Warning: This article contains minor spoilers for Kingdom Hearts 3, Sonic Mania, Hi-Fi Rush, Persona 4, Doom 2016, Final Fantasy X, A Hat in Time, Undertale, Bayonetta, Pokemon Black/White, Paper Mario, Dragon Quest 9, Metal Gear Solid 2. 

Boss fights. Some series struggle with them, others are known for them. Done well, these are often the highlights of a game, serving as narrative climaxes, engaging tests of skill, and often visual/audio spectacles. Recently, I got around to the Kingdom Hearts 3 DLC, the bulk of which consists of bonus boss fights against the members of the series villainous group, Organization XIII. These were a fun, if sometimes grueling barrage of encounters, with each boss’s difficulty turned up to their peak. After completing this gauntlet, I found myself questioning what made the whole thing work, so today I’ve decided to take a look at boss fight design, using these fights as the springboard into the conversation. So, what can we learn from each of these battles?

Saix

The Lesson: The boss can have something as powerful or “broken” as you want, so long as the player has a meaningful way to respond to it.

After being the weakest boss for several games, Saix finally lived up to his hype in this DLC. To make this happen, the designers gave him better ways to charge his berserker mode, made half his moveset completely unblockable, and decided that even though he’s only supposed to use his desperation attack when he reaches half health, he can just do it whenever if his berserk mode lasts long enough. At first, these traits made him feel overwhelming. However, the entire thing remained well balanced by the fact that the player had means of interacting with these mechanics. The loading screen tips make a point of using ice magic to interrupt his attempts to charge his berserk gauge, and following this advice allows the player to both limit the time he spends in it, and prevent him from accessing his desperation move more than once. Similarly, while most of his moveset cannot be blocked, there are constant visual cues warning you when an unblockable attack is coming, giving you all the time in the world to dodge if you’ve been paying attention. Similarly, many games will give the boss an unfair advantage that the players have a way of interacting with. Kirby Superstar featured Chameleo Arm, a boss whose invisibility powers could be countered by using its own projectiles to splatter it in paint. Pokemon Black and White gave its final boss an under-leveled Hydreigon, infamous for wiping out entire teams by itself, but Hydreigon is also cripplingly weak to the fighting type pokemon Unova put so much effort into making viable. Final Fantasy X features Evrae Altana, a draconic zombie that only allows a specific trio of characters to fight it, robbing you of a medic against a boss with a staggering HP pool… unless you notice that it is a zombie and thus can be instantly killed by using healing items on it. Many bosses have obviously unfair advantages because they are built to give the player a challenge, but in a well-designed encounter, the player will always have a way to interact with those advantages to come out on top.

Luxord

The Lesson: Not everything has to be an epic fight. Sometimes you should break up the pacing with a minigame, puzzle boss, or nonstandard opponent.

Amidst a barrage of difficult challenges, Luxord’s battle was a breath of fresh air, if only for how different it was. His “fight” is less of a battle than it is a series of minigames that test your reaction time. The boss poses little threat to your health, with any losses most likely caused by messing up his minigames and running out the timer. This makes him an inherent breather between the more difficult sections of the DLC, and that resulted in something that, while still not the easiest thing in the world, was a more fun and relaxing challenge. Many games can benefit from having a boss like this, and many of them do. Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus gave us Mz. Ruby, a boss that forewent a conventional fight in favor of a rhythm game. Persona 3 featured the Wheel of Fortune boss, whose only attack was a wheel of status effects and damaging options it spun every turn, but the player had enough control over where the wheel landed that it turned into a game of choosing how you wanted the boss to act once you got the mechanics down. Similarly, Sonic CD featured the famous Metal Sonic race as its penultimate boss, in spite of the fact that you really did just race him instead of actually fighting. These gimmick bosses serve a necessary purpose in letting the player take a break from the game’s typical fight mechanics, and can provide a memorable experience through their unique challenges. We all love a good boss fight, but sometimes giving the player a moment to well, play around, can be just as good.

