When I first tried my hand at running a D&D game, I had a tendency to make up my own monsters instead of using the ones from the monster manual. I think I was actually pretty good at giving them interesting abilities, but I had a tendency to give the bosses too many hit points. The battles just dragged on and became boring. I remember one particularly long battle against a giant bug, where I realized my players were getting antsy, so I halved the monster’s hit points mid-battle. I don’t think they caught on, but I certainly learned a lesson.
Video games, on the other hand, don’t care if you get bored. It’s one thing if a boss battle is interesting, and has lots of different puzzle-type aspects, but even then I wouldn’t want it to take more than ten minutes. It’s even worse if the battle is really difficult, far from a save point, or has an unskippable cut scene you have to watch before each attempt. Endurance tests are flat-out boring. If you see everything there is to see in the first three minutes, but the battle still continues for twenty, that’s just dull. It’s also a cheap way to add fake difficulty.
Final Fantasy VII had a couple of optional boss battles that were just long for the sake of long. Emerald Weapon was especially boring. The fight had a 20 minute time limit, and you really were in greater danger of running out of time than getting killed. One of the preferred methods for winning is to spam “Knights of the Round”, a powerful summon that unfortunately has a very long animation. I can forgive FFVII since they were optional, though.
The Metroid series has some good examples bosses battles that overstay their welcome, but it also has some examples of bosses done right. I think the problem is that programmers associate Metroid with the original 8-bit game, so they think, “Oh, only hardcore Nintendo fans love this series, we have to make sure the boss battles are as Nintendo Hard as possible!” The problem with this logic is that, for the most part, older games were difficult because otherwise they’d be too short. And while as kids we loved bragging about the games we’d beaten, we also despised the frustration of games that expected godlike reflexes (I’m looking at you, Ninja Gaiden). I hear people my age wax nostalgic about how stupidly difficult the hoverbike level was in Battletoads, but I’ve never heard any of us say, “Hey, let’s dig it out and play it again now!” Because while they are fond memories, the level simply isn’t fun.
I have no doubt that Metroid fans enjoy a good challenge, but at the same time, GameFAQs is full of posts complaining about the length of certain boss fights. So I know I’m not the only one. I’ve put off finishing “Samus Returns” on 3DS because I’ve seen the final boss fight. It looks dreadfully long.
Bottom line, some programmers need to learn the difference between challenging and tedious. There’s more to a memorable boss fight than a big bag of hit points.
Rant over.
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