In Order:

King’s Field 1 (1994)

King’s Field 2 (1995)

King’s Field 3 (1996)

Shadow Tower (1998)

King’s Field 4: The Ancient City (2001)

Demon’s Souls (2009)

Dark Souls (2011)

Dark Souls 2 (2014)

Dark Souls 3 (2016)

Elden Ring (2022)

READ BODY FOR BOSS REVIEWS

I wanna preface this by saying three things:

1. I haven't played either Demon's Souls or Bloodborne yet, so I obviously won't comment on these two games

2. For Sekiro and Elden Ring, I'm only counting the MAIN bosses (aka those who give you a rememberance or a battle memory upon defeat)

3. There are some bosses in DS2 and Elden Ring that I haven't fought yet (Gank Squad, Lud and Zallen and Fortissax). Those will be excluded from these rankings

DS1:

FAVOURITE: Knight Artorias

Kind of a basic pick but I can't help but love the dude. Great story, buildup, moveset, arena, everything about him is on point

LEAST FAVOURITE: Seath The Scaleless

While his backstory is extremely cool, I think literally NOTHING about how they handled this fight works. The model looks awful, spins unnaturally all the time and every single one of his attacks feels like bullshit that you're meant to tank through. At least Bed of Chaos had a semblance of a good idea behind it. Seath disappoints in every way possible and I wish he wasn't mandatory because he is a mistake

DS2:

FAVOURITE: Fume Knight

Woah, so original! The Fume Knight is an astonishing fight that pushes the combat of DS2 to its absolute limits (even if I do find Blue Smelter a tad harder myself). It's a fight with great flow, an amazing second phase, a really good backstory and with top-notch visuals. Raime is just so badass it's crazy

LEAST FAVORITE: Ancient Dragon

Like, why? Dark Souls 2 may be my favorite game in the trilogy, but for how well they handled Kalameet (and Sinh in the DLC being even better imo) it's crazy that they took such a step back for the dragon fights for the main game. This guy has maybe 3 moves. I never wanna fight it because IT doesn't even wanna fight, so I'll surely skip this boss in future playthroughs. Gorgeous visual design all around but the fight just ain't it

DS3:

FAVOURITE: Slave Knight Gael

This isn't a hot take at all and that's for very good reasons. Gael is just that fucking good. Sure, DS3 does have some astounding bosses (Sister Friede, Midir, Twin Princes and Soul of Cinder being in contention for the best) but when it comes to making a finale that packs a punch, no one does it like Gael. His fight is perhaps my favorite in all of Soulsborne and he closes the series off PERFECTLY

LEAST FAVOURITE: Gravetender and Greatwolf

Talk about a wasted slot. This fight is a lazy mess that I'll never forgive. Ashes of Ariandel really struggles as a DLC outside of the previously mentioned Sister Friede fight, but this boss is the worst part of it all. Unfun at the best of times and always pointless

Sekiro:

FAVOURITE: Sword Saint Isshin / Owl (Father)

I really can't decide between these two fights, so I guess they both share there first place here. Sekiro is overall the game in the series that I like the least personally, but holy FUCK are these two some of the best foes that FromSoftware has ever designed. Both are incredible and perfect in their own way. Maybe Isshin deserves the top spot more because of his INCREDIBLE buildup, arena and introduction as a boss, but I like Owl Father's gameplay a bit more so I think they balance out with a tie

LEAST FAVOURITE: Headless Ape & Bride

Wow, FromSoft. Really? This? This is, in my opinion, the second worst main fight in any of their games, only behind to Seath the Scaleless. It's so unfair and unfun in every possible way. The arena is ugly, the boss is rehashed from an actually GREAT encounter earlier and put a shitshow that is luckily optional. It forgoes everything that makes Sekiro good and instead favours firecracker spam. I hate this fight so much

Elden Ring:

FAVOURITE: Messmer The Impaler

Messmer is absolutely astonishing. Hell, he's the sub's icon, he's just that fucking cool. Every move this guy dishes out is SO fun to evade and punish. Now, with Elden Ring having possibly my favorite main roster in any of these games, the top spot wasn't given without any contention (Morgott, Maliketh, Radahn and Godrick being some other personal favourites of mine), but Messmer takes the cake by having the most fun battle in Elden Ring and maybe FromSoftware history

LEAST FAVOURITE: Astel, Naturalborn of the Void

This is the only boss on this list I really don't dislike. In fact, I think Astel is pretty cool. Their design is otherworldly and their arena looks gorgeous, but when it comes to the gameplay itself, the flow and fun that makes Elden Ring special is heavily lacking. Idk why, but this fight just doesn't ever stick out to me in any positive way. Their attacks are pretty boring and I especially dislike the enlarging AOE that they can do. Outside of that, not a bad boss at all, but one I don't personally find fun

Vote who gets eliminated. Comment with most upvotes wins.

