IGN

Amazon has finally confirmed The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Season 3.

The Prime Video adaptation sees directors Charlotte Brändström, Sanaa Hamri, and Stefan Schwartz in place for the upcoming season, which is currently in pre-production at Shepperton Studios in the UK. Filming begins this spring.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the events of Season 3 will follow a “major” time jump, with Sauron crafting the One Ring. Here’s the official blurb, as reported by THR:

Jumping forward several years from the events of Season 2, Season 3 takes place at the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as the Dark Lord seeks to craft the One Ring that will give him the edge he needs to win the war and conquer all Middle-earth at last.

The War of the Elves, like the rest of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, takes place during the Second Age of Middle-earth, which itself leads into the events depicted in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s adaptation.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power continues to captivate audiences worldwide, and we’re thrilled that a third season is underway,” said Vernon Sanders, head of television, Amazon MGM Studios.

“The creative team has an extraordinary vision of what’s to come with stories that have left us enchanted and enthralled. We look forward to continuing this epic journey, for our global customers, delving even deeper into the legendary tales that shaped Middle-earth.”

Charlotte Brändström, who served as co-executive producer and directed multiple episodes in Seasons 1 and 2, returns as executive producer and director for Season 3. She is joined by returning director Sanaa Hamri, who helmed several episodes in Season 2, and veteran director Stefan Schwartz. Each director will oversee multiple episodes in the upcoming season, Amazon said.

Amazon said The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been an “unprecedented success,” with a “broad, highly engaged, global fan base.” Season 1 remains the biggest TV premiere in the history of Prime Video and Season 2 the most-watched returning season by hours watched. Overall, The Rings of Power has attracted over 170 million viewers worldwide, Amazon said, and “continues to be one of Amazon’s strongest drivers for new Prime membership sign-ups.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is produced by showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay.

Warning! Spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power follow.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 finally revealed the identity of the Stranger to be Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings’ most famous wizard. Check out IGN’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 finale review to find out what we thought of its big finish, then our feature explaining the Season 2 ending and how it sets up Season 3. Gandalf’s involvement in the coming war with Sauron seems like a sure bet.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

On the heels of an insect-filled survival game and a 2D detective story straight out of the 16th century that were pleasantly surprising departures from what developer Obsidian does best, Avowed is a return to that traditional action RPG comfort food we know and love. Set in the fantasy universe of Pillars of Eternity, this is a game that’s filled with all my favorite RPG cliches, like standing around a campfire with my party members to exchange dark backstories and unresolved traumas, and looting every single slain enemy before their corpse has even begun to cool. Per Obsidian’s pedigree, the writing, world-building, and open-world maps are all quite good, and running around lobbing deadly spells at reanimated skeletons and violent lizard folk to claim shiny new gear is as entertaining as you might expect, if not exactly breaking new ground. That’s a bit of a trend, actually: Avowed draws so much from the Skyrims and Dragon Ages of the past that it ends up an overall unsurprising adventure that has few distinctive ideas to call its own.

As both a chosen Godlike imbued with magical powers and the Envoy of the Emperor your character is granted a downright irresponsible amount of authority to do whatever you please, and you’re dispatched to the wild continent of the Living Lands to put an end to a mysterious plague of madness called the Dreamscourge while also finding the time to aid any person on the street who asks you for help with whatever personal problem they might have. You’ll spend your days delving into ruined yet beautiful caves, sewers, and forgotten places in search of loot and XP, while taking every opportunity to whale on beasts and ne’er-do-wells with swords, bows, and spells. Yes, this is basically the premise of every western RPG from the past several decades, but that’s because it’s a formula that works reliably. Avowed executes almost every aspect of it quite well.

This is especially true of the dialogue and story, which is without question the thing Avowed does best. Unraveling the mystery of the fungal Dreamscourge and the otherworldly forces at play is a journey well worth seeing to its conclusion, especially since your decisions can have a profound impact on how things end up – the ending I got hinted at loads of things that could have gone much differently and my fingerprints were all over the ultimate fate of the Living Lands, which could make it worth another playthrough to see how things might have gone differently. And although you usually don’t make major world-changing decisions until you’re just about to move on to the next zone, there are a few times where the consequences of my choices were immediately and keenly felt, like the time I decided to cast a spell so powerful it randomly killed a substantial percentage of the population, Thanos-style, and everyone hated me thereafter. Granted, most of the twists and turns that Avowed’s plot sets up become pretty apparent well before your character and their companions become aware of them, which is a bit disappointing given the Pillars of Eternity series’ track record for wild revelations that took me by surprise. Even so, the story kept the adventure running full steam the whole time, especially with interesting choices to make to keep you company along the way.

Bantering alongside your four companions, each of whom brings their own opinions, personal problems for you to untangle, and cool combat and puzzle-solving abilities to rely upon while exploring the Living Lands is especially delightful. Just like in sister Obsidian RPG The Outer Worlds, you can bring two of these rapscallions with you at a time, which allows you to experiment with different pairings for mechanical purposes or just to hear them trash talk your decisions. Hanging out with Kai, the sarcastic reptilian mercenary with a fondness for woodworking is rarely dull, and bringing the furry, catlike, and relentlessly horny mage Yatzli along will almost guarantee you won’t have to go very long without some choice innuendos. Sadly, she’s just a tease: you can’t actually romance any of them, and the social links you can develop are fairly shallow. That seems like a fairly big miss since it’s otherwise great at building camaraderie with your eclectic found family, and even a fade-to-black sexytime scene can give you something to remember an RPG playthrough by.

Leaning into Obsidian’s substantial worldbuilding chops, Avowed is absolutely brimming with lore that builds upon the world the Pillars of Eternity games established, and it’s easy to lose hours just reading books and scrolls or discussing politics with the locals of every major region. Better still, even if you aren’t an expert on the world of Eora, there’s an extremely handy reference guide that populates with key places, factions, people, and concepts unique to the world whenever a character brings it up in a conversation, similar to the active time lore feature in Final Fantasy XVI. So before you make that really important decision that might well carry dire consequences, you can quickly toggle over to make sure you understand what they heck they’re talking about before proceeding. That makes Avowed’s typical fantasy setting that’s filled with what can quickly become too many made-up words and foreign concepts a whole heck of a lot easier to navigate.

