There’s no hesitation to fight the guy: it’s just you two on the edge of existence, swinging swords.

There are no chiropractors at the end of the world. Imagine starting up a round of Street Fighter 2, only to come up against a purple abyssal dragon.

Studying monstrous bosses can be fun and might eventually give way to a well-designed fight beneath a pile of your dead bodies ( Ludwig from Bloodborne comes to mind), it’s just the initial buffer stage of parsing what’s in front of you that can feel unfair. The process of learning the behavior and capabilities of a given monster piles on the trial and error necessary to understand them. When locking on, the camera either centers on their mass and pulls you under their legs, where other limbs crowd the foreground and make precision attacks and evades nearly impossible. Size is always impressive, but strange anatomies make big bosses harder to track, especially once they start moving and swinging and shooting lasers out of some hidden hole. Big usually implies a beastly form with knotty limbs and billowing wings. The bigger a Dark Souls boss, the more frustrating they are to fight, generally.

Dragon boss ds3 ringed city