Chadius: Action Games Boss Battles: Keep it interesting!

By Chad Serrant 12/30/04

Megaman X8 has no Good Boss Battles

I played through Megaman X8 for the PS2. So how was it?

In a word, dissapointing. MMX8 was a really generic action game. The stages in Megaman games have ranged from gimmicky to bland to annoying (except for Megaman X [1, which was all good, I can't explain why.]) The boss fights are where the real meat is found. Games can have really crappy and boring stages as long as the boss fights are entertaining. And Megaman games (the early ones, at least) have some of the most exciting and intense boss fights around.

MMX8, however, has incredibly bland boss battles that don't test skill but test patience. The bosses rely on either easy-to-see patterns or cheap hits that you can't anticipate that deal a lot of damage. Without exciting boss battles, the game quickly falls apart.

An action game relies on its boss battles to keep things interesting for the player. I'll say it again: the key to boss battles is making things interesting for the player. The boss battles represent the zenith of action and platform game design. If the boss battles become uninteresting, this indicates a weakness in the game design itself, and the game suffers.

Here are three interesting ideas on creating a good boss:

• Bosses have to pose a threat.
• Bosses have to give a fair chance.
• There should be optimal ways to deal damage.

I think these three rules are necessary in making good boss fights. I'll be using examples from several games to illustrate my point.

Bosses have to pose a threat

Bosses have to be challenging. Bosses must present some reason for being called a boss. The bosses in Megaman Zero are very difficult. Most bosses can kill Zero in three or four hits. Viewtiful Joe's bosses are no slouches either and are punishing on higher difficulties.

Boss fights should represent the final hurdle in a stage. It should be the final test that you have to go through before the game allows you into the next stage.

One thing you need to avoid is the player waiting around for the boss to become vulnerable. Megaman X8 suffered heavily from this problem. When reduced to about 1/3 life, the bosses become COMPLETELY invincible and perform a "super" attack. And by "super," I mean incredibly easy to dodge. Burn Rooster, for example, flies to the center of the arena and then covers one side of the arena with fire. You can just jump over him. And do nothing. Even though you're in no danger of getting hurt, you can't do anything to him. So you just sit there, waiting for him to finish.

This has led me to one rule about boss fights: the only reason the player should not be attacking the boss is because it increases the chance of getting hit. If the player is perfectly safe and is not attacking, the player is bored.

Now, this doesn't mean the player should be constantly attacking if the boss isn't attacking. Take Hulk Davidson from Viewtiful Joe. He carries a huge axe, and he likes to swing low. Joe dodges this and can hit Hulk as he recovers from the swing. After about two hits, Hulk will use his axe to block additional hits. If the axe is hit too many times, it breaks. When Hulk loses his axe, he begins firing homing missiles and dropping napalm while he waits for another axe. These new attacks are very hard to avoid, compared to the predictable axe swing.

Fighting Hulk without the axe is a lot harder than with the axe. The moral of the story is: don't break it. Only patiently and slowly, and you'll never break it. Higher difficulties stress the need to avoid breaking the axe, since Hulk fires more missiles and can take more hits. Risking its destruction would be folly.

This is a tricky way to convince the player to not attack. Attacking will significantly increases the chance of getting hit.

Bosses have to give a fair chance

On the flip side, bosses have to be fair. What I mean by this is that they cannot rely on "cheap" hits. If the player was injured, the player needs to feel it was his fault. The player should never feel that the game used an unavoidable attack; there must be a way to avoid damage.

You can go through Megaman Zero without being hit if you simply pay attention to what the boss is doing. Maha Ganeshariff is a boss that has a few attacks that seem impossible to dodge.

Here's one of them. He attaches himself to the ceiling and swings around like a pendulum. The only safe spot is the corner. He finishes the move by letting go and swinging into the corner. There is a very tiny gap from where he falls and before he lands where you can dash through. Discovering this dodge takes a few tries. But then you figure it out and he never hits you with that attack again -- unless you're not paying attention.

Most of the bosses in these games have a handful of attacks that at first seem difficult to avoid but some trick that makes the attack much easier to avoid. If the boss does this, the player will be interested to find the counter to each attack. And that is exactly what a boss should be: interesting.