When you aren’t chatting up the locals, you’ll probably be sending them back to The Wheel for reincarnation via Avowed’s tumultuous combat. You’ll face off against the usual baddies, from typical fantasy creatures and animals to anthropomorphic mushrooms and people driven to madness by the Dreamscourge. Fighting with melee weapons and magic feels smoother and more competent than it does in many similar fantasy RPGs, but evading dozens of enemies as they charge through sickly marshes and barren deserts isn’t as easy as it looks. I spent most of my time playing as a squishy wizard who had little in the way of protection and had to do my best to keep my distance, quick-dodge like a champ, and rain down as many high-powered spells as I could to keep them at bay. I’m especially fond of one that opens a black hole that lifts enemies helplessly into the air, and another that fills the area with a deadly lightning storm. Alternatively, there are more martial character build options that require more blocking, stabbing, and making use of power attacks to break the enemy’s guard, and each of these has their own skill trees that let you do neat things like smack enemies onto their backs with a powerful ramming attack. As someone who insists on playing on the hardest difficulty on my first run, I definitely found myself knocked on my butt more than a few times, and accidentally stumbling into an area that I wasn’t properly leveled for was quite humbling. But it was never insurmountable.

My biggest issue with combat is in the variety of opponents: for the vast majority of my 50-hour completionist run (you could easily beat it in less than half that time if you breeze past some side quests and play on normal difficulty) I found myself fighting the same handful of enemy types everywhere I ventured, and almost none of them are interesting or unique in their behaviors to begin with. There’s, of course, skeletons in need of re-killing, oversized spiders that spit gunk at you, and bears (oh my). And by God, are there so many bears in this world! Even when it doesn’t really make any sense for them to be here, they throw a few bears into the mix. A bandit camp with half a dozen ruffians sitting around a campfire? Why not add two pet bears to the party?

After a few hours the novelty of fighting these humdrum fantasy baddies, and my interest in squaring off against them, diminished. Every once in a while something big, scary, and unexpected would arrive and make me remember how to defeat a non-bear opponent, but these welcome surprises are too few and far between.

Thankfully there’s plenty more to do and see while exploring each of Avowed’s four substantial open-world hubs, each filled with side quests to complete, minor puzzles to solve, hidden chests to loot, and people to talk smack to. You’ll go from a forested port town to a creepy, corrupted countryside, then to a perilous desert and an ashen wasteland with an active volcano spewing lava every which way. It’s a structure that resembles The Outer Worlds’ separate planets: None of the maps are especially big, but they make great use of the space they have, and they’re all delightfully colorful and brimming with personality that’s a welcome change from the sometimes drab and dull places we end up exploring in other RPGs.

Those maps are great to explore the first time you go through them, though they don’t give you many reasons to stick around or run through again since enemies never respawn. This is a blessing insofar as you don’t have to retread the same areas to fight monsters (and bears) that have arbitrarily reappeared, but this also means any backtracking is completely devoid of life. They’re empty to the point where I felt extremely pressured to move onto the next zone as soon as possible because it felt as if the clean-up crew was going to show up to break down the set and remove the furniture at any moment.

One unique aspect of Avowed’s exploration is just how much it wants you to engage with its parkour system: it gives you ample opportunities to leap from ledge to ledge, mantling over this and that as you search for hidden treasure chests and avoid traps. This is an emphasis on mobility that’s fairly unusual for the genre, and it adds an activity that’s a welcome change from the routine to focus on in between (or sometimes during) combat. You won’t be doing wall-running or anything quite so fancy as what you’d find in Dying Light 2, but it’s still an interesting extra dimension to break up the conventional dungeon delving.

While there aren’t a lot of big new ideas that set Avowed apart, there are some nice smaller ones that I’d love to see every RPG hereafter learn from. For example, although there’s a stamina system during combat whereby you can exhaust yourself and lose the ability to fight back for a short time, running never drains it, whether you’re in or out of combat. So I appreciated that Avowed never inflicted the all-too-familiar annoyance of constantly running out of energy every 15 seconds when sprinting around the world. Similarly, you have encumbrance limits when looting items, but it’s quite generous with the space it gives you, even if you’re a wimpy wizard with a relatively small capacity like myself. What’s more, only larger items like weapons and armor count towards your carrying capacity, while consumables, materials, and other small items are weightless, ammo for guns and arrows for bows are unlimited, and larger items can be dismantled on the spot to turn them into valuable (and weightless) materials. There’s even an option to just hit a “send to camp” button anywhere in the world to instantly transport loot to your stash. These little details might not be genre-shifting refinements, but as someone who is easily infuriated by meaningless limitations that start to feel terrible after dozens of hours, they were seriously a godsend and I appreciate Obsidian’s thoughtful approach to removing some traditional RPG friction.

Yet if there’s one thing that impressed me the most about Avowed, it’s the fact that across my 50+ hours with it on Xbox Series X, I encountered almost no glitches or technical issues worth mentioning. There was one time where I unwittingly killed an optional boss before accepting the quest to hunt it down, another where my compass wouldn’t tell me where to go for the next part of the main story, and sometimes I’d see odd polygons pop in and out while exploring the world. But I can count the number of times these things happened on one hand, and I didn’t experience a single crash even once during my entire time playing. That’s all but unprecedented for this genre, and an extremely welcome surprise.

Let’s get the comparisons out of the way first; Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feels closer to the Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed era of games as opposed to the more recent Team Sonic Racing, but has taken advantage of the enhancements that Team Sonic Racing brought to the table. While I’ve enjoyed both formats, the three-character mechanic of building a team to work together to coordinate racing and drift lines is gone. Instead, CrossWorlds goes back to Mario Kart’s everyone-for-themselves format. Like Mario Kart, it shares some similarities, from the items on the courses to the various shortcuts and cart customization. However, while it shares some DNA, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds evolves beyond what we’ve gotten from its now 11-year-old competitor. Now, one area that CrossWorlds may come up short in compared to Team Sonic Racing is so far, there is no sign of an adventure mode, but this was an early look, so that might be one of the many reveals that the team is saving for later.

While many elements mimic its competitors, the green and red rocket-powered gloves bounce off walls or home in on opponents, being the most one-to-one example to the shells in Mario Kart and the customizable car parts and wheels like we got in MK8. There is still enough here to help CrossWorlds stand apart from the crowd, though. Plenty of the elements core to Sonic games, such as the various wisp powerups like drill and tornado ability, knock other racers away and defend you from incoming attacks. There were also magnets you could throw out as hazards, which pull enemies towards them if they get too close, and their ultimate rubber band item to help those in lower positions catch up, the Monster Truck, which turns your car into a massive monster truck that knocks enemies away and allows you to drive over all terrains without penalty.

