It’s not THAT tough to think up a boss fight
in isolation. You could design a weird centipede to fight,
or a floaty hands man, or some kinda anonymous robot and it’d fit in just about any game
series. A cookie-cutter boss fight probably won’t
be that memorable, though. Rival boss fights are another story. They almost have to be. Rivals take time to cultivate, like a chia
pet. And building a rivalry is a slow burn, like
a chia pet. All the setup is worth it, though. The best rival bosses might not always be
the toughest, or the longest, or the flashiest boss fights, but they can easily be the most
memorable. It’s time to make it personal. Let’s talk about how to build a rival boss! Hah, psh. Looks like SOMEONE’s browsing in the PAST. Wanna browse from the future? Go get today’s sponsor, Opera GX! It’s an internet browser, but, like, they
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and that’s the trickiest part. You’ve gotta build the rivals first. Rivals are usually built on the similarity
between characters. It could be a lot of things - two characters
with similar goals, similar training, a similar background - rivals almost always emerge from
an overlap of circumstances, and the rivalry can be the embodiment of how different choices
made can create different paths from the same starting point. So to build a rivalry, you need to start by
building the characters. They need the right backstory, motivation,
and temperament to link together. Neighborhood friends? That works. Neighborhood frenemies? Even better. Maybe the same. The coworker you don’t like? The kid just ahead of you in the standings? Your former mentor with a weird past? Literal clones? Yeah. All great rivalry material. Pokemon loves its rivals. The series hardly goes one entry without a
new rival being introduced. Generation to generation, the series has become
a pretty good showcase of different ways you can build up a rivalry. Gen 1 starts off very strong with Blue. He's your neighborhood friend slash jerk kid
that your character is already familiar with. The world of Pokemon revolves around competition,
which gives plenty of opportunities to test and develop this rivalry. You find Blue over and over again as you travel
the world, and both of you build your skills and strength in between encounters, with Blue
being a formidable fight every time you face off. The gym leaders in Pokemon are markers of
progression, but they rarely have much of a personal connection with your character. Blue is the one who you're driven to stay
ahead of. Being a jerk isn’t a prerequisite for being
a rival, though. It’s just a personality quirk. Barry, your rival in Gen 4, is hyperactive
- more annoying than antagonistic. Gen 5’s Cheren is just very driven, and
a touch over-serious about competing with you. He’s subtly arrogant, but not in-your-face
about it like Blue. You do want your rival to have SOME personality
quirks, though. May/Brendan from Gen 3 is a straightforward
rival, but not a jerk, or much of anything else personality-wise. They’re a little too much like wonder bread. The rivalry can also center around what the
rival gets out of the competition. Silver in Gen 2 is the son of a crime boss,
steals a Pokemon to get started, and the rivalry becomes the thing that teaches him that an
obsession with power isn’t the only way to live. Bianca in Gen 5 is trying to break away from
her helicopter dad. She takes the starter Pokemon weak to the
type you chose, and her story arc is about finding herself and figuring out what she
wants to do with her life, whether or not it’s through battling Pokemon. N, also in Gen 5, is on an ideological crusade
to free all the Pokemon, including his own. That’s something. Nemona in Gen 9 is my favorite of the series. She’s already a champion. She’s reached the top of the Pokemon fighting
career ladder - there’s no one left for her to beat. Nemona starts over alongside you, training
a new team from scratch, with the goal of making you the best version of yourself, so
she can finally get a decent challenge for a change. When you finally beat her in a champion match,
she’s SUPER psyched. Nemona is Goku. Which side of the rivalry is ‘on top’
can change, too. Most often, games will put your character
as the underdog trying to beat someone else ahead of you, but that’s not the only way. Sometimes YOU’RE the rival. Hop in Gen 8 has a big ol’ inferiority complex
with his champion brother and he often fights you to try to prove himself. He struggles with moments of self doubt after
repeatedly losing to the player and other trainers. Over time, he learns to relax a little and
accept that battling isn’t everything, kinda like Bianca. Hau from Gen 7 sees you as a rival, but he
doesn’t have as many personality quirks to speak of. He’s just happy to be here. Not the most interesting rival material. The rivalry doesn’t have to be shared by
both sides at all. A one-sided rivalry can thrive from a single
