These Are The Easiest Bosses In Dark Souls
When you hear "Dark Souls," you probably think of difficult games that take place in decrepit, Gothic worlds on the brink of collapse. Every door is a trap, every corner an ambush, and every hallway a coffin-in-waiting. Moreover, each enemy — even the trash mobs — hits like a tornado and can drain your health in seconds. Unsurprisingly, bosses pose grueling challenges that require dozens (or event hundreds) of retries.
Not every Dark Souls boss fight poses an Ornstein and Smough level of difficulty, however. The Asylum Demon allows you to bravely run away to find a more advantageous position —but you will probably turn into a meat pancake during your first encounter. This encounter is "easy" because it is a learning experience first and foremost, but some bosses are simpler to tackle for other reasons. The following Dark Souls bosses can still kill you if you're not careful, but can be overcome in a much more straight forward manner than their brethren.
Moonlight Butterfly
In the real world, butterflies and moths are delicate little creatures that pose no threat to you (unless you try to eat them), and the same is generally true in fiction. There are exceptions, such as Mothra and Volcarona, and of all franchises, you would expect Dark Souls to produce deadly butterflies since it transformed creatures such as rats and clams into nightmarish beasts. However, not even Dark Souls makes butterflies particularly dangerous.
The Moonlight Butterfly might look confusingly intimidating due to its size and anatomy, but it is nothing but a body and wings. No head to bite with, no legs to stab with. In other words, the Moonlight Butterfly is a pure magic user. You an easily dodge its attacks, and it needs to take a breather between magic blasts, which gives you enough time to either heal or unleash ranged or magic attacks of your own. Even if you are a melee-only player, the butterfly lands every now and then for a nectar smoothie, granting you the opportunity to shatter its glass-like defenses with a melee weapon.
Covetous Demon
In Dark Souls, a monster's design is a window into its attack strategy and difficulty. For example, enemies with wings are capable of flight, and creatures that are 50% wheel usually roll up in groups and stunlock you into the grave. Meanwhile, corpulent enemies without legs are slow and easy to dodge, which isn't a good combination for a boss.
Dark Souls 2's Covetous Demon is infamous for having all the mobility of Jabba the Hut. Virtually all of its attacks are short ranged and come with long windups. Sure, the damage the Covetous Demon dishes out is massive, but it is mostly hypothetical since the demon's attacks are easy to avoid and even more easily counterattacked. While you can defeat the Covetous Demon with melee strikes, any sort of ranged offense (or even a spear) gives you a great advantage over this glacial boss.
Deacons of the Deep/Prowling Magus and Congregation
Souls-like games, including Dark Souls, are less difficult (relatively speaking) when players funnel enemies into one-on-one battles. The more enemies you face at once, the more likely they are to gang up on you and melt your health into nothingness. This is why most boss battles are mano-a-mano duels: to provide some level of fairness when you fight creatures with more teeth than body. However, the Dark Souls franchise occasionally breaks tradition and turns mob battles into boss fights.
The Prowling Magus and Congregation, as well as Deacons of the Deep, are two examples of "boss" battles that throw several weak enemies at players instead of one powerful monster. Weapons with wide arcs cleave through these mobs and can easily stagger any spellcasters in the middle of channeling. Each fight has its own twist. However, both encounters aim for quantity over quality, so tackling them like normal enemies (i.e., making sure you aren't surrounded) is usually enough to escape unscathed — or at least alive.
Pinwheel
Virtually every boss in Dark Souls comes with associated world-building lore, from the optional Gaping Dragon to the eternal good doggo Sif. However, one boss has next to no lore, and much of what is known about him is actually speculation. Fittingly, since that boss' backstory comes across as an afterthought, so does his difficulty — or lack thereof.
Many gamers consider Pinwheel to be the easiest boss in Dark Souls history, and for good reason. Pinwheel mostly relies on pyromancy, but all of his attacks have obvious telegraphs and are easily dodged. Pinwheel's unique mechanic lets him summon clones that are quickly distinguishable from the original, and these clones fall apart with one hit. Players can easily burn through his health and kill him before he can reveal his trump card and summon eight clones at once. In fact, many players might not realize he is capable of such a feat since they kill him so quickly.
Once his eight clones have poofed, Pinwheel can't summon any more, leaving him all out of tricks. Pinwheel doesn't leave a mark on the game's lore, but still wormed his way into gamers' brains by going against the grain of traditional Souls-like difficulty.