Hello, this is the sixth in a series of opinion pieces that I'm doing on the action genre of video games. If you haven't read any of these before, I highly recommend starting with the first one on the basics and continuing from there. Or, at the very least, read the previous post on Enemy design as this is going to pick up where that left off.
Action games have a lot going for them in a lot of ways, depending on how you build them: good enemies, a good combat system, good level design, all of these things are important to making a good action game. However, I would say the most important aspect of an action game is its boss battles. Boss battles are much more at home in the action genre than every other genre of video games, which is why pretty much all the best boss battles come from games that are heavily focused on action.
DMC3's Vergil? Action game. Ninja Gaiden's Genshin? Action game. Jetstream Sam, Monsoon, and Senator Armstrong from MGR? Action game. Sephiroth and Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts 2? Action RPG.
Really the only non-action focused game I can think of that has a boss battle that is among the best would probably be The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, and that boss battle is great much more so because of the stealth focus than any actual use of fighting.
So, now, we're going to cover boss battles in-depth. And the first thing you want to do is decide how many bosses you want to have. And to do that, first I have to define what a boss is. A boss, by definition, is an enemy encounter that tests the skills you've acquired up until the point you come across them.
An example of a good first boss would probably be Phantom from Devil May Cry. The reason I say he's a good first boss is because of how he's designed. Just hacking away and slashing at enemies will get you TO Phantom but that by itself will not get you PAST him. You actually need to find a strategy in order to beat him. At least the first time.
That said, while Phantom is a good boss, Devil May Cry is not by any means the best game to go to for a boss lineup. Devil May Cry has around 23 missions and, while not all of those missions have boss fights in them, the number of bosses in the game amounts to around 5. Phantom, Nero Angelo, Griffin, Nightmare, and Mundus. Even if you disregard Mundus because he's the final boss, that's only four bosses in a game with 23 missions. Even factoring out missions that don't have boss fights, you still have to fight each of these bosses around 3-4 times depending on the way you play. Hell, you even fight Mundus twice, even if those two boss fights are distinct from each other in terms of both strategy and difficulty.
Devil May Cry 3, by comparison, has a better variety of bosses but even then, there's not really that many. DMC3 has Hell Vanguard, Cerberus, Gigapede, Agni & Rudra, Leviathan's Heart, Nevan, Beowulf, Geryon the Time Steed, Doppelganger the Shadow Void, Arkham, Lady, and Vergil. That's twelve bosses. That might sound like a lot in text but, let's remove some of these for the purposes of this discussion.
Hell Vanguard is a regular enemy made bigger and stronger so I would consider it more of a mini or sub-boss than an actual boss fight. I would also put Gigapede into that category, since there's not really much to that enemy really at all. Leviathan's heart doesn't really fight back, which means the fight is really more about fending off mooks. It's a stage boss much more than an actual boss, so I'm disregarding it. And finally, while I do love Agni and Rudra, I'm going to count those two as 1 boss fight since they only ever appear together.
In total, that leaves 9 bosses. Of course, of those bosses, you fight Vergil 3 times, and in a previous stage, you can fight any combination of three or more of all the bosses in the game except for Lady, Vergil, and Arkham. This means that there are actually more fights than the total of nine bosses. Jester is an optional boss in the Special Edition, so if you want to count him, that makes 10 but otherwise, it's more or less the same.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 has around 33 boss fights. Before I get into that though, I want to stress that that number is actually a bit of a fake. You see, the main Greater Fiends, Alexei, Zedonius, Volf, and Elizabeth are each fought twice in the game, Genshin is fought 3 times, Rasetsu and Gomodos Troll are fought twice a piece, as are the Two Tengu. And finally, although that number counts Vazdah twice because it's a two-stage boss battle, I'm only going to count that once.
So that's around -10 on the 33, so that gives us 23 unique bosses, in a game with 17 total chapters. And even if we disregard Gigadeath for being the Ninja Gaiden Equivalent of Gigapede from DMC3, that's still amounting to almost two boss battles per chapter.
