September 7, 2010 scottcjones 15Comments

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Before leaving for work in the morning, my dad was in the habit of writing out lengthy lists of chores that he wanted me and my brother to complete that day. He always signed his lists with the same two ominious words, always in capital letters: THE BOSS.

Bosses are frightening beings. They can make you do things that you wouldn’t normally do, like wear a dumb uniform, and say strange things like, “Welcome to Chili’s!” Bosses also have the power to tell you that you can’t go home yet even if you want to go home, because, as they will explain, “There is still more work to do.” Worst of all, bosses can take money away from you with another pair of words that is even more terrifying than THE BOSS. Those two words are: YOU’RE FIRED.

Maybe this is why I’ve always adored boss battles in videogames. It’s a chance for me to dole out some well-deserved karmic payback for all those mustachioed middle managers who told me that I couldn’t go home, that there was still more work to do, and, oh yes, please wear this dumb hat while working or else I will take money away from you.

Bosses–the virtual kind–have technically been around since a screen-filling mothership first appeared in the fifth and final level of Phoenix, an obscure 1980’s-era arcade shooter. The first boss encounter I personally can recall with any clarity is Bowser in Super Mario Bros. I remember getting to the end of that white brick and lava level, and seeing this heavily pixellated lizard standing in front of me, and thinking two things: 1. WHAT THE SHIT ASS HELL IS THAT? and 2. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BEAT IT?

So began two long, dramatic decades of boss encounters for me. I’ve confronted bosses in Contra III: The Alien Wars (ROGUE TURTLE WITH A BEES NEST LIVING ON IT!), Super Metroid (RIDLEY!), Doom (CYBERDEMON, NOOOOO!) and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (DESERT WORM THING!). A fantasy that I’ve actually had on several occasions: I imagine all the bosses in all the games getting together once a year, maybe in a nice resort like Sandals, and sitting in a room, trying for the life of them to understand how the hell this Scott Jones person keeps beating all of them, year after year after year. “Enough is enough!” Bowser says, pounding one of his lizard fists on the table. “THIS STOPS NOW!”

Yet my beloved boss battles seem to be on the decline in recent years. Gamers, at least most of the gamers who I talk to on a routine basis, seem to be tired of dealing with this artificial ramping-up of difficulty in a game’s final moments. Worse still, as evidenced by the lackluster boss fights I’ve seen so far this year, game makers seem to be growing increasingly tired of making them.

Boss battles have, very sadly, become fill-in-the-blank exercises in tedium. Same way that old movies always ended with the image of two people kissing or a cowboy riding off into a sunset, games still insist on ending with a boss battle of some sort. I’ve finished an unnatural amount of games so far in 2010. But could I tell you who, or what, I fought in the final moments of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Bayonetta, Alan Wake, or even the vaunted God of War III?

I could not.

And that’s a problem.

What I do remember, in each case, is a flurry of noise, and hyperbole, and melodrama, and CG. All of which was designed to give me a sense of closure, to make me feel powerful, and to let me know that I have arrived at the end of a very great experience. Like a Vietnam flashback, I can recall vague explosions, and amorphous, oversized creatures coming into view. And I remember frustration–lots and lots of frustration.

Yet, more than frustration, I remember feeling irritated and pissed off in these final moments. Instead of having a ball in what should be the game’s dramatic crescendo, most of the time I recall thinking, Goddamn it all, will this thing just fucking die already, and let me get on with my life. All that stood between me and a hard-earned rolling-of-the-credits of an uneven 8 to 15-hour experience was this big, stupid, bellowing, nonsensical creature with a multilayered health bar spanning the screen. Not once did these creatures, or the moments they were providing me with, give me closure, or make me feel empowered. I didn’t walk away with any sort of fist-pumping, woo-hooing satisfaction. Strip away the explosions, and the hyperbole, and the CG, and what you’re left with is a dated game design trope.

The fight with Fontaine/Atlas at the end of BioShock, to my mind, is the tombstone at the end of the boss-battle era. After one of the most consistently inventive and evocative experiences I’d ever had, Irrational Games/2K Boston ended the whole fucking thing in the most banal way imaginable: with a dull, unsatisfying boss battle. That milquetoast fight against Fontaine/Atlas still irks me. Even the eerie beating you dole out to Andrew Ryan’s smug face with a golf club would have made for a bolder, more unsettling, and more appropriate ending to BioShock.

I’ve written the epitaph for this virtual tombstone: “Here lies the body of the boss battle. It lived a good life. In the end, its multilayered health bar finally ran out. Rest in peace. 1980-2007. P.S. Yes: It’s really dead this time.”

