Two Phases, Gank Fights and Gimmicks: How FromSoftware Designs Bosses

2026-10-24 · 8 min read · Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls III, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring

FromSoftware has made hundreds of bosses across its soulslike games, and once you have fought enough of them you start to see the same skeletons under different skin. That is not a criticism. A small number of templates, used with intent, is exactly how you get a library of fights that feel distinct but still teach a consistent language. Learn the templates and new bosses become readable faster, and that is half of what people mean when they say they have got good at these games.

What follows is a field guide to the main patterns, with examples from every game in the series. The categories overlap - plenty of bosses are a phase fight and a gimmick fight at the same time - but each has its own purpose, and each has its own failure mode when it goes wrong.

The phase transition

The two-phase boss is the series' signature move. You learn a moveset, bring the health bar down to around half, and the boss changes: a new weapon, a new element, a transformation, sometimes a new health bar entirely. Done well, the transition is a story beat as much as a mechanical one. It tells you the opponent was holding something back.

Godrick the Grafted is the textbook early example. At the phase change he grafts a dragon's head onto his arm and starts breathing fire, which is both a new set of attacks and a perfect summary of the character: a weak lord who has spent his whole life stitching other people's strength onto himself. Lady Maria in Bloodborne's Old Hunters DLC goes from a fast, honest swordswoman to someone using her own blood as a weapon, and then sets her blades alight. Each phase raises the tempo without changing the core rhythm you have learned.

The Soul of Cinder is the most loved transition in the series. Its first phase cycles through the fighting styles of previous Lords of Cinder. Its second phase drops the stance-switching and fights you with Gwyn's moveset from the first Dark Souls, while a piano version of Gwyn's theme plays. It is a phase change that works entirely through memory: players who never played Dark Souls see a hard fight, and players who did see the whole trilogy come full circle.

Sekiro takes the idea furthest, with bosses that have several deathblow markers and shift between them. Isshin, the Sword Saint is the final form of a fight that starts as Genichiro, and its later phases add a spear, a gun and lightning to a moveset you already respect. Malenia, in Elden Ring, becomes the Goddess of Rot at her phase change, opening with Scarlet Aeonia, an attack that teaches you to run before it teaches you anything else.

The failure mode is the transition that invalidates rather than escalates. A second phase that resets everything you learned and is far harder than the first makes the first phase a toll you pay on every attempt. The best phase fights keep enough of the first phase alive that your learning carries over.

The gank fight

Souls games are built around one-on-one duels, so fights with multiple enemies are a deliberate rule change. They stop asking whether you can read an opponent and start asking whether you can manage a space. The good ones are puzzles about positioning and order. The bad ones are a crowd.

Ornstein and Smough are the archetype, and the reason they work is that order matters. Kill Ornstein first and Smough absorbs his power, gaining lightning. Kill Smough first and Ornstein becomes a giant. Same encounter, two different second halves, and it rewards the player who chose deliberately. The Bell Gargoyles, one of the first bosses in Dark Souls, teach the same lesson earlier and more gently: a second gargoyle joins partway through, and you have to deal with one before the other overwhelms you.

Dark Souls II leans on group fights more than any other game in the series, and it is the best illustration of the pattern's range. The Throne Watcher and Throne Defender revive each other unless both are brought down close together, which turns a two-on-one into a damage-management puzzle. The Ruin Sentinels, the Royal Rat Authority and the Belfry Gargoyles are less loved, and they show what happens when the answer is simply to survive more enemies at once.

Dark Souls III found a clever variant with the Abyss Watchers: the boss is a group of warriors, and some of the extras fight each other as well as you, so the encounter has its own politics. Elden Ring's Godskin Duo goes the other way, two bosses resurrecting each other on a shared health bar in one of the most disliked fights in the game. The difference between the two is the clearest summary of the pattern: a gank fight is good when the extra bodies create decisions, and bad when they only create noise.

