In which case, I would have preferred that the game end at the end of the hard part. Or keep in the “get back to your ship before the bomb goes off” part, but with you still using whatever weaponry you’ve earned to that point. The super-gun, though, just as a feel of “Why give this to me now?”.
Did you ever play Shadow of the Colossus? The whole game is finding large bosses, figuring out how to kill them, and doing it. It’s unique and actually kind of cool.
No, because I absolutely detested Ico. I know about the game though. I wouldn’t really count them as bosses. Not in the traditional sense.
Yeah, I hate doing the end bosses. Even if they’re fine the first time, I hate re-playing them. I’ll slog through a game multiple times to check it out with different characters and such, but get near the end and… meh. Then I usually stop, or enable cheats to cruise through the end quickly.
Ugh. I enjoyed the game up until that part. After failing 20 times I just gave up and watched the ending online. I usually beat my games.
I’m glad other people feel the same! 
I hate the whole idea of boss fights. I personally think they’re relics of the old arcade days when the point was to beat the crap out of the kids so that they’d keep pumping quarters into the box.
JRPGs are famous for their cheap-assed boss fights, which have become a tradition, more or less. They typically make you slog through a long dungeon with difficult fights to make you burn through supplies, don’t give save points or save areas close to the boss, give the boss several waves/lives, and you have no idea how many of them there are until you actually succeed in playing through it. The worst is when they have immunities to common spells, so if you’ve got a good specialized build you sometimes can’t even beat the game the first time. Some people seem to like that style of game design, but I never could stand it.
One of the best “boss fights” ever was the first Splinter Cell. You have to work your way through the castle grounds to a place where you listen in on a phone conversation with your laser mic. Control gives you the kill order, and you have to take a moderately difficult shot in a short time period under pressure. It is exactly what an early poster said a good final fight should be: a review of all the skills you learned in the game. You don’t shoot the guy 5 times in the flashing vulnerable area that only appears after you dodge 3 special attacks without getting hit; you shoot him once in the head and exfiltrate. There were some frustrations about civilian casualties and limited areas in that game, but the end fight was just right.
But that’s poor encounter design, not the concept of bosses in general. I like bosses, when done well. Unskippable cutscenes, lack of saves, those are all tangential to the idea of a boss fight. When boss fights are good, they’re really good. When they’re bad, they’re infuriating. Zelda is an example of them being good, they’re frequently a prompt for you to try and use your tools in “newly familiar” ways, it’s not so much a “final exam” so much as saying “we’ve taught you how to use this, now think outside the box.”
Spirit Tracks, for all it flaws, had probably my favorite example of this, you’ve been taught all dungeon to use your grappling hook to slingshot yourself across gaps, but when you get to the boss, what do you do? No, don’t slingshot yourself (unless you like drowning/being dragon food), you use the property OF a slingshot to reflect its attacks back at it.
While I agree that making a boss immune to common spells is annoying, it can serve its purpose, making the player mix it up. I’m the first to admit it’s usually done very poorly, but taking the player out of his comfort zone can be a good thing, it just can’t be a complete 180. For instance, in the new Deus Ex, it’s out of the bag now that most boss fights are firefights. Well, it’s hair-pulling annoying for a stealth player. BUT, the fact they MAKE you kill them isn’t necessarily a problem, I can see someone being forced into the do or die situation. The thing is, they should have allowed to for more ways to do a firefight, for instance, sneaking around and taking pot shots. That still forces you out of your comfort zone, but doesn’t completely invalidate your play style. I think that’s a good mantra for bosses, “new, yet familiar.” Take the player out of their comfort zone and make them do things differently than they normally would, but rely on the same set of skills, with maybe one or two differences here and there.
I love a good boss fight. Right now I’m playing through Arkham Asylum (for the first time, don’t tell me about any specifics in it, please), and one thing I love about it is how every little while, I face a miniboss, and I have to figure out a rhythm to the fight that’s different from my normal pitiful mash-all-the-buttons-at-once approach to fighting.
Diablo 2 also had pretty good boss fights. I remember one just being ridiculous, however: a giant beetle was chasing me around a room, one-shotting my hireling and two-shotting me, and my super-specialized ice amazon took forever, like literally a hundred resurrections back to the room, to kill it. Later I found out online that it was nearly immune to cold damage… still, though, that game had some really good boss fights.
