Quick anatomy of a great Bloodborne boss fight

I’m not a game designer, so this is a fairly “amateur” opinion piece, but I really enjoyed the Lady Maria boss fight in the recent Bloodborne: The Old Hunters DLC, and thought I would try to summarize what I thought made it so great.

First, a quick video of the fight from Youtube:

Why is this fight great? From an aesthetics perspective:

  • Lady Maria is probably the most memorable humanoid boss in the whole game. The majority of Bloodborne bosses are beasts, which are generally physically much bigger and usually don’t wield weapons, whereas Lady Maria dual-wields the Rakuyo and dances around the arena with agility. This makes it feel like a classic samurai showdown scene
  • Lady Maria’s 3 phases – where she gains new powerful attacks – are accompanied by evolving visuals: lots of blood (dark red) in phase 2, and added flames (orange) in phase 3, making for some very attractive (and deadly) eye-candy
  • The arena has a gorgeous backwall – the astral clocktower’s clock-face with lots of natural light dropping into the relatively dark wooden flooring
  • In terms of sound-design, this fight not only features an epic score, but also cleverly utilizes the destructable wooden candle-racks (two rows on the two side-walls) to help create tension

From a gameplay / mechanics perspective:

  • As the player in the above video narrates, Lady Maria utilizes timing delays in her attack to throw the player off. So on the first encounter she may feel incredibly over-powering, but after a few trials the player can learn to properly predict / dodge her abilities – this is consistent with Bloodborne’s overarching design philosophy (hard but fair, rewarding to learn)
  • Her attacks (especially in later phases) also reinforce the counter-intuitive design where the closer you are to the enemy the safer you are – this is counter to most players’ natural inclination to keep a safe distance (“fight or flight”)
  • Like other Bloodborne bosses, she can be beaten with any weapon (or no weapon at all), and or even by a character that has never been leveled up. There are strategies that exploit her weaknesses (in Lady Maria’s case, she is quite susceptible to parrying), or you can try to fight her “fair”. The player can pick and choose his/her own challenge in how to defeat this boss – the game is extremely open to different play-styles / player fantasies

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