakith and possibly even Godfrey are more difficult than ragon partly because this is a two-face fight with Elden beast but they are very different I love raton's design however this isn't a difficulty ranking this is like an overall design and a worst to best so I think ragon is one of the best bosses in Elden ring inarguably despite him not being necessarily the hardest he still is no easy walk in the park or a pushover genuinely the only minor gripe I have about raton's fight is I don't like the mechanic where he goes invisible and yet can still be starting up an attack and you literally cannot see what he's doing if that were not the case if he just didn't go invisible but he still teleported I would be totally fine with that it's the only little complaint I have about it otherwise it's a god tier boss to me and then also closing out our list for bloodborne as well we have lwig the ours SL the holy blade now I'm not sure if I actually think that lwig is the best boss in all of bloodborne I think I still like Maria more and maybe even cause but to say that lwig is not an absolutely unique incredible and fascinating boss would be a lie he is basically the malakith archetype which again you know I have a soft spot for I really like and this is is kind of version one of his boss battle it plays out just like malakith where he starts out in a more of a beast and Primal form in his move set and his style and his Pace complements that brilliantly he's very difficult to approach and he has moves that are you know aggressive and quick and they come out fast he can jump from the ceiling and nearly One-Shot you if you're not being careful but once you get him to you know around half health and he enters phase two the fight completely changes he realizes that the moonlight great sword was on his back this whole time and he now starts utilizing it and so from this point on he starts fighting a lot more formal and chival ristic he's even up on his two legs and the fight is not at all what it was in Phase One it becomes like a little bit more of a ranged battle you kind of need to methodically approach him instead the boss design as far as his look goes and the arena he's in is genuinely terrifying and I just love everything about the atmosphere here and you know mechanics aside those are wonderful and nearly perfect too everything falls into place like a symphony to make this an unforgettable experience I think the bloodborne Community really thinks lwig is maybe the best fight in the whole game and I would possibly agree with that can definitely see that opinion although again I still do think I like Maria and CA just a little bit more although you know it's again such a close battle between all of them no matter what though I do feel to some extent lwig has become the face of bloodborne and really what this game represents and the things that make it unique and special such an amazingly crafted game and I think it has some of the best bosses in gaming history uh flat out it's too difficult to figure out where to place all of these goats but we need to talk about giniro from SEO now this is including every encounter you might fight him in because you f face him at the beginning of the game in ashaa Castle and at the very end and so he has slight variations in each and every single encounter maybe a couple different moves here and there but largely it's the same boss just in a different context but regardless of which time you're fighting him giniro is one of the best designed boss es ever when we were speaking about lady butterfly a little bit earlier in the video I said that was my moment in SEO when the game clicked for me when I was playing it for the first time and I heard the sentiment from a lot of people that giniro was actually where the game clicked for them ginro will probably be the boss that you fight right after lady butterfly so that makes sense and I can completely understand why that is the case cuz I also feel he introduces more mechanics that are not present in lady butterfly for example in phase two of giniro he starts utilizing lightning reversals I've kind of talked about how I think they're a little cheaply introduced for the first time but once you know like exactly how to do this it becomes extremely easy and unironically his phase two is so much easier than his first phases like it's insane kichiro I feel is the best learning tool in serro for just learning the mechanics and also learning how to become the boss because that is what this game specifically is fundamentally built on you will get bullied by ginro your first couple of times playing him that's pretty much for sure but as you play it again and again again you'll slight to you know improve and get better you realize that you can completely stomp him out and run him over to where he can't really do anything to you at all it feels very different getting a Flawless ginro run versus like any other traditional Dark Souls boss it's a different experience and being the boss in a real sense is a totally distinct feeling and I absolutely love OS one of the best bosses in gaming ever created heading on back to Dark Souls 3 we have lauran and lothric near the end of the base game and this is perhaps the greatest Duo fight ever created in a Souls game I think I'll die on that Hill I feel the rhythm and the flow of this boss fight is absolutely unmatched by anything else and the moves make sense they're extremely intuitive and everything feels very challenging but fun and fair and the gimmick slash like you know comeback mechanic is that lothric can actually revive lauran an indefinite amount of times until you deal enough damage to him so it's all about positioning as well where you want to end up kind of near near the back of him in end lag Windows to where you can punish the younger Prince so that he does not revive his brother almost infinitely I don't know what it is they just got the flow and feel right about everything and I love the way the animations and weapons look like it's extremely intuitive to dodge and react to everything is brilliant man it's like music it's perfect I could go on for hours about why this fight specifically is absolutely god tier and I wish there were a few more fights like this even in more modern Souls games there's not really an Elden ring equivalent to this that I can point to and say like hey they perfected this formula because I feel like this kind of is the Perfection of this formula and I wouldn't I I wouldn't even know how to improve this fight to be honest I've sit here and thought about it for a long time and I cannot come up with the single thing that they could do in order to make this fight objectively genuinely better you know I can sit here and look at virtually any Souls boss and me being the nitpicky internet armchair critic that I am I can name a bunch of things that I would do differently or what I would change to make the fight better but I'm stumped with this this and I think that's a great sign like it's perfect the way it is I would not change a goddamn thing about it