There should be optimal ways to deal damage

A big issue with Sonic Adventure was that you could only hit a boss once at a time. You had to WAIT for the boss to do his one move that made him vulnerable, and then you could hit him -- ONCE. This is fine, but to make boss battles really interesting, you need to give the player multiple ways to deal damage. Let the player discover the maximum amount of damage they can deal without getting hit.

In Megaman Zero, for example, Zero's Z-Saber has two basic types of attacks. The first attack is Zero's 3-hit combo. The first hit is weak, but the following two are much stronger, and all hits will affect the boss (despite the "invincibility" glow.) The problem is Zero needs all three hits to land for the attack to be effective, and the boss usually isn't standing still while Zero does this.

The second alternative is to charge up the saber and release it on the boss. It deals a lot of damage, although not as much as the 3-hit combo. Also, it hits immediately, giving Zero plenty of time to run away from the boss.

So the dilemma becomes: should Zero charge up for a quick hit-and-run, or should he wait for the boss to be super-vulnerable so he can do a 3-hit combo? The player needs to decide in advance on which strategy should be used. The answer is not always clear, which keeps the player (all with me now) INTERESTED in experimenting with the boss.

Viewtiful Joe had more experimentation. Bosses were always vulnerable, but sometimes their defense would drop when they tired out or where dizzy. The key was to figure out when the best time was to hit the boss. Is it better to get a few quick hits here and there, or is it better to concentrate and pay attention for the big moment when the boss is a sitting duck?

Case Study

Here are some interesting boss fights that highlight the various points about boss fights. Most importantly, they are INTERESTING.

Viewtiful Joe: Fire Leo

Fire Leo is a very interesting boss, to say the least. He is the boss of the stage that consists solely of boss battles. Since you had to be at the top of your fighting form to even reach him, you knew the battle was going to be intense. He's so hot, you can't even touch him.

No really, you can't touch him. Since he's about 8 trillion degrees, and his hair is raw flame, Joe takes a ton of damage just for touching him. Step 1 is figuring out how to get his flame off. Especially while he's spitting fireballs everywhere.

Fire Leo runs around the arena, dropping lava rocks wherever he goes. When he stops, he begins spitting fireballs across the arena. Joe cannot automatically dodge them in slow-mo, either. Basically, the player throws a lot of lives away experimenting on the "invincible" boss. Luckily, the player has fought the previous five bosses and knows that the developers must have made a simple solution to dealing with that fire. After all, the previous bosses had a trick to beating them - some skill that needed to be used.

Well, after many, many, MANY tries, the player figures out the trick, using a little-known property of Mach Speed. When Joe uses Mach Speed on the rocks Fire Leo drops, Joe bursts aflame! Fireballs pass through Joe without leaving a mark! "Hmmm," the player wonders, "I wonder if I'm immune to Fire Leo's heat now?"

It works! Hitting Fire Leo knocks the flames off of him, and he stops spitting out fireballs. He begins attacking high and low, standard issue stuff. After you break his shield though, Leo begins the Whirlwind of Despair. He spins like a tornado, attacking high and low with extra speed and extra damage.

To defeat Fire Leo's whirlwind, Joe must dodge one set of five attacks. He must actively dodge the attacks, and not simply run away. Only after five whiffs will Fire Leo become dizzy, giving Joe his moment to connect and deal major damage. Fire Leo recovers and jumps into the lava pool to ignite himself and grab another shield.

The player knows the strategy; now the game demands a flawless performance. Fire Leo has so much life that there is no room for mistakes. Also when Fire Leo is weak he speeds up considerably, reducing the room for error even further.

As challenging as it is now, the fight is even harder on Ultra-V rated mode. Without skull markers telling you which way Fire Leo is attacking, it seems impossible to avoid the Whirlwind of Despair. But the resourceful player (who IS playing on Ultra-V rated mode) knows a few tricks. Slow-mo shows Fire Leo aiming right before he does it. Fire Leo also makes two different grunts to signify high or low attacks. These tiny details give players the edge they need to outlast Fire Leo. The developers could have easily ignored these details. But this would have made the boss unreasonably difficult.

