Saturday Soapbox: Horrible Bosses

By Christian Donlan Published 8 October, 2011

Are gaming's greatest villains an endangered species?

I love bosses. I always have. I love their blend of spectacle and challenge, and I love their screen-shaking scale or - if it's Treasure - their luminously stupid names. Fatman, Bowser, Pinky Roader - who wouldn't want to hang out with people like that?

But I love them in principle, too. I love the fact they're called bosses, suggesting that they somehow also manage the levels they top or tail, keeping grunts signed up to the health plan and collecting timesheets. I love the way they belong only to video games, and not books or movies or paintings or folk songs. Turner wasn't moved to draw a massive lizard-headed mech stomping out of the ice storm as Hannibal crossed the Alps, and Jane Austen didn't interrupt Mansfield Park every fifty pages to make way for a thirty-foot baby skull mounted on a scorpion's body. I wish she had, frankly, but she didn't. Why? Because bosses are ours, and this is the only art form where they really make sense.

Often these days, though, you could be forgiven for thinking that they don't make as much sense as they used to. In fact, sometimes they seem distinctly out of place. Is something weird going on? Are bosses in trouble?

"Deus Ex is the poster boy for horrible bosses, but it's far from the only game knocking about that makes taking on the big guys feel like an empty, inane faff."

Look at - you guessed it - Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and you might think they are. This is, after all, a game that's been universally lauded for its intricacy, its cold-edged battle-smarts, and its crate-stacking, vent-sneaking freedom of approach. Everyone agrees that Eidos Montreal did a staggering job on this one.

But you know what else everybody agrees with? The fact that the bosses stink. They force you to kill even if you're trying to just tranq-dart everyone, they turn the game into an all-out shooter, and they interrupt the elegant make-your-own-fun pace of the whole enterprise. They're the jocks dropping in to spoil your Dungeons and Dragons evening. They shouldn't be there, and now they won't leave. (Also, they've brought brewskis.)

It's alright, though. You know why? Because apparently Eidos Montreal didn't create the bosses. The team out-sourced them to a studio called Grip Entertainment.

Seriously, the team did what?

A boss should be the kind of thing a development studio leaps at the opportunity to tackle, right? A big showboating exercise in art skills and design brilliance. It shouldn't be the sort of work you hand off to the guys down the road - but apparently that's what it's becoming. Bosses in Human Revolution appear to have been included because, well, a game needs bosses. Any bosses. Even bosses that break key mechanics and do nothing but annoy everybody.

pinky

Treasure makes some of the most lovable bosses in the business - and some of the most ingenious.

Deus Ex is the poster boy for horrible bosses, but it's far from the only game knocking about that makes taking on the big guys feel like an empty, inane faff. Sometimes it seems that everywhere you look, bosses are growing old, stale, and weary. There are still plenty of great bosses around - we'll get to them in a minute, in fact - but there are just as many that feel like vestigial tails, ideas that have outlived their time and their usefulness.

Where did bosses come from? I think they came from the arcades. If that's true, then their origins, as Eugene Jarvis, who worked on boss-masterpieces like Smash TV and NARC once said to me, were anything but respectable. Jarvis told me that the likes of Mr Big and Mutoid Man turned up in his games because someone came down to the design pit one afternoon and said, "Okay, at this point in the game, you need to take four dollars from the player right now." In terms of mechanics, they were pure road block, pure cash-sapper, and the only reason we loved them were because the people who created them were supremely talented at taking your money in a way that made you come back for more.

Here's a problem, then. It's not that designers aren't as good anymore - although, it's worth noting, almost nobody has ever been as good as Eugene Jarvis. It's that some contemporary games have changed in two crucial ways. For one thing, freed from their coin slots, they're now paced much more carefully, built around an insistent tug that keeps you moving at all times. Think of the endless forward momentum of something like Uncharted: bosses screw that kind of thing up pretty badly with restarts, reloads, and - eventually - the retreat to FAQs. Well-meant or otherwise, they're often nothing more than a wrench flung into the cogs and gears that keep the fairground ride zipping along.

Then, and I think this is particularly true for Deus Ex, there's the fact that the classic boss is often primarily a bullet sponge - and that's a problem in a world where more and more games are choosing to build their fun around mechanics that go beyond mere shooting. A boss worthy of Deus Ex would have to allow you to sneak your way to victory if you'd chosen that augmentation approach. Or one-hit-kill your way to victory. Or... Okay, I'm starting to understand why boss design was such a nightmare for a game like Human Revolution...

colossus

Team Ico elevated bosses to centre stage with Shadow of the Colossus, and turned each battle into something strange and poignant.

Luckily, the illnesses that plague bosses aren't terminal. In fact, as doctors often say, bosses just need to change their lifestyle a little. If a boss is really a blend of spectacle and challenge - a sort of walking set-piece - there's no reason they have to be a hulking damage sponge in the first place, is there?

