In preparation forBlasphemous 2, I decided to do a deep-dive into the utterly bonkers and arcane lore of the originalBlasphemousto remind myself (and, well, figure out for the first time) what the hell it was all about. On this research odyssey, which culminated in me writing aBlasphemous story explainerthat tookwaylonger than I thought it would, I watched back some of the great boss fights of the game, and it really reminded me just how impressive, horrifying, and outright brilliant some of these battles were.
In fact, I think these are some of the best boss designs in gaming full-stop. Somehow, despite being limited to pixel-art and a 2D plane, they manage to be as intimidating, spectacular, and haunting as any boss fight in the glossiest of PS5 blockbusters or the most daunting of FromSoft games.
That FromSoft influence on Blasphemous is clear. While the game is slightly on the ‘Vania’ side of the spectrum betweenCastlevaniaandDark Souls(which is very much a thing), its boss battles, like the Souls, are for the most part divided into duels against opponents of similar size to yourself, and spectacle fights, where you fight some behemoth that’s multitudes bigger than you.
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Design-wise, I can see why most people rank the duels among the game’s most scintillating encounters. Quirce, Returned by the Flames is a great fight with a varied moveset against a withered man who was resurrected by the Miracle after being wrongly burned at the stake. The fight has an excellent rhythm to it, as he attacks you with a sword that floats just behind him, forcing you to be super-mindful of your timing as the flaming weapon gives your foe a deceptively long reach.
Crisanta of the Wrapped Agony, meanwhile, is the classic ‘duel against a version of yourself,’ with parries aplenty, tons of evasion and dodging from both sides, and a second phase. All the fights have excellent music to accompany them, but where most have slower, drum-heavy beats with an almost funereal quality (the Melquiades song is a serious banger), the Crisanta fight is a faster-paced Flamenco-style number that gives me flashes of the duel between the Bride and O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill Vol. 1. The energy of this battle is great.
These fights are accompanied by fantastic lore too, which weaves elegantly through the boss designs themselves. Exposito, Scion of Abjuration is a baby whose mother was burned at the stake. Her dying wish was that a ‘wicker mum’ be crafted for the baby to hold onto him and stop him crying. Working in the weird ways that it does, the Miracle brought this wicker figure to life, and you end up fighting a giant iteration of this baby-wicker-mother pair.
It’s not mechanically the strongest fight in the game, as you mainly fight this scorpion-like tail that has no visible connection to the boss looming in the background. But the way this horrifying baby giant, weeping bloody tears under a blindfold, slowly rises in the background, its cry reverberating around the cavernous arena, is chilling, as is the one-shot move where the wicker mum brings the baby close to you, and if you’re not quick enough it casually and without emotion picks you up and tears you limb to limb like you were an insect.
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Melquiades, The Exhumed Archbishop is a macabre spectacle inspired by Italian Catacomb Saints, where the bodies of revered Christian figures would be exhumed and dressed up in the finest garments and jewellery of the day. There’s nothing left of the Archibishop but a giant skeleton—bleached and bejeweled by the people who exhumed it—when you encounter him, so you’re effectively fighting this religious figure’s entourage, who hold the corpse aloft with giant hands that occasionally try to swat you. The way this battle creates a sense of depth by the skeleton held up in the background, then the hands that swat you actually appearing in the foreground infrontof the platforming plane you’re on is just chef’s kiss.
And let’s not forget Our Lady of the Charred Visage, a giant scorched face whose eyes menacingly follow you like a portrait adorning the wall of a haunted house. There’s a larger-than-life quality to all of these fights, realised through expedient animation and beautiful pixel art.
A key thing for me is that despite having that melancholy, tragi-heroic atmosphere of FromSoft boss battles, difficulty-wise Blasphemous’ bosses are significantly easier while still being challenging. Where certain Elden Ring fights would take me a couple of dozen attempts (and rarely fewer than five), I’d generally cut through Blasphemous boss fights in 5-10 attempts, which feels like a sweet spot between a solid challenge and something that ends up breaking your flow with the game until you’ve learned all the movesets after many, many deaths. Tonally these fights owe a lot to FromSoft, but the fact that Blasphemous put the brakes on FromSoft’s runaway train of exponentially increasing boss difficulty in each of its games was a good move.
If there’s one thing that’s making me a bit wary of Blasphemous 2, it’s that in the trailer I didn’t see a single one of these spectacle battles involving a behemoth boss looming in the background and attacking you in the foreground. While these battles are often a little less precise mechanically than the duels, they’ve always felt to me like a spectacular testament to the dark powers of the Miracle, and a vital counterpoint to the duels. TakeElden Ring, for example; sure, everyone goes on about theGodfreyand theMaleniafights, but the game really wouldn’t be the same without the bombast and heavy-metal excess ofRykard’s second phase, orthe glorious Radahn battlewhich broke so many conventional rules of FromSoft boss fights.
To stay at the top table of boss battles in gaming, Blasphemous 2 needs those spectacle fights as much as it needs the sharp, snappy duels.
