It may not have been the first game to feature it, but ever since the screen stopped scrolling on R-Type with a massive enemy filling your view, the Boss Battle has been a staple part of many games. I don’t know which game has the honour of introducing the concept of the Boss, but R-Type is certainly a memorable one and also illustrates what I feel is a generally “fair” Boss encounter, that being one where the difficulty level of the Boss is in keeping with the difficulty of the rest of the level leading up to that encounter.

Pretty much any action game you care to mention will contain a Boss encounter at some point, generally in the form of a bigger, harder to kill character, or some massive spaceship or the like. Such sections are usually also graphical highlights, and are intended to give the player the feel they are making progress through the game. So, what happens “When Boss Battles Go Wrong?”. Here’s a list of some of the major problems with Boss Battles.

• The Difficulty Spike - Up until the Boss you’ve been making steady progression through the game. There’s been the odd area you’ve had trouble with, but otherwise things are going well. Then you reach the Boss, and suddenly the game you’ve been enjoying becomes the game you despise. All of a sudden you’re plunged into a sequence of restarts because if you can’t get rid of the Boss, then you’re not going to see the next part of the game. Normally with these Bosses it’s the case that you know exactly what it is you have to do, but achieving that goal seems near impossible because the Boss moves too fast, or attacks too frequently.
• The War of Attrition - This is a Boss Battle which is actually pretty simple to beat, but is made difficult by the addition of too much repetition. In this instance, the Boss will have an attack pattern which consists of a sequence of relatively easy to dodge moves, then a state where you can have a go at attacking. This is fine for say, 3 times, but by the 10th attempt you’ve got a bit bored and start to make mistakes. A variation here is that you make one mistake, which then plummets you down a ravine killing you instantly, and forcing a restart that way.



• The Energy Zapper - This is a Boss who takes relatively little damage from your attacks, yet is capable of reducing your health bar by half with a single swipe. OK, if you were to meet a 40 foot giant robot for real then a single attack would probably kill you outright, but that’s not the point. My in-game character is pretty hard most of the time, and can jump his own height, so why can this Boss take him out so easily? Quite often these Bosses could be remedied just by allowing the player some way of getting back some energy.
• The Rejuvenating Boss - This is most unfair if not dealt with properly. You attack the Boss and knock his energy bar down to half. All of a sudden he flies across to the other side of the arena, glows a bit, and his energy bar starts to creep back up. By the time you reach him most of his energy has been regained, and you’re back to square one. Oh, except you’ve lost a quarter of your energy already and you can’t get any health back.
• The Random Factor - Also known as The Unpredictable Boss. This is the Boss who has three different attack patterns which are chosen from at random. More often than not you find one of them easier to deal with than the other two, but the Boss will somehow realise this and always pick one of the other two attacks.

This is by no means a complete list, but for the most part you’re guaranteed to have come across a Boss that fits into one (or more) of theses catagories at some point. For me, a great example of how Boss Battles should be handled is with Shadow of the Colossus, a game consisting of nothing but Boss Battles! In this game you rarely have to restart a Boss encounter, just because you can normally always find somewhere to hide and regain your energy. Killing the Boss always involves the same mechanism of plunging your sword into a weak point, but the difficulty comes from work out how to trick the Colossus into letting you shimmy up his leg or jump onto his head in the first place. The Bosses here can still be annoying, but once you’ve worked them out, you can normally finish them off reasonably easily. Shadow of the Colossus may get a bit repetitive because of this, but at least you don’t end up shouting at the screen when you’ve had thirty attempts at the same part of the game, each time spending 5 minutes to get to the exact same point before getting killed!

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