Boss Battles Roundup
The “boss battle” is one of gaming’s oldest tropes, and it rears its unpredictable head in a wide variety of AAA games, whether it belongs there or not. I asked the Ontological Geek staff to respond to four questions about the nature and purpose of boss battles, so we could try to get a better understanding of what they are, why they exist, which games handle them well, and which games handle them poorly.
The four questions I asked everyone to answer are:
1. What role ought a boss battle fill?
2. Name (and explain) a game which uses boss battles well, and why.
3. Talk about a game which uses boss battles poorly, and why.
4. Analyze a particular boss battle and explain why it works or doesn’t work.
What role ought a boss battle fill?
The question of the virtuous boss battle boils down to the kind of game to which it belongs. In practice, there are generally two kinds of boss battles: ludological checkpoints and narrative high points. It’s hard to say when the distinction arose, though it’s a safe bet that the former predated the latter.
Ludological checkpoints are the kind of battle typified in Zelda games; you get an item or technique in a dungeon, use it against the boss. Advancement in the game is contingent on proficiency. You cannot continue on in the game unless you have proven apt enough to get past the enemy in the last room of the level. To return to Zelda, apart from thematic differences, any of the bosses in Ocarina of Time can be swapped out for any other. There is no real reason, for example, that Gohma must be the first boss you encounter, as opposed to later on in the game. The bosses’ interchangeability is due to their role as tests for the player rather than having much narrative significance. Even in cases where the bosses aren’t interchangeable, ludological checkpoints focus more on proficiency in gameplay and the player’s skill.
Narrative high points, though they may require proficiency with certain items, are centered in challenges that are significant to the narrative. You contend with this boss at this time because your agency as a character and the boss’ agency as an opposed character intersect at this point. You fight Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3 for very specific reasons each time you meet him. Though Shepard must be leveled up enough and employ some strategy to defeat him, the Kai Leng encounters, for example, are more focused on the story of Shepard bringing righteous justice to the murderer of Thane (sob).
I’m not about to make a moral judgment on which is the superior kind of boss battle. First, I don’t think a real answer exists. Second, to attempt an answer would be terribly unfair to a substantial portion of quality games. As with most things in life, it is best to acknowledge that both kinds of battles can be excellent in their own way.
Name (and explain) a game which uses boss battles well, and why.
Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal:
I’ve been a gamer since I can remember, and I’ve taken on many bosses in my day. But the gym leaders of the first two generations of Pokémon (which are the only ones I played contemporarily) will always hold a special place in my heart.
Though nominally governed by the story of a young boy (or girl, thank you Crystal) trying to be the best like no one ever was, the pacing of the GSC generation was driven entirely by the player, how far ze had come up to that point. And what better way to test the player than pitting hir against gym leaders, sixteen in all. Each of these gyms is structured like a maze that forces you to confront several trainers as you made your way to the leader. These mazes themselves often posed a bit of a challenge (I remember not very fondly Saffron City’s endless teleporting tiles), adding an additional level to the challenge you faced each town.
Further, each of these gyms was specialized to different types of Pokémon. In addition to providing ample opportunity for theming that makes each town feel unique and memorable, the gyms give you the chance to test your regular party against various types, which is very useful on your way to become a Pokémon Master. The challenges are designed to make you better at the game, which is pretty much how bosses ought to work in games.
Talk about a game which uses boss battles poorly, and why.
Smash Bros. series:
As a series, the Smash Bros. games have always been an oddity. The concept was fresh and original (in the 90s) and has already been perfectly executed (in the GameCube days). Now Nintendo is stretching the last original thought it’s had in over a decade as far as it can go. What does this have to do with bosses, you ask? The fact that there are new bosses completely divorced from any previous Nintendo IP when the game’s core concept is a grudge match between all its previous IPs (and some from Sony and Sega).
