The Taurus Demon is Dark Souls’ Best Example of Utilizing Player Choice

gamerant.com:

The first real boss that most players encounter in the original Dark Souls after the initial tutorial with the Asylum Demon is the Taurus Demon. This fight can be daunting for first-time players and trivial for longtime fans, but it acts as a teaching tool of its own by putting player choice front and center with the boss, arena design, and some crossbow-wielding hollows.

Much of this stellar design for the Taurus Demon almost acts like it's setting up for a trend in Dark Souls, although few bosses manage to give quite the same experience. Due to the early encounter being designed to catch the player off-guard in multiple ways, it ends up giving a wider variety of combat options than most fights in the franchise.

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The first thing to note about the fight against Dark Souls’ first difficult boss is that before the enemy even appears, there is already an opportunity for the player to get caught unaware by the archers at the start of the arena. After dispatching them, the Taurus Demon itself doesn’t even appear until walking down the ramparts and dropping directly onto the player.

From here, the player has two options, to either face the Taurus Demon head-on or head back to the battlement that previously housed the archers for access to a wider arena. Reaching the battlement offers up yet another choice, though, with players then having the opportunity to deal a plunging attack that had already been shown to be powerful against the Asylum Demon, nearly killing one of FromSoftware's toughest enemies in a single hit. In this case, every moment of the fight grants the player more opportunities to take advantage of previous knowledge in order to make the fight