Are most modern boss battles unnesscary?

[oxymoron]

I'm with the bossfight lovers. There's nothing like a well-designed climactic throwdown to make you celebrate the skill you didn't know you had in you.

They also tend to have amazing music.

What I don't like is an unskippable cutscene and/or chunk of dialog before a bossfight. That makes me crazy if I have to reload.

I like boss fights just not the damn near impossible ones like in Journey to Silius. It should be fun and hard but not too hard where I want to blast myself.

[KDub]

Of course they are necessary, even in games that mostly rely on a narrative; you have to have peaks in your story. If it it is just one slow rise to the end it would be boring.

And who says you need a boss fight in order to have a peak in a story? Visual novels and adventure games can tell great stories and they don't have any boss fights. And boss fight isn't the only way to challenge a player. There a different ways you can create peaks and challenge, depending on the context. An interesting plot twist, a thought provoking conversation, a puzzle, a minigame, an interesting set piece fight, there are many ways to create memorable moments. I sure as hell remember the visit to Moonside a lot better than any of the numerous boss fights of Earthbound. There are some good moments in that game that I remember, but the boss fights with giant moles and things like that? Very unremarkable. The final boss is great though, not disputing that.

You're kinda comparing apples to oranges and then answered it yourself with "depending on the context"

/end thread

[oxymoron]

@Kdub
I didn't know you had a game site. I like your let's plays.

[Menegrothx]

No I'm not. I never mentioned those genres in my original post, because I was talking about genres that generally feature bosses. You're the one who brought it up by your comment, as you said that even games that mostly rely on a narrative need to have bosses.

My point is that just because you can have boss fights, doesn't mean you should, unless you're going to put effort into them. Take Bioshock for instance. HORRIBLE last boss. The game did not need to have a boss fight. It did not make the game any better. It did not help to peak the story. Bioshock 2 on the other hand wasn't as good plotwise, but it had a better ending. There wasn't a big final boss, but rather a big fight scene at the end, which made for a good ending. That doesn't mean that they couldn't have worked some good boss fights into those games.
Or the final bosses of Final Fantasy 9 and Persona 4. The final boss of FF9 literally appeared out of nowhere. What's wrong with Kuja? You had known for the whole duration of the game that he's going to be final boss, there was no need for Necron. Persona 4 would have been BETTER if it had ended on Adachi. Again, a final boss that appeared out of nowhere, and in this case it fucked up the plot, which had been perfect up to that point. Of course being RPGs, both FF IX and P4 had other bosses too, but atleast in Persona's case, there was a reason for each boss fight (and they were tactical).

[oxymoron]

^ I agree with you. Not every game is meant to have a boss fight. Although I did like the bloaters in tlou.

[KDub]

No...you did.

I said rely heavily on narrative. Bioshock still relies heavily on a narrative but is an action game and benefits from having a boss fight. That is where that context thing comes into play.

A visual novel is not an action game and some would argue not even really a game at all.

You compared apples to oranges.

Also, just because you didn't like a final boss in some games compared to something else doesn't mean games on a whole don't benefit from having a boss section/s at all.

[brunoafh]

I feel like no one even read the original post, where it clearly states that he likes boss battles, and the issue is that some games have bad (therefore pointless) boss battles.

I see this problem in nearly all modern FPS. There are exceptions (Killzone, Serious Sam, haven't played much of the new Duke), but for the most part bosses feel incredibly tacked on and pointless. Random tank, helicopter, etc. One of the many things that bugs me about where the genre has gone, as awesome boss battles used to be a staple.

Some action games suffer from this and are pretty much ruined by it. Devil May Cry 2 and Ninja Gaiden 2 (the Xbox one) come to mind immediately. These are games that basically thrive off good boss design, so when the bosses aren't very good, what's left? As others have said a boss battle is pretty much the ultimate test of skill in the game, so when that test is boring/bad, you start to wish it was just not even there. God of War is kind of in the middle here. The actual fights themselves are not very engaging from a gameplay standpoint, but the point is just to "be cool", and it does that very well. I'll probably never forget the insanely awesome battle with Hades from GoW 3, yet all I remember is how it looks, the battle itself was just mashing and QTEs.

Dynasty Warriors is totally guilty of having horrible boss fights for the most part. I love the games, but the boss fights are so pointless and boring. They just do not need to be there. They don't feel rewarding, it comes down to the same thing every time, they are easily cheesed, etc. You can tell there's about zero thought behind it and they are just enemies you've been fighting with huge health bars.

[ZenErik]

Depends on the game. But as a JRPG fan, I love boss battles. At the same time, I agree that they would not really fit in well with a game like The Last of Us. And fittingly, TLoU has no boss battles.

[KDub]

, TLoU has no boss battles.

Your first encounter of a bloater is a boss battle. Large enemy you had never seen, no way out of the room, tougher than all of the other enemies until that point etc. It did its job well which was to provide a moment of major tension, note that the difficulty would be rising and put in place a new layer on the story. It was a great boss battle!

[Gunstar Green]

There are some games where bosses just feel shoehorned in because "it's a video game, we need bosses."

But there are other games where they're integral to the experience. No More Heroes and Metal Gear Rising come to mind for two modern action games that really thrive on their boss encounters.