Back in 2001, the first Halo showed that an end of game boss could actually take the form of a long Warthog ride across an exploding environment - the perfect final showdown for an adventure with such rangy, cinematic ambitions. And this week, the likes of Dark Souls suggests that it's alright if your boss is a damage sponge as long as it's also a puzzle - near impossible to defeat at first, but slowly made manageable as you learn your craft in playing the game.

And while some bosses are starting to look a little peaky, it's worth noting that others are really thriving: even a likeably middle-of-the-road offering like Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions can have a little fun with them by stepping away from the standard template and threading its bosses right through the entirety of a level, so you're always fighting them, and always learning how to fight them a little bit better.

deus

I'm not resting, I'm crying.

This, then, is why it would be a real shame if bosses ever left gaming behind for good and went padding off into the mist like those sorrowful ancients in that bit in The Dark Crystal. A really good boss doesn't just ramp up the challenge, it ramps up your own skills too, allowing you to revel in your emerging mastery. The best bosses aren't just about handing out punishment, they're about holding a mirror up to your dextrous brilliance, which is why the likes of Radiant Silvergun can offer you bosses that have the audacity to actually commit suicide if you don't finish them off quickly - and stylishly - enough yourself.

So bosses aren't on the way out. Sorry about all that: it was just a cheap starting point to build a discussion around. But, as with any game mechanic like traversal, levelling, or even health, it's worth taking a look at bosses every now and then just to make sure that they're still fit for purpose. Pinky Roader, after all, deserves nothing less.

Picture of Christian.

About Christian Donlan

Chris Donlan writes about games for Eurogamer and some magazines. His heroes include Eugene Jarvis, Errol Morris, and Linus Van Pelt.

Read more articles from Christian by visiting the Christian Donlan archive page.

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Comments (75) Latest comment 8 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • linea #1 8 months ago

    "Turner wasn't moved to draw a massive lizard-headed mech stomping out of the ice storm as Hannibal crossed the Alps, and Jane Austen didn't interrupt Mansfield Park every fifty pages to make way for a thirty-foot baby skull mounted on a scorpion's body. "

    I think this may be the single greatest sentence written in the history of computer games journalism

  • Snufkin #2 8 months ago

    The second boss in Deus Ex was horrible (spoilers ahead). You're urged to shoot the floor to slow her down, which ends up killing you too. She's invisible for 90% of the fight. Argh! IN the end just pumped her full of machine pistol bullets (thank God for the homing mod I added) and soaked up the damage with Hypostims. Still, it left a bad taste in my mouth after avoiding every alarm and henchman on the way there.

    Now Dark Souls has arrived, I'm sure we'll all have a few more nasty boss fights to talk about.

    EDIT: I've thought of a boss in films - surely the Alien Queen in Aliens qualifies??
    Edited by Snufkin at 08/10/11 @ 07:36

  • MarketZero #3 8 months ago

    Great article, although I would argue that a lot of action films have a boss battle dynamic about them, including mini bosses.

  • bionic #4 8 months ago

    'It shouldn't be the sort of work you hand off to the guys down the road - but apparently that's what it's becoming.'

    The first big game i experienced where the bosses were an expic fail was Donkey Kong Country on the SNES. It was like, whoever was behind those bosses didn't have a clue. The boss design was abysmal. So it is not a new thing in gaming.

    For those who havn't played and completed DKC, to give you an idea of how poor the bosses are, here is an example:
    Imagine, your jumping through an amazing looking snow level, it looks beautiful. There's these funny little crocodile creatures snapping away, the game feels great, and looks better than anything available at that time. The end of the level is approaching, you know there's going to be a boss, you hope they've managed to invent something better than the big bird (ostrich / flamingo) on a previous level (where only the head was shown ?) and your gamers mind thinks, there is bound to be some sort of snow monster anytime soon. But no, at the end of the snow level is a large black barrel. The best thing RARE could come up with was a f-cking big black barrel ???

    YouTube: the barrel isn't even as big as i remembered. Look at the shaking action, its like they came up with this one during lunch
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9tD65SX...
    Edited by bionic at 08/10/11 @ 07:58

  • Augmentation #5 8 months ago

    I'm not a particularly big fan of bosses. To me, they almost always represent a break in the flow of the games I play. If I'm playing a 2D platformer, I'm playing it to jump around a big level, not change my tactics. Of course, this changes in individual games - Super Meat Boy's bosses were pretty good because they matched the gameplay entirely.

    I don't think, therefore, that certain games should be afraid to shy away from bosses (and by bosses I mean the Big Bad). So far, the bosses in the Uncharted series have disappointed me completely - I'd much rather they used an experience à la Halo.Yet games like SotC are built around bosses - and done well! So if a game doesn't suit a boss, it shouldn't be included.

    In conclusion: god, I hope Uncharted 3 doesn't have a terrible end-game boss...

  • DDevil #6 8 months ago

    It's all context isn't it? The bosses stuck out like a sore thumb in Deus Ex but you'd miss them if they were gone from the next Treasure shoot-em-up. I think we just want game devs to be mindful of whether or not the game needs them, and in what form.

  • Pinewood_Groves #7 8 months ago

    Doesn't pretty much every action/sci-fi film there is end with what basically amounts to a boss fight?

