Algorithm sending a rare gem this way, hard to find a video with this few views yet with a high quality presentation and at the same time enjoyable. Great work. One of those videos that keeps you immersed the whole time, and overall interesting data here.
@@YurikHunt thank you very much! I always like making these videos as I was genuinely curious of the answer and couldn’t find anyone else who made a video like it. And data can be quite dry so needs decent presentation. Thanks again :)
@@kanosig Thanks! I appreciate it! Just know that presenting Excel slides is boring, so needs more visual flair to keep people watching nearly an hour of Dry Data Analysis!
I died to pinwheel. Granted, it was early game on my first ever souls game playthrough, and I fought it in exactly the most difficult way you can, but still.
I died to pinwheel once. In my defence, I was extremely blazed; it was NG+5, and I was speedrunning at that point. I got complacent and let too many clones spawn. Turns out he's a reasonable challenge after a certain amount spawn.
@@Gringoo777 I fought melania, (not handicapped into a challenge run) using everything at my disposal, and she is NOT the hardest boss LMAO. She isn't even worse than demon of hatred
I don’t understand that, I’d get instantly rushed by the rats and toxified and killed instantly, I’d have time to take out 1 rat with a bow but by that point the rest of the rats would kill me instantly and the boss would be on top of me
@@Nomad-bl4yw It's not the big one that kills you, it's the little rats. Usually. If you can't kill them at range before they reach you, and your weapon of choice isn't able to sweep through them all before the big boy shows up, you're in trouble.
It terrifies me. The little rats are annoying but usually I try to snipe 2-3 out of 4 with bows from distance, sometimes I fail. If it wasn't for them, it would be easier. p.s. And I still didn't need to die 68 times. At worst 10.
Never really posed much of a challenge to me tbf, was always shocked when looking at the lists how high Fume ranked. But is what it is, thats why Data is more interesting to me!
Games are so cool as an interactive medium. Miyazaki and his team have continually pushed the idea of difficulty and hostile game environments to push players to better themselves, and collaborate with each other. It can be argued that each entry in the series has continually pushed towards or deviated from this concept, as they iterate on what works, and refine what doesn't. All that being said, the discussion around difficulty in the games is cancerous and gatekeepy and generally not very productive, I think a lot of players miss out on WHY something is hard and only want surface level discussions on big numbers and fast attacks. The video I just watched is a direct refutation of that. This video is art, man. I love anybody that's able to break down some meaningless numbers into careful and insightful takeaways of the design and intent of the original work. The care and dedication put into this breakdown is astounding. Setting aside FromSoft games, I really want to express my appreciation for small content creators with extreme amounts of passion for niche hobbies like these. I don't care what you do or if you ever put out a video again, you've gained a lifelong fan. I normally never comment, but this video, and reading all your interactions with different types of comments whether they be data nerds, diehard From fans (SotE when??) or just cool people, makes me feel something warm and fuzzy. It makes me feel like I need to reach out and let you know I cared just as much as you did about this subject. Thanks, man.
@@johnathandanger7315 absolutely. Some of my friends have very strong opinions on the ease of the Soulslikes. The games make me immersed in a distinct set of worlds, with minimal dialogue and well crafted game mechanics, truly a work of art. The sense of accomplishment is always a big draw for the series, but it is much more than that and having more people play never hurts! If you enjoy playing a certain way, more power too you, if the design is strong enough people will keep coming back to it! Much appreciated good sir! I will always post videos, I love making! I work full time and made a game before which is why they aren’t as quick, but I will always continue making the videos as long as they are good quality and people like them!
One thing with dark souls 2 is that the devs actually released some stats relating to boss difficulty, in particular, the fume knight which had a 93% death rate. I think this is what causes most people to think its the hardest boss in the game.
Fume Knight was quite tough but 90% of my deaths to it were from one attack that killed me and I couldn't figure out how to dodge through reliably. A bit like Malenia really...
@@unbearable505 It was just some sweep attack he does with his flaming sword that I flubbed constantly until one day after playing elden ring for a few months I went back and 2-shot him.
@@562.anthony2 Sir Alonne was eating me alive a few years ago. You can't circle strafe him like Fume Knight and he swings waaay faster with almost identical reach (as in, the length of a tennis court). He almost never uses slow heavy attacks.
I think as an entire playerbase we've just gotten better, and having the internet helps a bunch. When I got demon souls on ps3 we had no internet and trying to figure it out was the hardest game I played at the time.
I genuinely was worried for his mental health when I watched it. But it's an odd feeling watching someone throw themselves at a wall over and over again and eventually break the wall... Feels like madness most of the time.
@@jefferygrandor7852 Ah? I've never thought much about that, since I like making videos for fun. Ads always annoy me when watching videos. Maybe I should check the settings more in the future!
@@OrangeJuiceJaz fun fact, youtube will always put ads on your video anyways at the start and end, so it really doesn’t hurt to just put an ad or two in their just to ensure other people get to actually see the video
@@jefferygrandor7852 Does it really? Thats a crying shame. Some adverts can be pretty gross, so Id rather do without, but thats a shame TH-cam does that, ruins the user experience. I never understood more than just upload video and put nice thumbnail in!
Ishin and Genichiro is for me the best boss the Fromsoft ever made, they are really technical and no gimmick, extremely fair while still challenging, and little to no cheesing.
My first run experience with Sekiro is really interesting in comparison with most others as I finished those two bosses in an unusually short amount of time - about 5 attempts each - while others, most notably Corrupted Monk and Owl Father, were much more difficult. I’ve always found this an extremely interesting and amusing outlier. I’m also using your comment as an excuse to call myself a technical genius and blame any hardships on the game rather than a lack of skill.
I agree they are fantastic bosses. Sekiro as whole just had a wacky difficulty curve. I died about 3x more to chained ogre than ishin. Once you learn how to deflect in sekiro the game becomes a cake walk. And Ishin is the perfect boss to show you that you've learned how to play the game
@@tylerbrown2899 agreed. That was one of the parts that took a while in editing. I’ve given enough data presentations at work that I know you need to keep attention and not repeat points etc. I am so glad it paid off!
This was an awesome video to watch. With how many late game bosses are hyped up as the hardest of all time, it’s fun to look back on bosses like the Bell Gargoyles, Genichiro, and Abyss Watchers and reminisce on just how much we struggled with them the first time. Makes past me who died to the gargoyles 31 times feel a lot better, and gives clarity to the accomplishment. Great vid. Also RIP to the guy who died over 60 times to Royal Rat.
I mean thats the case really isnt it? Ornstein and Smough were the halfway point of Dark Souls 1. These gates early on that teach the player important things are difficult as well! I struggled immensely with Bellend Gargoyles and Genichiro... I am not afraid to admit it!
I played ds1 for the first time after playing ds3, ds2, elden ring, etc and it was a cake walk for me. I could see it being unforgiving for a first timer though. Anyone with some patience and souls like experience could do pretty well from my observation. Everything was really slow, and ornstein + smough was simple as well. It's evident people got better since ds1
@@thetoyodacar2264 Yep 100%. DS1 was my first and my friend refused to give me tips and I don't like using guides, so I had a horrid build with like 40 resistance because my mate thought it would be funny to make me level that instead of strength. But going back to it now feels so slow. Amazing how these games train a sort of muscle.
@@kurenian I started with ds3, my first wall was probably the abyss watchers. I did also struggle on ludex gundyr for at least an hour. If you mean my first wall in ds1 then I can't really say I had one. I realize now that ds2 probably over-prepared me for the slower, jankier gameplay. First wall in ds2 was the tripple gank sentinel boss in lost bastille, got me used to dealing with ganks in shitty situations (the entirety of ds2)
Oh gosh. Yeah I am sure it will. I won't touch that with a barge pole, I just like the game and looking at the data. Give it 2 months and people will be calling for my Public execution
honestly one of the funniest things ive seen is someone say that the hardest from soft game is the one you started with. Because really I see these games as like a rollercoaster where if you dont understand the mechanics and the whole gameplay of wait, dodge, hit, repeat youll have a miserable time, but then all of sudden it clicks where you start recognizing that the bosses and enemies have patterns and start to figure out what can be punished. Whats even weirder is that malenia I got really luck with my dodged at time and beat her on my maybe 7th try, but for some reason took me 2 consecutive mind numbing days to beat commander niall in the one snow fortress. I have no clue why but that boss just couldnt click with me and I genuinley despise him lol. So like elden ring was my first one and probably took me maybe a month to beat, and then I kept replaying it making new characters and such to the point where I think ive beaten it 8 times now, and then when I went to try out the other fromsoftware games, there werent any sorta of walls that I can think of, maybe orphan of kos I think it took me 2 hours to beat him, but thats a far cry to when i first started and would spend a whole day just on one regular boss in elden ring. I genuinley consider the fromsoft games to be one of a kind and am kinda sad now that Ive played them all lol. As im writing this comment my mind just blanked out consort radahn and you know yeah fuck him that fight was misserable to learn, one of those moments where I didnt pop off or get excited when I beat him I just sorta sat there and stared at my screen.
I'm the exact opposite lmao, malenia skewered me for a good two days while I beat niall on my second try. I decided to play the whole game without using summons so I could get the hardcore gamer experience and was genuinely disappointed by niall, but I guess some people see him as the most annoying prick in the entire game
Niall in the snow is hard if you're using a weapon that can't stun lock his knights, my first time fighting him might've been with a katana and it was miserable, kept dying to the dual wielding knight but then fight him with a collossal weapon and it's easy mode cause you can just stun lock that knight into an early grave. BTW if Elden Ring is hard, just use a collosal weapon, didn't realize how OP those weapons are until recently. Aside from some main bosses, most enemies in the game will react to your hits, that's a far cry from just using a katana or straight sword. It's crazy how people say bleed / status effects are OP, if those didn't exist, there'd be no need to ever use a small fast weapon.
I think one thing worth noting with certain Elden Ring bosses (Mogh, Tree Sentinel) is that people die to them a lot since they fight them early. For example, Tree Sentinel isn't meant to be fought immediately, but a lot of people will fight him and brute force him, resulting in a lot of deaths. This could also explain Mogh's spike in deaths - since there is a questline, which a lot of people do, which allows you to fight Mogh early, Mogh might be getting more deaths because of it. seeing my friends play elden ring, these two things happened to them - one of my friends died a ton to tree sentinel, and another one got to Mogh early and got destroyed by him
Fantastic video. Just want to give a huge "thank you" for sitting through so many runs and crunching the numbers on them. Pretty crazy to think so many hours of hardwork can be condensed in about 45 minutes. Would be interesting to see if more contributors could add runs (or possibly even mods that count all of the data for you) to see what the numbers look like across hundreds of thousands of players.
@@garlicbreadgod thank you so much! 100% enjoyed it and it was well worth doing! If I expand the community enough that I can get other peoples unbiased runs then that would really benefit the data analysis!
orphan of kos took me 2/3 hours of consecutive deaths to finally get used to him. when i beat him it was the biggest high i felt in all my years of gaming.
I felt the exact same with ornstein and smough (my first souls game), orphan, isshin and malenia. The 4 hardest bosses I ever fought in any game, all of them took me 3-4 hours and a lot of sweat.
100% if I get more resources, 100 objective runs on each game. So would be 700 different people, all recorded, all data analysed. This would give a good sample size to accurately reflect the data. Wouldn't get weird spikes like Royal Rat Authority.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Definitely. Royal Rat Authority is one point, but I would looooove to know how much people have tried to kill that early tree sentinel in ER when they saw it for the first time. I know I have realized it was for a later time (not my first From Soft) but I still went back to it like once or twice before deciding it was the moment and I was finally at a good level for it. So I still died a little to it and it would still count towards its stats. Stuff like this. Small interactions might just show up buy crunching all the numbers.
