Why are there no more epic boss battles?

[TheRookie8]

God of War managed to integrate large-scale, exciting boss battles. While some may have used quick-time events a tad too much, they managed to integrate a diverse set of gameplay mechanics.

From a story perspective, the boss battles were also exceptional. When you fought a mythological god, you KNEW and FELT like you were fighting a god. And their defeat had a lasting effect on the game as a whole.

 

[DioWallachia]

Am I the only one who misses these?
Nowadays games just feel like a gray, bland mass. Back in the good old days there were so many awesome games which had epic boss battles which sent shivers down your spine, which made you feel anger and joy, and immense satisfaction when you finally won the fight.

Nowadays it's just pew pew, kill everyone, pew pew, strong monster, hit weak spot, pew pew, dodge attack, hit weak spot, pew pew.
Or alternatively in RPGs, smash that one attack until the boss dies.

I realize how blinded by nostalgia I am, but I still long for the good old days with games like Final Fantasies, Suikoden and such.
Just give me back these great moments.

(Whinepost over)

Guess I'll just boot up the emulator, pick up the controller and replay Final Fantasy IX or something.

You are not blinded by nostalgia..............yet. You still NEED to play the games made by the company Treasure. How epic are those boss fights? lets say that even a Sega Genesis game like Alien Soldier (a boss rush arcade-eske game) has at least 25 levels and 31 bosses in total. After you finish playing that THEN your convertion to the nostalgia will be complete.

 

[TheRookie8]

How has no-one mentioned God Of War 3 yet? I'm pretty sure Kronos is on record as the biggest boss ever included in a videogame. He stands a genuine mile high, you traverse his entire body as if its one ginormous level, and absolutely brutalize him in a thousand different ways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=s1TJn4jYpZs#t=505s
(the framing thing isn't working :/)
Wyzen is bigger

i think Bayonetta's Jubilaus is bigger to

As the saying goes: "Size isn't everything, but it sure does help."

 

[Don Savik]

Boss battles are a great way to wrap up some story elements or locations before you move on to the next one. I know stories have gotten more intricate and complicated so bosses aren't necessarily viable, but I wouldn't mind them so much if they actually GOT THEIR ENDINGS RIGHT. So many games these days leave on unsatisfying cliffhangers. I'd rather just kill the badguy's super robot and save the freaking day to be honest.

That being said, its hard to do bosses right too. Nobody likes doing the same thing 3 times and winning. Nobody likes shooting glowy weakspots while the boss is stunned (because them not fighting back is fun, right? ...right?). Nobody likes untelegraphed instakill attacks. Nobody likes using some superweapon you got in the last 2 minutes of the game to kill the boss, completely disregarding all strategy you've learned up until that point. Etc etc etc.

 

[JasonEllis66]

Guess I'll just boot up the emulator, pick up the controller and replay Final Fantasy IX or something.

First of all, FF9 fucking sucked.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd argue that it depends on 1: your definition of "epic" and 2: what games you play.

Not that anyone was paying attention by the end of the game, but the boss battle against Knight Commander Meredith in Dragon Age II was pretty epic. The boss battle against Alduin in Skyrim was pretty epic. Hell, even the last stand at the missle tanks in Mass Effect 3 was pretty epic (as it stands in place of a boss battle).

DA2 fucking sucked, and so did Meredith. That fight was shit, that story was shit, and the whole character was 60% shit.
Alduin sucked. It was yet another fucking dragon.
And the last stand sucked. Run to cover, blast blast blast, run to another cover, blast blast blast. Nothing that broke the monotone of blasting the same dudes. Don't get me wrong, I thought the combat was fine, but if it wasn't for the story, wouldn't play the game.

FF9 is also one of my favorite final fantasy games, tactics was awesome though. Arkham City had a lot of great boss fights.

 

[Conn1496]

It's mainly because battling one big enemy just donesn't seem as cool these days, and when they do show up, they're way too easy... Which is a shame, because showdowns are awesome. Yay, old style boss battles!

 

[malestrithe]

Count on God of War to have one epic boss battle each game. That boss also doubles the the first level encounter.

 

[StylinBones]

I know everyone has already said it, but I'd like to echo - come on, OP. What are you talking about?

 

[viranimus]

They're all in MMO's ... the challenge? OTHER PEOPLE. And your internet... But occasionally you'll join a team that just clicks and the boss is still insanely hard. (Insanely hard to me is epic)

I like those moments.