That said, more bosses or boss fights does not necessarily mean better game overall. In DMC4, you had to fight every boss twice, once as Nero and once as Dante, and most of the bosses, except for Kredo, can be beaten by jumping on them and crash landing on them. They can be cheesed and because of that, it's not really motivating to master them.
So, how many boss fights do we want? Well, ultimately it's going to depend largely on the game you're designing and how much of the experience you want the bosses to take up. To use two games from Fumito Ueda, Ico had only one boss fight at the end and several enemy encounters, whereas Shadow of the Colossus featured 13 boss fights that were essentially the only encounters in the game.
If I were to put a figure on this, though, I would say your bosses should account for around 10-15% of your overall game. So, if you have a ten hour game, I would say ten bosses that, if fought properly and skillfully could be beaten in 6-10 minutes a piece.
Of course you could decrease the number of bosses overall and have the player fight each one multiple times, to get a feel for how they should really fight. Alternatively, you could have overall ten boss fights in a game that last only 3 hours, which would keep the figure the same but would dramatically increase the proportion of boss encounters to overall play time.
Once you've got your bosses down, you want to design them so that they are just as climactic as they need to be for when they appear. Obviously, the final boss should be the biggest and best boss of them all, but you also want the first boss to be reasonably skill-based without it being overwhelming, given that you're probably dealing with a new player. The mid-boss, the boss for the very middle of the game should also be a high point.
In terms of what to do for the boss fights, well, many people, myself included, have a preference for the rival boss, where the boss is given a moveset that's quite similar to yours and is challenging because they can do what you do but better. Genshin, Vergil, Sephiroth, these are bosses that challenge you and keep you on your toes. They can do a lot of the same things you can but can do them much better depending on your own skill level, which is why fighting them is fun.
That said, one might argue that bosses need some personality, which I'll get into more once I get into the story, but for now, I will say that build-up and resulting payoff are good for bosses to have.
If you don't want to give a boss a playable character-esque kit to work with, you could always make them something that challenges the player to think outside the box. Phantom is a good first boss because he's not a boss that you can beat by being thoughtless. The Colosi in Shadow of the Colossus are puzzle bosses that make you look and get to their weak points: not particularly innovative but at the time it was a novel thing.
Whatever you do, just make sure the bosses are challenging but fair. You want to make sure that a player can beat them with the skillset they have available.
That wraps this up. Next time, I'll be talking about Story and Optional Content in depth so I hope you'll join me then, thanks for reading.
EDIT: Okay, since I wasn't able to fit the boss personality issue into the following post or into this one, I've decided to make an edit to cover that right here.
As I've said, Bosses are primarily tests of what you know. But, a good boss may have some degree of personality to it that makes it more memorable or unique than just a really hard fight. Agni & Rudra, Nevan, Vergil, and Lady are all bosses that offer unique personalities and reasons to fight that are not simply "Because the plot demands it." While those bosses have unique motivations and reasons, I think Lady was perhaps the most reliant on that to be an interesting boss. Since she is 100% human, she needed to have a motivation for fighting Dante, that being that she wanted to settle things with her father and Dante wanted to stop her because she was injured.
Agni & Rudra are a pair of fire and wind swords that have been waiting for someone powerful enough to wield them, and that person just happened to be Dante. Vergil is Dante's brother and the two are fighting because of opposing ideologies. Nevan is perhaps the weakest example but her personality as a seductress getting ready to kill Dante was at least interesting for what she was; too bad the boss fight itself was pretty lackluster.
A lot of bosses in Ninja Gaiden tend to be hard but interesting only because they're hard. A lot of them are fun to fight but don't really offer anything of personality to latch onto to make the fights more awesome.
So that's just something to keep in mind. Personality in bosses is not necessary but if you want them to be memorable, it's wise that you at least give it a shot.
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