Pointers to triumph in this tricky soulslike.
It’s understandable you’d be searching for The First Berserker: Khazan tips; it’s a tough game. While I don’t think it’s quite as hard as Sekiro or some of Elden Ring’s tougher sections, because of its tanky bosses and limited healing, it requires you to focus on each boss and really perfect your strategy when fighting them
There isn’t all that much margin for error in Khazan, but if you do engage, you’ll quickly appreciate the depth of its bosses and how great it feels when you experiment with an idea and use it to triumph over a tricky foe. Here I’ll provide some pointers that’ll help smooth your way through the game, especially at the start when you’re still puzzling out how everything works.
Keep an eye on stamina and don’t neglect skills
Stamina is your key resource in Khazan; you use it to attack, guard, and dodge, but even a brink guard—what this game calls a perfect parry—will cost you a little stamina. If you run out, you’ll get stunned for a while, meaning the boss you’re fighting can go to town. Some bosses even have attacks that will drain your entire stamina bar in one if you try to block them, so these are better avoided entirely. Remember you can also consume Vitality Spheres to temporarily buff your stamina.
So, how do you defeat tanky bosses when your stamina is so restrictive? This is where skills come in. Since skills don’t use stamina, they are the perfect little cheat you can use to increase your damage output, or even in place of a brink dodge or brink guard, enhancing their effectiveness. All you need to do is attack and defend to accumulate spirit to spend on skills during a fight.
Take a look at your skill tree once you decide on a weapon and determine how you can best combo your attacks into skills and vice versa—Khazan is almost like a fighting game in the way it lets you combine attacks, and doing this effectively will really unleash your damage potential against hardy bosses.
Grab Netherworld Energy to buff your healing
Another tricky aspect of Khazan is limited healing. At the start of the game, you only have three Netherworld Energy to consume each time you rest at a Blade Nexus, but you can find more while exploring each mission. The first is in the Embars Ruins (third mission) right after you enter the hall with the big hanging creature.
On the level above to your right, you’ll spot a character playing a lute, and you can hear their music if you get close. Climb up the stairs, take a right, drop down to their level, and then grab the golden glowing item to get the Netherworld Energy.
There’s another in Skoffa Cave in the Strange Stench mission. When climbing the wooden beams to the top of the cave near the start—while also being attacked by bats—you can find this one at the highest point of the scaffolding structure. As with the previous, this is a golden glowing item as well.
Don’t neglect your javelin ability
Javelin is really strong in Khazan, especially as an ability against ranged enemies. You can use it to take down annoying archers so you don’t get peppered while trying to fight other foes. You can also use it to knock down hanging structures on top of monsters, smash unreachable soulstones at range, and even during moments in certain bosses. I recommend grabbing the Rest in Peace upgrade which stops any skeletal enemies killed with javelin from reviving—this is absurdly useful against those frost-firing skeletal archers you can’t reach, who’ll revive even if you do manage to kill them.
Experiment with your build
There’s a reason that Khazan offers free skill respecs at all times—if something isn’t working for a boss, simply change things up and experiment. You could even switch weapons, though Khazan’s arsenal is pretty versatile with the right skills. Most bosses in Khazan feel like difficulty spikes because they’re trying to teach you to engage with and overcome systems you might not have really used much. That’s why smart experimentation is key. You’ve actually got to think about each boss and how to defeat them vs. just brute forcing things with some powerful build.
Guard regular attacks but dodge elemental ones
One lesson you’ll learn from bosses pretty quickly is to avoid guarding against elemental attacks. Similar to other games like Elden Ring, elemental damage can penetrate your guard and start to build a status, like fire, poison, or plague. You can take a consumable to cleanse these or increase your resistance, but honestly, it’s easier to just recognise which boss attacks are elemental and dodge them instead.
It’s pretty easy to tell which since these are always consistent with bosses. Volbaino, for instance, only deals fire damage when he hits you with his flaming nail, and Shacktuka only builds plague when it bites you, or licks its paw and swipes. Recognising which attacks to dodge and which to block is pretty key in Khazan, especially if you’re not some kind of deflection and counterattack master who can rinse bosses before they do anything.
Use the resistance accessories you find in each area
Besides munching on some elemental resistance consumables, you can also equip accessories to buff your resistances, and this is important. As you progress through each mission area, you’ll generally find a set of accessories that buffs resistance for the boss you’re about to face at the end. Take Aratra the spider, for instance—while exploring Skoffa Cave in the Strange Smell mission, you can find the Necklace of Sealed Venom and the Ringed of Sealed Venom, both of which grant poison resistance.
Craft consumables at the blacksmith to give you a buff in bosses
Once you unlock the blacksmith, you’ll be able to start using all those Transmutation Shards and Spirit Orbs you’ve been collecting from enemies to craft consumables. Select craft with the blacksmith and cycle to the far right where the consumables tab is shown with a little potion bottle.
You can craft cleanses to remove statuses, elemental resistance consumables, and even enhancers that imbue your own weapon with an element. In a game with such tanky bosses, using enhancers to up your damage and experiment to find the boss’s weakness is all but mandatory, and will speed up each boss fight. To unlock more consumable recipes, you’ll need to complete bonus training objectives in Daphrona’s Codex.
Don’t forget about Daphrona
This netherworld character you meet in the Embars Ruins has a number of handy functions. She can unleash any soulstones you find to provide permanent buffs, upgrade the Spirit of Advocacy (essentially your boss summon if you want one), and she also offers an extremely good Training Grounds where you can practice against most enemy types.
Daphrona’s Codex, in-particular, is worth paying attention to. Rather than simply an encyclopedia of enemies, it provides rewards for completing little bonus training objectives when fighting foes, granting you consumables, gear, and even consumable recipes that’ll unlock the ability to craft them with the blacksmith.
Try using deflection on the most predictable boss attacks
Both counterattack—timing a parry against a red unblockable attack—and deflection—timing a parry against a regular attack—are hard to pull off, but if you can, they do massive stamina damage to a boss or enemy. Rather than trying to parry every single attack like you’re playing Dark Souls, remember that not every attack can be parried.
While fighting each boss and experimenting, look for opportunities where a parry might be possible, and weave it into your strategy. Generally, boss attacks that are very slow, or where the timing is predictable, can be parried with deflection. If you nail down that timing, it’ll give you a consistent advantage when trying to beat that boss.
Grab the Coward’s Lantern from Danjin
Invisible enemies suck, we can all agree. Khazan has its own variant of sneaky foe in the form of an assassin-like skeleton who appears in certain areas from the midgame onwards. While you can see their footprints as they move, you can acquire a hard counter to them in the form of the Coward’s Lantern. You can purchase this from Danjin—a jar-headed character—in the Cradle of Jars bonus mission. This is also worth completing since it unlocks Danjin as a vendor in The Crevice and he’ll give you pot-based cosmetics in exchange for finding his pots throughout the game.
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