The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is shaping up to be the game of the year, so here’s everything that you need to know about the weird, wonderful and frankly massive bosses in the latest adventure for Link. We already had a few trailers to go on, which was enough to get started on the named big beast enemies that feature in the Breath of the Wild sequel, but with the game out you can see the full list of campaign and optional TOTK bosses below.
Contents:
- Introduction
- Campaign bosses
- Optional TotK bosses
- More The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom news, guide and features
Introduction
We’ll start by going over The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom bosses that you encounter in the main campaign play through, along with notes on how to defeat them. After that we’ll take a look at the incredible optional bosses that you can fight when you track them down out in the wild during the amazing exploration of Hyrule, the Sky Islands and the depths.
AdvertisementThe Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild had some great battles, but it had one of the loosest premises when it comes to bosses. The reason for this is the structure of the game, which moved away from the more traditional dungeons and bosses concept that has dominated Zelda games since the beginning.
As a result, apart from the Blights, you get a lot of fights that could be interpreted as being a boss, or boss like, as well as a powerful core enemy type. Essentially, they repeat throughout TotK, which makes them sort of hard to categorize.
RELATED: Spider-Man 2 PS5 bosses
A great example is the Guardian, which you take on early on in Breath of the Wild. It’s a named enemy and it’s big and tough, so it’s boss-like, but you’ll find them all over the open world Zelda adventure.
For the sake of our list of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom bosses we’re going to include anything like them, as well as those in the main campaign. However, we’ll add in details for each where there’s going to be more than one of them, which will include Lynels, Thaluses, Hynox and their latest addition, the Gleeok.
You can follow us on Twitter to see more on the latest video games releases, and you can see more on The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom with the official Nintendo Twitter page at https://twitter.com/NintendoAmerica.
Campaign bosses
AdvertisementAs a part of the core campaign story you’ll need to head out to investigate Regional Anomalies. These are similar to the Divine Beast quests from BotW, but in TotK you find them in a Temple or on the way to one. The following is a list of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom bosses that you will have to take on through the main campaign story:
1. Colgera
If you follow Purah’s advice to go to Hebra then the first of these will see you on a quest to work with Tulin of the Rito Village. It’s a trek, but you’ll eventually make it to the Wind Temple and when you open all of the locks you’ll unleash Colgera.
You can check it out in the video above to see how to defeat it, but it all comes down to diving through its weak section from above. It gets tougher with the hurricanes, but you can use Tulin to help you dodge these or dive under them and then you’ll have a race to get over it for another dive.
2. Sludge Like
If you take on the Zora Regional Anomaly next then you’ll eventually come face to face with the Slidge Like. You’ll have Prince Sidon with you as a support character, but he’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
AdvertisementUse Fuse to attach King’s Mark scales to your bow and this will clear the mud, get in close and wait for it’s tongue to show. Give it a jab and then you’ll have free hits. Repeat the process to beat the Sludge Like.
3. Mucktorok
This is another of the Temple bosses in TotK and you take it on with Sidon at the Temple of Water. Activate Sidon after a little wait each attack and this will give you protection and allow you to wash away Mucktorok’s sludge and allow you to do damage on it.
You can sprint jump to avoid its sludge beam and wave moves and then move in to unleash Sidon’s water move. Smash up the little fellow with your best weapon and that will see you through the first phase.
However, it throws a whole lot of mud onto the boss fight arena and you’ll need to use the water attack to clear enough of it away. However, don’t spend too much time doing this as it will get replaced. Instead focus on closing in on it to do a jump attack move as you leap over it’s wave and beams.
AdvertisementSprint in a circle to get close to it when it’s doing the sludge splats and again you’ll have another chance of hitting it. The problem is that it jumps away in the sludge, so it takes a while to chip away at it, unless you can catch it with a jumping water attack as it’s moving around.
You can see this in the video above to get a feel for what you’re aiming for. Save your strongest weapon for the second phase to help you make the most of your opportunities and when you beat it you’ll know you’ve just taken out one of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom’s toughest bosses.
