Boss Design Studio: Soul Master

Frowny face :(

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Boss Design Studio, my roughly fortnightly essay series wherein I overanalyze videogame bosses and tell you what I think about them.

In this post, I'm looking at Hollow Knight's boss Soul Master, also known as the Soup Master by people (me) who once made that typo and thought it was hilarious.

If I had to briefly summarize this boss, I'd say "pompous and a bit mad". That's less brief than I've managed to be with the other bossfights, but Soul Master is difficult to summarize.

Before we begin, I should explain something. "Soul," in Hollow Knight, does not, as far as I know, refer to what we think of as souls. It's more like life force, and it also serves as the magic energy meter for the game. You get it primarily by hitting enemies with your sword, and you use it to heal, as well as to cast the various spells you can find throughout the game. Some NPCs (like the Snail Shamans) and enemies/bosses (like this guy) can also use it; it's the predominant magic system of the Hollow Knight universe.

The Soul Master is found at the end of the Soul Sanctum, a sub-area of the City of Tears area (an abandoned city). In-lore, it was basically a magic academy slash research center, dedicated to trying to stave off the plague that was ravaging the kingdom. It rapidly devolved into, well... y'know the "scary abandoned lab where everything went very wrong and now it's full of monsters" trope? That's the Soul Sanctum.

Its admittedly elegant halls and corridors are filled with piles of discarded research, occasional corpses, and the two predominant enemies: the blob-like ones with the lovely name "Mistakes", which have an equally lovely habit of suddenly appearing out of the floor and charging at you, and the Soul Twisters. Those are flying wizard-like bugs, they float and teleport around and shoot homing orbs of Soul at you, and the teleporting means they're really annoying to kill. (There's also a miniboss, Soul Warrior, in the middle of the area, but he's mostly just a tougher Soul Twister who has a sword and can't fly. He does a nice job of foreshadowing some of Soul Master's attacks, though.)

Soul Master is located at the very end of the Soul Sanctum, and you actually fight him on the roof. This allows him to make a more dramatic entrance than most bosses, as he slowly rises up as an ominous silhouette in the distance before gathering Soul to himself and teleporting into the arena.

He teleports a lot, meaning that in order to do any significant damage, you have to chase him around the arena. But he also attacks you in between the teleports, making the bossfight a series of switches between "you chasing Soul Master around the arena" and "Soul Master chasing you around the arena". Smooth segue into talking about attacks, I choose you!

The simplest attack he has is just dashing (well, I say "dashing", it's rather languid for a Hollow Knight dash) across the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, he deals contact damage, so it's less "opportunity to hit him" and more "attack you have to avoid". You can just facetank the attack and focus on hitting him, but that's generally a bad idea.

Most of his attacks, however, are both more complicated and more magical. For his "main" attack, he teleports above you and slams down to the ground, sending shockwaves across the arena. He also occasionally feints this attack, aborting it partway through and starting over above wherever you just dodged to. The teleports-above-you-and-dives-downward attack is actually foreshadowed by that miniboss I mentioned, Soul Warrior, though Soul Warrior doesn't make shockwaves; instead, he tries to hit you with a sword.

Soul Master also has two attacks using the same Soul orbs that the Soul Twisters (those wizard bugs) have. He can just shoot them out of those gems on his forehead, and he can also fly across the arena with four orbs orbiting him. Both of these attacks are rather annoying to dodge, but as I know from experience, you can get good at evading them.

He tends to teleport between attacks, making the bossfight, as I said before, a lot of switching between "run away from the boss" and "chase the boss down so you can hit him". And he also staggers! Unlike most bosses, Soul Master doesn't fall to the ground when he staggers; instead, he sort of deflates and just hovers in place for a few seconds.

This boss is an interesting case, because he has almost an entire area dedicated to subtly foreshadowing him and teaching the player how to fight him. The Soul Sanctum is full of enemies that use the same attacks, or at least similar ones; both the Soul Twisters and the Soul Warrior use the homing Soul orbs, and the Soul Warrior also has a "teleport above you and then drop onto your head" attack. Even the dashing-slowly-across-the-arena is sort of introduced to the player earlier, with the Mistakes and their charging at you.

