The Final!

You've tracked down the princess, solved all the villagers minor squabbles and are ready to end it once and for all. It's time to fight the Final Boss.

Final Bosses are the culmination of everything you have accomplished in your time with the game. All that you have learned gets put on the test in this final exam. Final Boss' are the developers most important weapon; it is in the final boss fight where players set their impression of a game in stone, and a weak final boss can ruin what is an otherwise astounding game. Just like a fireworks display, we feel disappointed if the final bang doesn't give the biggest boom. Unlike a fireworks display, the Final Boss must tie together all of the narrative points, gameplay experiences, art aesthetics, and musical themes for a single moment of connectedness. The Final Boss is the time when you want your audience to finally understand everything that the game has been trying to say. From the tireless perseverance of Mario's search for the missing Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros., to the crushing fate of death in Persona 3, it must all be encapsulated in this final climactic scene.

Final Bosses come in all shapes and sizes. They can be multiform monstrosities that eventually shapeshift into building size blobs of flesh, or they can be a normal human being. For the most part, however, Final Boss' tend to sit in two categories: human-esque opponents and what I define as the more monstrous encounters. The following videos present a view of these two categories:

Human Type - Final Fight with Ganondorf from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
-(note there are three fights before this one)


Monster Type - Mother Brain from Super Metroid:
-skip to


I will say that both of these are considered examples of extremely good Final Boss fights, with the Mother Brain fight from Super Metroid known as one of the best boss fights in video gaming (how much of this is rose-tinted glasses is unclear as I am most certainly wearing mine). Bad Final Boss fights are a dime a dozen, and most games tend to end quite weakly, and usually on the wrong chord. One reason for this neglect, of what I consider to be the most important part of a video game, is that unlike movies or books, which most people finish eventually, video games rarely get finished. I myself had this problem, and only in the past four years or so have I really tried to get to the end of video games (time constraints coupled with most games averaging in at 50-60 play time to complete made me only invest in beating the games I really, really liked). Developers are aware of this, and so they spend the majority of their development time working on the beginning of their game, in order to hook players into investing their time (and more importantly money) into the rest of the game. Since the least amount of people will see the end of the game, why should they spend the most effort on it?

Still, I feel that a fantastic Final Boss can take even a mediocre game to the stars, and some games have been entirely defined to me (and my peers) by their final encounter. Perhaps the most haunting of all of these is the final boss of Earthbound (what the image up top is depicting).

Warning! These two videos will make very little sense to you without the context of the entire game. Try not to understand the plot, but instead focus on the way the music works together with the shifting background to convey a sense of hopelessness and dread.

Maverick

I was going to talk about Final Boss encounters today, and the I saw this, Top Gun. That link will take you to a forty-minute video talking about Brandon Crisp, a young man who died last November after running away from home because his parents took his XBox360 away from him. The video talks about Brandon's death, his obsession with video games that led to his running away, video game addiction, and professional gaming.

Let me preface everything I am about to write by saying that Brandon's death was a tragic accident and I would never wish for this to happen to anyone.

This video perfectly demonstrates how those in video game culture (or the industry) see those who aren't, as well as how those outside of the culture see those who are in it. The scenes between the professional gaming team and the interviewer I feel are the most pronounced in this aspect. Here we have a woman who has almost no knowledge of video games, asking weighted questions to a group that in order to exist has to legitimize gaming in the eyes of people like her. My favorite moment is when the interviewer presses the group on the fact that they are killing people in these games, as she makes a legitimate statement, but you can see in the gamers' expressions that they can't make her understand with just words, as she'll just keep going back to that single point. The group does a very good job of keeping their cool, as I'm sure that if I were in that situation I would either burst out saying, "it's just a game!" (thus countering my own attempts to legitimize my career) or going off on a long tirade about how when you really kill people they release their bowls and can't come back to life in fifteen seconds.

The most heartbreaking scenes in this video are those with the parents. It's just so sad to see them, that even after this tragedy, they don't understand their kid well enough to know why he ran away after they took his XBox. The father talks nonchalantly about having to go in and rip the cords out of the wall sometimes (did he never learn that this could damage the system?). The saddest to me is how they begin to learn that their son wanted to be a professional gamer, but decide to create a scholarship in his name that promotes "real" sports, completely neglecting the fact that their son began to game in the first place after he got kicked out of Hockey because he was too small to be a goalie. It's like watching them spit on their own son's grave. It just seems to me that Brandon would have preferred that they try and make a scholarship that would help someone break into professional gaming (not an easy task considering you won't see any monetary rewards until you are among the top 100 or so gamers amongst several million rivals, all while your practice is looked down upon because you're just playing games).

The video is an interesting look into both of these worlds, and even though it does some things that make my blood boil (ignore the fact that he got kicked out of hockey for his size and putting the burden of parenting on game companies) it is still a very interesting video to watch.