Thats kind of funny to me... Because MMOs are only getting easier as time rolls on. Hell WoW is like MMOs for kindergarteners and the bar has only been lowered since.

Oh and on Boss battles I know its been said but I want to say it in a slightly different way? The "Souls" Brothers would like a word with you... in private.... behind a locked door.... and no one will recognize the bloody clump that is left in the room afterward and there wouldnt be enough left to shovel into a body bag.

 

[JoesshittyOs]

Nostalgia, outdated gameplay mechanic that has been done to death, or it simply wasn't as fun as you remember them (which I guess may be considered as nostalgia). Take you're pick.

Games don't play on that kind of gameplay structure anymore. They've generally evolved into something else. For instance, Bioshock. There's mini Bosses such as the Big Daddies, but I'd really only say there was one boss fight in that game towards the end.

For the most part, boss fights don't really have a place in most of the games I can think of that now exclude them. It would seem tacky.

Plus, to be completely honest with you, I rarely remember enjoying any boss fights. I fucking hated the concept.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

I like Persona 4's boss fights.

The first boss is weak to electricity, your starting element, turning it a bit of a back-and-forth. However, before this point you've only ever fought one real fight, AND you don't have any party members, making it a bit more frantic. You're also weak to its wind attacks. It's designed to teach the player what guarding does, so it's not very difficult.

The second boss is weak to your partner's wind techniques, so it goes down rather easily, too.

The third boss is where things pick up. By that time, you've gotten a party member who uses Ice attacks. Considering the pattern of bosses before, it would only be logical that it be weak to ice, right? Nope. It's not weak to anything. Furthermore, it doesn't telegraph its attacks like previous bosses, so you can't tell your fire-weak party member to guard when it's about to use fire attacks, and when it hits her weakness, it gets an extra turn. It can do a ton of damage with a single attack. AND it summons a minion that can use more powerful healing techniques than you can. Speaking of healing, none of your party members have any multi-targeting healing spells. If you've been fusing Personas correctly, you, the protagonist, might have one. You're also potentially the biggest damage dealer in the party, so you need to choose whether to prioritize offence or defence. You're not just repeating the same moves, either; the boss has a lot of HP for this point in the game, so chances are you'll need to save your SP to heal. You don't have any multi-target buffs, so you'll probably be using any buffing items you find in the dungeon. This is a difficult fight, so much so that it's been changed in Persona 4: Golden to be weak to ice. When you're not prepared, it will kill you. I thought it was pretty epic, honestly. There's nothing more satisfying than emerging victorious after a long and tough boss fight.

 

[Innegativeion]

Yesterday I finished Skyward Sword, and that game has some really awesome bosses. Some of the best in the series in my opinion.

I don't care what anyone says about this game or its motion controls.

Wildly hacking away at Girahim's bastard sword was probably amongst the biggest adrenaline rushes I've gotten from a game this year.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

God of War 3 was pretty cheesy, but well epic.

My personal favourites in the epic drawer are hands down Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Gods, demons, angels, humans - they're all in a bad place somewhere between life and death. Awesome stuff.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

I recently played Dark Souls, and the boss fights were great, but I still miss the story context the boss fights used to have. They were built up and foreshadowed enough, so that when you actually had to fight this boss, you were all like "Oh shit! OH SHIT! This is it! The time is now! D: ".

Games like Dark Souls kinda missed this, and from what I've heard Dragon's Dogma did too.

I may give it a whirl though.

I can't quite agree to that. The only bit I can probably agree to is that Demon's Souls and Dark Souls handle these things differently, just like King's Field did back in the days - you're thrown into a world with rather specific rules and plenty of backstory for you to discover; it's just not laid out for you in text form, you have to focus on the ride from the very start. You need to watch the intro, you need to read the descriptions of items you find, you need to listen to what NPCs care to tell you.

It's also why the "Souls experience" is such a blast, and it's why no background music while exploring the world actually works really, really well. The epic bombastic orchestral tracks during boss fights blow you away and rape your brain while you're pretty much in fight-or-flight overdrive mode already, and when you're pretty much aimlessly running around, the ambient sounds are your first warning signs, as you oftentimes hear what might want to kill you a bit before you actually see it. Also, the terrain is pretty deadly all by itself with more than one opportunity to fall to your certain death if you decide to just run around.

