My Favorite Boss Encounters

Niku
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My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Niku » Fri Dec 18, 2020 10:43 pm



The Mantis Lords - Hollow Knight (2017)

There are three more or less mandatory, linear items to pick up when you begin a game of Hollow Knight before the world really opens up. By beating the first boss in the first area, you'll get your first magic spell which will let you blast your way into the next area, where you have a pretty good "fighting someone of your size and skill set" type fight to get the dash that lets you open up a few more pathways. This leads you to the Fungal Wastes; overgrown caverns covered in mushrooms but lacking what seems to be much civilization compared to the Forgotten Crossroads or Greenpath. As you make your way down through the Fungal Wastes though, you begin to see signs of village life; more ornately tribal than the remnants of society that you've come across up until then.

And then you encounter the mantises and the mantis youths; they're tall, slender, nimble, and deadly in a way that most enemies have decidedly not been up until then. Hollow Knight enemies seem kinda rounded and bumbly and cute even when they can mess you up, but the mantises are as dangerous as their spike-laden village located at the bottom of the Wastes. It's not hard to get into a rhythm fighting the flying youths or the dashing warriors, but by this point you're probably far from a bench and wondering how deep the village goes.

Luckily, you get the third item: the mantis claw, your Mega Man X-esque wall jump, and now you can explore almost the entire map if you're driven or clever enough to do so. The world's your oyster.

But Mantis Village continues downward, and eventually you find yourself in the clear boss arena. Three Mantis Lords sit on thrones in the background. They do not attack.

Unlike the doors-slamming-shut chaos of most boss battles thrusting you into them whether you're ready or not, they simply sit and watch you until you follow the prompt in the center of the room that bids you to Challenge, and you draw your nail.

One of the three stands up and decides to fucking end you.

The mantises have easily been the biggest threat up to this point in the game, but if you've honed your skill with the downward slashing "pogo" jump you're probably in a good place to take out the garbage by now. The Mantis Lord is much faster than the regular mantises. She will ruin your five hit points without seeming to have any time to heal. The music is swelling, and if it's your first time, and you're here at the right time, the Mantis Lord will probably end you right then and there.

A friendly bug you may or may have not met at this point, Quirrel, is waiting for you when you respawn. He recommends you explore a bit, maybe go get your first weapon upgrade.

You don't. You go back to challenge the Mantis Lord again. And very quickly, you realize that the boss is overwhelming you with a very simple basket of tricks; at your default damage level, it takes something like 40 hits to win the battle while you can only take five unless you find places to heal. But essentially, the Lord has three moves; she will cling to the wall and throw a massive projectile that boomerangs back, she will start on one side of the arena and dash to the other along the ground, or she will appear directly above you and slam down into the ground (at just enough of an angle to catch you off guard if you're not careful). She can cling high or low, and the projectile will thus either start low and go high or vice versa. She can start on the left or the right for the dash. And she will always appear right above you from the air. The order is random, and still very quick, but you probably figure out that the wall-cling leaves a decent amount of time to heal a pip or two of damage when you stand in the safe spots from the projectile. So you learn it; 40 hits.

It's the most interesting and fast paced boss battle in the game up to this point, even accounting for the slightly less predictable Hornet in Greenpath, but what really comes through is just how learnable the patterns are. And soon you're in the rhythm. She drops, you dash, you turn, you slash. She lunges, and you pogo off of her balletically to land a hit -- and land another as you hit the ground if you're positioning right. The projectile becomes the opportunity to hit her once, twice, three times or to heal for any flubs you've made. Sure, it's faster and easier if you listened to Quirrel and went off to the City of Tears to get your first nail upgrade, or you come back with more health later, but this fight against the Mantis Lord is what teaches you what Hollow Knight is as a game; absolutely perfect pattern recognition, against beautifully animated enemies, set against an incredible soundtrack. By the time you beat the Mantis Lord, it's likely you haven't even gotten hit a single time in that attempt.

And maybe you forgot that the other two were watching the entire time, right up until they stand up as their sister falls.

And now you get to fight the other two simultaneously.

It's the exact same patterns, but there's never a guarantee they're going to be doing them in a nice, neat order. They'll dash at the same time and you'll pogo off both of them at once and feel amazing; or maybe you'll try to pogo the dashing one, and send yourself straight up into her sister's spear as she materializes above you for the slam. You'll misjudge the lazy arc of their massive projectile when it's coming from both sides, and the "safe" floor now has a lunging mantis sliding across it.