My friend found an alternate method to hitting Fire Leo that ignored dodging altogether. He jumped to the top of the whirlwind and punched Fire Leo in Slow-mo while slowly falling. While each punch did minimal damage, it did add up to even more damage than the "standard" method. The game allowed the player to find high damage attacks -- as long as the player was willing to experiment.

Megaman X: Vile

In the first stage of Megaman X, X bumps into a bounty hunter (who looks a lot like Boba Fett) on top of an armored mech. What makes this fight interesting is that the player will LOSE. Despite this glaring issue, the programmers put in enough juicy tidbits that allow players to juice all they can out of the fight.

First of all, players do not initially know they are supposed to lose the fight. Vile gives several indicators that suggest he is beatable. When he is shot, the mech lights up and recoils slightly. The player can actively push him backwards. He's not actually taking damage, but the player doesn't know.

Second of all, Vile has some attacks that can be dodged. Vile starts off by charging at you if you're too far away (that can't be dodged, sadly.) When he returns, he runs right up to you and does a very fast punch. He keeps this up for about 10 punches before he charges again. The punch is incredibly fast, but if you learn the correct timing, you can jump over it indefinetly. The timing is very tight, but it can still be done. Expert players get to tinker around and see how long they can stall their inevitable demise.

Finally, the player can cheat the scripting engine. Since the boss is unbeatable, the game doesn't want to kill the player. When X is weak, Vile jumps back and fires a paralysis shot that is supposed to stun X. Once X is stunned, Vile can capture him and the fight will end. Unless the player is crafty enough to sneak up to Vile, run under the paralysis shot and touch Vile directly, which will kill X. So when the game tries to take mercy on the player, the player can spit in its face and die in glory. Of course, the game will not continue until Vile captures X, but it's fun to play around with the invincible boss.

Even when a boss can't be beaten, the developers can still add enough to make the losing fight interesting.

Megaman Zero 2: Phoenix Magnion

Many of the bosses in the Megaman series are blind attackers. That is, they attack with their set of three to five attacks, not caring about what the player is doing, until either the boss dies or the player dies. Phoenix Magnion (PM) is different. But still interesting.

PM floats in midair. And floats. And floats some more. PM doesn't make a move until you attack first. At first, the player sits there, waiting for PM to attack. Every minute or so the room erupts and the player has to dodge the lava spurts. PM is immune to the lava, so he has the upper hand. When the player finally attacks, PM teleports out of the way and counter attacks. The key is to counter PM when he counters.

He can be hit out of all but one of his counters, but some are harder to avoid than others. This challenges the player into maximizing damage but trying to counter everything.

Firedash: PM runs off screen, lights himself ablaze and charges across the screen, climbing and falling to match Zero's height. The easiest way to avoid the attack is to run and climb up the wall. But the much more risky method is to perform a well-timed dash jump up and over him. The riskiest method is to make such a tight jump that you can hit him with your saber before you land. Is this crazy plan worth the risk? Let the player decide!

Mirage Attack: Four images of PM surround Zero. They all try to tail whip him before disapating. To dodge the attack, Zero must perform a well-timed jump that will keep him above the tails. To squeeze in that extra hit, though, Zero will have to guess which image is the real one. A charged buster shot can hit two of them, and Zero should have just enough time to slash a third one, giving him a 75% chance of hitting PM. Actually, if you look carefully, you can tell which one is the real one and hit him right away (PM still attacks, though.)

Grab (non-crispy version): PM will swoop down and try to grab Zero. With fast reactions Zero can smack him out of it. For the occasional times Zero screws up, PM summons the souls of Zero's old enemies. Sigma, Byte, Vile, and the Colonel attack Zero. Goody! Fan service!

Some shooting thingie I never pay attention to: I usually smack him out of it. The easiest of attacks to counter.

Grab (Extra-crispy version): Only if you're doing really well in the game will PM try this. He turns bright orange and will teleport around the arena, trying to grab you. This grab hurts A LOT and PM is completely invincible. The damage this attack deals ensures that the player is active and is trying to avoid the attack (unlike another fire-based bird boss, who shall remain nameless.) Good! Keep the player interested!

The only time a player shouldn't attack is when he feels seriously threatened.

The player is always active during this boss battle. The player is either baiting, dodging, or attacking PM throughout the fight. This keeps the player (geez, how many times do I have to say it) INTERESTED during the boss battle.