Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night guide: Zangetsu boss fight

Zangetsu may only be Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s second boss, but he’s still difficult and frustrating — unless you know what to do. In this guide, we’ll show you how to beat Zangetsu with only three things to keep in mind.

Get out of the way

Half of the battle here is avoiding Zangetsu’s powerful attacks. Don’t get greedy and attack him too much. He’ll counterattack and cause serious damage. Instead, conserve your offense, put some distance between you and him, and react to his attacks.

That’s easy to say. It’s better to see, and you can see us doing that above by:

• Running underneath his chain attack
• Sliding out of the way of a normal attack
• Jumping over his attacks

You don’t need to memorize an exhaustive list of Zangetsu’s attacks to react to them. Just remember to get out of the way. Doing so sets you up for our next piece of advice.

Attack from behind

This is basically a second part of the advice we wrote above. Avoiding Zangetsu’s attacks also sets you up for delivering attacks of your own. Your best opportunities for offense happen just after he’s attacked, ideally when Zangetsu is facing the other way.

You can see several examples of this above. The common thread? We let him attack, avoid his attacks, and then we capitalize when before he has the opportunity to respond. Also, we get out of there before he can counterattack.

Use directional shards with multiple projectiles

Above, you can see us using the True Arrow shard (which we mentioned in our Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night beginner’s guide). At rank 3 for a cost of 30 MP, it fires three arrows, each of which inflicts 24 damage. Land them all, and that’s 72 total damage. Contrast that to the whopping 18 damage we caused with our strongest weapon, and you can see why we’re super into this. (Take the advice we gave in the previous section and save these attacks for when he’s facing the other way, too.)

We also like True Arrow because it’s easy to farm for upgrades early. Outside of the save room near Zangetsu, there’s a Barbatos (an enemy who wears a green hat and fires arrows). Kill your first, and you’ll get True Arrow. Keep killing them, and you can level True Arrow up with the shards you get (eventually).