@@Jbn0s0rus yeah completely. I certainly did try to beat it even though I knew before hand it acts as a deterrent. Reminded me of the Cyclopses from DS2. I’d love to know the most discovered and missed areas as well. Like without a guide who finds Malenia or Placidusax!
Should've mentioned that since the data comes from streamers/youtubers, it usually won't be a true blind playthrough because their chat/community will give them hints. Like going for midir's head instead of the body, or finding good gear/build in elden ring, not saying its impossible to figure out in a blind playthrough but its part of the reason why people's opinions about the games' difficulty are split.
You're completely right. This was a big problem I had with Bloodborne. There was about 3 runs I watched about 10 hours of before I realised that they weren't doing blind as they were grabbing all the secrets and all boss weaknesses without many deaths... It is annoying. Unfortunately I wish I had 100s of runs! Thank you for watching though! I will have to consider where I get data more in the future!
2:24 I hope Sony sees this fxcking FACT right here! The Demon Souls Remake brought them the majority of the sales! Do they think they won’t make much with a Bloodborne Remake/Remaster ??? Or is it simply about them not having the time to have teams work on that project over other future IPs ??
Yeah for sure. I have seen interviews with Miyazaki specifically on Bloodborne recently. He acknowledges it, wants it but the decision seems to be out of From's hands... so its Sony just shitting the bed.
Thank you so much! haha if it only had 5 views and those 5 people liked it thats all I really want! I just know I won't be able to resist an equally long endeavour in the future... Pokemon is calling my name like the green goblin mask...
I might have missed if you did something similar as I was cleaning but I am curious to see deaths for Elden Ring split into two categories. One with deaths using spirit summons and one without. There is a split in the community about whether spirit summons are a core mechanic in the game and if developers expected you to use them. Depending on your belief, it creates two different difficulty curves that completely change your perception of the game. On my first play through of Elden Ring I stopped dying once I acquired the mimic tear and went on the longest personal streak of no deaths in any From game. I finally died a single time to Elden Beast and then 8 times to Malenia. In the dlc, 6/10 remembrance bosses were beaten first try for me with only the final boss and putrescent knight killing me more than once. I redid all of Elden Ring with 0 summons and while I still beat many bosses on the first try, I still died way more often with end game bosses killing me at least once despite technically having a more optimized build and better knowledge of boss behaviors. While every game has overpowered builds, Elden Ring allows you to summon for boss fights without increasing the bosses health pool! It would be so cool if From released this data!
agreed, I also think this could be useful to have, maybe in conjunction with the SOTE DLC. From what I could tell in the data, a Summon almost halved the deaths to a boss, where 2 summons make it closer to 5x less. less so in more modern games with the health scaling better. But regardless alot of people use mimic tear and hide at the back lobbing spells, so may be useful to see the difference.
I was really hoping my absolute mental block against the witch of hemwick would be more supported in data but multiple playthroughs later and I’ve still never beaten them without at LEAST 3 deaths
Speaking of Alecto: I have many hundreds of hours in Elden Ring. It's my favorite game, after all. I recently (not really, but close enough) did a run where I fought and beat all 165 bosses on one character, and I found Alecto to be the hardest, by far, not gonna lie. Obviously, some bosses like Malenia are harder, but I've "mastered" her fight, to the point where I can dodge basically all attacks fairly reliably. But Alecto just messes me up. That destined death ground stab into the AOE is probably the attack that I struggle to dodge consistently the most.
Thanks! Sleep is overrated. Yeah, problem is it is weird with consistency. I have see Shadow of the Erdtree videos with 2000+ deaths without even beating Messmer. Yet some runs have 5 deaths to Radahn at max. The Variance is so crazy.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz I got radahn on my second try first playthrough. was overleveled a bit though. also can you tell me how the "average of 3 runs" thing works? I assume most of the people uploading their runs did not upload 3 separate playthroughs
@@jamesnesran2348 You're right. So for me the true test of difficulty is always a first time blind play through, untainted with prior knowledge. I scoured TH-cam and Twitch watching lets play videos with literally 0 views where the game was their first ever Fromsoft game. So picking up Bloodborne as their first of the Soulslikes, gives them a pure experience and you can really test how tough the bosses actually are. I took 3 seperate LPer's runs to then average the results since some people are more skilled or do different builds so may give skewed results. Unfortunately, only three runs isn't enough, doesn't give a perfect sample size. If I could it would be 100 runs each or something and specifically choose people who've never played to actually record the runs in isolated (non internet guide) environments. But alas... I have only so many years on this earth to live.
40:32 was such a beautiful sink. I love these games, and while i can get sucked into the story and watch hours of lore and forget about the gameplay, looking at them through just the lense of actual gameplay shows why these games are the beat out there. Story and gameplay are equal in there own respects and amazing and will be remembered forever
Agreed, had to be put in the video somewhere, don't think ive ever seen that happen without hitting eachother. Honestly. If We didn't have VaatiVidya explain the lore I would still love the game as the combat just makes me FEEL the tension of combat. I felt bad for the Witcher 3 as it was the first game I played after Dark Souls 1 for the first time and I just couldn't enjoy the swordplay because Dark Souls tainted my perception of gameplay forevermore. But even then... Miyazaki is a genius.
As somebody new to the fromsoft community and their inside jokes, "Semon of Dong" is one of the funniest things I've ever heard with zero context whatsoever.
Dark eater midir, is still the most difficult in my eyes, because of the fact that the ringed city dlc came out 2 years after the base game, and most players were, at the very least on NG+/NG++. Which makes 90% of his moves in 2nd phase 1 shot you, so from a community standpoint, I feel that most actual players (not streamers) were facing him at a much more challenging level. (Edit) The problem with the “difficulty scaling” in most of fromsofts’ souls like games, is that the dlc boss’s are usually released 2+ years after the base game, which forces players to either run through the entire game again on a new character to not face them on a NG+ scale, or suffer through a fight that’s much tougher than it should be. It took me 3 games to learn to not go into NG+ before the dlc came out.
I also feel like his moveset is way better than average at fighting multiple opponents. Like to the point where I think not summoning probably makes him easier or at least more predictable
amazing work mate, loved the video! I personally think that "total time per boss" may be a better metric on how hard that boss is bc it takes into account both deaths and runback
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Up!. Adding some cents, it would be good to comment on the runback time which can affect this metric, although it might be difficult to distinguish and measure during gameplay samples.
@@WadeBrooks-l2c this is totally fine! Everyone is different. Some people can’t believe people die this much! But I’ve seen runs where someone was on like 2000 deaths by Renalla. It’s all fine!
Great video lol you should also do the DLC in comparison to this list. I will say, Melania is the only boss I truly struggled with in the game or DLC. It took me like 6 hours to finally beat her (and that doesn't include the 2 hours of respecs and item hunting I did after the first couple of hours). Even Consort Radahn, I beat on the second try. The difference is with him, you can literally mimic summon, and if you have "heal from afar" and a flask of Marika equiped, your mimic will heal itself and you can also just sit there and literally tank Radahn's entire moveset and stab him with a bleed spear from behind your shield. You can't really do that with Melania. Rot and healing herself makes that almost impossible, also the one shot grab that she can do. It's a very tough fight. That all said though, I absolutely can see how Consort would potentially be number one...really the best option to fight him is to just put on 100 poise armor, talismans that reduce holy damage and increase your blocking ability with shields, grab the fingerprint stone shield with a bleed spear (I used Mohg's spear), and just stand there and pound away at him with your mimic.
I love all the other data points! "What makes a fun fight difficult" and "what makes a difficult fight fun" are some of the most important things for game developers for designing bosses, along with options to balance the variety. It's not just informative, it's educational! Now I know why Midir feels overtuned even though he's apparently not that hard, and why Nameless king really feels like the quintessential hard boss. I wish you showed more details on dark souls 2 because I really wonder how Fume Knight and Nameless King compare
I agree! This is the stuff that interests me, how the data is visualised through the games design. IE Nameless King does powerful hits, which makes it hard. I do feel there is so much more to look into, If I had more time (and sanity) Id have made a 30 minute video on each game seperately to actually give each boss the care it deserves. Fume Knight needs more looking into as to why its so different in data and perception!
I still remember my first time fighting Sword Saint Isshin. I actually beat him on my first try but oh my god was it close. No gourd or pellets left, heart pounding out of my chest. It was only later on when I found out about his reputation in difficulty. When I reached him on NG+, he kicked my ass many many times and left me genuinely wondering how in the hell I beat him first try back then.
off the top of my head, i know SSI has more than 12 moves. 1) he rushes at you and the parry timing is immediately when he gets to you 2-3) he sheathes his sword, if you stay close to him he jumps towards you, swings, then does a sweeping attack. if you're far away he waits longer and then dashes in and does a cross slash 4) 3 hit combo 5) push you away into mikiri counter 6)no push away into mikiri counter 7) dragon flash (vertical wind wave attack 8) ichimonji into horizontal swipe phase 2 9) long sword and spear combo 10) spear horizontal wind wave attack 11) overhead spear slam (normally an input read from healing 12-13) jump back into gunspam , has 2 follow ups, one is mikiri, other is a sweep attack 14) single heavy gun shot 15) diagonal wind slice i think there's more moves for phase 2 but this is all off the top of my head phase 3 15) overhead lightning attack 16) horizontal lightning attack
I believed this was the case, but used Fextralife as my source. I struggled to tell some of the moves apart but checking the footage you're probably right. More moves just means more patterns to remember, which is always going to test the player more!
Yeah, he must have more than 13 moves, but I would add that the worst (or best) thing about him is how he combines those into a never ending combo that you never saw before, for example I remember him doing the sword and spear combo and instead of waiting or jumping back, he rushed forward inmediately hitting me with the three gun shots when I was about to hit him
@@a.k.a_ems yep. I remember having trouble in each stage of the fight, resetting to remember the timings of different attacks. I bet if I rewatch it’s probably closer to 20-25 distinct combos
I'm quite shocked how fume knight is 8th place and old dragonslayer is 5th. I think data may not be 100% accurate because it depends on how long have you been playing these games, what your build is and when you fight bosses. Fume knight can be accessed right after old iron king, so you can kill him as your 7th boss. But also you can kill him right before Nashandra. So the difference will be mainly in level of your character.
Exactly. DS3 was my first souls game and I died around 50 times at the Abyss Watchers LOL. More times than at Malenia. Also we are vastly different as players. Even in Sekiro where your build is very limited some people find Isshin way harder than the Demon of Hatred but for me it was the exact opposite. It threw me off because it wasn't a humanoid boss that can be parried. For me only the second phase of Isshin was truly hard with all the varied timings in his combos.
I think there's only ONE problem with this list, and it is that most people palying Demon's Souls on PS5 on TH-cam I saw, played it last, either after DS3 or after even Elden Ring. So by the time they played it it was a piece of cake. I was surprised at how easy it was, boss-wise, where the real difficulty was the levels themselves and that you had only one "bonfire" and that you needed to open shortcuts to the boss, and let's not mention the levels where there were NO shorcuts at all and you have to cross the whole level each time you wanted to reach the boss. But I had played all Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro at the time. I wonder how the results would be with actual playthroughs of the original release only.
Yep, gathering data for Demon's Souls was the most frustrating of all of them. I thought it would be easy, but sorting videos on TH-cam by date there were shockingly few lets plays pre 2011, which meant they had to be new players. Even then those players chose to summon a lot for every boss, which really does skew the data. Demon's Souls Remake is all good and all, but noone is picking it up before Elden Ring or DS3. I tried my hardest to only pick people who specifically state that its their first Fromsoft game. (Even though some people clearly lied knowing exactly what to do and when...) I reckon If I had 3 friends who completely didnt know anything about Fromsoft Soulslikes and then made them play through it, the data would be far cleaner. Maybe someday in the future it would make much cleaner results!
31:08 holy shit! I haven't played Elden Ring yet and skipped its segment to avoid spoilers, only to immediately be confronted with that statistic. This picture made me so unbelievably fucking hype in literally just a second that it was on screen!
@@rodo1252 yep. 100% the other runs were 5 and 2 deaths which is the problem with a low data pool. 100 runs would be perfect and outliers would smooth more. But I don’t want to die.
@@rodo1252 they need to be addressed. I can’t just say Royal Rat is the hardest without looking into why. It’s why so much misinformation can come from data and graphs. It’s probably unfair on Darklurker, but hey ho! Interesting to see anyway!
Lovely video! I was always puzzled why people seem to consider the older games as harder. My theory is that the most vocal souls players are the older ones who started with the earlier games. Your first game is always your hardest--though I'm glad to see that my nameless king PTSD wasn't without warrant according to these stats.
13:16 this chart is crazy, god bless you for collecting this data. the only thing that surprises me is sekiro being lower than ER, when sekiro doesn't have any way to get overleveled and whallop a boss by sheer force without learning their patterns, you can only get a better chance to beat the boss by dying to the boss, whereas with elden ring you can go and upgrade your weapons, respec into strength and damage trade, respec into magic for a safer ranged option, respec into dex/arc for a broken bleed/freeze build, etc.
5:53 I don't think this is the case. What actually happened is that most of the people who fought the Penetrator rescued the NPC that gets automatically summoned... And that guy can pretty much solo the boss xD
@@sergiopucela I may have to go back and look at the footage. I know one person summoned another player. The other two just went around his back but I’ll have another check
I can't imagine the amount of time and effort put into making this. You managed to make a video about stats so much fun. I hope youtube does it thing and this vid blows up. Ps: Bandai Namco actually released some stats for the main game, which also included the boss deaths. Interestingly, the results aren't that far off from your research (Malenia>margit>radagon>tree sentinel>radahn). Some pretty cool stuff, I'd suggest you check it out if you haven't.
Ah fantastic! Thats my hope, I could just read off stats from a spreadsheet, but It needs more visual elements to drive points home! I don't care so much, just glad people like it! Oh really? have you got a link? Id love to look it up.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Great work bro! idk why my comment keeps on getting removed. I'm guessing it's because of the link. Just look up the ER subreddit with this headline "Infographic stats from Bandai’s website"
@@rodo1252 So! I’m glad you brought this up. Originally I had 3 different lists for this. All, which is all 170 odd bosses in the game Main which would be all the remembrance bosses + the side bosses that caused trouble like Alecto, Tree Sentinel, Crucible knight etc. Then remembrance bosses since they are the “non side bosses for story progression”. Difficult to categorise it. I also toyed with “unique bosses” but then I would have to not include Godrick. It’s weird. Demi Human chief appeared on the main list because one person had that as their first boss and struggled hard with it!
Great video, well done. For Elden Ring a big part of the difficulty with Malenia is that many first time players completely ignored very important defensive aspects of the character building and mechanics. People were rolling up to Haligtree with less than 50 vigor, no defensive talismans or buffs while also completely ignoring very important mechanics like guard counters and defensive ashes of war. It was basically Nameless King all over again where a Boss was designed from the ground up to punish a certain popular tendency, it was roll spamming for Nameless King and glass cannon builds for Malenia.
That was very informative! I would be interested in a sequel including Elden Ring's DLC to see the difference between what we've perceived and how it really was. Personally, I had lots of death on the first day because I thought that I could win in the DLC just by turning off my brain and spamming Lion's Claw. But once I realized that everything hits like a truck in the DLC, I actually started to dodge correctly the bosses' moves and I died way less. With Mimic, I've defeated Radhan in around 30min. Against Malenia tho even with Mimic, it took me days (but I was a beginner) so who's really the strongest? I'm not 100% sure.
@@azarmajed4810 Because summons allow you to beat the boss without learning their mechanics. If you don't know the mechanics how can you say how hard it is? If you fight the boss solo you need to learn when it's safe to heal, when you can attack inbetween the bosses combos. if there is someone else to take agro your heal/attack window just becomes wait until your spirit ashe take agros I beat malenia solo I beat her the moment I could consistently dodge all her attacks and knew exactly when it was safe to heal/attack I promise if I watched you fight malenia solo you will not be able to dodge her attacks consistantly and be able to attack safely. if I am wrong summon me to your world or i'll summon you to mine. I will give you 5 attempts to fight her solo, if you are able to get to malenia's second phase twice in those 5 attempts I will say I am wrong. if you can't even get the boss to the second phase consistantly then you did not learn her movesett well enough to be able to rate the bosses difficulty.
@@epic1053 Nah man, forget about summoning me to your world. Here is a video of me fighting Malenia solo at RL1: th-cam.com/video/NM1n3l6gN1Y/w-d-xo.html You didn't get my point at all tho. If I fight BOTH Malenia and Radhan using the same summon, I can tell which one was the hardest for me under those circumstances. Yes it's easier than fighting solo, but no it doesn't mean you can't compare the difficulty between fights using the same summon. Come on man, stop this elitist Souls player behavior. This is making the fanbase look bad.
Crazy thing, I’m a guy who died to pinwheel. I only started playing dark souls a few days ago sometime last week. I went to the catacombs straight away, I got past the mobs which was very hard and I was confused. I have played other from soft games but never dark souls 1, so I just assumed it was a difficult game because it was an old game, I got to pinwheel, he killed me. I came back again and killed him. Worst part is, I headed down to tomb of the giants and getting back out of there when I realised I wasn’t supposed to be there was a slog.
Thanks so much. My girlfriend is begging me not to do a video on Final Fantasy or Pokemon, knowing that would take over 1000 hours to gather the data easily.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz hey man I just wanna say that I think the data really adds value to the video. I hope you keep it up! You might wanna check out Johnstone’s content if you end up deciding to do pokemon; I haven’t played the games in a while but he puts a lot of time and thought into his experiments and also usually does have his stats/data displayed on screen, sometimes discussing it.
@@timothyvenske6519 Thank you so much! Oh absolutely, that would be a great start for me. If I have questions already answered then I don't need to research the games. But I will look them up! Thanks!
Hats of to you, you have my respect. It's surreal watching this video and thinking of how much time you've dedicated to watch all of this content and collect all of your data. You came out of nowhere, make incredible content and throw in Semon of Dong? I'll hand it over. That thing. My subscription.
This is interesting, I have heard both the opinion of its the Easiest or the Hardest. Maybe its because there isn't much leeway with the combat, so if you GET the mechanics and parrying, you clean house. If you struggle to time parries (I am notoriously bad with rhythm games), then its tough. I found Owl Father 2nd hardest (behind Demon of Hatred for me)
I will never get over the Rat boss deaths in DS2, that you mentioned. In the hundreds of hours I put into that game, I'm pretty sure I died to it twice. On my first playthrough, and it felt like flukes. I imagine those stats have a lot to do with it being peoples introductions into DS.
Yep. If you take out the outlier who died over 50 times. Which is down to the build not being good at dealing with mobs from what I remember, then RRA goes down to like 10th.
Imo Melanias difficulty isnt due to her being a well designed, skill required boss. Its because of her BS healing on hit and how far she can travel with her waterfowl dance
@@Willzb-xk4ew yeah I’d probably agree. The healing disincentivises tanky defence builds and the Waterfowl dance is just cruel really. I feel like Radahn doesn’t have any of these annoyances and just is hard. End of
She has regen and also giant pull of hp. Amongst main bosses only Fire Giant and Rikard have more HP. But Rikard is gimmick boss and Fire Giant has +100% dmg weak spots (and 0% phys dmg resists).
I feel like certain bosses in DS3 like Gael, Watchers and SoC are gimmick bosses in a sense in that they don’t punish rolling away and have a generous jumping splash attack if you do so which can be punished. If you are already rolling back and see the pattern, they become trivial. Compared to say Fume’s stab combo or Midirs 1HKO dash, they basically provide gifts. Gael’s third phase for instance is hard to get hit if you bait the triple splash attack and wail on him during recovery.
Honestly sword saint isshin kinda surprises me. Most of my deaths in that fight were me throwing myself off the cliff cause I wasn’t happy with the attempt. Ik people consider him difficult but for me it felt like after all the general minibosses I was pretty well prepared. Imo I found isshin in the shura ending harder because of his fire attacks.
@@HomeostaticOwl that’s interesting! Maybe you really clicked with the combat and so things were less of a test for your parrying! I found Demon of Hatred an absolute nightmare. That and Guardian Ape… actually I suck as Sekiro…
It is really cool how much harder your first souls game is than the others you play, my first was ds1 and i no joke habe more deaths to taurus demon by far than any other boss ive done after playing every souls game. I died like 130 times to taurus demon and only beat him because he fell off the ledge which i didnt even know could happen at the time.
they aren’t really “souls likes” souls likes are not made by fromsoftware, these are “souls games”. It’s like calling a castlevania game a metroidvania, quite redundant and wrong.
Demon of Hatred bar none. Sekiro has the top 5 imo cause that game is actually difficult in ways that you can't just cheese like Soulslikes. Like there's nobody who you can summon to bail you out, it takes actual execution to play Sekiro well and the Demon of Hatred you can't just stack buffs and burn through you have to chip aways little by little. Sekiro challenge runs are way more impressive than any other game Fromsoft makes too.
Yeah, no. Isshin Ashina, Inner Isshin and Isshin, the Sword Saint only took me between 7 to 9 attempts max. Since then, they've always taken far less. You can also cheese all of them, too. But even if I struggled with them like most people who aren't anywhere near as good, Consort Radahn would be the most difficult anyway. Miyazaki aimed to push the difficulty of Shadow of the Erdtree to a height above all of their games, to set a bar for boss difficulty never seen within FromSoftware games. And they did.
The work put into this video really paid off in terms of the quality of information. It's very interesting to see this data and how it aligns with the community perception, especially given I've felt relatively alone in saying that the difficulty of bosses has only trended upwards over time. I've thought Fromsoft has felt a need to challenge people more as players become more experienced and the community gains ever increasing resources. I think it would also be very interesting to have a new player vs veteran player compression just to see how much experience effects boss difficulty, and if veteran players are really having as easy a time with bosses like the Abyss Watchers as they are saying.
@@Natalie-sr8hm yeah. There’s lots that still could be analysed if it came down to it, having a larger pool of people who played it would be handy, but it is what it is for now. Future videos perhaps! Thanks so much!
After completing a Level 1 run in every Souls game and Elden Ring I can say that ER is hands down the hardest fromsoft game, casually it's extremely easy cause of Mimic tear and bleed plus all the crazy builds you can make but challenge running the game is very difficult, hell I fought the first boss in Dark Souls 3 at SL1 and beat it first try and in ER it took 1-2 hours to beat Margit RL1, Margit is harder than every Souls game 1st boss combined.
Yeah christ... absolute madlad. I can imagine this to be the case. Demon Souls each enemy has far more predictable patterns. While in Elden Ring the Enemy AI is far more sophisticated to mix it up. I hate to imagine what Miyazaki will cook up for the next one
I've not done rl1, but I have the plat, during which I solo'd every boss at least once, and yeah. That playfile is 600 hours. It's not just how absurdly big and long the game is, there are bosses that are notably much harder to solo than any other from game. Just the final boss gauntlet in itself is a right hassle. That said, Glock Saint Isshin gave me more trouble than any other from boss so far.
This has got to be one of the most interesting and well done video ideas I've seen on youtube in a long time. Well done OrangeJuiceJaz, you are the darkest soul
I know that all players of these games have different strengths and weaknesses, but I just can't fathom the Nameless King data. I found that boss to be fairly easy, but he probably just uses abilities that I find easier to read than most people.
@@zeroflame33 thank you for watching! I would genuinely love too, but unfortunately unless they are shrunk and have some slight speed changes to them, TH-cam flags the video with copyright a lot of the time meaning the video doesn’t get shown or I have to literally remove and reupload the video again without the footage. It’s annoying I agree. I am sorry!
