The second phase of the Echo Knight fight has extremely high lateral tracking and range on nearly all of his attacks, this makes the iframe dodge and the parry the only viable tools to deal with the attacks (as opposed to fundamentals like positioning and hitboxes). The first phase could be managed with smart spacing and a good strategy, but this goes out the window in the second phase. This creates a bad combination with the way the attacks are animated in this game. Almost all of the attack animations for enemies in this game have delayed spring timings, where the attack is delayed at first but then comes out very quickly at the end, this means that the attacks are deliberately animated to hit at unintuitive times and need to be memorized in order to be countered with the timing-based defensive mechanics (iframe dodge and parry).
This makes the boss a very memorization-heavy encounter. It’s okay to have a memorization-heavy fight in situations where the fight can be quickly and conveniently re-attempted, but the Echo Knight phase 2 is the exact opposite of this, as it requires completing the entire crucible and the first phase all over again. Learning this fight through memorization, as it seems to be intended, clashes heavily with the design of the crucible, as the skills needed to complete the floors are irrelevant in memorizing the specific moveset of the end boss. You are not “training” for the boss while completing the floors, only fighting the boss can train you for the boss when the fight relies so heavily on memorization.
Overall, this game seems to have a bias towards the timing-based counters (iframe dodge and parry), which I don’t particularly like, but the fundamentals have worked pretty well too for me in 30+ hours of gameplay so far. The Echo Knight phase 2 fight is where this bias goes from mild annoyance to being completely overbearing, since the boss seems to be designed to shut down your fundamentals in order to force you to use the timed counters. And it’s also the worst possible boss to have this change in, because the fight can’t be retried quickly.
I think it would benefit the design of this game greatly if either the phase 2 of this boss was balanced to be more viable with spacing, or else allowing the fight to be quickly retried.