character deciding you’re their personal challenge. Wally in Gen 3 is a sicko. I mean a sickly kid. He’s decided that beating you is his path
to self-actualization. You’re more than happy to play along, but
you don’t really have the same drive to beat Wally. C’mon, it’s Wally! You don’t get points for beating up Wally. I’ve left Gen 6 out so far, and that’s
because it’s tough to argue that they’re true rivals. The ‘rivalry’ is split among 4 characters,
none of whom have much backstory. They don’t have strong motivation to beat
you and they aren’t building towards much of anything. Hau and May/Brendan may not have the strongest
motivations, but they still have more going on than this group. None of these rivals across the series are
incredibly deep characters. Most are just a handful of lines of dialogue
spread over hours and hours of gameplay, but that doesn’t make them any less impactful
as rivals. Pokemon’s structure, fight pacing, and evolution
of skill all help support the feeling of the rivalry. A great rival doesn’t need a LOT of motivation
and backstory, they just need the right kind. Sometimes you’re your own biggest rival. But what if you took that like 3 steps more
literally? Welcome to Self-Discovery Mountain. It’s Celeste. You, Madeline, climb the mountain. You can do it. Badeline is the manifestation of Madeline’s
negative emotions, feelings of self doubt, and general inner demons. All the parts that try to get you to just
give up on this self-reflecting journey and go home. She knows all your moves. In Chapter 2, she chases you and copies your
every movement, one-for-one, with a time delay. Madeline doesn’t want to confront herself,
so if you make any contact, you’re dead and get sent back to the last checkpoint. You must run from yourself, and more and more
clones appear as you progress. The sequence is dripping with subtext, and
the mechanics of racing and dodging fit perfectly in a twitchy precision platformer like Celeste. As you can imagine, you have to face your
inner self at some point, which in this game involves chasing Badeline down. Good job Madeline. Celeste creates a new take on the mirror moveset
rival type that adapts it to both work in the game’s specific flavor of platformer
and fit perfectly in the themes of its narrative. OK, let’s say you’ve decided on who your
rival is going to be and built up their backstory and motivations. Great. Now’s the time to turn the rival into a
boss. Your great Rival Boss isn’t much of a boss
without a great fight, right? Character action games loooooove rivals. Devil May Cry’s Vergil is a staple of not
only character action rival bosses, but rival bosses in general. But I’ve talked about Devil May Cry in roughly
every other video we’ve made this year. I’m Vergil’d out. Let’s talk about Bayonetta 2 instead. That one’s good. Guess what, you play as Bayonetta, the Umbran
Witch - one of a magical clan of women who can do stylish combos, slow down time, and
summon giant demons with hair-centric powers. In this one, Bayonetta is pitted against a
Lumen Sage, a member of a rival clan who can ALSO do sick combos. Their clan is more angelic themed than your
demonic-themed one. Y'know, two sides of a coin, and all that. The first game had Jeanne, who was almost
a mirror image of Bayo, but the Lumen Sage in the sequel is designed as more of an alternate
player-character. You still have plenty of comparable moves
like fast combos and slowing down time, but he has a double sided spear, magic projectiles,
and his own version of the wicked weave. As the fights between the two of you escalate,
so does the spectacle. You're both able to summon kaiju-style monsters
to duke it out in the background while you settle things in the foreground. If you can interrupt the Lumen Sage's moves,
you might be able to interrupt the kaiju in the background from hitting YOU with a special. Your monster interrupts his monster. Each of the Lumen Sage encounters take a slightly
different approach to this concept, all as the spectacle ratchets upward to become some
of the most memorable fights of the game. But maybe this is overlooking a bigger question. Bayonetta has The Masked Lumen and Jeanne. Devil May Cry has Vergil and Dante, depending
on the game. Jetstream Sam, Henry Cooldown, Genshin, the
Regent of the Mask, Captain Blue, Vorkken - WHY are rival bosses such a staple in character
action games? The main draw of the genre is how they let
you overpower your opponents with stylish, technical, flashy combos using a character
with an elaborate moveset. Whether you’re Dante, Bayonetta, or the
Wonderful 101, you reach a point where you feel like you have full control over the battlefield,
story-wise and gameplay-wise, no matter what gets thrown your way. Your sense of power and control needs to get
re-challenged. It might take a while to happen, but when
it does, that’s usually when the rival shows up. The rival is essentially another version of
