How to do Boss Battles Right

Boss battles are a divisive feature in most games. In my eyes, they fall onto one of two extremes: absolute garbage or an exciting, well-crafted finale piece to the narrative of obstacles you face throughout the game. Honestly, in most games it seems like an afterthought tacked on to a combat encounter to try to artificially induce a narrative climax, and in those circumstances, they are usually failures.

 I’ve selected three games that do boss battles right to illustrate how they should be constructed, and to hopefully make you think about the more subtle points of game design. 

PORTAL 2

Friendships will be destroyed.

Spoilers ahead.

The Portal games are famous for taking a novel approach to puzzle gaming and first-person games by giving you the devices needed to alter the three-dimensional space of the world. While the puzzles are confusing at first, you go in to a test chamber knowing that you have every tool you need to solve it in your hand.

The boss battle against Wheatley in Portal 2 is the pinnacle of the game’s puzzle and encounter design. After trekking your way through the old Aperture Science facility and learning about bomb-throwing machines and the three colors of gel, you go in to the final encounter with the knowledge of how to use them to defeat a sociopathic robot. Valve are masters of training you on new gameplay mechanics without you even realizing it. When it’s finally time to rumble with Wheatley, the boss encounter feels like a final exam that you didn’t know you’d been studying for the past 7 hours.

SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS

J-Just passing through...

In a game where the core mechanic is fighting gargantuan stone and fur monsters, you better hope that the bosses are fun to fight. Luckily, in 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus, the game takes skills you learn along the way and applies them in a whole new way.

To even get to the environments where the Colossi reside, you have to platform, shimmy, grip, and explore the geometry of the locations around you. Team Ico is doing a very clever thing here: they are planting the seeds of the game’s mechanics into your brain, long before you slay your first monster. By the time you reach one of the behemoths, you realize that you have been practicing how to platform and clamber your way to its weak spot the whole time you thought you were just trying to get from point A to point B.

Shadow of the Colossus’ boss fights are a success not only in regards to game mechanics, but also succeed in progressing the story’s minimal narrative. No one I know didn’t feel at least a tiny pang of sorrow when he struck the final blow on the majestic creatures. If you know anyone who kills colossi without any remorse or regret, they probably aren’t the type of people you want to talk to at parties if you know what I mean.

MEGA MAN SERIES

Quick Man, really?

The Mega Man games are hard. They are not, however, unfair. Every time you die, the game does an excellent job of making you feel like you made a mistake, rather than the game being unfair. The series is very good at communicating what you need to do to succeed, and it is very good at punishing you when you make the slightest mistake.

Despite this, the creators of the series are actually somewhat flexible when designing the boss encounters. You can tackle the main stages in any order you want, but through some trial and error, you realize that there is a certain subtlety to the game. There is a “correct” order to go through the bosses: each one giving you a new tool or ability that is more effective at the next boss in line.

However, the best part about this free-form design is that it’s completely optional. If you want, you can try to just bludgeon your way through the stages in a random order, but if you figure out (or look up) the optimum order to approach the encounters, you might save yourself a world of pain.

These three games offer a refreshing breath of air in a world dominated by awful boss design. All too often, a boss battle means “enemy x with twice as much health”. These encounters offer only frustration and disappointment, and are the quickest way to get me to stop playing a game. If you’re going to put a boss battle or two in your game, do it right, or for the love of god, don’t do it at all.


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