That depends on how spell (or other weapon) acquisition is handled. It’s one thing if, like in Zelda, you can’t get to the boss without first getting the weapon needed to kill it, even if that weapon isn’t one you’d usually use. It’s another if, say, you can only learn a limited set of spell slots, and when you get to the boss, it turns out that nothing you have can hurt it. Worse, if the only indication you have of this is when you’re actually facing down the boss. Worse yet, if once you enter the boss’s room you can’t go back to get whatever you need.
This is in part due to the limitations of video games. The types of games these things pop up in are usually games that are very much inspired by P&P RPGs (or very rarely “FPS RPGs”). In a P&P RPG, you can bullshit your way out of an encounter using incredibly improbable means, often more resembling a Rube Goldberg machine made by Indiana Jones than a plan. In a CRPG you’re often more… limited in what you’re likely carrying, and especially what you can interact with in the environment. I agree it’s bad form to force this on people when you have RPGs with an inventory management/ability management system UNLESS you’ve established from the beginning the mantra of “be prepared!” Unfortunately, I can’t think of any games off the top of my head that have really reveled in making the player plan ahead that haven’t devolved into a game of trial, error and quickload.
Oh, and here’s another bitch I have about boss fights, especially as you find them in JRPG games – when you beat them down, they morph into a different kind of creature with suddenly a full complement of hit points. And of course, I understand the problem that level-scaling is supposed to solve. It’s not fun for the game to be too easy. But, it’s also not fun to have to avoid leveling-up in order to keep a final boss from being too powerful.
I’m not a huge fan of Boss Fights, either… I agree they seem like a hold-over from the coin-op era and are something modern gaming should largely have moved away from IMHO.
Here are some of the common problems that have made me disgusted with boss fights:
- Not being able to carry a good complement of supplies, and no restocking them. Paper Mario and its iterations are a huge offender. I like the game a lot, but I’m not terribly good at them. Still, I can do all right, until it gets to the final dungeon/boss fight, in which case it becomes stupidly hard.
- No save points. This shit just needs to go away. Video game manufacturers need to realize that a good portion of their gamers are adult gamers now, with real lives and jobs. Save points should be ample, or you should be allowed to save at will.
- Removing one of your party members right before the boss fight. Final Fantasy 8 still makes me mad - you spend so much of your time invested in the most spoiled brat princess ever. Right when you start liking her, she goes away for a lot of the game and IIRC is completely gone in the last fight. Same with FF 9.
I agree though that when boss fights are good, they’re really good. Epic boss fights are cool, and I just loved beating the crap out of Seymour (FFX) over and over again. Fighting Waka three stupid times as Okami? A waste of my time, and his. He’s not even my enemy! And when I am resenting such a lovely game for making me do this, it’s not really a good thing.
I don’t understand how bosses are holdovers from the arcade days. I mean, anything abnormally difficult is a holdover (and I joke occasionally about how they forgot I wasn’t playing a coin-op machine when a game gets ridiculously hard), but fair bosses never felt “arcadey” to me. I mean, they’re perhaps overused (RPGs like to shoehorn in bosses where they don’t make sense), but they’re definitely a good way to punctuate an area. You want to have highs and lows in your game, without anything to spike the excitement of an area, the game feels mediocre and samey. The only ways to really do this are bosses, or events (and these often overlap).
Events are nice, but they can be just as bullshit as bosses (escape the building in X seconds! Quick Time Events! Fight off 100 mooks!)
I suppose you could use a cutscene, but I’d rather the gameplay complement the story, and that high and lows occur in the gameplay, not just the cutscenes. I don’t really want to fight the same 100 faceless mooks and then get a cutscene.
Some games may definitely lend themselves to “events” better though, Half-Life 2 didn’t really need the helicopter for instance; usually the most heart pounding areas were when the Combine figured out you were doing naughty things and tried to surround you in a building. Though multi-strider battles could be fun sometimes.
I don’t know, maybe it has to do with skill levels too (not that I’m amazing, I just have less trouble than you I think). I never found the bosses in Paper Mario to be that difficult, even Bowser. I also never really had any use for supplies either. I usually carried around maybe one or two of those dishes made from Whompa Lumps, or maybe one honey covered Ultra Shroom, but never really had that much of an issue. If I really needed help I just used star power.
Lack of save points is stupid though, at the very least games should have a save point between difficult encounters, and the room before a boss. They should definitely have quicksave and quit (where you can save at any point, but can only load from that save once, and must turn your game off after saving). I can understand making limitations or having save points due to discouraging save scumming, but games with save points like to be dumb, no argument there. But that’s not a complaint limited to bosses, or even final dungeons.
