Bloodborne Boss Rundown, Part 2

Blood-starved to Watch some Giant Chieftains???

    This week* I fought and defeated three bosses. I've written about each, per your enjoyment. 

BLOOD-STARVED BEAST:

 

    After lots of my wandering around Old Yharnam, I came across this eerily quiet and ominous looking room. It's fairly open with large pillars on the sides. It looks like a boss room. It feels like a boss room. By god, the air even tastes like a boss room. But, is it really a boss room?

    Yes. Yes it is.

    This is the domain of the Blood-starved Beast. From what I gather from Tweets I've seen from fellow players, this guy is causing people quite a bit of misery. I can understand why, but at the same time, I almost killed him on my first attempt, and it only took me I think five tries in total. He can be a bastard, but he's not that bad.

    His appearance is pretty interesting. Well, maybe gross is a better word. If I've fully comprehended what he's supposed to be. It looks like a tall humanoid creature that is wearing a cape of skin. I think? I might have recently read that BS Beast is supposed to be a human that is mostly transformed into a beast. It's supposed to be visceral and disturbing. Judge for yourself as to what the hell you think it's supposed to be:

See? What in the good lord's name?

    He walks around on all fours like some mutated animal, but he can rear up on his back two legs to attack. He'll slash with his claws, and what starts out looking like a singular slash can turn into a nasty combo that will decimate you quickly. As you injure him and he loses health, he'll start adding poison to his repertoire. This might be the first place in the game where I really experienced poison. And let me tell you all something: it's FAST. Holy shit does "slow poison" work fast. I believe he does two "poison buffs". Now, I'm not looking online for information, mostly, so if I'm wrong, someone please let me know. I think first he buffs his claws and makes them poisonous, and then later, when he has maybe a quarter of his health left, he buffs his whole body to become poison, so that even being near him poisons you. This is undoubtedly the toughest part of the battle. You obviously need to get close to him to attack, yet doing so is dangerous in and of itself. 

    Luckily I had amassed a decent amount of antidotes going Old Yharnam. They came in very handy for this battle. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it might not be possible to kill this guy without at least a few antidotes. 

    So while he's slashing and poisoning away, what's the novice Hunter to do? Well, as always, I used pillars to my advantage. If you need to catch a breather to heal/use an antidote/fire buff your weapon, it's easy enough to run away from him, go behind a pillar, and do what you need to do. You can also put a pillar in between the two of you to stay away from his attacks. But do know sometimes his claws can go through the pillars. Such is life in Yharnam.

    My strategy was to dodge-strafe his swipes and get behind him. Here, I could take some good swings at him. He's not too hard to dodge this way. Of course, you can also use bullets to parry him. His attacks are easy enough to do this with. When he starts going the poison route, well I pretty much kept the same strategy, but I was a little more cautious, and I kept a closer eye on my health. On the attempt I beat him, I used probably 3-4 antidotes. 

    On my very first attempt where I got him down to ONE HIT then got killed myself, I used a mixture of Molotov cocktails and fire paper. Fire paper is the item akin to the charcoal pine resin from Dark Souls. It imbues your weapon with fire. Up until I got this item, I wasn't sure these different buffs still existed. I was very happy to find this. So I used fire mainly to fight him. It worked well, but since I had such limited amounts, I ran out of them by the time I finally did beat him. 

Another lovely picture

  

  On my successful attempt, I just stuck with my normal “tricked out” Hunter’s Axe with the strategy above. Towards the back end of the battle, during his poison shitshow, I really slowed everything down for myself because I was terrified of getting killed again. I prevailed, and as a reward I got the first Chalice for the fabled Chalice Dungeon. I didn’t know until later on that this guy is completely optional. I’m sure most people do fight him though.

    Finally, the run up to this guy sucks. It’s long, filled with enemies, and is tedious. You can get to BS Beast without engaging in combat, but you gotta be fast and careful. In general, besides the Chalice Dungeons, the runs from the Lanterns to the bosses of this game, even if a shortcut is open, are long and tiresome. Makes you want to beat a boss on the first try, that’s for sure. 

 

UNDEAD GIANT:

 

    Here we are at the first boss of the Chalice Dungeon. And here's a surprising thing about this particular fella: he killed me! A lot! In fact, I've died more to this guy than I have to any other boss up to this point. Yup, even more than Father G. But, I didn't get NEARLY as frustrated here. I'll explain that reasoning in a bit. First, let me tell you all about this giant who doesn't seem to be alive anymore.

    While his name is Undead Giant, he's kind of disappointing for a giant. Maybe he's a dwarf giant. Like, he's obviously much bigger than the human characters, but compared to the other giants, he's pretty small. He's certainly not as gigantic as the Giants in DSII, but he's substantial enough. Notice how I haven't been capitalizing the word "giant" when talking about him, yet I did capitalize it when talking about the Giants in Dark Souls II. Important distinction to make, in that I don't think there's any correlation between the two. And why the hell would there be? I wonder how much correlation, if any at all, exists between this game and the spiritual predecessors. In time we'll know. Wow, little tangent there. At any rate, this particular giant is probably twice your height, yet he's also got a much larger body. He walks around with some sheet draped over him. He has what looks like an altar of candles strapped to his back. And of course, he has two large curved hooks for hands. He looks great, and is probably my favorite boss design thus far.

