Art of the Final Battle

[Hailey Knight]

Another topic for discussion of video games.

I feel like final battles haven't felt as ... big I guess for some games as they used to. Maybe that's because of the stakes. I used to play a lot of Squaresoft RPGs, so the stakes were usually global. I'm not sure. I just know some games recently have disappointed me in their final confrontations.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine
Ignoring the fact that you don't even really get to fight the final boss, it just feels empty and pointless. Those who played it probably know what I'm talking about.

Mass Effect 3
I love Marauder Shields, but he wasn't much of a challenge. I was really expecting Harbinger to be the big bad instead.

And even games that have great final battles sometimes don't feel like the final battle was a big deal. I mean big deal as in, when you're getting to the end, you're invested in the characters' plight, you're pissed at the villain, you want to kill this asshole--no, you HAVE TO kill this asshole. It's important.

I love Batman: Arkham City. I love it all over. But...

Spoiler

Clever as the twists were, I feel like the focus kept shifting so much that by the time I got to the end, I wasn't really all that amped to take down the Joker, not like in Arkham Asylum. He was ever present, but on the sidelines to Doctor Strange, and then to his boss, sort of.

So maybe the key is build-up. I know I have more to say, but I'm getting tired, so maybe people's thoughts or examples will jog my mind toward more insightful thoughts. Good examples, bad examples. Discuss! I like discussions.

 

[GasBandit]

This isn't even my final form.

 

[bhamv3]

I mentioned this in another thread, that while the final battles in Darksiders felt epic, they weren't all that challenging, gameplay-wise. Still though, not that bad.

I thought Bioshock 2's final battle was disappointing compared to Bioshock.

Spoiler

Going from fighting a superpowered Fontaine to holding your position against waves of mooks? And what's worse, you have Big Sister Eleanor helping you out, and she can basically wipe out entire waves of mooks by herself.

 

[Azurephoenix]

I felt that Mass Effect 2 had a great build up to the suicide mission and that the final boss had a suitably nasty and epic feel. Not to mention that if you really screwed up on the preparation side, you could lose the whole team as well as your own life and fail in suitable fashion.

I also greatly enjoyed the final battle in Dragon Age Origins. It felt grand and the game help make it feel like the stakes were really up there.

 

[Jay]

Lavos from Chrono Trigger. All 982498234832 ways to fight him.

 

[GasBandit]

The final boss in FTL is a pretty epic fight. If you haven't built up enough, it will absolutely END you in one of its 3 stages.

I have to say that 90s square games generally did this right. I mean, we make fun of it now, but remember Final Fantasy 7, how one of Sephiroth's final attacks was to make the sun go supernova, obliterating mercury and venus, and the expanding star just BARELY touching earth right where your party was standing?

Yeah, it did get old after about the 10th time it happened, but back in 1997 that was some mindblowing shit there.

"Bells, frogs, bing cherries, jingle bells, magic cheese, SEPHIROTH"

 

[ThatNickGuy]

Regarding Arkham City, who are we kidding? The real final boss that felt the most rewarding (in both Bat-games) was The Riddler.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 had one of my favourite "boss" battles. The huge open world, the constant pressure to save the site, etc. I died so many flipping times the first couple of times I played it. Although, I remember the first time I played and beat it, I was under the impression that the only way to kill the hunters was with the gravity gun. I remember hearing that during the game's development but didn't know it'd been removed before its release. Funny how repeated plays after that became much easier.

Loved both Monkey Island games' final battles with LeChuck, especially Monkey Island 2, where you had to put together your own voodoo doll while LeChuck chased you around.

 

[GasBandit]

Not to repost from the "endings" thread, but the whole last level of Bionic Commando for the NES was pretty damn good. Take out the minbosses, witness the resurrection of Hitler, destroy his ultimate weapon, then take him out with a bazooka shot to the cockpit of his helicopter while falling past it. Goriest face-splosion on the NES ever.

