Get in, loser, we’re gonna go fight a building. The giant boss battle is a cornerstone of
game design. Fighting a colossal boss is one of the most
reliable ways to make a high spectacle set piece that will stick in the mind of the player. It works in every genre. Platforming. RPG. Action. Puzzle. Fighti… Oof. Uh. Well, it CAN work in every genre. Designing at this scale is trickier than you
think, and if you’re not careful, you can cause a lot of collateral damage. Let’s talk about the design of colossal
boss fights, some games that ran into massive problems, and how different game styles go
big. Today’s episode is sponsored by GXC from
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some games, and win some prizes. Thanks, GXC! The giant boss fight is well-worn territory. Sometimes it’s more monster, sometimes more
mech. Some fights are a surprise one-off, and some
are the game's very core. Some lean into the spectacle, and some the
mechanics. There are so many different ways you could
go with it that ANY colossal boss fight is good, right? Ehhhh. Final Fantasy XV has a cautionary tale. The Adamantoise. One of the game’s optional superbosses is
against a living turtle mountain. But what’s wrong with it, you ask? That looks cool. And you’re right. THIS is cool. But THIS isn’t. Does punching a wall sound fun? No? Then let’s take a step back. Why do games have giant boss fights in the
first place? Not to sound too obvious, but it’s a fun
concept! Everyone wants to be David fighting Goliath. Boss fights are supposed to be memorable,
unique, spectacular elements of a game. They’re a final test of your skill, a narrative
crescendo, a harder challenge, and a way to force you to think a little differently about
how you’ve been playing the game up until this point. A giant boss fight checks all of those boxes
in a ready-made, super flexible format. But what’s so special about a giant boss? It’s just big, right? Sure, but we’re talking about bosses big
enough to impact how a game operates by its mere presence. Colossal bosses throw a wrench into a game’s
movement mechanics, animation systems, your environmental design, even how the CAMERA
in your game works. You can’t drop Godzilla 2 into your game
and expect everything to just work out. If you want to add in a giant boss, you’ve
gotta tailor every aspect of the fight to fit your game’s strengths. It usually takes some custom work to make
the tweaks to fit a colossal boss into a game. It might involve minor changes, or it might
require building new systems from scratch, but not every game does that legwork. The distances involved in giant boss fights
can really screw up how character movement feels. Controls that feel good in small spaces might
not work over large distances. Breath of the Wild's final boss is Dark Beast
Ganon, and the movement in the fight is really dull. Ganon is extremely slow and unfocused on you. Running around hitting basic targets is both
mechanically not that interesting but also dragged out by the long, plain distances you
have to go through to move around from side to side. Up until this point, Breath of the Wild's
movement has been varied and exciting, with plenty of gliding and climbing mechanics,
plus advanced moves like Shield Sliding if you wanted to. This is just real basic horseback riding on
flat terrain. There's no mixing in the game's strengths,
just the most boring type of movement over the longest time. There's a ton of buildup and ceremony surrounding
the fight, and the super basic movement is a let-down. Some colossal bosses don't play nicely with
a game's basic combat mechanics. Streets of Rage 4's final boss is split into
two phases: A regular 1 on 2 fight and a 1 on 1 on Giant Robot Spider fight. The spider is a stage-filling stationary robot
that attacks you alongside one of the characters. Streets of Rage 4 has a marvelous combo system
supporting its basic brawl mechanics. Stuns and combos are a cornerstone of making
the fights feel satisfying, but the spider robot can't be stunned or juggled. You're stuck punching a wall with a tiny combo. YOU can be popped up in the air, though. The spider robot turns into something like
a stage hazard rather than a 1 on 1 fight, which was never the game's strong suit. It turns the finale into a tedious pot-shot-and-retreat
exercise that barely resembles the rest of the game's combat. Though, with the spider boss you can at least
see what’s going on. That’s not always the case. The scale of colossal bosses can play havoc
with how scenes are framed. Melee-focused games can have an especially
hard time dealing with this scale. It’s tough to fight what you can’t see. The Legend of Korra is a character action
game that tries to do as much as it can on a tight budget, but it occasionally cuts corners
a little too hard. These giant spirit enemies are late game mini-bosses,
and are just upscaled versions of normal enemies, without much accommodation. The game’s camera has a very tough time
following the action, as it either clips into the boss or gets partially obscured, which
makes it tougher to react to telegraphed moves. Legs block your view all the time. While you’re fighting, it’s often very
hard to tell what’s even happening. Then the game throws two of them at you at
once. No, it turns out that doesn’t solve the
problem. OK, so you can’t just drop a colossal boss
in a usual fight and hope for the best. You’ve gotta adapt something, somehow. Turning it into the spectacular fight you’re
dreaming about means emphasizing some parts and de-emphasizing others. But which path you take depends on what you
