Sekiro: Best Tips to Fighting The Guardian Ape

The Guardian Ape is an exciting foe that blends elements of Sekiro’s beautiful combat system with FromSoftware’s previous titles

As players progress further in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, they’re going to find the bosses begin to more and more feel like a mixture of Dark Souls and Bloodbourne encounters. One such foe is the Guardian Ape, who appears to feel like a Bloodborne boss of massive swinging and grappling until things take a turn for the worst during the second phase. Here are the best tips for completing this prolifically tricky boss, and moving forward.

Guardian Ape

Items

There are a handful of things you want to make sure you go in with before you jump down to meet this fearsome foe. The first is the Prosthetic firecracker tool. Because it’s a massive ape, many may have already guessed it’s going to be susceptible to the firecrackers, which stun beasts. The Guardian Ape is no exception. You’ll want to use these a handful of times during your fight. However, you cannot rely on it. We’ll explain later.

The second thing you want to make sure you bring is some form of antidote item. During the fight, the Guardian Ape can poison you during the battle, and having this handy in your inventory will make this fight far more manageable. The last item you’re going to need to use is a pacifying agent, which is used during the second part of the fight. You’ll know which one, trust me.

Headed Guardian Ape

During the first phase of the fight, the Guardian Ape is a massive force of swinging limbs and charging attacks. It wants to get in close to you and lash out. Because you can deflect these heavy blows, you’re going to welcome this forward attack and meet the ape straight on. However, watch out for its sweeping grapple. You can jump over this attack, jumping on the ape’s head and staggering its posture. Regardless, throughout the fight you want to stay in close, deflecting the ape’s massive fists and continue pressing forward. You’ll notice when the ape pulls away, you can grapple onto the sword stuck in its neck and lunge into it. Do this every so often when you’re at a medium distance from the large creature, dealing a decent amount of damage.

You can use your firecrackers only a handful of times during this fight. If you use it too often, the ape does not register it and instead, continues its attack. It’s better to use the firecrackers in intervals, judging your use by the amount of health left. When it does work, it’ll stun the beast for a short time, and you can attack it. As the creature steadily loses more health, it’s going to grow more desperate, and if you get in close striking it’s rear, it’s going to fart on you to cause poison damage. It can also throw its feces at you, causing you to take damage and poison damage. To dodge these disgusting attacks before they take effect, you need to use the surrounding trees to grapple the away.

When you give the ape the killing blow, you’ll notice it only had one health bar, despite it being a more massive boss and having a Shinobi memory tied to it. That’s because the fight is still on.

Headless Guardian Ape

After cutting off the ape’s head, it’s now carrying the head around and is using the sword you used that was previously inside of it. Now, you’re deflecting the large sword slashes instead of its large fists.

There are two unblockable moves you need to avoid. The first is the terror attack, and you’ll know it’s coming when the ape is about to place its head back on it, and let out a scream. This scream deals terror damage to you, and if you let it fill you instantly die. That’s a complicated part of the fight and makes the surrounding trees even more useful. The second one is a regular sweeping attack, which you can avoid with a simple side step or a jump. You can’t jump on its head, as it’s holding that in its spare hand. However, you can still jump to the side of it and deal a handful of strikes against it before needing to back off.

Most of the attacks the Headless Guardian Ape does are relatively standard. The most complicated part is dodging the terror attack, as it’s instant death if you stay inside of the attack’s area of effect for far too long. Hopefully, during the first part of the fight, the Guardian Ape did not ruin too many of these for you.