@@zeroflame33 I don't get money from the videos, but it literally gets taken down or removed otherwise. Same with music, why its quiet and pitch shifted.
Yep. Biggest take from the video seem to be this. Maybe I should do the toughest older bosses and look at their actual run backs more to see which are the most egregious.
Really think this video could have been improved with the addition of SOTE as there's a lot of discussion if the final boss is harder than anything else From has put out. Also curious how people would view the difficulty of Kos or Midir fighting them after Putrescent Knight and Bayle, as they're very closely related fights. Great comprehensive view.
@@thebluegiraffe4796 I am making a video of SOTE compared to the base game. Started making this a month before and thought I’d be finished. Spoiler alert. The final boss is hard
@@umutozer9667 spoiler alert. I have started collecting data for SOTE. The final boss already has more deaths in one run than Nameless king did in 3. I think we could have a new top.
@@FlaskFlash while it's harder than the games I've played for sure, there's a lot of folks that think Isshin or Kos is harder. Haven't played bb/sekiro yet. Some people think Midir is harder lol
I've only ever played Sekiro and Elden RIng (with the DLC as well) out of all of these, and i must admit, your conclusions match my own observations, up to a one new game plus. The main caveat being, for me at least, Sekiro prepared me so well by the end of the game, that i didn't find Sword Saint Ashina as hard, regarding the effort and time invested to beat him. But Lady Butterfly and Genichiro take all the credit for that, as those two fights, as hard as they were for me when i first played, gave me all the tools to face him, on a much more level footing. It was still i hard fight, but in the end i beat him at the start of my third session (one session lasting from a couple of hours up to 4 hours), unlike Genichiro that took 3 full sessions, similar to Lady Butterfly. Headless Ape and Demon of Hate on the other hand, most likely because of how much of a departure from the main game-flow they are, were just plain hard. They didn't take as much time, but they took possibly even more effort, due to how outside the box you need to think when facing them, in a game that unlike Elden Ring, doesn't give you many tools to deal with diversity. Elden Ring wise, not counting the DLC, was largely as you mentioned. That being said, my second run was much easier and my new game plus run, was even made trivial by the full assortment of skills, weapons and spells i accumulated (Radahn died before he could take his meteor/comet form). That being said, due to the variety of bosses, you don't get the impression that the game has prepared you for the end fights like you do in Sekiro. Not on the first run at least. The bosses just have way too varied move sets and abilities, so you constantly need to adapt. HOWEVER, by the start of your second run (non new game plus), you are prepared. You are in fact so WELL prepared, that the second run is even easier then Sekiro's. Melenia, which i fought for 4 days before actually needing to respec in order to beat the first time around, fell in just 5 or 6 tries. Literally 10-15 minutes. Melenia man! And when i went into the DLC at level 141 or so (well inside recommended range of 130-150), it wasn't really all that hard. Yes, there are new bosses, yes they have unique moves, yes they hit HARD, but so do WE! The hardest boss in the game took about 2 hours to beat. 2 hours! Compare that to my first run of Elden Ring or Sekiro, when those fights took sessions, often separated by days. I don't know, maybe running full games of Sekiro and Elden RIng prepared my mindset enough, but i just didn't feel the DLC all that hard. Not in terms of relative effort anyways. Disclaimer: ER was my first souls like, so maybe that played a roll as well.
I think souls games are easier the more you watch people play them. I played bloodborne and ds3 a few years back, almost blind, and struggled so intensely miserably hard (like 200 deaths per boss) that I quit. About a year later I started regularly watching people play these games on youtube. Now having my own ps5 and playing elden ring and bloodborne (haven’t retried ds3 yet), I’ve died maybe like 20 times total in each game except for my attempt to do Dual Crucible Knight fight at level 45 to get the set in Elden ring. It feels like surprisingly easy. Not really sure why
It's closer to a Rhythm game than people think. Most bosses have clear windups and swings, which if you watch and observe its much clearer. Being in the fight sets in a bit of panic which makes it difficult to read attacks. Genuinely probably does help you understand where and when to dodge and attack!
I think the main reason for Malenia being considered the hardest boss is because most ER players are very new to soulsborne games, I've only played DS3 and moved on to Elden Ring. When I reached Malenia I was disappointed to defeat her on the third attempt.
@@Pontiffeye yeah I agree, this could be the case. Lots of this could come down to the people who I chose to play the game. I tried desperately to find people who played it as their first fromsoft game. Which was a nightmare for Dark Souls 2. You’d think earlier games would therefore be more difficult as it would be mosts first game. My friend beat Malenia in 20 tries and Elden Ring was his first fromsoft. So it just sort of depends.
That's just flawed boss design. I couldn't stop hating on Malenia in the last two years due to how they made her to be the unquestionable hardest boss everyone must talk about all the time when they mention Elden Ring yet certain builds can just stunlock her for 90% of the fight where she won't even do her most dangerous attacks, while other builds get completely shut down by her input reading, combo escapes and infinite hyper armor which can even prevent stance breaks.
@@lharsay It sort of just is what it is with the unbelievable variety in Elden ring. I had a big bonk build using the Ruins greatsword first time and I had to resort to Mimic Tear scrub fighting to beat her since I suck. But then saw people using Wheel of Ghiza to just eviscerate her. She isn't my favourite fight purely as the Waterfowl dance feels like such a sword of damacles hanging over my head that at any point it may completely kill me. It is definitely better based on different builds. I like a lot of the DLC fights as they feel varied and interesting regardless of build.
@@lharsay no it's not, it just highlights how people have widely differing experiences based on there build and playstyle. This has been a thing since forever.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz believe it or not but you definitely could have just blocked the first flurry of waterfowl with two handing the ruins greatsword if you have something like 40 endurance. You don't need 100 physical reduction or a great shield to do this.
Great video. As someone that got platinum on Bloodborne last week, I can say that the only boss that gave me some trouble (that you didn't mention) was Abhorrent Beast from the Ailing Loran Chalice layer 3. PS: I already got platinum on all the other soulslike, so I'm quite experienced, however, for some reason, this boss was a pain for me.
Much appreciated! I am already 70 hours in on SOTE. Maybe this is my purpose and when I stop analysing video games I will let the Undead curse take hold.
This was fun! :) I really miss the "gimmick" fights. Spamming circle and r1 is fine and all, obviously hard enough, but some variation would be great. Here's to hoping Sekiro's combat get's another go! Good job! Nice to have numbers :)
i think instead of "deaths by falling" it should've been "deaths by environment", further broken into falling vs environmental hazards like poison, fire, damaging spikes, explosive barrels, falling rocks, collapsing arena, curse fountains, petrification jars. i am just realizing now that many (most?) of these unique environmental hazards are from DS2 and didn't reappear in any subsequent games. that's a shame because they're so fun. yes, i'm the one miyazaki plant who loves environmental hazards like poison swamps. they change the gameplay dynamics a lot, they encourage creativity and diversify your interaction with the game, and as an added bonus, those hazards can be loads of fun when the enemies are also vulnerable to them, like explosive barrels. this kind of thing rewards creativity, it doesn't make much of a difference if you run through the levels without fighting anyone like a speedrunner, but if you're actually being thoughtful and cautious, and you're actually fighting all the enemies, those hazards can be super fun. like don't tell me you've never been messing around in a souls game, led an enemy/npc to a lethal fall, and then used something with knockback like a zweihander or a kick to send them off the cliff. that's some good old fashioned deliberate engagement with the environment right there. it's not just a backdrop for a boss rush, it's a world, the fighting is guerilla, cunning beats muscle 9 times out of 10.
@@Amoeby absolutely! I appreciate it a lot :) I mean the fromsoft games have some excellent music, but Majula is definitely the best hub world song for sure
I think the reason 4 kings have such a high perception is their NG+ version. Waaay back in the day before DS2, when NG+ runs of dark souls were big in the community, 4 kings were legendary for wreaking havoc.
![[UNCUT] The Loyal Pin ปิ่นภักดิ์ EP.6 (2/4)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GgeGQOP10RQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Didn't expect hidden gem...
In short praise the video!
☀🙏
502 people rated your message
@@IsraelMedrano infinite health exploit
Algorithm sending a rare gem this way, hard to find a video with this few views yet with a high quality presentation and at the same time enjoyable. Great work. One of those videos that keeps you immersed the whole time, and overall interesting data here.
@@YurikHunt thank you very much! I always like making these videos as I was genuinely curious of the answer and couldn’t find anyone else who made a video like it. And data can be quite dry so needs decent presentation. Thanks again :)
I didn't even notice this was a tiny channel until I read this. Everything about the production made me assume otherwise
@@kanosig Thank you so much! I just like to make videos in my spare time on stuff I find interesting!
@@kanosig Thanks! I appreciate it! Just know that presenting Excel slides is boring, so needs more visual flair to keep people watching nearly an hour of Dry Data Analysis!
12:59 "Semon of Dong" yes he said it
Thats the funniest shit i read today
Twice!
"There is a player who died to pinwheel-"
It's Jerma.... Jerma is the only documented case I know of where someone lost to Pinwheel.
The chosen one. Seen content never before seen to man.
And most likely the only person to first try Flamelurker
@@DarkGarfield_ true! Fuck that guy!
I died to pinwheel.
Granted, it was early game on my first ever souls game playthrough, and I fought it in exactly the most difficult way you can, but still.
I died to pinwheel once. In my defence, I was extremely blazed; it was NG+5, and I was speedrunning at that point. I got complacent and let too many clones spawn. Turns out he's a reasonable challenge after a certain amount spawn.
if TH-cam does its thing, this video will blow up in the souls community, so well made and so interesting!
I'd love that!
Actually you have just reminded me, I need to include links to the peoples channels I used footage of as well. They are the real MVPs
Prime Radahn is 100% number one
👀👀👀
Nope, Malenia is numba one
Consort Radahn was crazy fr
@@Gringoo777 I fought melania, (not handicapped into a challenge run) using everything at my disposal, and she is NOT the hardest boss LMAO. She isn't even worse than demon of hatred
@@sageof6pandas233the only reason she is hard is her regen
If she didnt regen them she would be easy as cake
68 deaths to the Royal Rat Authority is wild
Lol never died to it...u have to aim for it's legs not just lock on .which some ppl are too dumb to do apparently
I don’t understand that, I’d get instantly rushed by the rats and toxified and killed instantly, I’d have time to take out 1 rat with a bow but by that point the rest of the rats would kill me instantly and the boss would be on top of me
@@Nomad-bl4yw It's not the big one that kills you, it's the little rats. Usually.
If you can't kill them at range before they reach you, and your weapon of choice isn't able to sweep through them all before the big boy shows up, you're in trouble.
holy shit... that was unironically me in 2014, Royal Rat Authority was my Malenia
It terrifies me. The little rats are annoying but usually I try to snipe 2-3 out of 4 with bows from distance, sometimes I fail. If it wasn't for them, it would be easier.
p.s. And I still didn't need to die 68 times. At worst 10.
I KNEW I wasnt crazy when I realized I died way more to Royal Rat Authority than Fume Knight.
Never really posed much of a challenge to me tbf, was always shocked when looking at the lists how high Fume ranked. But is what it is, thats why Data is more interesting to me!
Games are so cool as an interactive medium. Miyazaki and his team have continually pushed the idea of difficulty and hostile game environments to push players to better themselves, and collaborate with each other. It can be argued that each entry in the series has continually pushed towards or deviated from this concept, as they iterate on what works, and refine what doesn't.
All that being said, the discussion around difficulty in the games is cancerous and gatekeepy and generally not very productive, I think a lot of players miss out on WHY something is hard and only want surface level discussions on big numbers and fast attacks. The video I just watched is a direct refutation of that. This video is art, man. I love anybody that's able to break down some meaningless numbers into careful and insightful takeaways of the design and intent of the original work. The care and dedication put into this breakdown is astounding.
