I really am in two minds when it comes to videogame bosses, to a point it’s nice to have a big enemy capping of an area, and it’s kind of fun to have something to work towards, but in the end more often than not it ends up being more of a negative than a plus for me personally, they are often one of the reasons that I end up reading more books than playing video games. There are so many things that can be done wrong with boss battles, and it’s annoying having to change the difficulty of the whole game, just because the bosses are annoying.

One funny thing about boss battles is that it’s very depending on the game, and what I hate about them in one game is what I love about them in another one. In RPGs I absolutely hate gimmick bosses, the ones that can only be hurt by doing some specific thing, or are especially strong to one type of character or the like, much of this is how much work it is to retool your whole team to the one thing that the developers wanted to do, and if you’re me you’re really bad at working out what they wanted and more likely than not that’s the end of that game for me.

For platformers however the gimmick bosses are the ones that are the most fun, probably because iterating solutions are a lot easier in a platformer, and ususally they are pretty quickly beat when you find the trick that they need.

In both cases though the bullet sponge bosses and the dragged out ones are the worst, while I can keep up dodging and going through a pattern for 10-15 minutes, after that it’s not fun any more, even more if you don’t have things like life bars, so you don’t even know how far you are along you just keep on pushing that stone up the mountain and hope that some time you’ll finally get it to rest somewhere else than down at the bottom.

It’s such a weird thing though, because a good boss can be really exhilerating, finally getting through this tough challenge, but that’s only if you actaully manage to push through it. More often than not, a bossfight is what will just make me have to abandon a game, which is annoying, yes, make it a bit more challenging than the base game, make it something flashy and huge, something fun, but so many seem to just push up the difficulty into something that is a game ender for me, which is a bit sad, because there are some games that I really would have loved to give some more time, I’m just not able to step up to the challenge that they give.

But that might just be because I’m not really that great at video games :p