The larger question then becomes: As games grow more complex and nuanced and mature, how do we end them?

I’ll take a stab at answering that question in an upcoming post. Wish me luck.

15 thoughts on “Why Boss Fights Sort of Stink These Days

  1. >Endings are tricky and difficult. Monty Python's solution was to not end anything. They just switched from one thing to another, mid-skit. Brilliant solution for sketch comedy. Is there a similar creative solution for games, do you think?

  2. >Final Fantasy always has good boss fights, including FF13, which was made of garbage for the most part. The boss fights are also great in Demon's Souls — they take some figuring out, they're hard but not obscenely long, they're high pressure, and when you finally succeed, you feel like a goddamn titan.

    That's not to say I disagree with your post.

  3. >You couldn't tell you were fighting Zeus at the end of GOW3? lol, what? You fight Zeus on 3-4 different tiers for like 10-15 minutes.

    BioShock end boss was fine too. You're just being pretentious now. If you wanna pronounce anything as dead since 2007, it should be Reviews on the Run.

    /sad panda

  4. >I think developers/designers/creators are really starting to actively pursue a destiny beyond pure entertainment.

    To enlighten and entertain, if you will.

    Games (not all) are evolving, and I agree, the industry and the audience are going to have to figure out to handle this new species. I see games (not all) as digital literature; the neat, tidy and expected endings just do not satisfy anymore. There's power in ambiguity – that void that makes you sit back, think and fill in the spaces for youself. I think we need more of that.

  5. >More and more, things will end like Bioshock should have, as you described. A perfect example of this in practice is Red Dead Redemption. Bioshock 2 and Crackdown 2 both fit crudely into the realm of the "new-boss fight," i.e. you are – barring some one-off examples – correct in saying The Boss Battle expired with Bioshock's Atlas battle.

    It's not enough to through you in a large-ish room anymore and empty your hard-earned ammo into some mutant until the credits role. And I think 2K knew that because by the time the sequel rolled around we were firmly into the new way of doing things: Lock you in a geometrically complicated space where you will inevitably hunker down in a corner, behind some structure and fight off hordes of mid-level enemies until you can make a dash to the credits.

    Metroid Other-M wins for inviting and innovative boss fights (if, in many people's minds, nothing else), but you are right. RIP Boss Battle and may the Boss Skirmish be on the way out as well.

    I'm interested in seeing where you think things will go next. The only endings I've played this year that feel appropriate to their respective games and mostly fresh are Reach, Red Dead, & Limbo. Their "boss battles" are varied, almost nonexistent in the sense that the term could be overlooked when describing them, but those endings will stick with me.

    Something new will come along, but let's just hope that the reliance on the "Boss Skirmish" is a fleeting one.

  6. >I'm going to have to agree with you on this one. When I was younger, I remember having to swallow my pride and go on to the boss battle, the main foe, the big cheese, the grandmaster etc (I could go on forever) and then talk about it the next day with my very few friends who enjoyed video gaming as much as I do.

    "How did you beat him/it?" "How did you do it?" and then there was always that one guy in our crowd, who, never believed you, no matter how convincing your story was.

    Spending countless times beating the "main boss" to prove your worth, or seeing how many different ways there are to beat it; my friend, those days are over 🙁

    It's now on to puzzling endings and accomplishing a "final" mission, not feeling the same amount of gratitude you would from way back when.

    Bring on the classic boss battles I say 🙂

  7. >I grew tired of the over-long Boss battles around the Final Fantasy 7 days. .. Monty Python: sometimes the cut to a new sketch worked, but their best stuff had an ending, a 'punchline moment' to the sketch. … Mgs3: I liked the game, but found some of the boss fights tiresome, and yet the better ones were a different style of Boss fight, more an outgrowth of the Boss's character and what was happening in the story at that moment, than the 'super monster' Boss fights of years ago. … Games have evolved beyond the point where a huge creature with an obscene number of hit points and ridiculous attack powers is considered a proper climax. A horde of 'smaller' enemies is not much better.

  8. >Man, I'll admit, I don't read your blog all that often, I think this is the second or third time…but I can't figure out why? Everytime I've read, I loved it. You're writing is spectacular! Keep doin' what you do, man!

    @againstmatt_

  9. >Fable 2 actually took an interesting approach to this.

    The last fight you have with a single huge and intimidating enemy is fairly well-done, given what it is, with some allies around and spawning mooks keeping you on your toes, but it WASN'T the final conflict.

