I know that I have been writing an awful lot about Hollow Knight lately but this is only because I think that it is quite possibly one of the best games ever made by any studio, bit or small. It is truly perfect.
When you consider that the company that made it, Team Cherry is (or at least was) comprised of just 3 people, that makes it all the more amazing.
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The game gets progressively harder, like you would expect of any game but the thing that makes this title so special is that the difficulty level is not some arbitrary slider in the options that just gives the enemies more HP or makes more enemies appear or even worse, makes your attacks less useful. Instead the difficulty is kind of up to you because there is so much optional content in the game and some of it is crazy hard. However, none of this additional stuff is mandatory to complete the game.
There are 3 endings (that I am aware of) in the game and all of them are accomplished by going through certain aspects of the game. The first one may have actually been the only one that was available back when this game was first made because there has been at least 3 DLC addons in the past. Whatever! I don't know the history of it, I just know that is is an absolutely fantastic game and rumor has it that Team Cherry is going to release another DLC which would just be amazing but honestly, they've done enough!
One of the parts of the game that I found quite interesting but also extremely difficult is the "Dream Bosses." These are all bosses that you have already fought once but they reappear in the "Dream world" and are considerably more difficult than the first time you faced them. There are 4 of them that I consider really difficult and I found all of them to be damn near impossible.
That is until I learned how to cheese one of them.
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The Failed Champion is found in the same place that you faced The False Knight which in all likelihood is the first boss you faced. I think it might actually be mandatory, maybe not, I don't know but if you are a casual gamer the way I am it certainly would have been the first one you faced. When you return to the same chamber that you faced him in the first time you can hear some sobbing going on around the area. Then you will discover a breakable wall that wasn't there the first time. When you do break open the wall there are a couple of grubs (I guess they are grubs - they are insects of some sort) that are mourning the death of the False Knight around his corpse. They immediately run away when you approach and this is how you access the "dream fight" with the Failed Champion.
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Now when I first got to the Failed Champion is was thinking to myself, oh this is going to be easy. It is anything but. He is MUCH faster than he was the first time and the attacks constantly coming from the top of the screen make jumping over his ground wave attacks far more difficult. You will almost certainly take some damage here. There are some YT gods that can do it without getting hit at all but well, you go ahead and give that a go if you like :)
You need to equip a couple of charms (and it would therefore be kind of helpful if you have them also) in order for this "cheese" to work. You need to equip all charms that will give you buddies to do damage for you. Weaversong gives you the little spiders that will constantly attack and if you combine this with Grubsong the weavers will gather spirit for you which will in turn allow you to use your second charm Glowing Womb, which will use the spirit to create more assistants that will suicide bomb him as well. Grimmchild is just there for a little bit of extra damage as it has a ranged attack that will hit him from time to time.
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With all of these equipped all you need to do is wall climb until your character is barely visible in the top right or left and then crystal heart hold yourself in position (on PS4 this is done by holding L2). Basically you just sit there and wait for your minions to gradually wear him down. His attacks will NOT hit you. You will need to exit the wall in order to bash his head once he is downed and then simply run back up from where you came.
There were very rare situations where one of the falling rocks managed to hit me and this knocked me off the wall but then you simply run to the other side of the room and repeat the process. He isn't quick enough to catch you.
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I guess I feel a little bit bad for doing this and it would probably be better if I legit learned how to defeat him not using this method. However, in my situation I am not going for 100% completion (or am i?) and needed just a little bit more spirit in order to fully upgrade my nail. This victory pushed me over the 1800 level and I was able to get it.
PS: This tactic also works on one of the other Dream Bosses, but I am not going to tell you which one because I know you will try it on all of them once you get to work for one :P