  • markusveralius #8 8 months ago

    The boss at the end of R-Type was pretty iconic, I think I've seen t-shirts of that one. Super Probotector on the SNES was great because of the continuous stream of the boss-variant, the mid-level bosses.

  • Biker_Bob_1971 #9 8 months ago

    Post deleted at 15:13:21 09-05-2012

  • Ceatlan #10 8 months ago

    I've always hated end of level bosses in all my 30 years of gaming, however I can accept that they had there place in games back then (especially in the arcade). Even now they probably have a place in certain genres (shoot'em ups for instance), but I just wish developers would drop them from genres that don't warrant them any more. I've lost count of how many games I've been really enjoying, loving the story, loving the game mechanics, difficulty level just spot on, only for the whole game to be ruined by a boss fight that doesn't fit in with the style of the rest of the game, racks up the difficulty for no reason compared to the rest of the game, or often both of those things.

    There's loads of games that I've given up on because of boss fights, and loads of others that I really loved and completed, but have never been able to face playing through again, precisely because of the boss fights. Deus Ex : HR is a classic example, I loved the game, and was determined to complete it, and I did even though I hated the boss fights, however despite loving it and wanting to play through it again, I just can't face playing through the boss fight sections again.
    Edited by Ceatlan at 08/10/11 @ 08:31

  • Master09 #11 8 months ago

    Dark Souls bosses are so hard they are making me Skyrim in frustration.

  • morriss #12 8 months ago

    I hate bosses. Ruin games completely.

  • Stuz359 #13 8 months ago

    You had an article about bosses and didn't mention Zelda once? Shame on you.

  • Obiwanshinobi #14 8 months ago

    A good bossfight should be like a first date, sporting this very same air of fear and anticipation. It's got nothing to do with the old and the new. Awful bosses are awful because of the awful game design. Make the bosses good and people will like to fight them - it's that simple.
    Speaking of Treasue, while their boss fetish is remarkable, I don't think they have THAT much knack for making their bosses good. Konami ways of of doing things is more pleasing to me. Compare Gunstar Heroes, Alien Soldier and Dynamite Headdy to Contra: Hard Corps and Rocket Knight Adventures (not just YouTube vids, but, you know, how the games actually play). Just saying.
    P.S. That being said, Treasure made YOU the boss in Gunstar Heroes (the Minion Soldier thing) and it was rad. Shadow of the Colossus seems to have aped the idea to an extent (the endgame thing).
    Edited by Obiwanshinobi at 08/10/11 @ 09:16

  • bostec #15 8 months ago

    Was playing Fight Night Champions the other night. I must of spent an hour and an half trying to do the 'end boss'. Running round the ring for 2 rounds, then place 75 body shots within 3 rounds? What a joke, he a fucking Terminator and thus I shall never complete Champions Mode. I hate all boss fights.

  • Inertia #16 8 months ago

    Turner did paint an end of level boss, blended with the bright sunset, in Ulysses deriding Polyphemus though. Goya did a good end of level boss depicting a giant father feasting on his children. And the Assyrians sculpted a few mismatch creatures at the gates of their temples. So maybe end-of-level-bosses run deeper in our psyche than we think.

  • DavidBoring #17 8 months ago

    You had an article about bosses and didn't mention Metal Gear Solid once? Shame on you.

    - fixed

  • nickthegun #18 8 months ago

    Generally, a boss isnt a problem if its a culmination of the skills you learned in the game up to that point, so it feels natural to get a pumped up bad guy to kill.

    The problem with deus ex, like a lot of the game, is that it had the air of choice but it was fairly clear how the designers *wanted* you to play. This utterly punished me in sections like the police station, where i hadnt chosen speech or hacking but ended up being a boon when it came to the bosses.

    Suddenly the augs I had previously been punished for choosing came into their own. I had the weapons and skills to kill them in three seconds flat. The second boss that everyone moans about was killed in about 30 seconds with 3 typhoon rounds and a heavy rifle clip on my first go.

    So, yeah, I had no real problems with the bosses at all because I, luckily, had made the specific build to kick their faces off, which is just stupid design.

  • CaptainQuint #19 8 months ago

    I hate bosses, always have.

  • DrStrangelove #20 8 months ago

    @markusveralius

    Super Probotector on the SNES was great because of the continuous stream of the boss-variant, the mid-level bosses.

    Oh, but the last boss on hard... That was one of the most punishing, most frustrating experiences in my gaming life. It was a painful struggle to lose as few lives as possible on the way there, only to have all remaining ones destroyed in ten seconds by that bastard. I never beat him without Action Replay, and the fight always took 5-10 minutes losing literally dozens of lives.

  • dr_zoidthrob #21 8 months ago

    The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

    Best film boss, Ever.

  • Silvergun-Blue #22 8 months ago

    @DrStrangeLove

    (shakes walking stick) Yup, they don't make em like they used to!

    I'm pretty sure that super probotector was made by a Konami development team that eventually formed Treasure. You ever play Alien soldier? It's like a game of boss fights occasionally punctuated by standard enemies! Truly epic 16 bit gaming.

