Who’s the Ornstein and Smough of Dark Souls 3?

If you’re feeling a little unhinged, you can hypothetically make this argument about seven different bosses.

Dark Souls 3 is a game about echoes. Narratively, thematically, and aesthetically, it expands on the first Dark Souls game in complex ways, both to draw players with fond memories of Dark Souls and its characters back into the series and to tell a story about history, legacy, and what it means to cyclically reproduce the familiar. This manifests most obviously in the large variety of returning characters and armor sets, such as Andre or the Wolf Knight armor, as well as in the return of iconic locations like Anor Londo. A little more subtle—but no less interesting to me—is DS’s tendency to “remix” bosses from DS1.

For some of these bosses, the intention to echo DS1 is clear. For example, Friede is obviously meant to evoke Priscilla: she is a lady with a scythe who you fight at the end of a snowy Painted World. You can make these connections across the game: Midir is Kalameet, the Gundyrs are Asylum/Stray Demon, Soul of Cinder is Gwyn, and so on. But, interestingly, Dark Souls 3 is missing an obvious remix of one of the most iconic bosses of Dark Souls. Which boss is the DS3 equivalent of Ornstein and Smough?

To be clear, this is not a question that needs an answer. Not every DS1 or DS3 boss has a parallel in the other game, and trying to force corresponding pairs runs the risk of ignoring important structural differences between the two games. I also risk ignoring FromSoft design tropes that expand past DS1 and DS3: for example, I haven’t played Shadow of the Erdtree yet, but I am sure hearing a whole lot about the Twin Princes right now for some reason. But let’s proceed from the assumption that DS3 is calling back to DS1 more than anything else, and this includes its boss design. As an exercise, comparing bosses from these two games in this way leads to some interesting questions about how the games are designed. What is the essence of an Ornstein-and-Smough-like boss? What are the characteristics we’re comparing anyway? Does this tell us anything useful about the way these games are structured more broadly?

The most obvious type of remix boss is the aesthetic one. This is a DS3 boss who just looks a whole lot like a particular DS1 boss. Friede and Midir are pretty good examples of this: a scythe-wielding barefoot lady who can turn invisible like Priscilla, a big black dragon with swooping and AOE attacks like Kalameet. Aldrich is another character who is super obviously building off a DS1 boss, both in terms of design and in the story of the game: not only does he take on the appearance of Gwyndolin, with their characteristic magic and bow-and-arrow attacks, but this similarity is justified in the narrative by the fact that, well, he literally eats Gwyndolin.

Aldrich takes us to the second type of remix boss: the narrative remix. This is a boss from DS3 who fits into the story of a boss from DS1. Aldrich and Soul of Cinder are two bosses who are in part literally composed of their corresponding DS1 boss; this fact explains their similarity in both aesthetics and attacks. A pure narrative remix—in which the stories are interrelated, but the aesthetics are rather different—is how I would describe the Abyss Watchers and their relation to Artorias. One might be tempted to put the Nameless King in this category, but his connection to Ornstein is a bit tangential. I’m thinking more about characters who are somehow modeled (or have modeled themselves) after a DS1 boss.

These first two types of remix boss seem to point to a single corresponding boss for Ornstein and Smough: the Dragonslayer Armor. This character, with its complex patterning, big red plume, and lightning-infused weapon, bears obvious similarities to Ornstein. They are also both dragonslayers: it seems like the Armor’s design was, in-universe, inspired by the dragonslayers of Anor Londo. Cool! But… this is just a remix of Ornstein, isn’t it? Where’s Smough?

For a boss that’s aesthetically linked to both Ornstein and Smough, we’re going to have to look back at Aldrich. This is another pretty obvious one: you fight Aldrich in O&S’s arena. While he as a character and boss encounter is most informed by Gwyndolin, an important but perhaps overlooked part of a boss’s design is their physical location, and his situation in O&S’s cathedral is a pretty big part of the story that the game is trying to tell about Aldrich. More than any other boss in DS3, Aldrich represents the purposeful appropriation of a legacy from the first game. Part of that legacy is how he has taken over the hall that used to belong to the protectors of Anor Londo and guardians of one of its gods.

Hmm. Could we perhaps expand “narrative remix” to include narrative parallels? Ornstein and Smough are situated in a church, preventing access to a daughter of Gwyn. Is there a boss in DS3 that fits this description? It is, admittedly, kind of ridiculous to pose Halflight as an O&S-type boss, especially since he seems to be moreso a callback to a particular Demon’s Souls boss. But this essay is all about making ridiculous connections. Let us add Halflight to the list and keep going.

