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I FORGOT TO MENTION
Feb. 2nd, 2026 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rydra_wongArtorias is a DLC boss.
Beating the final boss of Dark Souls puts you straight into New Game Plus, so you need to do the DLC first, but yeah. I have in fact completed the base game up until you enter the last area. And there is a general consensus that the final boss is not the hardest in the game.
The DLC bosses are all substantially harder than the base game ones, and I have two more left, so it remains to be seen whether I can beat them, but at this point the odds look decent that I will at least be able to finish the base game.
I would like to remind you all that my initial goal was to see if I could beat the tutorial.
Beating the final boss of Dark Souls puts you straight into New Game Plus, so you need to do the DLC first, but yeah. I have in fact completed the base game up until you enter the last area. And there is a general consensus that the final boss is not the hardest in the game.
The DLC bosses are all substantially harder than the base game ones, and I have two more left, so it remains to be seen whether I can beat them, but at this point the odds look decent that I will at least be able to finish the base game.
I would like to remind you all that my initial goal was to see if I could beat the tutorial.
Yesterday I beat ARTORIAS
Jan. 29th, 2026 11:13 amrydra_wongAnd I am still buzzing and I am so so so proud of myself and I need to talk about it and I only know two people who know what it means.
If anyone has 80 seconds, I rec watching Symbalily's first encounter with Artorias the Abysswalker:
Like O&S, this is one of the most iconic fights in the entire Dark Souls series. But I would say it's as much of a difficulty spike again relative to them as they are to the game before them.
Context: Artorias is the great legendary hero you've been hearing about all through the base game. But now he's been defeated by the Abyss, with his left arm shattered (his sword arm, so he's fighting you by swinging a sword with his off hand) and his mind mostly gone.
(There is meta to be meta-ed about FromSoft's long line of incredibly badass disabled characters; I don't know if it's necessarily #unproblematic #goodrepresentation, given that so many of them are trying to kill you and it's often being used to evoke ruin and tragedy, but it's not nothing either. Adaptive king Artorias.)
The way he howls and shakes reminds me of nothing so much as the Tumblr story about the rabid raccoon. It's eerie and wrong and awful.
He is incredibly aggressive and incredibly fast, and if you start chipping his health down he draws on the Abyss to power himself up further in a way that can rapidly make his hits unblockable (at least for most builds), so you can only try, desperately, to dodge. And after one or two power-ups, he can and will one-hit kill you, and then do front flips on your corpse.
I think I had to level my brain up to do this fight. Holy shit.
I have been IMMERSED over the last few days, learning his patterns and rhythms, and now I feel weirdly close to Artorias and emotional about it. More than any of the other bosses so far, Artorias feels like fighting a person. I gave his soul to an old friend of his to take care of. Sleep well, dude.
If anyone has 80 seconds, I rec watching Symbalily's first encounter with Artorias the Abysswalker:
Like O&S, this is one of the most iconic fights in the entire Dark Souls series. But I would say it's as much of a difficulty spike again relative to them as they are to the game before them.
Context: Artorias is the great legendary hero you've been hearing about all through the base game. But now he's been defeated by the Abyss, with his left arm shattered (his sword arm, so he's fighting you by swinging a sword with his off hand) and his mind mostly gone.
(There is meta to be meta-ed about FromSoft's long line of incredibly badass disabled characters; I don't know if it's necessarily #unproblematic #goodrepresentation, given that so many of them are trying to kill you and it's often being used to evoke ruin and tragedy, but it's not nothing either. Adaptive king Artorias.)
The way he howls and shakes reminds me of nothing so much as the Tumblr story about the rabid raccoon. It's eerie and wrong and awful.
He is incredibly aggressive and incredibly fast, and if you start chipping his health down he draws on the Abyss to power himself up further in a way that can rapidly make his hits unblockable (at least for most builds), so you can only try, desperately, to dodge. And after one or two power-ups, he can and will one-hit kill you, and then do front flips on your corpse.
I think I had to level my brain up to do this fight. Holy shit.
I have been IMMERSED over the last few days, learning his patterns and rhythms, and now I feel weirdly close to Artorias and emotional about it. More than any of the other bosses so far, Artorias feels like fighting a person. I gave his soul to an old friend of his to take care of. Sleep well, dude.