I love video games, but for me it’s all about the journey and not the destination, and I’ve been known to actually sigh when I pick up the controller to battle through the final area. Someone said this when recommending Alpha Protocol (that the journey is better than the end) and to me, that’s perfectly fine.
I mean, I just spent untold hours exploring the world, finding and at least attempting every little sidequest, getting all the characters, doing everything I can - the final area just seems like a grind. Mostly for all of my games I only beat them once, unless there is a sequel that has a different story depending on how you end (Mass Effect, for example). But I play them multiple times.
Okami is an immensely enjoyable game and I love it. I replayed it not too long ago…and stopped just short of the Ark. Why do I need to go through all that pain again?
I can’t be the only one! Do other people feel the same way?
I absolutely feel the same way. I love the open world games, like Fallout, Mass Effect or the Elder Scrolls games, or for that matter the GTA series, Saint’s Row and The Saboteur. I’ve logged hundreds of hours over multiple playthroughs, but only finished each game once.
Deus Ex:HR resonated with me for two reasons. One, the lowest difficulty was “Tell me a story” - which is pretty much what I want, and two: the boss fights were so jarringly misplaced it was no surprise to learn they’d contracted them out to a different company.
I mostly play games to experience as much as possible of what the creators’ imagination has allowed them to cram in. And to build the greatest hoard of virtual loot the virtual world has ever virtually seen. Literally.
There have been several that I have stopped right before the end. Breath of Fire III was one. I don’t know if I ever finished Final Fantasy VIII, either. Now, I hardly play JRPGS. I lost some steam with the Fallouts, but only with expansions (e.g. finished FO3, but not Broken Steel).
Sometimes, Youtube or other places have ending playthroughs so that you don’t need to do the work! Convenient.
I don’t mind end bosses/end levels, but I hate, hate, hate time-consuming end bosses/end levels where if you fail you have to do the whole rigmarole over again.
To this day, I’ve still never finished GTA: San Andreas, even though I like the game.
Yeah, why do final boss fights tend to suck so much? You’d think developers would want to end on a high note.
So many good games were besmirched by incomprehensibly bad final battles: Deus Ex HR left me thinking “what, that was the final boss, what?!?”. Oblivion’s end was forgettable. Fallout 3’s final boss is just a short small skirmish. New Vegas is also a letdown.
Bioshock’s end was Nintendo like : figure out the boss’ attack, dodge, hit, repeat 3 times total. It was like the egg-throwing dragon in super mario;
You might have that game confused with another. Oblivion has the most intense ending sequence I have seen in a long time, and there is no “final boss battle.”
Yatzee from Zero Punctuation has a good point that boss battles should be a review of the gameplay you’ve learned so far.
Personally, I don’t mind a challenging boss battle. I mean, I never got through the final boss of Baldur’s Gate II without cheating, but the cheating was a challenge, too, because I had to exploit AI tricks to even be able to get the distance from the enemy that allowed me to make the saved games that I then edited. =)
What I hate is a boss battle that you can’t save right before, especially if there’s an unskippable cutscene. What cabal of geniuses keep deciding this is a good idea?
Stupid and cliched. So many games I have enjoyed only to get to some impossible final boss battle and not be able to finish. There has got to be a better test of your gaming skill.
The last game I finished was Uncharted 2 and the only reason I finished was by cheating on the boss battle.
I’ve mostly forgotten it, but isn’t there a fairly tough wizard-dude that you fight near the end? At least tough in the sense that my usual schtick didn’t work as well as it usually did.
Oblivion and Morrowind are two games that I replayed many times without bothering to finish; as far as I know, they don’t have a bunch of multiple endings, so I didn’t bother. Or do they?
Second Oblivion as per hogarth. There was a final boss, and what followed was merely a cutscene you got to playthrough, kinda like the opening scene from half-Life if it were stuck on the end. That said, it’s not a bad way of ending things.
Some people actually were able to kill…
Mehrunes Dagon. Sure, he’s got ludicrous hit poins and all kinds of defences, but some people do it anyway. IIRC the favorite is using the Arrow of Slaying. He just kinda dissolves, which in its own way is a hilariously appropriate ending, too.
WHen I think back to the good vs. great games, I often find the approach to boss battles is a big differences. Good games may be fun, and I don’t want them to end, but they tend to run downhill as the game closes in on the finale and I often stop paying out of boredom. Great games ramp UP and become even more fun, and the excitement of beating the game makes me want to return in the future to play again and again.
