Hey, I hear you’re in the market for a good
time. Maybe something to tell your friends about. Shhhhhhhh. Not here, not so loud. It’s a secret. If you come back, I’ll let you in on the
secret. IT’S SECRET BOSSES! Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say that. Secret bosses aren’t just optional bosses. They’re deeper than that. The secret within every secret boss elevates
it to its own distinct category. The process gives designers a lot more to
work with than just a normal boss or even an optional one. But no two secret bosses are the same. They can come in so many different forms,
and the path you take to get there shapes what a player will get out of the experience. Let’s talk about the design of secret bosses
and how the mystery surrounding them can add an ocean of depth to a game. But first, you can't beat a godskin apostle without a
godlike skincare routine. That's not even a secret boss, Mike. What’s with this segue? Mike: I'M ONLY 30 HOURS INTO ELDEN RING, AND
I'M BAD AT IT. SHUT UP, YOU TRY MAKING A BOSS-RELATED SKIN
CARE SEGUE Dan: Today’s episode sponsor is Geologie! Mike: oh right, that works Dan: It’s men’s skincare reinvented. Your skin is important, and taking care of
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skincare quiz to save up to 70% off on your 30-day trial. That’s G-E-O-L-O-G-I-E dot com. Thanks, Geologie! People love a mystery. With one suggestion, one clue, one breadcrumb
trail, a mystery creates a reason to care. Have you ever found a secret about a game
you thought you knew everything about? Maybe your friends at school found a new combo,
or there was some secret dev level someone discovered online. My favorite one was Missingno in Pokemon Blue. When I was a kid, I’d already beaten the
game. I thought there wasn’t much else to do,
but when I surfed on the coast of Cinnabar Island and found… THIS, that was something new. It broke the level cap, broke items, broke
the hall of fame. It broke Kanto itself, and it was right off
the coast of Cinnabar Island this whole time, if you knew how to get it. Now, Missingno wasn’t an intentional secret. It was just a glitch. A dramatic one tucked away in a corner, but
one that could capture my imagination as a kid all the same. If Missingno was right there, who knows what
else was lying just out of sight? Secret bosses can do the same thing, but on
purpose. What is a secret boss anyway? Is it just an optional boss? Well, it IS optional, but a secret boss isn’t
just a boss that you can stumble into. Secret bosses are what they are because of
what you have to do to get to them. The extra effort you have to go through creates
subtle effects. A secret boss can elevate a game beyond a
checklist of tasks into something interconnected and living. The secret creates mystery and gives the impression
of even more to come. Something hidden to discover if you know where
to look. An extra challenge waiting just around the
corner if you prove yourself worthy. Best of all, a designer looking to create
a secret boss has plenty of tools they can use to create exactly the right experience. Every secret boss is a combination of two
parts: The Secret and The Boss. Wow, that sounds really dumb when I put it
like that. We gotta jazz this up somehow. How about… The Road, and The Destination. There we go. First, the Road. Secret bosses are only secret if you have
to DO something to find them. But that could be anything. Puzzles, dialogue, tasks, hidden actions - as
long as you go out of your way to do it, your actions can pave the secret road. The different ingredients you use to pave
it will make the road feel different. The road to a secret boss can be paved with
puzzles. Figure out the puzzle, and your prize is a
cool thing to punch or some hidden side of the story that's fun to listen to. Or both. Discovering that the puzzle even exists can
be part of the fun, too. In Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course, you
go through a special multi-step side quest in the overworld to unlock a secret boss fight. In the shop, there's a mysterious trinket
called the Broken Relic that you can buy. It doesn't do anything, but as you talk to
the NPCs, you'll start to get a sense that there's a puzzle in the graveyard that everyone's
dialogue is trying to help you solve. The relic acts as an obvious hint that there's
an unsolved thread dangling in front of you, and the hidden-but-not-too-hidden graveyard
plot both adds intrigue while making it clear enough to keep people searching down the path. At the end of that path, once you solve the
puzzle, you get that big reward. The boss fight is very unusual. You take a little nap and fight within a strange
