“Whaddaya mean my boss fight is unoriginal?!”
Last year, both for fun and for critical purposes, I played upwards of fifty games. This year, I’ve been playing five or six games on a rotating basis, and a friend of mine recently asked a question that stopped me cold: “Fought any good bosses lately?”
And it dawned on me: No. No I haven’t. I’ve played great games, but I haven’t fought a boss I’ve cared about in a while. Here’s why it might be time to fire the boss.
A Lot Of Games Phone It In
DMC: Devil May Cry is a game that spent a fortune on art design and level design, where you platform your way through a Matrix-esque car chase, where you fight your way to the heart of a news network in a Tron-inspired sequence after getting there by traveling through an upside-down prison and subway… and where you have the same three boss fights, repeated. While the mechanics of the fight and the scale of the graphics are different, it’s one of three fights: Giant disgusting four-legged creature you have to dodge, giant two legged creature you basically fight from the waist up and occasionally platform to a new location to continue the fight, and normal sized guy who can throw stuff at you and rarely drops his guard.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because every single hack-and-slash game has these three boss fights. The God Of War franchise uses all of these constantly, for example, Zelda is prone to similar fights albeit with slightly more of a puzzle bent, and so on. But at least they have three. All Borderlands 2, and many other shooters, had was a boss where you dodged environmental hazards and shot at a beast, and if you knew where to park your ass on the map and just chip away at his health, it was pretty much just fifteen minutes of jamming a button. In every single case, getting there was all of the fun. Which brings us to point two:
Most Boss Fights Are Really, Really Repetitive
Want to know how to beat the final boss in DmC: Devil May Cry? Spam the shotgun. Seriously. All you’ve got to do for most of the fight.
I’m not picking on the game for this because this is almost every boss fight in every game: Work out the pattern, figure out the weakness, and then rinse and repeat until dead. And in otherwise great games, it can completely derail the flow: Deus Ex: Human Revolution was widely slammed for its boss fights, not least because there was really only three ways to fight the bosses, and only two of them were intentional.
Most Boss Fights Aren’t Challenging Once You Know What To Do
Dishonored has precisely one boss fight in the entire game, and you can beat it by using your powers cleverly or by being a master of timing. Or you can just sit in a window and smack him with crossbow bolts.
Granted, you don’t have to fight this guy. The real fun comes in not fighting him. But it’s still an illustration of a fairly serious problem: Boss fights are difficult to design to avoid a player essentially opting out of them. Deus Ex: Human Revolution featured a skill called the Typhoon that’s literally a Skip Boss button. Press it a few times, watch the cutscene, and move on to the part of the game you care about.
So is the boss fight unsalvageable? No. But game developers need to start being more creative. Fighting a boss is a chore, right now, but bosses that can be beaten multiple ways, or avoided entirely by clever gamers, are the way of the future. Most games are becoming increasingly nonlinear in how you can approach playing them even if your path is relatively straightforward, and the boss fight has to do the same.
Batman: Arkham City, for example, has quite possibly the best boss fight of this hardware generation in the form of Mr. Freeze: A tense and complex fight that requires timing, forethought, and coolness under pressure. It’s possibly the most Batman-esque moment in either game, where you go up against a stronger opponent and outthink him. God Of War III got around it by turning a boss into a level you crawl all over like a flea. DmC: Devil May Cry has moments in one boss fight where you fight enemies in the middle of news chopper footage.
That’s the key. Bosses need more tactics, more variety, and more ways to fight them. Rinse and repeat is for shampoo, not video games.
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Revengeance will be a good measuring stick I think of which direction boss fights are headed…if they can’t manage to make a good boss fight out of robot ninjas what hope is there?
I think boss fights at this point are largely ways to show off setpieces. Like, watching Raiden use missiles as stepping stones to take out an enemy is hilarious and I can’t wait to play it, but I doubt it’s going to bring anything new to the table.
I enjoyed the boss battles in DMC for the most part also playing through it on Son Of Sparda difficulty changes the boss fights enough for them to feel fresh even on new game+.
Honestly, the only boss fight I genuinely enjoyed in the game was Bob Barbas, which is the toughest fight in the entire game. The rest was just evade, evade, evade, stab.
Definitely agree with you about the Arkham City/Mr.Freeze fight.
The lack of good boss battles really hit me while I was playing Borderlands 2. The introduction of said bosses is awesome, but for the most part, you just have to keep moving and shooting them with a shotgun.
