I was watching a streamer on Twitch the other day play through the latest DLC for the game Dark Souls 3. I like watching people play this game. I love the sense of exploration. I love the loot that you can find in the game and the fact that a large portion of the game world's lore is actually found when you inspect each item you find and read it's description. I love that the equipment is not just another sword or helmet, but it was someone's helmet, and they had a story, a purpose. The enemies are almost artistic in their art styles and their varied fighting techniques. There is artistry in the incredible visuals, the mind-blowing music, and the attention to details that many may overlook in a rush to beat the game. It is a world that invites you to stay and explore, to become part of it's story. But I said I love watching it played. What I do not like is playing it. And that is for one reason: the boss fights. If there is one mechanic in gaming that I dislike more often than not, it is the boss fight.
The Dark Souls franchise is built on a foundation of wild and intricate fights with epic boss characters, each a feast for the the eyes and the ears. All of the exploring and loot-gathering is merely a preparation to face these gods of the game world. And each boss fight is a game unto itself. Dark Souls is not easy. It is not meant to be easy. Dying to a regular mob is not uncommon. But the bosses, they are on another level. They each have their own powers and moves, their own phases (new parts of the fight that unlock after getting them down to a certain health level), and it is your job to learn the dance that comes with these moves and powers in order to defeat them. I have heard of people spending hours and hours on one boss fight alone, encountering the boss, trying to learn a bit more of the dance, then dying, and repeating the cycle. I played the first game, loved it right up until I hit the first boss. Then, after trying a couple of times, I set down my controller, got up, removed the disk from my machine, and never went back.
Boss fights are like nails on a chalk board for me. I get why people like them: they are the epic finale to everything that you work for in many games. They are the root of the problem that you are trying to solve, and the quickest way to solve it is to punch it, shoot it, stab it, or kill it by whatever means you are equipped with at the time. There is a sense of accomplishment at fighting something greater and overcoming it. But for me, it is many times a jarring interruption in the gameplay that, up until that point I had been enjoying. I am the first to say that I am not a hardcore-mode kind of person. I play for story and escapism, not to slam myself repeatedly into boss gates that often seem thrown in because they are expected. Dark Souls does boss fights well, but I don't have the interest to spend my precious gaming time on those gates. I have played countless games in my decades of gaming and there are very few times when I have enjoyed fighting bosses. More often, they leave me frustrated and feeling like I am wasting time I could have been enjoying the game. Don't get me wrong: I have no issue with difficulty in a game. I even welcome it in many cases, unless I know that a difficult game also has boss fights.
I know I am not the usual gamer and I am ok with that. Unfortunately, that means I have to suffer through the inevitable boss fights if I want to play many games. And in more than a few cases, like the Dark Souls franchise, I choose not to play them despite knowing that I would enjoy all other aspects of the game, no matter the difficulty. Many times when I have this conversation, people ask what alternatives to the standard boss fight there are. Boss fights have been in games so long that it is often hard for people to grasp the idea of a game without boss fights. But there are alternatives, and to me these games are a welcome breath in a world smokey with the fires of bosses. One good example is a recent game named Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Though flawed in its own ways, the game sucked me in with the promise of bossless play, and it delivered. But how?
Beyond the setting, cyberpunk, the game play of Deus Ex revolves around missions. The beauty of the game was twofold. One, you had a choice in how to complete those missions. You could be stealthy or violent, murderous or pacifist. All that mattered was that you accomplished your goal. The rest was up to you. And those goals included taking down someone with more power or thwarting epic plans. But instead of straight up boss fights to decide the outcome, missions had you erode power bases or steal items important to the plans so that they could not carry them out, or had to figure out some other way. I played the game stealthy and only killed one person the whole time and that occured at the very end, during what was set up to be a big final boss fight. The beauty of this fight, though, was that you again had multiple ways of taking care of the boss outside of straight violence, and my method was discovered thanks to wandering off the beaten path and exploring. What I found was a very game-appropriate way of taking the boss out without firing a shot, and I felt extremely satisfied with my conclusion to the game. And there is the other side of boss fights for me: if they have to occur due to story, give me another way to defeat them outside of the dance of the boss fight.
There are many games nowadays that eschew the traditional boss battles, thankfully, so my game card can stay filled without fighting more than a few bosses. After all of my words against boss fights, I will say that, if they are few, are integral to the story (and not just an artificial game play gate), and offer me a way to utilize the skills that I have developed in the game, then I am not totally opposed to the occasional boss fight. Sometimes I even welcome it if it adds value to the story and is not some devious dance that I have to learn that breaks the pattern of game play. But if the game revolves around the idea of the boss fight being the driving goal, then I will probably give the game a hard pass. I don't have the time or patience to offer to those games. For those, I will turn to watching my favorite streamers on Twitch to experience vicariously the thrill of victory and agony of defeat versus my gaming nemesis: the boss fight.
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