  • d00dl #23 8 months ago

    The end boss in bullet witch is probably the most annoying boss i've ever fought. I spent an hour, 1 HOUR shooting the stupid thing in its weak spots and it still didn't die. It certainly killed my patience in the game though.

  • RodHull #24 8 months ago

    On the whole bosses irritate the hell out of me, but there is the odd one that I enjoy. The bosses in Kameo and Gods spring to mind: not the most challenging out there, but beautifully designed and fun to explore their weaknesses.

  • flaming.carrot #25 8 months ago

    Some of the boss fights in the God of War series are ridiculously irritating on the harder settings. Though the collosus fight the spans the entire first level of GOW2 is pretty neat.

  • SpeckledJim #26 8 months ago

    Interesting to see I'm not the only one who dislikes boss fights.

    I've only encountered one that I recall with any fondness, and precisely because it defies the standard boss fight cliches. The tentacle boss from Half Life.

    You enter its "arena", but are free to leave at any point. It has no glowing points of weakness for you to shoot. You can shoot it all day and do no damage. In order to kill it you have to interact with the game just as you have been doing up to that point, clearing out enemies and manipulating switches to change the environment.

    It's tense because to complete the sequence you must sneak past the creature a number of times. It tracks by sound, so running is a bad move. Death can be almost instantaneous, yet is completely avoidable with care.

    To me that sums up what a boss fight should be, a large environmental puzzle in effect, rather than a faintly ridiculous intermission between the proper sections of the game.
    Edited by SpeckledJim at 08/10/11 @ 10:35

  • Architect_z #27 8 months ago

    Great article. I play alot of retro titles and I love bosses. Especially on retro games due to how rediculous some of them were. A particular favourite was the fire breathing fat guys in Streets of Rage 2. I think retro games needed
    Bosses arent always necessary for modern games, but Demon's Souls had some of the best bosses, the boss designs were really big, ugly and intimidating, and considering the game was already intimidating when you were just taking on the normal enemies, this made the bosses seem impossible to defeat.

  • Architect_z #28 8 months ago

    P.S. - LIKE A BOSS!

  • linksdad #29 8 months ago

    For a boss fight to work it has to take what you have recently learned or earned and introduce a new way of using it. The battles should not last too long and should fairly punish you if you get things wrong.
    Once you work out the weakness(es) and have a moderate amount of skill, the boss should be killable almost every time i.e. no cheap shots.

  • jonbwfc #30 8 months ago

    "They're the jocks dropping in to spoil your Dungeons and Dragons evening. They shouldn't be there, and now they won't leave. (Also, they've brought brewskis.)"
    That's a pretty poor analogy to use on a European-centric web site.

    Jon

  • gelf #31 8 months ago

    I love a good boss fight, its one of my fave things in gaming but it is rare these days for any of them to be good, including genres where there's really no excuse of it not fitting the game design like fighting games. Compare the tough but fair M Bison(mostly) in Street Fighter 2 to the utterly cheap bastard that is Seth in SF4.

    A really good boss battle can make a game for me, the Metal Gear Solid series would be less without them for example. MGS1 and 3 in particular had very good bosses in the main.

  • Kami #32 8 months ago

    The mystery third reason for a boss fight in a game is plot-driven; sometimes a boss is needed to finish off a chapter, or arc of a story, and conclude it. Assassin's Creed 2/Brotherhood was very adept at this idea - bosses were as quick to fall to Ezio's blade; but getting to them, well, there's the challenge. Or in the earlier Final Fantasy games, a boss would tie off a particular area, or plot point.

    I think the problem is, the boss fight has had to diversify - so often, you wouldn't really notice what is meant to be a boss fight. Technically, I always consider a fight against any creature/NPC that is 'named' (i.e. "Lord Seraphim" instead of his adds called "Blood Mages";) to be a boss fight, regardless of how easy (Dragon Age 2) or how hard (Demons Souls) that is.

    Bosses that come with their own levels, stages etc. are showboats, and that is where a designer can have the most fun. When you self-contain a boss in their own little room, you can do... well. A lot more than if you were chasing a boss down a few ruined tunnels on foot. But they're becoming rarer as games become more adept at telling stories; left for the latter stages of a game if not the end, a reward for your effort and a brick wall to test if you've paid attention the past 6-12 hours of gameplay.

    Bosses aren't doomed. But I think sometimes they are getting to be a little "Blink and you'll miss them".

    And who knows, maybe one day we'll run into a digital version of Jennifer Aniston, trying desperately to be slutty and failing a little bit too much at it. Perhaps the best thing to do on a boss that like that is put it out of its misery... :p

  • Obiwanshinobi #33 8 months ago

    An example of a game where bosses SHOULD work like a charm, but they fucking' don't - the original Max Payne on the PC. Their durability just does not make any fucking sense in the context of the game. We're talking the game where almost everybody (the playable character being no exception) gets killed INSTANTLY by a Molotov cocktail or a handgrenade (Max Payne 2 changed this for worse, but I like the cruelty of it about 1). That's where bosses with a long lifebar instead of any spark of ingenuous game design stick out like a sore thumb.
    An example of a game making a lot of hoo-hah about its bosses without making the bosses all that great deal of fun to fight - Diablo 1&2 (I did have some fun fighting some of them, but why of why aren't they of the Ys level of ingenuity).
    ...and yet Metal Gear Solid games, with all their awesome bosses, take all the flak in the world for setting the rot in the apple of videogaming. I say skip all the cutscenes and radio/codec chat if you want, and there is still a good video game underneath.

