The first boss I remember fighting was Doctor Robotnik at the end of Sonic 2‘s first level. I couldn’t beat him; I was six, and I hadn’t played a lot of video games that required twitch skills; I’d mostly played PC adventure games. One morning, my six year old self got off the bus from school and my mother, picking me up from the bus stop, ran up to me, yelling, “I beat him! I beat him!”
And from that point on, I never found Sonic 2′s first stage difficult. I got stuck on the second, but I persevered, because I knew if I beat him I’d never have trouble with Chemical Plant again.
Critical analysis views bosses as video game anachronism, awkward homages thrown into modern games. But that’s not what bosses are: bosses are punctuation, the periods, commas, and semicolons of a video game. A good one, a quick stop, can raise tension, building the stakes to new heights, while an easier boss can change the mood dramatically, as well. Rather than just being points where players can express their mastery or a nostalgic adherence to tradition, a good boss can accentuate what a game is trying to tell us.
Dark Souls provides us with a veritable masters class on boss design. More than any other game it employs bosses as finite punctuation. Its first boss, the Asylum Demon, is a checkpoint designed to prove mastery, sure, but the rest are all designed as definitive battles that change the world the player experiences. For instance, the Capra Demon fight at the end of the Undead Burg follows up a relatively painless area with an incredibly difficult boss, a boss who made me quit the game for the first time. The boss battle makes the area before him begin to seem oppressive and dangerous, and the more trouble you have with him the more dangerous it seems, even though it’s probably the area of the game I died the least in. And when you beat it, the area retains some of that mystique. If I were to replay Dark Souls I would dread going under the ...