you, but a little better. Sometimes a lot better. When you do it right, the rival boss fight
gives players a run for their money. It’s one thing to dodge a bunch of tail
and claw swipes or whatever, it’s another thing to face off against your own arsenal
of abilities. It’s a way to check ego. To pull back the curtain and show off that
no, you haven’t mastered all of this combat yet. It evokes the feeling of a multiplayer fight
in a single-player game, where you’re facing off against an opponent who’s just better
at the game than you. For the developers, the rival fight doesn’t
have to deal with nearly as many balancing issues and limitations that a ‘real’ multiplayer
mode would have. The rivals in these character action games
create a clean 1-on-1 boss fight to drive home the depth of combat and open up the next
act of the story, all while giving players a fresh style of boss that feels completely
different than the more common bosses with asymmetric abilities. They’re unique, they’re important, and
they’re challenging. What more could you want? Mirror matches work great in character action,
but not every style of game can do a mirror match rival so smoothly. You might have to search a little harder for
an appropriate rival fight format. Sonic is no stranger to rival characters,
but the fights against them across the series can struggle to fit into the normal sort of
Sonic gameplay. Shadow is the most popular and edgiest of
them all. He's got the same speed, the same homing attacks,
the same invincible boost - he's built as a mirror to Sonic. In his debut in Sonic Adventure 2, he, and
by extension Sonic if you’re playing as Shadow, is more of a traditional boss fight,
but it's hard to make the gameplay of a mirror boss fight work in a 3D Sonic game. They boiled down to clunky spamming of your
homing attack on each other in an awkwardly small arena until one of you came out victorious. The best strategies involved exploiting the
AI, especially in the last fight, where you could wait in place, charge a spindash, and
fire right as Shadow stops to do a special. Repeat for a minute until you win. It's OK, but it’s not that fun. So stop trying to make fighting Shadow like
fighting Robotnik and let’s try to make something different! Sonic Generations has 3 rival characters. Metal Sonic, who you fight like a normal boss,
Silver, who you also fight like a normal boss, and the one who can’t play by anyone else’s
rules, Shadow. The fight with Shadow isn’t a standard arena
fight, but instead is a quasi-multiplayer mirror match of a normal 3D Sonic stage. It’s a race. You’re both on the same track, running for
a power source. Once you or Shadow get enough charges for
it, a special attack is triggered, which works like a little mini-game. If Shadow gets it, you have to dodge an onslaught
of attacks until his power up timer runs out, and it’s back to racing for more charges. If YOU get it, you get a super charged boost
and fire off purple asteroids to slow Shadow down. Catch up to him and finish him off. It’s mostly just window dressing on an otherwise
normal speed-focused Sonic level, but it’s a great change of pace from the more traditional
Sonic arena boss fights. For a series that has tried over and over
to make mirror-match rival bosses work, with, let’s be honest, mixed results, it’s great
to see good things come from a reimagining of what a Sonic rival boss fight could look
like. Rival fights are almost always going to be
major points of a game. There’s too much story gravity surrounding
a rival for it to be a throwaway element. As such a prominent part of the game, you
can use a rival boss to showcase parts of your combat system that you think are especially
cool. Like, say, if you revamped some mechanics
in a remake. Krauser in the original Resident Evil 4 is
arguably Leon’s rival. He worked with Leon in the past, but it’s
kinda vague. Krauser kicks off the events of the game by
kidnapping Ashley, so Leon: get psyched RIGHT NOW about taking down one of your… coworkers. He’s framed as a rival, but beyond a few
late cutscenes, a quick time event with knives, and one straightforward boss fight, he didn’t
get a lot of time in the spotlight. A missed opportunity. Until the remake. RE4 Remake expanded on tons of core elements
of the original - not just updating the game, but creating an even more refined experience. And Krauser got the best upgrade of all. Remake Krauser gets a deeper backstory explaining
his motives. He’s now a military trainer, taught Leon
directly, and then got Big Mad at the government for getting all his dudes killed in Operation
Javier, so he joins a zombie cult. The game steps up the framing of him as a
dark reflection of Leon. Best of all, the knife fight is real now. They made the melee combat much better in
the remake. Now your knife has new defensive options,
like using it to break away from enemies, or parrying to break open the opponent’s
