Dark Souls III: Nameless King Boss Fight

The Nameless King is an optional boss found in the optional area Archdragon Peak.

In order to go there, you first need to kill Oceiros the Consumed King and then obtain the Path of the Dragon gesture in the large tomb behind his room.

Then go to the small outdoors plateau in Irithyll Dungeon and find the skeleton of a lizard man sitting in the same pose amid some empty husks of hollows.

Place yourself in the position by using the gesture next to the skeleton and you will be teleported to Archdragon Peak after a short cutscene.

When you get to Archdragon Peak, you will encounter some strange lizard- or dragon-like humanoids that you will not find anywhere else in the game.

The first boss is the Ancient Wyvern, which must be killed before you can continue exploring and eventually find a very large bell that must be rung in order to cover the entire area in thick fog and make the Nameless King boss available.

When you first enter the boss fight area, the King will come flying down from above mounted on a giant bird- or dragon-like creature.

It looks mostly like a bird to me, but it also breathes fire every chance it gets, so perhaps it's really a dragon. Or maybe something in between. Which begs the age-old question, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Or the dragon or the bird? Or the bird or the dragon egg?

Well, in this case, the giant bird-dragon thing with the King on its back comes first. In this phase of the fight, the boss is called King of the Storm.

The objective of the first phase is to kill the bird, forcing the King to dismount. The bird will attack and breathe fire, and the King will use it to charge you and also lash out with his sword any chance he gets.

In this phase, it's very tempting to hide under the bird and slash at its legs, but it takes very little damage from that, and it triggers a very nasty fire breathing attack, in which the bird soars up high and then covers a significant area of the ground beneath it with fire, most likely giving you a medium-roast in the process. This breath attack is highly damaging, but can be completely avoided by not hiding under the bird.

(Which, to be fair, is easier said than done when the grumpy piece of poultry lands on top of you, knocks you over and gives the King a golden opportunity to smack you over the head with his sword while you're down).

Anyway, what you should focus on during phase one is damaging the bird's head and neck. For some reason, I evidently suck at judging the distance to the bird's head on the screen, as you will see me slicing big, fat holes in the air. The bird is also quite good at lifting its head just as I reach it, also making me miss it.

The easiest time to land some good blows is when the bird does it sideways fire breath attack, as staying to its right (your left) of its head will not only mean you don't get hit by the fire, but also keep you in range of giving it some good smacks.

Be warned, though, the King will also use this opportunity to give you some smacks over the head with his sword, so it's sort of a quid pro quo situation with both being the smacker and the smackee.

The bird-dragon thing is easily staggered and when that happens, make sure to take advantage of the situation and get some good hits in. It actually has quite a small health pool, so the most difficult part of phase one is to stay alive and actually get within attacking range of the head.

Once the bird is dead, the King dismounts and phase two starts. And I bet you thought phase one was hard.

When he dismounts, his name changes to Nameless King and he's here to lay down the law of the land, his first decree being your head on a silver platter. Well, we'll see about that.

To me at least, phase two was much harder. The King is highly aggressive, apparently in a foul mood over losing his pet bird-dragon, and he attacks very quickly and relentlessly, especially when you're close to him.

He has a couple of attacks where he ascends up into the air and then charges down at you. One of them is slightly delayed, so you will have a tendency to roll too soon. The other is almost instantaneous, requiring you to roll very quickly. They're not that hard to tell apart and learning that should be a priority as they're both hugely damaging.

He also has several mean combos when you're up close to him and even some sort of shockwave that he uses when you're far away. Oh, and he has at least two different lightning-based attacks as well. One of them takes him a while to charge up and when it hits, it lands almost instantly at your position, so keep moving – or get a few free hits in while he's charging if you're already close to him.

As you can hear, there is a lot of fun going on in this fight. And as always in a Souls game, "fun" is synonym for pain, agony and frustration all in one gloriously twisted package. Good times.

After several failed attempts at taking him out in melee, I eventually ended up going ranged in phase two, kiting him back and forth in the area and slowly wearing him down with my longbow.

It took quite a while because he appears to be somewhat resistant to arrows and didn't take very much damage per shot, but it made the fight a lot simpler to me, because I only had to worry about his long-range attacks, which were much easier to dodge than the high speed of successive attacks when you're in melee range of him.

I read somewhere that he is weak to fire, which is why you will see me use fire arrows against him. I'm not sure that is true, though, as he took significantly less damage from my arrows than what I usually do, but I wasn't about to mess around with swapping ammo in the middle of the fight with this angry member of royalty on my case.

I guess some may consider this approach borderline cheesing, but I disagree. I think it's valid use of game mechanics.

I'm not in a safe spot where he can't hurt me (as you can see, I'm actually quite close to dying several times), it just so happens that he is less formidable when you keep him at a distance.

I do need to get close to him several times, when I need to reposition or start moving back the other way, and there are some close calls there. So unless you consider ranged weapons as a whole cheesing, then I do believe that this is a fair way to handle this fight.

But who cares anyway, this is a single player game that I play to have fun and relax (okay, I'm kinda playing it fast and loose with the word "relax" here, I know), so I'll play it in whichever way I find enjoyable ;-)

I tend to always pick the archer archetype in other role-playing games, and my one pet peeve with the Souls series is that ranged combat feels more like a support tool or an afterthought than a viable alternative to melee.

I realize that some people have done challenge runs and completed the entire game with only a ranged weapon, so it is definitely possible, but self-nerfing isn't something I enjoy in a game I already find challenging enough.

Especially considering that in Dark Souls III, you can only carry 99 of each type of arrow. In the previous installments, you could at least carry 999 arrows on you, making it a lot more feasible to not use a melee weapon.

Anyway, I like fights where I can sneak around, keep my distance and slowly wear the enemy down rather than being in the thick of the action where I can't see what's going on half the time because the camera is too close to me.

I realize the Souls games are melee-focused by design and that's fair enough, all I'm saying is that I quite enjoyed a boss fight where going ranged was actually a viable choice, without it feeling like cheesing.

Hail to the King, baby! Or maybe not.