As a final note, most professional gamers make roughly $30-$40k a year, and this is not including those who can't support themselves by gaming alone (the vast majority). This is most likely why the professional gamers refused to answer how much they make, which is a very personal question anyways.

Slight Delay

You can blame midterms turning me into a foggy brained monster, or roommates being so hard to ignore for the lack of the promised post. I would love to write one now, but I simply cannot write the post I want to in fourteen minutes tonight. Even if I had to hours until it was tomorrow, my brain is not working at the speed I need it to in order to even keep my eyes open, so post is delayed until I get up for breakfast tomorrow.

Medius Dies

I just wanted to say that the lack of posts is not because I've died, or stopped writing again. I have midterms tomorrow and decided that it would be better if I spent all my time reviewing my Latin rather than distracting myself with discussions about boss fights in video games. Expect to see a post tomorrow talking about Final Boss'.

Notice

I forgot to mention this previously, but part of my returning is that I will no longer be updating according to my old schedule (Sunday-Thursday). Instead I am going to post updates when I feel inspired or have the the time do so. What this means is that some days, like today, there will be no post. However, this also means that there may be posts on Fridays and Saturdays, and there may even be multiple posts in one day, just not today.

Defending Midterms

In a video game some of the most defining moments are the clashes with dramatic and powerful figures that test player skills to their limits. These encounters are extremely unique with the enemy often having a special model and sometimes even their own theme music. These are bosses, one of the most important pieces in video game design.

Bosses can best be thought of as tests or midterm exams. Bosses are much more difficult than everyday assignments (regular enemies) or quizzes (mid-bosses) and are given more of a chance to overcome the player (just as it's much easier to bomb your midterms than it is a regular exam). Bosses also comprise many elements of previous encounters: in the skills required to defeat them, the aesthetics in their design, and in the themes they present (again much like how a midterm is comprised of questions from your previous homework assignments and quizzes). Bosses also provide a place for designers to really show off what they can do.

However, some games ignore bosses or use them improperly. Often games will fail to implement bosses (not knowing how to work them into the narrative or not seeing why they are necessary). These games often suffer, as without boss encounters to test player progress, game difficulty often ramps up excessively or fails to challenge (interest) players. Furthermore, without these extreme encounters, players often begin to get bored of doing the same things over and over again (imagine the most boring job you've ever performed). Some games refuse to use boss encounters because of their genre; a puzzle game that has no boss encounters, because why would a puzzle game have bosses? These are poor design, as even in puzzles players need lulls and highs, here a boss could be a particularly difficult puzzle made of the solutions to multiple previous puzzles.

I present to you as examples three video games and their takes on boss encounters (the videos include the boss encounters).

#1 Fallout 3 - Video Link

- This is the only boss encounter in Fallout 3, and it takes place fairly early within the game. Notice how quickly the encounter ends (despite the fact that the player is playing on the highest difficulty level). Note also that there is no unique music for the encounter. While the enemy model is unique, there are fifteen or so more super mutant behemoths like this within the game (though this is the only one who attacks suddenly and is referenced by other characters within the game). One of Bethesda's largest failings with their open world titles is the lack of bosses. There are simply too few unique enemies, and Fallout 3 is the worst offender. Aside from this beasty, every major enemy encountered in the main storyline is the same as the regular enemies you encounter randomly. The "final boss" of the game is a human who dies in two shots, not exactly the way to put an endcap on your story.

#2 Prince of Persia


Prince of Persia takes the opposite approach from Fallout 3. While Fallout 3 has one, questionable boss encounter, Prince of Persia has only a few fights that aren't boss encounters. Or perhaps I should say that it only has a few fights that aren't with boss characters. You see Prince of Persia has five main enemies (The Hunter, The Alchemist, The Concubine, The Warrior, and one more...)that you fight over the course of the game. You have many fights with each of these bosses, but they are small skirmishes that merely teach you the skills necessary to defeat them in their final boss encounters (much like the quizzes from before). The start of this video is one of the six encounters you have with The Warrior, and you can already see how much more developed an encounter this than Fallout 3 and it's super mutant behemoth. Note how the player must utilize certain strategies, and how much more cinematic the camera angles and arena are. Note (though it is difficult to hear in the video) the music that matches the event so closely. A vast improvement over Fallout 3.

#3 Shadow of The Colossus


This is a special video, as Shadow of the Colossus is not an ordinary game by any means. Shadow of the Colossus has 16 enemies in the entire game, the first being the one shown in the video. Each of these enemies is a full-fledged boss encounter, though each one teaches you something new that must later be applied to the final boss. I included this video not to praise such a strategy, as I feel that normal enemies and mid-bosses are just as important as homework and quizzes, but because it nails exactly what a boss encounter should look and feel like.

Bosses can be a very powerful tool, and can truly define a gaming experience, but when used incorrectly they can vastly weaken what may be a solid experience otherwise.