Summary
- Some early Soulslike bosses, like Father Gascoigne, set an almost insurmountable difficulty bar right from the start.
- The Unstable Lancer in Steelrising proves to be a daunting challenge due to jolty movements and limited resources for new players.
- The Tree Sentinel in Elden Ring, despite being optional, attracts many players to an early and painful fight due to lack of direction.
Soulslike is one of the most popular game genres out there, providing a significantly challenging experience for players to conquer, which is almost always driven by boss fights. Some games lay off the gas and ease players into the worlds with simpler fights, while others throw them straight in the deep end with a brutally difficult fight that guarantees more than a few deaths.
The Hardest Boss Fights In Soulslikes, Ranked
FromSoftware's Demon's Souls & Dark Souls spawned a subgenre known for grueling encounters. Which are the most difficult bosses in Soulslikes?
But sometimes, that difficulty and frustration can actually be a breaking point, forcing players to close and even uninstall the game with no desire to progress further. Whether it's an impossible boss located near the end of the game, or one right at the start, there are plenty of bosses that have turned players away, some never to return again.
8 Father Gascoigne
An Insane Challenge So Early On
Bloodborne
- Released
- March 24, 2015
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Violence
- Developer(s)
- From Software
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 4
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
Father Gascoigne is the first main boss in Bloodborne and also happens to be one of the hardest overall. Many players will have started their journey into Yharnam and struggled through the early stages, maybe even taking on the Cleric Beast along the way, but nothing prepares players more than the insane challenge that awaits across the bridge.
He's fast, aggressive, and barely gives the player any windows to recover, with the second phase only making all those problems worse. On top of this, the blood vials are limited and don't replenish automatically, so for new players who don't have a healthy supply, they will be forced to go farming to have a chance against him. He is a major barrier in a game that is otherwise full of flawless bosses, many of which will never be seen by some.
7 Unstable Lancer
Stuttery Moves And Robotic Animations
Steelrising
- Released
- September 8, 2022
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ due to Blood, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Spiders
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG
- Platform(s)
- PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
- OpenCritic Rating
- Fair
Steelrising is a decent soulslike that does a lot of things right and experiments in other directions as well. One of the most decisive aspects of the game is how enemies move and attack in a more jolty and unpredictable manner that is very different from any other game in the genre. This is shown off right from the start with the Unstable Lancer, the first main boss, and arguably one of the most difficult.
7 Best Soulslike Games That Are Mostly Boss Fights
These titles cut right to the heart of the soulslike experience - the boss fights.
Because players have just started out and they don't have that many heals or levels, their overall power is pretty low. A high-health boss with very hard-to-learn patterns - it makes sense why so many players gave up so early. Once the movements are understood, the rest of the game is a complete breeze, but that initial hurdle is often too high to clear.
6 Tree Sentinel
Optional, Yet Everyone Seems To Fight It
Elden Ring
- Released
- February 25, 2022
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- From Software
- Platform(s)
- PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
The Tree Sentinel is a very interesting boss, but not because it's super hard or unique, but because of how players approach it in different ways. After finishing the tutorial area, it is the first enemy that players lay their eyes on, and despite having a huge open-world to explore right in front of them, many chose to charge head-on with no preparation over and over again.
Elden Ring doesn't give players any real direction, as the game expects that players will want to explore just with their own will to see the world, and at no point does the game force them to fight the Tree Sentinel. Yet, like a moth to a flame, so many players chose the painful route of fighting it early rather than returning later, resulting in more than a few broken controllers and choice words in their reviews.
5 Oggdo Bogdo
Hitboxes And Damage That Just Don't Make Sense
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
- Released
- November 15, 2019
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- T for Teen: Mild Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Respawn Entertainment
- Platform(s)
- PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, PC, Stadia
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
Oggdo Bogdo is by no means a complicated or very in-depth boss fight. If anything, it is one of the simpler encounters that players can find in Fallen Order, but its location in the game is what made so many players quit due to their frustration.
8 Most Satisfying Soulslike Bosses To Beat, Ranked
Overcoming these challenging Soulslike foes also brings a palpable sense of accomplishment.
Players can find the fleshy beast in a cave very early into the playthrough, but regardless of the difficulty, the damage is always high, and the attacks always seem to land. He has very large hitboxes on all of his attacks, and with no extra ways of helping other than returning later, many players switched the game off and left it at that.
4 Capra Demon
Cramped And Too Much To Handle At Once
Dark Souls Remastered
- Released
- May 23, 2018
WHERE TO PLAY
The Capra Demon is the perfect example of a gank fight gone wrong. In a game with iconic battles like Ornstein and Smough, it is a shame that many players will have never gotten that far, thanks to this annoying and claustrophobic encounter that serves more as a camera puzzle than an actual boss.
The boss arena is so small and laid out in a peculiar way that it gives players little breathing room to recover or even dodge. This, combined with the extra dogs staggering the player over and over, makes it easy to see why this boss was the deciding factor for whether players should continue or not.
3 Chained Ogre
Removing All The Fundamentals
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
- Released
- March 22, 2019
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Violence
- Developer(s)
- From Software
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
Sekiro is not exactly a walk in the park, and it is easily one of the hardest games in the genre. A lot of that difficulty comes down to the tight parry windows and aggressive attacks, but the Chained Ogre is frustrating for many different reasons and is positioned right at the start of the game.
For one, players were taught to parry and deflect the majority of the incoming attacks, but the Ogre has many that either cannot be parried or have tiny windows with no margin for error. On top of this, the area for the fight is right next to a cliff, which the boss has a habit of tossing players off of multiple times in a fight, ensuring maximum frustration and an end to many people's playthroughs.
2 Lud And Zallen, The King's Pets
A Horrible Duo Boss With The Worst Run-Back In History
Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin
- Released
- April 2, 2015
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- T For Teen Due To Blood and Gore, Game Experience May Change During Online Play, Mild Language, Partial Nudity, Violence
- Developer(s)
- FromSoftware
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG
- Platform(s)
- PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
Dark Souls 2 is one of the few games in the FromSoftware catalog that has a large amount of mixed perceptions surrounding it. Some love it, some despise it, but there is not a single human on the planet who can say that Lud and Zallen are a good boss fight, and many players will never have seen it despite having played through the entire game.
The fight itself is frustrating enough on its own, being a gank fight against two pretty tough foes, but the main reason that so many people will have erased the game from their memory, is the ludicrous run-back that sees players sprinting across an icy landscape for several minutes, with no way of seeing half the time, that is also covered in enemies that spawn out of nowhere and never give up.
1 Malenia, Blade Of Miquella
Wait, There's A Second Phase?
Elden Ring
- Released
- February 25, 2022
WHERE TO PLAY
There are plenty of bosses in Elden Ring that could be considered annoying or challenging, but there is also a long list of fights that are exceptionally enjoyable and high-quality. However, among all of them, there is no boss that has caused anywhere near as much bloodshed, pain, tears, and anger as Malenia.
All the way at the edge of the map, after nearly 100 hours of playing, players are greeted with a disgustingly brutal fight that almost always takes dozens, if not hundreds, of attempts to take down. Her presence in the game spawned several players whose sole goal was to help others defeat her, because with no guides and no one to explain her moveset, it is virtually impossible to figure out how to avoid certain moves and how to make it through the whole fight alive.
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