4. Yunobo
As the header for the boss fight says, he’s clearly not himself. However, this is an easy one to win. Just dodge the charge and be quick to get in a hit as soon as he bumps into the wall and you’ll be able to bring him back around.
5. Moragia
This three-headed volcano beast seems impossible to beat to begin with, but when you work out that you just need to circle around to the right and use TotK’s Wing glider device to get up to it you have a much better chance of beating it. You can see how it all goes down in the video above, so you don’t need to spend ages trying to get extra fireproof setups, which just don’t work.
RELATED: Where to find diamonds in The Legend of Zelda TotK
6. Marbled Gohma
AdvertisementAfter a trek through the Depths beneath Death Mountain, you’ll get the Fire Temple, which culminated in the Marbled Gohma boss fight. Shoot Yunobo at it’s legs to bring it down and then smash away at it’s eye to get through the first phase.
As is usual for the Temple bosses in The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, Marbled Gohma gets a lot tougher in the second phase. He starts to walk on the roof, making it trickier to get your Yunobo shots off and it fires exploding rocks to encircle you.
Use the water shield if you’ve been to Zora already and smash open the surrounding blocks to get out if you’re not fast enough to run out of them before they land. Use a speed up elixir if you have one and then line up your shots for its legs, which you can see in the video below.
RELATED: The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom best armor
7. Queen Gibdo
Things dial up to 11 for the boss of the Lightning Temple. The giant insect Queen Gobdo is tough to begin with and then gets way harder in the second phase. You can see the fight in full with the video below, but if you want more details notes you can see our full strategy guide to help you defeat the scourge of the sand.
8. Phantom Ganon
AdvertisementYou can either play this one brave and try to get your perfect evade and flurry rushes down or you can dodge and run to stay out of the firing line of its dangerous and sometimes delayed sword strikes. Either way, you’re still going to want to hit it with arrows to the head, which do a lot of damage if you’ve picked up some of the strong bows on your way through Hyrule castle.
The stairs offer a good place to retreat to during the second phase, which is easier than the first, because you should have more time and space for the head shots. If it does catch you with a sword attack then get your health back up with a meal or two and then keep going, but with slightly more cautious approach from that point on.
The bad news, though, is that you’ll have to fight a version of Phantom Ganon again later in TotK in the depths beneath the Great Deku Tree. This time, it starts out with a an intro from the Gloom hands thing, but you can read out full guide to get way more details on how to tackle it.
9. Seized Construct
Once you finish things off in The Construct Factory, you get to ride an armored construct to get to this boss fight at the Spirit Temple to the south of the Depots. You then use it in the fight against the Seized Construct and the process to follow is to block it’s attack with the shield, attack it with the mace a few times and this will send it into the electric fence surrounding the boss fight arena.
AdvertisementChase it down and get in some more attacks, plus throw in some cannon fire to help you control the fight. In the second phase it starts to fly, but you can bring it down to the ground with more cannon fire and then repeat the process in the steps above.
Don’t worry about re-attaching a mace if it breaks in the second phase as this can leave you open to attacks. You can just use the standard L arm attacks to do a similar thing as above. If it comes at you with lasers shoot it with the cannon and get in for some more hits. You can see the fight in action below if you want to see some of the tips working.
10. Demon King Ganondorf
It’s time to take on the big man himself in the final fight in the main campaign for The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. It’s all about getting the timing for the flurry rush and using the right direction in terms of your dodge – backwards for a swipe across and to the side for swipes down or straight at you from the spear.
RELATED: How to find to Ganondorf
You can see this in action in the video above. You can also throw in some good head shots if you’re feeling lucky. If you go into the air you can rain these down on him for some decent damage when Demon King Ganondorf uses his dark club and area of attack that gives you the air current to ride.
AdvertisementHowever, in The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, you’ve got plenty of options to take to the skies for bullet time arrow shots. A bomb shield with a shield surf will do the trick, but you can also get it by fusing a Wing device to your shield, which give you more height with a shield surf jump, so you can go straight into glider and bullet time.