A pretty obvious answer to the question of “what makes an O&S-like boss” is the following: it’s a boss who just feels similar to fight. I’ll call this a mechanical remix. A true mechanical remix of O&S should have all the hallmarks that contribute to the unique feel of that encounter. First, obviously, there must be two bosses at once. One of them should be smaller and faster, and one of them should be larger and slower, but hit harder. The big one should feel like they’re about to flatten you into a pancake at any moment. The small one should hang back, playing carefully rather than aggressively, but when they strike, they should strike fast.

In my opinion, the most mechanically-similar boss to Ornstein and Smough in DS3 is Friede and Father Ariandel. Granted, these two have a little more going on, especially with all the fire-and-ice stuff. But Ariandel’s got the signature slam-attack, and I would honestly point to Friede especially as a very Ornstein-like encounter. A lot of what I liked about fighting Ornstein was how patient he feels: the two of you can circle each other around the arena for some time without anyone making a move. Friede feels the same way. Like Ornstein, it’s best to let her come to you. Also like Ornstein, these long pauses make her unexpectedly challenging. Dark Souls boss fights are all about rhythm: a boss like Champion Gundyr might be hard because of how relentlessly he pursues you, but at least he’s fairly predictable about it. A slow-paced, patient boss like Dancer or Friede can trip you up just as much.

Another mechanical consideration is how the fight is structured in terms of phases. This is probably less important or definitional than attacks and rhythm, but it’s still worth noting. Friede is unique thanks to her three-phase structure, where she’s only joined by her father on the second phase. Looking purely at boss phases, I think it’s safe to say that the Demon Prince is surprisingly O&S-like. Like O&S, this fight starts with two bosses who you must fight at once—then, whichever boss you kill last (or don’t kill, in the case of O&S) determines how the second phase will go. This second phase involves a bigger and scarier boss, but only one of them this time.

Beyond aesthetics and mechanics, one might group together bosses who seem to stem from a similar core concept, idea, or gimmick—what I’ll call a conceptual remix. Fighting a conceptual remix boss doesn’t necessarily feel similar to fighting the original; rather, it feels like a new spin on an old set of tropes. For example, I’d say that the Curse-rotted Greatwood, as a boss, is kind of working from the same premise as Bed of Chaos: a tree-themed gimmick boss who only takes damage in certain places! But this is inherently a floaty category, as it differs drastically based on what core gimmick you think characterizes Ornstein and Smough. Is it the “protectors of a giant god woman” thing? There’s Halflight. Is it the “you fight two of them and then you fight one of them” thing? There’s the Demon Prince. Is it… just the fact that there are two of them? Surely it can’t be that. There needs to be something that differentiates a Bell Gargoyles-like boss from an O&S-like boss.

Actually, let’s think about the Bell Gargoyles a little bit. These are an early-game boss in DS1 who you must defeat to access the first Bell of Awakening. You first have to fight only one of them; once you get it down to half health, another one (who is already at half health itself) jumps down to join the fray. In some ways, Ornstein and Smough are nothing without the Bell Gargoyles. The Gargoyles teach the player the simple but important lesson that sometimes, there can be two bosses at once. Two factors serve to soften what is surely a terrifying revelation for some players: you don’t have to deal with both at the start of the fight, and you don’t have to deplete two whole health bars. This prepares players for O&S, who do both come at you at the start of the fight, and whose health you will have to drain entirely yourself.

The Bell Gargoyles parallel in DS3 is pretty clear: it’s the Abyss Watchers. This is the “oh shit, there are two of them” fight that gatekeeps the first of the Cinders. (Should I instead be counting the Deacons as the first tag-team fight? No. They are mechanically very different from the sort of bosses we are discussing here.) So, which scary duo do the Abyss Watchers prepare you for? One might say the Twin Princes, but Lothric and Lorian represent a pretty unique spin on the tag-team boss formula, even if they are the only boss in the base game to display two health bars on screen at once. I think Pontiff Sulyvahn is a clearer parallel. Against the Abyss Watchers, you have some safety in that some of them will start fighting each other. The Pontiff and his clone are the first assured two-against-one scenario. Does this make Sulyvahn an O&S-like? Well… maybe? If we define the “concept” behind O&S as “mid-game tag-team boss foreshadowed by an earlier tag-team boss,” then sure, why not.