I don’t think games should be limited in removing your party numbers, the characters in-universe are hurt by it too. Sometimes it makes sense in the story for party members to disappear, and while I think there should be a better solution that tediously re-linking magic, or grinding them levels and new equipment, or whatever if you didn’t maintain them, I think that taking away party members can serve the story and the encounter really well if thought through.
The worst offender for this has to be Ultima: Exodus (I think that was Ultima III?), which took it beyond boss fights (actually, I don’t think there were even any boss fights). What wandering monsters you encountered depended on your level. The level 1 and 2 monsters could all be killed effortlessly, but anything else was a slog, and for some monsters a very deadly slog. All monster encounters give the same treasure, and the hardest monsters only give about 4 times as much XP as the easiest monsters (and you’d find the easy monsters in larger groups anyway). And the only benefit you gained from leveling up was more HP-- Better attacks depended solely on better weapons, and spells solely on ability scores, both of which you bought with gold. So the only incentive ever for leveling up was to get one party member to level 5 so you could fight pirates and get their ship, and right before the final dungeon where all the monster encounters were dragons anyway.
I more or less don’t HATE boss fights per se (as long as they’re not cheap, and fit the plot arc). I do much prefer games that give me an option of continuing onward rather than finishing them.
This may be why my favorite MMO remains EVE, and why I prefer Minecraft over Terraria despite the absurd amount of variety in the latter–it eventually has boss fights and then what?
The worst offender unquestionably has to be un-modded Oblivion, where if you play a character intuitively (putting the things you want to do a lot as your main skills, and then doing them a lot), you level up at a fair clip. The monsters then level up with you, until every creature in every area is carrying elite end-game weaponry and wearing elite end-game armor and beating the crap out of you. Whereas if you play counterintuitively (making something like juggling or basketweaving your main skill and then spending all your time doing useful stuff like swordfighting), you never level up despite getting really good at your skills, and the monsters stay really weak and easy. It’s the single worst gamebreaking flaw I’ve ever seen in an otherwise good game, worse even than Daggerfall’s porous dungeons.
Final Fantasy Tactics. There’s a part where you fight a string of battles in a row. Thankfully, they give you the option to save. But woe to s/he who only uses one save slot, because they don’t give you any opportunity to change equipment, jobs, etc. Eventually you get to a part where you have to fight a guy one-on-one with no warning. Normally he massacres you. The normal solution is change your job to Squire ahead of time (normally the crappiest job except the main character’s version is boosted). Then you play “keep away” with him and continually use the speed-boosting “Yell” or “Scream” abilities until you can act several times for one of his actions. After that it’s fun to wail on the bad guy. But just the fact that you can be permanently stuck, more than halfway in, because of a tough and surprise solo fight, this makes you want to pound your head upon the wall.
A related problem in Oblivion, Morrowind, and I don’t know about Arena (fixed in Skyrim… for the better?). Essentially, if you want to have the best stat boosts, you would pick favored skills that you would rarely use. So if you’re a knight, you would pick “Unarmed,” “Destruction,” and “Sneak,” for example, as only those contribute to level progression, while the nonfavored skills contribute to stat boosts.
Heh, I played a battle cleric in Everquest, and at one point in time we had a full party of clerics, and did quite well. We had a good rotation of healing and DPS alternation going, and the flying hammer pets for fun. It was played for fun more than anything - you have to have fun.
I sort of got burnt on raiding between EQ and WoW, so I am pretty much soloing my way through Lord of the Rings Online. I will help someone out if they ask me, and we can overcome the language barrier [I play on a German server] and my kinship thinks I am only a little strange. I hit 60 over the weekend, and for the past 5 levels or so I have alternated running level appropriate quests and going back to the beginning zones and completing all the deeds in the deed log. Hey, I get Turbine points for doing the deeds, I can spend them in the game store for stuff like resurrection scrolls and suchlike. I have done 2 instances with my kinship, and 5 or 6 paired up with my german gaming buddy [who is why I play on that server, though we normally just chat in game as we are at different levels and in different kinships.]
Now there is a game suggestion for you, LOTRO - you really can solo almost the entire content of the game if you like, it lacks barrens asshole chat, and the kinships tend to be small and friendly or large and raidy so you can find one that you like. The crafting is a bit lacking, there isn’t really much of a market in the auction house but I think that is mainly because it is still a small game population.