Since Melee, the SB games have featured Bowser, who it could be fairly argued is the original boss character as a playable character. They also have Ganondorf, whose previous appearances rightly go down in boss battle history. I remember fondly the times in my childhood I spent fighting Bowser and Ganondorf. I do not, however, recall from my youth confrontations with Duon, Galleom, or Tabu. The implementation of new characters in a game designed to elevate old characters misses the point somehow.
Analyze a particular boss battle and explain why it works or doesn’t work.
The End – Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
The End is an ancient, photosynthesizing (Just go with it. It’s Kojima, after all) sniper who Snake must challenge in his coming-of-age quest to surpass his mentor, the Boss. The Metal Gear Solid series has always had an exceptional finesse with regards to bosses, and the End is perhaps the perfect execution of an MGS boss. Or any sort of boss, for that matter. Snake’s throw-down with the End is the exemplar of the gameplay overhaul attempted in the third Metal Gear Solid game, and embodies everything I love about the series.
The setup is simple: You and the End in a forest. Neither of you know for certain where the other is, and your job is to find and defeat him before he does the same to you. You have technology you can use to find and track him (heat/night vision goggles), and he has a bird that spies on you. You can each either opt to track the other down and capture/kill at close range, or you can engage in a rootin’ tootin’ snipe hunt. Oh, and you both need to eat to stay alive.
This battle is the most intense boss experience I’ve ever had, and it is unlike anything else I’ve played. Unlike the other set piece battles in the game, no music plays. The game provides no extra tension through the soundtrack because it doesn’t need to. You are engaged in a duel of equals, perfectly matched, and you must hunt or die. Framing the confrontation in this way not only perfectly capitalizes on the survival systems of Snake Eater, it serves as the ultimate test of your Snake-skills. Snake is a survival-badass and a nerves-of-steel soldier. The fight with the End gives you the chance to prove that you are, too.
What role ought a boss battle fill?
Ideally, a boss battle ought to serve as a culmination of a sequence – bringing to full the thematic, aesthetic or mechanical aspects of the preceding section of the game. The boss battle most frequently serves as climax, but I’m uncomfortable with mandating that a boss battle should always serve that purpose. Boss battles occasionally serve as denouement to a climax – see the Yevon conflict after the clash with Jecht in Final Fantasy X, which is sans conflict and impossible to lose, and thus doesn’t have the climactic mechanical expression as the previous fight, nor the emotional and dramatic resonance, and so serves as a falling action rather than a peak.
Name (and explain) a game which uses boss battles well, and why.
Shadow of the Colossus has been described as “just boss battles,” but that isn’t quite fair; the game’s sixteen sections are introduced by exploration through desolate and primordial locations that prompt reflection and which culminate in clashes with titanic creatures that exhibit a slew of different ideas and temperaments. The mechanics for dealing with the colossi are based around climbing and problem-solving, and the game becomes an exercise in strategy and endurance, which suits the game still atmosphere and slow pace.
Talk about a game which uses boss battles poorly, and why.
Any time Assassin’s Creed throws a tougher opponent at the player than an elite guard, it becomes ineffective. It uses the same combat system and tools that usually allows you to feel like a powerful assassin (comprised of powerful counters and instant kills), but to make it more challenging, it just makes it so your most powerful tools don’t work. It doesn’t tell you that beforehand; you just fail when you attempt to use them. As a result, it feels unusually constrained, and like something you just sort of slog through to get to the other side; not a very effective climax.
Analyze a particular boss battle and explain why it works or doesn’t work.
Dead Space has largely ineffective boss encounters; it pits you against massive creatures that don’t project the same sort of too-close-for-comfort terror that the game excels at. The stand-out is an encounter with a hulking, but still man-sized, terror that endlessly regenerates. That sense of powerlessness, that one is being relentlessly hunted, is powerful. The encounters are stretched across two different chapters, and the final solutions are always using the environment to eliminate the creature. It takes a cue from sci-fi/horror predecessor Alien, and it’s played out to great effect; this sequence is the game’s most terrifying and breathless, and probably the best mechanical expression of the sort of horror that the game attempts to depict.