Beyond the items Sonic Racing CrossWorlds is all about – well, crossing worlds, with each race separated into the traditional three laps. Still, each lap feels different, thanks to the marquee CrossWorlds mechanic. At the end of the first lap, whoever is leading the pack will determine which course the second lap will take by driving through one of two giant travel rings that transport everyone seamlessly once they arrive at that point. The options for these are randomized, and sometimes, one of the options itself is a randomizer, so not even the leader will know what to expect if they choose it.

During my demo time, my second lap took me across stages themed with things like dinosaurs, pirates, or lava, where we spent most of the lap in a plane, another mechanic that I will get to later. There are also modifiers for the second stage, called frenzy, that will alter the lap, such as placing moving boost gates along the entire lap or granting a maximum boost gauge after drifting for only a split second and making the whole lap feel like I was back in the days of the snaking that plagued and ruined Mario Kart DS. Thankfully, frenzy modifiers are random, and across my 15 or so races, the instant boost frenzy only happened once – so I’m not worried at all about it becoming an issue in CrossWorlds.

After finishing the second lap, another transport ring seamlessly sends players back to the original course, but with some minor but effective changes to the course layout in key areas. Courses like Metal Harbor evolve, where you have to drive around the outside of a rocket launchpad on lap one, but on lap three, the rocket has launched as it did in Sonic Adventure 2, replacing it with a steep Half-pipe ramp that allows players to perform as many air tricks as possible to gain a considerable speed boost when landing on the opposite side. And that’s just one example! In another course with water segments, I saw gates open, allowing access to shortcuts or supercharged item boxes with a higher chance of granting better items. CrossWorlds is also hiding shortcuts around the map as well as shortcut rings that activate on the final lap tha would temporarily send me to another world. These secret rings are powerful shortcuts as they extended my lead in races or helped me catch up and made it more challenging for other racers to target me with their items. I don’t know what forces were causing these rings to appear as I raced, but they were worth the effort of being ready to take them.

Like the Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed games, portions of laps, or sometimes entire laps, place you in a plane or boat instead of a car. All of these vehicles have a unique identity, and while they share similarities, they have mechanics to help them stand out from one another. In addition to the standard drift mechanic you get in a car when transformed into a boat, you have a charge mechanic that jumps it out of the water, giving another opportunity to perform air tricks for speed boosts, which can help you regain some speed after hitting a hazard or being tagged by an enemy’s attack. While planes offer more routes than the other vehicles, they do so only if you spot the alternate paths, like a chain of boost gates underneath the road on Magma Planet where you need to dodge waves of magma to maximize the planes advantage. The variety of vehicles and paths gave me nostalgic notes of figuring out the best routes based on the vehicle I was in like I did in Diddy Kong Racing from my Nintendo 64 days but with all the updates to the formula you would hope for in a game released nearly two decades later.

While I was playing, I spotted some incredible inclusions spanning multiple generations that longtime fans of Sonic will be excited about. The roster of characters shown so far ranged from the expected heroes and regular all-stars Sonic, Tails, & Knuckles to less frequently playable characters like Cream, Omega, and even Zazz from Lost World. The rider you put behind the wheel also has unique stats that will affect how they drive each car, and even rivals like Sonic and Shadow have similar yet different stats, such as one having more speed while the other having more power or boost. Vehicles fall into five classes: speed, acceleration, handling, power, and boost, all of which have high stats in the matching category with the looks to match it, and I could quickly feel the change in my car as I swapped between them.

When racing in my power vehicle, which I had customized to look like a bulldozer, I felt thematically appropriate as I bullied other racers all while stealing their rings and giving myself a speed boost thanks to some gadgets I had installed, which I will also get to in a bit. Characters and types of cars have the most significant impact on your vehicle’s stats, which you can then modify by changing individual car parts like the wheels, and more. I picked my favorite Shadow and raced in four of the five vehicle types, all of which worked well enough to where I finished in first place for 75% of my races and top five in all of the rest except for one (where a well-timed item hit me and caused me to miss a ramp and fall off the map in the final stretch of a race). Along with changing out parts for stats, you can also deck out your car with decals and change the colors and materials to your heart’s content. Combining your character with car customization allows you to make your vehicle your own.

The last bit of customization comes from another mechanic called the gadget panel. It’s a powerful tool for changing how people race, granting abilities like an increased chance of getting certain items, adding a fourth level to the drift boost gauge, or granting you rings for performing specific actions. Every ability costs anywhere from one to three slots, and your panel to install them consists of two rows of three for a maximum of six slots. I started with only two slots, but after a few hours of racing, I increased this to five, giving me more options to slot in new abilities that changed how I approached races. Early on, I had opted for an ability that allowed me to grab rings from a greater range, which took up a single slot, but later on, I swapped to a pair of two-slot abilities that would give me a boost when colliding with others racers while also stealing 10 rings from them to help me reach my top speed sooner and also slowing my competition. Fortunately for my competitors and unfortunately for me, they caught on to my antics thanks to the ability to see other racers’ builds before a race, and shortly after implementing that strategy, nearly everyone else copied it, plunging our races into chaos like a 12-player game of bumper cars. Needless to say, this was a ton of fun as we all kept trying to ram into each other to get out in front of the pack.

Even though it was just a short test drive with my favorite hedgehogs and friends, I am eager to see what else hasn’t yet been revealed. The racing felt snappy and responsive, and each car customization operated as I expected. I felt like a superstar hitting enemies with the well-timed items I unleashed, and the new CrossWorlds mechanic was a blast, allowing me to learn courses while keeping each race feeling fresh, as I never knew what to expect on the second lap of every race. There’s a lot more left to learn about Sonic’s latest racer, but so far, so good.

FromSoftware has become a leading developer of action RPGs, crafting a number of unforgettable journeys into grimdark lands filled with horrors and wonder in equal measure. But, despite its unrivaled approach to level and lore design, FromSoft’s lasting legacy will likely always be its bosses: deeply challenging, typically horrific foes that push your skills to the very limits.

For its next game, Elden Ring Nightreign, FromSoftware is going all-in on the bosses. This roguelike-ish co-op game is fully combat focused, with each of Nightreign’s runs pitting players against an increasingly difficult set of bosses. And, as the first trailer revealed, some of those bosses are returning foes from the Dark Souls series, including the majestic Nameless King.

With all this in mind, we asked ourselves: what are the best boss fights FromSoftware has made? We considered battles from across FromSoftware’s “Soulsborne” style games – Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Demon’s Souls, and the Dark Souls trilogy. We assessed not just the challenge of each fight, but every element of the battle: the music, the setting, the mechanical complexity, the lore significance, and many other details. What follows are our 25 favourites, based on all those criteria.

