Question Of The Week [October 1st 2025]

Q: Do You Enjoy Boss Fights?

A: Boss fights are a staple of gaming ever since the earliest days of video games back on the Plato computer system in 1979 for a Dungeons and Dragons game. Since then players have been tasked with rising to the challenge of taking on a “boss” in games that usually impedes progress until they have defeated it.

I for one absolutely hate modern boss fights and rarely ever get any enjoyment out of them. It seems to stem from several different circumstances and I find myself loathing anytime I’m forced to deal with them in games now. So I’ll recount why I dislike them so much, and encourage others to ask “why do these bosses even exist?” as well.

One of the main reasons I don’t enjoy boss fights in games is because it impedes progress in the game. I play as many games as possible and making it through a game is time consuming enough as it is. When a boss fight pops up in a game, it stops progress and requires you to deal with said boss before continuing on. It’s a challenge at its most basic level, and games can and should in most cases be challenging. However, the rise of Indie gaming in the early 2010’s saw developers who were sick and tired of the hand-holdy tutorials and long hallway set pieces in gaming’s biggest blockbusters and wanted a return to the classic challenges of the early days of gaming.

“NES/Ninja Gaiden hard” became the battle cry of these games that featured a difficulty seen in the classic Nintendo games. “Tough as nails” also was a frequent way to describe exactly what the game was all about, and most games started to pull major influences from the original console games for the developer’s childhood. So games became ultra tough with boss fights making a bit of a comeback. Shovel Knight was one of the earlier big indie darling games that really tried to push difficulty in games and it succeeded as the final boss rush mode at the end was something even years later I couldn’t complete.

While difficulty in and of itself isn’t an issue, it’s when the emphasis is put solely and squarely on it and becomes the focal point, that is where I started to notice and have an issue with. But that isn’t the only reason I don’t enjoy boss encounters either.

One of the biggest factors is that I find them incredibly rote and boring. Requiring memorization of attack patterns and leaving a small window of opportunity to attack. It becomes less about skill and more about the actual pattern recognition and execution of attacking in the opening between animations. I prefer to be able to use the game’s environment and the tools and mechanics of the game to overcome obstacles in the world, as that’s the whole loop. But once a boss fight shows up, the game deviates from its entire ethos and subjects the player to an entirely new and different way of approaching how to play the game. Instead of exploring and using your arsenal to attack and move past enemies at your own pace, you are essentially locked in a room and have to change the way you think and play to defeat the enemy.

This wouldn't be such an issue if most games did stick so rigidly to the original Nintendo boss formula of 3x3. Three hits then the boss seems to get angry and change to a new phase of attack. Three more hits, then a third phase and then three final hits and the boss dies or is defeated. Challenges can be overcome and progress can continue on. It’s been this way for over 40 plus years and continues on to this day. I find it not only tedious but unintuitive, unchallenging and lazy. There is no ingenuity or creativity applied to this, it’s become a formula that is added in and seems more like a check box to be marked off rather than something that was put in because it was designed into the game.

It’s funny, because Cuphead is exactly this, it’s an entire game built around boss fights with only a handful of run and gun stages, but I think Cuphead is a special exception due to the fact that its creativity bleeds through into every facet of the game. It’s beautiful, with an extremely unique and gorgeous artstyle that really hasn’t been replicated in gaming since its release in 2017. I think that it also was designed to be challenging but ultimately fair with the allowance to use powerups and parrying to give at least a couple ways to defeat the bosses, not just the single attack window. There are always opportunities to cause damage.

While thinking about boss fights yesterday, I ended up pondering what would actually make a boss fight enjoyable for me. I recalled the fight in Batman: Arkham City against Mr. Freeze and how it didn’t require you memorizing attack patterns and was lauded as one of the best boss fights ever less than a handful of years ago. What makes Mr. Freeze's fight so good is that it requires full use of the environment and having to adapt on the fly to come up with new strategies and utilizing the powerups and abilities Batman has. It’s a game of not just cat and mouse, but also strategy that is the core of Batman’s “always prepared” ethos.

Another boss fight I did enjoy was recently with The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’s final Ganon battle. Not the one against him himself, although that was actually pretty fun, thanks to me streaming the game on Twitch with viewers cheering me on. It ended with an insane back and forth parry after parry with a single quarter of a heart left. It was intense and well fought.But what really made it memorable besides the emergent aspect was the actual finale, where Ganon turns into a dragon, and it’s a skydiving freefall in the air trying to land on top of this massive dragon in the sky and stab him with the Master Sword. The overwhelming emotional swelling accompanied by the beautiful crescendo of music makes it truly a standout memorable boss fight.

Finally, the most recent boss fight against King K.Rool in Donkey Kong Bananza was both great and utterly abysmal as I talked about it in the Editor’s Note spoiler section of the review (I added it after, since I didn’t want to spoil the fight for anyone). The first phase was fairly boring and way too long no matter what powerup you have. Featuring the same 3x3 formula. Once you beat him, the game pretends you are finished, but then interrupts with a fantastic setpiece boss battle with returning nostalgic music from the original Donkey Kong Country series, and was a perfect way to end the game. Check out my playthrough of the series, or the YouTube short I made, where you see me talking about how perfect of a boss battle and ending it is. The less said about the third phase of the fight, the better though. I’m just going to move on.

Just these three fights in different games in particular, really do evoke something deep in me that yearns for a boss fight, but not one based on memorization and just going through the motions. Instead, I want to have a crazy all out battle against overwhelmingly massive odds stacked against me, but feel powerful enough to take on the challenge without it feeling unfair. Utilizing the environment and tools and mechanics the game has given me allows me to break free of dodge & wait, and strategize to make me feel like I’m ultimately in control. The adage of “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me” is what I want to feel more often than not. Boss fights need to break the mold and do more to allow the player to feel powerful and enjoy the game. Not bang their head against the wall until they perform a task that the developers want them to satisfy. That takes the fun out of the game, and for me, gaming should be ultimately fun, not a slog of repetitive task required to be executed