To me, this is one of the huge problems behind many strategy games. The excitment in front-loaded, and you can often craft a winning strategy long before you actually rule everything. In fact, the endgame can become painfully tedious with vast numbers of units to micromanage and economics to run. Very common the more “realistic” the game is, from Civilization to Total War. The irony is this is hugely anti-historical; you’d have to be made of stone not to at least feel excited during Sekigahara, the race to Appamatox, or the Battle of the Bulge or Berlin.
I really like the way the Last Remnant handled this - the end boss isn’t all that tough, unless you have done all the optional content that includes some really, really hard fights. Then you unlock the Final Supreme True Form of the boss and you get to have your insanely difficult boss fight if you really want, but for people like me who just want to see how the story ends it’s not a huge pain. That game generally did things like this elsewhere too. The story-related, mandatory fights were tough but fair (except maybe one boss that was a bit too harsh IMO), and then there were optional challenges off the beaten path for those who had figured out all the tricks and had pimped-out max level optimal parties.
I usually try to finish the game at least once, but I agree that there’s little point for the last fight to be frustratingly difficult. Make it epic with huge fireworks, sure, but the actual mechanics don’t have to be punishing. Though having a difficulty setting you can change mid-game makes it less of a problem - looking through my Steam list, I did that in DA2 (for three reasons - I didn’t have a healer, I hated the ending and just wanted it to be over with, and the bosses have ridiculous hp making the fights last forever) and Witcher 2 (hated all boss fights in that game, either I suck or they really were 4x harder than the normal combat, the last fight being especially bad).
Other than those two games, haven’t had to stop because I can’t pass the last challenges lately. I still feel sad I was never able to finish Ultima V back in 1993 though, after getting all the way to 6th or 5th level of the final 8 level dungeon.
If I remember correctly, half-life 2 did this right.
You get the most bad-ass gun in the game handed to you and you just stroll through the last level satisfyingly destroying everything.
Daggerfall had multiple. Like Deus Ex, the canon ending is that all happened simultaneously. I never beat Morrowind, either. But in that case I get bogged down with sidequests.
As I recall, it ends in a jumping puzzle. Those are bad enough, but in a FPS? That’s just wrong.
I don’t think I beat Half-life without cheating, but that’s because of the damn baby-monster and especially the icthyosaurs.
Oh god, i’m flashing back to Prototype. A boss with incredibly cheap attacks and a ridiculously short time limit. The only time i have actually thrown a controller across the room was when trying to beat that game.
In Deus Ex 3 it is backwards though. I got to the first boss with 0 combat skills, and it took every bit of luck I could muster for about 50 tries to get through it. After that I I realized it was part of it and upgraded my weapons and shit the boss battles get easier and easier.
a rocket launcher upgraded to reload faster than the bastards recovery from being shot by a rocket is a great thing
Now, see, that just seems anticlimactic to me, especially if I’ve spent most of the game gradually upgrading my weapons to be incrementally better. Like in Super Metroid: Why did I bother picking up the Wave Gun and the Freeze Gun and all the rest, if you’re just going to give me that Hyper Gun for the final fight? Was any of the rest of that even relevant?
I’m straining my memory here, but I think the level before that was quite difficult and sort of the actual finale. You just get some dessert at the end.
Well, it depends if it’s appropriate or not. Some are just random, but others are fun and part of the story. I don’t like the overly-traditional “End of Level Boss Fight.” I do enjoy having well-designed bosses scattered throughout the game, sometimes early in a stage, sometimes late, and with suitable rewards.
My problem comes from RPGs where I make an unconventional party that ends up making boss fights impossible. For instance I’ve been replaying Dragon Age 2 lately, for instance as a Warrior on easy difficulty with no party members. Or an all-mage 3-person party on Normal difficulty. I find tactics and things that work on all the normal battles, and I end up getting crushed versus bosses – either having to turn the difficulty down, or reform the party, or just quit.
Another related problem I have is that I like all the run-of-the-mill fights to be challenging. Not that every fight has to be impossible, but in a game like DA, every single battle should result in several healing potions spent, about a 50% chance that 1 or more party members were knocked unconscious, etc. Unfortunately, the boss fights are ramped up so much I find myself forced to turn the difficulty down for them, which I hate to do.