This isn’t a list of the most difficult bosses. This is a list of the greatest bosses in FromSoftware history.

25. Old Monk (Demon’s Souls)

Conceptually, the Old Monk from Demon’s Souls is one of the coolest ways FromSoftware has tried to push its vision of PvP multiplayer invasions. Instead of a traditional, computer-controlled boss, the Old Monk has the chance of being puppeted by another player. While the level of challenge the Old Monk poses largely depends on the skill of the summoned player, this unusual event nonetheless does a good job of reminding you that enemy players can appear in your game at any time, even during a boss fight.

24. Old Hero (Demon’s Souls)

While many of its bosses have been totally eclipsed by more elegantly designed foes in subsequent games, Demon’s Souls’ puzzle-style showdowns remain fascinating highpoints in FromSoft’s library. Old Hero is the best example; a tall, glowing, hard-hitting ancient warrior who is completely blind. He flails out in all directions, but his inability to track you by sight makes avoiding his blade practically trivial. However, while he can’t see you he can hear you, and so the clash against Old Hero becomes a quasi-stealth experience. It’s hardly a difficult fight, settling into a pattern of sneaking into position, striking the Hero’s ankles, and then silently holding back until he resets his patrol. Despite this, Old Hero stands as a unique event in FromSoft history, and laid the groundwork for esoteric bosses like Elden Ring’s Rennala and Sekiro’s Folding Screen Monkeys.

23. Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon (Dark Souls 2: Crown of the Sunken King)

Dragons are typically some of the toughest bosses in FromSoftware’s games, but early dragon fights in games like Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls felt more like prototypes compared to some of the epic dragon fights that appear in newer games. A turning point for fantasy’s iconic winged beasts, when dragon fights truly began to feel like epic clashes, came in Dark Souls 2’s Sunken Crown trilogy with the battle against Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon. With swelling music accompanying this monstrously difficult fight in the depths of a poisonous cavern, Sinh is the template for how cool and terrifying all later dragon fights feel in FromSoftware games.

22. Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos (Bloodborne)

While you must put down a number of eldritch creatures during your journey through Yarnham, none reflects Bloodborne’s relationship with the works of Lovecraft quite like Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos. A mass of tentacles, growths, and wings, she’s the creature worshiped by the Healing Church and the origin point of Blood Ministration. In short, she’s a key reason for why the events of Bloodborne take place. While she doesn’t quite prove as fearsome as her backstory may suggest, she nonetheless provides a thematically-rich showdown; her most devastating attack sees her rip open the cosmos to fire volleys of arcane energy, while her regurgitated blood inflicts Frenzy; a status effect that slowly drives you insane by inflicting the Eldritch Truth upon your mind. As we said, it’s Lovecraft as hell.

21. Fume Knight (Dark Souls 2)

Arguably the most difficult fight in Dark Souls 2, Fume Knight combines speed and brawn. He dual-wields two weapons; a long-sword for speedy attacks, and a hulking Buster Sword-style blade for heavy damage. He’ll later combine the two into one giant flame sword that you do not want to get on the wrong end of. While the Fume Knight’s difficulty makes him stand out, he’s also very fun to fight. FromSoft’s duel-style fights typically pit you against either a speedy knight or a heavy, but Fume Knight combines both in one flame-wielding package.

20. Bayle the Dread (Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree)

The fight against Bayle the Dread is memorable enough on its own, what with being one of the hardest bosses in a DLC featuring some of the toughest bosses throughout all of Elden Ring. But what really elevates it and sends it over the edge, making it one of the best fights throughout the series, is your NPC ally, Igon. His guttural cries of sheer hatred for Bayle, both in the leadup to the fight and the fight itself, are just so unforgettable, and add another layer of excitement in an already incredibly exciting face-off against a hideous dragon.

19. Father Gascoigne (Bloodborne)

Every FromSoft game has a proving ground moment relatively early on. These boss fights challenge your grasp of the game’s mechanics, and if you can’t overcome them, then that’s likely where your playthrough ends. Bloodborne features perhaps the best of this particular style of boss with Father Gascoigne. If you just mindlessly strike at him, he will counter you with a gunshot and use a visceral attack for huge damage. And if you just try to just rely on your reflexes and dodge his attacks, he will likely outlast you thanks to how little damage you do and how few healing blood vials you likely have. To take on Gascoigne, you need to learn how to use the environment to your advantage, to not get greedy with your offense, and ideally how to use your own gun to parry his slower attacks – all of which are crucial skills that you’ll need to know for future, harder fights in Bloodborne.

18. Starscourge Radahn (Elden Ring)

Elden Ring is bursting to the seams with sweeping spectacle, but not many of its encounters come close to facing off against the scale of Starscourge Radahn and his vast festival battlefield. The oversized, maniacal experimenter of gravity magic may cut a slightly comical figure atop his tiny-by-comparison steed, but the last thing you’ll be doing is laughing when he’s plunging down to earth like a meteor hellbent on your destruction…

While a patch dropped in Elden Ring’s earliest days means he no longer offers the same level of ludicrous challenge he once did, the battle against Radahn is still a fight that stands as one of Miyazaki’s most inventive. The ability to summon in numerous NPC companions you’ve met along your journey adds a real sense of “epicness” to the battle as well, as the likes of Blaidd, Lionel the Lionhearted, and everyone’s favourite big pot lad, Iron First Alexander, join the fray. It’s an encounter worthy of the Festival of Combat’s name, and one that ends in one of the most (literally) earth-shattering moments of Elden Ring, revealing a whole new layer to FromSoft’s masterpiece.

17. Great Grey Wolf Sif (Dark Souls)

FromSoft’s games are laden with melancholy, but few moments reach the heart-tugging heights (depths?) of being asked to strike down Great Grey Wolf Sif. Artorias’ loyal oversized canine companion, Sif can be found guarding the grave of its fallen master, wielding his large greatsword between his jaws. This may not be Dark Souls’ most challenging encounter, but it is one heavy with atmosphere and story implications. All this can’t help but leave an emotional imprint on those who take part in it. As such, it remains one of the series’ most enduring moments, and a reminder that FromSoft’s worlds and characters are rarely presented as morally black and white. Instead, they’re forever grey.

16. Maliketh, the Black Blade (Elden Ring)

If you want an example of one of, if not the most purely aggressive bosses in Souslike history, look no further than Maliketh. Even in his bestial first phase, he rushes towards you, darting in and out of the fight, tossing rocks at you even as he dodges away. But the real terror begins when he throws away his robe and reveals his true form: Maliketh, the Black Blade. He doesn’t even restore his health, but it never feels like he’s coming into the battle at anything less than 100% because it’s so hard to actually find opportunities to hit him. His combos are long and have multiple follow ups that are easy to catch you by surprise if you’ve not committed every precise pattern to memory. Despite this difficulty though, Maliketh remains one of the most memorable boss battles throughout all of Elden Ring for how high intensity the whole fight is, right from the get go.

