Mada mada koi inu yo

You're supposed to fight the horse lad first, then go back and clear the estate.

I fought her first. She's the most kino souls first boss, and really sets the tone for the rest of the game.

You get the ogre's weakness weapon in the estate though.

Yare yare daze

Yeah, you can get the flame canon then leave but I don't think you're intended to clear the entire estate first time through, at least I didn't.

I wish Owl played a bigger role in the game

Its opinion of course but I feel like the level was designed to push you to beat juzou, walk down the small corridor and get fucked a few times to butterfly, making you backtrack til later

I'm stuck on Hirata owl. Why is the damage you take in this game so FUCKING HIGH. Leveling up strength and physical attributes feels so pointless when you still don't do that much damage to bosses yet they can two shot you. A lot of the mini bosses and main bosses in this game are fun but the balance is just so fucked. Reminds me of when I played Bloodborne, I remember feeling the exact same way.

He almost kills you at hirata then organizes a huge assault on ashina changing the level halfway through the game, and leads to a different ending, I'd say he's already very significant

You're not supposed to take hits, you need to git gud and parries.
Parrying is 50% of the game, if you can't do it you're fucked.

Yeah, hate how increasing your health bar just feels like you're stretching your existing one across the screen instead of actually affecting its value

holy shit, from doesnt even use subsurface scattering for their character models

Muda Muda Wryyyyy!

You need to get into the mindset of thinking of posture as your actual health bar and the vitality bar as the fuckup meter.
You should always be trying to take posture damage over vit.

This is true, also getting your posture broken isn't very punishing, there's hardly any enemies which take full advantage of it so you don't even have to be perfect at parries.

I can parry damn well, but in a prolonged fight I usually mess up a couple of times, either mistiming a single string, trading with a hit because I thought I could attack, or getting fucked by the camera or input lag when I know I pressed the guard button in time but the game says I didn't.
I feel like getting gud isn't enough any more, this game expects you to play flawlessly. Because of this whenever I beat a really hard boss/mini-boss a lot of the time it feels like I just got lucky rather than my expertise, because I managed to simply not fuck up. But that doesn't really feel different from how I play normally.
I still like the game I just think it's too punishing for how tight you have to be on the combat.

>anyone actually dying to Lady Butterfly

I don't get it and I'm not even shit posting. Went through pirate estate as soon as it was available and killed her first try without even taking damage. The game even tells you exactly how to do it right at the start of the fight with that combat tip popup.

Literally just attack attack side dodge ad infinitum and she can't do shit.

It took way too long for this to finally sink in for me. Once it did the game became 100x easier.

She is literally the easiest boss in the game.

mist noble.