The Mantis Lords is the apex, perfect boss battle in Hollow Knight. It's a game with a ton of great boss fights; Nightmare King Grimm easily could have gotten this write up instead, if he wasn't the culmination of a late game DLC that expects you to have tons of skill and power ups by that point. Mantis Lords is beautiful because it comes at a time when you have the absolute bare minimum to fight them with, and beating them right then and there is the right thing to do. The fastest, most nimble boss up until that point is also the best telegraphed, to make you feel like an absolute wizard for nailing it and then to immediately force you to do it in double-time as you fight two of the same boss simultaneously before you can finally claim victory. Taking out one of the dual sisters means you're back to the beginning of the fight; a natural cooldown period, where you're only fighting one again, with only a few hits left.

You win, and the sisters show their respect by letting you continue on to the west. If you go back up through the village, the mantises no longer attack; they bow to you instead. And they damn well should.

The final DLC in Hollow Knight added a boss rush. It has a couple of new bosses in it; it's something to do when you've got nothing else left in the game, but it's my least favorite part of the whole package overall with a single exception. It does give you something you've been wanting since the very first trip to the bottom of Mantis Village.

You reach the Mantis Lords in the Pantheon of Hollownest, and the rhythm of the fight feels like a well-worn glove now. You're much stronger, with more tricks at your disposal, so the single Mantis Lord slips into muscle memory and is over even more quickly than it ever has been before. The Lord teleports back to her throne, and her sisters stand as they always do.

Then the injured lord stands as well.

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Thad
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Thad » Sat Dec 19, 2020 8:55 pm

Mr. Freeze in Arkham City -- there are various ways to interact with the terrain and stun him so you can attack him. Whatever technique you use, it won't work a second time.

Last boss in the original New Super Mario Bros. -- you have to fight Bowser and Junior at the same time.

Last boss in Wind Waker -- a two-on-one battle where you take on Ganon with help from Zelda.

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Niku » Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:14 am



Rom, the Vacuous Spider - Bloodborne (2015)

Good Hunter. You have spent hours at this point slaying all manner of beasts. Ravenous, blood-starved things with sickness in their claws, those that would be pious yet if only their bones had not twisted, and men who may only be soothed a moment by the memory of music from long ago. The hunt in Yharnam is a brutal thing, where assistance is fleeting and the Doll's embrace comes quickly. But you know your purpose.

I think I spent more time playing through the opening streets of Yharnam than I did the entire rest of Bloodborne; it was and is the only FromSoft game in their loosely connected catalogue that I've spent any time with, and I hadn't exactly pored over how things worked in Demon's or Dark Souls prior. I just knew they were supposed to be good, hard, and Bloodborne was a fresh way in. I learned later that much of what was causing me problems was not having yet found my playstyle -- though I ended up getting through the Blood-Starved Beast in that initial playthrough I believe, that was where I more or less wandered away.

When I came back, it seemed prudent to start from scratch. The streets of Yharnam were no longer the roadblock they had been at the very beginning, and the Cleric Beast fell much, much quicker. It turned out that the Threaded Cane was my weapon, not the Saw Cleaver as I'd started out with the first time around. And so I began to actually make progress, real progress, at a fairly good clip.

But the thing about FromSoft games is that it's not just the combat that pushes back against you; it's the world, it's the lore. Understanding what is going on is just as difficult to grasp as any enemy that's stronger or faster than what has come before. And in Yharnam, that opacity is entirely the point. There are things that are simply not meant to be seen with human eyes, and there are those who hold the veil in place. Perhaps if only you had enough eyes, you too may see. Or perhaps to realize that there is far more than a sickness of the blood crumbling the world around you, you need to go eye-for-an-eye, until the whole world is blind enough to see.

There is no fog gate here; there is just the long stretch of brick stretching out from Byrgenwerth College, where they studied the cosmic phenomenon pressing down upon the world, and the ocean beneath it. You dive into the waters below, and then stand on their underside.

Rom sits there, not paying you any mind. Once a scholar, now transformed into a massive lump of eyes and glowing particulates and little else, the monster has no interest or curiosity in things that find her. She just is, sitting there, knowing what the world is and keeping the Red Moon at bay. She's surrounded by smaller Kin that resemble herself, but with enlongated limbs that are neither quite arachnid nor cephalopod for the way they skitter and stretch.

