Terrifyingly, Bloodborne was released on PS4, a console apparently doomed to be the game's forever tomb, on March 24, 2015. A substantial DLC, The Old Hunters, hit the game in November. Ever since, one player, who goes by Noahman90 on Reddit, has been up to his eyeballs in The Old Hunters for one specific purpose: the Orphan of Kos, one of the hardest bosses on FromSoftware's roster, absolutely must die.
Noahman has spent over a decade, and some 3,500 hours across multiple characters, playing Bloodborne. The vast majority of that playtime was spent helping other players fight the Orphan of Kos, much like Elden Ring hero Let Me Solo Her's famous Malenia support. But with the Bloodborne population dwindling to the point that Noahman doesn't even "get summoned anymore," it's finally time to hang up his hunter's hat.
Speaking with GamesRadar+, Noahman explains that he originally focused on the Orphan of Kos because it is "easily the highest demand boss in the game for summon requests," which makes for fast runs. Eventually, he caught the bug. "I started to really like the boss even more than I already did," he tells me. "Fighting the Orphan was so, so much [fun]. I started to get good and I liked the feeling of helping people out."
The nature of FromSoftware's multiplayer summoning system is perfect for players like Noahman, who says he isn't very social. "The relationship between Summoner and Cooperator is like two ships passing in the night," he reasons. "Except in this instance I'd help the ship get to port safe and be on my way."
Noahman has helped a lot of ships get to port. After the first few years of play, he says there were "very few losses" during his summoning sessions. By his best estimate, he's helped anywhere from 5,000 to 6,000 hunters beat the Orphan of Kos. You can find years-old clips of him running circles around the boss on his Reddit profile.
Slowly plugging away, mostly on Fridays and weekends, Noahman mastered the fight and dialed in his character. "My favorite setup for the Orphan of Kos was the Blade of Mercy and that's it," he says, referring to a pair of trickshop daggers that combine into a short sword. "No guns (the parrying trivializes that fight). Blade of mercy is a very, very close-range weapon. Usually used by people in PvP settings. Although against the Orphan the BOM (if used well) matchup was like a dance... nothing in any other Souls game quite like it."
Bloodborne was actually Noahman's first Souls game – that is, his first exposure to the modern FromSoftware action RPGs – and even as "every boss in that damn DLC kicked my ass," the Orphan of Kos proved to be an especially fierce nemesis. This neatly mirrors the origin story for Let Me Solo Her, who likewise struggled with Malenia before resolving to help others through the fight.
Noahman reckons the Orphan isn't the hardest boss in Bloodborne, though. For his money, that crown goes to either Laurence himself or the Watchdog of the Old Lords, but they're kind of cheating with their difficulty. "They are hard because they are not designed well with bullshit AOE hitboxes and fire splash damage," Noahman says, speaking pure facts.
I always have the same question when I speak to players like Noahman, who stick to self-imposed challenges for years on end: why? Noahman's answer is a perfect summary of what pushes people to engage with games at all, setting and chasing their own goals: "Because it was fun."
"After a while it became an obsession trying to perfect that battle with the Orphan," he concludes. "Even now I feel as though there are areas that I can still improve."
Jordan writes: I couldn't love Dark Souls or Bloodborne, but Phantom Blade Zero is the action RPG I wanted them to be.