 

[figmentPez]

Regarding Arkham City, who are we kidding? The real final boss that felt the most rewarding (in both Bat-games) was The Riddler.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 had one of my favourite "boss" battles. The huge open world, the constant pressure to save the site, etc. I died so many flipping times the first couple of times I played it. Although, I remember the first time I played and beat it, I was under the impression that the only way to kill the hunters was with the gravity gun. I remember hearing that during the game's development but didn't know it'd been removed before its release. Funny how repeated plays after that became much easier.

Loved both Monkey Island games' final battles with LeChuck, especially Monkey Island 2, where you had to put together your own voodoo doll while LeChuck chased you around.

I... I don't know how to rate your post. I'm with you completely on HL2:ep2; that was a fantastic ending. Epic, with a real sense of impending doom and consequences for failure. However, I can't agree with you on Monkey Island. I hated the ending sequences of every one of those. Trying to solve puzzles while being tossed about from location to location and having limited time to think about inventory and the environment is a colossal pain and it's not a type of pacing I like at all in an adventure game.

 

[GasBandit]

I also liked half of the final levels from Saints Row the Third.

Spoiler

Well, depending upon which decision tree you went down... the statue rescue was a real Crowning Moment of Awesome where you get to be a Big Damn Hero, complete with Bonnie Tyler soundtrack. The martian movie level afterwards was a big ball of WTF, corny yet frustrating. The other tree is the opposite... chasing down and killing Killbane at the expense of leaving Shaundi, Viola and the others to die is a major downer and frankly pretty darn out of character for the Boss up to that point, I think. But the level after that with the STAG flying carrier is hella fun too.

 

[Hailey Knight]

I have to say that 90s square games generally did this right. I mean, we make fun of it now, but remember Final Fantasy 7, how one of Sephiroth's final attacks was to make the sun go supernova, obliterating mercury and venus, and the expanding star just BARELY touching earth right where your party was standing?

Yeah, it did get old after about the 10th time it happened, but back in 1997 that was some mindblowing shit there.

"Bells, frogs, bing cherries, jingle bells, magic cheese, SEPHIROTH"

I'm with you there all the way. Final Fantasies IV, V, VI, VII, Tactics--getting to the final boss of each of those felt huge. Chrono Trigger did this perfectly. Hell, even friggin' Super Mario RPG built up Smithy enough that going back to Bowser's Keep felt like all had to be put right in the world. Not sure how many people finished Xenogears, but despite the abridged nature of disc 2, the final boss sequence(s) = epic. Also, Earthbound.

But then... oh then we get to other things.

Final Fantasy 8

I did not give a shit about fighting Ultimecia. While the actual scenes, dungeon, and boss forms were great, the game was such a disjointed mess that I didn't care. And it's not because we never saw her--Zemus had that issue in FFIV and it was an awesome fight. But in this one ... eh. There was more going on when you go fight Adel in my opinion.

Final Fantasy 9

WHAT THE FUCK. WHO THE FUCK. WHY THE FUCK. Garland's presence almost neutered Kuja, the final dungeon--awesome as it is--has nothing to do with anything else in the game, the stakes are changed around completely a la Mass Effect 3, and to top it off, the main antagonist is replaced by some doomsday weirdo from the nothingness. And again, Zemus was sort of the same, but it actually worked there. I can see why Square would try the same thing, but they didn't make it work in these later ventures.

And the worst offender by Square of the games I actually gave a shit about from that time period...

Chrono Cross

Considering how artfully Lavos is built up in Chrono Trigger, not just as the antagonist, but as an indomitable force of nature and the catalyst for not only all the game's events, but most important moments in the time and history of that world, the way the villains were handled in Chrono Cross was especially pathetic. Bad guy is Lynx... no wait, you're Lynx. No, Lynx is your father. No, Lynx is a computer from the future of an alternate timeline brought into existence by the defeat of Lavos. No, wait, the bad guy is the dragons you've been helping (one of whom is a French jester somehow) who are actually the divided pieces of a Dragon God from a future where there was no Lavos. No, wait, it's a fragment of Lavos that's merged with a cherished character from the previous game and exists in the darkness of time, none of which has been mentioned before and you only find out about on a beach in the last five minutes of the game from the ghosts of characters from the previous game.

