Boss Design Studio: Dung Defender

As you may have guessed, he's a dung beetle.

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

In this post, I'm looking at Dung Defender, the only Hollow Knight boss who's actually having fun. If I had to briefly summarize his bossfight, I'd say "jovial".

But first, I would like to note that he is not named Dung Defender because he defends the dung. He is named Dung Defender because he is a dung beetle, who is also a defender. He's also one of the few bosses to have a real name, not just a title: he's named Ogrim, which I'm going to use interchangeably with his title because "Dung Defender" is already starting to not sound like real words to me as I write this.

Anyway. What he's defending is the area called Isma's Grove, home to a dead plant NPC named Isma (and also home to the acid-immunity item). Both Ogrim and Isma were members of Hallownest's elite knights back when the kingdom was still a kingdom and wasn't full of zombies, and they were apparently also in love. It's not stated how Isma died, but die she did, and he's now standing guard over her tomb.

As you approach the arena, you can hear him yelling things. I'm not sure who he's yelling them at. Maybe he hears you coming and is talking to you. In any case, the shouting does not stop during the battle; Ogrim opens the fight with a battle cry, and he continues yelling them throughout. They aren't very menacing, and in fact they sound like he's having fun.

Dung Defender's primary attack is throwing balls of dung at you. They bounce around the arena, and you can hit them with your sword to redirect them. If you stand right in front of him while he's throwing them, you can also get hit directly, because the throwing animation does bring his arm forward. That, by the way, is the only time he actually hits you directly; he does do contact damage, but aside from this, that's all he does. He hurts you by running into you or landing on you, not by hitting you.

Occasionally, after doing two throws in succession, the boss then jumps into the air, curls into a ball, and proceeds to join his projectiles in bouncing around the arena. This attack, while it does mean that you have a third projectile to avoid, also contributes a lot to the "having fun" aspect of the fight. (If you time it right you can also stop him from landing on you by hitting him upward, which bounces him back into the air. Which, again, contributes to the boss-is-having-fun aspect.)

His other attack (well, attacks) involves diving into the arena floor. Dung Defender has two versions of this attack: one where he repeatedly pops in and out of the floor, and one where he stays under it and rapidly swims back and forth before jumping out again and throwing a bunch of dung balls at once. As with many things in Hollow Knight, it's the animations that really make this attack. The repeated-diving-in-and-out version has an animation that looks like he's diving into a pool, and the animation for the jumping out at the end of the staying-under-the-floor version has him spinning around in midair.

When the boss reaches half health, he does his initial battlecry again, then chains together a bunch of the jump-out-of-the-ground-and-throw-dung-balls-everywhere attack. This specific chained attack only happens once per fight.

Oh, and the stagger! Ogrim staggers by falling over on his back and waving his limbs in the air. It's quite a funny animation, and it doesn't exactly scream "menacing"; this is one of those bosses that aren't evil, even if you're still fighting for your life against them.

Dung Defender is one of the few bosses in Hollow Knight not to die when you defeat him. Instead, he sort of explodes, then flies offscreen before landing upside-down in the background and slowly sinking out of sight. He also leaves behind an item you can use, and he no longer blocks you from opening the path to Isma's Grove. And if you save the game, then return to the arena after defeating him, he'll pop out of the ground and talk to you.

His dialogue when you return after the fight reinforces the non-evil part; he apologizes for trying to kill you, saying he mistook you for one of the mindless infected zombie bugs. He also gives a bunch of lore, including some ominous bits that players encountering him for the first time won't understand yet. (These are foreshadowing |the Hollow Knight, as well as the Knight's relation to it|.)

The arena for this bossfight is located in my absolute least favorite area in the entire game: the Royal Waterways, also known as the sewers beneath the City of Tears. I really hate this area, not because it's the sewers but because it's full of the Fluke enemies, which are just... really creepy and disgusting.

It's the sewer show, with our special guest star, Little Ghost!

I'm not actually sure where all the dung in the background comes from. There aren't any mammals in Hollow Knight, and insect droppings don't look like that (I know because I looked up what they do look like, which is one of the weirder contributions to my search history). But eh, Ogrim is a dung beetle, and it's not like the world has to make a ton of physical sense. We have a mountain of laser-emitting crystals and a canyon full of floating jellyfish and acid, after all.

The boss music for this fight is "Dung Defender", a very bouncy song in a very major key. It gives the feeling of, again, someone who's having fun fighting you. It also seems sort of... knightly? A "glory of battle" sort of vibe.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for a boss who's both more depressing and more depressed.