  • The-Bodybuilder #34 8 months ago

    "I love the way they belong only to video games, and not books or movies"

    Never watched a Bond movie then?
    Personally I'm all for getting rid of bosses. So many games I never finished due to unfair cheat bosses.

    Strangely enough my 2 most memorable bosses were in tenchu (level 9, I think) and the first boss in headhunter. Rather than hulking monstrosities, both bosses were pretty "even" humans with similar ability to me.
    The tenchu boss, I realised we didn't even need to fight in the designated area, and ended up running around and fighting all over the entire stage, a true epic sword battle. It ended in a gaming glitch with him falling into the river.

    The headhunter boss was just cool; 2 guys fighting on a rainy rooftop playing hide & seek + kill.
    Edited by The-Bodybuilder at 08/10/11 @ 12:42

  • Markusdragon #35 8 months ago

    Surely set-pieces are the new bosses? Instead of punctuating the game with the nigh-unkillable brutal coin-stealers of the days of olde, we've replaced them with big budget linear sequences that make the player say 'woah'. And ultimately, it's for precisely the same reason - a player that dies to a boss which he thinks he needs one more quarter to beat will pay up for more, whilst setpieces actively shape the the player's memory of the game crowding out the more monotonous and conventional bits, or indeed some of the outright missteps made by the developers, and when the end of the game comes along, they shout encore and are duly given such in the guise of paid DLC and sequels.
    Edited by Markusdragon at 08/10/11 @ 12:26

  • The-Bodybuilder #36 8 months ago

    Talk of tough bosses and no one mentioned Alma off Ninja Gaiden? Or all the cheap ass bosses in NG2 that made me stop.

    Another cool "mini boss" was the The Beserker in Gears of War.

  • superbeast2010 #37 8 months ago

    Post deleted at 10:57:39 01-02-2012

  • P1GEONPOO #38 8 months ago

    I think its worth the negs.

    I LOVE BOSS FIGHTS.

  • Boomalla #39 8 months ago

    I love a good boss fight as it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when he's been defeated by little old me....rawr

  • IIJAZMANII #40 8 months ago

    When boss fights are done well (Resi4, God of war...) they will forever be memorable.

  • Bernkastel #41 8 months ago

    I love boss fights. There no thrill in gaming like the one you experience after finally beating that one guy that's been wiping the floor with you for the better part of an hour just to finally come out on top after finally mastering the pattern and handing him his oversized behind on a effing platter. That's why I love the Ys series. Falcom are geniuses when it comes to boss fights.

    As for more recent examples, I thought the bosses in Bayonetta were pretty much spot on. Despite being plagued by the modern day easy way out when it comes to toppling the hulking bastards (yes, that means you, quick time events), that single moment where you finally overpower them and give them a taste of their own medicine by summoning your own oversized embodiment of arse kicking and watch the baddies quiver in terror and try to run for their lives is just too satisfying.

    So as far as I'm concerned, long live boss battles. Until the player shows up, at least.

  • Skeletor #42 8 months ago

    Nice article but it seems the author didn't spend much time researching the topic:

    "I love the way they belong only to video games, and not books or movies"

    This is simply wrong and should be rewritten. There are plenty of movies predating videogames that served as inspiration for videogame bosses, at the arcades or at home. The Death Star at the end of SW Ep. IV is basically one huge boss and the ventilation shaft was probably the biggest inspiration for the boss core in Gradius. Bosses in Bond movies and the alienqueen in Aliens are even more obvious examples. Another major inspiration for videogame bosses is the Dungeons and Dragons pen&paper RPG.

    "In terms of mechanics, they were pure road block, pure cash-sapper, and the only reason we loved them were because the people who created them were supremely talented at taking your money in a way that made you come back for more."

    Pretty sloppy conclusion imho if you look back at the history of arcade games. Many Japanese game designers most certainly didn't follow such cheap design courses - the bosses in R-Type, Strider or the Metal Slug games are no cash-sappers, they're the final test of a level, combinig all the skills you learned before. Gamers love them because destroying the boss meant you're worthy of the next level.Credit feeding through the games is a form of training but has nothing to do with proper skills.

    "It's not that designers aren't as good anymore - although, it's worth noting, almost nobody has ever been as good as Eugene Jarvis."

    It's also worth noting that your statement is pure fanboy talk and lacks any significant backup, considering the genius behind titles like Ghost 'n Goblins or R-Type - both predating Smash Tv and Narc. Once again, sloppy research for an otherwise well written article.

