moonflowers

begrudgingly a game dev

more sinister than intimidating


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @moonflowers's post:

I like the flashback scene you can view afterwards where Miquella turns directly to the camera and goes ‘this totally made sense from a narrative perspective we totally didn’t pull this out of our asses’.

this boss just makes me sad

the whole dlc makes me sad. no miquella in the miquella dlc at all. honestly the whole thing felt like the lowest common denominator version of what someone would imagine a souls game to be. i know you’re more positive on it but i found very little to enjoy in it

I think that Miquella being a largely unseen character works for most of the DLC; it’s how Marika is presented I think that works as a parallel because my read of the story was that it was broadly about Miquella’s inability to anything other than repeat Marika’s mistakes. But that final boss is just so deflationary. It exists because the DLCs always end with you dodging some mad as fuck wank beasts intense combos and Miquella wouldn’t work as that kind of boss (not that Miquella necessarily needed to be a boss). It’s genuinely sad to see FromSoft so fucking trapped by their own conventions that they can’t imagine another way to end the DLC. It’s just an utter failure of imagination; it’s pure formula.

It’s such a sticking point for me because I really liked the bosses in the DLC and I think the base game bosses are, by and large, shit tier. I spend the whole DLC thinking to myself ‘oh thank God, they finally remembered how to make good bosses’ and it turns out lol jk and the rug was yanked from under me. And it’s such a flag of a really obvious trend, which is they’ve got no room left to make bosses that are anything other than skill checks. They’ll never make another Gaping Dragon or Quelaag, because they aren’t impressive for streamers to no hit.

It’s remarkable that the DLC is in my opinion better than the base game in almost every way and my take away is somehow that FromSoft maybe don’t have the juice anymore.

i wish i knew what you saw in these bosses. aside from dancing lion and relanna i killed almost all of them in 4-6 hits, and i’m not exaggerating even slightly. i found the base game far more engaging. the dlc felt like i was fighting cemetery shades over and over

I rolled in with a standard quality build specifically to avoid melting the bosses. I was in a nice spot where I needed to tweak my loadout for each boss, but was mostly keeping up with what seemed to be the game’s expectation in terms of damage. This balance only really broke down for me on Radahn and Bayle, which funnily enough are the two bosses than feel like them just going back to the well (Bayle is just Placidusax again).

The two stand outs for me were Rellana and Midra. Midra is one I don’t think a lot of people will talk about, but I really enjoyed; he felt like a Dark Souls boss, which is to say a throwback to before every single boss had to be Nameless King.

Other than Radahn the only two real stinkers for me were Commander Gaius and the Hippo. Gaius has just the weirdest dodge timings and I hated him (in hindsight I was pretty underpowered in terms of Scadu fragments). The Hippo honestly just felt like they artificially made him more difficult by putting the lock on point in a stupid place.

It’s really stark to me when there are DLC specific enemies and bosses and reused base game stuff right next to each other. I found myself having way less fun every time the density of base game enemies increased.

They can fuck right off with the Death Rite Bird they stuck in there, those guys are abysmal.