It's when you stop for a moment to catch your breath and wait for your heartbeat to slow down a little that you notice that some vistas of the game's world are breathtakingly beautiful.

 

[piinyouri]

How has no-one mentioned God Of War 3 yet? I'm pretty sure Kronos is on record as the biggest boss ever included in a videogame. He stands a genuine mile high, you traverse his entire body as if its one ginormous level, and absolutely brutalize him in a thousand different ways.


Fuck, every boss in GOW 3 was pretty damn spectacular. It says a lot when one of the least exciting bosses in a game is a 50 foot scorpion you fight in the middle of a mountain.

Have to second this.
I'm not the biggest GoW fan, but I literally could not believe what I was doing in that fight. Insane.

 

[Scrustle]

Yesterday I finished Skyward Sword, and that game has some really awesome bosses. Some of the best in the series in my opinion.

I don't care what anyone says about this game or its motion controls.

Wildly hacking away at Girahim's bastard sword was probably amongst the biggest adrenaline rushes I've gotten from a game this year.

The sword controls work perfectly fine. If anyone says they don't they're doing it wrong.

 

[OniaPL]

I recently played Dark Souls, and the boss fights were great, but I still miss the story context the boss fights used to have. They were built up and foreshadowed enough, so that when you actually had to fight this boss, you were all like "Oh shit! OH SHIT! This is it! The time is now! D: ".

Games like Dark Souls kinda missed this, and from what I've heard Dragon's Dogma did too.

I may give it a whirl though.

I can't quite agree to that. The only bit I can probably agree to is that Demon's Souls and Dark Souls handle these things differently, just like King's Field did back in the days - you're thrown into a world with rather specific rules and plenty of backstory for you to discover; it's just not laid out for you in text form, you have to focus on the ride from the very start. You need to watch the intro, you need to read the descriptions of items you find, you need to listen to what NPCs care to tell you.

It's also why the "Souls experience" is such a blast, and it's why no background music while exploring the world actually works really, really well. The epic bombastic orchestral tracks during boss fights blow you away and rape your brain while you're pretty much in fight-or-flight overdrive mode already, and when you're pretty much aimlessly running around, the ambient sounds are your first warning signs, as you oftentimes hear what might want to kill you a bit before you actually see it. Also, the terrain is pretty deadly all by itself with more than one opportunity to fall to your certain death if you decide to just run around.

It's when you stop for a moment to catch your breath and wait for your heartbeat to slow down a little that you notice that some vistas of the game's world are breathtakingly beautiful.

I think that is a fair point, and don't get me wrong, I like Dark Souls (aside from the PvP experience). But let's be honest here, Dark Souls wasn't about the story. The story itself wasn't interesting enough, and the game didn't give me a single reason to care about any of the characters or the actual story. The story acted as a frame for the areas and the fights.

For example, when I fought Seth the Scaleless; My reaction wasn't "Oh, it's Seth! lolwtfbbq", it was "Oh, there is a dragon. I'ma go kill it."
The boss fights, while extremely fun and entertaining from the perspective of gameplay and challenge, do not qualify as "epic" in my opinion. I had nothing to fight for, I didn't care about any characters in the world, I was just there to kill some monsters.
I'd imagine this was the case for many; While the story wasn't "laid out" and presented in the most traditional form, it was still quite average and overall, meh.

 

[TheCommanders]

I feel like part of the problem is not that there are no good boss fights, but there are too many boss fights. Games don't need boss fights, and even if they do, they don't necessarily need them equally spaced out at nice intervals all throughout a game. Most games seem to be *trying* (not always succeeding) to break out of the grind of: level, boss, level boss, level boss, game, final boss. What annoys me (and Zero Punctuation touched on this) is games that have boss fights which really don't have anything to do with the content or feel of the rest of the game. A few examples: the finale of L.A. Noire, the boss fights in Deus Ex:HR, any of the final bosses in the Assassin's Creed games (ya know, where you just stand around on a flat piece of ground and wail at them with your sword because that's the only thing that works against them...). Or games where Boss fights feel token because they are essentially just a fight from any other part of the game, like some of the bosses in Arkham Asylum or City where the boss just throws the same goons that you've been fighting all game at you.

All that said, there are plenty of good ones, but a boss fight should be saved for when it's truly appropriate, not just thrown in whenever you feel like.