dream, sandwiched between an angel and a devil. The two will swap places based on where you’re
facing which phases the attacks in and out of existence. It’s not all that hard of a fight - it’s
only one phase - but the unusual dreamy aesthetic, unique flip mechanics, and the secret path
to get there make it stand out from the pack. How else can we pave the secret road? Instead of puzzles, you could try putting
your secret boss behind a dialog tree. Persona 4 did. Persona 4 is a murder mystery wrapped in an
RPG, and the true ending is hidden behind whether or not you know whodunit. You’ve got a couple very, very important
conversations that you have to pass in order to get there, with… uh… whoever this is,
who knows. Get through the conversation correctly and
you’ll get to the rest of the game. And then there’s another dialogue tree to
do later on for the true TRUE final boss. The secret in Persona 4’s true final boss
path is really just a test to see how well you’ve been paying attention, and the reward
is a much more satisfying ending. Next, what if the secret boss was the reward
for just doing… everything? Golden Sun: The Lost Age locks its strongest
superboss behind 100% completion, where you have to collect every single collectible Djinn
in the game… …
… …AND in the original game! (You bring your progress over with a password.) It’s a very, very long road to travel, but
for series superfans it’s a clever way to cap the experience. Man, that’s a long road, though. At least you only have to do it once. Unlike Persona 5. You can't even get to Persona 5 Vanilla's
secret boss in your first playthrough. It's only available in New Game Plus. Now, I love Persona 5. I think I've made that painfully clear. But having to play through almost the whole
thing back to back to be prepared for the ultimate challenge isn't super appealing to
me. I don't really want to spend the time re-grinding
social links from 0 and going through the same story again to just fight one boss. There's no problem with having a secret boss
at the end of a 100% completion journey. It's a capstone for playing through the rest
of the content. A secret boss that requires REPLAYING most
of the game is less OK - especially for a game whose calling card is its story. It might discourage players from playing that
bit of content at all. If the secret boss were story-focused, though,
that might be a different story. The more you can make the road mesh with the
destination, the better. When you’re paving the secret road, keep
in mind that you can be creative with where you put the path. The key puzzles or actions don’t have to
just be in some quiet corner, or during downtime. They could be anywhere. Back to Cuphead for this one. Cuphead has secrets you can suss out in the
MIDDLE of boss fights. Some bosses have special attacks or add-on
enemies you don't usually see, but you unlock them if you complete special criteria. Others have secret alternate phases. The second part of the Howling Aces fight
has a team of puppies circling around you in jet packs. If you take them out normally, the boss will
rotate the entire screen in the final phase. It’s very disorienting. If it’s too much for you, there’s a secret
alternative. Instead of taking each jetpack out, just carefully
hit them until each one starts to smoke. You’ll trigger a completely different and
way less vomit-inducing final phase. It’s not much easier to beat, but it’s
easier on your stomach. Some fights like Sally Stageplay can go in
a completely different direction if you figure out the secret. If you jump off the background cherubs in
the first phase, you bring down a background prop on top of the background husband. It changes the narrative of the stage play
entirely and gives the second and third phases more complicated patterns to dodge. The extra context is fun, but the unique way
the game compels you to reach the extra stages makes the process stand out more than it would
have otherwise. For many secret bosses, the fun is in the
hunt itself. The Nyakuza Metro DLC for A Hat in Time is
a sprawling cyberpunk Tokyo, full of places to explore and a ton of verticality in its
platforming. The scene is dense with small details, like
these goofy billboards, Cat Roombas to bounce off, and subway cars pulled by giant cats. There's plenty to see along the way, but stashed
away somewhere is a hidden mini-boss you could find by going off the beaten path. Parkour up this unsuspecting building to the
roof, bounce on this shady spring. You get sent to a boss arena with nothing
but this manhole cover… Kiwami…means…extreme… Oh this is gonna be a Yakuza thing isn’t