Rom sometimes feels like a "feast or famine" kind of fight, one where you either overtake it without trouble or one where you try again and again and again to claim victory. The mechanics themselves are simple, but the sheer number of tiny spiders combined with the attacks can sometimes line up very poorly. It begins with nonhostility; while the small spiders will leap and attack at you, Rom herself will do nothing but retreat whenever you approach. She is a massive target, but she does scurry quick enough that you have to hit her more vulnerable midsection rather than attacking her multi-faceted head; something that follows through on the multitude of adds around her you need to be struck from the side or the back rather than head-on. But once you do get in some damage, eventually the former scholar teleports away to another part of the endless sea on which you stand, and begins to launch a salvo of magical attacks. Missiles from the sky when you're far, shockwave blasts when you're near. Do even more damage, and in her desperation as the end draws near she'll begin to flail and roll wildly to try to keep you away from her.

It's hard to tell if Rom truly is vacuous until the moments she realizes that she's under threat, and harder to tell if she's defending her own life or defending the knowledge she's keeping at bay.

What makes Rom such a memorable boss fight in a game full of them is not the mechanical depth or the white-knuckle back and forth parrying required in some of the more memorable battles, but how everything before, during, and after Rom manages to inform the story of the Bloodborne. Even if you've been happily meandering around not trying to piece things together, reaching Byrgenwerth feels different than many of the other areas you've seen up until that point, and diving into the ocean into another world entirely is unlike the start to any other boss battle you've faced. Rom itself is a monster unlike anything you've experienced, the first Kin you've encountered. And when your prey is slaughtered, the nightmare truly begins.

Rom did know more than anyone else, and was keeping the Red Moon at bay. Once it unfurls in full, the world itself transforms. Massive eldritch horrors now hang from the sky where there was nothing before, beasts grow even more feral and deadly in their attacks, and it becomes inescapably clear that you're not in gothic werewolf London anymore; you're in Lovecraft country. The entire feeling and plot of the game transform once you defeat Rom, peeling back the layers of what was already there in a way that no one can ignore even if you've refused to read a single bit of item text or engage with any of the cryptic NPCs. Every boss in Bloodborne grants Insight, but Rom does so beyond the mechanics of the game.

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby beatbandito » Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:38 am

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Friday » Sun Dec 20, 2020 12:43 pm

It should also be noted, that just like every other Elder God/Lovecraft boss in the game, Rom is not hostile to the player on first encounter.

The old gods are specifically said to be not just indifferent, but actually sympathetic to humanity, after all.

The only exception to this rule is Moon Presence, which for me puts to bed the question of "Is the Hunt being perpetuated for humanities benefit?"

No. It is not.
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Metal Slime » Sun Dec 20, 2020 5:32 pm

It might not mechanically be the greatest fight in Zelda games, but one of the top boss fights ever in terms of presentation for me has been Ganon from OoT. By having the details of his model be obscured by shadow for most of the fight except for lightning flashes and certain sequences, it goes a long way towards making Ganon look more imposing and menacing even if his moveset is just swinging swords around. This is usually a decision that doesn't get used much in multimedia outside of horror since if someone makes a cool creature design, they want to be able to show it off as much as they can.

This doesn't apply to the 3DS version of OoT where they somehow missed the point and chose to have Ganon's form fully illuminated through the entire fight.


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Thad
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Thad » Mon Dec 21, 2020 10:03 am

I think it makes for an interesting bit of continuity with the Ganon fights in the original game and LttP, too; shadow was kind of Ganon's thing. (I still love in LttP when he refers to turning out the lights as a "secret technique of darkness".)

LttP had some great boss fights. The Moldorm, Agahnim, and the Water Temple boss who you have to pull bits off with the Hookshot all come to mind.

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Mothra » Tue Dec 22, 2020 1:51 am



Probably one of the easiest single bosses in the game, but I love this thing's entrance.



Again, easy enough, just had a cool entrance. I also love how the Doom Slayer has a portal right there and walks away from it, just for the sake of the fight.




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Thad
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 22, 2020 2:36 pm

All the Super Metroid bosses are pretty memorable. I guess I can single out Kraid for being the biggest spectacle even if he was the least interesting fight. Being able to electrocute Draygon was a nice detail, too.

Mother Brain deserves more credit as a cinematic than a boss fight.