Sulyvahn does have another thing going for him, and that’s the fact that he is placed in the mid-game. What if we completely threw out everything about O&S as an encounter, and just looked at what comes before and after them? This brings us to my last remix type: the structural remix. An example is Asylum Demon and Stray Demon versus Iudex Gundyr and Champion Gundyr: tutorial bosses who turn up in a more challenging, optional form later in the game. If “the O&S boss” of DS3 is the one placed just about in the middle of the game, Sulyvahn feels right, regardless of if you do Yhorm or Aldrich first.

The thing about Ornstein and Smough, though, is that defeating them doesn’t just let you progress through the rest of the area, like defeating Sulyvahn lets you continue deeper into Irithyll. They are the gatekeepers of the whole second half of the game. Defeat them, and you obtain the Lordvessel (a game-changing item that doesn’t really have a parallel in a more linear game like DS3) and unlock multiple new avenues of progression. As far as “opening up the map” goes, in DS3, this happens most prominently in Irithyll, when you’re given the choice between heading towards two different Lords of Cinder. But the gatekeepers for Irithyll are either the Deacons or Wolnir, and those two bosses cannot be the O&S of DS3 for a very simple reason: because they don’t represent a significant enough challenge. An important trait of O&S is how their difficulty makes their defeat especially satisfying. So, if you interpret “gatekeeper boss” as “a bottleneck boss who all roads lead to and who all players must fight before the game opens up to nonlinear progression again,” and stipulate that this boss must represent a new sort of difficulty, and throw in that progressing past this boss must require backtracking to areas you could previously see but not access—then the Ornstein and Smough of DS3 is the Dancer of the Boreal Valley.

As a boss fight, the Dancer feels very different from O&S, except maybe that, like Ornstein, her moves are oddly-paced. Within the overall arc of the games, though, it seems like Dancer and O&S are placed in similar positions. Both games have a turning point where you have to come back to places that you’ve already visited. In DS1, that means returning to the Demon Ruins, the Catacombs, and Anor Londo to progress past newly-unsealed barriers. In DS3, that means returning to Lothric proper to finally enter its castle, and to do that you must fight the Dancer. Does that mean she occupies a similar role to O&S in the overarching story of DS3? Sure!

One conclusion you could take from this exercise is basically a checklist of what makes Ornstein and Smough so iconic. They have a plethora of unique properties. They’re a difficult tag-team boss. They’re two simultaneous opponents with two very different fighting styles that require different approaches. The player can influence their second phase in an interesting way. Defeating them rewards the player with arguably the most significant progression milestone in the game. By distributing these properties between multiple bosses in DS3, one could say that FromSoft leveled the playing field between bosses a bit, creating not only a more even spread of these interesting traits but more creative spins on tried-and-true formulas. Does this make DS3’s bosses feel more homogenous? Maybe so—DS3 has far more “humanoid with big weapon” type bosses, a design you only see in DS1 with O&S and Artorias. But I really don’t think that’s because FromSoft was making DS3 bosses while thinking incessantly about Ornstein and Smough. The only bosses I would guess were actively O&S-inspired are Dragonslayer Armor, Aldrich, Friede/Ariandel, and maybe the phase-switching thing you can do with Demon Prince, though I really can’t make proper speculations about this without knowing more about FromSoft design trends in general.

Finally… if you think about it, it would be kind of cheap to just do O&S again, right? They already did Ornstein redux in Dark Souls 2. As we have seen, there are quite a lot of things that make O&S iconic—some of which have less to do with the boss design and more to do with how they fit into the arc of the gameplay—and putting all those traits into one DS3 boss might make it feel like DS3 was aping DS1’s style too much. I think it’s cool that you can draw all these connections between the games that feel less like one-to-one correspondences and more like webs of parallels. You can see Ornstein and Smough throughout many DS3 boss encounters. And even if some DS3 bosses feel transparently like “remixes” of particular DS1 fights, there’s always the DNA of multiple different characters coming together—or some all-new element entirely. The Abyss Watchers evoke Artorias and the Bell Gargoyles, Aldrich evokes Gwyndolin, Nito, and O&S, and so on. For a game about a world trapped in a perpetual state of stagnation, it offers a little bit of hope. Not everything is exactly the same as that which came before it—and that’s a good thing!