Boss Design Studio: Spoiler Boss

 

 

 

Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?

This post deals with a boss whose nature is a spoiler for its game's story. There are major unmarked spoilers in the body of this post.

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 the Hollow Knight, the (first) final boss of the game with the same name. It's the saddest bossfight I've ever encountered, and if I had to briefly describe the bossfight, I'd say "tragic."

The Hollow Knight is found inside the Temple of the Black Egg, an area we've spent the past couple of bossfights unlocking. In-lore, it's the Pale King's chosen vessel, basically a living prison for the infection that's been ravaging everything. Except the infection doesn't like being imprisoned, so it spent the past however long since it got sealed trying to break out. You can see the Hollow Knight's original form in-game (during a complicated sort of dream sequence) as the Pure Vessel, and compared to it, the Hollow Knight looks incredibly decrepit. Case in point, the Pure Vessel has two arms.

Oh, I should mention that it's also your sibling.

After walking through a long tunnel of magical runes (presumably some sort of extra seal to keep the Infection in), you enter the central room of the Black Egg. The Hollow Knight hangs chained in the center of the room, with four magic-reinforced chains anchoring it to the floor. You have to sever each of those chains, complete with magic-seal-breaking noises and animations, to start the bossfight.

And then, when you've broken all four of the anchor chains, the Hollow Knight (still chained) does a little boss-intro before breaking out of its remaining restraints and dropping to the floor. There's a brief pause before it stands up and screams at you, and the fight begins.

This bossfight has four phases, each with some differences. I'll cover the attacks in a moment, but first, I want to discuss the movement.

The Hollow Knight, aside from just walking (which it rarely does), has three main movement modes. The first, and least interesting, is a brief backwards dash that it seems to mostly use to get out from under you when you're jumping around attacking it from above. The second is a leap, which it repositions itself with. Also not very interesting, but it does occasionally land on you.

And for the third movement ability, the Hollow Knight can also teleport. It's one of the few physical bosses that can do so (as far as I know, the only others are Grimm, |the Radiance|, Soul Warrior, and Soul Master; the Warrior Dreams also teleport, but they're basically ghosts). And this ability is interesting, because unlike the Soul Bosses' Soul-based teleporting and the other two's Dream-Realm-based teleporting, the Hollow Knight appears to use void to teleport.

Final bosses are interesting cases, because almost always, most of their attacks will be something you've seen before. There's a good reason for that; as the final boss, it should sort of "cap off" the whole videogame, and calling back the attacks of previous bosses is a good way to do that. I could probably ramble for a while about the philosophy of final boss design in particular, but I think I'll save that for |the Radiance|.

The Hollow Knight's attacks are no exception to this. In the first phase, it has three attacks, two of which we've seen before. (Or three, depending on how much optional stuff you did.)

Its first attack is pretty basic: it swings its sword three times. And you'll have seen this attack before, probably many times if you've spent any significant time in the City of Tears, because it's the same attack the city guards use. This attack connects the Hollow Knight to the wider world of Hallownest, which is just... a really neat little detail.

The second attack is a dash attack, in which the Hollow Knight draws its sword back like a spear and dashes horizontally across the screen. Which isn't special in and of itself -- a lot of bosses have dash attacks -- but the animation for the attack is highly reminiscent of the horizontal-dash-across-the-screen attack that the Mantis Lords have. That's another neat detail connecting the Hollow Knight to the wider Hallownest, and it's also an example of the "final boss using other bosses' attacks" thing.

And the third attack is a parry. Basically, the Hollow Knight holds its sword up in front of it; if you hit it before it stops parrying, it doesn't take any damage, and it'll riposte with a swing of its sword. This sort of parry move is used in exactly one other place in Hollow Knight: the Hornet Sentinel bossfight, aka your rematch against Hornet, who happens to be the Hollow Knight's half sister.

Which is where it gets interesting, because almost all the time in Hollow Knight, if something's going to block your attack, it'll use a shield. As I said before, almost nothing in Hallownest will parry you. But in Pharloom (the setting of Silksong), parries are everywhere, particularly among the Citadel bugs. So it doesn't seem like an accident to me that the two characters in Hallownest who use them are someone whose mom is from Pharloom, and her half-brother who we've already established is trained with bits of all the distinct fighting styles present in Hallownest. (Hence the city-guard sword attack and the Mantis-Lords dash attack.)