it. *HAT-KID CHAAAN*
Yep, it’s a Majima cat. The fight is pretty simple - the mini-boss
is just a beefed-up version of a normal enemy, but it's more involved than you think, and
the journey was the point, anyway. A Hat In Time uses a secret boss as an end-destination
that gives a more concrete reason to explore the cityscape. It’s perfectly valid for the road to be
more fun than the destination. The mystery is often more fun than the answer,
and that’s OK. But that’s not the only way to make a great
secret boss. Sometimes the end is fun, too. So you’ve done it. You collected all the garbage. You talked to the guy and gave that weird
answer six times in a row. You unlocked the developer commentary and
did the thing they told you to do. You’re here, ready to fight the super dragon,
or the weird court jester, or the developers themselves. But how do you make the fight worthwhile? What things do you have to keep in mind to
make the juice worth the squeeze? First, get a sense of what you want the fight
to focus on. A game probably tries to focus on one aspect
of itself more than others. Some games are more intense and action-packed. Some are more relaxed and introspective. Some lean into choice, and some into one polished
experience. Every game’s gonna be a little different. Whatever your game’s calling card is, some
of the best secret bosses try to give the ultimate payoff for that aspect of its game. If you want to go for extreme challenge, well,
that's pretty easy to do as a secret boss. Final Fantasy IX’s biggest secret boss is
a paint sphere. Who is also an alien. Where Ozma fits into the Final Fantasy IX
universe isn’t super clear, but it’ll kill you all the same. Ozma is reachable only by getting real deep
into this Chocobo minigame, getting a special ability, then flying to a secret sky garden. Hit up this cave, bulldoze over the warning
the game puts there, and… well, good luck. Ozma can devastate the party almost immediately,
counterattacks all the time, and can sorta cheat to fire off turns faster than other
bosses in the game. It’s not really fair, but then again it’s
not really meant to be. But there’s another secret to this secret
boss. There’s a different long sidequest to beat
that makes the Ozma fight much easier by letting you use physical attacks and making some of
Ozma’s own attacks not also heal it. Probably go for that one first. Up to you. Ozma is a classic example of an ultimate test
for people who have wrung out every other challenge a game can throw at you. Many games add in a boss rush or an arena
mode as an extra challenge and stick a secret boss at the end of it in one way or another. The True Arenas are a tradition in the Kirby
series, showing up ever since Super Star Ultra on the DS. It's the 'hard' version of the regular arena
mode, made up of gauntlets where you fight all the hard variants of every boss in a row,
plus the exclusive bosses in the game's extra campaign modes. You get limited heals between fights, and
if you make it to the end, you get a harder instance of the final boss. Beat THAT, and you get the secret EXTRA form
of the final boss. Or just SOME GUY. The mode is a swerve from Kirby's usually
easy and forgiving platforming. The True Arenas pull no punches and will test
you, demanding that you learn each one of these fights. The attacks are aggressive and intense, and
if you fail at any point, it's back to the start for you. Even better, pausing during most of these
fights gets you a bit of extra lore. Kirby lore. If you don't know about Kirby lore, go look
that up. It's worth it. Kirby's True Arenas are a great finale for
dedicated players and give a challenge unlike the others you've faced in the game up to
that point. Challenge-focused secret bosses can work in
a huge variety of genres. What if we go way out in another direction? Like… I dunno, DDR. Several DDR games have secret unlockable songs
that you can take a crack at only once you’ve scored high enough in a few songs in a row. SPRINT GOOD, THEN SPRINT FASTER. IF YOU’RE GOOD ENOUGH, GET READY TO SPRINT
THE FASTEST YOU’VE EVER SPRINTED. Those songs are secret bosses by any measure. They’re just really really fast songs that
are really hard to do. It’s not rocket science, just crank up the
difficulty and that’s plenty enough to be a secret boss. If you’re a game about choices and story,
have your secret boss reflect the choices you’ve made and give you a bunch of good
story resolution. Deltarune is obsessed with letting you choose
your own path and giving substantial consequences to the characters depending on the choices
you make. The True Final Secret Boss of the game is
Spamton NEO, reachable at the end of two paths. Either by completing a bunch of tasks, or
by completing a bunch of tasks in addition to completing a long, disturbing sidequest
and royally messing up the world and all the good vibes along the way. You’ve made your bed, now you get to lie
in it. The Spamton NEO fight, whichever path you
take to get to it, is a major highlight. As is tradition with the True Final optional
bosses in Toby Fox’s games, it has some of the best music and most interesting dialogue
as well as being the hardest challenge to get through. In all aspects, he makes the final destination
worth the road it took to get there, even if you have to chip off a little piece of
your soul along the way. OK, so once you’ve nailed down what your
secret boss is going for, you’ve got another question to think about. What do you want to actually use the boss
to accomplish? You could use it as an instant element of
surprise. Arcade-style games with short, linear structures
and high replay value are a perfect place to tuck away a secret boss to spring onto
players at a moment’s notice when the time is just right. Fighting games LOVE to do this. Let’s go back to your local 90s arcade and
look at Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Each play is a quarter, so maybe you’ve
dedicated yourself and gotten good enough to get pretty far without having to pay for
a continue. This run, though, this is the run. You’re winning right and left. Maybe you can get to the end on one quarter! Quick, too! Focus. Get ready for Bison. What. HUH. WHO’S THAT? *whispers* It’s Akuma. Akuma was added as Street Fighter’s first
secret character as a nod to the rumors going around that there were secret boss characters
just like this in the earlier versions of the game. Akuma was part of the “anything goes”
era of secret bosses in fighting games, where any rumor could be true, and if not, the devs
might make it true in the next game. Mortal Kombat dipped into that well a bunch. This is the era of Reptile and Noob Saibot,
where no rumor was too outrageous - no character too stupid - to be a secret boss. That treatment of secret bosses in fighting
games doesn’t only work in arcades. Some of the most famous surprise secret bosses
are in Super Smash Bros. Melee - Crazy Hand in Classic Mode, and Giga Bowser in Adventure
Mode. There’s a little twist, though. Secret bosses in a home console context should
be a little easier to reach. The payoff of a secret only comes if someone
knows it’s there. Arcades could rely on crowds to show off whatever
cool thing was happening. Melee made its secret bosses pretty easy to
stumble into on your own. It’s not all that hard to get to after a
few runs in the mode, but each secret fight is still set up as a surprise. Crazy Hand shows up in the middle of the normal
Master Hand fight. Giga Bowser shows up in a cutscene after beating
Bowser normally. Melee came out at an optimal time for these
kinds of secret bosses where plenty of players at the time would either naturally discover
these fights or at least hunt them based on unclear rumors, adding to their mystique. If you're lucky enough to have a successful
series on your hands, you could even use the secret boss as a secret marketing opportunity
for the next game. That's what Kingdom Hearts did. Quite a bit, actually. If you're the kind of person that would jump
through a ton of hoops to get to a secret boss, you're exactly the kind of person who
would love a sneak peek at the next entry in the series. Several of Kingdom Hearts' biggest superbosses
leaned hard into the mystery factor to entice players. Kingdom Hearts 1 Final Mix, 2 Final Mix, Birth
by Sleep, and the DLC for Kingdom Hearts 3 all featured secret superbosses that teased
future games by pitting you against mysterious figures that would play key roles later on. Fights like the Lingering Will and Yozora
created intense fights that were both a blast to play and their own self-contained hype
machines for super fans, thanks to their mystery and integration into the series proper. And after you do this once, fans will take
the cue and scour any future game for the same thing. It works for Marvel in their post-credit secret
scenes, and if you do it like this, it's good enough for video games. The comment section on this video should be
fun. Let us know about your favorite secret bosses,
and the weird paths you had to take to get to them. Secret bosses are a powerful tool for adding
deeper layers to any game. Whether the payoff is the boss itself or the
road to get there, secret bosses are a great reward for the players who dig deep. *chill vibes from Kingdom Hearts II*