15. Dancer of the Boreal Valley (Dark Souls 3)

Dancer of the Boreal Valley is a visually stunning, technically unique boss fight. Wielding a pair of curved blades, this giant armored boss utilizes her long limbs and erratic fighting style to keep players on their toes. Unusually timed animations mean you never know when she’s going to strike, nor from what distance, making it hard to predict her moves. But Dark Souls 3’s animation team deserves extra credit for creating such an eerie figure whose dance-like movements certainly live up to her name.

14. Genichiro Ashina (Sekiro)

The first time players face off against Sekiro’s Genichiro Ashina, the battle takes place in a field of reeds on a moonlit night. While the boss fight will likely last only a few short minutes, it is one of the most memorable fights in the entire game. That’s until you face him again atop Ashina castle, where you’ll face one of the most epic duels in FromSoftware history. Crossing swords with Genichiro Ashina will require all your strength and guile, and learning to deflect literal lightning back at your foe is perhaps Sekiro’s mythical swordsman fantasy at its most potent. Ultimately, though, this fight is a test to see whether you grasp Sekiro’s key concepts of parrying and deflecting. Because if you’re not prepared for Genichiro, you’re not prepared for Sekiro.

13. Owl (Father) (Sekiro)

As Sekiro’s storyline begins to branch in its final act, progressing towards the Purification ending involves killing Wolf’s imposing and traitorous father, Owl. The fight’s emotional blows are second only to its physical ones, as Owl is one of the most aggressive and hardest-hitting bosses in the entire game. He has an arsenal of lethal gadgets up his sleeve, hurling handfuls of shuriken as he leaps through the air and casting trails of thick smoke and sparks that conceal his long-reaching sword strikes. Despite his heavy, muscular physique he’s surprisingly quick, especially during the fight’s second phase when he’s able to make use of a spectral owl to teleport across the arena. Murdering your father is a difficult thing to do, but when the fight’s as thrilling as this one, the feeling is not entirely unpleasant.

12. Soul of Cinder (Dark Souls 3)

If there’s a boss who can represent the very essence of Dark Souls through aesthetics alone, it’s the Soul of Cinder. The final boss of Dark Souls 3, this manifestation of every Lord who linked the Flame takes the form of a grimdark knight shrouded in fire. Its amalgamation nature means it fights with an unpredictable array of styles. One moment it could perform a deadly pirouette with an elegant curved sword, and the next close the distance between you with a piercing spear lunge. It’s the fight’s second phase, though, that really locks Soul of Cinder into the history books. Unleashing heavy, multi-strike combos with a flaming blade, his attack patterns recreate those of Gwyn, the Lord of Cinder and final boss of the original Dark Souls. And so the trilogy ends in a beautiful, haunting reflection of its seminal first outing.

11. Sister Friede (Dark Souls 3: Ashes of Ariandel)

A brutal endurance test across three distinct phases, Sister Friede is arguably the most punishing boss fight in the entire Dark Souls series. Hidden away in the Ashes of Ariandel DLC, Friede is a scythe-wielding nun that fights with such relentless aggression that the most difficult thing is not so much staying alive, but finding the opportunity to deal even a single point of damage. She fights alone in the fierce first and third phases, but it’s the middle phase where things really get going. Friede awakens the ginormous Father Ariandel, who drags himself around the area while spilling great tides of searing flame from his massive bowl. Overcoming both Ariandel and the frost-casting Friede simultaneously is a song of ice and fire for the ages.

10. Orphan of Kos (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Bloodborne’s most infamous foe, Orphan of Kos plagues the nightmares of all who have faced it. The grotesque, shrieking offspring of a dying Great One, the Orphan is a terrifyingly fast boss. After closing the distance with a spry leap, it attacks tirelessly with lengthy, unpredictable combos that are difficult to parry and leave practically zero room for error. Oh, and if its corpse-like form wasn’t gross enough, it wields its own solidified placenta as a weapon, hurling pieces of it at you as if they were organic grenades. It truly is the thing of nightmares.

9. Malenia, Blade of Miquella (Elden Ring)

No other FromSoft boss has defined the cultural zeitgeist like how Malenia, Blade of Miquella did. That was a clear shift in the gaming community when players steadily started to discover her hiding spot at the bottom of Elden Ring’s Haligtree. Arguably the 2020 Game of the Year winner’s most challenging fight, and if not definitely one of its most memorable, the clash against Malenia takes place over two punishing stages that put all of your dueling skills to the test. If your name isn’t Let Me Solo Her, that is.

The first is a sword-centered face-off in which the legendary twin of Miquella, who brought Caelid to ruins through an unleashing of scarlet rot, aims to skewer you with her mesmerisingly deadly waterfowl dance maneuver. If you manage to weave yourself in and out of her flurrying swipes you’ll meet her second form: the beautifully destructive Goddess of Rot persona that unleashes sparkling red plumes that eat at your health bar. Malenia’s a mighty challenge to take down, but also a boss fight filled with visual spectacle and rooted in a deep story attached to the shattering of Elden Ring’s world.

8. Guardian Ape (Sekiro)

Sekiro’s Guardian Ape is undoubtedly the most comedic foe on this list. As you’d expect of a giant monkey, this mighty beast lashes out with a primal rage, its gangly limbs flailing outwards in order to sweep you off your feet. But between those strikes are moments of gleeful toilet humour, as the Guardian Ape farts poison gas in your face and slings stinky mounds of poop across the battlefield. It’s delightfully silly stuff.

But the Guardian Ape is also the dirtiest trick FromSoft has ever pulled, and not because of all the feces. With the ape’s head severed from its neck, it seems like the fight is over. The “Shinobi Execution” graphic even appears, which always marks the end of a tough battle. And then the Guardian Ape stands up, its head grasped in one hand, the sword that decapitated it in the other. And then you must survive a frenzied fright with the Ape’s shrieking, reanimated corpse. There’s never been a table flip quite as effective as this one.