Setting aside FromSoft games, I really want to express my appreciation for small content creators with extreme amounts of passion for niche hobbies like these. I don't care what you do or if you ever put out a video again, you've gained a lifelong fan. I normally never comment, but this video, and reading all your interactions with different types of comments whether they be data nerds, diehard From fans (SotE when??) or just cool people, makes me feel something warm and fuzzy. It makes me feel like I need to reach out and let you know I cared just as much as you did about this subject. Thanks, man.
@@johnathandanger7315 absolutely. Some of my friends have very strong opinions on the ease of the Soulslikes. The games make me immersed in a distinct set of worlds, with minimal dialogue and well crafted game mechanics, truly a work of art.
The sense of accomplishment is always a big draw for the series, but it is much more than that and having more people play never hurts! If you enjoy playing a certain way, more power too you, if the design is strong enough people will keep coming back to it!
Much appreciated good sir! I will always post videos, I love making! I work full time and made a game before which is why they aren’t as quick, but I will always continue making the videos as long as they are good quality and people like them!
One thing with dark souls 2 is that the devs actually released some stats relating to boss difficulty, in particular, the fume knight which had a 93% death rate. I think this is what causes most people to think its the hardest boss in the game.
Fume Knight was quite tough but 90% of my deaths to it were from one attack that killed me and I couldn't figure out how to dodge through reliably.
A bit like Malenia really...
@@JorfikWas it the fire orbs? They easily gave me the most trouble when I fought him first.
@@unbearable505 It was just some sweep attack he does with his flaming sword that I flubbed constantly until one day after playing elden ring for a few months I went back and 2-shot him.
I always thought sir alonne was harder. You can’t even fight him until you beat fume knight
@@562.anthony2 Sir Alonne was eating me alive a few years ago. You can't circle strafe him like Fume Knight and he swings waaay faster with almost identical reach (as in, the length of a tennis court). He almost never uses slow heavy attacks.
I think as an entire playerbase we've just gotten better, and having the internet helps a bunch. When I got demon souls on ps3 we had no internet and trying to figure it out was the hardest game I played at the time.
I love the "KaiCenat gave me this data by being thoroughly railed for hours due to his stubbornness" comment
I genuinely was worried for his mental health when I watched it. But it's an odd feeling watching someone throw themselves at a wall over and over again and eventually break the wall... Feels like madness most of the time.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz relatable
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Reminds me of that quote from Vaas about insanity.
Commenting for the algorithm, videos like these need way more views for how much work were put into them.
@@brandonperez8133 much appreciated! Glad you enjoyed it :)
It’s cause he doesn’t have any ads, you have to put ads in or TH-cam will make sure you aren’t watched
@@jefferygrandor7852 Ah? I've never thought much about that, since I like making videos for fun. Ads always annoy me when watching videos. Maybe I should check the settings more in the future!
@@OrangeJuiceJaz fun fact, youtube will always put ads on your video anyways at the start and end, so it really doesn’t hurt to just put an ad or two in their just to ensure other people get to actually see the video
@@jefferygrandor7852 Does it really? Thats a crying shame. Some adverts can be pretty gross, so Id rather do without, but thats a shame TH-cam does that, ruins the user experience.
I never understood more than just upload video and put nice thumbnail in!
Ishin and Genichiro is for me the best boss the Fromsoft ever made, they are really technical and no gimmick, extremely fair while still challenging, and little to no cheesing.
My first run experience with Sekiro is really interesting in comparison with most others as I finished those two bosses in an unusually short amount of time - about 5 attempts each - while others, most notably Corrupted Monk and Owl Father, were much more difficult. I’ve always found this an extremely interesting and amusing outlier. I’m also using your comment as an excuse to call myself a technical genius and blame any hardships on the game rather than a lack of skill.
I agree they are fantastic bosses. Sekiro as whole just had a wacky difficulty curve. I died about 3x more to chained ogre than ishin. Once you learn how to deflect in sekiro the game becomes a cake walk. And Ishin is the perfect boss to show you that you've learned how to play the game
The sheer volume of work you put into this video deserves attention, the fact that you kept it interesting is crazy.
@@tylerbrown2899 agreed. That was one of the parts that took a while in editing. I’ve given enough data presentations at work that I know you need to keep attention and not repeat points etc. I am so glad it paid off!
This was an awesome video to watch. With how many late game bosses are hyped up as the hardest of all time, it’s fun to look back on bosses like the Bell Gargoyles, Genichiro, and Abyss Watchers and reminisce on just how much we struggled with them the first time. Makes past me who died to the gargoyles 31 times feel a lot better, and gives clarity to the accomplishment. Great vid.
Also RIP to the guy who died over 60 times to Royal Rat.
I mean thats the case really isnt it? Ornstein and Smough were the halfway point of Dark Souls 1. These gates early on that teach the player important things are difficult as well! I struggled immensely with Bellend Gargoyles and Genichiro... I am not afraid to admit it!
I played ds1 for the first time after playing ds3, ds2, elden ring, etc and it was a cake walk for me. I could see it being unforgiving for a first timer though. Anyone with some patience and souls like experience could do pretty well from my observation. Everything was really slow, and ornstein + smough was simple as well. It's evident people got better since ds1
@@thetoyodacar2264 I'm curious as someone who started with DS1- which boss was your first "wall" moment, where you really had to learn the game?
@@thetoyodacar2264 Yep 100%. DS1 was my first and my friend refused to give me tips and I don't like using guides, so I had a horrid build with like 40 resistance because my mate thought it would be funny to make me level that instead of strength.
But going back to it now feels so slow. Amazing how these games train a sort of muscle.
@@kurenian I started with ds3, my first wall was probably the abyss watchers. I did also struggle on ludex gundyr for at least an hour.
If you mean my first wall in ds1 then I can't really say I had one. I realize now that ds2 probably over-prepared me for the slower, jankier gameplay. First wall in ds2 was the tripple gank sentinel boss in lost bastille, got me used to dealing with ganks in shitty situations (the entirety of ds2)
Nice job on the video, really interesting. I’m sure this will encourage entirely sincere and civil discussion about difficulty.
Oh gosh. Yeah I am sure it will. I won't touch that with a barge pole, I just like the game and looking at the data.
Give it 2 months and people will be calling for my Public execution
bro, top-notch work wtffff (38:30 ah yes, biggie smalls)
thank you so much!
honestly one of the funniest things ive seen is someone say that the hardest from soft game is the one you started with. Because really I see these games as like a rollercoaster where if you dont understand the mechanics and the whole gameplay of wait, dodge, hit, repeat youll have a miserable time, but then all of sudden it clicks where you start recognizing that the bosses and enemies have patterns and start to figure out what can be punished. Whats even weirder is that malenia I got really luck with my dodged at time and beat her on my maybe 7th try, but for some reason took me 2 consecutive mind numbing days to beat commander niall in the one snow fortress. I have no clue why but that boss just couldnt click with me and I genuinley despise him lol. So like elden ring was my first one and probably took me maybe a month to beat, and then I kept replaying it making new characters and such to the point where I think ive beaten it 8 times now, and then when I went to try out the other fromsoftware games, there werent any sorta of walls that I can think of, maybe orphan of kos I think it took me 2 hours to beat him, but thats a far cry to when i first started and would spend a whole day just on one regular boss in elden ring. I genuinley consider the fromsoft games to be one of a kind and am kinda sad now that Ive played them all lol. As im writing this comment my mind just blanked out consort radahn and you know yeah fuck him that fight was misserable to learn, one of those moments where I didnt pop off or get excited when I beat him I just sorta sat there and stared at my screen.
i consider the one i started with the easiest (ds1)
Heck yeah, we love fromsoft games, but what were they smoking with Consort Radahn.
Niall was SO HARD BRO. His two knights murdered me and messed up my rhythm
I'm the exact opposite lmao, malenia skewered me for a good two days while I beat niall on my second try. I decided to play the whole game without using summons so I could get the hardcore gamer experience and was genuinely disappointed by niall, but I guess some people see him as the most annoying prick in the entire game
Niall in the snow is hard if you're using a weapon that can't stun lock his knights, my first time fighting him might've been with a katana and it was miserable, kept dying to the dual wielding knight but then fight him with a collossal weapon and it's easy mode cause you can just stun lock that knight into an early grave. BTW if Elden Ring is hard, just use a collosal weapon, didn't realize how OP those weapons are until recently. Aside from some main bosses, most enemies in the game will react to your hits, that's a far cry from just using a katana or straight sword. It's crazy how people say bleed / status effects are OP, if those didn't exist, there'd be no need to ever use a small fast weapon.
I think one thing worth noting with certain Elden Ring bosses (Mogh, Tree Sentinel) is that people die to them a lot since they fight them early. For example, Tree Sentinel isn't meant to be fought immediately, but a lot of people will fight him and brute force him, resulting in a lot of deaths. This could also explain Mogh's spike in deaths - since there is a questline, which a lot of people do, which allows you to fight Mogh early, Mogh might be getting more deaths because of it. seeing my friends play elden ring, these two things happened to them - one of my friends died a ton to tree sentinel, and another one got to Mogh early and got destroyed by him
I want to know about Alecto, my guy had 62 kills with 63 hits
Royal Rat Authority being #1 isn’t that surprising, that boss sucks! The worst boss in the game I’m 100% serious
this might be the best video I've ever watched with less than 1k views
much appreciated! I enjoy making them!
Fantastic video. Just want to give a huge "thank you" for sitting through so many runs and crunching the numbers on them. Pretty crazy to think so many hours of hardwork can be condensed in about 45 minutes.
Would be interesting to see if more contributors could add runs (or possibly even mods that count all of the data for you) to see what the numbers look like across hundreds of thousands of players.
@@garlicbreadgod thank you so much! 100% enjoyed it and it was well worth doing!
If I expand the community enough that I can get other peoples unbiased runs then that would really benefit the data analysis!
nah nah guys trying ceaseless discharge normally for the first time in 500+ hours is the hardest boss
I naturally discovered the ceaseless skip because I just wanted the item and then got scared when the boss showed up so I ran.
I beat the game like 5 times before I learned how to skip him
he was easy ngl
orphan of kos took me 2/3 hours of consecutive deaths to finally get used to him.
when i beat him it was the biggest high i felt in all my years of gaming.
I felt the exact same with ornstein and smough (my first souls game), orphan, isshin and malenia. The 4 hardest bosses I ever fought in any game, all of them took me 3-4 hours and a lot of sweat.
Now we have to do with way more runs to boost the sample size and be even more objective on this. I love the idea.
100% if I get more resources, 100 objective runs on each game. So would be 700 different people, all recorded, all data analysed. This would give a good sample size to accurately reflect the data. Wouldn't get weird spikes like Royal Rat Authority.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Definitely. Royal Rat Authority is one point, but I would looooove to know how much people have tried to kill that early tree sentinel in ER when they saw it for the first time.
I know I have realized it was for a later time (not my first From Soft) but I still went back to it like once or twice before deciding it was the moment and I was finally at a good level for it. So I still died a little to it and it would still count towards its stats.
Stuff like this. Small interactions might just show up buy crunching all the numbers.
@@Jbn0s0rus yeah completely. I certainly did try to beat it even though I knew before hand it acts as a deterrent. Reminded me of the Cyclopses from DS2. I’d love to know the most discovered and missed areas as well. Like without a guide who finds Malenia or Placidusax!
Should've mentioned that since the data comes from streamers/youtubers, it usually won't be a true blind playthrough because their chat/community will give them hints. Like going for midir's head instead of the body, or finding good gear/build in elden ring, not saying its impossible to figure out in a blind playthrough but its part of the reason why people's opinions about the games' difficulty are split.
the video is still great tho 👍
You're completely right. This was a big problem I had with Bloodborne. There was about 3 runs I watched about 10 hours of before I realised that they weren't doing blind as they were grabbing all the secrets and all boss weaknesses without many deaths... It is annoying. Unfortunately I wish I had 100s of runs! Thank you for watching though! I will have to consider where I get data more in the future!