When the party left Terra Tower in my first playthrough, I had no idea what we were doing. It seemed like everything had been taken care of, even if nothing had any relevance to anything else.

What a fucking mess.

 

[bhamv3]

I wish Fallout 3 could've had a better final battle, either in the vanilla game or in Broken Steel.

Spoiler

Sure, the leadup is pretty awesome, but Colonel Autumn goes down so easily to an end-game character.

 

[fade]

I thought ME2 had a weenie final boss. The pattern was obvious from the beginning of the fight. And they practically came out and told you what you needed to do to keep the characters alive.

 

[Hailey Knight]

I thought ME2 had a weenie final boss. The pattern was obvious from the beginning of the fight. And they practically came out and told you what you needed to do to keep the characters alive.

Agree on the sad excuse for a final boss, disagree on the characters. In some cases they made it obvious, but others were more open-ended, and then your friendship status with those characters came into play. Also, ship upgrades determined some deaths. Not to mention, in some parts one character determined whether another died. Example from my play:

Spoiler

Tali and I were not on good terms because I took Legion's side when she and him were having a pissy match on the Normandy. I sent her into the pipes at the start of the base. She ended up dying. I thought it was because she didn't like me anymore so her morale was down, but I looked it up online later and it turned out the problem was because I made Grunt my commander for that portion, and he wasn't command material.

 

[bhamv3]

Agree on the sad excuse for a final boss, disagree on the characters. In some cases they made it obvious, but others were more open-ended, and then your friendship status with those characters came into play. Also, ship upgrades determined some deaths. Not to mention, in some parts one character determined whether another died. Example from my play:

Spoiler

Tali and I were not on good terms because I took Legion's side when she and him were having a pissy match on the Normandy. I sent her into the pipes at the start of the base. She ended up dying. I thought it was because she didn't like me anymore so her morale was down, but I looked it up online later and it turned out the problem was because I made Grunt my commander for that portion, and he wasn't command material.

I had a similar situation.

Spoiler

Lost Legion after the pipes, he took a rocket to the face, because I made Zaeed my commander. Leader of the Blue Suns can't command? Ok, sure, his stories indicate he tends to be the only one to survive his missions, but still, that's a pretty subtle clue.

 

[Frank]

Kefka pretty much craps on other Final Fantasy final bosses. Dancing Mad is one of the best final boss themes of all time as well. Well done in my opinion, though it suffers from being far to easy depending on what you accomplish before you get to him. The best kind of old school RPG boss fight is the kind where you find yourself on a teeter totter. You get points where you have to lay into the boss and feel great about it and you get points where the boss is on the cusp of just overwhelming you and you're doing everything in your power to just hold on another turn. Those were the effing best. You felt great when you won.

I'm a pretty old school gamer so I still love me some bosses and am a little bummed that so many games seem to be shying away from them now. Of course there are ways to easily make boss fights shit, like plot armour. Plot armour is one thing I completely detest in bosses. You beat this boss, only to lose the fight in a cut scene (fuck you Kai Leng).

 

[AshburnerX]

I thought Bioshock 2's final battle was disappointing compared to Bioshock.

Spoiler

Going from fighting a superpowered Fontaine to holding your position against waves of mooks? And what's worse, you have Big Sister Eleanor helping you out, and she can basically wipe out entire waves of mooks by herself.

The Bioshock 1 boss fight was really stupid. It tried to stick a traditional boss fight into a game that didn't need one, which was the only real problem System Shock 2 had too.

 

[figmentPez]

Just finished Trine 2: The Goblin Menace, and I have to say I haven't liked a single final boss in any of the Trine games. Granted, the end of Trine 2 was a huge improvement over the final level of the first game, especially over the unpatched version, but all of them are a huge departure from the pacing and style of the rest of the game that it just doesn't work. Most of the time in Trine is spent solving puzzles with little or no time pressure. The few areas of combat are relatively simple, and require little in the way of platforming or puzzle solving while in danger. The final bosses of the game throw that out the window.

