My Least Favourite Cliches: The Hopeless Boss Battle

One of my least favorite video game clichés is any boss battle in which the player is scripted to lose, because victory would be narratively inconvenient. TVTropes helpfully names this scenario the “Hopeless Boss Fight” trope, and it can be just, like, so frustrating, you guys. While there are different kinds of hopeless boss fights in gaming, the variant that particularly irks me is the battle that proceeds as normal until such time as a scripted event is triggered, automatically and seemingly arbitrarily deciding the outcome in the enemy’s favor. Implemented well, a hopeless battle against overwhelming odds can effectively communicate the stakes to the player, letting them know exactly how powerful the enemy is, and laying a foundation for the work the player needs to do to improve. Implemented poorly, as in so many role-playing games, the hopeless boss fight wastes valuable time, breaks the rules of the game, and ignores the medium’s strengths in order to press forward with a traditional narrative.

Paradoxically, some of the worst offenders are also considered some of the best games ever made; many Playstation 1-era RPGs, particularly the Final Fantasy series, feature the trope, usually in its most irksome form. Final Fantasy IX, for example, is an otherwise excellent Japanese RPG marred by a recurring series of hopeless face-offs against the Alexandrian General Beatrix. These battles exhibit some of the worst the cliché has to offer, as each time you fight Beatrix, no indication is given that she will use her overwhelming ability until the very end of the fight. The snippets of dialogue that supposedly presage her fearsome combat ability are not borne out by the experience of the fight, and until the story demands it, combat proceeds the same as any other boss battle. When you lose (and you will lose), Beatrix sneers at you and fucks off into the night. Thrilling! And lest you think this is an issue exclusive to a bygone era of gaming, one of my least favorite examples occurs in the otherwise thoroughly enjoyable Mass Effect 3, which in 2012 featured a battle against a dorky cyborg assassin named Kai Leng that ended in much the same fashion as the fight with Beatrix in FFIX. It doesn’t matter how hard you whale on him (and I whaled on him), the fight always ends the same way — with the player mocked over their “loss” in a cutscene in which they have no control, a particularly egregious oversight in a supposedly choice-driven game like Mass Effect.

While it’s tempting to write the cliché off entirely, when executed well the hopeless boss battle can serve an important narrative purpose. Provided the loss occurs within the game’s existing mechanics, a hopeless boss fight can be used to as a jumping off point to help illustrate the character’s progression over the course of the story. This goes hand in hand with one of the great strengths of gaming as a storytelling medium: allowing players to experience the events of the story firsthand. Unlike in movies or books, the events happen to the player. Whether controlling a predefined character, or a custom avatar, the protagonist acts as a cipher through which the player interacts with the game world, usually in order to act out some manner of power fantasy. Imagine then, the potential of undermining that power fantasy using the game’s existing rules! What if, instead of fighting through to the end as usual and being informed you lost in a scripted event, the player were to fight an actual hopeless battle? Wouldn’t this scenario engender in the player the actual sense of hopelessness that’s trying to be conveyed? And wouldn’t winning a rematch against the same boss later on feel all the more satisfying as a means to measure how far the player has come? It can be done well.

A great example of a hopeless boss fight done well can be found in Mega Man X for the Super Nintendo. The end of the game’s introductory level features a fight against a boss called Vile, in which the protagonist’s (X) ass is well and truly handed to him. The game doesn’t allow you to beat Vile at this point, but it also doesn’t waste your time by pretending you can, only to take the victory away from you at the last minute. Vile defeats you handily, and the subsequent cut scene demonstrates that, while Vile can be beaten, the player will need to be much stronger in order to do so. When you do ultimately face off against Vile again late in the game, it’s still challenging, but not insurmountable; the protagonist has grown, and so has the player, and the game expertly uses this opportunity to convey that growth. This version of the hopeless boss fight is executed so well, you almost don’t even notice it’s happening.