2:24 I hope Sony sees this fxcking FACT right here! The Demon Souls Remake brought them the majority of the sales! Do they think they won’t make much with a Bloodborne Remake/Remaster ??? Or is it simply about them not having the time to have teams work on that project over other future IPs ??
Yeah for sure. I have seen interviews with Miyazaki specifically on Bloodborne recently. He acknowledges it, wants it but the decision seems to be out of From's hands... so its Sony just shitting the bed.
HOW THE HELL DOES THIS NOT HAVE ATLEAST 1MIL+ VIEWS. But besides that great video. The amount of work youve put in this is astonishing.
Thank you so much! haha if it only had 5 views and those 5 people liked it thats all I really want! I just know I won't be able to resist an equally long endeavour in the future... Pokemon is calling my name like the green goblin mask...
The work that's gone into this video is immense, you've more than earned a subscriber and deserve many more, great vid!
Thank you so much! I appreciate it! Just hope the next one can be as interesting!
Smough doing the default fortnite dance will never not be the funniest shit ever 💀
@@shekm0de agreed. Have used it twice now in videos and I think he is here to stay.
I might have missed if you did something similar as I was cleaning but I am curious to see deaths for Elden Ring split into two categories.
One with deaths using spirit summons and one without. There is a split in the community about whether spirit summons are a core mechanic in the game and if developers expected you to use them. Depending on your belief, it creates two different difficulty curves that completely change your perception of the game.
On my first play through of Elden Ring I stopped dying once I acquired the mimic tear and went on the longest personal streak of no deaths in any From game. I finally died a single time to Elden Beast and then 8 times to Malenia. In the dlc, 6/10 remembrance bosses were beaten first try for me with only the final boss and putrescent knight killing me more than once.
I redid all of Elden Ring with 0 summons and while I still beat many bosses on the first try, I still died way more often with end game bosses killing me at least once despite technically having a more optimized build and better knowledge of boss behaviors.
While every game has overpowered builds, Elden Ring allows you to summon for boss fights without increasing the bosses health pool!
It would be so cool if From released this data!
agreed, I also think this could be useful to have, maybe in conjunction with the SOTE DLC. From what I could tell in the data, a Summon almost halved the deaths to a boss, where 2 summons make it closer to 5x less. less so in more modern games with the health scaling better. But regardless alot of people use mimic tear and hide at the back lobbing spells, so may be useful to see the difference.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Yeah! Regardless, excellent job on the video!
@@joshuaseco7115 It's a great idea! thanks so much!
I was really hoping my absolute mental block against the witch of hemwick would be more supported in data but multiple playthroughs later and I’ve still never beaten them without at LEAST 3 deaths
Hey, it happens. There is no wrong boss to struggle with. Even people died to Pinwheel, so you can feel better!
If you go in with no insight the shadow creatures will not spawn
@@julianrubin4575 Wait... is this real? God I love bloodborne. That insight mechanic is inspired.
Speaking of Alecto: I have many hundreds of hours in Elden Ring. It's my favorite game, after all. I recently (not really, but close enough) did a run where I fought and beat all 165 bosses on one character, and I found Alecto to be the hardest, by far, not gonna lie.
Obviously, some bosses like Malenia are harder, but I've "mastered" her fight, to the point where I can dodge basically all attacks fairly reliably. But Alecto just messes me up. That destined death ground stab into the AOE is probably the attack that I struggle to dodge consistently the most.
you spent a scary amount of time to make this. shocked how high the average death count was
Thanks! Sleep is overrated.
Yeah, problem is it is weird with consistency. I have see Shadow of the Erdtree videos with 2000+ deaths without even beating Messmer. Yet some runs have 5 deaths to Radahn at max. The Variance is so crazy.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz I got radahn on my second try first playthrough. was overleveled a bit though. also can you tell me how the "average of 3 runs" thing works? I assume most of the people uploading their runs did not upload 3 separate playthroughs
@@jamesnesran2348 You're right. So for me the true test of difficulty is always a first time blind play through, untainted with prior knowledge.
I scoured TH-cam and Twitch watching lets play videos with literally 0 views where the game was their first ever Fromsoft game. So picking up Bloodborne as their first of the Soulslikes, gives them a pure experience and you can really test how tough the bosses actually are. I took 3 seperate LPer's runs to then average the results since some people are more skilled or do different builds so may give skewed results.
Unfortunately, only three runs isn't enough, doesn't give a perfect sample size. If I could it would be 100 runs each or something and specifically choose people who've never played to actually record the runs in isolated (non internet guide) environments. But alas... I have only so many years on this earth to live.
40:32 was such a beautiful sink. I love these games, and while i can get sucked into the story and watch hours of lore and forget about the gameplay, looking at them through just the lense of actual gameplay shows why these games are the beat out there. Story and gameplay are equal in there own respects and amazing and will be remembered forever
Agreed, had to be put in the video somewhere, don't think ive ever seen that happen without hitting eachother.
Honestly. If We didn't have VaatiVidya explain the lore I would still love the game as the combat just makes me FEEL the tension of combat. I felt bad for the Witcher 3 as it was the first game I played after Dark Souls 1 for the first time and I just couldn't enjoy the swordplay because Dark Souls tainted my perception of gameplay forevermore.
But even then... Miyazaki is a genius.
And the team of course. A game isn't made by one person!
As somebody new to the fromsoft community and their inside jokes, "Semon of Dong" is one of the funniest things I've ever heard with zero context whatsoever.
Bro play Armored Core 6 like immediately
Dark eater midir, is still the most difficult in my eyes, because of the fact that the ringed city dlc came out 2 years after the base game, and most players were, at the very least on NG+/NG++. Which makes 90% of his moves in 2nd phase 1 shot you, so from a community standpoint, I feel that most actual players (not streamers) were facing him at a much more challenging level.
(Edit)
The problem with the “difficulty scaling” in most of fromsofts’ souls like games, is that the dlc boss’s are usually released 2+ years after the base game, which forces players to either run through the entire game again on a new character to not face them on a NG+ scale, or suffer through a fight that’s much tougher than it should be. It took me 3 games to learn to not go into NG+ before the dlc came out.
I also feel like his moveset is way better than average at fighting multiple opponents. Like to the point where I think not summoning probably makes him easier or at least more predictable
Midir is the only Souls boss I still have never beat. but I've only faced him on NG+ and on.
amazing work mate, loved the video! I personally think that "total time per boss" may be a better metric on how hard that boss is bc it takes into account both deaths and runback
You're probably right. May go back and look at the figures more for the SOTE video!
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Up!. Adding some cents, it would be good to comment on the runback time which can affect this metric, although it might be difficult to distinguish and measure during gameplay samples.
@@yukioichida_ Yeah true. There are definitely deaths that were affected by a tough runback and entering the fog gate on lower health.
Never would have expected nameless king to be ranked this high lmao.
Seeing these death stats makes me self conscious, I die way more than all of them combined!
@@WadeBrooks-l2c this is totally fine! Everyone is different. Some people can’t believe people die this much! But I’ve seen runs where someone was on like 2000 deaths by Renalla. It’s all fine!
Great video lol you should also do the DLC in comparison to this list.
I will say, Melania is the only boss I truly struggled with in the game or DLC. It took me like 6 hours to finally beat her (and that doesn't include the 2 hours of respecs and item hunting I did after the first couple of hours). Even Consort Radahn, I beat on the second try. The difference is with him, you can literally mimic summon, and if you have "heal from afar" and a flask of Marika equiped, your mimic will heal itself and you can also just sit there and literally tank Radahn's entire moveset and stab him with a bleed spear from behind your shield. You can't really do that with Melania. Rot and healing herself makes that almost impossible, also the one shot grab that she can do. It's a very tough fight. That all said though, I absolutely can see how Consort would potentially be number one...really the best option to fight him is to just put on 100 poise armor, talismans that reduce holy damage and increase your blocking ability with shields, grab the fingerprint stone shield with a bleed spear (I used Mohg's spear), and just stand there and pound away at him with your mimic.
I love all the other data points! "What makes a fun fight difficult" and "what makes a difficult fight fun" are some of the most important things for game developers for designing bosses, along with options to balance the variety. It's not just informative, it's educational!
Now I know why Midir feels overtuned even though he's apparently not that hard, and why Nameless king really feels like the quintessential hard boss. I wish you showed more details on dark souls 2 because I really wonder how Fume Knight and Nameless King compare
I agree! This is the stuff that interests me, how the data is visualised through the games design. IE Nameless King does powerful hits, which makes it hard.
I do feel there is so much more to look into, If I had more time (and sanity) Id have made a 30 minute video on each game seperately to actually give each boss the care it deserves. Fume Knight needs more looking into as to why its so different in data and perception!
I still remember my first time fighting Sword Saint Isshin. I actually beat him on my first try but oh my god was it close. No gourd or pellets left, heart pounding out of my chest. It was only later on when I found out about his reputation in difficulty.
When I reached him on NG+, he kicked my ass many many times and left me genuinely wondering how in the hell I beat him first try back then.
off the top of my head, i know SSI has more than 12 moves.
1) he rushes at you and the parry timing is immediately when he gets to you
2-3) he sheathes his sword, if you stay close to him he jumps towards you, swings, then does a sweeping attack. if you're far away he waits longer and then dashes in and does a cross slash
4) 3 hit combo
5) push you away into mikiri counter
6)no push away into mikiri counter
7) dragon flash (vertical wind wave attack
8) ichimonji into horizontal swipe
phase 2
9) long sword and spear combo
10) spear horizontal wind wave attack
11) overhead spear slam (normally an input read from healing
12-13) jump back into gunspam , has 2 follow ups, one is mikiri, other is a sweep attack
14) single heavy gun shot
15) diagonal wind slice
i think there's more moves for phase 2 but this is all off the top of my head
phase 3
15) overhead lightning attack
16) horizontal lightning attack
I believed this was the case, but used Fextralife as my source. I struggled to tell some of the moves apart but checking the footage you're probably right. More moves just means more patterns to remember, which is always going to test the player more!
Yeah, he must have more than 13 moves, but I would add that the worst (or best) thing about him is how he combines those into a never ending combo that you never saw before, for example I remember him doing the sword and spear combo and instead of waiting or jumping back, he rushed forward inmediately hitting me with the three gun shots when I was about to hit him
@@a.k.a_ems yep. I remember having trouble in each stage of the fight, resetting to remember the timings of different attacks. I bet if I rewatch it’s probably closer to 20-25 distinct combos
I'm quite shocked how fume knight is 8th place and old dragonslayer is 5th.
I think data may not be 100% accurate because it depends on how long have you been playing these games, what your build is and when you fight bosses. Fume knight can be accessed right after old iron king, so you can kill him as your 7th boss. But also you can kill him right before Nashandra. So the difference will be mainly in level of your character.
Exactly. DS3 was my first souls game and I died around 50 times at the Abyss Watchers LOL. More times than at Malenia. Also we are vastly different as players. Even in Sekiro where your build is very limited some people find Isshin way harder than the Demon of Hatred but for me it was the exact opposite. It threw me off because it wasn't a humanoid boss that can be parried. For me only the second phase of Isshin was truly hard with all the varied timings in his combos.
I think there's only ONE problem with this list, and it is that most people palying Demon's Souls on PS5 on TH-cam I saw, played it last, either after DS3 or after even Elden Ring. So by the time they played it it was a piece of cake. I was surprised at how easy it was, boss-wise, where the real difficulty was the levels themselves and that you had only one "bonfire" and that you needed to open shortcuts to the boss, and let's not mention the levels where there were NO shorcuts at all and you have to cross the whole level each time you wanted to reach the boss. But I had played all Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro at the time. I wonder how the results would be with actual playthroughs of the original release only.