it's excellent it has very close competition to what may be otherwise the best fight in all of the Dark Souls Trilogy and specifically Dark Souls 3 I think it's up to these two if it's not the twin princes it has to be the absolute lad Mr berserk himself slave night Gale from Dark Souls 3 this is the final DLC boss in this game and the last Dark Souls II boss on our list I feel like this is the best for a variety of reasons but more importantly I think that they understood the basics of why Souls bosses work and this is the amalgamation of all the lessons they learned from out their previous games he's got The Perfect Blend of ranged and melee attacks along with some mixups some timing switches in later phases and an escalation of tension that is extremely real he has a giant Health pole so pretty much no matter what you're not speeding through this fight with any kind of realistic build and the way that everything ratchets up in tension as the fight gets nearer to the end actually makes you pretty nervous and and can really incite some fear in you I think slave Knight Gale was probably the most fun I had in Dark Souls II period because I knew the journey was about to nearly come to an end and I realized that this is where they understood how to do a finale I get Gwyn is like a good final boss and it makes sense why he's kind of weak and pathetic for the lore but you want something that kind of sticks with you and leaves an impression slave Knight Gale left the biggest boss impression on and is kind of what I imagine when I think of Dark Souls I if it's not soul of Cinder I feel like slave Knight Gale is the face of this game in some ways his design when it comes to his look weapon and move set evidently takes a lot of inspiration from berserk and it makes sense why it has the repeating crossbow in his move side even though I personally feel it's a little bit out of place for a game like this it makes sense if they're drawing a lot of inspiration from all that but man I can't talk highly enough about this particular boss and I really do see a lot of his design sign coming in for the influence in Elden ring you can look at a lot of the bosses and see that they were very clearly inspired from a lot of the lessons that he employed himself and so I hope we see something as Grand scale and epic for finale bosses just like him because he's everything mechanically and Visually thematically that you want getting close to the end of our list here we have yet another final boss and this is the true last boss of the game ising The Sword Saint from SEO so what's so cool about him is that he is The Perfect final boss if slave Knight Gale is just maybe a little bit flawed what eian manages to do is test every single skill and mechanic that you've learned through the game including you know sword fighting you fight against every weapon type swords Spears guns lightning reversals you name it uh literally all of it in this battle you cannot afford to hesitate at all he even says that when you die to him he says hesitation is defeat which again just sounds like a cool thing that a samurai would say or whatever but he's genuinely giving you tips on how to beat this boss it's very meta it's a little bit like fourth wallish but it's so much fun still and learning this fight took me a long time the first time around because it is a very steep learning curve once I got it down it's very easy to repeat and do Flawless from here on out I think the second phase is actually the most difficult of his because third phase he starts using lightning reversals and again if you know how to kind of abuse that mechanic you get rewarded uh extra proportionally for that to wear a point that might be a little bit too far in your favor I mean I don't think either of us are complaining I feel you know we'll take all the help we can get but if we can get free damage and posture off lightning reversals we'll take those all day it really comes down to how much he spams the move to be honest but I'm getting a little bit off track the point is it's the most learnable boss and it has the the like biggest rewarding learning curve as well it feels so satisfying to learn and finally overcome it for the first time I would say it becomes far easier on repeat playthroughs because much of it is just developing the muscle memory and learning the deliberate response to each one of his moves because you have to react in a very specific way and while I absolutely think eing the sword Saint is perfect there is one boss and it's going to be the top of the list for me the very best boss in ladies and gentlemen I introduce the goat the man himself Al father from SEO so while this is technically not the last boss in the game I think it is the greatest one this whole video currently is 2 hours in 48 minutes long so far and I could talk for that exact same length about just this boss specifically I realized that this one was something special when I was coming home and just literally replaying this boss over and over again even after I had beat the game there was something about the way that this like the logic trees can go and that the the replayability of this fight is absolutely unmatched if you're really good you can kind of speed through ehen if you really just shut him down you can't necessarily do the same thing here it's a bit harder to do so but I just think that the variety of you know playr to playr of this is insane and the way that you can strategize against al there's so many intricacies to this fight now if you were paying attention earlier uh you you're like hey we fought great Shinobi Al why is there a big difference well there isn't a huge difference but I do feel as if father is better he's more in his prime in the game and so he fights a bit more aggressively doesn't use his like corny cheese tactics as much and is a little bit just more you know straightforward on the ground sword to sword kind of combat and just like I don't know dude it's sheer perfection I believe ala is the greatest boss fight of any Souls game from demon souls to Elden ring this is the peak of its design execution philosophy and everything else now we ranked a lot of Souls bosses today but if for some reason I missed one or you think something else should have been on this list please write it on a piece of paper and shove it up your anyways no I'm just kidding uh thank you guys so much for watching this video took an unreal amount of time and work and so if you made it this far I just want to say like thank you beyond what I could say in words like I really do appreciate it I worked so unbelievably hard putting this together for you guys and this video from its conception and me fighting all of the bosses and then putting together all the footage to make this took well over a year so this has been a Year's work of my life and I really hope you guys got something out of it leave a like if you did subscribe if you're new to the channel and let me know what you thought below but thank you all for watching once again and I will catch you guys in the next one