11. Demon Dragon
TotK closes out with the Demon Dragon to save Hyrule, Zelda and right-minded people everywhere. It’s not the toughest of bosses, but it can take a bit of time to work out how to defeat it. You can also see it getting it’s dragon rear handed to it towards the end of the Demon King Ganondorf video above.
You use the good dragon to get above the weak spots before jumping off and then dive and use the glider to get to them. A few sword swipes from the Master Sword – or whatever you weapon of choice is – and you’ll smash it up. Take out the rest, including the one on Demon Dragon’s head and you’ll complete the main story.
Optional The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom bosses
As you might expect, the two trailers we’d for The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom didn’t really give that much away. However, now that the game is out we’ve got a full list of the optional bosses that you can face in TotK, and with the Blood Moon you’ll get to fight them as much as you want.
AdvertisementThese will give you parts to help you upgrade your armor and to fuse with weapons and your shield to get creative with your combat. They can be found both above ground, on Sky Islands and in the Depths, which encourages exploration with a very rewarding process.
Gleeok
Initially, we only got to see this boss from a distance in the second trailer (pictured above), but we got a much closer shot of it in trailer 3. Dragons have featured a lot in recent titles like God of War Ragnarok and Hogwarts Legacy, but Zelda games were doing them way back in the 1980s.
The one that most matched the hydra-like dragon on the bridge at the beginning of trailer 2 and in front of Link in trailer 3 is Gleeok. It took its bow way back in ’87 in the first The Legend of Zelda game and it’s was brought back for Tears of the Kingdom, much like Lynels and Hynox in Breath of the Wild.
When the dragon first appears in the NES game it only has two heads and is a little easier to beat than its later appearance. It then beefs up to be a four-headed hydra boss for its second fight with Link, however, in TotK it’s always got three heads.
AdvertisementIt was confirmed with the “you can do what” video that the boss was indeed the dragon we thought it was, but adding in the details that the one we saw was a Flame Gleeok and it has a flying attack similar to the dragons on God of War Ragnarok. As there’s a Flame Gleeok it was a good assumption that there would be different varieties of it, making it one of the repeated bosses in The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.
With the release of the game we found out that there’s a Lightning Gleeok, Ice Gleeok and one that has a head from all three types. It’s a tough boss to beat, but head shots will help you out to bring it down for some big hits and elemental damage helps a lot.
You can check out our guide to defeat the Flame Gleeok with the link below. You can also see in the image below that Link is fighting it with a very weird Fuse combination. It’s a shield with a cannon attached to it, so this should be a big part of how best to beat the boss.
RELATED: The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Flame Gleeok guide
Bokoblin boss
This is definitely going to be a recurring enemy type, but its name and size means that it’s worth a mention. These will be the commanders for the Bokoblins and we’re expecting them to come in a range of different varieties.
AdvertisementSome of them will be more powerful than others, so we could get some interesting boss battles out of them. It’s also possible that they’re not really bosses at all, despite the name, so we’ll update things when we get our hands on The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.
For example, we don’t include a Moblin in the list, despite the fact that they’re big and have larger health than other enemies in the game. It might be a similar story for the Bokoblin bosses, but either way it’s going to be fun taking them on.
Hinox
These giant cyclops suckers will be returning from Breath of the Wild, where they were brilliantly reinvented from their previous dungeon boss appearances in older Zelda games. Everything about them screams boss fight, but they’re usually just found lumbering around the countryside of Hyrule.
Box giant monster
We’re not too sure about what this is, but it’s clearly a big boss of some sort. It’s made up of a series of boxes a bit like a metalic version of the Italia ’90 World Cup mascot. It looks like you’ll need to hit it in certain parts of its cuboid body to damage it.
As with the Hinox it looks like it can be found in the open, so it might be a recurring enemy. If it is then it could have various different elemental types like Lynels and Thaluses.
