Part 8: - Road of Sacrifices Part 1
The casual episode covers exactly what's in the video. Only in eight minutes instead of roughly 30:00. The rest of the video is walking to the next area. Which isn't in the main video. So if you only have a few minutes and maybe prefer a more casual atmosphere this is probably the way to go.
Crystal Sage
The Crystal Sage is an interesting boss. It's almost like they saw Pinwheel from Dark Souls and tried to find a way to make him less of a joke. Full disclosure. I died to pinwheel once. In my LP of the game no less. The Crystal Sage is kinda similar after all.
The Sage is a spellcasting boss, it does have a melee attack but that one's just kind of there. You might not even see it if you're aggressive enough because he'll flinch out of it every time you hit him. My general advice for Phase 1 is to dodge past all the purple stuff to reach the Sage to lay the smack down on his candy ass until he peaces out! Once teleported he'll reappear at a different location. Though, the spots he can appear in are fixed the order is randomized. Crystals will appear to come from the ground, to my knowledge they do no damage whatsoever. Just touching them will break them.
Once he's down to roughly 50% of his health the second phase starts, and now you also have to dodge blue stuff. The Sage will summon three clones. They have the same moves as the big guy himself only they die in one hit and their magic is blue instead of purple. A wise person will kill the clones before attacking the real boss because their spells are quite damaging. Always be on the move and ideally bring a fast weapon in case your main hand one is of the slower variety. This will reduce the time you're just standing around in an attack animation, waiting to be killed by magic coming from a total of four sources. I found myself having trouble on my huge-weapon run for this reason.
Once the clones are dead continue to spam attacks on the Sage proper until he teleports and the whole game begins anew. Depending on how powerful you are you can kill him in 2-6 teleports on most characters. This is due to you being able to fight him much later in the game by going down a different route first. All in all he's not too hard, but definitely not to be underestimated. That last part is true for every boss, but especially this one, because if things go south they go straight to the pole.
As we can learn from the description of his Soul and the spell and weapon we can make from it this was only one of two crystal sages. This one sided with the legion of Farron Keep, an area close by. Oddly enough he's not guarding the path to Farron Keep but to the Cathedral of the Deep. The other sage, at this point, we don't really know anything about.
A Brief History of Big Hat Logan
A lot of people drew connections to Big Hat Logan from Dark Souls when they saw the Crystal Sage and the hollow sorcerer's with the big hats. Some went as far as saying that one of the sages was Logan himself. In truth it's more like they are part of a big Logan fan club. So I find it best, for those not already aware, to describe who Logan is exactly.
In Dark Souls we first learn of him from Griggs of Vinheim, who admires Logan and tells us about how awesome of a sorcerer Logan is and how shit he is by comparison. Griggs paints us a picture of a Legend. And for all you know he may be just that. Logan is a fairly well hidden NPC. A lot of people might not find him on their first playthrough. I think this is intended to enhance the myth of the Big Hatted Sorcerer. On the other hand, they may not have made it that way for any specific reason. Another character, Rickert of Vinheim, will let you know that Logan is over 100 years old and shouldn't even be alive. Thing is, he's of course undead, which grants him some form of immortality. Interesting that the people who know him did not consider this. Is he really that awesome?
When we find Logan he's in a cage in a room that has no real entrance (we have to bust a hole in the wall to get there), just hanging out there with his huge hat, being fairly chill, especially considering the situation he's in. Once freed he'll go to Firelink Shrine and set up shop near Griggs, who'll just go "Noooo, don't go to me, I suck, Logan's right over there, go to Logan, he's a basically demigod". Naturally, Logan has much more powerful spells in stock than Griggs.
After the game progresses far enough Logan moves on. But not before telling us where to. In fact this would not be the first time he's telling us he made his intentions clear form the start: He wants to go to the Duke's Archives, which belong to Seath, the Scaleless Dragon who betrayed his own race and got granted the title of Duke by Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight. But I'll find an excuse to talk about Seath in more detail at a later point, as he's probably my favorite Souls antagonist, so for now I'll stick to what's essential for Logan's story.
Logan was fascinated with Seath because he had attained true immortality. Logan describes him as a "true undead" in a later encounter. The source of Seath's immortality is a crystal. In fact, Crystals are all over Seath's archives. Once we find Logan he is, of course, captured again. This time in a cell befitting of the myth that surrounds the man. But it's way too big for him. So of course, we rescue him again. And he moves to a different spot in the archives where he begins studying Seath's research on immortality and begins to sell us crystal infused versions of his previous spells.
And here is where Logan's story begins to mirror Seath's. In the process of researching way to become immortal he went completely mad. His research included kidnapping people to experiment on them and fusing various monsters with people or other monsters. We have Man-Serpents and Cthulhu Nagas roaming about his place, for instance. Then there's regular crystal infused hollows. While Logan doesn't actually do that, delving into Seath's research still turns him insane. This becomes apparent if you visit him again later, he'll just ramble on about how great seath is and eventually his ramblings beome unintelligible. Once all of his spells are purchased he moves on to a final location: The room we first fought Seath in.
Logan decided in order to become immortal he must be more like Seath. Since Seath was a Scaleless, naked dragon, Logan stripped himself of all his clothes and hung around in the archives. Most other characters in the first Dark Souls go hollow and attack you somewhere once their stock is depleted, Logan doesn't. He still attacks you but he's specifically not hollow. Just bonkers. The only reason he's still wearing his hat is so you can tell it's Logan. And that's where the tale of the legendary Logan ends. Pantsless and no idea what's going on anymore.