Good video. This game and the bosses here are really underrated. The bosses were very good and I had a feeling you will put King Darius very high, however my favourite boss must be Vahram's second encounter.
Came here to watch after beating the game for myself. Every single boss was great! The whole game was great! 10/10. I’d like to correct you a bit on Ahzdaha though. You don’t need to phase shift to avoid the laser attack. It’s possible to avoid it by running in the corner and jumping at the last second, using the bow to stay airborne. Having said that, teleporting is more fun, so I wouldn’t recommend doing what I did
Surprisingly, I had minimal bugs. The only big one I had was with an NPC where the game was convinced I was still mid-conversation even though it ended, leaving me frozen on the spot. Aside from that, just a few weird animation glitches here and there in an otherwise very polished experience. I also find this game to be better than Hollow Knight. Yes, Hollow Knight has a better atmosphere with a more unique art direction, but the gameplay quality, especially in its consistency throughout the whole runtime, is handily in the Lost Crown's court. HK just had a lot of bosses that felt filler, mechanically uninspired enemies, and some pretty empty sections and reused platform gimmicks. The Lost Crown isn't bereft of the latter issues (main bosses are just dope; Darius and God Vahram are my favs), but even then it was either never as bad as HK could be, or they were more engagingly utilized. I was surprised by the influences in this game. Hollow Knight aside, there is a fair bit of Elden Ring here, as well as some Hades and God of War.
Here's my own ranking of the bosses in this game : 9) Uvishka Its the simplest main fight in the game, nothing else to say 8) Jahandar Asside from Uvishka, every bosses in the game is good to great, and Jahandar is no exception, he's the real first boss of the game, and a great one at that, parying him is good and all of his attacks are fun to dodge. 7) Menolias The main reason why he is this low is because of the first phase, it is so annoying to have him going back and forth across the stage, it drags on the fight for longer than necessary. Thankfully the second and third phases are much better thanks to his martial moves and the music is really awesome, one of the best boss themes in the game IMO. 6) Kiana She asks for quick reactions and makes great use of the teleporting power, not to mention her phase transitionning attack not only looks cool, but is also super damn satisfying to parry. 5) Azhdaha Like you said, the combinations of bite and tail swipes are really good to dodge, even tough I suck at dodging them. Also her reckless attack is surprisingly hard to parry compared to the previous bosses, which caught me off guard. And her bomb attack makes great use of the time portal, and it is super satisfying to just throw the bomb back at her. Azhdaha and Kiana are pretty much interchangable in this ranking. 4) Orod While he is a fun fight, he isn't any higher because of how quick his attacks are in the second phase, they barelly leave time to react sometimes. Still, his special attacks, and parrying the other attacks is really fun. 3) Vahram first encounter The top 3 bosses in this game are pretty much interchangable here, but let's start with this one. The main reason he is this high is because parrying him is SO. DAMN. SATISFYING. And his other attacks are fun too like the judgement cut attack, and the time reversal is really cool. 2) King Darius The first phase (or ice phase) is pretty simple, but the second phase (or fire phase) is where it gets great, and the third phase being a combination of both elements make it awesome, with him making combos of ice and fire attacks, not to mention when he dashes around in the air trying to get you, and then finishing it with a parriable dash in the air. This fight is really crazy. 1) Vahram God form This fight has it all, attacks that test most of your albities, a reckless attack that when parried shows some really sick cinematography of Sargon getting punched by Vahram, only for him to uppercut the dude, before headbutting him so damn hard that it throws him on the ground, an awesome music, and a final phase that makes you feel invicible on top of having an incredible finisher. This fight is not only the best fight in the game, but also one of my favorite bosses in gaming. That's it for the ranking, you can reply to me what you think of it along with sharing me your own ranking.
OHHHHHH. That's how I could've avoid the gigantic red bombs that raises fire from Azdaha, I actually never thought of that. Plus it looked like it did so much damage when you have thrown away the bomb at the serpent.
Pop: Sands of time is one of my favorite games ever. I didnt even know a new game came out. Thanks for this vid ill be going to buy this. On a scale of 1-10 how will you rate this game?
I just finished a video essay by I Finished a Video Game just now, leaving a comment in which i said i hoped for an in-depth analysis/breakdown video on POP: TLC bosses and how they operate, and then i find this in my recommended. Surely the Simurgh or some other incarnation of good and joy must be to thank for this positive merging of timelines. Uvishka may rank the lowest, but to me his and the Kushan Attacks themes are some of the best action-y themes of the game. Fun to know: Gareth Coker also worked on the OST for Darksiders Genesis. Very good soundtrack there as well, together with the Darksiders 2 OST by Jesper Kyd. And MAN am i glad to see Orod and King Darius ranking so high up. Rival type fights often are remembered the best in character action/hack-and-slash type games and for good reason, but as a fan of both monsters and clearly physically muscular characters who have skill to go *with* the muscle, i find that nice to see. Thank you very much for this video. I see in the rest of the comments that you are quite critical of games and don't regularly give high scores, yet the thought has formed in my head to ask if you could check out the games Soulstice and Cookie Cutter to rank their bosses (Character Action/Hack-and-Slash type game and combat-oriented Metroidvania respectively). I very much love both games and hope to see more of them in the future, trying my best to spread word of them, but they've also got some rough parts. I'd also want to bring up Clash: Artifacts of Chaos and perhaps No Straight Roads, not necessarily for the sake of a ranking but just to check out and see if they're cool. Either way, let's hope that POP: TLC as well as other games will become more known and well-remembered. Have a good one and take care.
