Bosses Experience

The Nameless King is a two-phase boss fight, which basically means that the fight will change at a certain point. For Nameless King, the second phase starts after the King of the Storm is defeated. If this is a little confusing, let me explain. When a players enters the boss arena, the name that appears is King of the Storm, but the boss that appears is the Nameless King riding on a dragon/ bird thing. Now, I am not sure if the bird is the King of the Storm, or the Nameless King and the bird are the King of the Storm, but either way, most people just call the entire boss fight the "Nameless King boss fight."

The first thing I remember about the Nameless King boss fight isn't the fight itself, but what happened before I even entered the fight. To activate the boss the I needed to ring a bell. The bell triggered a cutscene that shows storm clouds rolling in. When the cutscene finished, the environment got darker, rain started falling, and storm clouds appeared in front of the me. To be clear, the storm clouds weren't just up in the sky, but on the ground as well. To get to the boss area, the player must walk across the clouds. Yes, WALK ACROSS CLOUDS. Unfortunately, the player has to fight on clouds too. The fight against the Nameless King is one of the hardest in the game, and that's without considering the clouds. The cloud made fighting him harder because they made distance harder to gauge. I could not tell how far I was from him the first couple of times I fought him. Maybe it was just me, or maybe it was caused by something else, but I am fairly certain that fighting on the clouds made judging distance more difficult then it needed to be.

Anyway, what about the fight itself? I am glad you asked, and if you didn't ... well I'll tell you anyway. I don't remember everything of course, but I will tell you what I do. Let's start with the first phase of the fight against the King of the Storm. One coolest part of the fight is when the Storm circles around the player and throws a lightning bolt. The cool part isn't the lightning, but dodging the lightning. In DS3 the player can lock their view onto an opponent to keep them in sight, so when the Storm flies around the player, the player's view will angle up making the action of dodging the bolt look cool, at least to me. There are some attacks on the other hand that are annoying to dodge. Sometimes Storm will fly up and hover there while it breaths fire directly downwards. This is annoying because more often than not, he will go out of sight, so I can't tell if he is just moving away from me or doing this attack. Also, this attack has a big AOE (area of effect), so I have to start running ASAP, or I will get hit by it. And is does a decent amount of damage. So overall, this attack is BS, but it is avoidable, so it's not total BS. The King of the Storm is a difficult enemy to say the least, but the Nameless King is worse.

When I first defeated the King of the Storm, I was happy that I finally defeated a boss that I had a decently difficult time defeating, until the cutscene started. In my experience, if a cutscene starts in a game like this, it almost always means that something unfortunate is about to happen, and unfortunately, I was right. The Nameless King showed up and killed me fairly quickly. So, why did I die to Nameless so quickly? Is it because he has some difficult attacks? Well, yes, but also because I just finished fighting the Storm and as a consequence, lost a good portion of my health. But hold on, it gets worse. If I don't defeat Nameless, I have to start all over. Which, as you may have guessed, means that I have to fight the Storm again just I have a shot at Nameless again. Now, I know what you may be thinking, "at least you can beat the Storm." I thought that too until I died to him two more times. And yes, I died to Nameless very quickly after beating Storm. As if fighting Storm over and over again wasn't bad enough, Nameless was no pushover either. In fact, I would say that Nameless is harder than Storm, which is saying something because I struggled with Storm. Anyway, I quit the game shortly after, but only for a few days. Once I was back in the game, I was ready to beat the boss ... bosses? Whatever, my point is that I was wrong. I had forgotten how to fight the boss during the break and die several more times. On the bright side, it didn't take me too long to get back into the swing of the game. After many more deaths, I finally beat the Nameless King with barely any heath left ... and then a cutscene started. But luckily for me, this was one of those cutscene that did not end with me dying. Instead, it was there just to signify the end of the fight. After fighting the Nameless King myself, I finally understood why people consider him to be one of the most difficult bosses in DS3, but unfortunately for me, he was not the most difficult.

