Boss Fights: Are they obsolete? Do we still need them?

Some games don't need them *cough* Deus Ex:HR, Gears of War*cough* and some... well, some don't really need bosses but the style of gameplay make a boss fight appropriate, if that makes sense.

@TEHMAXXORZ: GOW doesn't need bosses??? Reaaally? I think that's one game where bosses fit in perfectly!

I think boss fights, when done right, are the best part of video games.

No boss fights in videogames??? I don't understand the question.

It depends on the series and implementation. Arkham Asylum had rather lame boss fights that revolved around tossing Batarangs rather than the actual combat or stealth. Arkham City is a huge improvement, and has some of the best boss battles in quite a while. Because they actually use the mechanics. One forces you to use multiple gadgets and abilities, the others do rely on the old "throw batarang at the weak point," but are mixed with actually interesting or at least fun combat sections.

Skyward Sword was also a huge improvement over Twilight Princess, the latter having revolved literally around "attack the glowing weak point" for every single boss. Almost every boss in Skyward Sword has multiple phases, and every when their weak point is predictable, it's pretty entertaining to get there. The biggest problem is that they don't use nearly enough use of the sword combat. I don't know why Nintendo made the Wii when a goddamn ZELDA GAME can't even make spectacular use of motion control.

One of the worst to me is Super Mario Galaxy, or really any platformer boss. You can't exactly be aggressive in a platformer. You just have to wait for the boss to show its weakness, then jump on it. Slow, tedious as hell to retry when you get killed, and just boring.

And of course I have to mention Human Revolution. These just do not fit. They are nothing at all like the rest of the game. Besides that, they can be cheesed so easily. Barret can be killed in 10 seconds if you have an assault rifle and 2 grenades, Federova is just incredibly easy and straightforward, Namir you can plant mines on his spawn point, punch him as he jumps over a wall, whatever. But if you mess up, all of these bosses kill you instantly. It's a waste of time to have them in there the way they are. I don't mind them because they're so damn easy, but still, they're a problem from a design view.

@SpawnMan: It really depends on how you implement them. I still think the Cronos part of God of War III is one of the best boss fights I have played yet. On the other side you have a great game like Batman: Arkham City which has just god awful boss fights. Good read. I usually don't read long posts but yours was fun to read.

The crummy thing about most boss fights is that they often increase the difficulty of the game significantly beyond normal. I don't play games on Normal looking to be brutalized every 2 hours. The Witcher 2 was the worst about this in recent memory--I literally had no way of defeating the Witcher boss that you fight in the elven ruins. People online recommending cheesing him (with items I didn't have) or reloading previous saves and grinding out a bunch of levels. I was not underlevelled for this fight. I just turned the difficulty down to easy, ultimately. He was TRIVIAL on easy. But I turned it back to normal for the rest of the game. I don't want tough bosses, but I want the rest of the game to be mildly challenging.

They should design a setting for wusses like me. "Normal gameplay, but easy bosses."

I think it would be pretty hard to make a decent JRPG without them. Just finished Vagrant Story - and damn, did that have some good ones.

@aceofspudz said:

The crummy thing about most boss fights is that they often increase the difficulty of the game significantly beyond normal. I don't play games on Normal looking to be brutalized every 2 hours. The Witcher 2 was the worst about this in recent memory--I literally had no way of defeating the Witcher boss that you fight in the elven ruins. People online recommending cheesing him (with items I didn't have) or reloading previous saves and grinding out a bunch of levels. I was not underlevelled for this fight. I just turned the difficulty down to easy, ultimately. He was TRIVIAL on easy. But I turned it back to normal for the rest of the game. I don't want tough bosses, but I want the rest of the game to be mildly challenging.

They should design a setting for wusses like me. "Normal gameplay, but easy bosses."

I quite liked them in the Witcher. They were more difficult than normal encounters, but that's how they should be. Using your potions and spells right, and known how to dodge and counter hits was all you needed.

They forced you to actually play like a Witcher, and not just a crazed swordsman.

I literally lost my breath for a second while reading the title. Boss battles are not obsolete. I can't imagine some games without any. Like Gears of War. Without boss battles all you'd do is walk, shoot, solve puzzle and repeat. I'm not saying they make the game but they make the game challenging and fun. Some boss battles even help you out with later non-boss related situations later in the game (depending on the game of course).

Can you imagine video games without boss fights? Boss fights have been in video games for many years. Boss fights are still an incredibly important element in many of today's games. Almost every high-profile game has a boss fight of some kind. It is by no means obsolete. It's still widely used today.

I would say that boss fights are probably always gonna be around because you sort of need something massive to fight at the end of a game or a level, but it's also sad because boss fights as a mechanic have really failed to evolve along with the rest of video games. Whenever I walk into a boss fight  I'm not thinking "holy shit, this is gonna be amazing!", what I'm really thinking is "so I just have to hit this guy's weak spot three times so I can get on with the rest of the game? great" or I have to pretend that swinging my sword at this boss or shooting him till his health bar goes down is entertaining because maybe I'll get a cool cut scene at the end of it?.
 
There are times when I wish that some games didn't have bosses because it doesn't fit in with the fiction or just the game in general but then I realize that without that boss the game would end after completing a better mission than the ones you've been doing for the whole time you've played that game. So all you're really left with is the Mass Effect 2 and Arkham Asylum bosses, it tells me that the games developers really couldn't figure out a way to end the game or combine everything you've experienced in the game into something exciting and monumental for the player to fight at the end so here's a thing for you to fight (hit three times) so you can feel like you crossed the finish line, but only because it's not nearly as bad as if we rolled the credits after you kill the final npc in the room.

There is a place for them, but not in every game genre.

@arcn: But do we really need bosses at the end of games to signal a finale? Can't they just end? are the developers so inept that they can't find a fitting ending without changing the pace of the game?