The Mother Brain fight from the original Metroid, largely reproduced in Super Metroid, deserves a shoutout for being so damn interesting. Hell, the Metroids themselves may not be bosses but they're memorable AF. My wife, who is not much of a gamer, was playing Smash online with our nephew the other day and I heard her shout from the living room "THAD WHAT THE HELL IS ON ME?"

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Friday » Tue Dec 22, 2020 3:54 pm

"It's an energy sucking bio-engineered jellyfish made by an ancient extinct race to counteract a mutagenic lifeform-mimicking virus honey, don't worry, your character will eventually be infused with its DNA and be able to consume the virus themselves!"

"Thad why are all these construction robots going insane?!"

"Honey I don't have time to give you the whole history but suffice it to say that a girly robot is going to be very upset about killing his girlfriend!"
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 22, 2020 4:51 pm

Look, I'm not going to explain why I sometimes shout "WHATAMIFIGHTINGFOOOOOOR", I'm just going to do it.

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby zaratustra » Thu Dec 24, 2020 7:45 pm

HAVE WE SERIOUSLY GONE THIS FAR WITHOUT BRINGING UP SEVEN FORCE YET

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Friday » Fri Dec 25, 2020 2:45 pm

My one regret from ek3 is not including Seven Force in the boss rush
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Niku » Sun Jan 31, 2021 1:42 pm



Sigma - Mega Man X (1993)

Wily had gotten predictable, despite the fact that every game had a tendency to do something new. The Wily Machine was just how every game in the series ended, and it didn't really matter if it did cool shit like the alien fight at the end of MM2 or the giant needle stomper form MM3 or "he's Russian this time" from MM4; somehow, the youth of the late eighties and early nineties got bored of massive mechanized mortality mashers festooned with bitchin' skulls. This is of course part 1 of the greater "everyone is wrong about Mega Man games all the time" discourse. Wily fuckin' rules and it doesn't matter that he shows up ten times in a row to kick in a little robot boy's shit and in fact that is part of why he fuckin' rules.

But by the time Mega Man X came out, regardless of personal feelings on the matter, the series was "boring" and "samey" and "long in the tooth" and "nobody cares about Dr. Wily AGAIN".

Friendship died with Tetsuwan Atom, now Cyperpunk OVAs are my best friend.

Mega Man X was just goddamn cool when it came out. It was one of the most THIS AIN'T YOUR KIDDIE NES BULLSHIT evolutions of a franchise I can think of from the era; it was faster, deeper, more ~mature~, and it genuinely elevated a lot of the skills and sensibilities from the original series in really smart ways. The level of detail (the effect beating levels in different orders could have, the special animations the bosses pulled out for certain weapon hits, the melodramatic story scenes) was beyond anything that they managed with the pantomimed actions and re-used sprites on the NES. People still debate whether or not Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World is the better game, but I don't know anyone who argues that Mega Man 5 is a better game than Mega Man X. The Mega Man games were challenging platforming and cool, unique bosses, and the X series elevated both of those core elements at a time when it was needed most.

Robot animals replaced themed men, but men weren't done being mega quite yet; even if they had become Reploids and Mavericks, there were still human-esque robots to ally with and fight against. While the Boba Fett rip-off Vile was an early contender for Coolest Thing To Ever Exist In Any Timeline, he wasn't the big bad; that was reserved for X's own Colonel Kurtz, Sigma. Sigma, who would become increasingly tired and increasingly stupid (both in-game and out), who would embody every terrible thing about Wily with none of the 60s Mad Scientist charm by the time the X series petered out, was Fucking Cool.



First of all, he teleports in and forces you to fight Velguarder who is a purple metal wolf. All the other bosses are various forms of anthropomorphic animals who are also robots, but not Vel. Vel's just a goddamn wolf, making it fairly unique among the other boss fights in the game if only because his hitbox is a much lower and leaner thing. His patterns aren't too tough, but they are fast, which is a theme; the final boss fight against Sigma is a three phase ordeal, each of which has its own very learnable and exploitable patterns but which will require you to learn them and stack them one on top of the other (provided you're not exploiting having full four e-tanks, anyway). As if Sigma siccing his robot dog that doesn't shoot bees out of his mouth when he barks wasn't baller enough, when you screw the pooch the big man himself comes down all over again.

And then he pulls out a fucking lightsaber.

You know, just in case the "Vile as Boba Fett" thing was actually TOO subtle for you.

