First, it’s probably a good idea to point out that I took about a week’s hiatus due to some time constraints and to refill my sanity meter. A big thank you to everyone who sticks it out despite my random absences, and I’m back and full energy now and ready to go. So…

Moving from level to level in any linear game will eventually lead to the owner of that space: the boss. The origins of this dig deep into gaming history – from early dungeon crawlers where you would face the inevitable dragon or the mothership that would overwhelm you in a space shooter – it has become a staple of the medium and the climax of any given sequence of events. There have been significant advances since the time you could simply count on an overpowered giant enemy to pound on you relentlessly (and steal your quarters), but yet the concept still remains very much the same as it did in the days of Super Mario Bros.. While the bosses are often a series of different models and style, much different than running and jumping on an axe through 8 worlds, modern games seem to focus on more style than substance when it comes to taking down an enemy in the ultimate final battle or even as the end challenge to a complex series of puzzles. Some games get it right, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that bosses have almost become a bit of a lazy decision for designers.

While bosses are the indication of the denouement of the game, a final sigh to a heavy battle through the entire experience, the pace of the bosses are often a good way to determine how you reward players and how you match the challenge of the levels they rule over. It’s this message that seems to get lost, and the break in gameplay that a boss can provide does not seem to much use besides the shock value of something big looming over your screen. Resident Evil 5 is certainly a victim of this, giving you a slight indication of what you will be facing without much context and then throwing a giant monster at you that mimics the same weaknesses as the previous ones you’ve fought – shoot the glowing bits and then it will die. While they do present a challenge akin to the massive amounts of enemies you encounter during similarly tense scenes, they just lack the impact or resolution when you defeat them. Gears of War, a series built on scale, falls short in a very different way, allowing boss battles to boil down to a particularly nasty looking bad guy who simply takes a half an hour spray of bullets to take down with no real strategy involved other than not being killed.

When it comes to innovation for boss battles, it’s hard to skate around the subject of Shadow of the Colossus, a game that was exclusivity based around that concept. Each boss was its own world, its own puzzle and had a personality about it without having had that built up through a back story or cliché heel-turning event in the game. It allowed you to create the story around it yourself, and your response to that would be personal to what you really felt was going on in the game. The ambiguity and scale that each boss took, demanding significant amount of your time in order to bring it down and knowing you could be easily thwarted at any minute, gave it a sense of true accomplishment when it was finally taken down. It’s easy to sing the praises of a game this far removed from its release, but the difficult thing to deal with is the lack of impact it seems to have had on major games currently.

One of the most surprising games to me last year was Dead Space, not for innovation but rather for the quality that was so consistent through every facet of the game, but even it mimicked the shortfalls of boss design giving you a similar “shoot here, dodge this” mentality that goes along with a lot of boss battles. While not every game is designed to have that level-boss-level-boss, the ones that do seem to almost cut and paste that idea with the allusions to something big that ultimately is a great display of graphics and rarely a good exploration of what the game can offer through controls. In Resident Evil 5, the game is about action and getting a sense of fright, though you are put into the roles of super-soldiers, and the best way they are able to convey that is through their mini-bosses, which had much more impact on my experience than any of the forgetful tentacle monsters that litter the chapter conclusions. It integrates into the rest of the game, while escalating the challenge and providing a recognizable threat that goes above and beyond what you would normally take down.

Ultimately, boss battles should be the most memorable part of the game. It is that impact that should go beyond the initial shock and last well into the challenge of defeating it. That challenge shouldn’t be swayed by figuring out some magical combination of button presses that grows tired or too easy when you come back to it, either, or else you lose that impact just as quickly. The more games can focus on bosses as a form of pacing, allowing you to get connected to them in a way that you can create opinions on their motivations, or understand why you want to remove them other than simply progressing the better the experience will be for these battles. Bosses should feel like more than just a stop-over between cutscenes and they are often being cast aside as an excuse to put you in front of a turret or overpower your enemy in order to take down an equally overpowered and personality challenged mammoth.