What role ought a boss battle fill?
The function of a boss character is that of a marker, a milestone for character or narrative progression. Some are imbued with great power, requiring an equally powerful player character to defeat them, while others derive importance from their plot relevance or emotional connection to the player character. The game could be a side-scrolling platformer or a story-driven RPG, but the boss character will normally appear at the end of a subsection of the game, whether that subsection takes the form of a level or the conclusion of a quest line. Bosses are a symbol of growth, either in character levels, player skill or character development, and defeating them is a demonstration of that growth. The same logic applies to optional bosses (Ruby & Emerald Weapon of FFVII are great examples) in that they exist separate from the scripted progression of the game, but are still a hurdle to be overcome when the player feels they have grown strong enough. To beat a boss demonstrates progression in a way that ever-increasing XP bars cannot, and in addition to providing a challenge they reinforce to the player that character growth is taking place.
Name (and explain) a game which uses boss battles well, and why.
Blue Dragon. For no reason other than that every boss battle, every single one, has this boss theme. What more needs to be said?
Talk about a game which uses boss battles poorly, and why.
Due to the nature of open-world game design, which gives players an opportunity to wander away from scripted storylines and dick about at their own pace, boss characters in such games are often underwhelming. They lack an inbuilt awareness of pacing, as the player may face them at level 5, 15 or 372, and as such developers struggle to find ways to make boss characters a challenge to tougher players without being a nightmare for younger ones. Skyrim is a particularly bad offender, given the myriad ways for a player to grow stronger through non plot-based exploration, allowing for those who have levelled up significantly to trounce supposedly frightening enemies. The final boss, Alduin the World-Eater, is such a trivial threat to a sufficiently levelled player that my character had no need to fight with tactics or strategy; I simply stood in one spot, trusting my max-strength enchanted plate armour to protect me while I rained arrows on the foe. This turned what ought to have been an awesome spectacle into just another day at the office, vastly lessening the impact that performing such a legendary feat should have had.
While an argument could be made that Alduin’s defeat was intended to be impressive from a narrative rather than mechanical standpoint, thanks to the aforementioned open-ended story structure it carries little weight to players who’ve wandered the world doing their own thing and largely forgetting about the main quest line. The battle stands as the end of just another quest rather than as a great challenge overcome, and for a game’s final boss the experience is deeply underwhelming. The same applies to almost every other boss character encountered; the player’s ability to become a walking tank subverts both the narrative purpose of and mechanical abilities of bosses, leaving them as nothing more than named mooks. With so many stories to juggle, Skyrim dilutes the impact any one of them can have, and with bosses being neither a test of skill nor of particular importance to the blank slate main character they inevitably become unimportant.
Analyze a particular boss battle and explain why it works or doesn’t work.
Batman: Arkham City is for the most part quite weak in terms of boss battles. As many of the Dark Knight’s more iconic enemies are no more superpowered than he is, they are often content to allow their thugs to do the brawling for them, reducing battles with big-name criminals to just another in a string of multitudinous brawls. Those who are possessed of greater skill or abilities, like Deadshot or Bane, are diminished by their stupidity or even by bypassing the opportunity for a fight entirely. However, one example stands above the rest as an almost perfect amalgamation of the best features of boss battles, and that’s the face-off with Mr Freeze.
As confrontation begins the first instinct is to follow the established method and twat him in the face. Unfortunately Freeze, as the player quickly learns, is too powerful for Batman to tackle head-on (or even with a swift boot to the back of the head) and will require adoption of elements from both the stealth gameplay and the gadget-based combat. By luring Freeze near to an interactive scenery object, Batman can use one of his wonderful little toys to turn the environment against his foe and then put in a few swift boots while Freeze is stunned. However, he can’t fool Freeze twice with the same trick; the villain will systematically knock out attack options as they’re used, forcing the player to adapt their strategy on the fly. Unlike more traditional boss fights the emphasis is not on repeatedly exploiting a weak spot, but on patience and observation. By using the scenery to your advantage, and timing attacks well, Freeze will eventually fall in a fashion much more satisfying than a simple punch-up.