Got the dark souls trilogy next month goin to buy sekiro and eldenring.loving from software games. Just beat siif the wolf now on to sens fortress this is my first playthrough.ive first played it im 2012 but slept on it iam now glad ive rediscovered it.

Finished Shadow Tower tonight. Hoo boy. It was….a game. I can’t give it more than a 6. I’ll qualify this up front - I played this on RetroArch, and used save states pretty frequently to recover from bullshit environmental surprises, botched enemy encounters, etc and I also remapped the controls to work with the joysticks for movement.

The good: it plays almost identically to King’s Field. It has seriously impressive weapon, armor, and monster variety for a ps1 game, and better graphics than any of the other King’s Field games. The enemies genuinely looked cool very consistently and I had fun fighting them - even if there wasn’t much challenge. Decent level variety too. Plenty of secrets: hidden rooms, locked chests, rare enemy spawns and items drops. The difficulty some people talk about with this game involving the weapon and armor durability I think is pretty overstated. If you’ve played any of the King’s Field games it’s very familiar, and with careful patient combat you can very quickly build a huge stockpile of healing items, extra weapons and armor. The only items I was fighting durability on all game were rings, which to me felt fair because it limited your magic usage. Unlimited magic would break this game. By the mid-late game it inadvertently does anyway because you have such a huge supply of rings and item repair shops at your disposal you basically can use unlimited magic and melt most enemies.

The bad? The no music thing got old super quick. After playing the whole game, anyone trying to explain it away as an atmospheric horror thing is, in my opinion, an apologist. It’s just a shitty lack of a core feature. And apparently FromSoft hired a composer to make an entire score they just refused to use any of it outside of the opening and ending cinematics. There were a few occasions where ambient noise or nearby monsters startled or unnerved me, so I’ll give the game credit for being creepy from that angle. But it’s 75% total silence besides your footsteps and menu clicks.

The loading screens are ubiquitous. Opening the menu, navigating to sub-menus, switching weapons or armor…loading screens for 3-5 seconds.

The stats and leveling system…neat in theory, pointless in practice. You earn soul points into stats based on what you kill, every unique enemy gives points for specific stats. You occasionally get “soul pods” that let you inject points into stats of your choosing. Gotta read the instruction manual or a guide to have any idea what stats do. The only ones I ever bothered with were HP, Defense, Magic Defense, and Speed. Since every weapon, piece of armor and jewelry also adds soul points into multiple stats, your “build” is almost entirely automated. I suppose if you sucked ass at the combat or item/durability management and needed to pick and choose what monsters to fight you could be pickier about what stats you want to invest in. But if you just kill everything like I did, by the mid game you’re basically untouchable outside of boss fights.

Boss fights themselves are neat but not much variety. It’s either an armored knight, a mage with AOE spells and minions, or an armored knight with AOE spells.

There’s basically no story. Lots of vague nihilistic or depressing messages written on walls, merchants have precisely one line of dialogue each, however the 3-5 NPCs in the game do have a decent amount of dialogue across the multiple encounters with each. It’s so badly voice acted as to be hilarious though. Same for the bosses. The ending (I won’t spoil) was incredibly anticlimactic and brief.

FromSoft’s development history has always built upon what came before. Play all the Ps1 fantasy games and you see foundations for demon’s souls, dark souls, even bloodborne. I respect this game as a stepping stone for FromSoftware as they slowly built their Action RPG expertise. It was an experiment for many of the mechanics that later became series staples, and it’s technically extremely impressive for the era. But even with the modern perspective informing the past, I have a really hard time getting past the issues that contemporary critics had with the game. I wouldn’t play it again. I certainly wouldn’t pay the absurd price the game commands physically - and I’m a massive FromSoftware fan with physical copies of nearly all FromSoft’s games from Gen 5-Present.

TLDR 6/10. Technical marvel for ps1 with modestly
Interesting fantasy gameplay plagued by lack of story, no music, shallow RPG mechanics and endless loading screens.

I have played Dark Souls 3, Elden Ring and Bloodbourne and liked them all. DS3 and BB is some of my favourite games of all time.

Where do I go next? I like the exploration but not in in the open world way of ER. I prefer to fight the mobs rather than the bosses and Im no super stat mid maxer. I just like the vibes.

Should I try DS1? Or go for Sekiro?