Sigma's middle form is probably my least favorite just because he mostly only bounces around the room, but he does touch a little bit on the best sorts of boss fights, the "you're fighting someone with a similar skill set and size as you" encounters. Sigma is bigger and bulkier than X, and has a melee weapon rather than a buster, but most of this portion of the fight is him dashing around and bouncing off of the walls: two of the unique skills added to X that good old Mega Man never got to use. And once you finish him off, he blows up real good leaving only his decapitated head behind.

Which he then merges with the giant piece of machinery that has been lurking in the background the entire time, which is also a giant purple wolf mecha. This is your usual "lots of screen covering attacks and needing to stand in unusual places to fight" sort of screen filling boss, and it's tough but fair with the tells from his attacks and giving you time to attack while also forcing you to not just leap up to the top of the screen and camp out on one of the mech's spinning hands. More importantly, like most of Mega Man X, it's just fucking cool.

Mega Man X is an incredibly intelligently designed game, a work of love from top to bottom, but more than anything else it exists to be cool. And if you're gonna be that cool, then your final boss battle better be cool too. At a time where Dr. Wily had never been more lame (Mr. X, coming soon!), Sigma was just really goddamn cool.

this would end immediately with the release of mega man x 2.
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Thad » Sun Jan 31, 2021 5:53 pm

Niku wrote:Wily had gotten predictable, despite the fact that every game had a tendency to do something new. The Wily Machine was just how every game in the series ended, and it didn't really matter if it did cool shit like the alien fight at the end of MM2 or the giant needle stomper form MM3 or "he's Russian this time" from MM4; somehow, the youth of the late eighties and early nineties got bored of massive mechanized mortality mashers festooned with bitchin' skulls. This is of course part 1 of the greater "everyone is wrong about Mega Man games all the time" discourse. Wily fuckin' rules and it doesn't matter that he shows up ten times in a row to kick in a little robot boy's shit and in fact that is part of why he fuckin' rules.

But by the time Mega Man X came out, regardless of personal feelings on the matter, the series was "boring" and "samey" and "long in the tooth" and "nobody cares about Dr. Wily AGAIN".


The problem wasn't that it was Dr. Wily every single time, it was that 3-6 kept trying to act like it wasn't Dr. Wily even though it was obviously Dr. Wily, and it got a little silly by the time everyone was like "Who is this mysterious new villain who's trying to take over the world with 8 Robot Masters?" when it's clearly Dr. Wily wearing a fake beard. And I dunno, maybe the goal was to play all this for laughs, maybe every character's comical obliviousness to the very very obvious was supposed to be funny, but if that's the case nobody seems to have bothered explaining it to the localization team. Or the US marketing and licensing departments, who clearly never got the memo that Protoman wasn't actually a bad guy.

Also Dr. Wily's final form in Mega Man 4 isn't bad in itself (not as good as in 2 or 3, but not bad), but reusing it in every single subsequent game* does not feel like a fun bit of continuity, it feels boring, repetitive, and lacking in creativity -- exactly the criticism usually leveled at later Mega Man games in general.

* At least, it's the same in 4-9, the arcade games, and Mega Man and Bass. I never finished 10 or played 11; if they finally changed things up, then good.

Niku wrote:His patterns aren't too tough, but they are fast, which is a theme; the final boss fight against Sigma is a three phase ordeal, each of which has its own very learnable and exploitable patterns but which will require you to learn them and stack them one on top of the other (provided you're not exploiting having full four e-tanks, anyway).

Or Hadoukens.

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Friday » Sun Jan 31, 2021 7:08 pm

Beating X1 Sigma (all three phases/forms) without using E-tanks or Hadouken still remains a pretty difficult challenge. They're not the best designed bosses mechanically, but they're no slouch. I appreciate a game that has actual boss fights with actual mechanics.
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby zaratustra » Sun Jan 31, 2021 7:33 pm

Ok listen:

every single boss in yoshi's island

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Niku » Sun Jan 31, 2021 7:40 pm

this guy gets it
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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby Thad » Mon Feb 01, 2021 12:16 pm

Yeah, I'll give a particular shout-out to the frog boss but they're all great.

At least, as far as I've gotten. I've never finished it.

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Re: My Favorite Boss Encounters

Postby nosimpleway » Mon Feb 01, 2021 2:02 pm

That's a shame, Raphael the Raven is correctly considered the high point

get it

because you fight him on the moon

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