    Edited by Skeletor at 08/10/11 @ 13:14

  • GamesConnoisseur #43 8 months ago

    Uncharted 2 end of game boss really jarring, doesn't fit in well with the maintee Saturday adventure filmic feel, bullets to head doesn't work! Even with the explanations of the ShangriLa immortality water thingy. That wasn't a great boss fight.

    Keep the character of the bad boss but do it in a more grounded fight, see the effects of the immortality and the side effects up close, script it in better in another word. Instead running round and round and round the same closed jungle, shooting the pulps from trees and dodging grenades.

    Worse anticlimax to a very well put together game.

  • bemani247 #44 8 months ago

    For me the best bosses were in side scrolling shooters, the bosses were often pretty out there in a design sense, Diarus (Every boss was fish related), Parodious (giant penguins, woman etc), Metal Slug (chain gun armed crabs) to name a few. many will disagree with me, but I believe, with 3D game size has become limitless, but imagination has become limited.

  • Ror1984 #45 8 months ago

    You had an article about bosses and didn't mention Metroid once? Shame on you.

    /properly fixed

    I have to echo statements others have made about boss battles in film. The first thing I thought of when reading that line in the article was the chubby Freddie Mercury look-a-like in Commando. The second was Roy Batty in Bladerunner. In fact you could even say Bladerunner is a series of mini-boss battles that lead up to the final boss. If you wanted to boil it down to the mundane, that is.

  • Smoped #46 8 months ago

    http://youtu.be/NisCkxU544c

  • Stoatboy #47 8 months ago

    The Warthog run at the end of Halo was bloody dreadful, and epitomised why many "bosses" are so poor. You'd never had to be good at driving a Warthog up until that point, and then suddenly you had to do it well across an incredibly tortuous piece of geometry (with physics that wasn't entirely reliable). You'd bought a first person shooter, spent the entire game working out how to effectively kill stuff, but finishing the game instead required good driving in a vehicle that handled like nothing else you'd ever driven in any game before, in an environment designed specifically to be largely undriveable.

    It also did a really good job of shafting it's own story - telling the player to go and wait for a dropship, which subsequently gets shot down before it reaches you, so on a replay you just ignore the stupid plot, because you already know that waiting for the dropship is a pointless waste of time and is only going to screw your chances of getting out alive.

    I loved the game as a whole, but that last bit was utterly dreadful for me and would have been wiped from my memory if I didn't hate it quite so much.

  • Nithron #48 8 months ago

    I think the original Deus Ex got the bosses exactly right. NPCs with similar abilities to you, and just as fragile. You could avoid them, but a head-on conflict was fun - they normally deserved to get taken down.

    This meant the boss fights were frantic, blink-and-you're-dead affairs - which not only makes sense, but was actually pretty damn fun.

  • bionic #49 8 months ago

    What was the first game to feat. a Boss ?

    The one type of game where a Boss a must, are shoor'em ups!

  • intpleeus #50 8 months ago

    I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned the similarities between Human Revolution and Alpha Protocol. Both allow for stealthy, diplomatic, and aggressive play-styles. Both are about big conspiracies. And Both include infuriatingly stupid and unavoidable bosses. Just like in Human Revolution, Alpha Protocol's bosses are near impossible if the player has chosen to craft a non-lethal and stealthy character. Obsidian don't even have the excuse of outsourcing.

  • dirtysteve #51 8 months ago

    HR's bosses were dreadful, reminded me of the final boss in R6:Vegas 2. An awful, cheap low-poly helicopter fight.

    I think the writer nailed it, spectacle and/or gameplay makes the memories. A lot of seemingly impressive bosses will fall by the wayside of history as the spectacle is eclipsed by newer games, unless they have that special something.

    Also, kudos to Body-builder, i think you're referring to Onikage, truly a great fight :)

  • Stoatboy #52 8 months ago

    @bionic: My guess at first boss fight would be Phoenix:

    <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkCqxKFYOJo
    ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkCqxKFYOJo
    </a>


    Edited by Stoatboy at 08/10/11 @ 15:40

  • tiddex #53 8 months ago

    im just revisiting god of war 3 because the completionist in me wants that platin trophy: taking down these bosses on titan difficulty with inhuman skill, memorizing patterns and sheer luck comes sooooo close to the good old pain in the ass of the 8-bit-era...

  • fatbob1080 #54 8 months ago

    I fucking hate bosses in games

  • fatbob1080 #55 8 months ago

    Cunts

  • digitalash #56 8 months ago

    Interesting how many people point out Uncharted as an example of how end bosses ruin the game. I think they should probably take a page out of their matinee adventure inspiration and end the final confrontation with a properly epic fist fight. Strip out the weapons, isolate the main protagonist and antagonist and put it on a human, intimate, mano-a-mano level. MGS series is great at doing this sometimes.

  • Rodchenko #57 8 months ago

    I'd love boss-fights if you could skip them. I'd say leave them up to the hardcore or the masochists and award them with trophies or achievements or other perks but give everyone else the option to show the boss a finger and continue with the regular flow of the game.