Yep, gathering data for Demon's Souls was the most frustrating of all of them. I thought it would be easy, but sorting videos on TH-cam by date there were shockingly few lets plays pre 2011, which meant they had to be new players. Even then those players chose to summon a lot for every boss, which really does skew the data. Demon's Souls Remake is all good and all, but noone is picking it up before Elden Ring or DS3. I tried my hardest to only pick people who specifically state that its their first Fromsoft game. (Even though some people clearly lied knowing exactly what to do and when...)
I reckon If I had 3 friends who completely didnt know anything about Fromsoft Soulslikes and then made them play through it, the data would be far cleaner. Maybe someday in the future it would make much cleaner results!
@@OrangeJuiceJazhaha yes please use your friends for scientific experiments
31:08 holy shit! I haven't played Elden Ring yet and skipped its segment to avoid spoilers, only to immediately be confronted with that statistic. This picture made me so unbelievably fucking hype in literally just a second that it was on screen!
Royal rat authority Georg, who died to royal rat authority 68 times, is an outlier, and should not have been counted
@@rodo1252 yep. 100% the other runs were 5 and 2 deaths which is the problem with a low data pool. 100 runs would be perfect and outliers would smooth more. But I don’t want to die.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz for the record i think you handled the nuances of your data pool pretty well through the whole video 👍
@@rodo1252 they need to be addressed. I can’t just say Royal Rat is the hardest without looking into why. It’s why so much misinformation can come from data and graphs. It’s probably unfair on Darklurker, but hey ho! Interesting to see anyway!
wow the effort you put into this video it's truly respectable ! All the data gathering must taken infinite time...
peak content cant wait for the updated list with dlc
Lovely video! I was always puzzled why people seem to consider the older games as harder. My theory is that the most vocal souls players are the older ones who started with the earlier games. Your first game is always your hardest--though I'm glad to see that my nameless king PTSD wasn't without warrant according to these stats.
holy this is some high quality editing def subbin
Much appreciated my friend :)
13:16 this chart is crazy, god bless you for collecting this data. the only thing that surprises me is sekiro being lower than ER, when sekiro doesn't have any way to get overleveled and whallop a boss by sheer force without learning their patterns, you can only get a better chance to beat the boss by dying to the boss, whereas with elden ring you can go and upgrade your weapons, respec into strength and damage trade, respec into magic for a safer ranged option, respec into dex/arc for a broken bleed/freeze build, etc.
What a great video, now do it with all of Armored Core
I'll get back to work. Why didn't I just choose Pikmin instead of Fromsoft
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Coulda been easier doing all of mario tbh.
@@jackedup447 Yeah don't look at my other videos. the police may put me on a list.
Absolute maniac. You madman! Thank you for your dedication.
5:53 I don't think this is the case. What actually happened is that most of the people who fought the Penetrator rescued the NPC that gets automatically summoned... And that guy can pretty much solo the boss xD
@@sergiopucela I may have to go back and look at the footage. I know one person summoned another player. The other two just went around his back but I’ll have another check
I can't imagine the amount of time and effort put into making this. You managed to make a video about stats so much fun. I hope youtube does it thing and this vid blows up.
Ps: Bandai Namco actually released some stats for the main game, which also included the boss deaths. Interestingly, the results aren't that far off from your research (Malenia>margit>radagon>tree sentinel>radahn). Some pretty cool stuff, I'd suggest you check it out if you haven't.
Ah fantastic! Thats my hope, I could just read off stats from a spreadsheet, but It needs more visual elements to drive points home! I don't care so much, just glad people like it!
Oh really? have you got a link? Id love to look it up.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Great work bro!
idk why my comment keeps on getting removed. I'm guessing it's because of the link. Just look up the ER subreddit with this headline "Infographic stats from Bandai’s website"
Tbf that "Main, remembrance, and mandatory bosses" list is a bit generous. Im not sure... Demi-human chief. Is particularly mandatory or important.
@@rodo1252 So! I’m glad you brought this up. Originally I had 3 different lists for this.
All, which is all 170 odd bosses in the game
Main which would be all the remembrance bosses + the side bosses that caused trouble like Alecto, Tree Sentinel, Crucible knight etc.
Then remembrance bosses since they are the “non side bosses for story progression”. Difficult to categorise it. I also toyed with “unique bosses” but then I would have to not include Godrick. It’s weird.
Demi Human chief appeared on the main list because one person had that as their first boss and struggled hard with it!
That thumbnail has got me thinking Orphan and Malenia are about to team-fight agsinst Isshin and Nameless King.
Great video, well done.
For Elden Ring a big part of the difficulty with Malenia is that many first time players completely ignored very important defensive aspects of the character building and mechanics. People were rolling up to Haligtree with less than 50 vigor, no defensive talismans or buffs while also completely ignoring very important mechanics like guard counters and defensive ashes of war.
It was basically Nameless King all over again where a Boss was designed from the ground up to punish a certain popular tendency, it was roll spamming for Nameless King and glass cannon builds for Malenia.
What a fascinating video! Commenting for the algorithm so more people can see this gem.
Much appreciated! Thanks for watching :)
That was very informative!
I would be interested in a sequel including Elden Ring's DLC to see the difference between what we've perceived and how it really was.
Personally, I had lots of death on the first day because I thought that I could win in the DLC just by turning off my brain and spamming Lion's Claw. But once I realized that everything hits like a truck in the DLC, I actually started to dodge correctly the bosses' moves and I died way less. With Mimic, I've defeated Radhan in around 30min. Against Malenia tho even with Mimic, it took me days (but I was a beginner) so who's really the strongest? I'm not 100% sure.
if u play with mimic you cannot judge honestly
@@SolarflareSW why?
I fought both using Mimic. Why can't I compare?
@@azarmajed4810yeah i don’t see why not
@@azarmajed4810 Because summons allow you to beat the boss without learning their mechanics. If you don't know the mechanics how can you say how hard it is?
If you fight the boss solo you need to learn when it's safe to heal, when you can attack inbetween the bosses combos.
if there is someone else to take agro your heal/attack window just becomes wait until your spirit ashe take agros
I beat malenia solo I beat her the moment I could consistently dodge all her attacks and knew exactly when it was safe to heal/attack
I promise if I watched you fight malenia solo you will not be able to dodge her attacks consistantly and be able to attack safely.
if I am wrong summon me to your world or i'll summon you to mine.
I will give you 5 attempts to fight her solo, if you are able to get to malenia's second phase twice in those 5 attempts I will say I am wrong.
if you can't even get the boss to the second phase consistantly then you did not learn her movesett well enough to be able to rate the bosses difficulty.
@@epic1053 Nah man, forget about summoning me to your world. Here is a video of me fighting Malenia solo at RL1: th-cam.com/video/NM1n3l6gN1Y/w-d-xo.html
You didn't get my point at all tho. If I fight BOTH Malenia and Radhan using the same summon, I can tell which one was the hardest for me under those circumstances. Yes it's easier than fighting solo, but no it doesn't mean you can't compare the difficulty between fights using the same summon.
Come on man, stop this elitist Souls player behavior. This is making the fanbase look bad.
Crazy thing, I’m a guy who died to pinwheel. I only started playing dark souls a few days ago sometime last week. I went to the catacombs straight away, I got past the mobs which was very hard and I was confused. I have played other from soft games but never dark souls 1, so I just assumed it was a difficult game because it was an old game, I got to pinwheel, he killed me. I came back again and killed him. Worst part is, I headed down to tomb of the giants and getting back out of there when I realised I wasn’t supposed to be there was a slog.
I did manage to get the ember though, so it was actually worth going down there
Now this is a new level of masochism I can get behind. Thanks for your service my man
Thanks so much. My girlfriend is begging me not to do a video on Final Fantasy or Pokemon, knowing that would take over 1000 hours to gather the data easily.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz hey man I just wanna say that I think the data really adds value to the video. I hope you keep it up!
You might wanna check out Johnstone’s content if you end up deciding to do pokemon; I haven’t played the games in a while but he puts a lot of time and thought into his experiments and also usually does have his stats/data displayed on screen, sometimes discussing it.
@@timothyvenske6519 Thank you so much! Oh absolutely, that would be a great start for me. If I have questions already answered then I don't need to research the games. But I will look them up! Thanks!
Hats of to you, you have my respect. It's surreal watching this video and thinking of how much time you've dedicated to watch all of this content and collect all of your data.
You came out of nowhere, make incredible content and throw in Semon of Dong?
I'll hand it over. That thing. My subscription.
Thank you very much for your work. Is it possible to have your docs to see the statistics in detail ?
@@Aatroxity thanks so much! At some point when I have finished the SOTE video I will put them online :)
This video is insane. Props for compiling all this data.
For me sekiro is the easiest game from all fromsoft and owl father is harder than isshin, the sword saint
This is interesting, I have heard both the opinion of its the Easiest or the Hardest. Maybe its because there isn't much leeway with the combat, so if you GET the mechanics and parrying, you clean house.
If you struggle to time parries (I am notoriously bad with rhythm games), then its tough. I found Owl Father 2nd hardest (behind Demon of Hatred for me)
I agree! Owl father is much harder than Isshin
I will never get over the Rat boss deaths in DS2, that you mentioned. In the hundreds of hours I put into that game, I'm pretty sure I died to it twice. On my first playthrough, and it felt like flukes. I imagine those stats have a lot to do with it being peoples introductions into DS.
Yep. If you take out the outlier who died over 50 times. Which is down to the build not being good at dealing with mobs from what I remember, then RRA goes down to like 10th.
Imo Melanias difficulty isnt due to her being a well designed, skill required boss. Its because of her BS healing on hit and how far she can travel with her waterfowl dance
@@Willzb-xk4ew yeah I’d probably agree. The healing disincentivises tanky defence builds and the Waterfowl dance is just cruel really. I feel like Radahn doesn’t have any of these annoyances and just is hard. End of
She has regen and also giant pull of hp. Amongst main bosses only Fire Giant and Rikard have more HP. But Rikard is gimmick boss and Fire Giant has +100% dmg weak spots (and 0% phys dmg resists).
I feel like certain bosses in DS3 like Gael, Watchers and SoC are gimmick bosses in a sense in that they don’t punish rolling away and have a generous jumping splash attack if you do so which can be punished. If you are already rolling back and see the pattern, they become trivial. Compared to say Fume’s stab combo or Midirs 1HKO dash, they basically provide gifts. Gael’s third phase for instance is hard to get hit if you bait the triple splash attack and wail on him during recovery.
Honestly sword saint isshin kinda surprises me. Most of my deaths in that fight were me throwing myself off the cliff cause I wasn’t happy with the attempt. Ik people consider him difficult but for me it felt like after all the general minibosses I was pretty well prepared. Imo I found isshin in the shura ending harder because of his fire attacks.
@@HomeostaticOwl that’s interesting! Maybe you really clicked with the combat and so things were less of a test for your parrying! I found Demon of Hatred an absolute nightmare. That and Guardian Ape… actually I suck as Sekiro…
It is really cool how much harder your first souls game is than the others you play, my first was ds1 and i no joke habe more deaths to taurus demon by far than any other boss ive done after playing every souls game. I died like 130 times to taurus demon and only beat him because he fell off the ledge which i didnt even know could happen at the time.
they aren’t really “souls likes” souls likes are not made by fromsoftware, these are “souls games”. It’s like calling a castlevania game a metroidvania, quite redundant and wrong.
Such a good video! I’m glad it came up in my feed
@@ShadeAnris thank you so much! Appreciate it x
Demon of Hatred bar none. Sekiro has the top 5 imo cause that game is actually difficult in ways that you can't just cheese like Soulslikes. Like there's nobody who you can summon to bail you out, it takes actual execution to play Sekiro well and the Demon of Hatred you can't just stack buffs and burn through you have to chip aways little by little.
Sekiro challenge runs are way more impressive than any other game Fromsoft makes too.
