I almost beat Vanguard in the tutorial when I made my Royal, had him down to maybe 3 more hits before I messed up. Keep meaning to go back and try again, but it's kind of easy-ish with Royal. It seems like you can make him use his stomp move if you attack him from behind one of his legs too. If you do it right, he'll just spam the stomp and never turn to attack you, and that move is crazy easy to dodge.
Time to go rock some NG+