  • Duallusion #58 8 months ago

    Not just movies; Greek mythology is brimfull of "boss fights", could be argued. Or David vs. Goliath: a classic boss fight. It's true though, that as a concept, they were born to be in games. They found their true home in this medium:)

    Too short an article. This is 5 page material!

  • Mister-Wario #59 8 months ago

    I remember the bosses in Rayman 1, Crash Bandicoot and Sonic the Hedgehog well, and I think they're a worthy addition to the games. They're a natural escalation of what you've been doing and don't really feel out of place: they're mainly about navigating your environment, learning the patterns and striking when the time is right. And, you know, I like them. The main issue with them Deus Ex seems to be tha they straightjacket what was before an incredibly flexible experience.

    The most ridiculous and memorable boss battles for me are definitely in the Metal Slug games. It's just manic shooting and dodging but they're pretty challenging and they're so overblown and crazy that I love them. Being chased down a rickety walkway by a giant crab firing cannon shells will stay with me for years to come.

  • Ror1984 #60 8 months ago

    @digitalash - they attempted that at the end of Drake's Fortune. Unfortunately, the way Naughty Dog chose to realise that was to interpret it as a horrible QTE-fest :(

  • RawNinjaKid #61 8 months ago

    "Bosses" are NOT essential for good or even a great game.
    In fact a lot of the time it doesn't make sense and is overused.


    "I love the way they belong only to video games, and not books or movies or paintings or folk songs"

    They do belong in Movies and Books. It's just that you don't think of them as bosses!!
    Edited by RawNinjaKid at 08/10/11 @ 23:16

  • Kanjin #62 8 months ago

    Cheap ass MMOs can make you hate bosses. 10 minutes to kill a boss that does nothing more than give your tank a huge armour repair cost? Fuck that.

    Add me to the hate-bosses list, never met one I play a level for, except maybe Sion in kotor 2, he was cool.

  • Miths #63 8 months ago

    I hate bosses with a passion, always have, with very few exceptions.
    I'm the type of player who usually plays a game "for the experience" (which is another way of saying I'm a wimp who rarely plays on a difficulty level higher than medium ;)), and there are few things I hate more than having my great and more or less predictable and comfortable gaming experience suddenly disrupted by a Huge Guy(tm) who requires that I - even on modest difficulty setting - suddenly increase my gaming competence, finger dexterity and pattern reading and timing ability ten fold, or get stopped dead in my tracks.

    Occasionally I do like to take a stab at more difficult games. I managed to put around 30 hours into Demon's Souls with relatively little frustration. Right now I'm playing Dark Souls, and the second boss required in excess of 30 attempts from me before I finally got him - in what still felt like a terribly awkward and not at all graceful display of combat skills from my character.
    And now I'm tearing my hair out over the next major boss (the "mini bosses" on the way were fortunately fairly easily dealt with).

    Obviously I don't blame a game like this with a stated purpose of killing you over and over again, for having tough boss fights. But there certainly have been many other games I've the years where I've absolutely hated them - and sometimes even stopped playing a game altogether because of a blood pressure increasing boss fight (Deus Ex: HR wasn't one of them though, I actually found those boss fights relatively easy - although I did resort to a little YouTube help with one of them).

  • BuckEntropy #64 8 months ago

    I'll second the oversight of an article about *horrible* bosses not mentioning Ninja Gaiden 2. It doesn't get much worse than that, like going from 11 to -3 in a heartbeat sometimes...

    I also think R-Type is one of the early archetypes for bosses that actually added something to the experience. They're intimidating, imaginative and impressive, never cheap (except maybe the last one) and make you think and alter your rhythm without breaking any rules. And that's one of the most common failings, too many games allow their bosses to cheat the established rules of the gameplay.

    Tomb Raider was another notable example to me, there were only a handful of bosses in a very very long game. And not that any of them were outstanding from a conceptual standpoint, but they never seemed forced, like when they showed up it's because it felt appropriate for that moment in the design of the game holistically. It's kind of weird how few games have managed to take the lesson in the interim. And one of the things I thought was worse about Gears 2 compared to the first game, the bosses generally felt both rote and forced.

    Halo was mentioned by the article, but as much as Halo 2 also disappointed me one of the few real highlights was actually it's boss fight. The Prophet of Truth is truly one of the best bosses ever, and again it's not about the object as such but the setup. How you approach and initiate that fight can have a massive effect on how difficult it is and how it ultimately plays out. So basically it's absolutely in keeping with the most notable virtue of a Halo game.

    Mega Man is a very clear example bosses with meaning. Which bosses you defeat first affects how you will play the rest of the game, and there's been surprisingly few games that have notably tapped that sort of psychology either.

    The Eugene Jarvis anecdote is really fascinating though, even if I'm not sure it should be considered so universally. But it serves to frame the deepest problem as I see it: when the "boss" is treated as a regimented obligation, it's creation and execution is likely to become as much a chore for the designers/artists/engineers as it then is for the player. Just a hurdle to get over and a box to check off before they can get back to the fun parts.