So that's the first phase. When you reduce it from its original 1000 hp to... *checks wiki* 750, the Hollow Knight pauses and screams at you again. Then it gets faster in both its movement and its attacks, and it gains two new ones.

For its first new attack, surprise, it can attack with Infection blobs just like Broken Vessel can! Specifically, the Hollow Knight flares open the side of its cloak where its missing arm used to be, then fires off a barrage of Infection blobs. If you look closely at the Hollow Knight during this time, you can see that under its cloak there are actually a bunch of Infected blisters, which presumably are what's producing the blobs.

In this phase, you've stabbed the Hollow Knight enough that it's no longer able to contain the Infection inside it, so it's now doing the next best thing and attacking using it. I think. There's a lot of possible interpretations for pretty much everything from this point on, and this is mine.

The second new attack for this phase is another one you might have seen before. The Hollow Knight teleports into the air above you, falls back to the ground and stabs its sword into the floor, and creates a bunch of evenly-spaced pillars of mixed Infection and void. This is, I believe, its only attack that deals two masks of damage; all of its others deal one mask.

As I said, there's another boss that uses a very similar attack (creating a bunch of evenly-spaced damaging pillars). However, said boss is actually Troupe Master Grimm, who to the best of our knowledge wasn't anywhere near Hallownest when the Hollow Knight was being trained. So I believe that these attacks actually have nothing to do with each other. My evidence for this? As I mentioned before, there's a complicated sort of dream sequence during which you can fight the Hollow Knight's original form, the Pure Vessel. And the Pure Vessel has a very similar attack, except it uses bladelike pillars of Soul. Thus, my theory is that the Hollow Knight is trying to do the Pure Vessel's Soul-pillars attack, but it's ending up with Infection/Void pillars instead.

All right. Now, the third phase, which begins when you reduce the Hollow Knight to *checks wiki again* 400 hp. It gains three new attacks in this phase, but interestingly, it also loses two of its old attacks. Almost. It's a bit complicated.

During this phase, the Hollow Knight is increasingly taken over by the Infection. I'm fairly confident that it's not really in control of its own actions anymore, and you'll see why in a bit. But it also loses both of its primary attacks from the first phase, the dash attack and the slash attack, except for immediately after it teleports. Y'know, the teleport that uses Void, which is described elsewhere as a natural counter to light (which is what Infection is). Hmm...

(Also, interestingly, it doesn't lose the parry, and I don't know why. Is it using its moments of lucidity to try to defend itself? That's my best guess, but I honestly don't know.)

Anyway, the new attacks. The first two are somewhat odd, because the Hollow Knight can't fly. And yet, for the first one, it jumps into the air in the middle of the arena and hangs there, suspended by nothing, spewing Infection from a cluster of massive blobs on its chest. The projectiles travel in random arcs through the arena, making this one of the "okay, now try to dodge all the projectiles" attacks.

The second of the odd ones starts out similar. The Hollow Knight floats into the air, before repeatedly slamming down at you. After the attack finishes, it drops to its knees and briefly pauses. But, again, the Hollow Knight can't fly. So what's going on here?

The answer, as I implied above, is that the Hollow Knight isn't the one fighting you anymore. Instead, the Infection (or rather, the entity at the Infection's source) is the one fighting you now, using the Hollow Knight as a crude weapon (at this point the Hollow Knight's containment, however tenuous, of the Infection is still strong enough to stop it from just getting out and fighting you directly).

Which makes sense with the animations for the above two attacks. In the first one, it's suspended in the air not by magic but by the Infection inside its chest. And in the second one, it's not moving itself; if you look closely at the animation, you can see it's being dragged around by Infection. It's actually being slammed down on its back, as discernable by a single frame of animation that I spent far too long trying to catch.

Poor guy.

And the third new attack for this phase is... uh... honestly kind of heartbreaking. The Hollow Knight raises its sword, pauses for a brief moment, and then impales itself through the chest. It then proceeds to pull out the sword and stab itself several more times before falling to its knees; the animation looks like it's crumpled on the floor in a heap. To make matters worse, it often uses this attack immediately after the scream to start the third phase; you're expecting a challenging new attack pattern, and instead the boss starts trying to kill itself.

I have three theories for why it's doing this, as follows:

1) The Infection is contained mostly in its chest, it knows this, and it's trying to stab the Infection.

2) The entity behind the Infection is making it, trying to speed up its death so the entity can escape.

3) All of the... *gestures at the above bossfight and the lore* has driven it to try to kill itself.