guard. And no more blind swiping, as the durability
meter makes you think beyond just spamming attacks to get your hits in. Krauser’s new boss fight gets to be the
showcase for the revamped knife mechanics. Unlike every other boss where you unload on
some fish or a monstrosity blob from across the room, this is done in close quarters. You’ve gotta get up in there and get ‘em. Timing your knife parries against his combos,
dodging when necessary, and breaking free when he grabs you is a legitimate test of
your skill in the new system. The fight is fast and tense, and serves up
even more exposition between Krauser and Leon as the fight goes on. It’s a great change of pace on its own,
and it’s way better than a QTE. The proper boss fight later on gets its own
upgrade. The first half puts you through a new gauntlet
of booby traps, while fending off knife and bow attacks for a while, before it wraps up
with a fight against Nightmare Cosplay Krauser. After you beat him, in a Resident Evil First,
he DOESN’T get real desperate. He actually concedes and allows Leon to finish
the job. The rival has been bested. The whole revamped package elevates Krauser
from a series of missed opportunities to a fantastic rival, and gives Leon some better
material to work with as the story’s protagonist. Rivals are great, but they involve a ton of
work to make. It’d sure be nice if you could offload the
responsibility of building a rival to the player. But that can’t work… Hmm. can it? Believe it or not, you can. But only if you’re WB. The Nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor is
a slick way to create a rivalry entirely through gameplay without having to write the rival
beforehand. A procedurally generated rival. You’re playing as Talion, fighting your
way through Orc encampments and such to try to take out the Orc leadership. Face off against grunts and work your way
up the chain to the stronger Captains. But this leadership structure isn’t a static
thing. As you knock out captains, others take their
place. Grunts get promoted, and with promotion comes
new perks, which makes them ever deadlier when you finally get around to face them. Once you do, make sure you finish the job. If you don’t, these captains will learn
a trick or two, thanks to you. There’s no story setup for most of these
rivals. They’re just built on the results of some
bad encounters you have with mid- to low-tier enemies. If you lose to one, they gain bonuses and
become more formidable over time. They keep gaining new traits, and these combos
of strengths and weaknesses make each captain fight a little differently. Keep failing, and not only do they keep getting
stronger, but your personal resolve to take them out grows as well. A completely anonymous character can rise
the ranks to become a real problem - a full-on boss that you haven’t been able to take
out yet. They’re the rival of not just Talion but
of YOU, the PLAYER. Talion was following your instructions, after
all. Or you could, y’know, win. Take a captain out a few times, and you not
only win, but you take down their status a few pegs. Or maybe you want to help one out a little. They aren’t all gunning for you. Some of them have their OWN rivalries with
other captains. If you take a liking to one of them, maybe
you could persuade them to help you out instead? Dominate one, and they become your pawn, and
they can help draw out even bigger threats. You’re gonna be the one to shape this hierarchy,
win or lose, with your rival turned secret ally. The longer you play, the more each of these
captains become familiar to you. Before you know it, you might’ve built a
whole bunch of rivals. Now, you might not get all the personality
of a fully designed story rival with your Nemeses, but there are some bits here to help
de-anonymize these guys. They’ll keep track of tactics, or how you
died, or other elements of how your previous fights have gone, and have a little cutscene
as you start to engage. Unless you’re, like, medium-ly good at the
game, and you take them all out in one fight. Then, they don’t really build up many traits,
and there won’t be much of a rivalry between you and them. It’s not perfect. Oh well, some other game will iterate on this
syst… oh, WB has a patent on it. Welp. Check back in 20 years. I challenge you to a comment battle. Head down there and tell me about some weird
rival fights you’ve seen. We’ve also got merch ready for the holidays,
so check out our selection of Design Doc mugs, cases, and clothing in the link below. Rival bosses are slow burns, because a rivalry
is an investment. It must be built brick by brick - sometimes
through interpersonal dynamics, sometimes with a deep backstory for their relationship,
sometimes as a way to showcase cool new gameplay elements, but always with a clear cut reason
for the fight to exist. Spend the time to build up the rivalry, and
the payoff can be spectacular. *chill vibes from Kid Icarus Uprising*
