Why are there no more epic boss battles?

[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.

 

[OniaPL]

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.

I enjoyed the Persona series. For example, Persona 3's final boss qualifies as "epic" IMO, because of the story context, the music during the fight, the presentation of the boss.
What I dislike about the Persona games is the grind; you run into a boss, realize you are 5 levels too low and grind.
I quitted Persona 4 with the final area left, just didn't want to do the grind again.

 

[Harbinger_]

I would argue that Mass Effect 2's final boss battle and the mission leading up to it was pretty awesome.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

I think it's nostalgia. Most of the games I play seem to have bosses, or at least significantly harder enemies that have to be killed with a measure of strategy. Skyrim probably sticks out as a recent example, but the LEGO games still do boss fights very well, everyone raves about God of War, Portal 1 was a clever mix of everything you'd learned throughout the game being used to win in a very fixed time limit, Stranglehold (a little older) was a third person shooter which had several boss fights that could be really tough on harder difficulties, and you really had to use every trick and skill to survive. Similiarly Max Payne was pretty good at boss fights.

If you play the right games then you'll find Boss Fights everywhere.

 

[OniaPL]

I would argue that Mass Effect 2's final boss battle and the mission leading up to it was pretty awesome.

This is the first time I have seen an opinion that was just straight wrong!

Nah, all kidding aside, I liked the final mission, it was my favorite part of the game and the fact that you actually got to lead your squad and people could actually die made it that moer exciting, but the final boss was just lolworthy. It wasn't exciting from the perspective of the story or the gameplay.

 

[Lunar Templar]

Technically, the boss in Asura's Wrath is cheating. The scenes of him hovering outside the Earth are obviously quite separate from the scenes with Asura. What Capcom have done is effectively the same as sticking a man in a Godzilla suit and plonking him on model city set.

As for Jubileus, she's big, but not that big. Comparitively, she'd still only be up to Kronos' knees.

not the point Wyzen was still bigger (and to be honest Asura's Wrath was more epic in pretty much every way )

any way if memory severs Jubileus was bigger,

and after a quick you tube search, i was proven right and wrong >.> clearly falling into the sun is a killer weight loss plan.

cause one second she's big enough to to use planets as a back stop, the next sec only a few hundred yards tall >.>

 

[Furioso]

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.

How so? That one is generally regarded as one of the greats, and was leagues better than FF8


OT: Shadow of the Colossus, the game is built on epic boss fights

 

[Exius Xavarus]

The battle with the dragon in Dragon's Dogma was beyond epic. So was the very final battle.

Vergil is also a pretty fuckin' epic boss.

 

[RJ 17]

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.

How so? That one is generally regarded as one of the greats, and was leagues better than FF8

Saying it's better than FF8 really isn't saying much since FF8 was pretty crappy as well. Too damn easy and every character has at least one issue he or she is absolutely emo over with Squall being King ***** Emo. As for 9, yeah, I know that apparently in the minority in thinking it was crap (though I have met plenty of others that feel the same as I) but the best I can describe it is a childish mockery of all the classic FF's, and as someone who grew up playing the classics (1-6) I just couldn't stand it.

I will say I liked FF8's card game better, though.

 

[Furioso]

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.

How so? That one is generally regarded as one of the greats, and was leagues better than FF8

I will say I liked FF8's card game better, though.

I did love the card game in FF8, I pretty much became a master at it, didn't like the whole spreading of rules part though

 

[Nicolairigel]

Actually, I think I prefer boss fights that are epic due to context more than mechanics. I know some may see this as poppycock (I dunno, I felt like using that word)but I find I get really pumped and find a fight more epic when it's just a one-on-one mano y mano fight with an opponent that's built up to. Honestly, I find boss fights with hard and annoying mechanics, as creative as they may be, to just be immersion-breaking. Don't get me wrong, there are some great mechanic and context boss fights; this may not be the best example but facing-off against the reaper on rannoch with nothing but a targeting laser had both a fun mechanic and intense-context atmosphere.

For instance, I love the Kei-lang boss fights purely do to the fact that you and this egotistical-assassin have it out for each other. Sure the mechanics weren't great, really not much more than any other Cerberus phantom accept with a pussy-failsafe, but I was pumped as hell and really got into the fight, especially when I killed leng with a Charge/biotic punch to the face.

The same goes for the Fallout New Vegas Dlc boss fights. In Dead Money, spin-kicking Father Elijah into a metal chasm after uncloaking behind while encumbered made it an instant classic for me after all of the interactions and connection my courier had with him. And of course, the Uyleuss boss fight in Lonesome Road was nothing more than a one-on-one fight against two medical bots and a pissed-off Jamaican, but the history and emotion shared with him made the fight mean something.

I guess this says something about what type of gamer I am, good personal story context will always more than make up for meh mechanics for me.