This attack almost singlehandedly elevates this bossfight from a normal climactic battle to... well... this. Team Cherry is really good at invoking feelings in players, whether that feeling is fun (Dung Defender) or fear (Deepnest) or wonder (half the intros to the areas)... but when they want to make something tragic, they can make something very, very tragic. It doesn't help that pretty much all of the Hollow Knight's animations look kind of like it's in pain, inasmuch as you can show that with only body language.

This isn't the final phase, either. There's a fourth, beginning when you reduce the Hollow Knight to 0 hp; no, that's not a typo, it's a quirk of how the boss health is tracked in this fight.

(Basically, if you've met the criteria to fight |the Radiance|, the end of Phase 3 is when |Hornet shows up and stuns the Hollow Knight long enough for you to enter the Radiance fight|. But if you haven't met those criteria, there's a fourth phase of this, as the Hollow Knight heals back to 250 hp.)

In this phase, it moves a lot slower, and it loses almost all of the attacks from previous phases; the only ones it retains are the puppeted-around-as-a-hammer one and the one where it tries to kill itself. But it does gain one new attack, if you can call it that: the Hollow Knight starts the triple slash attack, but only makes it through one swing before collapsing again.

By this point, this isn't really a bossfight anymore. It's more of an execution or a mercy kill. If you're anything like me, you'll feel kind of bad for actually going through with killing the Hollow Knight, but it has to be done.

And that's the Tragedy of the Hollow Knight.

The Hollow Knight is fought in the Temple of the Black Egg, a building designed specifically to keep it alive and keep the Infection contained. Granted, the containment part eventually failed, but it's implied to have worked for quite a long time.

The actual arena takes a backseat to the fight. It's full of Infection, as one might expect from the chamber containing the Infection's source; it's also crisscrossed with chains, which presumably were part of what bound the Hollow Knight in place before you freed it. The doorway is sealed off with a seal once you enter, reinforcing to the "there's magic in place to keep anything from getting out" aspect.

The arena is also about twice as wide as the screen, giving you and the boss plenty of room to move around. Also, I only noticed this while writing this post, but bits of Infection sometimes drip from the ceiling.

I get most of my images from the wiki.

The Hollow Knight's boss music is "Sealed Vessel", the only specific boss track in Hollow Knight not to be named after the boss it plays for. I assume this is to avoid spoiling the plot twist that you are not the Hollow Knight. The song on the soundtrack also covers the Black Egg's background music, as well as the music for the ending, but that's not the part we're interested in.

This song does not give you a break. It has violins (high enough that it fits to describe them as "wailing"), probably some other string instruments (I think there's a cello), a piano at times, cymbals at important chord moments, and I can almost hear a pipe organ in parts of it, hidden behind the other sounds. (Which actually works with the lore, if you believe my theory that pipe organs in this game represent |the Radiance| and/or the Dream Realm; |the Radiance| is in here, but also contained behind other things.)

It's a very sturm und drang track, with essentially no calmer breaks, fitting the climactic-battle nature of this fight. Either you have dramatic chords, or the violins are going very fast. Oddly enough, you can also almost hear the Mantis Lords leitmotif in this; I... think this reinforces my theory of that motif representing the nobility of old Hallownest (the Hollow Knight is, after all, the child of the Pale King, making it royalty).

But that's only for the first two phases. The music changes for the third and fourth.

We lose almost all the instruments, only retaining the violins and cellos. The song is much slower now, and it becomes honestly very sad / melancholy. The violin is doing the main melody now, with the cello doing supporting melodies; a choir also comes in partway through, which is mostly normal until you realize that the song which most prominently uses vocals is actually |"Radiance"|.

I could go on for a while about this song, but this is already a really long post, so I'll just hit the highlights:

-In the second half (phases 3 and 4), the song doesn't sound like a bossfight anymore, it's just melancholy and tragic.

-The feeling of "tragic but inevitable" is helped by the fact that there basically aren't any pauses in the music; it just keeps marching inevitably onward. I think the chord progression probably also plays into that, but I don't know enough about chords to be sure.

-You can also hear the title theme everywhere in this, which makes sense considering that the Hollow Knight is A) the final boss, B) the title character, and C) the main character's sibling.

And that's the Hollow Knight, probably in the top three best-made bossfights I've ever encountered (which is why this post is almost three thousand words). And it's still the saddest.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for a bunch of optional pseudo-minibosses from this game.