Alternatively, a series like the Souls games, in which any of the boss fights can feel hopeless by dint of the game’s difficult design, allows for this kind of player-driven narrative to emerge naturally through gameplay (although there is one unwinnable fight — Dark Souls’ Seath the Scaleless). Show me someone who’s played a Souls game and doesn’t have a story about repeatedly losing to a boss, only to come back stronger and win by the skin of their teeth, and I’ll show you a liar. It’s by making use of the strengths of the medium that Dark Souls and its contemporaries are able to breathe new life into this hoary trope.

By comparison, the traditional hopeless boss fights are so frustrating because they come so close to being able to impart this exact sense of fear, and ultimately growth, on the player but fall disappointingly short, laying bare the mechanics of the game and completely shattering a carefully built-up immersion.

So it’s easy to justify why I hate this specific kind of encounter. On top of everything, they are a massive waste of time — my time, your time, the game’s time. Just everyone’s time is wasted since, more often than not, the fight lasts the same amount of time as a normal boss fight. The only difference is at the end, instead of the traditional victory fanfare and a feeling of accomplishment, the game wrenches control away from the player to tell them that, no, actually, they lost. This is usually accompanied by a pithy remark from the enemy along the lines of “I don’t have time to waste on this.” Oh, you don’t have time to waste on this, you obnoxious digital jackass? This is literally all you’re programmed to do! I’m a real person! I could be making scones or something! It doesn’t help that losing the fight in the traditional way (i.e. the boss kills your characters ahead of the scripted event) will often result in the usual Game Over sequence and force you to start again. Am I supposed to win, or am I supposed to lose? Apparently the game doesn’t know.

These fights are also a failure even from a mechanical perspective. Games are built on a foundation of trust between the developers and the players that the gameplay experience is governed by a set of immutable rules (in the case of RPGs: deplete an enemy’s HP, and they die). While breaking these rules with deliberate intent can make a powerful statement on the player’s role in the story, too often the hopeless boss fight relies on arbitrarily redefining the rules in situations specific to a particular battle. It amounts to a case of having one’s cake and eating it too on the part of the developers. They’re able to force a specific narrative experience on the player without having to rethink their design to allow for this new possibility to evolve organically. Part of this is due to the limitations of the medium at any given time (as I said, PS1-era RPGs are rife with this trope), since it’s impractical for designers to plan for every possible outcome of a given scenario.

But even as the technology powering video games has advanced, and budgets and team sizes have skyrocketed, we still find developers retreating to this trope. Why? Perhaps we could chalk this up to gaming’s overarching difficulties with providing the player with anything beyond the illusion of choice. In most cases, the player’s actions amount to a binary outcome; combat in particular typically ends in one of two potential states — victory or loss — and while the player’s actions are generally portrayed as having an impact on the game, typically the story only continues in the event of the former outcome. From a narrative perspective, even games like the seemingly choice-driven Mass Effect, mentioned above, suffer from this issue. Many of the supposed moral quandaries the player is tasked with resolving boil down to one of two options: kiss the puppy, or kick the puppy (or in the case of Telltale’s The Walking Dead series, kick the puppy, or stomp the puppy). Maybe the hopeless boss fight as depicted in Final Fantasy IX is really just the ultimate example of how little impact the player has on most games.

And in the end, breaking that illusion, and revealing the artifice of the whole affair might just be the hopeless boss fight’s greatest sin. Games, like most forms of media, exist to kill time. On some level, we know that by sitting down to play a game, we’re not generally engaging in a productive use of time, but the narrative and gameplay serve to mask this issue. As long as the guts of the machine are hidden from view, we’re able to lie to ourselves, but when the game itself lays bare the inner workings of the game, and admits that it’s simply killing time, it can be difficult to reconcile. There are, of course, solutions to this problem. Trim the fat, refrain from actively wasting the player’s time, and find a way to make the hopelessness engaging. There are ways to do it. I don’t need my games to be wall-to-wall power trips. I just want them to stop openly wasting my time. I’ve got precious little as it is.

This article originally ran October 2017, on Narrativity.com.