Dark Souls Boss Concept: Ballerina Knight

I absolutely adore the souls series, mostly for the gameplay and the atmosphere, however if you dig deep there's some genuinely intriguing lore in the item descriptions and the npc dialog.

The 'story' is why every souls series presents such a convincing world. There is no hand-holding. NPCs will have conversations with the player as if you are already part of their world and thus have a sufficient general knowledge of the world's history and the way it functions (i.e-the various death mechanics in the game, how "souls" work as "currency" etc...). In this way NPCs will often miss out bits of information the player needs to know (due to being "out of the loop" of historical happenings), this leads to a HUGE amount of speculation and leaps of faith when trying to string together the tale of the desolate land you are exploring. On paper perhaps this sounds boring, however it leads to one of the most fascinating aspects of the franchise which is the actual SPECULATION of the lore. SO many different people have different fan theories and undoubtedly some of them might even be more interesting that the "true" version of events that the developers had in mind. It's kind of like the "reading the book then watching the movie" effect. Books as a medium lack the ability to convey certain bits of information to the reader, everything is limited to the words on the page and the rest has to be filled in by you imagination. Like this our imaginations will fill the missing blanks between the pieces of evidence in the game and provide the lore with our own personal touch to the story, one which is as rich and fascinating as can be in our own mind's eye. We can believe anything we want with the gentle non-intrusive guiding hand of npc comments and item descriptions which we will only stumble upon if we actively go looking for them.

NOWHERE is the lore more prevalent than in the game's bosses, all looming and impressive. They are all much more than an enemy to conquer if you know where to dig for backstory. I won't go into detail on this but if you want to look up some fascinating ones check out Artorias and Sif, King Allant, the Ancient Dragon (imo he's Aldia), Ornstein and Smough. Some of my visual favorites are Ornstein, Artorias, Sif, The Looking Glass Knight, Manus and the old hero. I thought I'd take a shot at creating my own boss with her own suitable macabre lore for a souls game.

As you can see She's a Ballerina Knight. Her arms have been dismembered and she fights with the blades fastened onto her knee stubs (her lower legs were also cut off). Her skirt is made of blades too so make sure you don't get close to her whilst she's doing her pirouettes :P . Her main attacks are slashing leg motions consisting of ballet dance moves, some martial arts flips and some good ole' kicks. Sh stands about 3-4 times the height of the player, so melee fighters will have to knock her down to do damage (hacking at her metal legs aint going to do anything :D ). This can be done by attacking her while she's doing a move standing on one leg (and obviously not being in the damage zone).