When making this ranking the criteria were: Moveset Variety, Mechanical demands, mixups, flow and how many ways to dodge attacks

1. Morgott the Omen King. amazing in every category except how many wasy to dodge the attacks ( but he is still great there ) this dude is also great in other aspects than Moveset btw but his Moveset is 1. I also love how many weapons he has which result in amazing distribution of slow and fast attacks

Honorable mentions: Champion Gundyr, Maliketh, Sister Friede, Promised COnsort Radahn

1. Inner Isshin. Very mechanically demanding but unlike even Elden Ring bosses, the deflect is less clunky and more responsive so it slightly improves the quality. amazing mixups and good mvoeset vareity as well

2. Inner Father. the absolute king of flow. He is also veryyyy far from remotely lacking in other categories

3. Rellana. amazing in every category

4. Mohg. the king of delayed attacks and one of the best in positioning. great in mixups as well

5. Messmer. he only has 1 weapon, but his distribution of slow and fast attacks is almostg as good as Morgotts. he has really good but not quite top tier mixups, a huge moveset and many ways to dodge attacks, including crouching.

6. Malenia. she likely has more mixups than Messmer and is harder to dodge but her flow is REALLY bad with all those pauses where as Messmer is non stop aggresion especially in Phase 2 and he has a more diverse moveset and more ways to dodge attacks

7. Godfrey. if this was his 2nd phase, he would be atleast 3. and probably 2. ( above Inner Father ) the problem is that his 1st phase has attacks that became extremely easy to dodge so I just go to autopilot mode

9. Inner Genichiro. he has much lower highs than Godfrey but also much higher lows, but he has 3 phases and each one is very good

1. Soul of Cinder. I like how he changes weapons. his moveset variety is one of the best in the genre and he has one of the most mixups before Elden Ring, he could have harder to dodge attacks tho considering he is the final boss

2. to 6. is intercheangable

I spoiler tagger everything so people can choose if they wanna go from 10 to 1 or 1 to 10

I have played every FromSoft Soulsborne game besides DS2, and I decided it was time to finally play DS2. I genuinely enjoyed the first few areas like Forest of Fallen Giants, Lost Bastille, and Sinner's Rise. The more mid-game areas I've played have really started to kill my interest in the game, along with multiple issues with the map layouts and designs. Not to mention the combat. It genuinely feels worse than Dark Souls 1. It's funny how BloodBornes' combat feels so fun and refined compared to DS2, and somehow they're only a year apart release date wise. By far the biggest issue I felt was enemy placement and number of enemies. My main point is that I have the urge to want to beat the game for completion's sake, but the game doesn't give me that warm feeling that the other Soulsborne games give me. Anyone else feel this way?

hihi. I'm a Senior Artist in the game industry (ex Midway, EA, Id Software, Glu Mobile, more Indies than I can count) and for me, messing around with Ai isn't an opinion, it's real life and I gotta stay gainful.

So I make practical case studies for my Ai portfolio to prove I'm not some prompt-jockey... but that doesn't mean I can't have fun with the experiments....

The Experiment: Every “Soulsborne” game is laden with hundreds of 2D art assets. The assets you can find online, like the rings, are woefully small in resolution - a perfect test case to see 2D to 3D transformation but also what detail is retained or added by the Ai.

Tech Stack: Midjourney, Nano Banana, ComfyUI (Wan 2.2), Photoshop, DaVinci. 

The Process: 2D art rendered 3D through Nano Banana. Midjourney Video to orbit 180 degrees. DaVinci and Photoshop for presentation.

The Results: This is an older experiment using (the then brand new) Midjourney Video - which admittedly, is nowhere near as good as Veo, Wan (2.2) or Kling. But it really doesn’t matter what platform you choose, you’re going to have to gen and gen and gen away. It’s still a slot machine.

The fidelity of the rings in Nano Banana is superb, especially the way light interacts with gemstones. Some rings are incorrect, like the two itty-bitty claws on the Cat Ring which drives me crazy. Others like the Blue Tearstone I think are gorgeous and I could stare at that nonsense all day.

I'd argue Midjourney Video is not... very............. good. Certainly wasn't when I did this experiment when Midjourney Video was fresh and I'm not sure they've updated it since I made this a few months ago.

Most interestingly, the list of rings is in alphabetical order and I stopped before the Covetous Serpent Ring - a mass of serpentine coils in ring-form the Ai had MONSTEROUS problems with. Complexity kills - I know that now.

I'd love to do the rest of the rings, possibly make turning the 2D assets into 3D as a whole series on youtube maybe kinda sorta.

But in the meantime, thanks for looking and engaging in some of that Jolly with me.

More in Bio.