Half of these bosses shouldn’t be in the game

About halfway through my All Bosses run now, I have a few bosses in Leyndell plus the endgame and DLC fights left. A few observations:
- Fighting every boss makes you absurdly overleveled sometimes. I regularly three-shot some minor bosses with the Cipher Pata’s Ash of War. This sort of extreme variety in player level makes the game very difficult to actually balance.
- Most of these fights are just filler. Mad Pumpkin Duo, Erdtree Burial Watchdog Duo, Perfumer and Misbegotten Warrior, Demi-Human Queens, a Night’s Cavalry in nearly every area, so many of these fights are pathetically easy and bland. I feel like I’m just crossing them off a list, they don’t feel like real boss fights.
- Many bosses that are genuinely very good get undermined by reuses. Fully-Grown Fallingstar Beast, Regal Ancestor Spirit, Godrick, Elemar of the Briar, Astel, and Magma Wyrm Makar are bosses that obviously had a ton of work put into their movesets and they are quite fun to fight. But they’re made less cool and unique by the fact that you fight copypasted versions of them other places, stripped of their original context. Elemar gets this the worst, as he isn’t any different from the Bell Bearing Hunters so if you’ve fought one of those he isn’t interesting at all.
- Ulcerated Tree Spirit is actually a great fight and I enjoy it every time.
Overall I think the game could’ve been greatly improved by being smaller, with half the bosses but more of them being unique. I hope if they do a sequel or more DLC that it is intentionally not as big. Shadow of the Erdtree was a step in the right direction size-wise but unfortunately also had a lot of reuse.
Also, duo Crucible Knights are actually pretty alright.