7. Knight Artorias (Dark Souls: Artorias of the Abyss)

Artorias the Abysswalker is a truly tragic figure within Dark Souls’ lore. Possessed by the essence of darkness and forced to abandon his friends and compatriots, Artorias is a great piece of Dark Souls writing. Not only that, he’s also an exhilarating boss fight. After dying again and again to Artorias’ rapid attacks and tricky combos, by the time I defeated him I felt like I should start recording my gameplay like SunhiLegend. Moreso than any other fight, beating Artorias feels like a rite of passage for anyone looking to embark on the path of mastering Dark Souls.

6. Nameless King (Dark Souls 3)

The Nameless King is an example of a perfect Dark Souls boss. He’s undeniably one of Dark Souls 3’s most difficult foes, but nevertheless puts up a fair and measured fight. His lightning-wreathed lunges and explosive slams are clearly telegraphed, and you don’t need superhuman reflexes to counter him. What you do need is endurance, persistence, and flexibility, as this long fight of two halves presents a duo of unique challenges. The first phase is a gold-standard dragon duel, with the King riding atop his fire-belching, constantly mobile wyvern. With his mount defeated, you move onto the grounded second phase in which you go toe-to-toe for the thrilling finale. Fought atop Archdragon Peak within the eye of a storm, Nameless King provides an unforgettable spectacle soundtracked by one of the series’ best ever musical themes. This really is almost as good as it gets.

5. Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough (Dark Souls)

The first time you encounter Ornstein and Smough, you might think to yourself, “Two on One? That doesn’t seem very fair.” What’s funny, then, is that after you finally manage to kill one of them, the other absorbs their fallen ally’s power, restoring all of their health, and becomes a tougher version of what you’ve already been fighting, no doubt prompting you to think, again, “Wait, that doesn’t seem very fair!”

Ornstein and Smough established the very template for this kind of double boss fight, and it’s one that FromSoftware loves to include in virtually every one of its games released since Dark Souls. None have quite reached the level of notoriety as Ornstein and Smough, though. It’s an unforgettable fight on its own, but its influence on the genre as a whole is what truly makes this battle so special.

4. Ludwig, The Accursed/Holy Blade (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Ludwig is arguably Bloodborne’s most complex boss. He constantly evolves throughout the fight, making use of new moves as you chip deeper into his health bar. Across both phases he’s able to command a total of 23 unique attacks, many of which are unleashed with such ferocity that even a minor error can leave you crushed beneath Ludwig’s hooves. To defeat him you need to fully embrace Bloodborne’s trademark aggression and speed, particularly in the first phase, in which Ludwig leaps around like a frenzied Buckaroo. Alongside being a serious challenge, Ludwig is a great encapsulation of Bloodborne’s tragic lore. He’s the Healing Church’s first hunter, now mutated into a horse-like, multi-limbed eldritch horror thanks to his dangerous obsessions. Proudly wielding Yarnham’s version of FromSoft’s recurring Moonlight Great Sword, Ludwig is one of the studio’s greatest creations.

3. Slave Knight Gael (Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City)

Few fights feel as truly mythical as the showdown with Slave Knight Gael. The final boss of Dark Souls 3’s The Ringed City DLC, he more than lives up to the task of being the trilogy’s concluding challenge. In the fight’s opening act he crawls around, beast like, swinging his blade in heavy, imprecise arcs. But come phase two, Gael takes on the strength of the Dark Soul itself. He stands upright, his cloak billowing like the wings of a fallen angel. Armed with a terrifying array of abilities, from clouds of spectral skulls and lighting strikes to a machinegun-like crossbow, this fallen knight really is the ultimate test of skill. And, thanks to Gael’s story being so intricately entwined with the entire canvas that is the Dark Souls story, besting him feels like a momentous occasion. Soundtracked by an orchestra and choir going the whole nine yards and fought on a battlefield that’s essentially the ashes of existence itself, Slave Knight Gael is Dark Souls’ finest ever boss.

2. Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

“A corpse should be left well alone.” With those words, Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower catapults her way into the top tier of FromSoftware’s greatest bosses. In her horological throne room, you’ll face one of Bloodborne’s most technically accomplished duelists. Dodging her twin swords and pistol is tough enough already, but as the music ramps up and she begins to channel her blood powers, the fight reaches greater and greater levels of intensity. Dodge, parry, and attack until finally you slaughter your foe. The song ends and the curtains draw. Lady Maria, take a bow.

1. Isshin, the Sword Saint (Sekiro)

The intricate complexities of its focused combat system sets Sekiro’s boss battles apart from their peers in the wider FromSoft library. Sekiro really is the best swordplay simulator around – a whirlwind of exhilarating parries and viciously sharp strikes – and so it’s perhaps only logical that its climatic clash stands as the very best boss fight FromSoftware has ever made. Isshin, the Sword Saint is everything that makes Sekiro so special, all wrapped up in a four-phase battle that’ll have your heart beating faster than it ever has before.

Technically two fights in one, Sekiro’s final clash begins with one last duel against Genichiro, who is ritually torn apart to resurrect his grandfather, the legendary warrior Isshin. And legendary really is the word; Isshin dominates a beautiful battlefield with a variety of techniques that pull on almost every single tactic you’ve mastered across your journey. You’ll need to counter piercing thrusts from both sword and spear, block bullets from a surprise pistol, and even deflect searing bolts of lightning in the fight’s final moments. Isshin is relentless in his offense, but there’s a precision and elegance to this fight that turns the whole thing into a deadly dance. It’s intimate and controlled and measured in a way few FromSoft battles are, and conquering Isshin provides an unmatched feeling of accomplishment. The Sword Saint may not be discussed as widely as iconic foes from Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Bloodborne, but his downfall is, at least as far as we’re concerned, FromSoftware’s finest boss battle.

Victory achieved. Prey slaughtered. Enemy felled. Our choices and ranking of the top 25 FromSoftware bosses is complete. Did we miss one of your favourites? Let us know your picks in the comments. You can also rank these 25 bosses yourself using the IGN Tier List tool below.

This list was compiled and written by Simon Cardy, Matt Kim, Mitchell Saltzman, and Matt Purslow.

HBO’s critically acclaimed The Last of Us show will run for four seasons, an executive has suggested.

HBO’s Francesca Orsi revealed that “it’s looking like” the smash TV adaptation will run for four seasons, although did stress there’s no “complete or final plan” at this time.

“I wouldn’t want to confirm that, but it’s looking like this season and then two more seasons after this, and we’re done,” Orsi told Deadline.

As for what to expect when the highly-anticipated show returns in April 2025? “There’s certain elements in terms of the various factions that are competing for survival that reveal themselves as a really intriguing survivalist group, and I think they just have a quality to them that feels distinct in how they present it,” Orsi said.

“There’s a certain way [the show] is presenting them in wardrobe and makeup that feels really different than the average person.”