  • Darth_Flibble #65 8 months ago

    I read the interview from the company that did the Outsourced boss fights for DE: HR and his response was almost "fuck off, I'm a shooter fan, never played this Des Erp" Hopefully no other company will use them again. The trouble is (imo of course) designers think a boss fight should be really difficult, and a lot of them use cheap tricks to make them difficult like a cheesy attack that wipes off a load of health (or even worse i hit kill) Uncharted 2 final boss was terrible, very cheap. Enemies should have limited ammo not infinite grenades/bullets. The final boss in Dead island was terrible with 2 players, also it just had some really shite and cheesy attacks with constant spawning infected

  • doyourealize #66 8 months ago

    The guy playing SotC in that pic is doing it wrong.

  • silver-jon #67 8 months ago

    Hi Christian.
    Really good article, well written.
    Bosses are a bit of a trouble in a game. I mean, if your character is not modded and equipped enough to deal with them adequately then they're a frustrating cheat (I mean, the number of games I've only played about 60% of because of an impossible boss makes me feel cheated out of the full price paid for the game). If your character is adequately modded/equipped then they're slightly more of a challenge than the rest of the game and simply serve as a delay to progress. If your character is over-modded/equipped then they're not really a boss. I just finished playing "Singularity" which was pretty good fun. But once past the train/dragon thing (which was an utter nightmare) I was totally untroubled because the game was generous with mods and ammo so I was virtually indestructable. Far Cry, on the other hand . . . . pfff.

  • kingpin3000 #68 8 months ago

    Boss fights can be great of they are done properly. Who doesn't remember fighting The End in MGS3? Just the simple fact that he would die of old age if you saved your game and left it for a week.

    If the battle is indeed fun and not taken too seriously then boss fights can continue to exist in the right games.

  • 3william56 #69 8 months ago

    Context, context, context. Bullet sponge bosses work fine in an arcade game, but are stupid in a "realistic" game like DXHR or Uncharted. Something clever, which was a puzzle to beat would work. Something that requires you to run around backwards in circles shooting glowing tree sap for a week doesn't. Vanquish does it right and in context. So does MGS 1 mostly - the Hind helo fight with stinger missiles on top of the radio tower is my personal favourite of all time.

    So it's not bosses as a concept that's the problem, but lazy game design. Having a big enemy, which takes time, brains, skill and patience to take down is fine. But it has to be a better game mechanic than pumping endless bullets into weak spots, forcing the player to get stuck in an obvious cover-free arena where the only real danger is forced stops and runs for ammo, plus one hit kills.

  • ProtoformX #70 8 months ago

    I've just finished a replay of God of War III and I love the bosses in that. The whole battle with Chronos was is sheer brilliance and when you've worn them down enough that that great big Circle icon appears above their head you know it's time for some... fun.

  • darm #71 8 months ago

    Wow. Never realized there were so much people really hating what's I beleive to be one of the best things in gaming. Seriously, bosses are one of the biggest sources of fun in the games I play. Be it a JRPG like Final Fantasy or Resonance of Fate, western RPG like Planescape or Oblivion, action game like DMC or Ninja Gaiden, 3rd person shooter like Gears of War & Uncharted, common enemies are most of the time just fodder that prevents me from pushing on to quickly. When this fodder is upped in numbers, this can really spoil the fun for me(seriously, I think Uncharted would have been so much better with 10 times less enemies), same thing when they introduce some tough guy that needs special tactics(or just more time and ammo) and there are 1-2 of those in every pack of enemies from that moment on - that's really annoying. Story, exploration and spectacular fights are what I like in the games, and a boss fight is always so much more spectacular. That's where you finally have a reason to use all that skills, combos, potions, whatever you obtained through the course of the game but were reluctant to unleash on mobs that are dispatched with 'older' stuff with just the same ease. And fights with regular enemies are just dumb inevitable evil.

  • tossum #72 8 months ago

    R-type level 1 boss: Alpha and Omega of bosses.

    (Except level 3)

    (Maybe level 2 as well...)

  • darc #73 8 months ago

    The moment Eidos realized they were willing to outsource bosses should have been the moment they realized bosses had no place in that particular game.

  • darc #74 8 months ago

    But DE:HR was by no means the worst example of bad bosses I've ever played.

    The single worst "boss battle" of all time, in terms of being totally out of context in an otherwise brilliant game, is in the final scene of "Risen". It becomes an entirely different game for 5 minutes, and not in a good way by any measure.

  • SG #75 8 months ago

    Gotta agree about MGS's bosses not only being brilliant but working seamlessly with the style of the game - even though it was mostly covert, the 1-on-1 battles didn't feel out of place.

    Another honourable mention has to go to the Metroid Prime bosses - you ha to use your brain and recently acquired skills to fight the bosses, and it was great the way you'd scan them and your computer would give you info on how to fight it rather than relying on dumb luck as to discovering how to battle them as with a lot of other games. Unfortunately MP3 became more 'shooty', and it was just a question of blasting them down, the shape-shifter woman was particularly frustrating, as was the final boss on hard mode. That took me an hour of shooting, replenishing health, then rinse and repeat.
    Edited by SG at 12/10/11 @ 13:48