Fighting Game Boss Fights
I have played a lot of fighting games over the years. I am by no means an expert, but I feel I have played enough to have a fairly broad view of the genre.
In every single fighting game I have ever played, I have yet to encounter a satisfying final boss fight. I am either completely underwhelmed or left completely pissed off. Why does the final boss fight have to suck?
You would think after all these years somebody would figure out how to make the last boss exciting without turning them into ridiculously cheap and unfair monsters.
In the typical fighting game, final bosses fall into 2 distinct categories: The Pushovers and the Impossibles.
Pushovers are defeated in 38 seconds by your little sister who is just mashing the medium kick button over and over. They take no skill to defeat and are quickly forgotten like Whatsisname and Thatotherguy. They don’t even register on your consciousness, and their games end up in the bargain bin. Defeating a Pushover gives you no satisfaction. You can barely stifle a yawn as you watch the credits roll.
Impossibles are a bunch of cheating bastards. Impossibles laugh at all the skills that you have acquired playing the game. They then take the general game mechanics and throw them right out the window. Impossibles don’t play like anyone else in the game. They shrug off your most powerful attacks or ignore them completely. Their standard attacks decimate your life bar and leave you screaming at the television. Defeating an impossible comes down to luck more than skill. Victory is ultimately arbitrary. A 1 becomes a 0 somewhere and the game decides you’ve won. You might spend 10 minutes getting to an Impossible and then 30 minutes cursing as you hit restart over and over.
Impossibles are by far the most prevalent kinds of bosses in fighting games. They have been ignoring the rules of their own games and breaking controllers for decades. Yeah, you might pump your fist when you finally defeat one, but inside you know your victory is hollow. Take Seth from Street Fighter IV as an example. He’ll teleport around the screen and launch unblockable attacks, even when you are in the midst of a sweet combo on his face. When I play Seth, I am not having fun. I am not learning the game. I am simply waiting for the 1 to become a 0 somewhere in the code that will let me win. Is this really what the designers want?
Why can’t we have reasonably difficult bosses without completely breaking the rules we have set up in the game? I don’t mind taking a whooping when the computer is playing fair. The final boss should be terrifying and awesome, but they shouldn’t be allowed to cheat. Bosses can be tough without resorting to cheating. Teleportation, unblockable attacks, absurdly high attack priority, the ability to block even in mid-attack, should be banned forever. I think we can all agree these were cheap tactics that were meant to get players to insert another quarter. They have no place in 2010.
Am I the only one that feels this way? Is the best we can hope for mediocrity when it comes to our final bosses?
Tags: fighting games, Seth, Street Fighter IV
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 29th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Hunter says:There’s actually a well known phenomenon called SNK Boss Syndrome. I think you have an idea of who to blame for this. SNK is notorious for this in their fighting games. In the KOF games, the bosses have attacks that can string together to kill you in 5 moves. Some have unblockable super attack, or infinite super bar (No joke). And honestly, if you think Seth is hard, you should see Street Fighter 3. Think you beat Gil? If he had a full super bar when you beat him, he comes back to life.
I think you know as well as I do why this exists. Quarters. Fighting games originated in the arcades, and like every other game that came from those wretched dens, they exist to eat quarters. Often times the games that have especially easy final bosses are the ones designed for home consoles.
April 29th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Jesse "Main Finger" Gregory says:@Hunter and Dave
From my KOFXII review:
“At the end, there is no boss. Honestly, this is probably for the best as I’ve found that the average SNK boss tends to be such a cheap bastard that he/she makes Street Fighter IV’s “Seth” seem like a newborn kitten.”
April 29th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Dave "shaolinjesus" Corvin says:Seth was just one of dozens of examples. Alpha 152 from DOA4 also springs to mind. As you are punching her she teleports away and kicks you in the back of the head.
I am just tired of cheap bosses that ignore the rules of their own game.
If you were watching Die Hard and all the sudden Hans Gruber was immune to bullets and one liners you would get upset.
April 30th, 2010 at 1:56 am
Jesse "Main Finger" Gregory says:for the record, I hate Seth too and think he should’ve been scaled differently in the console release, I just wanted to add to the SNK boss hate
May 11th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Grant Walker says:The boss of Arcana heart is the only fighting game boss I’ve never beaten
August 9th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
casey says:I actually thought that Jinpachi from Tekken 5 was a very good final boss in that he was nearly impossible… Unless you cleverly took the time out to strategize and learn all of his moves and how to counter them as whatever character you chose to confront him with. Jinpachi was over powered and extremely difficult to defeat using standard methods of combat and to over come him (more easily) you had to completely rethink your fighting style.
I think the “overpowered final boss” has its place in modern fighting games, when done well.