Dark Souls III: Lothric the Younger Prince Boss Fight

This encounter is also known as the Twin Princes – and the boss soul you get for defeating them is called Soul of the Twin Princes as well – because you actually spend most of the encounter fighting Lothric's older brother, Lorian.

However, the true boss of the encounter is Lothric the Younger Prince, because phase two will not end until you kill him. No matter how many times you kill his brother Lorian, Lothric will keep resurrecting him, dragging out the fight and eventually wearing you down.

Lorian is a melee warrior whereas Lothric is a mage. During phase one, you only fight Lorian and this would actually be a fairly easy fight if it wasn't for his constant random teleportation.

When you first enter the room, he will teleport next to you and whack you with his sword, unless you stand completely still and not move at all, in which case he will slowly crawl toward you. I use this opportunity to put a few arrows in him and chip off some of his health to make phase one shorter.

I guess this is borderline cheesing, but after dying to this boss about thirty times I didn't care anymore. Oh, did I forget to mention? To me, this was by far the hardest boss in the game when I got to it, none of the previous bosses were even close.

Anyway, once you engage in melee with Lorian, he will start swinging and poking at you with his sword as if he's getting paid to do so. Most of his attacks are reasonably easy to avoid, but one of them is just slightly delayed so you'll have a tendency to roll too early, so watch out for that.

What makes this fight really annoyingly difficult, at least to me, is his random teleportation that constantly breaks the rhythm of the fight.

Sometimes he will teleport right behind you and smack you with his sword, other times he will teleport further away and charge up some sort of medieval death ray.

If his teleport breaks your lock-on, it's most likely the latter so pause for half a second and pan the camera around to find out where he is. The death ray is fairly easy to avoid by rolling sideways, or you can charge at him and be ready to give him a few swings in return when he releases it.

If his teleport doesn't break your lock-on, immediately roll away to the side, because he's most likely right behind you and there is already a very large greatsword moving toward your head at high speed.

Although I usually fight with my twin-blades dual wielded, I found it better to use a shield in this fight. The Black Knight shield is amazingly effective at mitigating the damage from Lorian's sword.

It's still better to roll away and avoid losing stamina to blocking, but if you keep up the shield while circling him, you may preserve some valuable health if he manages to land a blow.

Once you kill Lorian, his annoying little brother decides to join the fight, which marks the beginning of phase two. He starts off with resurrecting Lorian and climbing on his back, so now you get to fight Lorian again, but this time he's supported by a spell-slinging mage.

You will notice that they have separate health bars and it is possible to damage Lothric by attacking the brothers from behind. In fact, this is what you should try to do, because the fight isn't over until Lothric dies.

If you kill Lorian again, you will get a few free swings on Lothric while he resurrects him, but it is better to try to kill Lothric as fast as possible.

Phase two is even harder than phase one. Lorian seems to be somewhat upset about you just killing him, so he's faster and more aggressive. Meanwhile, you also have to contend with the spells Lothric is hurling at you, and if you thought Lorian would forget about the random teleporting in the middle of all the excitement, you would be wrong.

All in all, phase two is rather chaotic and it's difficult to get into a good rhythm, which I really think is the reason I found this encounter so difficult.

By the way, did you know that on the now shutdown website Most Awesomest Thing Ever, the concept of teleportation was rated the most awesome thing by its users?

By contrast, the Universe that encompasses all of existence was in third place, life itself was in fifth place and pizza was in tenth place.

I'm not even going to get into the unfathomable ridiculousness of pizza not being in top three, but I will say that whoever voted teleportation in the first place obviously never fought this boss, because after dying I don't even know how many times, I truly, passionately believe that teleportation sucks so much that it could be a vacuum cleaner brand.

Maybe even the leading vacuum cleaner brand in the world. Teleportation™. Sucking more than anything else since 2016.

Oh, but I digress.

Prince Lothric has two spells you need to watch out for the most. The one he most likely uses first is a bunch of small, slow moving homing missiles that he shoots up into the air, after which they slowly move down and toward you. The best way to avoid them is to run or roll directly toward and under them.

The second one is his own version of the aforementioned medieval death ray. He is quite good at using it at times that are very inconvenient to you (as opposed to all the moments in life when having a death ray shot at you is a welcome distraction), and it has a much shorter ramp up time than Lorian's, so be ready to roll immediately.

If you kill Lorian again and make use of the golden opportunity to lay some pain on Lothric while he's once again busy resurrecting his brother, you also need to be careful with the area of effect explosion he releases when done resurrecting. It's not hugely damaging, so if you're at full health and very close to killing them, it may be better to just get the final couple of swings in and end the ordeal, just be mindful of it.

When you finally prevail and kill the boss, you can use the boss soul to craft Lorian's greatsword. Considering how many times that thing has killed me, I was going to mount it over the fireplace in Firelink Shrine, but as it turns out, it is also extremely effective at disposing of a boss in the Ashes of Ariandel DLC, so if you're going to do that, you may want to hang on to this sword ;-)