Bosses are just thrown into games now because that’s the pattern gamers & game developers are accustomed to.
Now I’ve got to play Arkham City again.
I think it’s where they stick the most “cinematic” moments, and gameplay suffers, or at least falls back on cliches, as a result.
God I loved that Dr. Freeze fight – good point on bringing it up.
In my opinion it *really* depends on the game – there are some games that still use boss fights incredibly well. case in point (and relevant since #3 comes out tomorrow) – the Dead Space series. many of the boss fights in those games are done brilliantly, with just enough challenge and skill needed while still being breath-taking and extremely cinematic.
I agree that it depends on the game. Games like DmC and God of War would feel weak without boss battles, but at the same time, as Dan says, switch that shit up for once and do something that hasn’t been done before. Make it harder than learning one sound strategy.
Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls do a good job of making boss battles. Those games really make you afraid of a boss the first time you fight it (and in some cases every time you fight) even if you do know a good strategy.
Also look at Shadow of the Colossus, a game that’s nothing but boss fights, but done so well.
DmC I actually enjoyed the arena battles a lot more: Part of the problem is the game throws you all these stylish toys to beat ass with, and then makes most of them utterly useless in boss fights.
I agree that boss fights shouldn’t be required, but certain games (Mega Man, Final Fantasy, ect.) just wouldn’t be the same without the boss fights, even if their strategies are predictable and repetitive. I think if the presentation is polished and the pay-off is satisfactory, then boss fights still have a perfectly fine place in a game.
I miss the classic 16-bit Boss-focused games. Konami made a lot of them (Rocket Knight Adventures). Treasure too (Radiant Silvergun, Dynamite Headdy). Games that were just a dozen or more boss fights with very short, easy stages in between.
I think the all-Boss game could still work. The two modern games that have attempted it, Shadow of the Colossus and No More Heroes were very refreshing and fun.
Malicious is another example, although whether it was entirely successful is a bit subjective.
Worst part of each Mass Effect was the boss fight. ME1 the Saran fight was pointless. ME2 the human reaper was anti-climatic. ME3 the fight against a full reaper, on foot, was totes believable y’all.
I just finished Crysis 2 that was gifted to me. No boss fights, just an enhanced mook. Compared to the dumb Crysis 1 boss it is a lot more believable.
Also I completely understand the rise of quicktime events because it allows you to have boss fights without having boss fights.
Ugh, don’t get me started on ME3′s on-foot Reaper fight. What was THAT about?
metal gear fight are always fun.
I hate the disjointedness of most boss fights. You spend 90 percent of your time playing a game one way and then when you get to the boss you throw that out the window and try to figure out the new pattern.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution in a nutshell, at least if you go the non-lethal route.
I thought both Arkham games had great boss fights that were genuinely challenging. Fighting Bane was terrifying in the first one, because it’s early in the game and he is so much more powerful than you.
I really liked all of the boss fights in Arkham City, especially the Mr. Freeze battle. But fighting Ra’s al Ghul and Solomon Grundy was also awesome. The Clayface final battle wasn’t great, but still better than most boss fights.
No there should always be boss fights. I love them and working up to them.
I don’t hate them as much as most people, but some have gotten tediously long. I remember Borderlands DLC in particular, some of those boss fights took 20 minutes. They weren’t hard, you just needed to unload more bullets than seemed necessary. If it’s not going to be overly complex, what’s the point of making me do the same thing for a half hour?
“Why The Boss? One Post Showing That Dan Seitz Started Gaming In 2010.”
Since second grade, actually. Familiarity breeds contempt, and all that.
I liked boss fights in DXHR, last game I recall with decent ones
Never been a big fan of boss fights, myself. Let’s see… are there any that I like? Recent ones, anyway? The Hunter and Ubermorph in the Dead Space games are excellent, and the last boss in DS2 was pretty cool too. The end of BioShock 2, while not a “boss” fight per se (come to think of it, I don’t believe that game had any actual bosses), was pretty fun. Hmm… Bronjahm in Wrath of the Lich King, haha. And probably at least a few other WoW ones. Wheatley in Portal 2… And MGS4 had a lot of solid ones: Crying Wolf, Screaming Mantis, the final fight with Liquid/Ocelot, the REX-RAY fight. Can’t really remember a lot of older ones, aside from Psycho Mantis. I imagine there might’ve been a few that I really dug, but probably not many. M.Bison from SF2? He was pretty hilarious.
And the answer is Angela.