And Back

I managed to injure my forearms rock climbing, so I haven’t been able to post very much in the last two days - sorry for the radio silence.  In my absence, N’Gai Croal kindly pointed us towards an interesting post that he wrote with Stephen Totilo on what makes for great bosses. 

Totilo makes the point, using Bioshock, that the actual game bosses aren’t really very interesting - for example, the first one you meet is basically a straight FPS fight.  However, the Big Daddies are both more challenging and more intriguing from a gameplay perspective.  This struck a nerve, because I’ve been playing Phantom Hourglass quite a bit and the bosses are very Zelda-esque: that is, if you’ve played one Zelda game, you already know how to defeat them.  For example, (and perhaps most irritatingly to me) the Ghost Ship boss is basically a straight rip-off of a LttF encounter that managed to be much more dramatic in that title.  This didn’t ruin the game for me by any means - I like it quite a bit - but it’s definitely germane to the discussion.

In the context of the Level Up post, Croal goes on to comment that he really liked MGS3’s final boss because it used “the tactical language that the game has already established” - in other words, it tested your skills well at what the game had already taught you.  Croal suggests that this is the real test of a good boss.  But I’d say it goes even further: Zelda uses the “tactical language” of each level, but it does so in an almost-limiting way… if you got the bow and arrows in a given level, you can bet the farm that the level’s boss is going to be vulnerable to the bow and arrow.  To me, this is frankly lazy boss design.  I’d love to see a Zelda game that mixed up item requirements, or forced you to use multiple item combinations in order to move past a boss. 

After all, you don’t want a design to become a prison - or a cliche.