The Final Boss
This post contains spoilers for the videogames Alan Wake, Batman Arkham Asylum and Bioshock. If you have not finished any of these games, and care about what happens in them, then don't read this.
What is it with videogames and final boss battles? While pretty much every other staple of the arcade era of games has fallen by the wayside in favour of accessibility and overall experience, the final boss battle is one thing that stubbornly refuses to go away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan off boss battles in games where boss battles make sense. Combat-centric games like God Of War, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta are made by their fantastic boss battles. The same goes for a lot of RPGs, with the most of the game pretty much making up the time between epic boss battles. Boss battles in these games rock.
But there are certain games that really don't suit boss battles. And yet they're still rammed in there; without fail, there will be a final boss encounter to overcome at the end of the game. And these often go a good way towards ruining otherwise excellent games. I'm going to use four fairly recent games as examples of dreadful final boss fights.
Bioshock - There are no boss fights in Bioshock, prior to the final boss. Big Daddies don't count; they're an intrinsic part of the environment, which you can choose to avoid. Bioshock is a game that focuses on choice, freeform combat and atmosphere. Great, chunky, tangible atmosphere.
Yet Bioshock ends with a simply dreadful boss fight against a pointlessly super-enhanced Atlas/Fontaine. All strategy, choice and atmosphere goes out of the window and what for the most part has been a delicately blend of genres becomes a dreary shooter from a decade ago. You strafe about blasting Mega-Fontaine with whatever your biggest gun is until he falls over and you win the game. Dreadful.
Batman: Arkham Asylum - There are boss fights in Arkham Asylum, but they are by far its weakest aspect, throwing out the satisfying crunch of the game's combat in favour of hackneyed learn-the-pattern-shoot-the-weakspot frustration.
And the final fight with the Joker, again rendered enormous for no real reason other than the lore of videogames dictates that this must be so, is the worst of the lot. It's teeth-grindingly frustrating as he takes you down with a few hits, forcing you to learn his movements and repeat the same actions again and again and again until he falls.
Alan Wake - There are no boss fights at all in Alan Wake. Your main opponents in the game are largely human in scale, stalking you through the moody shadows, aside from the odd possessed tractor to provide some bizarre differentiation. For the most part, your opponent in Alan Wake is the darkness itself.
Yet there's a final boss battle to be had, and it's against a goddamn tornado. A tornado you kill with flashbang grenades. I mean really, what the hell?
Dead Space 2 - The most recent candidate for the incredibly misjudged and redundant final boss battle award. Dead Space, like Alan Wake, is best when you are taking on a few human-sized, moderately powerful opponents. The larger the enemy is in Dead Space, the more it breaks the games otherwise stellar tension and shows up the problems with its otherwise excellently designed control system.
And the final boss battle is just dreadful. I'm not going to go into it, as the game is definitely worth playing if you haven't already, but it is bad. Possibly worse than Alan Wake's friggin' evil tornado.
All the above games are not games that are about combat. There's combat in them, sure, but it's not the real focus. The focus of all these games is atmosphere, narrative and experience. It's something the above examples excel at more than most games.
And when they finish with a crappy boss battle, it ruins the lasting impression you have of that game. Because the final boss is that last thing you see, it's what sticks in your memory. However good the game is up to that point, if the last boss is frustrating and unnecessary, then it's that frustration that comes to mind when you recall that game.
And it's a shame, because all of these games would have been better without their final bosses. I understand the need for a climax to the game, but another thing the above games are very good at is compelling set-pieces. Why can't we end with a gripping set piece, a chunk of action that underscores a game's strong points, rather than a pointless boss fight that only serves to highlight the reasons why the game is not, in fact, a combat game.
