Tag: boss fights | A Banana Peeled

I am firmly in the end game so I’ll be talking about end game bosses, questlines, and such. Therefore, consider everything I’m about to say to be some kind of spoiler and be forewarned.

We need to talk about Miquella’s Haligtree, an area that is the most miserable I’ve been in for any From game. Including DLCs. Blighttown is a cakewalk in comparison. even the Ringed City, which made me cry the first time I traversed it, would be a welcome respite from the hellhole that is Miquella’s Haligtree.

Let’s first talk about the area. It’s hard to get to in the first place. You need two halves of a medallion, and one of those halves include a mini questline in and of itself. Which, fine. I don’t actually have a problem with that because that’s FromSoft. It’s one of their quirks to have optional areas that are really easy to miss and really hard to find. There are some like the Great Hollow of Dark Souls that you find by hitting two illusory walls. When you go down it, you reach Ash Lake–a really serene and surreal area.

Then there are areas like Archdragon Peak in Dark Souls III that you need a gesture found in another completely optional place to be taken to another place where you use the gesture. It then transports you to Archdragon Peak. Did I find that on my own? Hell, no! Ash Lake is more of a set piece to wander through and marvel, whereas Archdragon Peak is an actual level with the hardest boss in the vanilla game.

Miquella’s Haligtree is hard to find. And, it’s hard to get to the first checkpoint because there is a hard-as-nails knight guarding it. Millicent, an NPC is also there, and I was worried that she could die if I tried to kill the knight in her vicinity. Not that it mattered because that knight one-shot me. Have I mentioned how much I love scrub enemies who can one-shot me? I know my vigor was low at that point (I’m at 30, which is laughable), but still.

At one point, there is a room in which there are two soldiers on ballistae, two hard-as-nails knights, some foot soldiers, and a Minor Erdtree. Yes, a field boss. They are just common enemies in this area. Which, fine for the ones you can run past and don’t have to deal with, but this one was in the thick of things. There is simply no way to kill all the enemies, so I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying frantically to find where I was supposed to go. The killer? You don’t actually even need to go into that room.

Ed. Note: This whole post is basically one major spoiler so be forewarned.

halfway there! — His sword is definitely bigger than mine.

Hello. The last we spoke, I was facing Owl (Father) at the end of my second trip to the Hirata Estate. I had attempted to fight him five or six times and was not feeling it at all. I was contemplating skipping him, but I knew it would eat my craw (a combination of eat at me and stick in my craw) and make me think less of myself. I also knew that had he come earlier in the game, I would have tried for at least an hour or two before starting to complain. My patience is razor thin at this point, and it’s hard to make myself do the grind.

I took a deep breath and jumped in. He wrecked my shit casually a dozen times before I even felt I had even a glimmer of a handle on him. It’s strange, though, because I didn’t think he was as hard as, say, Genichiro (the boss who took me literal days to beat), but I think that’s because I beat the first version of him fairly easily. This version, however was Owl in his prime, and he was a nightmare for me. I tried the cheese from the video I had watched, but my problem with the cheese was that there was one move Father did that fucked me up every time. It’s when he threw his shuriken then raised his sword high to his left and held it. The cheese is to move forward and dodge twice, but instead, I pressed down LB (block) while dodging, which didn’t do jack or shit. Father would slice through me and because it was a counter-attack, decimate my health bar to a sliver. Then, he would follow up with another attack that would kill me. Every. Goddamn. Time. If I managed to block the attack, the followup would still devastate me.

After an hour, I knew it was the wrong way to counter that attack, but every goddamn time, even as I was telling my brain not to press LB, I would press it. At that point, it was just better for me to try to avoid that attack altogether. This is one of my issues with the bosses in Sekiro–the best way to fight several of them is to bait out one or two of the attacks and run away from the rest. It’s a viable strategy, but it doesn’t really feel great while doing it. Also, with Owl (Father) at least for me, I wasn’t able to bait out the attack I wanted on a reliable basis.

It seemed I had to fight this boss on his own merits, which, as I wrote before, I did not want to do at this time. However, my pride demanded it of me, so I girded my loin and hopped into the fray. I have written before about the five stages of beating a boss before (near the end of this post), and I’ll expand on them a bit here. The first stage is incredulity and fear, somewhat akin to denial. “I have to fight this thing/guy/gal? No. No. No. No way I’m going to beat this boss!” I have literally walked away from a boss arena and refused to deal with it for some time (if I had other things I could do) because I was just not ready. I did it with Genichiro, and I avoided him for hours. The second stage is resignation. “Welp. I guess I have to do this. Alrighty then.” Third stage is anger and rage. This stage can last quite some time. I distinctly remember with Owl (Father) during this stage, I was cursing him, his mother, his father, and everyone else in his lineage. I cursed out FromSoft and Miyazaki, and everyone involved in the game. I was an angry, angry, ANGRY gamergrrl during a large portion of this fight, let me tell you. Fourth stage is having a glimmer of hope. That moment when you realize that maybe, just maybe, you can beat this thing/guy/gal. It can be one block you’d never gotten off before. Or you get ’em to their second phase (which, by the way, was a lie for Genichiro as he had three phases. Asshole). Or you just see things in a way you hadn’t before. The final stage is the ‘I finally beat this fucking boss’ phase, which is the best phase of all.

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