The "boss" in the first game required tons of platforming, while solving puzzles, and avoiding some real BS traps that trigger out of nowhere, right on top of you. It become more twitch gaming and pattern memorization than puzzle solving. The bosses in Trine 2 and it's expansion at least got rid of the rising lava from the first game, but kept the difficult platforming under threat of death. In this state the wizard becomes nearly useless because you can't afford to stand still long enough to use his powers. The end boss of The Goblin Menace literally had me shouting "BULLSHIT!" at my computer screen because of the hit detection on the final boss. My sword could swing right through the boss's vulnerable part, but not register. Not to mention 2/3 of the way through the fight the game effectively takes away the respawn point, meaning if you lose a character after that point, they're gone for good. Most of the game is spent with fun experimentation, and then the final boss just yanks away the ability to be creative without a huge penalty for failure.

If making an end boss requires removing the fun that drives most of your game, then you've designed a very bad boss. This was true for Deus Ex: Human Revolution (though The Missing Link DLC was much better), as well.

 

[AshburnerX]

If making an end boss requires removing the fun that drives most of your game, then you've designed a very bad boss. This was true for Deus Ex: Human Revolution (though The Missing Link DLC was much better), as well.

They literally farmed those boss fights out to a different studio, which is one of the reasons they stick out so much. If it had been the same team, I fully suspect the game would have been more like the original in how it handles boss fights, like it did in The Missing Link.

 

[CynicismKills]

Good fights:

Kefka - The whole dungeon leading up to that battle gets you ready, too. Splitting the group up (and praying your weenie party doesn't get stomped), and then getting to that tower of bosses as Dancing Mad swells in the background. Kefka drops in, dressed like a God, and the real fight begins. Well, unless you taught everyone Ultima. Then it's kind of a joke. Still, the atmosphere of the dungeon and final fight is just fantastic.

Zemus/Zeromus - Another good one. The dungeon will stomp you into the ground if you're not ready (especially the extra bosses to get ultimate weapons), and Zeromus hits like a truck loaded with smaller trucks. Not to mention he's got one of the best boss themes in FF.

There's plenty of others, too. Tactics had a ton of great boss battles. Breath of Fire II's last two bosses were insanely unforgiving and challenging. I enjoyed Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3's last bosses as well.

As for bad, Final Fantasy XII goes at the top of my list. Three forms and they're all piss-easy if you've done even a handful of sidequests, and the only reason the last fight takes any time at all is the stupid Paling ability some later bosses had in the game (making them immune to physical and/or magic damage for a few minutes at a time). The ending was good, but that fight was such a letdown. I didn't even have to try, really. I'd put the second-to-last boss of XIII behind that, as it was super easy to cheese his phase changes with Poison spam. The last boss was tough, though.

 

[filmfanatic]

I still love the final battle with Bowser in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. There's just something about the epic scope of it, hurling eggs at a giant Bowser in the back ground that is slowly advancing towards you.

 

[Gilgamesh]

Dead Space did a pretty damn good job of a current gen final boss. Hive Mind is a great exercise in reaction timing and pattern recognition.

 

[figmentPez]

Final boss fights I liked, to one degree or another:

• X-Men Legends II - It's pretty fun to get all sorts of cool new superpowers for the final boss fight.
• Super Mario World - Bowser, you so wacky.
• Planescape Torment - I like that there are so many ways the conversation can play out, and combat is not always the end result.
• Left 4 Dead / L4D2 - Some of the end sequences are better than others, but overall some pretty impressive escape sequences.
• Plants Vs Zombies - pretty freaking epic standoff that requires quick and decisive action.
• Super Metroid - Freaking Hyper-Beam, and the emotional moments mid-battle!

Final boss fights that sucked:

• Metro 2033 - mostly QTEs, and really boring single button mashing at at that.
• Half Life
• Aquaria - just a confusing mess. (The game is amazing though.)