You can't use it in the first phase though. I personally found first phase of his fight way harder than the second one.

You can also backstab ogre to get rid of his first life at the beginning of the battle but it is very hard to do so.

I got the fire and killed him pretty easily. The fire helped but really it just seemed like this throws were not connecting for some reason 🤷🏻‍♂️

Progressed a bit more. Killed that white Shinobi tracker very easily. Then some purple ninja wrecked me.

I need to look up a tutorial on the whole guard or whatever aspect of the combat. I’m delivering killing blows on people but I have no idea why.

The combat in the game is focused on dealing this so called killing blows. To do so, you need to break enemy posture. The yellow bar that is displayed below health bar. To fill that bar you need to perfectly deflect enemy attacks with LB button. The less HP the enemy has, the faster yellow bar fills, and slower it regenerates. (Same mechanics apply to your character as well). Once the enemy posture is broken (yellow bar is filled), you can kill him with a death blow instantly.

Fired it back up today. Killed the purple ninja guy. Got to some big drunken dude boss fight and died a couple times because of grabs.

The game doesn’t seem overly difficult but I’m finding that I take so much time off between sessions that I lose my way of how the game controls and it’s mechanics. So I spend a few lives getting back into the hang of it and then I die a couple times in a fight and get bored and stop. Might have to play this when I have a lot of free time to devote solely to it.