If you missed the first season, there’s still time to catch up, as Episode 1 of Season 2 is set to premiere in April. Unlike Season 1, which covered the entirety of the first game, HBO plans to extend The Last of Us Part 2 beyond a single season, building Season 2 with a “natural breakpoint” after just seven episodes.

Season 2 is will introduce us to several new faces, including Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, Danny Ramirez as Manny, Tati Gabrielle as Mel. We’re still unclear on Catherine O’Hara’s mysterious role, though.

In IGN’s The Last of Us: Season 1 review, we called it “a stunning adaptation that should thrill newcomers and enrich those already familiar with Joel and Ellie’s journey alike,” awarding it an impressive 9/10.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Embracer has hailed the success of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, confirming it is near the 2 million sold mark.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sold 1 million copies just a day after launch, and has now nearly doubled that figure 10 days later.

It’s an incredible sales success for developer Warhorse Studios’ medieval Europe action role playing game sequel, which launched on February 4 across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S. Embracer said Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 did particularly well on Steam, where it saw over 250,000 peak concurrent players. For context, the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance hit a peak Steam concurrent player count of 96,069 seven years ago.

It’s worth noting that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s actual peak concurrent player count will be bigger, given the game launched on console as well as PC. However, neither Sony nor Microsoft make player numbers public.

Embracer, which owns Warhorse Studios via its subsidiary, Plaion, said Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 “has been initially successful, not only in terms of player and critic reception, but also in terms of performance.”

“This reflects the dedication and hard work of our development studio, Warhorse Studios, and our publisher, Deep Silver,” Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said.

“It is our strong belief that the game will continue to generate substantial revenues over the coming years, highlighting the exceptional quality, immersion and appeal of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Warhorse Studios has a robust roadmap, including updates and new content over the next 12 months, ensuring an engaging and continuously evolving experience for the community.

“We are immensely proud of the teams involved in the successful release of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which has significantly outperformed our expectations so far,” Wingefors added.

Other than Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Embracer has Killing Floor 3 due out later this quarter (January to March 2025).

Embracer said it has more than 5,000 game developers working on its upcoming games, with 10 triple-A games due out over the next three financial years (FY 2025/26, FY 2026/27, and FY 2027/28). Eight of these are from internal studios, two from external studios.

In FY 2025/26, Embracer has two triple-A games scheduled to be released towards the end of the financial year. Mid-size releases include Gothic 1 Remake, REANIMAL, Fellowship, Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, Titan Quest II, Screamer, Echoes of the End (working title), Tides of Tomorrow, Satisfactory (console) and the full release of Wreckfest 2, alongside a similar number of mid-sized games yet to be announced.

Embracer has endured a tough time in recent years, laying off thousands of staff and selling a number of its studios, including Borderlands maker Gearbox and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developer Saber Interactive. It still owns Metro developer 4A Games, which is working on a brand new game in the series.

Getting started in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2? Check out our advice on Things to Do First and How to Make Money Fast Early to get you started, or head to our Walkthrough hub for a step-by-step guide to the main quest. We’ve also got guides for the myriad Activities and Tasks, Side Quests, and even Cheat Codes and Console Commands.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is releasing a free demo for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii today on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC via Steam.

The studio announced the demo on X/Twitter, saying it will be available to download at 7am Pacific / 10am Eastern / 3pm UK. The full game will be available February 21 also on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but these platforms will not get the free demo.

RGG Studio didn’t say explicitly if progress from the demo will carry on to the full Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii but, based on its contents, that doesn’t appear to be the case. The demo appears to let players essentially skip forward to certain freeroam and battle areas and therefore doesn’t follow the natural story.

Players can “freely explore part of the Honolulu and Madlantis locations,” neither of which appear to be available at the beginning of the full game.

They can also switch between the Mad Dog and Sea Dog fighting styles, fight against “powerful bounty enemies,” challenge four ship and deck battles in the Pirates’ Coliseum, play with new customization features, and “enjoy side experiences like karaoke with a selection of three songs.”

Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is a spin-off sequel to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the eighth mainline entry in the Yakuza / Like a Dragon series (or ninth including Yakuza 0). It follows Goro Majima as he wakes up with amnesia and becomes a pirate, exploring the likes of Hawaii along the way.

A trailer released at the October Xbox Partner Showcase revealed a proper first look at ship combat akin to Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and the return of the beloved character Taiga Saejima, perhaps teasing more ties to the main series than previously thought.

It will also be a decent bit longer than previous Yakuza spin-off Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, with its story taking around 15 to 18 hours to complete. Fans can also dress up Majima as longtime series protagonist Kiryu Kazuma, but only if they sign up for email notifications or a Sega reward system.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

PlayStation 5 just had its biggest quarter yet, selling 9.5 million units between October and December 2024.

That brings overall PS5 sales to 75 million, and bumps Sony’s gaming business by 37% compared to the same period last year.

Sony has now bundled PS5 Pro sales into its overall hardware numbers, so we’re unable to separate the success of its new upgraded console. But the company stressed that sales of all PS5s now brought its latest console in-line with its projected 18 million sales by the end of March 2025, and just 1.5 million units behind predecessor PS4, which had sold 76.5 million units at the same point in its production cycle.

Monthly active users across its service are also up to 129 million, up 5% year-on-year and marking a new milestone, with overall sales of games and consoles also up by 16%. 42% of PS5 sales were to new PlayStation Network users. Sony’s big release during the quarter was Astro Bot, which has sold 1.5 million copies.

With “significant increases” reported during its games and network services segment for the quarter, Sony raised its profit forecast by 2%.

Sony did not comment on its wide-reaching outage last week, which took its PlayStation Network service offline for almost a full day. Sony eventually deemed the 24-hour outage an “operational issue” and offered PlayStation Plus members an additional five days of service in compensation.

Sony’s State of Play 2025 broadcast highlighted games coming to PS5 in the next year, including Housemarque’s Saros and Days Gone Remastered. Sony also has Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2 coming out later in 2025.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Borderlands 4 now has a firm September 23, 2025 release date, as confirmed during Sony’s State of Play 2025 broadcast. But where does that leave Grand Theft Auto 6?

Last week, Rockstar parent company Take-Two reiterated GTA 6’s fall 2025 release window, but now we know Borderlands 4 is out in September, there’s no chance GTA 6 will be out the same month.

So when? October? November? December 2025? All seem up for grabs now for GTA 6. The risk of course is that Take-Two ends up cannibalizing its big 2025 games by releasing them too close together. And let’s not forget Mafia: The Old Country launches at some point summer 2025.