I love lies of P and I beleieve that it has the best level design in any video game ever at least mechanically if not aesthetically but the bosses just objectively werent very good and I couldnt put my finger on why but after playing prince of persia the lost crown I finally realized that it all fell down to how you dealt with the bosses and in lies of P the only thing you could do to learn a boss is learn their parry timings and thats it for most bosses as compared to the last crown where you used like a plethora of time based abilities on top of your movement options to deal with every move made by the bosses its just a lot more fun and intuitive learning to fight a boss that way rather than the way lies of P does it which makes it redundant and downright unfun at times
Yeah, I like LoP too but the bosses in general are a bit static and you generally just stand still in front of them and parry moves. It was much easier for me when writing the script for PoP video because you could tell the purpose of each ability. In LoP many attacks are pretty fun, cool, but there's not much more to it than just being a filler move because a boss needs to have attacks. In PoP usually each ability demands a certain thing out of the player.
I hope they take more of a sekiro approach in the next game where its not only the parries that matter but you also have to dodge jump mikiri use your arm etc to beat bosses its much more plausible than using the lost crowns mechanics plus I felt like darrius and isshin were very similiar as they fight for their son are old honoured warriors that get resurrected and test everything the player has learnt till that point in the game while being addicting@@magicat7356
I wasn't that surprised that the game would be excellent because the developers are Ubisoft Montpellier, who developed Rayman Origins and Legends. In my opinion, these are some of the best 2D platformers. That's why, just like Rayman, PoP is a 2D title that has the sprinting and jumping on point and overall it's a very grippy gameplay. In addition to the acrobatics, the fights are also impressive. Despite the limited selection of weapons, they can be surprisingly complex and develop a fluffy flow with parries and evasive slides - especially (as you showed) in the creative boss fights. It may not quite reach the level of a Hollow Knight, Super Metroid or Castlevania SotN because the story, characters and world are not that exciting. (but I don't find it as boring and annoying as some other Ubisoft stories. It's just a solid framework of a story.) And because the presentation isn't as unique as Hollow Knight or the Ori series. (it has bombastic anime-esque sequences, but the overall art design is quite unimpressive.) Apart from that, genre fans in particular get an excellent game here that takes the known Metroidvania virtues to heart, implements them in a motivating way, adds quality of live features that make exploration much more enjoyable and are so ingenious that every Metroidvania from now should have it. I hope this game won't be forgotten in the end of the year. Also hopefully this game has the financial success that it needs. Even if this video is not one of your most famous, thank you for giving this game some attention on your channel.
I ran into one bug where one layer of sound effects completely vanished, but the game still played fine. I basically had to just wait until it crashed until it fixed itself - which was inevitable. It was the only one I encountered and it didn’t affect actual gameplay at all, it was just weird. It was like I was deaf but could still hear the music and object sound effects, just not Sargon’s.
One bug I had with Menolias is that I had literally beat him. My last strike was too close to the force field wall? It glitched, my HUD disappeared and the fight continued lol. He could kill me but I couldn’t do any damage to him. HAD TO RESTART. Same with Vahram fight one. I was PIIISSSEDDDDD 😂 As for the fight I thought was hardest? It was either Kiana or Orod for me. Not used to having to think that damn fast! 🤣🤣🤣 You are on your toes the entire fight!
3:30 Can you imagine fighting the manticore without realizing you can destroy the lightning orb with your bow? Who would do that, not me... *ahem* Edit: i thought the Aradashir arena was going to be a Radjen fight at some point until i finished the eight soldier quest. Feel like that would have been a better use of that location
I found that you can utterly CHEESE Menolias by just standing in a corner, avoid his attacks and wait for him to thrown his chakram and go for an attack, since you got a wall behind you, he can't dash behind you, making parrying piss easy. And since you ain't too aggressive, he can't counter you, heck when I did that he only countered once and that's cuz I got a bit more aggressive. So turns out to beat a defensive character... play defense Also I beat Kiana without the Shadow of the Simurg ability and this SUCKED, but it wasn't impossible.
I really do feel you're being very harsh on final Vahram lol. I find he has a few aspects and moves superior to regular Vahram. I much more favor his greater utilization of movement and longer duration attacks, and the fact that his melee attack isn't neutralized by a single parry (one of my grievances with regular Vahram). A lot of these moves are more satisfying to execute than regular Vahram's moveset. Though in the end I do agree with the placement, the length and the pacing are dealbreakers.
In total Hollow Knight has a higher numbr of good bosses, but it also has way more mediocre ones, and the good bosses in PoP are generally better than the good ones in HK. Overall yeah, probably. They did get better and better with the DLC's though, so IF ONE DAY IN THE 2030'S Silksong comes out, I'd expect it to have a good boss roster!
@@magicat7356 I hope Silksong has fewer bosses while being better in quality. I don’t want no Marmu, Gorb (sorry, you’re only good as a meme), and Markoth. Also, do we have a hive mind? While fighting Jahandar, I thought about the barrel from Cuphead exactly like you. I have never had an original thought apparently. Likewise, I was dissatisfied too when I found out you can shoot the orb down with arrows. Did you know you can also hit it with your melee weapon? It’s trickier, but also possible. It takes like 10 hits though.