    The major antagonist is killed with the press of a button. Or, alternatively, the LACK of pressing a button. Either way, he talks and someone — you or Reaver — shoots him mid-sentence.

    A lot of people HATED the game for this. Internet forums are filled with seething masses spouting venom on the subject because the big bad didn't give them a boss fight.

    Of course, there are others, myself included, who recognized what the end-game challenges really were. There were two of them:
    1. Before you shoot him, the big bad shoots you. A surreal near-death experience comes back, and only by walking away from a perfect life with your long-dead sister over her desperate cries that you stay can you return to the real world. For a lot of players, this was difficult.
    2. After you shoot him, you gain access to the great power that he was seeking, and have the opportunity to have a single wish granted. Either you can wish for thousands of people who died to the big bad's ambition to be resurrected, your family to be returned, or for great wealth. This, too, was difficult for many players.

    Of course, that's because Molyneux aims for serious, personal emotional investment on the part of players. The design failed to impress anyone who didn't invest themselves in their characters, and it would be utterly useless in a game that wasn't built on those notions.

    It's certainly not a way that video games as a medium could reasonably look to finishing their stories, but it IS a different, fresh approach that could be pursued by more games than Fable if developers and publishers had the courage to try and we as players were willing to engage with the medium in that way.

    Outside of that, MGS3 has been mentioned already, and with good reason. One of the best things you can do if you decide to make a game with a "standard" approach to the final-boss endgame is to build something meaningful into that final conflict. Rather than just having a big bad guy with exceptional power who you finally get to take down, relationships or stories can be crafted to give the fight more meaning than whether or not you can complete the game.

    MGS 3 made the final boss someone important to you, with real personality and ambiguous antagonism. They made her the most significant figure in your character's life, illustrated it well enough for the player to understand, and then made you pull the trigger.
    Most games would have ended with killing someone like Volgin.

    Games are developing into something greater than they were before. As we learn to tell stories with them, we'll hopefully learn how to end those stories in ways that are meaningful. Even trashy pop-literature tends to find ways to end on one of its most poignant notes, and we just have to hope that games will eventually find their way to the same sort of thing.

  10. >Fable 2 actually took an interesting approach to this.

    The last fight you have with a single huge and intimidating enemy is fairly well-done, given what it is, with some allies around and spawning mooks keeping you on your toes, but it WASN'T the final conflict.

    The major antagonist is killed with the press of a button. Or, alternatively, the LACK of pressing a button. Either way, he talks and someone — you or Reaver — shoots him mid-sentence.

    A lot of people HATED the game for this. Internet forums are filled with seething masses spouting venom on the subject because the big bad didn't give them a boss fight.

    Of course, there are others, myself included, who recognized what the end-game challenges really were. There were two of them:
    1. Before you shoot him, the big bad shoots you. A surreal near-death experience comes back, and only by walking away from a perfect life with your long-dead sister over her desperate cries that you stay can you return to the real world. For a lot of players, this was difficult.
    2. After you shoot him, you gain access to the great power that he was seeking, and have the opportunity to have a single wish granted. Either you can wish for thousands of people who died to the big bad's ambition to be resurrected, your family to be returned, or for great wealth. This, too, was difficult for many players.

    Of course, that's because Molyneux aims for serious, personal emotional investment on the part of players. The design failed to impress anyone who didn't invest themselves in their characters, and it would be utterly useless in a game that wasn't built on those notions.

    It's certainly not a way that video games as a medium could reasonably look to finishing their stories, but it IS a different, fresh approach that could be pursued by more games than Fable if developers and publishers had the courage to try and we as players were willing to engage with the medium in that way.

    Outside of that, MGS3 has been mentioned already, and with good reason. One of the best things you can do if you decide to make a game with a "standard" approach to the final-boss endgame is to build something meaningful into that final conflict. Rather than just having a big bad guy with exceptional power who you finally get to take down, relationships or stories can be crafted to give the fight more meaning than whether or not you can complete the game.

    MGS 3 made the final boss someone important to you, with real personality and ambiguous antagonism. They made her the most significant figure in your character's life, illustrated it well enough for the player to understand, and then made you pull the trigger.
    Most games would have ended with killing someone like Volgin.

    Games are developing into something greater than they were before. As we learn to tell stories with them, we'll hopefully learn how to end those stories in ways that are meaningful. Even trashy pop-literature tends to find ways to end on one of its most poignant notes, and we just have to hope that games will eventually find their way to the same sort of thing.

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