In my opinion, the ones I struggled most with are (Non DLC):
Demon of Hatred
Orphan of Kos
Malenia
Ornstein and Smough
Genichiro
Yeah, no. Isshin Ashina, Inner Isshin and Isshin, the Sword Saint only took me between 7 to 9 attempts max. Since then, they've always taken far less. You can also cheese all of them, too. But even if I struggled with them like most people who aren't anywhere near as good, Consort Radahn would be the most difficult anyway. Miyazaki aimed to push the difficulty of Shadow of the Erdtree to a height above all of their games, to set a bar for boss difficulty never seen within FromSoftware games. And they did.
The work put into this video really paid off in terms of the quality of information. It's very interesting to see this data and how it aligns with the community perception, especially given I've felt relatively alone in saying that the difficulty of bosses has only trended upwards over time. I've thought Fromsoft has felt a need to challenge people more as players become more experienced and the community gains ever increasing resources. I think it would also be very interesting to have a new player vs veteran player compression just to see how much experience effects boss difficulty, and if veteran players are really having as easy a time with bosses like the Abyss Watchers as they are saying.
@@Natalie-sr8hm yeah. There’s lots that still could be analysed if it came down to it, having a larger pool of people who played it would be handy, but it is what it is for now. Future videos perhaps!
Thanks so much!
After completing a Level 1 run in every Souls game and Elden Ring I can say that ER is hands down the hardest fromsoft game, casually it's extremely easy cause of Mimic tear and bleed plus all the crazy builds you can make but challenge running the game is very difficult, hell I fought the first boss in Dark Souls 3 at SL1 and beat it first try and in ER it took 1-2 hours to beat Margit RL1, Margit is harder than every Souls game 1st boss combined.
Yeah christ... absolute madlad. I can imagine this to be the case. Demon Souls each enemy has far more predictable patterns. While in Elden Ring the Enemy AI is far more sophisticated to mix it up. I hate to imagine what Miyazaki will cook up for the next one
I've not done rl1, but I have the plat, during which I solo'd every boss at least once, and yeah. That playfile is 600 hours. It's not just how absurdly big and long the game is, there are bosses that are notably much harder to solo than any other from game. Just the final boss gauntlet in itself is a right hassle.
That said, Glock Saint Isshin gave me more trouble than any other from boss so far.
This has got to be one of the most interesting and well done video ideas I've seen on youtube in a long time. Well done OrangeJuiceJaz, you are the darkest soul
0:02 things start to get serious
I know that all players of these games have different strengths and weaknesses, but I just can't fathom the Nameless King data. I found that boss to be fairly easy, but he probably just uses abilities that I find easier to read than most people.
Good video, but please make the gameplay segments full screen for the next one. Watching this on my phone's screen was difficult.
@@zeroflame33 thank you for watching! I would genuinely love too, but unfortunately unless they are shrunk and have some slight speed changes to them, TH-cam flags the video with copyright a lot of the time meaning the video doesn’t get shown or I have to literally remove and reupload the video again without the footage. It’s annoying I agree. I am sorry!
@@OrangeJuiceJaz Ah I see, that makes sense
@@zeroflame33 I don't get money from the videos, but it literally gets taken down or removed otherwise. Same with music, why its quiet and pitch shifted.
Great video, been saying this for ever. The difficulty in earlier souls were the run backs, actual artificial difficulty.. vs what ER is accused of
Yep. Biggest take from the video seem to be this. Maybe I should do the toughest older bosses and look at their actual run backs more to see which are the most egregious.
Really think this video could have been improved with the addition of SOTE as there's a lot of discussion if the final boss is harder than anything else From has put out. Also curious how people would view the difficulty of Kos or Midir fighting them after Putrescent Knight and Bayle, as they're very closely related fights.
Great comprehensive view.
@@thebluegiraffe4796 I am making a video of SOTE compared to the base game. Started making this a month before and thought I’d be finished. Spoiler alert. The final boss is hard
The final boss is at least three times harder than anything before it imo
@@umutozer9667 spoiler alert. I have started collecting data for SOTE. The final boss already has more deaths in one run than Nameless king did in 3. I think we could have a new top.
There's no discussion. It is.
@@FlaskFlash while it's harder than the games I've played for sure, there's a lot of folks that think Isshin or Kos is harder. Haven't played bb/sekiro yet.
Some people think Midir is harder lol
I've only ever played Sekiro and Elden RIng (with the DLC as well) out of all of these, and i must admit, your conclusions match my own observations, up to a one new game plus. The main caveat being, for me at least, Sekiro prepared me so well by the end of the game, that i didn't find Sword Saint Ashina as hard, regarding the effort and time invested to beat him. But Lady Butterfly and Genichiro take all the credit for that, as those two fights, as hard as they were for me when i first played, gave me all the tools to face him, on a much more level footing. It was still i hard fight, but in the end i beat him at the start of my third session (one session lasting from a couple of hours up to 4 hours), unlike Genichiro that took 3 full sessions, similar to Lady Butterfly. Headless Ape and Demon of Hate on the other hand, most likely because of how much of a departure from the main game-flow they are, were just plain hard. They didn't take as much time, but they took possibly even more effort, due to how outside the box you need to think when facing them, in a game that unlike Elden Ring, doesn't give you many tools to deal with diversity. Elden Ring wise, not counting the DLC, was largely as you mentioned. That being said, my second run was much easier and my new game plus run, was even made trivial by the full assortment of skills, weapons and spells i accumulated (Radahn died before he could take his meteor/comet form). That being said, due to the variety of bosses, you don't get the impression that the game has prepared you for the end fights like you do in Sekiro. Not on the first run at least. The bosses just have way too varied move sets and abilities, so you constantly need to adapt. HOWEVER, by the start of your second run (non new game plus), you are prepared. You are in fact so WELL prepared, that the second run is even easier then Sekiro's. Melenia, which i fought for 4 days before actually needing to respec in order to beat the first time around, fell in just 5 or 6 tries. Literally 10-15 minutes. Melenia man! And when i went into the DLC at level 141 or so (well inside recommended range of 130-150), it wasn't really all that hard. Yes, there are new bosses, yes they have unique moves, yes they hit HARD, but so do WE! The hardest boss in the game took about 2 hours to beat. 2 hours! Compare that to my first run of Elden Ring or Sekiro, when those fights took sessions, often separated by days. I don't know, maybe running full games of Sekiro and Elden RIng prepared my mindset enough, but i just didn't feel the DLC all that hard. Not in terms of relative effort anyways. Disclaimer: ER was my first souls like, so maybe that played a roll as well.
I think souls games are easier the more you watch people play them. I played bloodborne and ds3 a few years back, almost blind, and struggled so intensely miserably hard (like 200 deaths per boss) that I quit. About a year later I started regularly watching people play these games on youtube. Now having my own ps5 and playing elden ring and bloodborne (haven’t retried ds3 yet), I’ve died maybe like 20 times total in each game except for my attempt to do Dual Crucible Knight fight at level 45 to get the set in Elden ring. It feels like surprisingly easy. Not really sure why
It's closer to a Rhythm game than people think. Most bosses have clear windups and swings, which if you watch and observe its much clearer. Being in the fight sets in a bit of panic which makes it difficult to read attacks.
Genuinely probably does help you understand where and when to dodge and attack!
20 times total per game? Lmao. You're lying for attention. Grow up
I feel like Fromsoft should be paying you for this research data breakdown
I mean if they are willing to pay me in figurines or a moonlight greatsword I wouldn't say no
I think the main reason for Malenia being considered the hardest boss is because most ER players are very new to soulsborne games, I've only played DS3 and moved on to Elden Ring. When I reached Malenia I was disappointed to defeat her on the third attempt.
@@Pontiffeye yeah I agree, this could be the case. Lots of this could come down to the people who I chose to play the game. I tried desperately to find people who played it as their first fromsoft game. Which was a nightmare for Dark Souls 2. You’d think earlier games would therefore be more difficult as it would be mosts first game.
My friend beat Malenia in 20 tries and Elden Ring was his first fromsoft. So it just sort of depends.
That's just flawed boss design. I couldn't stop hating on Malenia in the last two years due to how they made her to be the unquestionable hardest boss everyone must talk about all the time when they mention Elden Ring yet certain builds can just stunlock her for 90% of the fight where she won't even do her most dangerous attacks, while other builds get completely shut down by her input reading, combo escapes and infinite hyper armor which can even prevent stance breaks.
@@lharsay It sort of just is what it is with the unbelievable variety in Elden ring. I had a big bonk build using the Ruins greatsword first time and I had to resort to Mimic Tear scrub fighting to beat her since I suck. But then saw people using Wheel of Ghiza to just eviscerate her. She isn't my favourite fight purely as the Waterfowl dance feels like such a sword of damacles hanging over my head that at any point it may completely kill me.
It is definitely better based on different builds. I like a lot of the DLC fights as they feel varied and interesting regardless of build.
@@lharsay no it's not, it just highlights how people have widely differing experiences based on there build and playstyle. This has been a thing since forever.
@@OrangeJuiceJaz believe it or not but you definitely could have just blocked the first flurry of waterfowl with two handing the ruins greatsword if you have something like 40 endurance. You don't need 100 physical reduction or a great shield to do this.
Great video.
As someone that got platinum on Bloodborne last week, I can say that the only boss that gave me some trouble (that you didn't mention) was Abhorrent Beast from the Ailing Loran Chalice layer 3.
PS: I already got platinum on all the other soulslike, so I'm quite experienced, however, for some reason, this boss was a pain for me.
This is the exact kind of video I needed in my feed, insane work there fam
Amazing video. May your channel flourish. Analyzing 500 hours of content for this is madness, please dont go hollow 🙏🏻
Much appreciated! I am already 70 hours in on SOTE. Maybe this is my purpose and when I stop analysing video games I will let the Undead curse take hold.
Dude, gimmick for Flamelurker is purple shield! Turns the fight into absolute cake!
This was fun! :)
I really miss the "gimmick" fights. Spamming circle and r1 is fine and all, obviously hard enough, but some variation would be great.
Here's to hoping Sekiro's combat get's another go!
Good job! Nice to have numbers :)
Just started learning data. Great content! Deserves a sub!
This is super dope I really hope this account blows up
i think instead of "deaths by falling" it should've been "deaths by environment", further broken into falling vs environmental hazards like poison, fire, damaging spikes, explosive barrels, falling rocks, collapsing arena, curse fountains, petrification jars.
i am just realizing now that many (most?) of these unique environmental hazards are from DS2 and didn't reappear in any subsequent games. that's a shame because they're so fun.
yes, i'm the one miyazaki plant who loves environmental hazards like poison swamps.
they change the gameplay dynamics a lot, they encourage creativity and diversify your interaction with the game, and as an added bonus, those hazards can be loads of fun when the enemies are also vulnerable to them, like explosive barrels. this kind of thing rewards creativity, it doesn't make much of a difference if you run through the levels without fighting anyone like a speedrunner, but if you're actually being thoughtful and cautious, and you're actually fighting all the enemies, those hazards can be super fun.
like don't tell me you've never been messing around in a souls game, led an enemy/npc to a lethal fall, and then used something with knockback like a zweihander or a kick to send them off the cliff.
that's some good old fashioned deliberate engagement with the environment right there.
it's not just a backdrop for a boss rush, it's a world, the fighting is guerilla, cunning beats muscle 9 times out of 10.
The massive spike over "Biggie Smalls" for DS1 is hilarious.
Thank you for your work and this video! It was magnificent! Additional respect for playing Majula OST at some point.
@@Amoeby absolutely! I appreciate it a lot :)
I mean the fromsoft games have some excellent music, but Majula is definitely the best hub world song for sure
I think the reason 4 kings have such a high perception is their NG+ version. Waaay back in the day before DS2, when NG+ runs of dark souls were big in the community, 4 kings were legendary for wreaking havoc.
@@derangedberger yeah I have heard that they become a mega barrier at the time!