The gimmick boss

A gimmick boss is one that cannot be beaten, or cannot be beaten comfortably, by normal fighting. Instead you have to notice something about the arena or the encounter. These are the fights people remember fondly once and never want to play again, and they are some of the best moments in the series.

Demon's Souls' Storm King is a giant flying ray over the Shrine of Storms. The real fight is finding the Storm Ruler sword in the arena, which fires a shockwave that can reach it in the sky.
Yhorm the Giant in Dark Souls III repeats the trick with a Storm Ruler of his own, lying in his arena. Swing it normally and it does little. Charge it and the giant goes down in a handful of hits.
The Dragon God in Demon's Souls is a stealth fight: you sneak between pillars to reach two ballistae while an enormous demon searches for you.
The Old Monk, also in Demon's Souls, could be another player. When online, the game pulls a real person into your world to play the boss.
Bloodborne's Micolash is a chase through the Nightmare of Mensis, a boss you have to corner before you can fight him.
Sekiro's Folding Screen Monkeys is a hide-and-seek puzzle with four monkeys, each catchable a different way.
The Great Serpent Rykard in Elden Ring is meant to be fought with the Serpent-Hunter, a spear the game hands you just before the arena, whose weapon art only reaches its full length in that room.

Gimmick bosses are designed for the first playthrough. The moment of realisation is the content, and on a replay the fight is often trivial. That is a feature. It breaks up a long game and reminds you that the world has more tools than your weapon. The failure mode is the gimmick that is hard to see and punishing to miss, which brings us to the bed.

When the gimmick fails

The Bed of Chaos is the end of Lost Izalith in Dark Souls, and it is the most widely disliked boss in the series. You have to break two roots on either side of the arena, while the floor collapses into a pit beneath you and branches sweep across the room, and then fall into a hole and find the core. Each of those steps is fine. Together they make a fight where you die from the arena, not the boss, and the only progress that survives a death is the roots you already broke. It is the cautionary tale for every gimmick fight since.

FromSoftware seems to agree. Later gimmicks are generally kinder: Yhorm gives you the answer in the room, Rykard gives it to you at the door. The design lesson the studio took from the Bed of Chaos is that a gimmick can be a surprise, but it should not be a trap.

The duel

The last pattern is the simplest and the most loved: one opponent, roughly human-sized, with a weapon and a moveset as complex as yours. Artorias in the Dark Souls DLC was the first of these that players treated as a benchmark. Slave Knight Gael, Lady Maria, Gehrman, Isshin, Malenia and Messmer followed. These fights have no gimmick and often no extra mechanic at all. They are about reading another fighter.

Duels are where the series' combat design shows its quality most directly, because nothing hides weak animation or bad telegraphing. They are also where the arguments about difficulty happen, because a duel that is too fast or too delayed has nowhere to put the blame but the boss. When people rank FromSoftware bosses, the top of the list is almost always duels.

Gimmick bosses test whether you are paying attention. Duels test whether you were paying attention the last forty times.

Repeats, remixes and runbacks

Two quieter patterns are worth a mention. The first is the callback: Iudex Gundyr at the start of Dark Souls III becomes Champion Gundyr much later, and the Asylum Demon of the first Dark Souls returns as the Stray Demon. Done well, it is a progress check. Elden Ring's repeated field bosses - another Erdtree Avatar, another Night's Cavalry, another pair of Crucible Knights - show the downside when the same idea is stretched across a world that size.

The second is the Sekiro Guardian Ape. You land the final deathblow, the music stops, the game seems to end the fight - and then the ape gets back up, holding its own head, and the second phase begins. It is a phase transition disguised as a victory, and it is a reminder that half of FromSoftware's boss design is about breaking the patterns it has spent years teaching you.

Patterns in Soulsdle

Most of the bosses mentioned here are in the Soulsdle pool, and the patterns show up in the data. Group bosses like Ornstein and Smough share a single entry, which can make their type and health columns surprising. Phase bosses often carry two or three types at once, because the creature you finish is not the one you started with. If the type tile comes back orange on a boss you thought was simple, it is worth asking which phase you were remembering.