Could Take-Two’s big games, and by that we really mean GTA 6, end up doing more harm to each other than good by releasing too close to each other? That’s a question we put to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick in an interview ahead of the company’s third quarter financial results. As you’d expect, Zelnick said Take-Two is planning its releases to avoid a risk of cannibalization, insisting the timing is driven by a desire to “respect the consumer’s need to spend a lot of time playing these hit games before they go on to the next.”

“No, I think we will plan the releases so as not to have that be a problem,” Zelnick said. “And what we found is when you’re giving consumers hits, they tend to be interested in pursuing other hits. In other words, I’ve said this many times, even when the hits aren’t ours, they’re a good thing for the industry. In this case, we hope that the hits will largely be ours. So we feel really good about it and I think that we will time our releases so as to respect the consumer’s need to spend a lot of time playing these hit games before they go on to the next.”

In the context of Borderlands 4’s just-announced September release date, when might GTA 6 come out? If Take-Two wants Borderlands 4 fans to spent “a lot of time” playing before moving on to, say, GTA 6, how long is a lot of time? One month? Two months? Three?

Amid all this speculation is of course the prospect that GTA 6 will be delayed either into early winter, or at some point in the first quarter of 2026.

“Look, there’s always a risk of slippage and I think as soon as you say words like absolutely, you jinx things,” Zelnick responded when IGN asked how confident he was that Rockstar would hit fall 2025 for GTA 6. “So we feel really good about it.”

On Borderlands 4, Zelnick insisted the brand remains “really strong” despite the disastrous Borderlands movie, which bombed at the box office and was mauled by critics and fans alike. In fact, Zelnick said that the movie’s failure won’t impact the potential success of Borderlands 4 at all.

“It’s no secret that the movie was a disappointment, but interestingly, it really benefited our catalog sales,” Zelnick explained. “So actually the effect was quite positive. It would’ve assumed been more positive if the movie had been better received. But the brand is really strong. We feel great about Borderlands 4.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Cobra Kai Season 6, Part 3 arrives Thursday, February 13 on Netflix. This is a spoiler-free review for all five final episodes.

Cobra Kai closes up shop with a final run of five episodes that made me cheer, cry and howl with (sometimes unintended) laughter. I found myself powerless against both its thrilling tournament action and its heart-tugging resolutions.

This farewell run focuses a bit more on the senseis than it does on the youthful next gen, honing in on what Daniel and Johnny both need from each other and what they want to represent as karate mentors. The main kids do have some big, rousing moments, spanning both defeat and victory, but it’s really the grown ups who shine here at the finish line. William Zabka, in particular, is phenomenal in a handful of heartbreaking scenes that work to key us in on just how miserable and lonely his life was following his epic All-Valley loss in 1984.

And Ralph Macchio’s Daniel, in turn, is able to really honor and heed Miyagi-Do’s teachings and prove why it’s a crucial, critical cog in The Valley’s karate scene. The Karate Kid, and Mr. Miyagi’s belief that karate was for defense only, was kind of revolutionary at the height of 1980s America’s appetite for martial-arts movies. This is what Daniel finds himself ruminating on in the aftermath of Barcelona, along with the overall need, or lack thereof, for tournament glory.

Does some of Daniel’s soul-searching come, once again, with a weird CGI Mr. Miyagi, plunging Cobra Kai in to the uncanny valley? Absolutely. But it’s easy to forgive the de-aging weirdness when you consider where this particular vision takes Daniel emotionally. Remember, Miyagi was humble. Almost to a fault. He didn’t care about titles, belts, levels, rumors, lies, or even Medals of Honor. All of his validation came from within. And this is also a big part of Cobra Kai’s overall impact.

Following the accidental death of Kwon in Part 2’s finale, the characters, and the show, have to regroup and figure out just how lethal the stakes will be heading into the finish. Franchise-wise, this isn’t unprecedented. The movies themselves, between The Karate Kid and The Karate Kid Part II, went from high school bully antics and tournament wins to fights to the death in Okinawa. And Cobra Kai has to wrestle with this in its endgame. Right at the point when it seems like the villainous machinations of Terry Silver are going to take things into (too) dark territory, the show does a hard fix in a rather magnificent way.

For the most part, every character’s story gets wrapped up in fun and fitting fashion, though there are some stragglers in this final act whose best moments, you’ll find, are behind them. Ultimately, Cobra Kai shifts its entire focus back to what brought it to the dance. It almost feels like, in this last stretch, the series remembers what its title is. Post-Barcelona, everything returns to its point of origin: The San Fernando Valley. The region that, between Cobra Kai and the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like something out of myth. An elsewhere. Like Doctor Doom’s Battleworld, but with karate teens ruling the landscape.

It could feel cheap or uninspired, like when sitcoms throw a wedding on their main set. (“We could just get married in Cheers!”) But The Valley is the weird, beating heart of Cobra Kai: Where Johnny needs to better himself, Daniel needs to balance himself, Tory and Robby need to find their path, and much much more. Now the world of international karate comes to them – with all the villains, like Silver and the Iron Dragons, still in play.

I’ve written before about how Cobra Kai is a fantastic blend of tones, mixing sitcom-style comedy with stark, effective drama. Sometimes characters are cartoonishly stubborn and obtuse, but that always usually leads to a brilliant bit of catharsis. These final episodes take from the same playbook, of course. Some elements play out with all the bells, whistles, and sitcom antics intact (botched proposals, baby-delivery zaniness), almost eliciting eye rolls. But others – hoo, boy – they zig instead of zag and I was thrown for a loop. In a great way. It all works.

Very few of the “bad guys” on Cobra Kai escape redemption. And if they don’t get to come full circle, we at least gain insight into their tragic motivation or witness a pivotal moment that feels like a seed planted for future absolution. Now that Cobra Kai actually has a surplus of adversaries, there’s room for one final act of apology and clarity. I won’t give away who it is, but it’s a doozy and it fuels the final two episodes in a magnificent manner.

Here at the end of all-things Cobra Kai, it’s phenomenal how the show’s collected characters: It scooped up strays and made them lovable. It started with the main characters, but over the course of seven years, it’s amassed a small army of beguiling misfits and lost souls in search of purpose. Some of them may not have had the final moments I fully wanted for them but the tapestry of the world is so detailed that you can easily imagine their lives and fates moving forward. And yes, the show still knows how to create exciting tournament showdowns, filled with nail-biting suspense. There’s even a final high-stakes fight that pretty much tips its headband at the entire Karate Kid franchise. Cobra Kai goes out on a very satisfying note, filled with hope and rejuvenation.