It could be said, not at all inaccurately, that boss battles are the appendices of gaming: vestigial remains of previous evolutionary iterations; in this case the big black soul-sucking boxes that used to be ubiquitous in every self-respecting shopping mall and pizza joint in the country (that is, before we all apparently up and decided to do away with malls and eat-in pizza, to make room for…Stars Buck, I guess?). However, like its biological cousin, the boss battle still somehow manages to retain a few useful functions.
Like the “rule of threes” in oral comedy, there are some design tropes that are longstanding because they are effective, and (perhaps more importantly) unique to the medium they’re serving.
Consider a linear game which presents a narrative with a clear through-line – pretty popular these days, what with all the The Biolast of Infinitely Shocking Us getting such high praise. Boss battles are tests of the skills we’ve had to learn to get far enough in the game to come face to face with the King or Queen of the bad’uns, and strive to push us father than we’ve heretofore been pushed; strategically or mechanically. This progression often necessarily matches the narratological arc, and helps to enforce it; the action and intensity (conflict) cresting and falling but always maintaining a net gain of inertia until the climax in which the arc is resolved, and a brief winding-down period for closure.
Punctuating key stops along the journey facilitates the wavy line a comfortable narrative has to draw. Each stop along the way introduces a crucial element, development, or obstacle, and the process of overcoming and moving forward is illustrated by the gameplay building intensity up to a discrete point of reckoning. Consider Chrono Trigger (sort of a proto-Mass Effect with its episodic structure, ensemble cast, and emphasis on multiple endings); each boss fits perfectly with the relevant episode’s theming and represents a unique threat to the main characters’ rather personal, reflective journeys of self-actualization as well as the central quest arc – that of using time travel to prevent the apocalypse.
About midway through Chrono Trigger, the heroes find themselves in a remote cavern in the middle ages staring down a pair of twin entities, Masa and Mune. The first segment of the battle has your team fighting them as an opposing army of two. My fledging gamer brain reacted very strongly to the second phase of the battle, in which they fuse together into a burly, threatening form, and different, triumphant music begins to play. Admittedly, at the time I was quite disappointed, thinking that I was facing the final battle all too soon. As good design would have it, this was simply a very effective dramatic phase of the game’s ongoing action, and though there was a quiet moment to follow (Chrono Trigger is very very good at these), the worst and best were both yet to come.
Back to BioShock Infinite for a moment: many peers I respect think that there are serious problems with Infinite, mostly in terms of the (VIOLENT) nature of the gameplay disrespecting and distracting from the story it’s trying to tell. I feel like that’s valid, though we all have very different ideas of what Infinite is about, which I think is rather the point. Consider the ending or the title.
Notwithstanding how effectively it manages its gameplay/story segregation otherwise, clearly it flirts with a boss structure but manages to either fall totally short or dodge the issue. Like Andrew Ryan in the original BioShock, there are major enemies who are built up monstrous creatures who through chance or fate are vying for the chance to quite thoroughly ruin your day. This time around there are at least two, and these are dispatched Ryan-style in unsatisfying (albeit rather shocking) cutscenes. Where Infinite really falters, though, is in its final engagement. Unlike BioShock, which placed less emphasis on combat than its baby brother, Infinite borrows against itself by giving us every reason to be jazzed for a swashbuckling grand finale in the sky, only to turn said finale into a frustrating wave attack/tower defense at the very end.
This isn’t to say Infinite is weakened because it lacked real bosses; it weakened itself by following the well-worn pattern of pacing which leaves holes for bosses, and failing to fill those holes in an effective way.