Vanitas

The Lesson: Sometimes you don’t need a gimmick. A straightforward fight can be fun enough when well-constructed.

Of course, what would be the point of a game where every fight was a gimmick that forewent the game’s typical mechanics? You also need the player to want to master the basics, and sometimes that means giving them a straightforward, no-nonsense encounter. Vanitas has no gimmick outside of the desperation attacks each boss of the DLC has. Instead, you get a very straightforward slugfest against him, one which rewards you for understanding the basic mechanics of the game. This is, frankly, the type of boss every game needs. Whether it be Ridley foregoing any gimmicks at all in favor of no-holds barred combat in his various Metroid appearances, the even duels with Vergil throughout the Devil May Cry games, or King Dedede’s many appearances throughout Kirby. These bosses all share the trait of simplicity. They give you flat arenas to face them in and there is no gimmick beyond two characters going at each other. The fact that all my examples are recurrent bosses throughout their respective series should speak volumes here. Making this into a “rival” fight where both player and boss fight on even round, potentially even with similar powers, is a common way of going about this kind of battle, as using the player’s same abilities ensures that there is no left field gimmick in the way of the battle.

Xehanort

The Lesson: Use flash when designing a climactic battle. Just remember that flash often equals intimidating, but easy.

While a direct fight can be a great time, some battles require a bit more pizazz to communicate their place in the plot. As a redo of the game’s final boss, Xehanort’s moveset is packed full of flashy moves, with angelic cannons appearing out of thin air, particle effects and unique projectiles flying around the screen, and multiple attacks that cause cutscenes and alter the battlefield. It really adds an air of finality to the battle, pushing the usual limits of the game’s visuals. Of course, all this pomp and circumstance leads to a moveset with quite a bit of startup time, giving players ample opportunity to react to any move they aren’t intimidated by the visuals for. Such a design philosophy is common in final bosses, such as Bayonetta’s Jubileus and Super Mario Galaxy’s rendition of Bowser. Both cases use Xehanort’s same sense of style, focusing on big flashy maneuvers and terrain altering attacks that ultimately don’t pose that much of a threat to the player, if only because it’s so easy to see those moves coming. My favorite instance of this gimmick, and an excellent parody of it, comes in Paper Mario’s Monstar, a surprise boss that guards a sacred location late into the game, and who has a dramatic attack with a fifteen second animation before dealing… one point of damage. They got it when putting that joke together; flash can be terrifying when you first see it, and that adds gravitas to a battle, but it doesn’t necessarily make it any harder. 

Xigbar

The Lesson: Don’t be afraid to break up combat with a rewarding, if indirect interaction (or to give the players an alternate win condition).

Mixing the right amount of flash into his battle, Xigbar constantly stays as far away from you as possible, releasing an endless barrage of projectiles that can be reflected back at him by a skilled player. When the player deflects enough of his shots, a reaction command called Showdown appears. Using this interrupts the fight to trigger a cutscene straight out of a spaghetti western, complete with a quickdraw minigame that knocks off two of Xigbar’s health bars if you win. It’s one of the most memorable parts of the DLC, breaking up what could otherwise be a frustrating battle with something both useful and funny. The command is so reliable that you could even ignore the typical rules of a battle and focus entirely on causing this repeatedly to defeat him. These little side events can be excellent additions to a battle and reward the player for thinking outside the box. You can see a similar design philosophy in Hi-Fi Rush, when Mimosa interrupts her battle for a dance-off that stuns her if you win. There’s also plenty of fights with clever alternate win conditions, such as poisoning The Fear’s food to destroy his stamina bar in Metal Gear Solid 3, or using the grapple beam on loose wires to instantly fry Draygen in Super Metroid. Clever tricks and asides like these help to both give players multiple ways to approach a fight while generating memorable segments.

Marluxia

The Lesson: Generate pressure during slower battles with mandatory side objectives.

