Prince of Persia - The Lost Crown: A really really tough boss battle

You know, one of the things that I have been really enjoying about The Lost Crown is the fact that things in it are tough, but they aren't unfair. The bosses I have encountered up to this point end up putting me in a situation where after have a fight a couple of times in a row I kind of have a pretty good idea about what it is going to take to defeat them and a lot of this is about patience and not trying to over-strike and taking damage at the same time.

Up to this point, and I don't really know how much of the game I have completed, I feel as though the boss battles as well as most of the enemies have been interesting and once you understand how they function, it can be great fun adjusting your strategy depending on the situation and who you are facing and how many.

However, when I got to this one boss things have changed a great deal in that this boss, who isn't even the final one, is FAR more difficult than any of the others I have faced up to this point.

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This is the first "full screen" boss that I have encountered and the guy is huge and doesn't really allow for a great deal of "run away!" which is a normal strategy of mine when I get to something that has some sort of sweeping attack... and this guy has many of them.

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The snake has several kinds of attacks and I have figured out how to dodge most of them but the issue here is that it is really difficult to actually damage it. I am not a fan of enemies that stay just beyond your ability to reach them and require precision jumping in order to even get a hit in. That is definitely what is going on with this guy.

The patience aspect of things is definitely a priority here because it is designed to punish you if you are just jumping around like a loon trying to smack it in the face. PoP is very "combo heavy" as far as damage output is involved and unfortunately, you simply do not have a lot of options when an enemy is hovering above you. You can only get single hits in and since that just tickles its life bar, there really isn't much reason to do that.

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At several points in the fight he does this sort of laser sweep that covers nearly the entirety of the floor and this simply isn't possible to dodge unless you use an ability that up until now you haven't really used in any active combat situations.

The trick here is that the game is forcing you to use all of the skills you have gathered up to this point and there is no way you are going to make it through this if you don't use them. I suppose you could maybe get lucky and have enough potions but honestly, it doesn't seem like even that would be very likely.

you are going to need to do plenty of parrying as well because there are points where there are simply too many projectiles coming at you to possibly dodge all of them. Many of your alternate skills such as dodging successfully doing damage to the enemy that attacked you, don't work here.

I think that for a lot of people this is going to be the boss that makes them put the controller down and I am one of those kinds of people. It is actually quite critical that I don't give up here though because if I do, I am going to forget all of the moves required to get through it and then just walk away on this game forever.

I have done this with so many games in the past that I am going to not allow this to happen. It is going to take probably significantly more tries on this boss than it has for others I have faced up to this point but I guess you could say that I kind of appreciate that they wait until this late in the game to throw something truly difficult at you. It isn't soulslike difficult or anything like that but it is considerably more difficult and complicated than any of the other bosses you have faced up to now. Most of those seemed like pushovers in comparison.