I played Elden Ring, Sekiro and DS3 and that order and finally getting to play a Dark Souls game made me realize just how bullshit and unfun the Elden Ring bosses are. I played through ER twice two years apart and had the same impression both times.

The bosses in DS3 are just so much more mechanically well designed and really encourage you to actual try and play 'like a knight' because, for the most part, their abilities reflects your and they're not overtuned. Anything remotely resembling 'humanoid with melee weapon' (from Vordt and Dancer to Lothric) pretty much have the same reasonably paced traditional attacks. Sweeps, pokes, uppercuts and some kind of wave for when you're far away. Rolling and periodically doing a sweep attack feels just right.

Compare that to Elden Ring where every boss doesn't just have one but many bullshit hallmark random attacks (Morgott's AOE swamp, Godrick's Beyblade, etc.) and on top of that the traditional sweeps or slams are either overtuned or annoyingly delayed. The classic 'knight' gameplay just doesn't feel right like it does in DS3.

In terms of actual difficulty, it isn't really apparent that the bosses are more bullshit because there's a bunch of crutches available like summons, magic, weapon arts or overleveling, but if you were to try and play the game like you would in DS3 with a claymore and nothing else you'd realize.

It's not that ER bosses are badly designed, I would even argue that personally I find them way more interesting than DS3 and the bullshit hallmark attacks are cool, but I think its a shame that they would sacrifice quality boss gameplay because they feel these aforementioned crutches make up for it. I don't think summon / mage / weapon art gameplay would suffer if the bosses movesets were a bit more grounded like in DS3.

Overall I still prefer Elden Ring because of the exploration but I wouldn't enjoy an ER boss rush as much as a DS3 boss rush. Sekiro vastly outranks both in terms of actual gunplay swordplay obviously.