Seemingly referencing the weird card game mechanics from his debut, Marluxia takes his sweet time approaching you during this battle. Seriously, he’d be a massive threat if he were aggressive, but that slow walk towards you he does after every other attack gives you all the time in the world to heal. Yet he’s still challenging because of his desperation attack, where he casts Doom and sticks a 15 second timer over your head. You’re then forced to break through one of his constructs before that timer runs out, or you die instantly. Despite how slow the battle can be (would it kill you to run Marluxia?), this instantly causes the player to panic, producing a mountain of pressure with one simple move. Little side objectives like this are an excellent way of getting the player’s blood pumping when the fight is otherwise too slow. Need more proof? Look to battles like Metal Gear Solid 2’s Fatman, who occasionally scatters explosives around the battlefield that will instantly lead to game over if you don’t stop to disarm them. Or Persona 4’s Shadow Kanji, who basically can’t be beaten if you ignore his minions and their healing spells. Even Punch-Out Wii got in on this idea, with Soda Popinski’s gimmick being that he couldn’t be beaten until after you knocked his drinks away, making up for him moving slower than the other bosses in his circuit. You don’t want to get too reliant on this gimmick, as instant game overs can lead to frustration, but so long as the player understands how to respond and has a real opportunity to do so, throwing a side-objective at them mid-battle can really change the fight’s tempo.

Riku Replica

The Lesson: Constant offense is its own kind of pressure.

Really though, if you want your fight to be hard, why bother with a gimmick when you can simply have your boss attack every .1 seconds? Riku Replica took this philosophy to heart, forgoing not only gimmicks, but the universal desperation attack mechanics of the other bosses, in exchange for a moveset where he just. Never. Stops. Attacking. When everyone else has obvious openings and gimmicks to alter the flow of combat, he stands out as particularly brutal, producing even more of a vicious slugfest than Vanitas did. And frankly, you don’t always need anything other than constant offense to threaten the player. Dragon Quest 9 brought back a host of legacy bosses from past games, and it was well known that the most dangerous one was the Dragon Lord, if only because his moveset ignored status effects and special attacks entirely in favor of tearing into you with high damage every single attack. The endless barrage of attacks can also be seen in battle such as Skullgirls’ Marie, who is putting 8 new projectiles on screen each time you blink, and the DJ Grooves/Conductor battle from Hat in Time’s Death Wish mode, which sees you fighting two bosses at once with no break between their attacks. Never underestimate the power of just attack-attack-attacking nonstop.

Young Xehanort

The Lesson: Sometimes, the boss is built to take a few tries, and that kind of pattern-based design kind of sucks, but can produce weirdly engaging battles.

If you don’t like the ideas of constant offense or side objectives, another way to make a fight difficult is to make it focus on pattern recognition, such that a player can’t reasonably win until they memorize the boss’s attack pattern in full. Personally, I hate these fights, and Young Xehanort makes it easy to see why. His strategy involves teleporting in a circle around you, repeatedly faking out his attack until it finally comes. How do you know when the attack is coming? Because his entire battle is running on a loop and he fakes you out a set number of times before each attack (by which I mean each attack has its own number of fakeouts before it comes, but he does all his attacks in a set order). So you win by memorizing “okay he fakes twice before the whip, then four times before the icicles, then he does one fakeout before the overhead whip.” The experience is miserable because there’s kind of nothing you can do but die to him until you learn the pattern. And that’s not rewarding when you can’t reasonably react to it on the first go-round (if you block during a fakeout, you’ll be caught in a vulnerable animation when the real attack comes). He’s still engaging in that you really have to tunnel vision in on him and focus on the game, but these kinds of fights are often only good because of the plot surrounding them. Take Undertale’s infamous Sans battle, which is beloved for the story, but consists of you dying over and over until you just memorize the entire thing, or Elizabeth’s bonus boss appearance in Persona 3, which demands that you know her pattern by heart or else she’ll instantly kill you for having the wrong equipment on the wrong turn. Easier variants of this can be okay for younger audiences, such as N. Tropy’s battle in Crash Bandicoot Warped, which is the same projectile pattern no matter how many times you attempt it, but that one mostly avoids the issue because the projectiles are very reactable. This is a style of battle to be wary of when designing a boss fight. It’s not inherently terrible, but is easy to mess up.

