Boss Stats and Numbers

Get ready for grade-level arithmetic!

    I died a lot in Dark Souls II over 112+ hours between two characters. Specifically (for the purpose of this blog), I died a lot on bosses too. I'm going to break down some simple numbers and go into a bit of depth about how I fared against the thirty (30!) bosses in the game.


    Firstly, my total death count to all the bosses on my initial playthough was 179. 179 over 30 bosses. That is an average of 5.9 deaths per boss (a few high numbers, and few zeroes, really skew the numbers)! That can basically be rounded up to six deaths per boss battles. What other games can you think of where you die an average of SIX TIMES PER BOSS? Imagine if you died six times on every boss in Final Fantasy VII, for instance. You think Dark Souls II has a lot of bosses? That game has probably double the amount, at least (factoring in the sidequest ones too). God, playtime on that game would be outrageous. Imagine if you died six times to all the bosses in ANY turn-based RPG? Yikes.


    My most deaths on any boss was a staggering 21. This happened on two different bosses: Lost Sinner and the Belfry Gargoyles. That's 42 deaths to kill two bosses. I would imagine that that's more than you would die in most other games, altogether. Also, for fun's sake, the boss I died to the most on Dark Souls was (surprise, surprise) Ornstein & Smough. I don't know the number exactly (it was years ago, after all), but I have no doubt that it was in the mid-twenties, at least. A nice note from the here and now, I'm currently playing Dark Souls, going for the platinum for that one (only need two trophies), and I just can. Not. Beat. Gwyn. Ugh. He is another boss from this game that is pretty high on the death list I believe (and to hell with your parrying suggestion. I can't parry). Now, the boss I died to the most in Demon's Souls was probably Flamelurker. Final note about Demon's, I remember easily beating both Fool's Idol and Old King Allant my first time through, and on basically every subsequent playthrough, they both (especially Allant) give me huge problems. Yeah, Fool's Idol. Lame.


    Conversely, I killed five bosses on my first try. These were: Giant Lord, Prowler Magus, Scorpioness Najka, Mytha, Baneful Queen, and Flexile Sentry). In comparison, if memory serves correct, in Dark Souls, I killed Iron Golem, Pinwheel, and I believe Demon Firesage and Centipede Demon on first tries (not 100% on those last two. They were no more than 1 death, for sure). For Demon's Souls, I think the only ones I killed on my first try were Leechmonger and Dirty Colossus. For such brutally tough areas, those guys are pushovers.


     Now, delving into my self-appointed (and only slightly arbitrary) difficulty ratings, we see that the average difficulty rating is an underwhelming 4.6, which would roughly be the difficulty of somewhere between Executioner's Chariot, Pursuer, and Velstadt. No bosses got a 1, a 4.5, or a 10 for their ratings. The highest rating was a 9.5, for only one boss battle (two bosses), that being those pesky Throne defenders. Three bosses got ratings of only 1.5, which would be the lowest (this dubious honor goes to Mytha, the Skeleton Lords, and poor old Magus). Now, a bit of a rant. Not entirely a rant, but I see people all over the forums and message boards I look at, and many people complain the bosses in this game are too easy. Are they really though? Sure, there were definitely some simple ones here, but I think that's more to do with the sheer number of them. I will say, I was dismayed a bit, initially, with the difficulty of some of the bosses. There were enough tough, challenging bosses to ultimately satisfy me, however.
    So let's quickly think back to Demon's and Dark Souls, and the difficulty of their bosses. Now that we've separated ourselves from the games (Demon's is FIVE years old, while Dark is about 2.5 years old), we can truly look back on the games and realize, "eh, there's not many hard bosses in these games either." Case in point: how many really tough bosses are there in Demon's Souls? I would consider tough to be an 8 or above on my difficulty scale. Going in order, starting at 1-1, Old King Allant (probably the hardest in that whole game), Flamelurker, and the Maneaters. Other than that, are any of the bosses worthy of an almighty "8"? Let's start again from the beginning, for a very quick rundown:

• Phalanx: easy
• Tower Knight: intimidating at first, but easy
• Penetrator: medium (unless Biorr is helping, then SUPER easy)
• Armor Spider: is pretty close to being on that 8+ list, but you can kill him from afar with well-timed dodges, and a hell of a lot of arrows
• Dragon God: easy
• Fool's Idol: easy, but can be super annoying (at least for me)
• Old Monk: if you're fighting the computer (which I assume everyone is at this point): pretty easy. If you're fighting a human, well results may vary. Could very well be the toughest battle in the game
• Adjudicator: annoying (because of the small area you fight him in), but ultimately easy
• Old Hero: a joke
• Storm King: can be annoying as hell, but easy
• Everything in world 5 is simple

    So, three hard bosses out of all those? Now let's go to the original Dark Souls. Same game: how many tough bosses? Ornstein & Smough (no doubt), Four Kings (even this is very questionable, but I'll include them), and Gwyn (no parrying, anyway). There are some fringe players too (I'm not going through the whole boss roster): Capra Demon (because of that bullshittingly small room) and Sif. I will say, the DLC is no fucking joke. All four of those bosses I'd probably rate at least a 7 (and truly, after Sanctuary Guardian, the final three might be 8.5+). So again, three bosses, with a possible two more.
    Now, what does this mean for Dark Souls II? Well, if anything, that there are as many hard boss battles as in the previous games, but because there are more of them, and they are more spaced out (the hard ones I mean), it seems that there aren't as many.
    Finally, here's a more detailed breakdown difficulty ratings from Dark Souls II (meaning, the number of battles that fall between the specific difficulty rating):

0 - 2.5:   9
3 - 5.5:   9
6 - 8:     7
8.5 - 10: 5


    I think that's all I can squeeze out of difficulty ratings. I think that's it anyways. So, what have we learned, exactly? I love these games too damn much. Really, there is no other conclusion that can be drawn. Why put so much work into something like this? It's a labor of love, and it was a blast to put together. I love writing (even if I don't "blog" like a pro. I'm sure my paragraph structure and order is not optimized, and I'm sure the tense of most of my writing is out of whack. Sit on it, Potsie!), and I love these (and many other) games.



     At first, I was going to say I was going to have one final Souls post, that would rank all the bosses from all the games, but as I've been compiling this list, I realized it was a fool's errand. It's very difficult to rank 73 bosses in an honest, complete way. Meaning, how much of a difference is there really, between numbers 56 and 57? It all comes down to arbitrary minutia. So, I'm not going to make the list. Perhaps one day I'll do a top ten list. So, sorry if you're disappointed (you aren't trust me). Stay tuned for what's coming on this (ever-evolving) blog!