When defeated, Soul Master rapidly teleports around the arena for like ten seconds, emitting a high-pitched and rather hilarious scream, before finally disappearing and leaving behind his dive-and-shockwave spell for you to take. If you aren't deliberately sequence breaking, you'll have seen this sort of floating collectable spell before, so it's obvious what it is. (And if you know enough to pull off the sort of crazy speedrunning skips that would enable you to sequence break and get here without any other spells, you probably aren't doing this for the first time, and thus you know what it is anyway.)

As Hollow Knight boss arenas go, Soul Master's is unique in that it's on the outside of a building. Usually, if there's a building involved at all, you'll be inside it; Soul Master, however, is fought on the roof of the Soul Sanctum.

Somebody left the lights on inside.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for...

SIKE! There's a second phase!

When you try to take the spell, the collecting-a-spell animation doesn't have a chance to fully play, because Soul Master teleports back in, reabsorbs it, and dives through the glass floor. It shatters, and you drop into the room below, starting the second phase. This phase goes at a much faster pace than the first one does, and there's basically no time to heal.

Soul Master's second-phase attacks are altered versions of his first phase attacks. His slam attack, instead of sending a shockwave across the arena, makes an explosion of Soul. Unlike in the first phase, he chains the slam attacks together. His second-phase slam attack animation also somehow seems grumpier than it does in the first phase; on a related note, the animation in both phases manages to give off the impression of "punching the floor" despite the fact that Soul Master has no arms.

His other attack in the second phase is an altered version of his Soul orb attack. Instead of shooting them from his forehead, he hovers in place and summons them from thin air at random points in the arena. This attack is the only real opportunity you have to attack him during this phase, but he doesn't stop summoning Soul orbs while you do it, so that part of the bossfight is always rather frenetic.

The animations of Soul Master's attacks contribute to a sort of feeling of pompousness. Throughout the first phase, it's almost like he's not taking you seriously; only once the second phase starts does it feel like the boss is actually trying.

As you may have guessed, the second phase has a new arena. The fight goes too fast for you to spend much time looking at it while fighting, but once you win that's no longer an issue. And then you notice that in addition to Hallownest's beautiful and elegant architecture, the room is absolutely full of corpses. Up until this point, there haven't really been many background corpses in the Soul Sanctum; now there are hundreds.

Broken glass and corpses. Yay.

Also, you see those glass jar things in the background? Those can be found throughout the rest of the Soul Sanctum. They're filled with Soul, and you can smash them to get part of your Soul meter refilled. They're also not usually connected to anything, so the fact that they have tubes going down into the corpse pit raises some disturbing implications.

Soul Master has his own boss theme, though not his own track on the soundtrack; it's part of the track "Soul Sanctum", which also has the area's ambient music. It's a very dramatic boss theme, and it sounds a bit... insane, I guess? I don't know how to describe it.

There are two interesting things I'd like to note about the boss theme. First, it uses the same descending twelve-note leitmotif from the beginning of the Mantis Lords' boss theme, which to the best of my knowledge is used in no other song in Hollow Knight. I'm not entirely sure why that shared bit of melody is in there, but I do have a theory: that motif symbolizes Hallownest's noble class, hence being used by the Mantis Lords (who are, after all, mantis lords) and Soul Master (who's implied, from context, to have been pretty important in pre-apocalypse Hallownest). That theory may or may not be true, but it's the best explanation I've come up with.

The second thing I'd like to note is that one of the instruments used in the Soul Sanctum and Soul Master themes is a pipe organ. That normally wouldn't be very significant, but throughout the rest of the Hollow Knight soundtrack, pipe organs seem to symbolize the Hollow Knight universe's gods. Aside from "Soul Sanctum", they're also used in "The Grimm Troupe", "Nightmare King", |"Radiance"|, "The Mist", "Phantom", and |"Awakening"|. In four of those, the boss you're fighting is either a Higher Being or the avatar of one; the remaining two are "The Mist" and "Phantom", and Phantom is |essentially a demigod, albeit a dying one|. Plus, y'know, it's entirely possible that at least "The Mist" is diegetic, because at the center of the titular area, there's a giant pipe organ.

But the Soul Sanctum is an odd one out. Nobody within it is a Higher Being, and it wasn't created from a dying almost-Higher Being. And yet, it has pipe organs in its music, and I have no idea why.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for the character who's having the most fun in the entire game.