want to focus on. If you’re trying to just make a cool set
piece with a colossal boss, you could sidestep the mechanics and camera problems entirely. Take the fight out of the player’s hands
and paper over some of the inherent limitations of colossal bosses with QTEs! Does your main character need to do a flippy-dip
ultra punch? Just make ‘em tap the Y button and let the
game take care of the rest. The camera doesn’t behave how you want? Frame the scene however you like! If you’re using a colossal boss fight primarily
as a spectacle delivery device, QTEs can make your exact dream come to life. They give the designer complete control over
what the player will see. Every camera angle, every punch, every slash
can be shown according to your perfect vision with perfect timing. Of course, there are some big tradeoffs. Like fun. QTEs sacrifice a lot of interaction. There’s nothing else going on for a player
to focus on, so you better make sure what you’re trying to show off looks good enough
to be worth it. You also need to think about what failing
a QTE does for your scene. Game over and restart, like Dragon’s Lair? Or this amazing Spiderman scene? Do you not allow failing? Would that just be better as a cutscene, then? If you do allow failing and continuing, how
much extra work do you have to do to show the consequences of missing a timing window? Good QTEs are few and far between and can
be a little bit of a cop-out, but they’re an option if you’ve got something really
cool you want to show off. Some genres can just skip over a lot of the
problems that come with the physical presence of a giant boss. Maybe with some fixed camera angles and more
abstract mechanics. Sounds like a JRPG to me! Traditional Final Fantasy games have huge
sprites compared to the player characters, and you can fight them just fine. Octopath Traveler takes that tradition and
cranks up the size and detail even further. These classic-style JRPGs can basically do
anything they want with the size of an enemy sprite, as the game mechanics are essentially
a math problem with some flashy effects. Attacks are abstracted away from the need
to really make the animations connect to each other. Like with QTEs, big sprites in JRPGs give
the drama of a unique, elaborate enemy with enough flexibility to avoid a lot of design
headaches. Colossal bosses might also help make different
kinds of gameplay possible. MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV rely on giant
enemies to help make a 24-on-1 fight work at all. The mechanics of an MMO are expected to be
a little more abstract than an action game, so losing the hit reactions is a worthwhile
sacrifice for letting a large group of player characters all have a distinct role in a big
fight, where everyone fighting smaller enemies would create a chaotic mess of characters
with overlapping and obscuring animations. The larger size of MMO bosses let large raids
exist as a game format. It’s not even an MMO-only concept, either. Wonderful 101 and Pikmin are both single player
games that use giant bosses to make their many-on-one fights better. Huge enemies can also be an easy at-a-glance
signal about enemy difficulty. In Shin Megami Tensei V, you enter combat
by running into things in the overworld. Scattered throughout are Demons that are way,
way out of your league - dozens of levels above what you could realistically defeat. Which enemies are which might have been a
trickier thing to signal to a player, but SMT just uses their size to let you know that
these guys are trouble. Even their minimap icon is big, so you shouldn’t
easily get blindsided by a fight. If you’re not going to do a QTE, and you
actually do want to fight the giant monster yourself, what else can you try? What if you just cut the scope down a little? You don’t have to fight the ENTIRE monster,
do you? Would fighting just part of it work? Just beat up on a leg for a bit? You get the general scope and feel of fighting
something massive, but you can abstract away part of it. Streets of Rage 4 tries to do this, and it
probably would’ve worked if not for the severe clash in game mechanics. Cross Code does it a little better. It has a fight with a massive mining robot
where you’re spending most of your time dodging its massive punches, shockwaves, and
projectiles. After this dodging phase, you get a new phase
where you can launch bombs at a weak point to stun and attack the robot. The whole fight is mostly framed around the
robot’s torso and arms, which helps focus the action in a way that keeps the battlefield
from getting too crowded. Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough
room to go around. What can you do with a colossal boss that
isn’t right next to you? Colossal bosses often act like a force of
nature, so it can make sense to face them indirectly. Take Bowser’s Fury, the add-on mini-campaign
built into Super Mario 3D World. Bowser has transformed into Fury Bowser, a
raging titan that you’ll have to deal with once in a while as you go about collecting
coins and cat shines and whatever. Fury Bowser’s presence is felt throughout
the game, even when he’s inactive. His spiky shell ‘egg’ slowly rises from
the center of the lake, spinning faster and faster until the rain starts to fall and the
music changes to something ominous. A storm is about to strike. The egg shoots into the sky, flashes, and
now you’ve got Fury Bowser to deal with. Fury Bowser acts like a challenge modifier
during normal gameplay, forcing the player to move and adapt, and to avoid more obstacles
he fires your way. The stages get modified as they’re pelted
with fireballs and spiky platforms, which you can use to gain more cover and avoid getting