I realize that I may have gone on a bit of a ramble when I talked about the Nameless King, so I will try to make this shorter. I may fail, but I will try. The lead up to this fight is nothing special, at least compared to Nameless. One thing to note is that the fight doesn't start immediately after entering the boss arena like with most boss fights. A player must go to the end of the arena where a cutscene will happen, and the fight will start after it's finished. During the cutscene Friede enters the arena from the same direction that the player does, so I turned around, ran at her, and started at her with my sword. After getting serval hits on her, which did a good amount of damage, I thought "well this won't be too difficult." I would soon regret these words. After about a few minutes of fighting she jumped back, did some fancy move, and then disappeared. She had gone invisible. After several seconds she reappeared behind me and hit me with her big scythe. I was more carful after that fight. Oh, did I mention that I died because of that attack. Anyway, eventually, I got lucky, and when she did went invisible, I was close enough to see her jump over me. Thanks to that, I knew that she was behind me. I still died, but I learned one important thing. If I am close enough to her, I can still see her. Armed with this new information, I went back into the fight with a new sense of confidence. Of course, this is a Dark Souls game, so I inevitably died again, but I learned something new again. Friede has a an attack that does multiple slashes in quick succession. This attack can be difficult to dodge from close up. So, what I learned was that I need to be close enough to her to see her when she goes invisible, but also be far enough away from her to avoid this attack. suffice it to say, it was a difficult balance to maintain. Once I adjusted to this strategy, I finally defeated Friede. However, she would not be one of the hardest bosses I have fought if this is where it ended.

Once Friede was defeated a cutscene started and we all know what that means. That's right, something unfortunate was about to happen. I supposed I should have mentioned this sooner, but I will just mention is now. There is another person is the boss arena. He is at the end of the arena, and he was part of the first cutscene that I mentioned needed to play for the fight to start. I am sure you can guess why I am bringing him up. Yep, he is the second boss I have to fight, but wait, it gets worse. When I say he is the second boss I don't just mean that he is the second phase, but that he is the second boss of the second phase, and can you guess who the first boss is? If you can see the second image for this boss then you know that it's Friede, and if you can't ... well now you know. As difficult as it sounds, the second phase is actually not that bad. Friede still goes invisible, but instead of attacking, she reappears somewhere else in the arena, and starts healing. Her healing ability doesn't heal their health by a large amount, and she can be easily interrupted by hitting her, which sounds a little wrong, but that's the game. I should mention that both bosses share one health pool or bar. Since they share the same health bar, I find that it's easier to focus on attacking the other boss. I guess I never mentioned the other boss's name, sorry other boss. His name is Father Ariandel, and he seems to take more damage than Friede, so he is the one I prefer to beat, which also sounds wrong. His attacks are also generally slower, so he is easier to dodge. So, overall, this second phase is relatively easy. In fact, I think I beat the second phase on my first try. To be honest, after defeating the second phase with relative ease, I was a little disappointed. But as they say, never say that something was easy because it will inevitably come back to bite you, and bite me it did.

After phase two, there is no cutscene, but a disembodied voice, who I assume is Ariandel, starts talking. After he is done, Friede comes back to life and is now called Blackflame Friede, and as you can probably guess, she now wields blackflames. She can still go invisible, but instead of healing or attacking with her scythe, she will cover parts of the floor in ice that eventually explode all while staying invisible. For clarity, the ice doesn't have a fiery explosion, it has an icy explosion. Ok, that likely did not make much sense, but just go with it. This ability is especially annoying because she moves quickly after doing an attack, so it's hard to catch a glimpse of her, much less catch her. She still has her trademark quick attacks, but she now has an attack that does so much damage that it can kill me in one shot, which is ridiculous. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but similarly to the Nameless King Boss fight, she gets all of her health back at the beginning of each phase. Oh, and this boss fight is usually just called the Sister Friede or just Friede boss fight, despite Father Ariandel being in it. I die to this third phase, and had to start all over, but worse still, it that on my successive attempts, I died to her first and second phases multiple times. I don't really know how to end this, so I am just going to say that I eventually killed the boss, felt relieved, and then slept for a week.