The boss fights in FromSoftware titles have become infamous among fans for a brutal difficulty built around stamina management and capitalizing on small windows of opportunity. However, Demon's Souls is often held up as an outlier among the Soulsborne series, due to the way that many bosses from the Dragon God to the Storm King are more puzzle than actual fight.
There are a few fights that buck this trend, with one of the most notable exceptions to the puzzle rule being the Flamelurker that blocks passage beyond area 2-2. The Flamelurker is by no means alone in being one of the few true FromSoftware boss fights in Demon's Souls, but it is an early example of the intense, aggressive designs that would eventually define the developer's games moving forward.
Flamelurker Brings Bloodborne's Aggression to Demon's Souls
The fight against the Flamelurker starts off normal enough for fights in either Demon's Souls or any other Soulsborne title. Players meet the boss through a cutscene, after which the Flamelurker starts charging forward and throwing out a flurry of fiery blows. However, as the fight continues, the boss starts to increase its pace, attacking faster and faster as the player chunks their health down through several phases. This is then capped off with the aura of flame that the boss gains once his health drops to roughly half.
In the case of the flame aura, the fight itself can generally be broken down into three major phases. The starting phase where there is no flaming aura, a second phase that causes attacks to end with a fiery shockwave, and finally the third phase where the player's health will be drained if they stay too close to the Flamelurker. While all of this is happening, the boss continues to throw a series of attacks at the player, punching and kicking like a lurching gorilla. It's a heart-pounding experience that has only been made more terrifying as the Demon's Souls remake brought it to next-gen consoles.
Long before Bloodborne's combat would focus on fast-paced aggression, Flamelurker challenged players to manage their health and stamina in a way that few other bosses from Demon's Souls did. With encounters like the Adjudicator or Old Monk that lean harder on the puzzle aspect than raw combat, the Flamelurker can be a pleasant and difficult change of pace. However, the fight itself isn't the only thing that this boss brought to the Soulsborne series, as the encounter is also the gate to what has become a common feature.
Flamelurker Unlocking Boss Weapons Set a Template for FromSoftware
Even though Flamelurker is technically only the second boss of the second area, the open-ended nature of the game means that players can actually approach the encounter late in the game. As such, it's likely that by the time a player finally manages to defeat Flamelurker, they might have a few boss souls in hand, with names that seem to imply that they are somehow important. After players beat this fiery enemy, Demon's Souls shows off one of the most impressive features the title brought to Soulslike genre with weapons crafted from defeated bosses.
Boss weapons are among the top fan-favorite items from the FromSoftware catalog, with even some of the worst Soulsborne bosses being well worth the trouble of fighting if it means getting a hold of a cool, new weapon. While it might be frustrating, especially for subsequent playthroughs, to have to take down a boss as difficult as Flamelurker to unlock boss weapons, the reward feels all the more earned for the trouble. As a result, the Flamelurker manages to deliver on many of the best aspects of the Souls series in a single package.
Demon's Souls is available now for PS5.