Terranort

The Lesson: Phase 2 doesn’t have to be bombastic, but it does have to mix things up.

The interesting way to handle the previous boss is by toying with the pattern in phase 2. When Terranort gets to half health and does his expected desperation move, he completely shifts the tide of the battle by altering his pattern as well. Primarily, all his attacks get remixed in round two, entirely in ways that you can react to if you understood him well enough to get to this point. Dealing with these new attack variants keeps the second half of the battle fresh, which is invaluable when some of his moves have so much invincibility that the battle can drag on. Having the boss change things up is important to keep the player stimulated. You can see this fighting Marx in Kirby Superstar, who starts the fight with a set pattern, and then throws it out the window in favor of doing whatever he wants whenever he wants to after the halfway point. You can also see it in bosses that force you to adapt as you go along, such as Nelo Angelo’s spectral sword gimmicks coming out in full force at the end of his final encounter in Devil May Cry, or in Arkham City’s Mr. Freeze battle, which removes whatever means the player used to damage him after each hit. 

Xemnas

The Lesson: Make legacy bosses work by understanding why they worked in past games and adapting around that.

Sometimes you bring back a boss from an older game. It can be a great moment of fan service, letting players relive a fond memory. But if the mechanics of the series have changed since we last saw this boss, you have to consider how to adapt them to the new game. Xemnas came from Kingdom Hearts 2, which focused heavily on aerial combat and reaction commands that triggered automatic actions to maintain a certain kind of cinematic feel at all times. But in 3, reaction commands have all but been removed, and the ridiculous airtime players could get in 2 isn’t quite so ridiculous, since most bosses fight on the ground. To make this work, they gave him a constant attack in black vines popping out of portals. These vines don’t deal any damage, but they do forcibly move the player, allowing Xemnas to force the fight into an aerial spectacle by moving the player with his attacks as necessary to replicate the style of his original battle. This proved to be a great way of approaching the fight, and some games really get how to handle this. Case in point, the Cyberdemon in Doom was known primarily for how intimidating it was, so when it returned in Doom 2016, the designers focused entirely on making it an intimidating force, literally dragging the player into the fight before they even knew it was there. Sonic Mania recreated the famous Metal Sonic race from CD and had the race end in a proper battle that incorporated elements from some of Metal Sonic’s later appearances. It’s also possible for a game to mess this up by focusing too much on just having a boss do what they used to do, rather than focusing on why it works. Case in point, Mugshot in Sly Cooper was a clever battle against an opponent too strong to engage with, making you rely on stealth and environmental factors to take him down. When he reappeared in Sly 3, he had all his old attacks… but you fought him as Carmelita, who has much more health than Sly and is capable of engaging in a gunfight, so the battle fell flat, as the intimidating factor that forced you to fight by running away was gone. Sometimes it’s not about having the boss do the same thing they used to do, but about understanding what made the boss work originally and replicating that feeling.

Xion

The Lesson: Never underestimate the power of a simple status effect.

While Xion is a difficult enough fight with her crazy mobility and high damage combos, the thing that puts her over the edge and makes her (in my opinion) the hardest of these bosses is the status effect tied to her attacks. One of her primary moves, which she spams constantly, reduces your maximum HP when it hits. Whereas every other boss, when things go wrong, can be stalled until you can heal, Xion will take any opportunity given to her to reduce your maximum HP to 1 and take healing off the table altogether. This one factor makes her significantly more difficult than her fellow organization members, even if some of them have much more difficult to avoid attacks. One status effect can completely rewrite the battle. See also, Final Fantasy X’s encounter with Yunalesca, who inflicts the party with a Zombie status that makes healing spells hurt them, Slay the Spire’s Time Eater, who automatically ends your turn if you play too many cards in a row, or Wario Land 4’s Cractus, who can also zombify Wario to make him miss attempts to attack. More often than not, we remember the big flashy moves and getting combo’d into a wall, and there’s good reason for that. But when making a difficult encounter, never underestimate just how badly one status effect can cripple a player’s strategy.