hit. These sequences create a more challenging
platforming segment full of improvisation but it’s still roughly the same gameplay
that 3D Marios are already good at. If you can get your hands on the Giga Cat
Bell power-up, it lets Mario stand on equal footing with Fury Bowser and start a more
traditional boss fight with a Kaiju flair. After scrambling to dodge attacks from an
immovable force in the distance, the game provides a great moment of catharsis. Beat him up. He’ll retreat. Lather, rinse and repeat until the game’s
finale. This stage of the fight isn’t much different
than your standard 3D Mario boss, but the different window dressing makes it stand out. If your game is about fighting at a distance,
that can work great, too. It really helps one genre that absolutely
loves colossal bosses. Shmups involve shooting at targets at range,
and keeping distance between you and your target while still fighting them helps make
colossal bosses more manageable to fight. Games like Cuphead, Sin and Punishment, and
Ikaruga have plenty of bosses that take up half the screen or more, but they don’t
have to tweak their gameplay much to accommodate them. Their fixed camera and movement style keep
these battles from getting too messy or hectic. The larger characters give room for more custom
and finely crafted animations that help make these bosses feel like unique and exciting
challenges and let you break the fight down into individual parts of the boss to target,
which is a nice change of pace from the game’s smaller enemies. The custom animations are even practical to
help telegraph big attacks that would feel unfair otherwise. The large boss targets also let you not worry
as much about precise aiming, so your patterns can become more demanding and fun to dodge. OK, now let’s try flipping it. If you don’t want to zoom out to fight the
monster at a distance, what if you zoomed way in? What if the boss itself were the environment? A colossal boss can work great as a living
level, where navigation and combat can become one and the same. It’s perfect for setpieces like the Kronos
fight in God of War 3, and it’s especially good with games that want to focus on fun,
fluid movement, and platforming, like Solar Ash. Solar Ash flows smoothly between normal level
segments and gigantic fights. You parkour your way through destroyed landscapes,
working towards several ‘anomalies’ that eventually unleash the boss. They’re levels unto themselves, taking you
through tough platforming challenges point to point, finding weak spots to attack as
you go. The monster moves throughout, making the terrain
shift constantly, forcing you to improvise. Each time you fight one, you’ll have to
traverse its body several times, taking a different path on each, and each path becomes
more and more deadly over time as its skin becomes like lava and platforms get destroyed. The shifting terrain leaves little room for
error and can get frustrating, but it feels exhilarating when you pull off that perfect
run. Remember, you’re not limited to just one
of these techniques, either. They can all work together quite well. The opening boss of Metal Gear Rising is Metal
Gear Ray, and it has a healthy balance of engaging gameplay and fun spectacle while
working around a lot of issues that trip up other games. It’s using the same combat system the game
already uses, without compromises. Movement from point to point still feels good
even with the increased distances. The fight takes place in a city block where
Ray jumps away from you and you have to get in close to hack at its legs. After enough damage, you’ll stagger the
boss and enter a quick blade mode QTE to attack the turrets on its body, then repeat the cycle. Ray’s attacks are well-telegraphed, the
camera isn’t an issue, and having to run up to Ray helps ground the fight before you
start breaking legs. The QTEs end up being little bonuses for successfully
beating down the boss, rewarding players with a cool little flourish before you get back
to it. The finishing blow is just as cool as you’d
hope it would be, and the second fight keeps punctuating gameplay moments with more outlandish
action to make the entire fight memorable and satisfying. But if you really want to make this work,
you could always design the game from scratch around giant boss fights. Shadow of the Colossus tailors its game mechanics
to fit the needs of its 16 climactic encounters, and with nothing much else to do in between
them, each mechanic can be balanced solely with its colossi in mind. Every encounter is about manipulating each
colossus’ AI in a way that exposes their weakness and allows you to hop onto their
body and hang on for dear life while navigating your way to their weak spot. The grip stamina isn’t used for a lot of
extended climbing sequences, so the designers could make it feel just right for the task. Combat is pretty simple on the colossus, and
without generic enemies to get in the way, it frees up input room for more in-depth puzzle-solving,
which helps make the game feel even more unique and unforgettable. Y’know, just make Shadow of the Colossus
2 and you’ll be fine. It worked for Solar Ash. Head down to the comments. There are some more unique styles of colossal
bosses we didn’t mention, but you can help fill in the gaps in the comments. Monster Hunter, The Souls Series, and Bayonetta
are a few that come to mind, but let us know your favorites, or least favorites. Colossal boss fights become immediate centerpieces
in their games, so careful thought can make room for something truly memorable. *chill vibes from Nier: Automata*