That "lock on" dot is distracting

    All his attacks focus on his hook hands. Besides a leaping attack, all he does is swipe his hooks around. Actually, my apologies, he also has a stomp attack that he'll use if you're really close to him. I mean, he couldn't use it from far away, so it's pretty obvious you'd have to be close to him for him to use it. He'll do anywhere from 1 to 5 hit combos. Suffice to say if you get caught up in that, you are toast. He swings pretty fast, which is a little off-putting at first, because he is generally a slow monster. And he just looks like he should be slow. Also, all of his attacks are at slightly different speeds, so it takes a while to really get his timing down. This was a battle that I was really missing being able to roll while locked on. Would have made this easier, as rolling covers more ground, and you could escape his attacks easier.

    I didn't have a complex strategy. I would generally wait until he started a combo, then figure out if it was a 3, 4, or 5 hit combo. Truthful speak right now: I don't think he even does the 5 hit ones until he's sustained a decent amount of damage. But at any rate, I'd wait, then I'd strafe TOWARDS him to dodge the last swing, then I'd dish out a few hits using my normal Axe. I didn't transform it because it attacks too slowly. I'd like to note that I couldn't shoot and stun him. I didn't try extensively, but I've been able to do it to the other bosses, so I think I have the general timing down. Maybe he just can't be parried...  

    ... except at one point I attacked him with a barrage of blows, and he got stunned. I didn't even notice this, and I kept swinging. This made me do the visceral attack on him. Maybe you can parry and visceral with the gun? I couldn't do it anyway. 

    Also, he has a large, strange growth on his leg. If you attack this, it will take off a major chunk of his health. I couldn't figure out why sometimes I would attack him and do crazy damage, and other times I did my normal amount. He very well might have a second "vulnerable" spot, I'm not sure. I was thinking that's how I stunned him, but I don't know. Getting that growth is a great way to start the battle. 

    As I mentioned above, this was the first boss of the first Chalice Dungeon. He was tough, but not frustratingly so, he looked awesome, and absolutely best of all, the path to him was simple as pie. I will say too that every time I died and had to re-spawn, it took 5 seconds or less. Every time. Without fail. Which is why I never got frustrated having to fight him. Even if some attempts I got killed in the first five seconds and didn't get a hit off, I'd be back fighting him again less than a minute later. As you all know, most everywhere else in the game you have to wait through that annoying-as-hell 30-40 second load time. Wonder why the Chalice Dungeon is so much faster? 

Going in for a killing blow

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MERCILESS WATCHERS & WATCHER CHIEFTAIN:

 

    Really dumb boss battle here. Easily the most pathetic of the game so far. It consists of fighting three big fat guys, kinda like the ones that guard the levers to open the locked doors on each Layer. They are just big guys with large club-and-cleaver-like weapons. The room I was in had stairs on either side that led up to a small landing, but they also kept going past this landing and led up to the top of the room. The three guys stayed up there. And I mean, they DID NOT COME DOWN, unless by force. Two had their melee weapons, and one was firing a blunderbuss with infinite ammo. Which is bullshit by the way. Allow me a mini-rant? Why the fuck do the enemies in the game that have guns have an infinite amount of bullets? Classic bullshit video game logic at its best. 

It was tough getting pictures of these guys

    They would just wander around the top area while I stood near the top of the stairs. Just standing here, they would not come to attack me. They walked around, and came near me, and even swung their weapons at me, but they won't come towards. Like they are locked into being at the top area. The blunderbuss guy has an itchy trigger finger to boot. Luckily, there are pillars at the tops of the stairs to stop the bullets. Neither one of the melee Watchers wanted to follow me, so I sort of attacked them around the pillars. It was annoying because I had to step to the top landing where they were, and try to bait one of them to attack me. So I would run up, try to swing once, hit one of them, and run back to the stairs. You certainly couldn't just stand up there, because you'd get torn to pieces by bullets and the melee weapons. 

Just chilling

     Eventually I got sick of waiting around and dishing out a few hits at a time. I was able to kill one of the melee guys by engaging in combat on the stairs and near the top of the area where he walked around. I couldn't quite do the same to the other melee guy. However, I was finally able to get him to the bottom of the stairs, by way of him accidentally falling. I dispatched him easily. At this point, it was only the blunderbuss-toting Watcher and me. I ran up there, dodged his gun, and smacked him good. He went down easily. Amazingly, all three went down easily because they are the only bosses so far to not have HUGE POOLS OF HEALTH. Got another Chalice for beating them too! But that'll have to wait, because it's on to Layer 3 and whatever boss might lay beyond. 

How do you like dem apples you stupid dead guy?

    Thanks again for reading these words that I've written. It really means a lot that even a handful of people read all this nerdy shit and really enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy, hey, that's perfectly fine too. I will take any and all constructive criticism. 

    Until next time, then...

(something really seems to be lacking in this post. Hey, wait a sec...)

*by this week, I mean last Friday through Monday night.