Larxene

The Lesson: Don’t build the boss to be overwhelming; build it to LOOK overwhelming.

With the most difficult to follow movement of her cohorts, a wide mix of attacks, clones of herself that will combo you into oblivion, unblockables, and weak points that are difficult to pinpoint, Larxene can feel like an overwhelming opponent, as every bit of progress you make against her just leads into a new problem. And that can be discouraging, but the more you study her, the more you realize that she’s not quite as difficult as she seems. She runs on a pattern, it’s just such a long and intricate pattern that you can fight her for over two minutes without realizing she has one. Once you pin that down though, she gets easier, and you realize that there are weaknesses in her movements; they’re just hard to see because she feels more powerful than she is. This is one of my favorite styles of boss design, as the fight ends up being challenging and fast-paced, but ultimately gives the player every opportunity to succeed as long as they pay close attention. Dark Souls is infamous for bosses like this, though the Asylum Demon is likely the best example, as it is known for its intimidating stature and how shocking it can be to have so much trouble with the first boss. Megaman X4 gives us yet another rendition of Sigma, this time with attacks that blanket most of the screen, but who can be consistently baited into leaving himself open once you understand how his attacks work. Then we have a personal favorite of mine, Pikmin 2’s Man-at-Legs, a spider with a machine gun on its belly that will instantly terrify players and murder half the Pikmin army with its advanced weaponry, but who also has some very noteworthy weaknesses, such as the need to reload if it misses a shot. When designing a boss, the goal should be to make them feel powerful, but to hand the player every tool they need to overcome that challenge. And bosses like this, who look overwhelming but really aren’t if you think it through? They get it.

Ansem

The Lesson: When the boss isn’t quite difficult enough, it’s time to add “That One Attack.”

Finally, when all else fails, when the boss just isn’t hard enough, when you made a good fight but you’re not sure the challenge factor is where it should be, it’s time for “That One Attack.” You all know which attack I’m talking about. It’s the one that ends your run even when you were doing well, the one that you pray the boss only uses once or twice, the one you don’t have a solid plan against. In an otherwise normal encounter, Ansem fully subscribes to this when he uses his desperation attack early, barraging the player with projectiles that inflict random status effects, all but guaranteeing the player is then struck by more of these projectiles in a cycle of pain. Much of the battle consists of finding a way to combat this, particularly when some of the projectiles also grab you and therefore can’t be blocked. But then you get past it, and you fight on, and then you find out he has a second desperation attack that lasts until you win, and this final move is the single most dangerous thing across all thirteen of these fights. I was prepared to write Ansem off as an easy opponent. I had saved him for last, so I was ready for anything, and his attacks weren’t too hard to avoid, even if they hit like a truck. But my hubris was met by That One Attack multiple times until I was able to plan around it. And I loved it as one last challenge. So when the fight isn’t quite hard enough, throw out That One Attack. Let Corvus in Dragon Quest 9 cast Magic Burst and nearly obliterate the party from full health. Let EarthBound’s Diamond Dog unleash its Glorious Lights and incapacitate half the party in one go. Let No Straight Roads’ Tatiana have a meltdown that instantly kills the player if they’re caught by it. So long as there’s a way to fight back, a truly climactic boss can always have That One Attack and remind you who the boss is supposed to be.

Of course, there’s one other important thing to consider amongst all this talk. The reason all these work so well is that they are a collective. Variety is the spice of life, and doing the same style of battle gets repetitive, so the real reason Organization XIII works so well as bosses is that they have such a wide variety of tactics that let you use every aspect of the game’s mechanics between the whole group. If they weren’t one big gauntlet, I doubt I would have appreciated the thought that went into them all nearly as much as I do. There’s no one thing that makes a great boss fight, but the fastest way to get it wrong is to make the same kind of battle many times in a row.