Dancing with Nightmare King Grimm (Hollow Knight)

Hollow Knight has a lot of boss battles, ranging from elementary ones like the Gruz mother to the tough Radiance. Many of them are very memorable, but if you tell me to pick one boss fight in the game, I would not even blink and say Nightmare King Grimm. It is my favourite boss fight in the game. Excuse me, did I call it a fight? It is more of a dance face-off where each move flows like a beautifully choreographed set.

It is one of the toughest boss fights in the game, might be the top 3 fights, but that's completely optional. I won't recommend skipping it, though. The difficulty is massive at first, but if you learn all the moves, you will want to play it over and over again.

There is one more massive reason which makes it my personal favourite, and that is the music. The soundtrack puts you directly into the mood. This track goes perfectly with the flow of the dance battle. I will put this soundtrack into the top 3 soundtracks from the game. That's a big thing because I love almost all the tracks in the game.

Enough of keeping you waiting, let me show you the fight. I recorded it this time because only pictures can never give it any justice. Enjoy!

There are only 4-5 different move sets Nightmare King Grimm (NKG) performs, and they are telegraphed to the players for a split second. You've got to react fast, though; it will punish you a lot for being slow. Dealing 2 mask shard damage for every hit you take, the stakes are so high, especially because there are almost no healing windows during those attacks. Healing is only safe when that transition animation plays, indicating the end of a phase. I believe they play at 75% health left, then 50%, then the last at 25% health left.

I spent like 2 hours learning this boss battle yesterday. It took me more than 50 retries to get to this stage where I can dodge its attack fairly consistently now and deal enough damage to knock it out. It has a ton of health as well, and if you take just 4 hits, you are going to die, so dodging becomes very crucial.

I hate the pufferfish attack, and that is one of my weak points. Those red bullet things come at you so fast that you need to constantly jump over one and keep an eye on the next one. Sometimes it makes me fall off the arena.

Spells are much more powerful than nail strikes, so whenever he does the attack where it lights up the floor on fire, you can easily dodge that and go and attack with Abyss Shriek, which deals a massive amount of damage. But it can be risky too, as you can see in the video, I took damage while trying to do that.

I am still not consistent enough and cannot defeat him every time. There are harder variants of it in the Godhome, where each hit deals double the damage and even a radiant version where you have to defeat it without taking any hits. That is my end goal for it. I want to master this fight not because it is a tough one and I want to prove something, but because I enjoy this fight, and even though I've played this many, many times, I still can't get enough of it. Truly a fantastic boss fight with such a blood-pumping soundtrack.

Have you played this game and fought this battle? Let me know what you think about this fight. I will leave the original soundtrack in the post too, just in case you want to hear it. Give it a go and I promise you will love it.