Thaluses
AdvertisementWhile we haven’t seen any Lynels yet, there is a Thalus in the second trailer for The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. These big stony beings require you to get up to their heads to defeat them and using heavier rock-smashing weapons does more damage to its weak spot brain sprout crystal.
The big question, though, is whether or not there will be anything unique about the Thaluses in the game compared to those from Breath of the Wild. We’re betting there will be to make the game feel like a new experience. This will probably be linked to the corruption or blight that you can see death-face Gannon sends out to his minions at the beginning of trailer 2.
It also looks like the sequel will have unique gameplay mechanics and weapons, so this should all come into play when you’re facing off against bosses. A good comparison is God of War Ragnarok, which also had a number of returning boss fights and enemies and the fun was all around how you use the new gameplay mechanics to take them down.
Lynels
These optional bosses are dotted around Hyrule once again, but they’ve been possessed by whatever demonic powers that Ganondorf unleashes. What this means for the fights isn’t clear, but it can’t be good. They were pretty mean in BotW, so they should be even more challenging in TotK.
RELATED: How to defeat the last Lynel in the Arena
Frox
AdvertisementThese big frog monsters can be found in the Depths beneath Hyrule and while they seem tough to start with they become a whole lot easier when you fire a Dazzlefruit at it. This will give you an easy in to run up its back and smash it’s rock weak spots for an easy haul.
Master Kohga
He’s back and badder than ever. In fact, when you go down the Josha side quests route to find out how to get to Ganondorf you’ll need to fight him a few times on different devices of his own making.
These range from boats to flying machines and his own form of the Seized Construct, but none of them are that tough. He’s always next to a mine in the Depths and the side quests will point you in the right direction, so talk to Josha in Lookout Landing to kick them off.
The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom bosses analysis
In older Zelda games that featured traditional dungeons there was an abundance of bosses to fight. That changed subtly with The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, which replaced these with open world encounters, puzzle trials and the four Divine Beasts.
RELATED: What to do first in The Legend of Zelda Tears of the KingdomAdvertisement
As a result, there were less old school boss fights, so it was interesting to see how this went down for The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. We were expecting more bosses in the game than in BotW, and that’s definitely the case with the two lists above.
All of the new ones featured in the early trailers appear to be free roaming encounters, and we were expecting there to be at least one or two more in the mix, which was the case with the Frox. However, there also needed to be an equivalent to the Blight bosses we had in the Divine Beasts, which were as close as the game got to dungeons.
In TotK, this was taken up by the Temple bosses and they don’t disappoint. However, it also through in a few extras along the way like Yunobu, the Sludge Like, Phantom Ganon and the extra Temple boss that was the Seized Construct.
In addition to this, there was the inevitable final boss fight and Ganondorf is a lot of fun to defeat as the Demon King and the Demon Dragon. He’s managed to find the kind of scary new power he need from the Secret Stone, which goes on to transform him into the brilliant monstrous adaptation before the very end.
AdvertisementIt’ll need to be something new from his incarnations in Breath of the Wild, but that’s got to be the case with all of the bosses and enemies in Tears of the Kingdom. Another area that could be reinvented is the Sheikah technology side of the boss list. Guardians and Scout bots were fun mini bosses last time around, but they’ll definitely need to be different to be worthy of the sequel.
You can see traces of this in the trailer with the Sheikah tech claws that surround Link. The walking box giant looks like it might be an adaptation of the ancient technology, so this could be a theme built on in the game.
Speed runs have been a big part of the lasting impact of Breath of the Wild, so we’re expecting something similar to be baked into the sequel. This will mean being able to avoid a lot of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom bosses to go more directly to the final confrontation somehow.
This supports the free roam boss encounter concept mentioned above in TotK and optional development activities like the Shrines last time around. Hopefully, there will be a few more surprises and hidden battles along the way, giving us multiple play-through options in Tears of the Kingdom, which would be the perfect cool summer of gaming following the release date in May.
Check out our computer games section for more news and features on Tears of the Kingdom, or visit The Legend of Zelda website at https://www.zelda.com/.
