I'm over final bosses. I can't think of one game where it hasn't annoyed me way more than it's worth. Either they are trivial easy - defanging the whole thing - or they just piss me off and take away from an otherwise good experience and dramatic story stuff! Also, no more phased bosses!!! - ThreadSky

meatcastlegameware.com • 19 days ago

I'm over final bosses. I can't think of one game where it hasn't annoyed me way more than it's worth. Either they are trivial easy - defanging the whole thing - or they just piss me off and take away from an otherwise good experience and dramatic story stuff! Also, no more phased bosses!!!

Comments

meatcastlegameware.com•19 days ago

This is a Clair Obscur post btw. I will make an exception though for games that give you cool ways to go around the "just fight him" path. If I can talk my way out, that's great. If I can do some sort of interesting twist on mechanics to get around it, that's great too.

kbkev.bsky.social•19 days ago

Having final bosses at all is a failure of game design, in my opinion. It's lazy. That's how I feel as a player. It's an overworn trope, predictable, and reduces a game to little more than a series of less or more irritating phases.

chrisair.itch.io•18 days ago

This probably falls into too easy territory for you, but I enjoyed the Metroid Dread final boss a ton. Just the right amount of challenging without being annoying, personally.

binarystar.games•19 days ago

One of the extremely few I can think of that I like is the original Dark Souls. Whooooole lot of others that miss the mark.

jazzelves.bsky.social•19 days ago

I have a whole game design talk about them which goes into the difference between a "victory lap" boss or a "challenge" or "brick wall" boss and how they also have to be designed in conversation with the rest of the game and pacing and just how HARD that is because

...y'ain't wrong at all.

meatcastlegameware.com•19 days ago

Yea, of those 3, I'd say I prefer Victory Lap, if I have to have one. I don't mind Challenge as well either although those are normally phases where even after I've totally figured out phases 1 + 2, I have to keep wasting my time redoing them to learn to beat Phase 3. Brick Wall just seems outdated.

jazzelves.bsky.social•19 days ago

My gold standards are Final Fantasies 6, 8 and 10 in a lot of ways. Each of them has a different FINAL-Final-Boss which A: isn't the hardest boss in the game, and also B: is set up in such a way that if you can *get there*, you can *beat the boss*, breaking rules in just the right ways to feel good.

jazzelves.bsky.social•19 days ago

They feel (different kinds of) appropriately hard, but you don't get the kind of total momentum loss that comes with "you keep losing and resetting to the last save point and seeing the whole cutscene over and over again", and that's legitimately hard to pull off.

meatcastlegameware.com•19 days ago

6 and 8 are my favorite FF's after Tactics and that may be why they are so strong in my memory then!

jazzelves.bsky.social•19 days ago

I guess the alternative is the SMT-style or DarkSouls "no, EVERY boss will wipe the floor with you if you don't have/learn/develop the Answer to it, why would the last boss be any different" for a fair end boss feeling? But it's such a tough thing to pull off, for something so obligatory.

meatcastlegameware.com•19 days ago

Yea, and I've had a lot of bosses be trivial by happenstance in Souls games which can sometimes feel good and sometimes be a letdown. DS1's boss was a one and down fight for me, which I enjoyed but I'm sure wasn't their intent - I just got lucky with my build/style really.

snaxwell.bsky.social•18 days ago

Yeah, that one did not feel great and I could feel myself fill myself with dread going into the end

meatcastlegameware.com•18 days ago

I've already found the game to be Too Long, like most games, and knowing I'll have to sink like 2 hours into dying a handful of times to a multi-phase boss that'll kill all story momentum doesn't make me happy!

aaronmfking.bsky.social•19 days ago

Not sure if you're talking about RPGs or videogames, but final bosses in RPGs and the enshrining of the "BBEG" (hated term) in the space is something I really hate.

meatcastlegameware.com•19 days ago

I'm talking about video games in this context, but yea, it does really apply to both for me, more often than not.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply