With notoriously hard games such as Elden Ring or other soulsbornes, there are plenty of bosses that are infamous for being unfair or just straight-up bad. Defenders like to say that it’s just a matter of skill, and that those who are complaining just need to “git gud,” but I do think there’s actually a case to be made sometimes for an overly-hard boss to just be badly designed. So, what makes for a “bad” boss?
I’m playing through Black Myth: Wukong at the moment, and for the most part I’d say that I’ve only encountered two badly designed bosses so far. Most of the game’s bosses are hard, of course, but most of them focus on making the player get the most out of its combat mechanics.
See, combat in Black Myth: Wukong is mostly about dodging and carefully timing your strikes, combos, abilities and power hits. Success is less about dealing out raw damage and more about learning the “dance” (if you will) that each boss is trying to teach you. And, yeah, a successful run against a boss looks a lot like a well-practiced dance. It’s the bosses that *don’t* follow this pattern and suddenly push you into trying to “game” them that are the problem.
As I said, I’ve run into only two such bosses so far: Kang Jin Loong and Captain Lotus – Vision. The fights are very different from each other, but they share the common problem of mostly ignoring the game’s combat mechanics. In the case of Kang Jin Loong, players are presented with a very large, *very* mobile enemy that spends most of its time flying out of reach and only comes down when attacking. The fight alternates between waiting for the thing to come down and desperately trying to stay in range so as to not miss out on its ground-based attacks.
You can either bring it down through patient attrition and very slowly chipping away at its health if you happen to be a dodging master, or you can exploit the Drop of Many Spell and try to wipe out two-thirds of its HP at the very beginning of the encounter (something I’m pretty sure isn’t intentional). I recommend the latter option because the former is just a long slog of a fight thanks to the sheer amount of waiting involved.
As for Captain Lotus – Vision, it’s issue is that it’s a projectile-spam boss in a game that’s otherwise about melee combat. Again, you can learn to dodge its projectiles and put on damage, but there’s none of that explosive and fun combat-as-a-dance feeling to it. You dodge its bullets, hit a few times, jump over the floor lasers and laser lines coming from every which way, get in for more damage (which the boss doesn’t react to), and just repeat until it’s dead. Not exactly hard (especially after clearing the area boss), but not at all fun either.
Changing things up in a game like Black Myth: Wukong or Elden Ring can be fun and even good since it allows for players to be challenged with something new and different. However, that change-up should still adhere to the kinds of combat that the game is built around. If it isn’t, then you at best get an okay boss that would have been better in another game. At worst, you introduce an experience to your players that actively sabotages their fun and makes them less interested in continuing. In other words, make a boss that’s too different and it’s almost guaranteed to be the one your players hate the most, even if it’s not objectively bad.
What do you think makes a bad boss? What’s a boss that you’ve run into that felt like it just didn’t belong in the game?
Image from the Black Myth: Wukong Steam page
VIRTUAL BASTION 