So, to sum up, bosses are one of the earliest persisting gaming tropes; they’re even managing to survive their slow disengagement from the strict “level” structure. They’re not going away any time in the foreseeable future. Interestingly, though I could think of several examples, Infinite being the most egregious, of boss battles making a game weaker by being weak or poorly-designed experiences in and of themselves, I find myself hard-pressed to imagine scenarios in which the boss structure would be necessarily unwelcome. As we’ve discussed before, fighting gigantic demons and facing our fears by two-way proxy is one of the biggest reasons people turn to gaming.
So facing down the Koopa Bros. ultimate attack might not just be fun, it may in fact represent one of the most important cornerstones of videogames.
What role ought a boss battle fill?
Boss battles, used correctly, function as narrative or mechanical high points of the game — either a showdown with a particularly important villain or at least a way of showcasing the game’s mechanics. In order to really be a boss battle, and not just “an important encounter,” it feels like the fight has to have slightly different rules from the rest of the game, while still being recognizable as the same game. Think of the boss fight at the end of FTL as a good example of what I mean — none of the other fights feel quite like that, but it’s identifiable as the same game, extrapolating from the same ruleset.
Name (and explain) a game which uses boss battles well, and why.
I’d like to say Kingdom Hearts here, but I haven’t actually played it in a million years, so I’m not sure if that’s just nostalgia speaking. Less facetiously, I’ll return to FTL, up above. Not everyone enjoys the boss battle at the end of FTL, but I find it to work very well as a test of the ship you’ve built throughout the game. It checks in turn to make sure you have a response to every major form of attack — regular weapons, cloaking devices, boarding parties, drones, etc. and then gives you a bit of time to restock and repair in between each major stage, while maintaining FTL’s omnipresent time limit. It also functions as a nice inversion of the usual direction of the game — usually, you are moving to the right on the map to some destination, fleeing the Rebel fleet, whereas here you are intercepting a ship which is itself trying to get to the right. In the end of FTL, your roles are reversed.
Talk about a game which uses boss battles poorly, and why.
I was a little surprised nobody mentioned Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so I guess I have to. The boss battles in DXHR are a particularly egregious example of shoehorned boss fights that exist because somebody realized videogames are supposed to have boss battles in them. I said above that boss battles should tweak the rules of the game while still being identifiable as the same game, and this is where DXHR fails. HR‘s boss fights devolve into clumsy firefights, devoid of the strategy and patience that characterizes the rest of the game. Jensen, the player character, remains just as fragile as he is in the rest of the game, but the enemies become substantially more capable of taking bullets. Normal enemies in HR die very quickly, and the game’s mechanics assume this throughout. It’s not designed for lengthy firefights, and it shows — not a single human being enjoyed those three sections. Though Matt did perform a pretty great read of them here which attempts to explain why they might not be completely unsalvageable.
Analyze a particular boss battle and explain why it works or doesn’t work.
The Siren fight in BioShock Infinite is the most annoying thing I have submitted myself to in a very, very long time. She flies around unpredictably, inexplicably reanimating dead enemies, all the while warbling the same three bars of the Lacrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem in a distorted voice. She comes from the “bullet sponge” school of design, where rather than making enemies behave in more interesting ways, they just have tons of hit points. Further, her ability to reanimate enemies means that there are nearly always a zillion minions around here taking potshots at her — and since these minions A, don’t stay dead, and B, don’t always drop ammunition, they are nothing more than pesky annoyances. Further, you have to do this boss fight three times, with no substantial differences between them other than the environment.
This might be forgivable if there was at least a strong narrative compulsion to fight the Siren, but there isn’t — she’s flown into a mindless, vicious rage simply because that’s what women do, right? There’s no reason to fight her once, much less three times. It’s probably the game’s nadir, both in terms of the narrative and any sense of swashbuckling fun you might have been having.
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